I had a friend named Venus once. Her father thought that was a feminine name. He went into the hospital to have surgery done to try to save the sight in one of his eyes. They operated on the wrong eye; now he’s blind.
Venus told me that in college she had been engaged to a guy named Jerry Mars. If they had married she would have been Venus Mars.
Red lights, green lights, strawberry wine,
A good friend of mine, follow the stars,
Venus and Mars are alright tonight.
-Paul McCartney
I was sitting in a bar one day when Bad Bobby said to me, “You know why people go to bars? It’s not to drink. They could drink a lot cheaper at home.” It was a rhetorical question, of course, so I sipped my beer and nodded. You go to bars for the company.
I like bars. I like being a regular. I like being recognized when I go into a place, even if it’s just as “the laptop guy”. You can become a regular very quickly in at least two different ways: you can do something unusual more than once, like open a laptop and work on a novel, or you can talk to the bartender and the other regulars. Generally I go for plan A – I’m not a conversation-striker-upper as a rule. But when the battery is finished and my beer isn’t I’ll sometime come out of my shell.
Whether I join the rest of the ebb and flow of humanity at the bar generally depends on the bartender. Theirs is not a job to envy, on their feet for hours on end, serving the same old drunks and hearing the same old conversations, just trying to make ends meet, when the only thing worse than getting slammed is getting no business at all. A rainy day might mean you don’t make rent.
Yet bartenders are, by and large, a cheery and friendly bunch. I expect that the ones who aren’t don’t last long in the business. I have watched them give every appearance of being interested when some moron tells them the same story for the third time that night. I have watched them end fights with grace and diplomacy.
This may come as shock to you, but I especially like it when bartenders are attractive women. Let’s face it, that’s the only time a woman is going to bring me a beer whenever I ask for one, and it’s the only time a woman will laugh at my jokes (I tip well). Even better is when the bartender has stories to tell, opinions, and no compunction about sharing them.
Now I’m on the road, and being a regular when you’re not in the same place very long is difficult. I was definitely a regular at Charlie O’s in Scotts Valley, having visited four times in two weeks, and lingering the last two times to chat with other patrons (and, of course, Kristen, the bartender). Since then, I’ve been in a couple of nice bars, a chain bar, and up here in Tahoe a couple of “locals bars.” Not dives, but not fancy either. (Sam’s Place, my first non-California bar on the trip, made me remember that it was after the nonsmoking laws got passed in CA that I started going to bars.) I may be here long enough to regularize myself, but I have to find the right bartender first.
Specific stories about specific bartenders will have to wait, except for this one: Almost exactly a year ago I was with Mikie, Mike, and Art in Louisville KY for the Kentucky Derby. We were staying at the Sheraton Blah Blah Blah and the usual bartender in the little hotel bar was Heather. What a sweetheart. We had some great conversations, and I watched her pretend to have conversations with all the losers that were in there with me. On the last day, when everyone was pissed off that Empire maker had lost (except, notably, Mikie, who bet on Fungicide to win, Yours truly, who hit the exacta, and Art, who hit the trifecta), the bar was decidedly ugly. Everyone was drunk on mint juleps from the track, and there was a long-running feud between two groups that never got quite bad enough to throw them out, but the atmosphere was poisoned. She brought Art and me are drinks and said to me quietly in her charming KY accent, “I may be smilin’ but it’s fake.” She told me later after things had settled down that she had also just broken up with her boyfriend, but had nowhere else to sleep.
As a side note, I had been having beers with a guy in that same bar the night before the race, and he showed up again after, only to be mobbed by people. Apparently he was one of the owners of Empire Maker, who was the heavy favorite and considered to be triple-crown material. We managed to have one quiet beer before the hordes drove him from the bar. He was a nice guy, the kind of guy you want to have perched on the bar stool next to yours.
I haven’t seen Heather since that day, but she will always rank among my favorite bartenders. Wherever you are, Heather, I know you’ll hold it together.
Today John and I were out shooting hoops, neither of us having touched a basketball for two years. (OK, little white lie, there, I touched my basketball when I packed it into the storage container. But you know what I mean.)
We were both soon winded and shooting quite badly. John looked at me and said, “How old of a senior league do you think we’d have to be in to be competitive?”
We decided that we could hold our own in a 70-and-up league. At least we’d do OK if we played rough.
My roommate Travis had a serious underbite, and he just had surgery to correct it. The procedure was called Upper Mandible something-or-other. I’d ask him what it was called but he wouldn’t be able to tell me anyway.
See, the thing about the upper mandible is that it’s attached to your head. Not just sort of attached, but really fused on there. Otherwise your upper teeth would move around, and we can’t have that. What happens if you wish to scoot your mandible forward a bit? You go to a doctor who starts by breaking your face.
Once you get your face good and broken, the doctor can scoot the ‘ol mandible around to his heart’s content. The next step in the chain of misery, however, is that once your choppers are correctly aligned, you want to nail down the mandible again so it goes back to its stodgy immobile old ways. This takes several weeks, during which time your mouth is wired completely shut.
Travis had his face broken Monday, and had to stay overnight in the hospital because he was bleeding too much and some of that was getting in his lungs. His pie hole is wired so tight he can barely even spit. When he got home yesterday his face was the size of a bowling ball and he had two tubes wedged into the sides of his mouth to help him breathe. He sounds like Darth Vader and looks kinda like him as well. You know, in the scene where he’s dying.
