Best Fish Sandwich (A Short Story)

Sometimes you end up on a road you’d promised yourself that you’d return to someday—just wasn’t planning to find myself there alone and I certainly wasn’t expecting company after relaxing into the lonesomeness. I was myself one big planet when I burst through the door of that bar. Once I’d been jogging in unknown territory and passed a neon sign the size of a Chevy Impalla laid across the side of a thick brick square building stuck on a hum drum intersection on a road to nowhere or just about anywhere. It said BEST FISH SANDWICHES. I wasn’t too hungry and when that barkeep asked what I was after I told him I just wanted to have a look. The only other woman around was his assistant and she disapeared moments after I arrived. There were two TVs on and a small gang of blue collar men camped around the corner of the bar putting time on the clocks they like to watch with apathetic melancholy, hazed, unglued vision, and dead as a door nail reserve.
I went into the back room, the diner, and picked up a plastic menu off a false wooden booth. The lights were dim and the windows were blocked by old bar towels and blankets. The air was stale and silent. This menu professed to serve bar patrons as well as lodgers, I inferred that the Inn was upstairs and kept my questions to myself when I returned to the bar. I tried to give the men some sass talk, but no one was up for play. They just asked me if I was an English Student and I said I was done with school. A man who was sitting by himself acknowledged me and asked if I’d like a drink. I said yes and the bartender poured me a small beer into an hourglass shaped half pint and told me that I should come back some time for a fish sandwich. He said that during lent folks drive from all over the city on Friday nights just to have one; he said I wouldn’t believe how packed the place gets.
My friend at the bar wanted to know if I had a boyfriend. I said Hell No and that men were absolutely no good. He finished his beer and ordered himself another. He said he loved a woman once very much and that he’d wronged her and lost her and that he drank to remember and that he drank to forget--her and all kinds of stories. He was shacked up with his deceased mother’s second husband who was not his father and taking care of him as a testament to his faith in his mother and for nothing else. He asked if I ever wanted another boyfriend and I said I wasn’t sure—that I’d been hurt a lot. He wondered if I took any of what happened with men as my fault. After that I stopped saying things about how lousy men were and left off sharing anything about love.
He told me that his blood was half irish and half german. I said if that isn’t the hottest blood under the bloody sun. We laughed together. He said he used to sell drugs in the Hill District. He even got busted. I asked him what jail was like and he said that he didn’t know. He hadn’t served any time, instead he’d payed off a great lawyer who paid off a judge that got him out of a whole mess of jail and fines and bullshit. He said that this city was as crooked as they come; the bottom line is the only way to cross. I told him that was silly, if it was bad here, it was worse or just as terrible everywhere else. Corruption doesn’t choose just one city and plant it’s haunches, and even if it did we’ve got three rivers, greyhound busses, a postal service, and an airport to send it just about anywhere we like—even down to Texas if wer’e aiming for the moon.
I sipped my Coors Light real slow and studied his face. It was hard and soft like a baked grape turned raisin. Mushy beneath, but tight on top and pulled into creases by aging and dehydrating in the day’s rays. His color was red and even. His mouth was tight, dry, and tiny. His lips puckered when he spoke and his little eyes were steady with remeberance and shone the purest blue—like a baby. He said I love my neices and nephews. He smiled and told me his favorite niece loved to dance. She competed. She used to come over to his house; when he was upstairs working she’d be downstairs making a small girl’s ruckus. He’d holler down and ask what she was up to and she’d holler back just fooling around, but he said she knew she was trianing. She was always perfecting her moves. He couldn’t believe it. He said she competed to be the miss dance of Pennsylvanian and won. After that she went to Disney to compete and she won the national. He said she was incredibble. Everyone had said she was going to win. He didn’t go to Florida, but he saw the tape when they returned. He started to cry. He said she was so incredible, it was so beautiful how talented and hardworking and humble she was. He said that she made him so happy; she was just a little girl, but she was so smart. He said she got good grades in school too.
I thanked him for the beer, kissed him on the cheek, told him he was a good guy, and left. After that I drove to another place I'd never been but had meant to see. It was a bowling alley and it was packed. I sat at the bar by myself and watched through a giant glass window men approaching the lanes and firing their balls at the pins. One man in particular had beautiful form. Every man's style struck me as a keen expression of his impression of himself. Men would come in the bar to order beers and try to start up a conversation with me or stand close enough in silence possibly waiting for me to begin an interaction. But I just sat there and sipped my beer and watched the men through the window. I went to leave and a man chased me down the stairs and stopped me. He apologized for being so forward but wanted to aske me out on a date. I said I was surpised only one man had run after me. He asked if I had a boyfriend. I said no. He asked if I wanted to go out. I said no and thanked him for the invitation.