Crowd Control
“Think about it,” the bartender with the red shirt and the long greasy hair tells me. “What’s the Cat known for?”
“Alcohol poisoning,” I joke, and regret it. The downstairs bar around us is empty except for a pair of washed-out women in hooded sweatshirts and a bony man flicking a piece of tape between his fingers. The bartender stares a hole through the back of my head.
“Guess again,” he says, very quietly.
“Music?”
“What’s the capacity upstairs? You don’t know, so I’ll tell you. Six hundred. How many smoke, you think?”
“Say half.”
“And all those people, filling the upstairs, suddenly needing to smoke, come outside. Clogging everything up. Listen, I used to smoke. I stopped smoking and drinking three years ago.” He holds up a bottle of Budweiser in each hand for a significant moment, before lowering both into the cooler behind the bar. “But this is America, and in America, I believe you have a God-given right to kill yourself however you want to.”
I drink up, jot a few notes, and leave. No way will that part of the discussion end up on my DC Style blog on the smoking ban.
First Week, New Year
I win the National Press Club’s short story contest, using the first chapter of the book; an agent in NYC is reading the first 40 pages. AARP the Magazine story comes out. OnTap issue comes out. Post story runs on Sunday. Amy Lin story runs in the City Paper.
New Year’s down at Lake Anna—a giant house in a forested stretch off the 606. Three days with journalists and other drinkers with writing problems, not to mention the contingent of increasingly belligerent Russians. I get the opportunity to work on my grilling skills, and develop an affinity for Rusty Nails.
I come back to a new office—and a desk with my chair and screen to the door. People sneak up and shoot rubber bands at the back of my head. It makes me think of the television ad where the monkeys scream and leap and basically destroy the life of their one human co-worker.
“Alcohol poisoning,” I joke, and regret it. The downstairs bar around us is empty except for a pair of washed-out women in hooded sweatshirts and a bony man flicking a piece of tape between his fingers. The bartender stares a hole through the back of my head.
“Guess again,” he says, very quietly.
“Music?”
“What’s the capacity upstairs? You don’t know, so I’ll tell you. Six hundred. How many smoke, you think?”
“Say half.”
“And all those people, filling the upstairs, suddenly needing to smoke, come outside. Clogging everything up. Listen, I used to smoke. I stopped smoking and drinking three years ago.” He holds up a bottle of Budweiser in each hand for a significant moment, before lowering both into the cooler behind the bar. “But this is America, and in America, I believe you have a God-given right to kill yourself however you want to.”
I drink up, jot a few notes, and leave. No way will that part of the discussion end up on my DC Style blog on the smoking ban.
First Week, New Year
I win the National Press Club’s short story contest, using the first chapter of the book; an agent in NYC is reading the first 40 pages. AARP the Magazine story comes out. OnTap issue comes out. Post story runs on Sunday. Amy Lin story runs in the City Paper.
New Year’s down at Lake Anna—a giant house in a forested stretch off the 606. Three days with journalists and other drinkers with writing problems, not to mention the contingent of increasingly belligerent Russians. I get the opportunity to work on my grilling skills, and develop an affinity for Rusty Nails.
I come back to a new office—and a desk with my chair and screen to the door. People sneak up and shoot rubber bands at the back of my head. It makes me think of the television ad where the monkeys scream and leap and basically destroy the life of their one human co-worker.
posted by NiK @ 3:37 PM
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