A memory of a bar where conflicting philosophies briefly managed to coexist in perfect peace.
I hardly ever go to bars anymore, which is perhaps why I remember one particular bar so clearly. There was even a time when I had what people call a regular place.
I was not particularly popular there. The owner liked to imagine her battered little establishment as something of a women’s bar, a place where women could go out on their own without being bothered by unpleasant men.
In a certain sense I saw the place that way as well, although from a rather different philosophy. For me it functioned as a kind of sexual pick-up point, a Tinder avant la lettre. None of the women or men I met there ever accused me of being pushy or unpleasant. For that reason I always considered the place a small but convincing example of how people with entirely different views of life can nevertheless make each other happy.
Among the bar staff I did have the reputation of being a querulant. I had heard that accusation before and it no longer troubled me very much. The examples used to support it were usually rather weak.
Every Friday afternoon the wine supplier arrived in his delivery van. I had the habit of offering him, with stubborn persistence, a glass of wine from his own stock. Had he simply replied that he did not drink while working, I would have accepted that without complaint. Instead he preferred to order a Bacardi with cola. That was my cue to inform everyone who happened to be drinking wine that the wine supplier apparently did not dare drink his own product. Even when I offered him an entire bottle of Bacardi as a gift if he would just drink one or two glasses of his own wine, he continued to refuse. Over time it became a running joke.
The wine there was in fact legendarily bad. As someone who invariably drank vodka with Sprite I probably had no reason to make such a point of it. That was not particularly kind of me, but who can sit in a bar for an entire afternoon and evening without occasionally becoming a little irritating?
I also had the unfortunate habit of sometimes paying the bill for someone who was no longer being served because their tab had grown too large. In doing so I undermined the authority of the owner. She liked to let the bills of guests she considered undesirable climb just a little too high, which allowed her to refuse them entry the next time they appeared. She could of course have told those people directly that they were not welcome, but she lacked the courage for that. One might therefore ask which of us was truly behaving badly.
If I myself happened to be ten euros short on a bill of two hundred, she would calmly send me home to fetch another bank card. Perhaps I could indeed be irritating from time to time, but rarely more irritating than the owner herself. Certainly not more irritating than the blunt bar staff, who clearly had higher ambitions and seemed to suspect that I had somehow managed to realise mine.
I call that pure harmony.
She was an irrepressible money wolf.
I was a drinker and a sex addict.
However much the bar staff disliked me, I ordered plenty of expensive drinks. That alone is the best guarantee that you will not be shown the door. In this way we all found our happiness in a bar that liked to present itself, at least for appearances, as a feminist women’s café.
I can now look back on those days with remarkable clarity because I hardly drink anymore. Perhaps once every six months, and then only with the professional drinker R., either in his apartment or in mine. Among professionals things proceed efficiently. For a short while the brakes come off.
Occasionally one of us is not entirely steady on his feet. He has an artificial knee and I have an artificial hip. We sometimes borrow each other’s crutches for the journey home. That does not always end well. I now seem to possess two left crutches, while he, as far as I know, no longer owns any at all. That is not entirely unfair. His artificial knee is barely two years old. My artificial hip is twenty-two years old and well past its expiration date. The consequences mostly appear in my back. Some mornings I wake up with a simple question: will today involve walking, or crawling?
The sex addiction also resolved itself rather gracefully. In my profession there comes a moment when one has the feeling of having seen and done everything. Age quietly lowers the testosterone level as well. Gradually the sex addiction faded and was replaced by a chocolate addiction.
What I sometimes miss in this city today is not that bar, or any bar. What I miss is something far simpler: the quiet harmony that once existed between people who believed entirely different things.