3. Klein
I keepa paperback book tucked under the bar. Not because I have time to read during my shift (that never happens), but I like to have it when I grab a five-minute break in the back of the restaurant. Usually I’m shoveling bites of whatever food the chef has placed on the metal break table while I read a few pages.
There’s been no opportunity for a break yet tonight. Obstinate Daughter is slammed. Every seat at the horseshoe-shaped bar is taken, with even more people crowding around the backless teak stools. Every table in the dining room is booked throughout the evening. The DJ, here on weekend nights, sets up his station in a corner of the bar. He doesn’t play pulsing club music, but more of a low-key background sound to match the hip, upscale vibe.
I’m on my first hour of nonstop drink making, and between the bodies jammed around the bar and the number of drink orders spitting out from the machine, it won’t be slowing anytime soon. When I was sixteen and working my first job as a host in a little Mediterranean place, I found the bartenders aloof and cool. Then I became one and realized they were aloof because they had to save their socializing for all the patrons at the bar.
“Excuse me,” someone screeches, a female, probably Lexi.
Five-foot-one Lexi emerges from a group of tall men standing near the bar, all holding icy beers. She wears a murderous glare as she barrels toward the drink pick-up station.
I close the lid on the cooler holding bottles of beer. “You look ready to commit heinous acts.”
“Ugh,” she groans, throwing down her drink tray on the rubber mat. “Why must they stand there?”
I line up all the glasses I’ll need to make Lexi’s long ass drink order. Grabbing a shaker and loading it with ice, I set about making lychee martinis for the thirty-seventh time tonight.
“If you haven’t noticed,” I glance up at Lexi briefly before continuing my work. “There’s nowhere else to stand. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it so busy.”
The live DJ starts his music at that exact moment, taking the scene and ratcheting it up to nuclear. “It’s that bachelorette party,” Lexi yells.
I shake the steel mixer, give it a good thwack on the edge of the bar to loosen the top, and pour the mixture into the waiting chilled martini glasses.
Lexi leans over the drink station so I can hear her while simultaneously threading her long midnight black hair into a ponytail. “The bride is a piece of work. She won’t shut up about the groom. Anybody who talks that much about their fiancé doesn’t mean a damn word of it.”
I nod and say nothing. I know better than to speak against Lexi. She divorced her philandering husband six months ago, and vociferously informs people he’d screw a cardboard box if it had a nice rack. That’s verbatim.
Lexi loads up her drink tray with my freshly made martinis. “They’re drinking like fish. At this rate, they’re going to float out of here.”
“Make sure you don’t over-serve them,” I caution, and for my care I am repaid with Lexi’s middle finger made longer by her lime green fake nail.
My feelings are far from hurt. Coming from Lexi, the middle finger is a sign of love.
I palm my chest and pretend to gaze at the heavens. The moment is over and I grab Raul, my barback, and ask him to aid Lexi in her treacherous sojourn across the bar to where the drunken women await.
More tickets spill out from the printer. I’m reaching for the new orders when I catch sight of Lexi’s finished ticket on the counter and realize she’s missing a mixed drink. Lexi will undoubtedly give me grief for making her walk back through the crowd to deliver the missing drink. In the name of protecting myself from her verbal assault, I whip up a quick vodka with soda and round the bar.
I stand at precisely six feet tall, and unlike Lexi, my wide shoulders make it easy to navigate the sea of bodies. In no time I’ve made it through the bar patrons and into the only slightly more tame restaurant area.
The bachelorette party is easy to spot for many reasons, not the least of which is the woman at the center of the table wearing a hot pink cowboy hat that reads Bride. Shockingly, there isn’t anything that resembles a dick anywhere in sight. At this point, I’ve seen it all. Obstinate Daughter is usually the first stop of the night for bachelorette parties. Carb-loading to start the festivities, I guess.
I get Lexi’s attention by lifting the missing drink in the air. She hurries around the table and takes it from me, whispering, “Thank you, but now you need to get out of here. One of the bridesmaids said she’s DTF, and her standards are low.” Lexi delivers a small shove to go along with her warning. “You’d be right up her alley.”
“I don’t know what that stands for.” I’m aware Lexi issued a jab, even if I don’t know what DTF means. Current pop culture, and its common vernacular, is something I stay away from. Give me books, my laptop, my family, and my weekly soccer scrimmage. In none of what I listed is the acronym DTF.
