The Blinds
I moved to Philadelphia for some peace and quiet after New York City. After paying a week’s rent in a roominghouse, I walked down the street to look for the nearest bar. Half a block. I walked in and sat down. It was the poor part of town and the bar was fifty years old. You could smell the urine and shit of one-half a century wafting up into the bar from the restrooms.
I ordered a draft. Everybody was talking, screaming up and down the bar.
It was unlike Los Angeles bars or San Francisco bars or New York bars or New Orleans bars or the bars of any of the cities I had been in.
It was 4:30 in the afternoon. Two guys were fighting in the center of the room. Everybody ignored them and kept on talking and drinking. The guy to the right of me was named Danny, the guy to the left, Jim. A bottle came looping through the air and just missed Danny’s nose. He grinned as it sailed past his cigarette. Then he turned in his seat and said to one of the fighters:
“That was pretty close, you son of a bitch! Come that close again, and you got a real fight on your hands!”
Then he turned away.
Almost every seat was taken. I wondered where they came from, these people, how they made it. Jim was quieter, older, very red-faced. He had a kind of gentle weariness created by thousands of hangovers. It was the bar of the lost and the damned if I had ever seen one.
There were women in there: one dyke who drank as if she didn’t enjoy it, a few housewives, fat, merry and a bit stupid, and two or three ladies who had come down from better times and were unattached. As I sat there one girl got up and left with a man. She was back in five minutes.
“Helen! Helen! How do you do it?”
She just laughed.
Another jumped up
"... If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!"
Sayfa 445
