by LSF Publications
by Austin Carr
A young man, lost and adrift over his girlfriend leaving during the holidays, finds peculiar solace at a local bar...
It took me over two and a half decades of life, but I was finally getting a handle on the whole 'Bah, humbug' deal.
Victorian literature turned to film wasn't really my deal. It seemed like a lot of impossibly stiff people dressing in improbably engineered clothing trying to get their mouths around ridiculously awkward sentences, and my exposure was pretty much limited to the two dozen or so renditions of Dickens' A Christmas Carol that inundated TV screens every December. For my money, which admittedly was limited, Mr. Magoo's turn as Scrooge lapped the field, although I always wondered what Snoopy could have done with the role had a Peanuts version been completed.
But this year I was feeling a little more kinship with old Ebeneezer. Granted, the old guy had a lot more reasons for bitterness than I did. I didn't have a dead partner spending half the company money on enough chain accessories to make even the most Goth chick envious and then dragging the ensemble along my nice hardwood floors. Nor did my parents get so lashed to the hookah pipe that they named me Ebeneezer, although Morgan wasn't exactly a social resume enhancer. But I did get the same holiday brush-off from the girlfriend. Okay, maybe not quite the same. Old Scrooge got the stiff arm because he loved cash too much; I apparently got the brush because I didn't have enough of it, and limited prospects of turning that reality around. Either way you looked at it, the girl was gone, and I could feel myself well on my way to curmudgeon status.
So now I thought I understood the translation. "Bah" meant you were screwed and "Humbug" obviously had something to do with double penetration. I looked sourly at the strings of Christmas lights adorning the house. Quite a few hours of labor invested in that money-sucking undertaking, and all of it because Shelly was a Christmas creature of the first rank. The shinier the baubles, the better she liked it. I didn't mind the effort, since it seemed to make it more likely that my own baubles would get properly shined. Now my baubles were on their own, and all I could see was a number of burnt out bulbs and sagging lines that I had no interest in fixing.
I couldn't stand being around the house, looking at a bed with only one side rumpled, a sink with one bowl in it, and a Christmas tree with a handful of presents that Shelly would never open. I'd already picked up one and put it in my shirt pocket; a gold tennis bracelet with a trio of small diamonds as accents. It wasn't a Faberge piece by any stretch, but the young saleslady had seemed wistful at the purchase, which was a good enough barometer for me. After all, what did I know about jewelry? Obviously more than I knew about the state of a relationship.
I got into my car and headed out aimlessly. Elvis' Blue Christmas was warbling on one station. It used to be a station changer, a depressing dirge masquerading as a holiday tune, but now I listened to it in full wallow, almost feeling the testosterone draining from my body with every stanza. No wonder the King supposedly had trouble in the sack. Record enough of that melancholy Christmas crap and you were lucky if you didn't end up a virtual eunuch. I found myself singing along and wondering if a younger Scrooge had ever found himself in a horse-drawn carriage, mournfully mouthing The Three Penny Opera. A car pulled up to me at a stop light and my peripheral vision told me that the two young female occupants were having a bit of a giggle over the guy crooning to himself. Ordinarily I'd have looked abashed, given my most disarming smile and done my level best to charm the pants off one or the other. Both if I could swing it. Now I just stared straight ahead, even when the driver tooted her horn. You and me, King. You and me.
I had no place to be and no interest in doing anything productive. I worked for myself, which was good, but had no interest in doing any, which wasn't. Jobs were piling up nearly as fast as my feeling of self-pity, but not getting nearly as much attention. It was just as well. I was unfocused and muddle headed and the best way I knew to kill off a business was to do a job as an afterthought. Better postpone the job than piss off the customer, although the former would eventually turn into the latter. I'd get back to the pile soon, but just not today. Or probably tomorrow.
Out of habit, I drove by Julio's, a neighborhood sports bar of a certain charm and ambiance, if by charm you meant reasonably priced spirits and by ambiance you meant spirits served by leggy young things. I was a regular, or at least I had been until Shelly had pulled her recent getaway. She'd been one of Julio's waitresses, all carefully selected for their appeal to basic male sports types, and we'd started going out about two weeks after she'd started working there. A month later she'd basically moved in with me. Six weeks later she'd been whisked away to another city by a guy with a bigger wallet. A three month romance. The Polaroid people would have been envious.
