The Beginning Always Has Promise...

            …It was just a typical Friday evening in Los Angeles. Well, typical for me at least. I’m not too sure how most folks spend the anxious hours between seven and eight pm, but I’d probably bet they don’t take my approach. I was perched on a rickety wooden stool, at the far end of the bar, in one of my favorite Hollywood haunts… the Kibitz Room.

The Kibitz Room is an odd sort of place. Tacked on to a Jewish delicatessen in a neighborhood that is half Hassidic, half hipster… the Kibitz is an unusual establishment to say the least. And the atmosphere and subsequent clientele is no different. During the daylight hours of operation, the Kibitz is akin to a beat saloon from some pulp Elmore Leonard western. Regular faces sluggishly roam in… more at home in the darkened confines of the bar than out under the sun. Members of the miserable service industry take their lunch breaks at the counter top, swigging down stiff drinks with the free tortilla chips on the side before returning to five star restaurants… places they could never afford to eat in. Not on their salary, at least. Then there are the geriatric singles, in cruising the place for the chance of some afternoon strange between whiskey sours and menthol cigarettes. Hell, even a few bartenders choose to make afternoon court in the Kibitz: they drink like the world is ending before they eyes as they exchange the horror stories from their respective centers of employment. From my time lingering in the Kibitz, I’ve come to understand how working in the service industry in Los Angeles is a fate far worse than being set upon by face-eating bath salt junkies and convicted sex offenders high on Spanish fly. Okay, I might exaggerate a bit… but not by much.

I sat hunched over at the bar, my elbows sticking to the highly lacquered counter, mindlessly stirring my Bacardi and coke as I watched the newest batch of race results of Santa Anita. The resident swarm of fruit flies patrolled the bar for lime garnishes left unattended; a whole suburban neighborhood of theirs was established beneath the Coors Light tap.

I’d like to get out to a racetrack soon, I thought. Every time I watched the ponies, I was pulled back into that nebulous haze known as nostalgia: summer afternoons spent at the Aqueduct in Queens, swilling overpriced cheap beer, baking in the oppressive August heat, and watching my friend lose race after race. In misguided indulgences into excess and impecuniously decadent depravity, we lived like animals and like kings. Guayaberas, straw fedoras, cigars, and shots of bourbon from smuggled flasks.

“Hey,” the bartender shouted; I snapped back to the dank reality around me. The bartender was a short, squat, aging Latino man with the most magnanimous moustache since Stalin. “Hey you! I told you no more!” He was prowling around the bar, shaking his fist at a ragged, broken down homeless man who was walking into the bar as if in a fugue state. A fractured, apathetic glare radiated from his gaze as he slowly yet meticulously placed one foot ahead of its companion. The bartender took another step towards him, grumbling loudly in Spanish. The drifter merely paused, surveyed the room with a sideways glance of his eyes, then turned and began shuffling back towards the door. Turning a corner, the only sign the vagrant left was the creaking of the heavy wooden door as it opened, the slow metallic moan as it closed, and the primal thud that concluded its sew-sawed journey.

“Puto pendejo,” I heard the bartender growl to himself as he resumed his post behind the countertop. It dawned on me that I was the only customer to take notice of the unexpected interloper: everyone else was stuck in their delirious realities.

In some bizarre, almost nefarious ritual, the bartender switched the decaying Magnavox televisions in the room to Jeopardy; every other patron in the room immediately sat upright, as if bombarded by an electrical current. The battered, veteran jukebox was cut off, interrupting Truckin’ by the Grateful Dead, and the TV volume went to max. This was the evening Jeopardy showdown in the Kibitz Room… where everyone is a contestant, and no one is a winner.

“What is the Spruce Goose,” I heard a familiar voice say. I turned to the right, facing the entryway, and caught sight of Louie. A former coworker turned constant misfit and partner in crime, my nonsensical French-Canadian friend Louie had been one of the few reliable sources of shenanigans in my west coast life. Yet how he came to be in the Kibitz just then… I had no idea.

“Ah shit,” I said, sitting upright and turning. “Here I was thinking I was gonna have a nice, peaceful evening and then I’m discovered by an insane, maple tree humping canuck.”

“Ferme la, you drunken New Hampshire dwarf.” Louie slapped me on the back and took a seat next to me.

“I don’t know who you’re calling dwarf, Lou. I’m taller than you.”

“Yeah, but I’m thin. You’re built like a human bomb shelter.”

