The Kismet was a storefront wine and beer bar a few blocks from the Lair and not much further from Ken’s Market. It was the kind of place that carried nothing but bottles of hard to pronounce Burgundies, and microbrews at five bucks a pint. The food came on big plates with filigreed sauces and carefully arranged asparagus spears. I walked past it nearly every day for a case of beer or a pack of smokes. There was a girl that worked there behind a wall of glass and a bar and a few hundred miles outside of my world. Long dark hair, dark eyes and a smile, she had a penchant for wearing bandanas and laughing at all the customer’s jokes, but she didn’t look out when I looked in.
I worked as a short order cook at a cafe on the other side of Greenlake. We served scones instead of toast and arranged oven roasted garlic herb potatoes in little fans on the edge of the plate, but we were in the wrong part of town for a bistro. I got hired as the part time weekend dishwasher, stoned off my ass. Worked a couple of days and flipped a burning omelet while the boss was watching. In three weeks, I went from dishwasher to line cook without a change in pay.
The restaurant was doing flat tailspin over a period of several years and the lead breakfast shift paid shit. After bills, I was lucky to afford smokes. The boss was cool. He bought me beers and fed me. Whenever a Stones song came on the radio next to the dishpit he poured a couple of pints and we took a break.
Most days I staggered back to the Lair just before four o’clock. Forty-five minutes to walk with a stop at Ken’s for smokes and beer if the waitresses kicked anything down that day.
Kismet opened at five.
Some days, she wore her glasses, glanced over the newspaper or wine lists and chatted with the Thai girl that cooked their entire menu on a pair of hotplates and a microwave. Some days she sang along to Etta James or Billie Holiday, arranging candles, table tents, barstools.
It was payday. The boss and I drank a couple of pitchers of beer after work, discussing waitresses over a game of pool at the pub a few doors down. I deposited my check and staggered up to Ken’s for a steak, a potato, and a case of beer. I would be broke tomorrow, but at least I would eat like a king that night. My boss called my spending philosophy tailspin economics. As long as I was going down in flames, I might as well enjoy the ride. After bills and dinner, I had twelve dollars left in my pocket. Twelve dollars and another two weeks of monotony.
As I walked past the front door of Kismet, it was open. She sang along to Etta as she took stock of the bottle lined shelves, her siren song calling gently to the sidewalk. I pulled a stool up to the bar and flipped through my spiral notebook for an empty page. She leaned against the counter, at long last fixed her gaze on me. Her hands folded like wings in front of her. “What can I get for you?”
“Something dark and profound.”
“A Porter maybe?”
“That’ll do.” I pulled a fistful of crumpled ones from my pocket.
There were a few other guys at the bar, regulars or whatever. They called her Emira. Try as I might to think of a line, the pitchers with my boss had laid me pretty low, and I wasn’t in the best shape to say anything witty. I sipped my beer, scribbled in my notebook. Nothing interesting, a letter to my friend Whitey in Encinitas. I slipped out to smoke a couple of times, mostly stalling the inevitable.
“Want another one?” She leaned against the counter, mopping a section with a stained bar towel. I looked up from a line on my page, enveloped in her unwitting beauty. Three pages of scribbling, searching for anything to say, just one line, but for her. She raised an eyebrow at me. I just nodded. “Same?” I nodded again. There went the last of my paycheck and I wasn’t any closer to a pickup line. She set a pint in front of me and wiped her way to the other end of the bar. A line. A word. Anything to be seen.
I pulled on my jacket and stepped out front to smoke a cigarette. The door swung shut behind me, closing in the din fading to distant Louis Armstrong and the muffled murmur of conversation and laughter. I lit a smoke and exhaled a weather pattern into an empty wet street. The clouds hung low and sepia toned. Lights bled like watercolors.
The music turned wave for a moment, crested, and deposited her, poised with a cigarette, beside me. There was something springy about her, the way she stood a little forward, like she might fly at any moment. A few cars rolled past, tires hissing through the rainwater. She glanced around, generally unaffected. I lit her cigarette. She folded her arms across her chest and watched the traffic coming the other way.
