Last Call Lounge

Last Call Lounge

By Stuart Spears

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THURSDAY

ONE

Worm was stupid but he was usually pretty lucky.

About the time I was getting ready for work that Thursday night, Worm was at the Galaxy.  I’d been there with him enough times to have a pretty good idea of what he was doing.

He was shooting pool at the whiskey-stained table in the back, probably with Scuba or Riley or some other regular whose name he didn’t know.  He was drinking longneck Lone Stars and shots of Jagermeister and a cigarette was smoldering in the black plastic ashtray on one of the tall cocktail tables on the back wall.

Worm was small and dried-out and the cocaine made him hop around on his toes.  He couldn’t stay still, especially when he shot pool, so he was probably bouncing from the pool table to the cigarette and back, setting down the cue, picking up the beer, putting down the beer, taking a drag off the cigarette.

If he was playing with Scuba, he was singing along with the jukebox, loud and off-key, because he knew it would drive Scuba nuts.

So, at some point during the night, Worm saw Oscar sitting at the bar, his back to the pool table.  More to the point, he saw the black backpack on the ground just in front of Oscar’s stool.

Some of this I got from things Worm told me.  Some I got from what Allen and Oscar told me.  Some I got from the newspaper.  And some I’m just guessing.

The Galaxy hid its edges in darkness.  Dingy blue paint covered the plywood walls.  The linoleum bartop buckled and cracked.  Smoke-thick air hung from the ceiling.  Corners slid into shadows.

Worm kept shooting glances at the backpack on the floor.  He didn’t know what was in it, but he knew Oscar – Oscar was Worm’s supplier, his wholesale source for the coke he dealt.  Oscar was dangerous.  Worm knew that he was addicted to whatever was in Oscar’s bag.  Not cocaine, although Worm was pretty hooked on that, too.

Worm knew that if it was Oscar’s bag, it had power.  And Worm wanted it.

So, when the lights went up in a blue-white flicker and the uniformed cop who appeared, big and blue, at the front door started yelling for everyone’s cooperation, Worm couldn’t help himself.  In the middle of a raid, while cops and TABC officers pushed in the front door and regulars panicked and sprinted towards the bathrooms and the exits, stupid Worm grabbed his coke supplier’s bag and ran.

Worm and I were regulars at the Galaxy Club.  More than regulars, really.  We were part of a select group of customers that was allowed to stay after hours, after the doors were locked, to drink and smoke while the bartenders cleaned and stocked.  We were mostly trusted friends, roommates of bartenders or buddies from elementary school.  I got to stay because I was a bartender, too, and I sometimes returned the favor at my bar.  Worm got to stay because he brought the coke.

We stayed late, sometimes until dawn, so we knew about an exit the average customer didn’t – the dumpster door.  It was in the storeroom and it let out onto the side of the building, right behind the dumpster – the bartenders used it to take out the trash.  A city ordinance required that all dumpsters be fenced in, so the dumpster and the exit were both blocked from view from the street.

When Worm grabbed the backpack, he ran into the storeroom and out the dumpster door.  Cops were watching the back door to catch panicky drunks as they burst out the back.  But the cops wouldn’t have known about the dumpster door.

So, Worm stood motionless, pinched between the fence and the metal dumpster, straining his head to see through the wooden fence slats.  The street on this side of the Galaxy was dark and still.  The door behind him was closed.  He held his breath, squeezed his way to the gate and pushed it open.  The wood groaned across the asphalt driveway.  Worm waited.  Still nothing. 

He pushed through the gate, stepped to the sidewalk, and flung the backpack over his shoulder.  Trying to look casual.  Like a neighbor just out for a midnight stroll down a dark street and past a dumpster.

But he was shaking, with adrenaline and excitement, and his pulse was pounding in his ears.  He kept focused and walked slowly toward his big, stupid truck parked around the corner.  He kept his eyes straight ahead and tried to slow his breathing.

About a half a block from the dumpster, Worm passed a blue Jeep with deep-tinted windows.  Inside, in the passenger seat, was Reynaldo, Oscar’s partner.  He had seen the cops pull up and was waiting.  He also saw a man push his way out from behind the dumpster.  He recognized Worm, recognized the backpack, and figured out what was going on.

Worm passed the Jeep.  Reynaldo reached up and flicked the dome light switch off.  He opened the passenger door and stepped out.  He left the door open.  He looked back toward the bar, saw nothing, turned back toward Worm and charged.

