Hero Status

***Without looking up he nudged his coffee cup toward the tender's edge of the bar and Fran, a sometimes friend and fellow member of the local bartending fraternity topped him off to the likely protests of the throngs of kids that always came to the bar at the same time and expected light speed service when there were 9 of them and just one Fran.  The ebb and flow of the kids coming and going buffeted him like rough tides.  It was fine when they all jammed up because they were stationary, and it was great when they were gone because he had space to breath.  The hard part was dealing with the influx and out flow in between high and low tides as they banged shoulders and hissed at each other like drunk penguins all trying to use one fax machine to send the exact same document to the same exact recipient, none of them realizing they had no business being in an office to begin with.***







The Bow Tie was a great place to cap off a night if you were under the age of 25.  If you were over 26 and under 40 and still out at 2 a.m., you were probably at the early morning Bow Tie too, but in a spirit opposite the younger set.  Mike Rall was under 26, but he felt like he was in his late 30s.  He sat quietly at the tan whorl grained bar, lovingly varnished and polished on a regular basis, with his head canted downward.  He kept his head down not out of sadness, but because the lights in the Bow Tie were always brilliant enough to keep the crowd sober or uncomfortable enough to eventually take their drunkenness elsewhere.  His eyes were fixed dimly on his cellphone. It lay flat on the bar, squared up with him, with its screen opened onto his message inbox.  The inbox was full, but not a single message was from recent history.  Unfortunately for Mike they were all from very recent memory.  Janus occupied 98 of the 100 message slots, the most recent two slots (filled the year before) were occupied by the last two messages his dad sent him.

"Have you thought about coming home," the message from his father read.  "We're here for you."  Bar tending took his mind to happier places while he could be behind the counter.  When he wasn't behind the counter he was at the Bow Tie with his coffee, earphones in, music player on as loud as it would go.  A group of teens descended on the bar around him, eyes fixed on the brass taps like black crows fixed to glittering bits of metal in an empty field.  They jostled and hung on him and chortled and pointed and flashed fake I.D.s and were served and swooped away to shoot poor games of pool and lodge darts in the wall farther off in the lesser light of the dining section.  He tried to defocus his eyes as far as they would go, turning everything in his field of vision into vaseline swabbed blur.

He thought he saw Janus at the bar near December the year before, but it was not her.  He tried to call her phone to surprise her, and save himself from an awkward hello if it wasn't her, but to his chagrin Janus answered the phone and the woman whose back he watched intently did not budge a muscle or skip a beat in her conversation at her booth with her friends.  "Mike?  Mike R?"

"Yeah, hey.  I thought I saw you here at the Bow Tie.  But it wasn't. Obviously."

"Mike I told you, we're just friends now, okay?"

"Yeah."

"I'm engaged.  I've been engaged for almost a year so you have to stop calling this late, okay?"

He nodded his head up and down to the music, his phone staring blankly into space for the 200th consecutive night.  Without looking up he nudged his coffee cup toward the tender's edge of the bar and Fran, a sometimes friend and fellow member of the local bartending fraternity topped him off to the likely protests of the throngs of kids that always came to the bar at the same time and expected light speed service when there were 9 of them and just one Fran.  The ebb and flow of the kids coming and going buffeted him like rough tides.  It was fine when they all jammed up because they were stationary, and it was great when they were gone because he had space to breath.  The hard part was dealing with the influx and out flow in between high and low tides as they banged shoulders and hissed at each other like drunk penguins all trying to use one fax machine to send the exact same document to the same exact recipient, none of them realizing they had no business being in an office to begin with.

Eventually the tide went out again, violently, but it felt good to Mike to finally have some space again.  One of the reasons why he was never at his apartment anymore was a complete lack of space in the basement efficiency.  His window was the size and shape of the bathroom window at the Bow Tie, minus the outlet to fresh air.  When he first viewed the apartment he was unlucky enough to come on a week when the landlord was still paying for dumpster service.  If only he could have known what an indulgence the landlord considered it to his "ungrateful, drugged up" tenants.  Just the thought of Deion's tea kettle proportions and blustery ever sweating black face made him smile.  He was, quite possibly, the worst landlord ever.  He drank some more of his cool coffee and jammed the volume button on his music player.

From the corner of his eye he could barely make out Fran's tall frame.  She was waving at someone, her hands moving wildly, but it wasn't unusual for Fran to get into arguments with customers.  He first became acquainted with her the first time he showed up at the Bow Tie the year before, more drunk than he knew he could physically be without dieing.  She was something of an exception for the area.  She wore her hair in a frizzy explosion of a bun behind her head and her dad was white American descended from southern French settlers and her mother was black as the heart of the congo.  Exotic and more or less domestic mixed better than twin exotics, went Mike's logic and the sodden logic of most single males who frequented the Bow Tie after stopping at every other place that would or would not serve them.  It was, as far as he knew, the balancing point between strange facial features and facial features that were strangely beautiful.

Mike sliced off another sliver of his attention and set it aside for Fran who was now turning to her register and back to the counter and then back to the register.  Her gesturing did not abate.  It normally only took her moments to twist a kid's testicle and ego hard enough to send him packing.  Even when she had to pinch, twist, tie-off, and then cut off his manhood in front of his whooping and hollering crew of best buds she could do that with a few ice pick jabs of insults that could make Winston Churchill and Mike Tyson both grab their knees with sick belly laughs.  Mike noticed the tide was still out, and had remained so for what felt several beats too long.  He focused his eyes briefly on his phone again.  The time read 3.30 a.m.  He still had 30 minutes before he had to leave and find somewhere else to park himself, or simply give up the Janus vigil for the night and go to his apartment.

