Amanda thought of her brother as the therapist she never wanted. He meant
well, but at times, didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. Like a parent who
wants to touch a sensitive subject but had no tact. She couldn’t understand why
Sam defended a train wreck like their father.
She was fired up and pissed off so she jumped in her car and headed back
to her place. But when she got there, she didn’t go inside. She walked three
blocks down to the closest bar she has ever known.
Small, purple and triangular in shape, the Sandy Hut was a notable hub
along the cityscape of Sandy Blvd. which ran like a rouge arrow through a
majority of east Portland. This sort of city planning left several
opportunities for three-sided buildings.
Also known as the Handy Slut, or as Amanda called it, the Smokey Hut, the
bar catered to people who just came from another bar. No one ever strove to
start their evening there, but it wasn’t uncommon to end up in its clutches.
As always, there was a faint cloud of smoke hanging in the air due to low
ceilings and lack of ventilation. It was a second-hand smoker’s wet dream.
The door opened to a small area occupied by an old pool table and a large
round table that sat six where a stage had been known to be erected for
performances. Booths lined two walls leading to the bar where all sorts of
colorful characters sat. One wall was a mural of a fancier bar filled with
caricatures of celebrities from the ’40s ’50s and ’60s. It was reminiscent of
artwork usually used to portray jazz musicians; Smokey colors including bard
blue, grey and shades of brown. It was a stark contrast to what was going on in
the real world surrounding it.
Across from the bar were the kitchen and bathroom, each as clean as each
other, and just outside of the kitchen was a jukebox filled with local
favorites and music staples. CCR's Suzy Q was currently playing.
Regulars at the bar nodded their hellos and Amanda found a seat between a
salty old man and a college student with a cigarette in one hand and an open
book in the other.
The old man to her right looked over at her with his one good eye
and winked with a smile, the returned to his love affair with his drink.
The bartender approached while at the same time putting her dirty mess of
hair up into a ponytail "what can I get you, sweetheart?"
"Anything brown," Amanda said with a sigh. She turned to her
side to riffle through her bag for some cash and saw her aunt’s keys with a
what-would-Jesus-do key chain 'he would order a double' she thought. She noticed that it was from Sam's church and
she knew he attached it, most likely recently.
And just as if her former though was said aloud, she found a glass with a
double of something light brown in front of her. She looked up at the bartender
"don't worry, I charged you for a rum and coke," she said with a more
than friendly smile. Amanda smiled back and took a sip and watched as the bartender moved on to the next patron.
She wasn't entirely sure about the look but she had a pretty good idea.
She leaned a certain way but never shied away from the other, especially when
it came to cute and generous bartenders.
She took a large gulp and felt it burn all the way down. There was a
time, long ago, when it was considered inappropriate for a woman to go into a
restaurant, let alone a bar, by herself without the company of a gentleman.
Even a female bartender wearing tight worn blue jeans with a large hole on the
thigh showing part of a seemingly large tattoo and one in the ass showing bare
cheek would be unheard of. But in the 21st-century northwest, it was just fine.
Amanda hadn’t been to the Hut in a while and was glad to see that Abe the
animal was still the cook. He was a bit of a dick, but he made bar food taste
gourmet.
She took a second gulp that burned just as much as the first and she
thought of her dad. The insignificant prick who blamed her for all of his
problems. She made it a point to not think of him all last summer while she
finished up her residency in Hood River, and now her all too caring brother had
to twist a simple visit into a quagmire of bullshit. He was less of a father and more of the bane
of her existence, literally. He was a nuisance, barely getting by on early
retirement while pickling his liver and resenting his children; Amanda for
their mother and Sam for defending that fact.
Her third sip didn’t hurt as much as the second, but when she set the
glass down, a little bit of the something light brown sloshed out the side. She
felt the alcohol on her hand. It felt like someone was blowing on it. It
reminded her of how her lips felt when she kissed her ex when he was
obnoxiously drunk. She realized that she managed to go a few hours without thinking
about him as well. She was thoroughly distracted by drug-store-Don and her
brother to think about all the other mixed feelings she had been wrapping around
her brain about another man who caused her so much grief.
She didn’t even get to her fourth drink when a girl recognized her from
the back of the bar “can you believe this skank?!? How many months have gone by
and she can’t even stop by to say hi?!?” the voice was that of an inebriated
woman. Amanda turned with a smirk. It was someone she knew but couldn’t
remember. A friendly face and voice she used to share a bar with.
“Hey… you,” she didn’t want to sound rude for not remembering the girl’s
name. They hugged and the girl ordered around of beers for herself and friends
sitting in the far corner of the bar. The bartender addressed the familiar
face as Carrie and the profile came rushing back.
Carrie was a regular who hung out with Amanda on a weekly basis, back
when going out to bars was exciting and new. They knew a lot of the same people
and because of this became proxy friends. It was a friendship that never left
the confines of the Hut. She convinced Amanda to join the people she was with
and they both walked back to the corner table where three other people sat. Two
of them she recognized right away. Griff and James she had known since high
school
Griff used to be a sweet guy, but after an incident at his house a few
years back, he was arrested and hadn’t been the same since. The details were
fuzzy as to why. All she knew was that he threw a party, there was an attempted
rape by an uninvited guest on a close friend of his, Griff took matters into
his own hands, and was found standing outside his house at dawn the
following morning in his boxers with a gun in his hands. The newspapers said
that when police arrived on the scene that he was stoic, staring at the ground
with blood on his forehead and was refusing to drop the gun.
