Chapter Ten
The first day as a shopkeeper had been a long one, exacerbated by constant concern over his relation-ship with Susan. Richard walked out of the store and onto the street, removed the keys from his pocket; closed and locked the door behind him. He walked to-ward the car and pushed the unlock button on the fob. The lights flashed and the driver’s door lock popped open. Before getting into the car he noticed a flickering neon sign. The letters were situated in a vertical fashion and read, Merlin’s. Briefly, he thought about not going home. It bothered him because he could never remember a time when, given the opportunity, he wasn’t excited about seeing his wife. She had not shown up at the store. It was better that she hadn’t. He needed time to sort through his thoughts.
The boldness in his step was rooted in defiance. Richard looked both ways as he crossed the street, and then hopped onto the curb in front of Merlin’s with a bounce.
The door was dark and made of solid wood. The handle was long, made of brass and mounted vertically. Wooden panels in the upper half of the door separated three narrow panes of yellow, rough, opaque glass. The glass allowed for no clear indication of the happenings on the other side. It was unlike any other on the street.
Richard grabbed the door handle, opened it and fearlessly walked inside. He stopped on the other side and sized up the room. Directly in front of him was the end of the bar. It ran the length of the wall to the left. There were two men seated there. The fact that they sat next to each other made it apparent that they were together, but they weren’t talking; only drinking. He looked to his right and noticed a pool table. There were two cues lying on top of it. The handled ends rested inside the corner pockets. They were crossed near the middle of the table. A white cue ball stained with blue chalk rested inside the crux of the sticks. On the wall behind the pool table he noticed an over-sized Confederate flag. Its right edge was tattered and threadbare. Only then did he realize that the felt on the table had the same design and the cues were set along the bars.
He approached, but didn’t want to sit at the end with his back to the door, so he walked around the front and took a seat. He sat far enough away from the two men to avoid being viewed as intrusive. The bartender leaned with his butt against the counter behind the bar, and held a folded newspaper in his right hand with a pen in his left. Richard surmised that the man was doing a crossword puzzle, and he appeared to be purpose-fully ignoring him. Feeling shunned, he spun around on his stool, looking over the bar once again, acting as if it was no big deal that the server was not interested in waiting on him.
Once again, he turned and faced the man. “Are you Merlin?” he asked, in a friendly manner.
The bartender looked up from his paper and glared. He tossed it onto the counter behind him and walked to where Richard sat. Placing his hands on the edge of the bar, he leaned forward and asked. “What’ll ya’ have?”
Feeling a bit intimidated, Richard hesitated. “I don’t know. Have you got any specialty drinks?”
The bartender looked disgustedly at him. “I’m a bartender, not a fucking menu. What you see in front of you is all we have.” He walked back to the counter, picked up his paper and resumed the position he held prior to the unwanted interruption.
Removing the hunch in his back, Richard sat up straight. Firmly he asked, “Can I get a Maker’s Mark and Diet Coke, please?” Shit, Richard thought to him-self. I shouldn’t have said ‘please.’
Without a word, the bartender slammed the newspaper onto the counter, walked to the bar and re-moved a highball glass from a pyramid shaped stack. He placed it firmly onto the bar then plunged a silver metal scoop into the ice machine beneath the bar, stop-ping just short of throwing the ice into the glass. One piece slid down the bar, coming to rest in front of the two men seated there.
“I’m sorry Jake!” The bartender cowered.
The man returned a glare in response to the bar-tender’s apology. He placed the heel of his hand on the bar in front of the cube, pulled his middle finger back with his thumb, and with as much tension as he could muster, released his digit, propelling it across the narrow walkway between the bar and the counter. It ricocheted between several whiskey bottles.
The bartender finished making Richard’s drink without protest. His demeanor had changed from mean to meek. There was only one man he knew that could create such an oppressive pall over a group. The man slid the drink across the bar until it came to rest in front of him.
“Thank you,” Richard said, enthusiastically and as friendly as he could. He wanted the bartender to know that he wished to be cordial, unlike Jake.
He said nothing, but somehow seemed more open to dialogue. When he returned to his crossword puzzle, the man flashed a slight smile toward his new customer before dropping his stare to the newspaper.
Richard sat silently, sipping his drink and taking in the atmosphere of Merlin’s. The cleanliness of the bar was surprising. The brass was free of tarnish and shined brightly. There was no smell of stale beer, or cigarette smoke. It seemed odd in a bar that had apparently been around for decades.
Several framed pictures were neatly hung in rows along the rear wall of the room. Lifting his drink from the bar, he stood and walked over to the photo-graphs. He was surprised to see that there were several people in the photos that he recognized. The bartender was in all of the pictures. Richard realized that he knew, or had come in contact with every person in the photos. Jarvis Anderson was in one. He recognized his much younger Great Aunt Susanna in another. She was standing next to the bartender at the beach. She looked to be in her forties. What a beautiful woman, Richard thought. He continued to scan the wall, seeing the bar-tender standing next to a lot of locals, all of whom Richard had met.
A surreal feeling came over him as he realized that there were also pictures of the bartender with celebrities, all of whom he had met, as well. There was Clint Eastwood, whom he bumped into outside a restaurant in Carmel, California one summer while on vacation. Mel Gibson was in another photograph. Richard met him when the first scene of the movie Lethal Weapon II was being filmed. The old Orlando City Hall was being imploded, and the director used the actual demolition as the opening for the film. A picture of Burt Reynolds caught Richard’s eye. It was a picture of him in his football uniform from The Longest Yard, with the bartender standing next to him.
