There’s not too many downtown bars that will let a man in a stitched leather mask sip a beer in peace but Armand’s is one of the few.
Armand is a big guy that looks like he might have lived off of steroids and power lifting. Depending on the day of the week you ask him he will tell you that he used to be a lumberjack, a caber chucker, a stevedore or a professional wrestler.
These days he just stood behind his bar, wiping up the residue of careless drink stains, elbow sweat and the random bits of spilled conscience.
I sat there at the bar and I listened to Armand’s story.
He was telling me about this girl.
“So what did she do?” I asked.
“First she hit him with the soup,” Armand told me.
“What kind of soup?”
“The red kind. Does it matter? She hit him with the soup and the salad and a steak smack-dab in the eye, faster than you can say arugula, topping the whole massacre off with a half a pitcher of beer broken squarely over his head.”
“What’d she do next?”
“Next she was up and out the door; stopping only to goose a waiter in the vestibule,” Armand went on.
“I guess he wasn’t waiting for that.”
“I guess he wasn’t. He dropped a tray of spaghetti trays onto a table full of Baptists, anointing them Bolognese-style. It was something to see. He nearly started a one-man pasta jihad.”
“So what did the waiter do then?”
“He didn’t bat an eyelash. He threw a napkin on the floor, motioned imperiously for a bus boy, blessed the Baptists in the name of the Sect of Saintly Spaghetti Pastafararians and called out aloud to the gods – is this love?”
“So was it?” I asked.
“Was it what?” Armand replied.
“Was it love?”
Armand shrugged.
“Don’t ask me - ask the expert who stomped through the vestibule and out the door after wasting a perfectly good half pitcher of beer.”
I bowed my head in memory of good beer.
“Better yet,” Armand concluded. “You should ask the waiter who brought the beer-baptised basher the bill from the Baptists and the lady he’d wronged and his own phone number – just in case.”
“Now that is love,” I admitted, poking a tube of tobacco in my grin.
I lit an unfiltered cigarette and puffed on it thoughtfully.
Fire like that deserved a little smoke.