He hit Worm full speed in the back, before Worm could turn.  They crashed down together. Worm’s face smacked into the sidewalk. Reynaldo flipped Worm onto his back and grabbed him by the throat, his thumb digging in deep just below Worm’s jaw.  Reynaldo shifted his weight, sat on top of Worm to pin him down.  He squeezed harder on Worm’s neck and, with his other hand, scrambled to pull his knife out of his pocket.

The backpack had fallen on the ground next to Worm.  The zipper was gaping open.  Worm thrust his hand inside, trying to find anything.  His pushed deeper and felt cool metal.  The grip of a gun slid into the palm of his hand.

Worm yanked the gun out and slammed the muzzle into Reynaldo’s temple.

The gun was loaded.

The safety was off.

About the time I was getting dressed for work that Thursday night, Worm pulled the trigger and Reynaldo’s skull exploded onto the sidewalk.

Worm pushed Reynaldo off him, shoved the gun in the backpack, grabbed it and ran.  His stupid, huge, jacked-up white truck was parked around the corner, almost at the end of the block.  Cops were moving toward the sound of the gunshot, but Worm was already around the corner and sprinting.  He climbed up into his truck and started the engine.  He drove for three blocks with his lights off, straight away from the Galaxy. 

No one was following him.  No one had seen him.  He had stolen Oscar’s backpack, slipped out of the raid, killed Oscar’s partner, and gotten away.

And poor, stupid Worm.  He thought all this made him very lucky.

TWO

The kid sat at the bar with a half-empty pint in front of him, smoking a cigarette and absently fiddling with his cell phone.  He had an off-kilter haircut and thrift store clothes, but I didn't really notice much else.  I was hung over.  The bar was air conditioned, but I sat by the front door and every time it opened, the sticky August heat hit me like a slap.  The sweet bourbon-smell of my own sweat was making my stomach kick.

“He's been sitting there with that one beer for an hour,” Mitchell said, pointing out the kid as soon as I'd walked in the front door.  “He hasn't done anything.”

I put as much of the scorn I was feeling on my face as I could and looked straight at Mitch.

“So what,” I said.  “Tell me when he does do something.”

I adjusted my stool, put my pack of cigarettes and my flashlight on the bar next to me, and sat down. Mitchell gave me a look I was supposed to care about, then went back to the storeroom. Tracy watched him leave, then poured us a quick shot when he was out of sight. Tracy was the newest bartender, a blond with cheerleader looks and not much else. The shots I did with her were always tinged with guilt because I had gone home with her quite a few times but just couldn’t seem to make myself be interested in her. We cheered – “to tough love” – and downed our shots before Mitchell got back. Mitchell didn’t think we should drink on the job, even if I did own the place. I lit a cigarette to cover up my whiskey breath.

“Little John,” Tracy said as I settled back in my stool. She leaned over the bar, her shirt fell open a little, her golden hair fell over her eyes. “Jenna’s having a party tonight. Wanna go?”

I’m too old, I wanted to tell her. I’m too old to be doing lines of coke until five a.m. and you’re too naive and it's just gonna end up awkward and painful and tedious. Instead, I took a drag off my cigarette.

“Sure,” I said.

Mitchell was back, leaning on the cash register and looking at me. He had worked there forever. My father hired him and he thought that meant he’d inherited some sort of responsibility for me. He stood there, leaning on the register, not saying anything.

“Shut up, Mitch,” I said, tapping my cigarette in an ashtray.  “And turn off the TV.”  The TV was on, which I hated at night.  And Mitch had it on the Weather Channel, of all things, watching some storm swirl near Cuba.  He didn't turn it off.  I shifted in my stool and turned my back to him.

The regular night crowd started coming in – girls with pierced lips, guys with haircuts. The daytime regulars were a bunch of old guys – sheetrockers and painters, electricians, a couple of merchant marines. They had been my Dad’s crowd when he ran the place and he could sit with them every day, hour after hour, drinking Irish whiskey and yelling about the Astros or the unions or, when he thought I was out of earshot, the Mexicans. When I took over, when Dad died, I tried to bring in the hipster crowd. I changed out the CDs in the jukebox, put in a pinball machine. It had been almost a year and I had had limited success. A pretty good young crowd came in on the weekends, but not much during the week.

The whole place seemed to be near the edge of something, like everyone might just stop coming in any day. I couldn’t really put my finger on it, but I got the feeling that the old-guy crowd was thinning out – dying off, or going on the wagon, maybe. And the hipster crowd always seemed fickle, like they might just collectively decide to move on. I was still making enough to get by, but every month felt a little more pinched. A busy Thursday would bode well for the rest of the weekend.

