Chapter Six
Teague
Thursday is a good night. Not busy-good, because busy means noise and noise means I can’t hear the music, but steady-good.
Enough people that the register fills and the tips add up and I stay moving, which is how I like to work.
Moving means I don’t get bored and bored means I start rearranging the bottles by color instead of type and Carl will somehow know from Tampa.
The regulars are here. Pool table couple, who got the dog, apparently.
A mutt named Springsteen, which I respect.
Paperback guy is in his booth with a different book, thicker this time, something with a ship on the cover.
Two women I don’t recognize are sharing nachos at a table near the jukebox, which isn’t actually a jukebox, it’s a speaker system I wired myself, but people call it the jukebox because it’s mounted on the wall where a jukebox used to be.
I’m restocking limes when she walks in.
Same girl. Zoe. Different energy. Tuesday she walked in like someone had let the air out of her. Tonight she’s upright, shoulders back, moving fast, and she slides onto the same barstool like she marked it with a flag last time.
“Moscow mule,” she says. No menu. No hesitation.
“No Shirley Temple first?”
“I graduated from Shirley Temples. I have a diploma and everything.”
Smirking, I shake my head but I still pull out a copper mug. Vodka, ginger beer, lime. Set it in front of her. She wraps both hands around it again, same grip, and takes a drink and closes her eyes for a second.
“Good day?” I ask, because I’m a bartender and that’s the job.
“I baked cookies.”
“Congratulations.”
“No, like — for the fire station. The one I told you about. I’m going back with cookies.
” She’s talking with her hands now, one still holding the mug, the other moving.
“The woman there, Torres, she told me to come back and bring food. So I’m bringing Grandma Eloise’s brown butter chocolate chips, which have literally never failed to make a human being like me. ”
“You’re bribing a fire captain with cookies.”
“I’m making a strong first impression through baked goods.”
“That’s bribery.”
“It’s strategy.” She grins. That same full-face grin from before, sudden and absurd, and I turn away to wipe down a section of bar that doesn’t need wiping.
The playlist is on shuffle tonight. It cycles from the Minutemen into X into Patti Smith, and when “Because the Night” comes on, Zoe’s head tilts.
“This one’s different.”
“Patti Smith. She’s the godmother.”
“Of punk?”
“Of everything.” I lean on the bar because Patti Smith deserves a lean. “She was a poet before she was a musician. She walked into CBGB in 1975 and read poetry over electric guitar and everyone in the room understood that the rules had just changed.”
“Changed how?”
“She proved you didn’t need permission. You didn’t need a record deal or a manager or someone in a suit telling you your art was valid.
You just needed a stage and a voice and something to say.
” I tap the bar. “Horses. 1975. One of the most important albums ever made. The first track opens with the line ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine’ and every church in America lost its mind. ”
“Did she mean it?”
“She meant all of it. That’s what made it dangerous.” I pick up a glass, start polishing. “Patti didn’t just play music. She made you feel like you were allowed to exist on your own terms. Like the mess was the point. Like you didn’t have to be clean and polished and acceptable to matter.”
Zoe is quiet for a second. She’s doing the elbow thing again, chin in hand, looking at me in that way she has where it feels less like being watched and more like being listened to by someone’s whole face.
“You talk about music like it saved your life,” she says.
I set the glass down. “Yeah that's not a conversation for tonight.”
She doesn’t push. That’s the thing about her. She got close to something real and she felt me pull back and she just let it go. Most people either don’t notice or they dig in. Zoe noticed and stopped. I don’t know what to do with that.
The playlist moves on. Bikini Kill. “Rebel Girl.” I turn it up.
“Okay, this one I know,” Zoe says, sitting up straight. “Wait. Is this punk?”
“Riot grrrl. Offshoot. Kathleen Hanna. Early nineties. Women in punk were always there but riot grrrl put them at the center and told everyone else to deal with it.”
“I know this from a TikTok.”
“Please don’t tell me that.”
