The jukebox is broken and only plays that Lenny Kravitz version of American Woman, so more often than not it sits unplugged in the corner as a darkened sarcophagus of commercial pop from the 90s. The bar plays songs from the phone of whoever opened that day through tinny, up-too-loud computer speakers that haunt the corners of the room. They don’t do any favors for the harmon mutes and spanish vocals that are making it hard to carry on a conversation.
Not that it matters to the Peace Corps kid chatting to some Australian girl two stools down. He’s definitely a Peace Corps kid. You know the type. Always droning on about Aldo Leopold or or What’s Really The Matter Here, like he’s really going to fix something. Like a few classes at Brown or wherever has somehow uniquely suited him to fix what the American Death Machine has spent four decades ruining.
Everyone hates the Peace Corps kids.
“This song, you know, it’s really pretty sad. With the trumpets and the drums and the dance beat and everything, it sounds happy, but when you listen to the lyrics, it’s about a girl dying.” The voice comes from the boy in cargo shorts and Chacos, a fresh bag of rolling tobacco on the bar in front of him. Classic corps.
“See?” he asks. “Listen to it. Allí fueron los bomberos con sus campanas, sus sirenas. Here come the firefighters.”
The girl isn’t much younger, a gap year kid. Maybe a year or two of Uni. Her eyes flit around the room for someone, anyone, to cut in, buy her a drink, get this guy away from her, talk about literally anything else on earth. Javi is working the door.
Rumor is he was a Kaibil in the war and saw things, did things, a man doesn’t come back from. Most nights he sits on a stool by the scarred wooden doors as though someone might be told they can’t come in and pans across the room with steely blue faraway eyes. When the doors close at 11 and the ashtrays come out he peeps to the street and yells to shut the fuck up when a military patrol rumbles down the cobblestones.
“Al cuarto de Tula, le cogió candela, Se quedó dormida y no apagó la vela. She went to sleep and didn’t blow out the candle. Vela, that’s another word for candle.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, man?” Javi yells through the barroom murmur. The Peace Corps kid sits upright on the stool with the posture of just being caught in something. “That song’s not about any fire. That song is about fucking, man! You know?” He gesticulates with his hips across the bar.
Rumor is one year during Semana Santa he saw from his perch a girl getting raped between a couple of cars. Story goes he just went over and killed the guy there in the street, didn’t even help the girl up or anything, just killed the guy with his hands and went back to work. No one really knows if that’s true or not, but people don’t really fuck with Javi.
“You know? Fucking? Like this?”
You can’t help but feel for the kid while he squirms on the stool. The entire bar looks at him, looks at Javi, looks back at him. Only Ibrahim Ferrer cuts the silence. And then quietly, almost imperceptibly, at first, the Australian girl begins to laugh. It’s only a giggle, really, and she tries to hold it back. Her lips are taught and she bites her cheeks bloody out of some deeply ingrained tenderness toward this awful boy.
Without the rum she might have made it. Instead a short, staccato, hacking kind of laugh bubbles over and escapes before she regains control. But then another, and then from behind the bar Sofia begins to laugh as well. And then before long the whole bar is in tears. The room is consumed by a wild, frantic, hysterical kind of laughter that feeds on itself until it is a beast of its own and whatever small funny thing brought it about is not only forgotten, it is moot.
Grown men roll on the floor and point at the Peace Corps volunteer, now flushed and staring stonefaced into his rum. He stammers for a moment, and gets up, and trips, and he runs for the door but Javi, the only person in the room not laughing or crying, yells after him that he owes for the last two drinks.
He shuffles back through a straight of crying, laughing, pointing people and lays too much money on the bar and turns and runs out through the heavy double doors and into the street, and before the door is even latched behind him a different young man takes his seat and begins talking to the girl, tears still streaming down his face.
Finding Balance
Just don't slip.
The Art of the Deal
The rooster in question is four feet tall. He’s one of those rare, proud birds that struts less with hubris or panache as much as ... Read more