From my stool, I could see most of the bar to my left, most of the block out the front door to my right. Once I saw a guy get beat almost to death in the storefront across the street. I watched the whole thing, but when the cops came around I didn’t say anything.

Inside, the bar stretched down half the length of the room, a long pine bar, smooth and dark with wear, carved with names and dates and curse words.  Past the bar was the pool table and the bathrooms, past that the office and storeroom.  The pool area was lit by a neon Lone Star sign and the stained glass light hanging over the table.  The front was lit by a string of red Christmas lights, three schoolhouse pendant lights hanging over the bar, and by the blue-green glow of the goddamned TV.  The back hall was lit only by the exit sign over the back door.

So, it was Thursday night and it was just starting to feel like a Thursday night. The earliest stages of the weekend. The music and the cigarette smoke and the red lights. I watched the room, not thinking about anything really. Two girls came in, really pretty girls who came in every week and flirted with me. I was pretty sure they were underage, so I didn’t card them.

“Hi,” said the blonder and probably younger of the two. Her hand brushed my knee as she walked past. I was watching them walk away when the door jerked open and Curator Jack marched in.

Curator Jack owned a bar down the street, a loungey place called Room 212. He'd been a lawyer, sometime in the past, but quit a couple years ago to buy Room 212.  Jack gave me a nod hello, leaned on the bar next to me. He felt that we were buddies – both bar owners, both with kids and angry ex-wives. He thought of us as comrades in the fight against unreasonable exes, underage drinkers and thieving bartenders and he thought this gave him the right to help himself to my cigarettes.

“How’s your kid?” he asked, reaching behind me to pick up my pack. He stood next to me, surveying, counting, adding. Some nights, he liked to tour the bars in the neighborhood, size up the competition. 

“All right, I guess,” I said, lighting his cigarette. His eyes drifted up to the weather map on the TV screen for a moment, then back to the room.  Trying to assess what kind of affect the storm would have on business.  He was a big guy, square. He kept his head shaved to hide a growing bald spot and wore a goatee to balance the shaved head. He was wearing a yellow guayabera and kept fishing around in one of the pockets with his thumb.

“You talk to him lately?” he asked.

“I called yesterday. Sarah wouldn’t put him on the phone,” I said.

Jack huffed a cloud of understanding out through his nose. Letting me know he knew what a pain-in-the-ass women can be. Sarah wouldn’t let me talk to Jacob because I had missed an appointment with a couple’s therapist and a lunch date with her and the kid and she thought it was some form of revenge to keep him off the phone. I huffed out a cloud of smoke, too, and Jack nodded.

We stood there for a long moment, watching the crowd. The 140-pound vegetarian guys, the skinny girls in shiny vintage tops. Ray Price came on the jukebox. Tracy brought Jack a beer. No one was shooting pool.

“Two weeks,” Jack said, shaking his head.  “Two weeks until the smoking ban.”  The City Council had just passed a ban on smoking indoors anywhere, even in bars, and bartenders and bar owners were convinced it was going to kill sales.  One more fucking thing to worry about.

“Yeah,” I said.

“At least you have the patio,” Jack said, pointing toward the rear exit.  Past the metal door was a fenced-in, twenty by twenty square of concrete with a couple of picnic tables on it.  I chewed on my thumbnail and stared at the door.

“Why don’t you sell me this place?” Jack asked, looking down at his shoes. I laughed a little.

“You ask me that every week.”

“You always tell me you’re thinking about it.”

“Well, I am thinking about it.”
The door opened and two muscular guys in tight t-shirts came in. Jack puffed out his chest a little, dug around in his pocket with his thumb while I checked their IDs.

The muscle guys were giving each other stupid grins while I held the IDs up, like being carded at their age was a joke.  Twenty-four year olds do that a lot more that thirty-four year olds.  I held their licenses up to the light then handed them back. 

“Gracias, esse,” the second kid said as he tucked his ID in his wallet.

“What’d you call me?” I said.  My foot went to the ground and I started to stand.

“What?” the kid stammered. He looked to his friend. “I didn’t.”

“Do you wanna come in here?” I was standing now and, despite myself, I wanted to punch this kid in the throat.

“Yeah,” the kid said, looking at the air between us. 

“Then don’t call me esse, esse,” I said and made myself sit back down.