“Thanks, you wretched, gangly fuck.” I raised my glass in salute, which Louie merely smirked at.

“Beefeater and tonic,” Louie called out as the bartender passed our way. He then clasped his hands and leaned forward, looking at the television. A few moments later, the bartender placed a highball glass, nearly overflowing, in front of Louie. “So,” he said after taking a sip of his drink, “where the hell have you been, mon frère?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t play coy, ami. You’ve been missing in action for the last few months. None of the regular crew has seen you around and you’ve been absent from the usual places.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Don’t be an asshole.”

“Alright,” I grunted; I picked up my drink and, in a more voracious effort than I expected, I finished it. “Maybe you’re right, Lou. I guess I have been lyin’ pretty low.”

“You don’t say,” Louie sarcastically spat. He took a gluttonous sip of his drink and slammed the glass down on the bar. “So then, mon ami. Where have you been?”

“I don’t know,” I replied with my trademark shrug. “I went away for a while over the holidays. I ended up spending almost a month back home, and I’m not sure why. I don’t even think you could understand, Lou. I just needed to get away… to reconnect with that primal identity I had when I was younger, full of promise and hope and innocence. I stayed because I needed to extradite myself from the chaos and miasma of this place and rediscover something pure… something true. I needed to find myself again.”

“Mon dieu,” Louie replied as he leaned back and surveyed my expression. After realizing I was sincere, the little Canadian finished his drink. “C’est vrai, no?”

“It’s true.”

“Why didn’t you say anything then my friend?”

“I don’t know,” I retorted. I raised my glass and shook it in the direction of the bartender, the universal drunkard sign for another; the bartender swooped by and grabbed my glass. “I think I just needed time to myself, buddy.”

“Je comprend, mon ami.” Louie smirked and shrugged. “After all, life is only what we make it, no?”

“I suppose you’re right, Louie.”

“Of course I am. You forget, mon ami… I’m always right.”

“That’s the biggest fallacy I’ve heard all week, and, living in LA… that is a gargantuan range to contend with.”

“Whatever,” Louie said dismissively. He flagged down the bartender, who replied with the stock ‘I’m busy but I see you and I’ll be right over’ nod of the noggin.

“How’d you know I was here,” I asked, realizing I hadn’t yet inquired.

“I didn’t,” he replied with a chuckle. “I was actually next door having some food with a few friends when, on my way to the restroom, I noticed your sorry excuse for a person sitting at the bar alone, I assume moping about the sad state of your existence.”

“Close… I was waiting for Jeopardy.”

“C’est merde!” The bartender arrived with Louie’s drink. “Two shots of Jameson, s’il vous plait.”

“You know we speak English in this country,” I teased. “Or Spanish, seeing as we live in LA.”

“Whatever. What are you doing tonight?”

“I’d planned on a quiet night in,” I said, cringing as the bartender poured two shots of Irish whiskey. “I have some social obligations tomorrow, and I figured I’d save my health for then.”

“When did you become such a pussy? You have told me all these stories about your life in New York, how you partied all the time. You have even called yourself Kid Chaos, you pretentious, self-aggrandizing bitch! And yet you have never shown this ability to handle the weird.”

“Hanging out with you has tapped my strength, Lou.”

The bartender placed the shots before us.

“To hell with that,” Louie countered. He picked up the shots and handed one to me. “I’ve got some things to do tonight, so you’re riding with me, no?”

“I don’t know Lou,” I tried to protest, placing the shot on the bar. “I’ve got shit to do tomorrow, plus I need to write tonight. I’ve been trying to fight my way out of a slump lately, and I shouldn’t miss my sessions.”

“C’est merde,” he barked, picking up my shot and handing it to me again.

“You’ve already said that.”

“Shut it. You’re a writer, no?”

“So I tell myself.”
            “Then writing will always be there,” Louie said defiantly. “You can always write, but you cannot always have experiences and live your life. You cannot exist exclusively on the page, mon frère. Life is for those actively participating. So stop lingering in social limbo and rejoin the world.” Louie tapped his shot glass against mine, then raised it… holding it up until I complied.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said after a moment’s contemplation. I clinked my shot glass against his and we downed the scorching golden liquid. After a few customary coughs and minor gags, my esophagus aflame with Irish firewater, I managed to look up. “Alright… what’s in store for the evening?”

“Have faith mon frère,” Louie replied with a deviant smile. “Have faith. Bartender! Two more shots, s’il vous plait!”...