And the Award Goes To... Mark Maynard

It’s coming up on twenty years now that I have been hanging out from time to time in bars, almost fifteen of them legally. And in that course of time I spent many of my younger years trying to get the attention of women, trying to be the one guy that females would cull from the herd of eager-eyed, cologne splashed men who spent an inordinate amount of time deciding which white button-down oxford to wear with which pair of bluejeans.

Now I am happily married, and spend my time in bars (infrequently as it is) more interested in whether or not the bartender notices me so that he can take my drink order expediently and mostly unaware of the other women in whatever establishment I find my self imbibing in.

And from time to time, I will occasionally notice a wayward female glance settle upon my countenance for a fleeting moment, and this flatters me and stokes my male ego momentarily; this safe moment of shared eye contact that each party realizes will go no further than a smile of acknowledgement.

So imagine my surprise last Saturday night to find myself the lucky winner of female attention, the only one culled from the herd I happened to be traveling with at the time.

We were in San Francisco’s Tenderloin to see a punk band play at a theater that dated back to the vaudeville days and when we arrived at the box office, tickets in hand, we saw that they were still offloading equipment from the trucks. We had already passed a number of decent bars on Market St., but my brother Tommy insisted that for nostalgic reasons we should drop in on Joe’s, a real classic joint somewhere in the vicinity.

There, right across Turk Street from the theater’s backstage dock was a classic corner bar. One door, a strip of aluminum framed windows fronting the street and a line of patrons populating every stool. Tommy walked up to the doorman who happened to be wearing a flannel shirt and a blue veterans baseball cap with the yellow embroidered lettering of a naval vessel that has most likely been scrapped for razorblades, and asked him if this fine establishment was Joe’s. The elderly gentleman watching the door got a sad look on his face and commiserated to my brother that Joe’s had recently burned to the ground. Tommy told him that was too bad and motioned the other five of us into the watering hole where he proceeded to procure each of us a cold bottle of Bud.

As we walked in the door we were greeted by the universal looks of “you don’t belong here” from each and every stool. Eventually, each head turned away from us to sulk back to it’s own visual reference point somewhere above the bartop.

The six of us stood awkwardly behind the stools in a little walkway between the bar and the windows, a blue linoleum highway that led directly to the filthy tiled bathroom that smelled of piss, mold and disillusionment.

We sipped quickly from our frosty bottles and quietly pointed out to one another the haphazard vertical walking pattern of a large cockroach making his way across an old whiskey label mirror behind the bartender’s head.

An aging, partially toothless barfly was heading to her empty stool around the far corner of the bar and had to walk behind our squad of invading infantrymen one by one. Fortune’s sweet eyes had favored me this night, for while each of us offered a similar opportunity, it was my ribcage this delicate wilting flower of the night decided to give a squeeze with her gnarled fingers, making me jump with such force that the King of Beers began foaming out the neck of my cool bottle. She took three steps past me and my other compatriots before turning to give me a twinkling red-eyed wink and a partially toothed smile as she turned the corner and settled onto the vinyl stool that still held the impression of her ample behind and spindly thighs for her until her return.