“It’s cold,” she said.
I nodded. A motorcycle turned onto Greenwood Avenue; a single white light turned angel on the glistening asphalt. “You want my jacket?” I asked.
“Nah.” She dropped her half-smoked cigarette to the sidewalk, crushed it under her toe, and turned away. The music rose for a moment and faded.
And then there was nothing. Myself, and the empty street again, a shooting star rolling easy towards me. The motorcycle slid past, fully loaded. That guy was going somewhere. Anywhere but here.
I glanced down at the better part of her damp unsmoked cigarette crushed on the sidewalk.
Nothing.
Of all the bullshit first lines.
I stopped into the Kismet once or twice a week after that, slipping in just after they opened, settling for porters and scribbling in my spiral. I became familiar to Emira. As she served me a beer, she’d lean against the counter and ask about what I was writing. She knew me as Tommy and was at the very least, polite. She smiled when she caught me looking up but kept herself busy with opening the bar.
The regulars filed in after me. Wine glasses and beer pints were filled and emptied and filled again and conversation turned to laughter and the night crept in with a slight buzz and settled along Greenwood Avenue with a sort of languid drunken ease. After three or four beers, my handwriting started getting sloppy and I’d have to put the notebook away and watch the rest of the scene unfold. I didn’t really know anybody there, and nobody really knew me, so it was easy to keep my mouth shut. I might not have any profound pick up lines, but at least I wasn’t about to go saying something stupid.
She had admirers. Seemed like most of the regulars were men, waiting their turn to talk with her. Got so that I could tell who she liked and who she didn’t by how quickly she set the drink down and moved on to the next customer. In the groups of men, the conversations got louder and rowdier as she drew near and hushed to whispers and smiles just after she passed. She never spent much time talking with them. With the older regulars, however, the mature and reasonable men, she might spend a few minutes entertaining a conversation. Judging by her responses, I gathered that she was intelligent enough, with a degree of some sort, and working as a nanny for the Kismet owners. The barmaid thing was just a side gig.
Around eleven, after her cook left for the night, she would pour herself a small glass of pinot and lean against the counter watching the final act of the evening, the music a little louder, the conversations turned a boisterous din. Drunks staggered out in pairs, or alone and laughing, or pulling their jackets on and lighting cigarettes. Sometimes she stepped out from behind the bar and pulled a stool up beside me and quietly watched, nodding her goodbyes as the bar cleared. She talked sometimes, and I listened, and there was awkward comfort in the last half hour. She generally let me stay after she’d flipped the sign, to finish another beer or just to keep her company. After a few weeks of watching her close, I got the distinct impression that despite the fact she didn’t talk to me much during business hours, at least she didn’t hate me for stalking her.
Randy called the Lair one afternoon. Said he was going to be playing at the Kismet on a Thursday night. Seems like I never get to see him DJ anymore. He had a friend up there that tended bar and she seemed to keep him in free beer, so he figured that because we lived so close and all, we might want to stop in and watch him spin. Might be beer in it for us. That was reason enough for me.
Thursday rolled around and Q, Chris and I wandered up to the Kismet, just after they opened. I brought my spiral and pen, just in case, and planted myself in the usual spot, tucked up against the wall in the corner. Emira was working. She set a porter in front of me and nodded hello. I flipped through until I found the last page of scribbles. I was about forty pages into that letter to Whitey.
I got another page and a half out before Randy arrived. He came in bundled in a big brown coat, carting record cases. “Hey Emira.”
“Hey Randy.” She came out to give him a hug.
He dropped his cases, hugged her, and glanced at me. “Hey Cap’n.”
“Hey Randy.”
“You’re early.”
“Getting some writing done.”
Emira stepped behind the bar. “You know Tommy?”
“Who, Cap’n? Yeah. You two have met?”
“Who’s Cap’n?”
“That’s Cap’n Noskivvies.” He pointed at me.
Emira gave me a look of genuine disbelief. “You’re Noskivvies?” Like she knew of him.
Andrew Tomacelli 