Eager to talk about the photographs, Richard quickly walked over and sat in the same seat he had vacated minutes earlier. He placed his drink on the bar. “I see you have a picture of my Great Aunt on the wall,” Richard said.
The bartender finished scribbling a word, letter by letter, into the boxes of his crossword. Only when he was finished did he look up from his paper. “Who’s that?”
“Susanna … ”
Before Richard could utter her last name, the bartender replied, “Susanna’s your aunt?”
“Yeah,” Richard said, relieved that the bartender reacted positively. “It looks like you knew each other for a long time.”
The bartender rolled his eyes upward toward the ceiling and to his left as he thought about exactly when he and Susanna had met. “I guess we met in nineteen sixty-five.”
“That was the year I was born,” Richard said, excitedly.
“There’s an interesting coincidence for you.”
Richard smiled as he drank the last of his drink. “Can I have another, please?”
Without a word the bartender took his glass and dumped the remaining ice into the sink behind the bar. He placed the tumbler back onto the counter, but stopped as he thought twice. The man then dropped it into a sink to be washed. He removed a clean one from the same pyramid he had before and made Richard a fresh drink. It was mixed a bit stiffer than the first.
“So tell me, are you Merlin?” he asked, again, certain that the bartender was in a congenial mood.
The bartender laughed. “Yeah, that’s me, but it’s not my real name.”
“How’d you acquire that name?”
Merlin laughed at the recollection. “It was about a month after I bought this place, which ironically also happened to be nineteen sixty-five. I realized that there were people in town who wouldn’t acknowledge my existence in public. But as long as I was in here serving up the alcohol to them, I was their best friend. So, I gave myself the name of Merlin since I felt banished from the outside world.”
“What is your real name?”
“Richard.”
Richard shook his head at yet another coincidence. “How well did you know my aunt?”
“Your aunt was one of the most well-grounded people I have ever known. She was one person who was never hypocritical. She came in here on occasion and had her Gin and Tonic. Whenever we’d bump into each other outside, she always greeted me like she was happy to see me. I’ve never felt more respected by anyone. She accepted me in her store, on the street, wherever. You must have had a quality upbringing.”
Ignoring Merlin’s statement, he asked, “So, she liked to drink, huh?”
“Oh yeah. She could bend her elbow with the best of ‘em.” Merlin paused, and then asked, “What brings you in here?”
“I was in the mood for a drink. Why? What brings most people in here?”
“Misery not only loves company, my friend, it seeks it out.”
Richard and Merlin spent what seemed like hours talking about everything from his aunt to how each had come to cross paths with the celebrities on the wall. No one else came or went during that time. For the both of them it was a pleasant discussion in a desolate environment. Jake and his friend kept to themselves the entire time.
When it was time for him to go home, he said goodbye to Merlin. He stepped onto the floor and his legs gave way. The alcohol had numbed his body more than he realized. He turned to Merlin while leaning against the bar for balance and dropped a couple of twenty-dollar bills on the counter. “Will that cover it?”
“Barely.”
He scratched through the wad of bills still in his hand. Finding a ten dollar bill, he pulled it from the bunch and dropped it on top of the two twenties. He shook his head as he realized how inebriated he was. The urge to urinate ached in Richard’s bladder. For a moment he considered waiting until he got home. He shoved the remaining bills into his pocket, gave a half-hearted wave to Merlin and walked toward the restroom.
He entered the men’s room and sauntered up to the nearest urinal. Once he had unzipped his pants and made the necessary arrangements not to pee on himself, Richard stared at the wall above the urinal. The music playing seemed especially loud. The song playing was Good Times, Bad Times, by Led Zeppelin. It didn’t matter that Richard never had music lessons; he found it odd that as he listened to the song that he heard every note, every strike of the drums, and every inflection in Robert Plant’s voice. He felt the soulful feel of the song in every ounce of his being. The alcohol had exposed every sensation in his body. When the words, ‘When my woman left home for a brown eyed man, well, I still don’t seem to care,’ were sung with feeling, Richard’s heart sank. “But I do care!”
When he emerged from the bathroom Richard was astonished to see his brother, Jeff, sitting at the bar. He walked over and sat down beside him. “What in the world are you doing here?”
“I just came in for a little libation, younger brother.” He had always referred to Richard in a way that placed him beneath the elder. When he was young it annoyed him, but as he grew to understand the kind of person his brother was, he took great pride in being different.
“What have you been up to, lately,” the older brother asked.
“Working my ass of as usual.”
Jeff laughed. “That’s the problem with you. You always worked hard, whereas, I always work smart.”
Richard felt the warmth of his rising blood pres-sure in his face. “If you’re so damned smart why can’t you hold a job?”
“Because the people I work with don’t under-stand my genius,” Jeff said as he sipped his beer.
“I suppose you’ve never done anything wrong, have you?”
Jeff only shook his head.
“What about that summer when I worked my ass off every day pushing a lawnmower for miles through our neighborhood, knocking on doors, asking if I could mow our neighbor’s lawns?”
“What about it?”
“I saved hundreds of dollars and you stole it from me.”
“You gave it to me. Don’t you remember?”
“No, I gave it to you so that you wouldn’t kick my ass.”
Jeff smiled. “You see, you did all the hard work and I did the smart work.”
Without responding, Richard stood and walked the length of the bar, through the door and onto the street. It was painfully clear that there would always be someone there to take from him what he worked hard to cultivate.