August 21, 2012
8:07 P.M.
I TOSS BACK the shot glass and feel fire in my throat, just at the moment that the bar ripples with displeasure. It’s a murmur gaining enough steam to rise above the thump-thumping of the Clash from the jukebox. Someone yells, “Sack the barkeep.”
In my periphery, I sense that the cause of collective concern has something to do with what’s on the TV. Without fully taking my eyes from the glass, I half gaze to my right into an upper corner of the bar, home to the gargantuan flat-panel television.
It’s ordinarily tuned to sports. But someone must’ve hit the remote control. Now the TV shows a news channel, broadcasting a presidential campaign event. One of those town-hall meetings, where everyday Americans ask questions that sound way too polite to express how the polls indicate they’re really feeling about the two candidates, the country, their lives.
I turn back to my empty glass. I let my eyes glaze. I consider what I’d ask if called upon at the town hall:
Hello, my name is Zach Coles. I used to work at the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, where I got paid to expose hypocrites like you and your corporate cronies. Then the economy imploded, I got laid off, and I do administrative office work that barely pays the bills. My question: Which of you has a plan that would get me my job back?
I can’t muster a smile at my own lies. Much of the time, my erstwhile newspaper job involved writing corporate earnings stories and doughy profiles for the business section, though I did have my share of kill shots. More than most. And I really lost the job not because of the economy, or not entirely because of it, but also thanks to the possibly heavy-handed way I once dealt with a spineless editor who shied away from tough stories and precise language. If you consider threatening an editor with physical violence to be too heavy-handed.
The bar returns to its sense of order, the channel evidently having been returned to its rightful place on ESPN.
I feel a guy sidle up next to me on one of the torn red vinyl seats that line the decrepit wooden bar. He settles in.
“Vodka?”
It takes me a second to realize he’s talking to me.
“Gin.”
“Brave man.”
I pick him up in the corner of my eye. He’s as big as I am, which I wouldn’t mention but it doesn’t much happen. Rather, we’re the same volume, different shape. I’m Laurel, he’s Hardy. More like hearty. Bouncer shoulders, wrestler chest.
I sense that he’s sizing me up too. Happens a lot when people see a wiry six-foot-six dude with a thick head of wooly hair and a beard that looks like seventies shag carpeting.
“Combination of burned-out taste buds and self-loathing—the gin thing.”
Hearty nods to the bartender.
“Ketel One and another liver buster for my friend.”
Bartender cups an ear. Can’t hear over the music. My big bar mate points to the clear bottle of vodka he wants and then at my glass.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of your generosity?” I ask, still locked on my glass.
“Tough economy.”
“Amen.”
I’m not remotely in the mood for conversation. Just might say something like: don’t think your drink is buying conversation. I’m doing a sudoku puzzle in my head.
The guy inhales his vodka. But he puts the glass down gently with chunky, ruddy hands.
“Want to add fifteen hundred dollars to your bank account?”
I sip my gin, feel the sleazy sizzle in my throat like I’m getting tattooed along my larynx, and realize just how much self-loathing. I don’t look at him.
He says: “It’ll take less than five minutes and everyone keeps their pants on.”
Now I turn and briefly take him in. Late thirties, with droopy, confident eyes. A gummy face, jowls, like his cheeks got liposuctioned. Short haircut. Stretched taut over his square shape, he wears a sport coat made of thin fabric, which for some reason makes me think it must be tan. It’s hard to tell in the dark, and the ear-splitting jukebox seems to diminish my ability not just to hear clearly but to see as well.
I don’t have a regular bar. This one, the Pastime, is semi-regular, recommended by a journalist acquaintance who frequents here and swears by its antisocial atmosphere.
“No thanks,” I say. “I don’t do shakedown work.”
I’m just assuming that’s his aim. People see a big guy with a devil-may-care drinking problem and insufficient funds for a haircut and shave and assume anything goes.
“It’s got to be ignominious,” he says.
“The vodka drinkers always use the big words.”
His vocab has almost perked me up but I’m unusually grouchy, which is saying something. I don’t feel like giving him the satisfaction of asking him what he’s talking about.
“Making coffee, filing manila folders, collating. Do you do collating as an administrative assistant?” he says.
Just like that, it’s a whole new conversation—one where the stranger buying the cheap swill knows that I recently took a bottom-rung job as an administrative assistant because the first ten career options weren’t hiring and because paying rent beats living in my trunk.
“Headline: Loob Award-winning journalist whose righteous indignation leads to newsroom violence is now forced to pay rent by collating,” he says.
“Loeb.” Not Loob.
The Gerald R. Loeb Award is the highest honor for business journalism. I won it five years ago, for the second time, at the Chronicle—before the economy imploded, cratering—among other things—newspapers, and causing layoffs of even award winners, especially the ones that once punched an editor for excising from a profile of a corrupt corporate executive a much-loved adjective.
Hearty leans in. I can smell the fish taco he ate sometime in the last hour. “There’s a computer thumb drive in a safe in your boss’s office. Probably in a folder. I’ll give you fifteen hundred dollars to bring it to me.”
He pulls out his wallet and spreads the bills, showing me hundreds of dollars.
“This computer drive has special meaning for me. It’s an easy job. You have the key to his office or can get it, then find your way into the safe.”
He doesn’t seem sure what to make of my slight grin. Am I bemused? Bored?
“Three grand. Final offer.”
“Absolutely, positively, no fucking way on Earth.”
He tilts his head to the side, then brings his thumb to his mouth and chews on a nail. I glance long enough to see the bent and bumpy cartilage of a nose that’s learned from experience.
“Figured you’d say that.”
He reaches into his wallet and pulls out a photo. He holds it beneath the edge of the bar. I can make out a school photo of a boy, probably six years old.
“This young man would appreciate if you brought me the thumb drive.”
“If the kid wants the thing, he can ask me himself.”
He half laughs. “I will kill Ezekiel if you don’t bring it to me.”
I squeeze the gin glass and wonder: if this guy knows me as well as he thinks he does, then he knows that I’ve got anger management problems that manifest as physical violence, including twice in a newsroom. Once over an editor changing an adjective.
I set down the glass.
“I’m not humoring you anymore.”
I stand up. I turn around to go.
“Meredith Canter,” he blares.
I freeze.
Before I turn around, he walks up behind me.
“You broke up six years ago. She broke up with you, actually.”
I turn to face him. “Guess what?” I say. He looks up at me—from six inches below.
“What?”
“I’m a tinderbox.”
“She broke up with you six years ago. In a café in Santa Cruz. Love of your life.”
“Righto. And I haven’t seen her since. I’ve talked to her voice mail twice—on her birthday. I don’t care who you are or what you want, but I won’t get it for you or be intimidated by the fact that you know how to use the Internet or talked to some people who know me. Don’t be fooled by my beard. Underneath here is someone who fights with enormous precision.”
He holds up the picture of the boy. The bar is thumping with an old Scorpions song that I once loved to hate, and I’m feeling the effects of four shots of gin.
“Roughly eight months after Meredith split up with you, Ezekiel was born.”
I take a deep breath. I’m doing the sudoku puzzle in my head.
“Bring me the computer drive in twenty-four hours.”
Hearty nods, turns, and slithers toward the door.