Pavement Pounding

March 22, 2006

Deborah didn't last very long tending bar at the dive. Her heart wasn't in it, and the owner could tell. "You know the game," he told her. "You gotta make dem guys tink dey got a chance witchoo." Flirt, in other words, which is something Deborah is finding harder and harder to fake, especially by the twelfth hour of a double shift. "This isn't working out," they agreed, and that was that. A free agent, omnce again.

Dive bars or fancy French restaurants, it doesn't really matter, Deborah is simply sick of bar tending. But since it's something she knows how to do, and New York is bursting with bars, she bit the bullet, took a fistful of resumes, and hit the streets.

I had the day off, and decided to tag along.

"Want to come inside?" Deborah asked, when we arrived at the first place on her list, a chichi downtown hotel.

"Nah," I told her. "I don't want to be the creepy boyfriend lurking in the shadows. I'll meet you up the street."

And that's how it went for most of the day, Deborah popping into bars, while I window shopped a few steps ahead. No one was hiring — at least not on the spot — and by five o'clock our routine began to change. Instead of looking for a restaurant that was hiring bar tenders, we began to look for a restaurant that would serve us food. The sun dipped and the temperature dropped as we strolled up Avenue A.

"Tom!" I called out to the monstrous graying beard that passed us on the sidewalk. "Tom!"

I hadn't seen Tom in over a year and it took him a moment to recognize me, but when he did he offered a hearty handshake. "Hey! What's going on? How've you been? What have you been up to?" His voice-over voice had gotten more gravely, and his beard had grown more wild since I'd seen him last, but he still dressed in his usual Luddite style, like an Old West snake oil salesman in a wool jacket that hadn't heard of dry cleaning yet. His ascot was clean, though. Or was it a cravat?

"Nothing much," I said. You know. Doing my thing, living my life."

"You're still around? Still out in Brooklyn? You haven't moved to California or anything?"

"Nah," I laughed. "I'm around. Just laying low, I guess. This is my girlfriend, Deborah. She's out looking for a bar tending gig. Know of anything?"

"Hey Deborah, nice to meet you. Did you go in here?" he asked, pointing to the bar on the corner.

Deborah turned to look. "No, Why? Are they hiring?"

"No, but that's where I work," he said. "Actually they just hired someone new last week. A female. That's what they were looking for. Too bad I didn't run into you guys last week. Timing is everything."

After the usual wrap up — good to see you, take care, stay in touch, et cetera — we continued on our respective ways.

"How do you know that guy?" Deborah asked.

"We used to hang around with the same cast of characters," I said, and proceeded to deconstruct the family tree that linked Tom and I together.

Deborah stopped me. "I think you might've told me about him once before. He's a little crazy, right?"

"Maybe," I shrugged. "But not any crazier than anyone else I know."

Deborah was a little downtrodden when we first walked into Odessa for dinner, but she perked right up when she heard Duran Duran playing on their stereo. And when it turned out they were playing a best of Duran Duran mix tape, it sent her into another world.

"Admit it," she said, bopping her head, "you love Duran Duran."

"Umm—"

"I remember the first time I ever saw them," she said, rather wistfully, "It was on Punchline -- a local kid's television show in Pittsburgh -- I fell in love immediately."

"Did you go out and buy all their records?" I asked.

"Are you kidding? My parents wouldn't let me. It was devil's music."

Despite her parent's disapproval, or more likely because of it, her infatuation with the group grew and, before long she managed to acquire a secret stash of pictures, surreptitiously torn from magazines found in her local library.

"I would take them with me to school every day so my parents wouldn't find them," she said.

It didn't work, though. Her mother discovered them during one of her frequent bedroom raids, and when she did, she burned the whole pile. "They wear makeup. They come from the devil!" And so on.

"Did you cry?" I asked.

"What do you think?"