“A really good TikTok.”
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.” But I’m almost smiling, which is annoying. She caught it. I can tell because she catches her bottom lip between her teeth, a quick bite-hold, and looks down at her mug like she’s hiding behind it.
I’ve served hundreds if not thousands of people at this bar.
I’ve flirted with some of them, slept with a few, forgotten most. I notice faces and hands and mouths because that’s what proximity does when you’re standing two feet from strangers for eight hours a night.
It’s professional observation. It’s pattern recognition. It’s nothing.
But I keep tracking her mouth and I don’t have a professional reason for that.
“Can I ask you something?” she says.
“You’re going to anyway.”
“The patches on your jacket. How long have you been collecting them?”
I glance at the hook by the back door where my jacket hangs during shifts. She followed my eyes there before, I remember that. She looked at the jacket when she was leaving.
“Since I was sixteen. First one was from a punk show in a basement in Fishtown. Some band I can’t even remember. The show was terrible and the patch was free and I sewed it on with thread I stole from my mom’s sewing kit.”
“Is it still on there?”
“Bottom left, under the BLM patch. It’s faded to hell. You can barely read it.”
“But you kept it.”
“It was the first one. You don’t throw away the first one.”
She nods. Not like she’s agreeing with me. Like she’s filing it. Putting it somewhere in that busy head of hers next to the Pretenders and CBGB and Patti Smith and whatever else she’s been collecting since last time.
“I looked up the Buzzcocks,” she says. “And the Clash. And the Pretenders.”
“And?”
“The Clash is incredible. London Calling is on my running playlist now.”
“You run?”
“Every morning. It’s a firefighter thing.” She shrugs. “Also a can’t-sit-still thing.”
I picture her running. Early morning, clean sneakers, London Calling in her earbuds, all that restless energy burning off block by block through the neighborhood we apparently share.
I stop picturing her running before my brain starts filling in more details, like how good she'd look in a pair of tight leggings.
“The Buzzcocks are fun,” she continues, “but I think I like the Pretenders best. Chrissie Hynde’s voice is—” She pauses, searching. “It sounds like she knows something you don’t and she’s not going to tell you what it is.”
That’s maybe the best description of Chrissie Hynde I’ve ever heard, and it came from a twenty-two-year-old who learned the word punk less than a week ago.
“You’re a quick study,” I say.
“I’m a good listener.” She finishes her mule. Sets the mug down. “One more?”
I check the clock. It’s ten-thirty. She’s had one drink in an hour and a half, and she’s not drunk or trying to get there. She’s just here. Sitting at my bar, drinking at a pace that says she’s staying for the company, not the alcohol.
I make her another mule. She puts a twenty on the bar before I set it down.
“Stop overtipping,” I say.
“Stop deserving it.”
I take the twenty. She’s a regular now. I don’t know when that happened exactly, somewhere between the Shirley Temple and the Patti Smith lecture, but she’s a regular.
She has a stool and a drink order and she knows where my jacket hangs and she put the Clash on her running playlist and she’ll be back.
That’s fine. Regulars are good for business. That’s all this is.
The nachos women leave. Paperback guy waves on his way out. The pool table couple starts a new game. Zoe stays until eleven and then slides off the stool and pulls on her jacket, a light denim thing, no patches, nothing on it, and stands there for a second.
“Same time soon?” she asks.
“Bar’s open every night.”
“But are you here every night?”
“I’m here every night.”
“Then I’ll be back.” She says it simply. No flirtation, no weight. Just a fact. She’ll be back. “Thanks for the music education, Teague.”
“Thanks for the tips.”
She leaves. The door swings shut. I wash her mug, wipe her spot, toss the napkin. Normal closing prep. Normal night.
Except I put on Horses after she’s gone, and I listen to it while I mop, and I think about a girl who said Chrissie Hynde sounds like she knows something you don’t and she’s not going to tell you what it is.
And if her voice is still in my head when I turn off the light, that doesn't mean anything.