I believe the estimate for how long Travis will be eating through a little tube the he sticks back in the corner of his mouth is 6 weeks. Then, not only will his teeth line up like little pearly cheerleaders but I imagine he will be a new, trim version of Travis.
I’m not sure – I’m embarrassed to ask – but I think he got the surgery done on purpose.
I had the top down, and it was chilly out, but not cold. Traffic was light, making the four lanes seem very wide. Suddenly I was hit with the memory of the first time I had driven up that highway, when I was moving to San Diego.
It was a different convertible then, but the same chill air. I remember I had noticed how the wide, sprawling interchanges made such good use of the terrain to establish their different levels. I remember worrying that I had missed my exit, which was silly because I also noticed how much better-marked the exits are here compared with New Mexico.
Of course, once I got that feeling I started looking for the things that had changed in the last 17 years. I realized that almost every building I saw for the next few miles had not been there on my maiden trip; the first time through that canyon the freeway was all there was, and I have to admit I was quite taken with the bigness of it, the graceful sweep of the curves in the interchanges, and the way it fit into the canyon, occupying the space – consuming it – harmoniously. The road was a giant sculpture for driving on. Some environmentalist I turned out to be that night.
The road is now flanked by shopping centers, and condos crown the tops of the mesas. Miramar hasn’t changed visibly from the road – the military is the only organization in this town more powerful than the developers, and God Bless ’em for that. But the freeway isn’t as free any more; it’s very presence made the rest of the clutter inevitable. What was a graceful and thought-provoking rape of nature has now become part of just another meaningless urban jumble.
Part of the change is in me, as well. I no longer look at all the cars and wonder, “Where the hell are all those people going? Back then, when I was in a more sympathetic mood, especially late at night when, living near the freeway, I would stop and notice on those rare occasions when the noise had stopped – there was an actual gap in traffic leaving a silence so profound you had to comment on it, but not until the cars had started again – I would stop and think about what it meant to be on the road, to be going somewhere, with all the purpose of life that implies.
Now it’s just a big road with lots of cars, often too many, that I use when I have need. Maybe some time away from the big ribbon will restore my awe.
The first night we stayed with Marek (pronounced marrrk), and there is a story there, but not the story for today, children. It ended at 6 am with a long cab ride. Ask me for the story of Marek’s parents some time over beers. Weird.
So a couple more nights like this follow, and Phil and I are feeling pretty run down. We decide to head over to Telc (pronounced teltch), as it is a very nice little traditional czech (pronounced check) town with a very old town center. Phil (pronounced fill) called his focus-puller and cameraman friend Tomas (pronounced toMAHSH – it would be more obvious if I could type the accent marks) to see if he wanted to come out and play. He replied that he could join us for a while, but that he had been up all night playing bluegrass music with his old band, and he was very tired, so couldn’t stay out late. Whew! An easy night at last.
We met up with Tomas and his girlfriend Dasa (pronounced dasha) in the town square, and went to the restaurant owned by a friend of Marianna’s (probably not really spelled that way) named Ivan (pronounced eeVAHN). Dasha was heading back to Prague that afternoon, and once she was gone Tomas seemed much more interested in hanging out. He cancelled plans to go and edit a documentaty he is working on and invited us over to his house. Uh, oh (pronounced here we go again).
At his house we met his parents, who were really very cool. They gave is beer, and after a little conversation Tomas’s mother complained that we weren’t drinking them fast enough. Tomas and his father played some music for us, and dad showed us some of the american folk and bluegrass albums he had collected quite illegally during the communist times.
After a while Mom came back from the kitchen with some sausage and bread and cheese, a traditional czech snack. The sausage had been made from wild boar by a friend of theirs only the day before. I’m no sausage expert, but this was pretty tasty. Then dad got up and came back with a vodka bottle. Not to worry, he quickly said, this was not vodka but slivovitce (pronounced, more or less, SLEE-vo-vit-seh), a drink made from plums (was it plums? it’s all so hazy now) and very alcoholic. This had been made by a friend of his. It was pretty tasty, but I had to be careful – if I let my guard down for a moment, my glass was refilled. There was some other really sweet cherry booze that we tried also, but apparently it’s purpose is to give the women something to sip while the men drink their slivovice. Talk about your good hosts. There was also plenty of good conversation, with Tomas and Phil being very diligent with translations.
Well, of course after that there was nothing Tomas wanted more than to go out drinking. We went to a little bar near the center of town (the town is small enough that almost everything is hear the center of town), and bellied up to the bar. Tomas is the only czech I have been with that even considered sitting at the bar. Tomash was barely staying awake until a bunch of women showed up. Nothing came of that, but that got him going again and then there was the whiskey… It’s hard to find good scotch in the czech republic, but that night we did. We had a good time discussing movie stuff – My brother (for my sake) and Tomas (for his own) thought it would attract the women over to us if we were talking like we were going to film a movie in town. Of course it didn’t work, but we did come up with a really good steadycam shot involving two cranes and all kinds of people moving around. (Apparently cable cams aren’t good for shots that require tight sound synchronization. Who would have thought?)
So there you have it, just another day in Cesky Republiky (prounouced Cheskie rePOOblikie).
Jerry (pronounced jerry)