The kid stood for a moment, hoping to think of a response, I guess, or hoping his friend would come to his defense.  When neither of those things happened, he turned his head away from me and walked into the bar.

Curator Jack watched them walk in, then turned back to me.  He smoked and I smoked and he watched the side of my face.  After a minute, he decided to change the subject.  He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and leaned his big head down close to my big head.

“You hear about the Galaxy?” he whispered.

“What about it?” I asked. He was already leaning in, so he figured he’d grab another one of my cigarettes.

“They were just raided,” he said with meaty excitement. “Five cop cars, TABC, everything.  And some guy got shot in the fucking face out back.”

“Jesus,” I said.  “What was the raid about?”  The Galaxy was seedy, but not in the way the cops usually cared about. Just in a way that made alcoholics feel at home.

“Somebody was dealing out of their bathroom,” Curator Jack said. “Riley said one of the cops said they’d been watching the place for weeks.”

“What happened?”
“They didn’t catch the guy who was dealing, but they found enough coke on one of the bartenders to arrest him.”

I wanted to ask which bartender, but I didn’t want to hear it from Jack. He was too happy about the whole thing and you don’t want to hear that kind of news from a guy who’s enjoying it. Besides, I didn’t really have to ask. If someone got caught, it was Richie. Richie was tall with long curly black hair and a redneck, Southern-rock, anti-everything attitude. He’d be the one the cops would want to talk to.

“What about the guy who got shot?” I asked.

“Nobody knows,” Jack said.  “They don’t even think he’d been inside.”

“A bunch of fucking cops right there and some guy gets shot,” I said.  “God bless the HPD.”

“Riley said the cops said they’re watching the whole neighborhood,” Jack said.

“Well, that shit doesn’t happen here,” I said.

“That you know of.” I looked up at him. He took a sip of his beer, raised his eyebrows.

“I keep an eye on things,” I said. My blood was up and I wanted to be done with Jack.

“Well, you have to be careful,” Jack said. “After what happened before.”  Just after I took over, I'd been busted by the TABC for serving a minor. The officer gave me a $300 fine and a stern talking to. I gave him the finger as soon as his back was turned.

“Thanks for the warning.”  I picked up my pack of cigarettes and put it in my pocket. Curator Jack got the hint.

“Okay, Little John,” he said, patting me on the shoulder. “Keep up the good work.”  He put a couple of dollars on the bar for the beer, nodded to Mitchell, and pushed out the door on to the street. I could feel my pulse in my neck.

“Can I get a shot of Beam, please?” I said to Tracy. She poured two.

“Did you hear about the Galaxy?” she asked as she set the glass down in front of me. Her eyes were wide. I downed my shot without answering her, so she took hers back to the other end of the bar. Mitchell watched me from the register.

After I got caught serving the minor, I was pretty vigilant about things for a while, like Dad had always been. The TABC could take away your liquor license if they had reason to believe you were allowing illicit activities, so I didn’t take any chances. I started carding everybody and I never bought coke from anybody in my own bar – I’d always meet Worm somewhere else. And if I even half-suspected some jackass dealer was using my bathroom as an office, I’d kick him out. Then a few months passed, business started dropping off, and somebody else’s criminal activities began to seem like the least of my worries. I still didn’t buy at my own place, but I didn’t patrol the restrooms much anymore.

Mitchell was still looking at me. I took my cigarettes out of my pocket, shook the pack at him.

“Cigarette?” I asked with a big grin on my face. He had just quit smoking six weeks before. He turned away. I lit one for myself.

The night went on, more or less like any other night. The same faces, more or less, and everybody having more or less the same good time. But there was something there, like a cloud the people brought in with them off the street. There was a little more shoving. A higher pitch to the voices.

I got the urge to call Sarah, get her to wake Jacob and put him on the phone. Some pang made me want to hear his voice. But I knew she wouldn’t answer. She never did when I called that late.  Before Jacob was born, she'd stay out late, hanging out with me at the bar or going out with friends.  Now that she had the kid, she resented me for still being able to stay out.

I sent a text to Richie – “You OK?”  He didn’t reply.

The night got busier and now everything had a darkness to it. A big guy with a circus-act beard tried to push me off my stool for carding his girlfriend. A black Chevy idled in front of the store across the street. I felt like the driver was watching me, but when I got the chance to look up again, the car was gone. Tracy and Mitchell bumped into each other behind the bar and Tracy dropped a bottle of vodka. The tinny sound of the glass breaking stung in my bad ear.