Lexi makes a little ferocious sound that’s not at all scary. “It means down to fuck you bookworm, and the longer you stay here, the more likely she’s going to harpoon you.”
So we’re continuing with the under-the-sea metaphor? I like it. “Well?—”
Lexi shoves me again, harder this time, and for her diminutive stature she has some power.
My weight shifts, and I spin with the intention of returning to the bar. But then I see... her.
Paisley Royce.
A woman who has haunted me for years. A dream, but in the flesh. A story I relive too often. Beautiful Paisley, with her unique blue-green eyes and her rosebud mouth.
Once upon a time, she and I shared a very messy, very drunken make-out session our freshman year of college. It was a terrible kiss, the kind you look back on and outwardly cringe. I grope-smashed her breast, our teeth clacked, and who knows what else happened. She was a friend of a friend, and I wound up at her off-campus apartment, a little high and a lot overwhelmed by how pretty she was. She smelled like orange blossoms, an all-time favorite scent of mine thanks to the three orange trees still growing in my mom’s backyard.
Paisley was special, different, an electric connection. I’d never, and haven’t since, felt pulled to someone with immediacy and urgency in equal measure. We talked for two hours, ranging from her obsession with Laffy Taffy (disgusting, in my opinion), to our shared love of Lord of the Rings and early aughts rom-com films.
She said I had lips like Peter Facinelli (I’d watched Can’t Hardly Wait recently, and felt proud I knew the actor she was talking about), and I replied with a suave But do my lips taste like his? She said she didn’t know what his lips tasted like, and I suggested she give mine a try so if the day ever came that she kissed Mr. Facinelli, she’d be able to compare.
The grope-smashing commenced.
The next day, fully sober and one hundred percent mortified, I sent her a text. Shooting for levity, I said Hey, it’s Klein, the guy you probably hoped to never hear from again.
I must have hit the bullseye with that joke, because she did not respond. I waited a week, feeling more and more like an idiot with every day that passed, then deleted her number. What was I even thinking, a guy like me and a girl like Paisley? She had class and sophistication oozing from her pores. She sat with good posture, well-spoken and well-mannered, and I thought maybe I’d hit the lottery, or that God had decided to make my dreams of finding the perfect woman come true.
Yeah. No.
Reality was more than an ice bath, it was a caveman’s spiked club across the head.
The experience taught me a valuable lesson: never get so drunk you cannot properly kiss a woman.
But that’s not where the story of Klein and Paisley ends. It gets worse. Way, way worse.
The following semester, we found ourselves in the same creative writing class. She pretended I didn’t exist. But me? I loved her from afar with a burning desire that consumed me. I lived for that twice a week seventy-five minute class. I went rain or shine, sickness or health. A gnarly cold didn’t keep me away, but it did keep me at the back of the class, a polite distance from people. I could never get up the courage to talk to Paisley, not after that kiss she clearly regretted.
The regret gnawed at me. A connection like that doesn’t come around often, and never so effortlessly. It wasn’t the mind-altering substance either. Paisley herself was the mind-altering substance, a woman sent to complete me.
Did I know all this from one evening with Paisley? Yes, I did.
Except I’d squandered it.
And my misstep? Another dude capitalized on it.
Shane Michael (really? Never trust a guy whose last name is a first name) was meticulous about his clothing. And his shoes, which were too clean in my opinion. He made his move. Paisley began walking with him to class, then one day he was sitting beside her.
And me? I felt like I’d been gut-punched, only the fist never left my gut. It was lodged in there, a thorn, the pain a fresh wave every Tuesday and Thursday.
Until the day we handed back our assignment to anonymously critique a classmate’s story. To be fair, I didn’t know it was Paisley’s story I tore apart. I was convinced the class was full of people who weren’t serious about writing, like I was, people who took the course because it sounded easy.
The professor taught many of the classes in the creative writing program, and considering my life goal was (and still is) to be a writer, I saw an opportunity to impress him, and I took it.
I eviscerated Paisley’s story. She cried. That’s how I knew it was hers. She knew it was me because I’m the only asshole who took the assignment seriously enough to use a red felt pen, and guess who had that pen out on the table when her eyes performed a search for evidence? Between that and the sheepish look giving me away, I was toast.
And the look in her eyes?
I’d expected the hurt, but the disappointment had confused me. She looked like she didn’t want to believe it was me who’d said what I’d said about her work. I didn’t apologize, because I didn’t know how to. Mortification from what I’d done to her writing, paired with her not responding to my text, swirled into a mass that left me unable to speak to her.