She heard that he was later committed for psychiatric evaluation for
suicidal tendencies. Amanda had thought of him often after hearing that as she
dealt with those issues herself and found herself now thinking of a girl she
once knew. This made her look back at the bartender again before she finally
sat down.
The other familiar face was James. James was Griff’s best friend. Probably
one of the only close friends he had. If Griff was Rain Man, James was his Charlie
Babbitt. He was the social and positive side of Griff’s recovery since being
released “a ray of sunshine in a dark hole,” James said to her with a smile and
a wave.
They got caught up and before long, others arrived who Amanda knew and
they pushed some tables together. This second wave was quite the eclectic
bunch. There was old Packsmith Jones, Rio “Runner” Salvatore, and Toni King. Rio
and Toni were in a jazz band and Packsmith was their manager. They had endless
stories about the Portland music scene and the way things used to be. After an
hour they made up a majority of the noise in the bar. Toni carried on about how
music was in his blood and how he claimed to be the great-nephew of Miles
Davis. And Packsmith went on about women in power who pissed him off: Barbara
Walters, Barbara Bush, and Barbara Streisand. He claimed it had nothing to do
with his ex-wife Barbara. He spouted off several un-circumstantial misogynistic
comments about them as he knocked back another beer.
Drinks kept coming as the night carried on. Something yellow, something
red, something with cream in it. This was followed by fried bar food and lots
of it. The jukebox was cycling through song after song; The Stones, The
Beatles, The Strokes, The Ramones, and one of Amanda’s picks “Mr. Ambulance
driver” by The Flaming Lips.
She used to listen to that song on her late-night shifts on her drive
home “this is a great song! It’s about this guy who rides with his love to the
hospital in an ambulance after an accident and he wished he could take her
place. It’s like Romeo and Juliet,” Amanda said with dreamy eyes.
“No, no, no, no, no that’s not right. The girl would have… I mean, the
guy was talking to the driver,” James tried to complete his thought without
spilling his halfway filled pint “the guy would need… would have to, um, drink
poison because he’s so over-incumbent with grief, and then,” this was followed
by a belch and a swallow and he stared at his beer for a second “um… I lost my
train of thought.”
The finer points of the lyrics and the works of William Shakespeare
continued well after the song ended. Eventually plays turned into poetry,
poetry turned to philosophy which turned to religion and brought Amanda back to
her brother and that’s when the bars front door opened.
The place she was sitting was the farthest point in the triangular
building from the door. Amanda thought she had brought her brother into
existence just by thinking of him when she saw that the entering figure was
wearing all black. This figure stood in the doorway. It was tall and very
slender. It wore a tall black top hat. One that was Abraham Lincoln than Mr.
Peanut. It also wore a long black coat and scarf. She couldn’t see the figure's eyes because they were so sunken in its skull. The cheekbones were very
pronounced and the face appeared to be made of stone. The figure appeared to be
male but she couldn’t be sure. It leaned forward and began to move to a nearby
table. But it didn’t walk, it seemed, to her astonishment, to float.
Amanda strained her eyes to see the figure's feet, but her view was blocked by people standing at the pool table near the entrance. There was no bobbing of the head or shoulders, so swinging of the arms. The figure just moved in the direction it was facing. She looked from face to face at the far end of the building to see if anyone else noticed what she was witnessing, but no one even seemed to notice the figure's existence.
Just before the figure sat down at a booth she got a look at the bottom of the legs and saw that the feet were hovering just a few inches off the ground and Amanda’s eyes went wide. She gave the figure her full attention as she became increasingly uncomfortable with what she was seeing. She couldn’t see the figure anymore because more people were pilling in from the cold weather outside.
She thought of asking if any of the people she was sitting with noticed, but she knew they didn’t, no one did. She thought about telling someone what she saw but they were all too inebriated to pay attention. With this, she realized that she was too inebriated to pay attention to anything herself and calmed down. If it wasn’t bad enough that she is getting hammered tonight, now she was also hallucinating. What was the something-red she drank earlier anyway? She knew that she needed to do, she needed another drink.
Amanda walked over to the bar where the flirty bartender met her “you’re lit up like a Christmas tree baby girl.”
“Well I need one more drink and I would like…” she paused with her eyes on the ceiling and her finger to her pursed lips as if in deep thought “un café español por favor.”
“Whoa señorita, let’s try a café négro,” Amanda didn’t get it at first.
“But I’m fine and I want coffee with liquor in it with nutmeg on top and I want to watch the 151 burn.”
“Darling, you’re cute, but you’re done for the night. I already ran your card so all you have to do is sign and if you want I’ll call you a cab,” Amanda frowned as she reluctantly signed her ridiculously cheap tab and left and eighty percent tip.
“I want to watch it burn!” She yelled obnoxiously at the ceiling as she took her copy of the receipt and with a mug of coffee, she walked back to her seat, but not before she swung by the table where the dark figure sat down only to discover no one was there. She took a sip of the steaming cup. Maybe she imagined the whole thing.
She returned to the group announcing “the hot bartender cut me off,” a resounding 'awe' of empathy came from the group followed by pats on the back.
Amanda stayed for another half hour to finish the contents of her mug and walked home.
When she arrived at her lonely home, she felt more clear-headed than when she left the bar, but not by much. She took off her clothes and went to bed where she fell asleep instantly. Never noticing the dark figure with the top hat and scarf floating outside of her second-story bedroom window.
