I didn’t sneak out. It felt like I snuck out. No one did this anymore.
“What can I get for you,” he asked, in a high-pitched voice.
“Gray Goose on the rocks,” I answered. It felt like a good order. A strong order that made me not feel like I was skulking away from work mid-day to have a drink, but like I was someone who knew what they wanted from the world, and was taking it, like I was in control.
“You got it.” I could hear the surprise in his voice. Maybe it was admiration at the solidity of my order.
The bar was quiet. The tables were a quarter filled for the lunch hour on a Tuesday. Heads were down digging into tasteless burgers on brioche rolls that were the real star of the show. The occasional beer dotted a tabletop, but most of the diners were too uptight to be caught with more than water with a twist of lemon at lunch.
The place was neither bright nor dim, neither dirty nor clean. The bartender personified the confusion of the place. He was bald with a bushy ZZ Top beard. His arms were heavily tattooed and the back of one calf had a skull with crossbones emblazoned on it. He wore a black Harley t-shirt and reading glasses hung around his neck.
He’d put them on to enter orders. He was out of place in this place. Or maybe the bar’s confusion was the perfect place for him.
It felt like he was a fraud. Just like the bar. But who was I to judge, sitting at the bar in my suit. A suit I wore with disdain because I’d smiled and nodded my way up the corporate ladder.
Maybe we were all frauds, just trying to get along.