Which was tragic, because my infatuation did not wane in the months that followed. The semester ended, and it was like Paisley dropped off the face of the earth. Two serious girlfriends later, she became a figment of my memory, a stalwart in my daydreams.
Unbelievably, here she is now, situated to the left of the bride. She wears her hair loose, meandering curls falling over shoulders left bare by her dress. I bet the royal blue fabric makes her eyes more blue than green, and suddenly I’m insatiably curious to know if this is true.
She’s still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, and the memory of sitting beside her, of being the recipient of her thoughts on life and basking in her ebullience when she liked something I said, hits me hard in the center of my chest.
She’s drinking one of those damn lychee martinis, and looks bored. Or sad. It’s hard to tell. Her shoulders are stiff, and the corners of her mouth turn down, and that could mean a lot of things.
Lexi’s push at my lower back knocks me from my reverie. It’s good to be literally shoved back into reality; I could stand there and stare at Paisley all night.
I allow Lexi to urge me through the crowd for two reasons. One, there are probably an astronomical amount of drink tickets to work on. Two, I don’t know what point there is in saying hello to Paisley after all this time. Probably best to let sleeping dogs lie.
Two cocktail servers send me death glares when I duck behind the bar. I don’t explain my absence, because it’s too loud for them to hear me anyway.
After a solid twenty minutes focused on slinging drinks, I’ve reached a point where I’m caught up.
My pocket vibrates at the same time Raul says he’s going to run to the back and tap a new keg.
“I’ll do it,” I offer quickly, stopping him. Usually I let all calls go to voicemail, but I’m waiting on one in particular.
Using the key on the ring in my pocket, I let myself into the keg room and pull out my phone.
“Dom,” I say my cousin’s name in lieu of a greeting.
“Where are you at?”
“Don’t end your sentence in a preposition.”
I can almost hear him rolling his eyes at me through the phone. “Where are you at, asshole?”
I don’t have time for chit chat. “Work. I only have a minute.”
I’ve been anxious all week. Dom’s not only my closest cousin, he’s also my literary agent. Recently he sent my book proposal to editors at all the major publishing houses.
“Good,” he replies, “because it’s not going to take more than ten seconds.”
I deflate. Good news isn’t delivered that swiftly. But bad news is.
“Nobody wants the manuscript?” I knew better than to hope, but I’ve been doing it quietly anyway. I press my phone to my ear with my shoulder and check to make sure the keg is empty.
“It’s not your manuscript that’s the problem. You’re a debut author and you don’t have any social media. Publishers need you to at least have an online presence. They don’t want to be solely responsible for your marketing.” Dom clears his throat. “Also, everybody is online, so the fact you’re not looks weird.”
I hold my tongue as I turn off the CO2 supply line. I’m weird for not sharing pictures of my dinner with strangers?
“I told you this might happen,” Dom reminds me.
Right now, I want to take him by the neck and wrestle him to the ground like I used to when we were kids, before he moved to New York City for college and never left.
“Yeah, I know.” I lift the coupler handle at the base of the tap where it joins the keg and rotate it counter-clockwise.
I can’t believe it. I’ve worked on that manuscript for four years. My soul is on those pages. And now it won’t get the opportunity to be considered, because the price of admission is an online presence.
FML.
Take that, Lexi. I know an acronym.
“I gotta go,” I say, reconnecting the coupler on the new keg.
“Consider social media,” Dom says, not-at-all gently. “You can’t win if you don’t play.”
“That’s what people who buy lottery tickets say.”
“And twenty-six year old writers who are one disappointment away from watching their dreams go up in flames.”
“Dickhead,” I mutter, stepping from the keg room and locking the door behind me.
“Go mix some drinks, cry baby. Call me when you’re ready to put yourself out there.”
He hangs up, and I slip my phone in my pocket. Dom gives me a fair amount of shit, but nobody has ever believed in me the way he has. He spent years letting me read my stories out loud to him. I am part of the reason he became a literary agent. He is part of the reason I continued writing.
Go mix some drinks, cry baby.
His harsh words accompany me back out to the music, the hordes of people swaying in place and laughing. It’ll calm down soon, once everybody moves on to the row of bars and clubs a few streets over.
Crestfallen, I resume my job on autopilot.
Tending bar in a trendy restaurant isn’t the worst, but I don’t want to do this forever.