He reached his hand out for his coffee mug, noticing a blotch of night quickly growing in his peripheral vision where there were no windows open to the night street.  It swallowed up more and more of his field of view.  It was not going to reign in it's approach short of a collision.  His drunk eye pulled itself into focus with the speed and coordination of a leg ironed hobo before a train as a "what the hell, man," shoved it's way out of his throat, yanking an ear bud out to make sure he said it loud enough.

The instant the ear bud popped loose, Fran's voice filled his head, smashing against his ear drum like fingernails shrieking across a chalk board,  "Ollie, stop it!"  Mike's eyes went wide as the hulk of human being grabbed the collar of his jacket and gripped it tight enough in a single fist to choke him.

"Did you not fucking hear me, son!  Get on the fucking floor!  This does not concern you, dog!"  Mike felt himself rising to his feet and realized he was not standing up as much as he was being pulled.  "You trying to be smart with me!"  The man's thick eyebrows were so tightly knit they formed a single black scar across his bloodshot eyes.

"Christ!  What the fuck is going on," he wheezed, his eyes darting to Fran who stood with her hands tight across her mouth.  A painful bluntness was stabbing into his side and glancing down he realized it was the muzzle of a handgun.  His mind raced.  Fran mentioned Oliver from time to time with glowing remarks and off hand that she thought from time to time of moving on to someone less inclined to remaining a burden of the state.  He never imagined Oliver was 6'5".  Or owned a gun.  Or had rage issues. Or drank hard enough for Mike to smell it as though he took a shot of 151 proof rum straight through his nostrils.

Oliver jerked Mike's back to the bar and leaned on him, "did you not fucking hear me!  The rules apply!  Or maybe they don't.  Maybe you're the motherfucker who thinks he can fuck around with my girl like I'm not going to find out eventually.  I'm not fucking stupid!"  The blunt jab of the gun muzzle left his gut and made a new home on Mike's temple as the dagger pits of Oliver's eyes bored into Mike's.  They contained little remorse and less hesitation.  Mike could read the darkness there as clearly as the block printed beer menu on the wall behind Oliver's head.  The message was payment in full for a break up he did not know happened until 20 seconds ago for reasons he had no inkling of.

"Oliver!"  Fran's screech turned both of their heads.  The orange handled glass coffee pot was already leaving her outstretched hand at the right release point for a side arm pitch.  It began to turn mid air, taking on a slow clock wise spin.  The black coffee, decaf Mike identified it by the rim color with relief, began to stream outward behind the pot like a comet trail.  Tearing his eyes away from the pots precession he saw Oliver's eyes closing, his teeth gritting, mouth grimacing for impact, and felt the gun barrel start to leave his skin.  He knew it was beginning to swivel toward Fran and he wasn't sure It could be swung fast enough to threaten Fran and the flying, rotating, globe of glass and scalding coffee.  In that instant of his own hesitation he could feel his hand rising to grab Oliver's forearm whether necessary or not.  His eyes too began to turn down and away from the projectile that caught and reflected the light of the Bow Tie like a dance hall prop at a night club, and as they did he saw the kids sprawled on the floor, hands behind their heads, eyes up turned at him and mouths agape with the wonderment and awe reserved for astronauts and grid-iron mvp's.

A smile started to break across his face, but before it could span his teeth and before the gun could align itself with Fran's body the sharp peal of the coffee pot shimmered through the air like arcing electricity to his eardrum.  The pot crashed against Oliver's gun hand, unaffected by Mike's efforts to sway it, and what was left of the coffee and glass that was not embedded or scattered there washed over the side of Mikes face, doing much less damage,as they both sprawled to the floor.  Oliver gripped his own wrist, bellowing profanity at the top of his lungs and cursing Fran to the end of time.  Mike sucked air between his clenched teeth mumbling as he scrambled away from the writhing gorilla mass of angry humanity that absorbed the brunt of the coffee until he sat on the floor with his back wedged against the bar.

Some of the kids immediately sprang to their feet and disappeared through the front door with track team speed.  Others clambered to their feet and huddled close to the former designated tough guys in their groups.  Mike looked up and saw two light skinned hands gripping a mean looking piece of gun metal pointed directly at Oliver.  "Is everyone alright?" came the now reassuringly calm, but still lean voice of Fran.  Like baby seals at the rim of a killer shark's wading pool the customers trembled, mute. Even Mike felt his eyes once again fixed on Oliver's writhing, rocking, form; blood from his wounded hand smeared across the cream colored floor tiles.

A phone dropped from the bar top into Mike's lap.  It took him several seconds to realize it was his.  "Call the police," she urged and his fingers fumbled into motion.

"Subletting," Fran told him over drinks four months later when their days off coincided, "is a minefield in D.C. and you can get screwed pretty easily if someone cops out."  He worked his way up to assistant manager of the front of the house where he worked. He still bartended once in a while to meet old regulars and chat up the game from Sunday, but he was happy to move up and when the owner moved out of the upstairs apartment to a nicer place closer to downtown.

It was in the half of the basement open to the service stairwell that he ran inventory for the midweek order.  His phone buzzed hard enough to feel like a taser in his lap.  He yanked his head up directly into a cross beam where more kegs lay waiting for use.  Pulling his phone out he navigated to his text messages.  The inbox was full. Fran Girard was a text addict, but Mike didn't mind.  "I get off in an hour.  When you coming over," he read her latest message. "You got off in 5 minutes last time I came over," he texted her back with a smirk and walked farther down the isle of kegs before pausing again.  "Seriously though- Be there in ten," he texted her once more before closing his phone, pocketing his pen and taking the stairs two at a time to his apartment door.