Popination Memorialization
a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: a guest post from The Robusto Room.
A NOTE FROM ZUKO: I have not sipped nor supped at any new pubs this week, so I thought I’d share another Bar of Yore with y’all—another of my partner’s dispatches from the past. This essay is from our defunct blog called Parallel Bars, on which we both wrote under pen names, from bars in the present and remembrances about those of yore.
This particular essay is a lovely piece about, among other things, memory. I use it as an exemplar often when I teach courses on Personal Essay or Memoir, as it’s a thoughtful and poignant Musing, in my entirely unbiased opinion. It takes place at my partner’s erstwhile favorite cigar bar haunt from the Before Times: The Robusto Room. Unfortunately, I’m sad to report that it, like so many good Popination locations (ooo, that’s a good one), it never opened back up after its lockdown closure. So here, to commemorate this Bar of Yore, is a guest post that I hope you enjoy.
Zorba of Omaha
by Seamus, March 2017
*
You’ve got to be careful in some bars in the afternoon. It’s one thing if there’s a brisk daytime trade, but if there isn’t, you run two risks. First, you’ll stand out. Second, you’re likely to have the company, if you have any company at all, of the more dedicated drunks. When somebody’s good and liquored up at two in the afternoon, it doesn’t usually benefit anybody involved for you to attract that person’s attention.
But, I like an afternoon cocktail and smoke, and it’s rare enough for the stars to align for me to get either, so given the opportunity I’ll likely take it. Thus, I found myself a few weeks back, enjoying the quiet, when I caught in the mirror the body language of a burly, clearly soused young guy rolling in from outside. It was cold that day, and as far as I can tell he’d likely been putting them away at the sports bar up the row, gone out for a cigarette, and stumbled in out of the chill to brighten my day. Swaying, he got his smoke out, but never actually got it lit. He’d spotted me, spent a minute sizing me up, then started to swing my way. He made his way toward my seat at the bar like a ship through heavy seas, lurching into a stool. He gave me the long look, then the inevitable, “Hey! I wanna ask you somethin’.”
So, I figured, that’s where we are. And honestly I wasn’t too worried. If he was going to be dead set on fighting there wasn’t much I could do about it, and in his condition the biggest worry would be keeping him from hurting himself. Still, I don’t style myself a tough guy and I don’t care for that business, and given any kind of option I’d rather hear a good story. My move with this kind of individual is, I’ll ask him questions. You just start peppering your interlocutor with interested inquiries into their life and circumstances which, nine times out of ten, puts them on their back foot and deescalates the whole scene. Before long I’ve figured out that this particular gentleman was from Nebraska, had grown up on a dairy farm which he viewed with a clear and longing nostalgia. And of course, having stirred up those ashes, pretty soon I’m hearing about his steer, his prize steer, which he went so far as to show at the 4H and then some other sort of livestock events. And as he gets rolling with all this he rises from the bar stool, unlit cigarette like a conductor’s wand, and his eyes go far away as he demonstrates for me the way of holding the halter, how you’re supposed to promenade around. We step through his several triumphs, but now I must hear about the terrible day when the steer, his good, good steer, decided to lay right down in the sawdust during the crucial showing. Our hero’s humiliation before judges and competitors alike, his impotence – a fourteen-year-old kid – against the physical will of a half-ton animal. He even goes so far as to describe in detail the sawdust clinging to the steer’s just-brushed hide when it finally did get up, and it’s obvious in the telling that this is all his glassy eyes can see.
As he moved around, showing me all this, I was reminded of Kazantzakis, the scene in Zorba the Greek where Zorba recounts a drunken evening spent with a wandering soldier, telling each other the stories of their lives in which, when their common languages failed them, one would yell “stop!” and the other would then rise and dance the story, right there in whatever long-gone Balkan tavern. So it was with this poor bastard dancing his journey through an equally long-gone Nebraskan youth.
Of course, I already knew that this story could only end one way, because a steer has only one purpose in this world. Inevitably we came to the day when he had to lead his friend up the ramp to the back of the processing truck, him walking alongside the ramp, the rope rising higher and higher, all of this enacted so that even I could see it clearly. Then the truck pulled away, and he watched it go. No movement artist could have outdone his performance then: the shoulders falling forward, the mask of grief.
And there he was – a drunken man, caretaker to a dead steer, standing alone in a deserted cigar bar on an icy Sunday afternoon, crying real tears for the departed. I guess you can make an allegory out of that if you want, but I don’t recommend it. Me, I paid for his beer and I went home. That’s just how the world is some afternoons.