Everything Nice: Bantam Discovery

When you got it, flaunt it


They say the truth will set you free. They never explain that with an insouciant thwack, the truth will shove you out into the cold, dark forest of self-awareness, to be pursued by the hungry wolverines of doubt and loathing. They never mention that part. And when it happens, you can only hope that somewhere in the woods you will find a bar that's still open.

Luckily, at six-thirty on a Friday in Manhattan, all the bars are open. Mike sat at one of them with her heels against the brass foot rail and sipped slowly and deliberately at a double Jameson neat. She stared into the glass after every sip and willed the alcohol to seep into her veins. She'd been drinking for too many years to rush foolishly into intoxication as though there weren't a long evening ahead. She had all the time in the world and an open tab.

The Town Drunk was a filthy cesspit in the Meatpacking District with a splintering bar and perpetually sticky floors. The jukebox played Merle Haggard and Bob Dylan and sometimes the Charlie Daniels Band. A few long-forgotten bras were tacked around the mirror behind the bar, mementos of the nights when young professional women got a little too amusing and lived out their sad Coyote Ugly fantasies on the bar top. Mike had never been one of these women; Mike was a regular.

"Guy at the jukebox is tryin' to work up the nerve," the bartender said quietly as he wiped up the bar in front of her.

Mike glanced into the mirror briefly and caught the outline of someone feeding the jukebox and trying to stare at her out of the corner of his eye.

"Good tip, Jimmy," she said.

"Don't worry." He chuckled. "I don't think he's gonna get there." Still smiling to himself, he moved down the bar to take an order.

Mike briefly mustered the energy to hope that Jimmy was right. She didn't have the reserves tonight to turn someone down politely, to make the obligatory six or seven sentences of conversation before excusing herself to pull out her cell phone or go for a smoke. And she didn't even smoke.

She was constantly having to turn men down, as though sometime in her early adolescence an evil fairy had come through Mike's window while she was sleeping and sprayed her down with some irresistible pheromone that she'd never be able to rinse off. Or maybe it was her utterly effortless and stunning beauty. One of the two. She didn't wear makeup. She cut her long, dark hair maybe twice a year. Fingernails, to Mike, were not for painting but for snapping open beer cans and taking off her stainless Swiss Army watch. Except it's hard to cover up a face that screams to be a portrait and legs that go on for miles. It's hard not to be noticed when you're nearly six feet tall and built like Elle Macpherson, but then, to each of us her challenges.

Mike hoped that Gunther would get there soon. They mostly left her alone when Gunther was around.

The door swung open with a shock of fading daylight, and as he frequently did when she thought of him, Gunther appeared. Like many Australians, Gunther entered a room larger than life, with the carefree warmth and goodwill of an entire continent blowing in behind him. How a ship of minor convicts and British undesirables spawned a nation of the world's most cheerful and gregarious individuals, we may never know. But nowhere is this more evident than in New York City, where the indigenous multitudes hurtle down crowded sidewalks just trying not to touch anyone. Gunther was Mike's equilibrium, a balance for her gruff pessimism, her best friend. And the only man to whom she wasn't related who'd never tried to sleep with her.

Gunther squinted when he saw Mike sitting at the bar, and consulted his watch. "Christ, Mikey, am I late?"

She smiled for a moment at the sight of his enormous, lanky form hoisting itself onto the adjacent barstool and tapping lightly on the bar with a smile at Jimmy to indicate he'd have the usual, which was a Guinness. Gunther always arrived first, as a rule. As the New York bureau chief for an Australian wire service, a title he considered perhaps too lofty as there was no bureau beneath him, Gunther worked from home, and occasionally from the Drunk, filing stories by phone to copy-takers in Sydney who would unfailingly get them somehow wrong. But the hours were terrific.

"No," she said slowly, "no, I'm early."

"Fess up." He smiled and sucked the foam from his beer. "You chuckin' a sickie?" It had taken years for Mike to comprehend the variety of Gunther's vernacular, but she was now able to understand that he was asking whether she'd played hooky.

"Try again," she said. "Worse. Much worse."

"Hang on," Gunther insisted. He tipped his glass back and within four seconds drained the whole thing, slamming it down on the bar in triumph when he was done. "'Nother one, Jimmy," he requested with a grin and turned back to Mike. "Okay," he said. "Now I'm ready."