David Wallace - Broom of the System

I slipped unconsciously into my bar mode. I looked at people. The people at the actual bar were easy, because of the huge mirror we were all looking into. The mirror revealed that the young bartender’s hair became a mohawk in back. I was given the Canadian Club and immediately tasted tapwater, to which I am acutely sensitive.

The man nearest me, a few stools away, even farther than I from the “Bob Newhart” audience, was the best-looking man in the room. He had a strong face, a chin I admired wistfully over my whiskey, his high features stronger for the fact that he was engagingly in need of a shave. Hair a kind of deep, dark blond, cut short and almost brushed up. The muscles of his jaw worked as he chewed peanuts. He drank beer; he had a small brown forest of bottles around him. The eyes were bright green, but bright and still soft, somehow, plant-green as opposed to emerald-green, so that he still looked like a human being, and not a product of technology, as so many green-eyed people in my opinion do. Look like products of technology. His chin, his generous chin was cleft. Enough about chins. I’m certain this person felt the stares of all the men in the room, but he didn’t seem to notice, simply sat hunched on his stool, legs reaching the supports and then some, in designer jeans and sportcoat and dress shirt opened at the neck, eating nuts and drinking beer at an impressive rate. I somehow smelled Amherst College.

The only Approach I had the misfortune to witness personally came from a big, sleek, blue-eyed man in a rugby shirt and white cotton pants. How he slid in between the man and myself, then slid the upper part of his body down the bar toward the man, hiding him a bit, so that I had to make exclusive use of the angle of the mirror above the glitter of the bar’s arsenal of bottles to watch. I shivered. I shivered only because the Approach looked so troublingly familiar. I had seen it at every single one of the singles bars, heterosexual singles bars I’d attended during the first desolate Lenoreless year after my hegira to Cleveland. It was indeed an Approach.

“Hi there,” said the Approacher to the man, in the mirror. “Do you come here often?”

I shivered.

“Nope,” said the man, popping a handful of nuts in his mouth. His eye caught mine in the mirror.

“No, I didn’t think so,” said the Approacher, gauging the man’s bicep under his sportcoat. “I come here fairly regularly, and I certainly would have noticed you, but I haven’t noticed you here before.” He played with his daiquiri glass.

The man looked the Approacher in the eye through the mirror, considering something. His green eyes grew liddy, sleepy, amused. “I think you’re probably barking up the wrong tree, here, guy,” he said to the Approacher. “I’m here as a rememberer, not a patron.”

The Approacher looked down at the man’s hands, around his beer glass, on the bar. “A rememberer?”

“Yup,” said the man. “I used to go to school around here. A few years ago.” A nut, into his mouth. “I used to come to this bar, a lot, before it changed.”

“Oh?” The Approacher cupped his chin in his hand, looked at the side of the man’s chewing face. “The Flange changed? I never heard about any change.”

“Sure enough.” The man looked levelly at the Approacher through the mirror. “Now, I’m sorry to say, it looks to be a place for faggots.” He said this slowly and distinctly. I looked down at my drink and my handkerchief. When I looked up the Approacher was gone, back at the television, and the man was placidly ordering what appeared to be his tenth beer, patiently repeating the order until the bartender could no longer pretend to ignore him.

Careful to make it in no way resemble an Approach, I came over to the man and sat on the stool beside him, my feet dangling.

“Look, I’m not a homosexual either,” I found myself saying, though thank God quietly. “In fact I too am here as a… rememberer and not a patron. But I think if one comes to a place like this, for whatever reason, it behooves one not to be overtly rude to the people for whom coming here is… entirely appropriate.” My ice snapped suddenly in my drink.

The man looked at me in the mirror, chewing. We waited while his mouth cleared of peanuts. “I got nothing against homosexuals,” he said. “They can go around being homosexuals amongst themselves all they want, far as I’m concerned. It’s just when it’s my own personal ass that they start sniffin’ after and checkin’ out, I find my tolerance level really plummets, for some reason.” He took some beer. “As for coming into this place, I was coming into this place when these old boys were all out kneeling in alleys in the rain.” He gestured slightly through the mirror at the Approacher and his friends. “This is more my place than theirs. I used to spend hours here, when it was a real bar. I used to talk to the whores here. They were real nice. I got educated here. My house used to come down here, en-fucking-masse, on Wednesday nights.”

“Wednesdays?” I asked. Wednesdays. “House as in… fraternity house?”

His green eyes were on mine in the mirror. I thought I could see something, in those eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Why?”

“Not… Amherst College fraternity house.”

“Yeah, I went to Amherst,” he said.

“Not… Psi Phi fraternity at Amherst,” I said.

He swiveled on his stool to face me. “Yeah.” I felt the jealous stares of the “Bob Newhart” crowd.

“My Lord,” I said. “Myself as well. Psi Phi. Class of ‘69.”

The man grinned widely. “ ‘83 here,” he said. Then his eyes narrowed; he held out his hand, each finger pointing in a different direction. Testing me, I knew. After only the briefest hesitation, I joined him in the Psi Phi handshake. I had not done it in so, so long. My throat ached a little bit. I found my arm tingling. “Quaa aa ngo!” we yelled in unison at the end, and grabbed each other’s wrists, and tapped elbows. I felt eyes.

“Sheeit.”

“Heavens.”

I held out my hand in the conventional way. “I am Richard Vigorous of Cleveland, Ohio.”

The man took it. “Andrew Sealander Lang,” he said, “of Nugget Bluff, which is to say really Dallas, Texas, and lately of Scarsdale, New York.”

“Scarsdale, Andrew?” I said. “I lived in Scarsdale, myself, for a good while. Mostly in the seventies.”

“But you moved,” Andrew Lang said, smiling. “I can understand, completely and entirely. Yes.”

What am I to say, retrospectively, here? Perhaps that I felt myself in the presence of a kinsman. Not simply a fraternity brother: I had been a completely marginal Psi Phi, and had actually moved out of the place in some haste in the middle of my sophomore year, when the House upperclassmen cut our stairs off halfway and fashioned a crude diving board and cut open the House’s living-room floor and filled the basement with beer and called the entire creation a swimming pool, into which it was dictated that all sophomores were to be required to dive and then drink themselves to safety. I was marginal. And I sensed in Lang a really hard-core Psi Phi: he had had at least ten beers, was entering into negotiations for the eleventh, and didn’t seem the slightest bit tipsy; nor, even more important, had he been to the restroom once since I arrived. This was collegiate manhood as I had come to know it.

No, but still I felt affinities, elective or otherwise. I sensed somehow in Lang another inside outsider, another lonely alumnus here at an alumniless time. Surrounded by insiders, now: children, swaggering and belonging, with their complicated eyes. Lang’s eyes, eyes the color of plants, were not complicated. I looked at them in the mirror. They were like my eyes. They were the eyes of a man gone back to the house where he grew up, to watch new children play in his yard, a new Rawlings Everbounce pass through a new basketball hoop over his garage, a new dog diddle on his mother’s rhododendrons. Sad, sad. Perhaps it was only the whiskey, and the beer, but I sensed sadness in Lang. His bar was my college. They were the same. And we simply no longer belonged, now.