I'd been avoiding the place for obvious reasons. Everyone knew me, Julio, the waitresses, a lot of the other regulars, and they no doubt knew I'd been given the old heave-ho. I hadn't been up to facing them, certainly not up to dealing with the boisterous happy hour crowd of which I was often a part. But it was early, an hour before the lunch trickle started, and the parking lot was nearly deserted. What the hell? Shelly sure wasn't going to be waiting tables, and I'd be damned if I was going to be driven from my favorite watering hole just because everyone knew I'd been kicked to the curb. I hit the brakes hard and swung into the parking lot, spraying a bit of gravel as I came in a little hotter than I intended. I figured there was a metaphor in there somewhere.
Julio had dressed up the waitresses in his warped idea of the Christmas spirit: form fitting, red Santa suit bustiers with white ruffs strategically placed above and below; white half-cut panties that exposed just enough to make a guy wish for stripper poles; and iridescent green stockings topped on the upper thigh by candy cane striped garters. It was enough to make Bing Crosby rethink the whole priest gig. Julio may have been an immigrant with less documentation than an eBay purchase requiring some assembly, but his image of Christmas was a pretty fair rendition of the American dream. Reasonably priced cold beer, multiple big screens with sports blaring, and pretty young girls with miles of legs. Every day a holiday at Julio's.
I slouched into my usual booth, tucked away in the corner where I was only a few steps from the rest room, lined up perfectly with a high definition Vizio, and easily able to adjust my crotch in relative privacy. The place was near deserted before eleven, with only a couple of dedicated drinkers manning the bar. I seldom was in here before five, and it was kind of depressing to see the place nearly empty, with only a couple of waitresses lazily patrolling the wasteland. The first one I noticed was Missy.
It figured that she'd be here, the waitress I knew the longest and had the best relationship with, just to make me even more uncomfortable. I'd always had a bit of a thing for her, at least until Shelly came along, bold as brass and forward as the prow of a battleship. With Missy, I'd flirted at a low temperature, appropriate for a customer without taking advantage of a girl whose job required her to be nice. Missy played along as well and I spent more than a couple of months playing the what-if game about her and her feelings, but before I could pull the trigger Shelly showed up with both guns blazing, making no secret of the fact that she liked me. A lot. For a fairly hesitant guy who'd made a habit out of second guessing his advances, Shelly was tailor-made.
Missy descended on me, a vision in her Christmas get up, sandy hair curling sweetly over her bare shoulders. She was guaranteed to get Santa to call in sick on the big day. "Welcome back, stranger," she smiled, giving me a sympathetic rub on the shoulder as she put down a coaster. "We missed you around here. What can I get you?"
I forced a grin. The old Morgan, not a care in the world. "A beer would be nice."
"Coming right up, sweetie." She hustled over to the bar and pointed me out to Julio, who waved as though I'd just returned from a stint in Afghanistan rather than Dump City. When Missy turned away I noticed that the garish stockings and garters actually detracted from the swell of her butt, rolling nicely under the white ruff. I idly wondered if Julio had a complaint box anywhere.
When she returned she set my beer in front of me with exaggerated care. "How are you doing, Morgan?" she asked sympathetically, putting a soft hand back on my shoulder.
I focused my attention on the Vizio, not trusting myself to look her in the eyes. This had turned out to be a bad idea, but I couldn't just get up and leave without looking even more pathetic then I felt. "I'm sitting in a sports bar at eleven in the morning drinking beer with people I used to make fun of," I said quietly, gesturing at the hard core barflies. "I can still see the back of my ex-girlfriend's head as she drives off in some asshole's XJE, without even a glance in the rear view mirror. I have no idea why she left, what I did, or didn't do, and I've been trying to wrap my head around it for a couple of weeks now with no answers. All in all, I've been better."
"I can imagine." Her grip tightened on my shoulder. "You really had no idea she was leaving?" she asked. Her tone was a bit unbelieving.
I thought back to a few weeks ago when I'd asked Shelly why she was boxing up her collection of animal figurines and she'd said something about giving them to Goodwill. I thought about a few late nights where she supposedly worked a few extra hours. Mostly I thought about pulling up to the house, home because I'd forgotten my checkbook, only to see Shelly getting into a shiny black Jaguar while some pencil neck wrestled a couple of suitcases into the trunk. She'd seen me pull up and simply ducked into the car while her friend hurriedly slammed the trunk and made for the driver's side. I shook my head as I sipped my beer.
She shook her head disgustedly. "Jesus, Morgan, I could have told you that Shelly would bolt as soon as the first guy with twenty more dollars in his pocket walked by." It was a lot more than twenty bucks, based on the car I saw her leaving in, but I got the sentiment. "Any of the girls here could have."
I nodded, making a concerted effort not to let my eyes roam over her costume. "Would have been nice if somebody had told me that before she moved in," I said evenly.
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