SoMa Literary Review - Twilight Bar

Twilight Bar

By Christin Rice

The great thing about San Francisco, Leila thought as she arrived for her ten p.m. shift at Twilight Bar, is its appreciation for the ugly. The deliberately awkward outfits and unflattering shapes were a relief. At least in SoMa, being too pretty wasn't prized—it was something to be suspicious of, otherwise you were FauxMa. So the fact she hadn't made time to do laundry and was wearing the same jeans she'd worn three days in a row now just meant she blended, like she belonged there.

Twilight Bar was pleasantly dark, with oddly hung tricycles on the walls, stag horns prominent over the jaegermeister machine. No bras dangling, thank god, though someone some millennia ago left a Summer's Eve box perched in the stag's antlers and no one had found a reason to remove it. A long wrap-around bar butted up to a corner with a square sit-down arcade game, and further back rested a well-loved pool table with a background of mannequin parts stacked in the very black darkness. There was a comfortable stickiness to the place, very loyal locals and only one belligerent drunk, Phil, who was actually fairly pleasant until he got his eighth Miller in him. He'd been thrown out repeatedly and always returned deeply apologetic and he was never actually violent, not to anyone other than himself anyway. So he was tolerated. Leila considered it a stroke of genius the night she signed up for an introductory bartending course three years into her loathsome cubicle life as a tiny cog in a gigantic and stuffy corporation. The class had ten fascinating-looking students and the teacher was passionate about correct mixes and generous pours. Leila left two hundred and fifty dollars lighter with an eight-week plan of escape from cubes.

As a woman in the business, you needed two things: a stance of control and a good push-up bra. The latter got the tips and the former kept you from getting messed with. It was very much like playing a role—the strong and attractive bartender. Granted, cubicle life also called for roles but no matter how well she felt she'd been playing them she couldn't get a promotion to save her life. At Twilight, every day was casual Friday with happy hour to look forward to.

"Hey Frank, how's it going tonight?" she asked the rumpled man sitting at the bar, as she tied on the little black waist apron upon which she'd wipe her hands the rest of the night.

"Okay Leila. Today was a good day—only two rejection letters in the mail, which is down from my average of five a day."

"That's good Frank, that's good. That calls for a drink. What can I get you?"

"A pint of Anchor Steam, and blow some luck on it while you're at it." Frank had written to every agent listed in the Writer's Market proposing they represent his yet-unwritten tale of Fatigue in Funny Places.

"Anchor Steam it is. Say Frank, what are you gonna do with the book advance when you get it? You're not gonna start going to one of those fancy-type bars that only serve martinis, are you?"

"I might, I just might. But only for the first week. Then I'd need to come back here for you to remind me who I am, help me keep my ego in check."

"That I can do, Frank." She busied herself with washing the few pint glasses left from the last girl's shift. Breathing in the yeasty air, establishing her wide-legged stance of confidence, she donned the mask. At twenty-nine she still wasn't sure what she was doing in life but something about this particular mask fit so well.

"Frank, where do you think your writing comes from? Like, what draws you to the written word?" She ran her towel around the rim of a pint glass to dry it.

Frank tugged his graying beard. "From my firm belief the world would be a better place if everyone could just embrace the way I see things."

"And how do you see things?"

"Things Leila, things are fucked up."

Leila chuckled to herself as the Perfect Couple walked in. The two came in once or twice a week, doted on each other, leaning into each other as they laughed at the Sci-Fi film loop on the television overhead or bent in heated conversation together. They were very hate-able. Good tippers, but sometimes that extra two dollars felt like a one-two across the face, reminding her she had no one, had had no one significant for two years now, and had never been in as perfect a relationship as theirs.

He ordered a Stella, she got the champagne in a can, asked for a glass with it. Of course. It was so annoying how imperfect they looked, she a little short, he a little wide. Their average appearance made them even more despicable, as if they knew they were perfect and comfortable in a way Leila had never been comfortable. She willed more people to come in, to diffuse her resentment.

With a lull in customers (in her head, she called them "clients" as a throwback to corporate life) she pondered what it would be like to work in a wine bar like the several just a quarter-mile away: French music playing overhead, better posture, bigger tips. And really, how hard was it? Open bottle, pour. There was no mixing. Not that she really got to mix much at Twilight, it was more a bottle and draft bar. In fact there was a grand total of two martini glasses in the place. But what could you expect of a place that had champagne in a can? Even those weren't exactly flying off the shelf. But wine, wine made you seem intelligent in a way that never happened with beer, at least not outside the larger pubs that specialized in numerous exotic drafts. Face it, her bar was a dive. But she took a certain pride in that. "Dive" meant it was divested of bullshit. And it was remarkably drama-free. Sure, people got thrown out, but there were very few fights and even fewer bitch-fests. It was sublime at times. And then other times she had an uncanny urge to go to bed at ten p.m., get up the next day, put on slacks, get morning joe-to-go and walk with a self-important air into a large building that paid regularly and well, however banal life was there.

It was particularly fascinating to her to be the sober one in a room full of people becoming more and more inebriated. Every night she felt as if they were all being swept out to the same sea and she was watching from the shore. Telescoping into the hook-ups, she witnessed the last-call desperation, the loud guffaws that were clear cover-ups for feeling excluded. Guffaws send out an umbrella message—a golf-sized umbrella—that you are fascinating, hilarious, caught up in the most awesome of groups. There were black cocktail napkins grabbed, pens borrowed. Leila wondered at the ratio of true to false contact info given, whether any of them came to any success in love.

“Twilight Bar” an excerpt from the novel in progress Turnover.

Christin Rice has an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, and a headache from drinking so much coffee. She lives in San Francisco.