Tommy had not intended to drink so much, but Reggie knew the bartender at Squire’s. She made everyone’s drink with top shelf, but charged rail. So. Tommy was pretty warm and very loose.
Mara, wrapped up in that red jacket she liked so much, had disappeared early in the night. Tommy took note of that. He’d been trying to figure her out ever since that night they talked at Jimmy’s Pub. Not being a drinker, she typically bounced as soon as the volume of conversation started increasing. Then again, she spent as many nights as she could in crowded rooms with live music. People can be friends without being part of the pirate crew, Tommy figured.
Juan Carlos and Martín were singing along with a banda song playing from a phone. Those two, Tommy thought with a smile.
Amparo looked over at Tommy and his knife bag laying on the bar. “Hey Top Chef, you know the kitchen got knives, right?”
Tommy laughed. He liked Amparo. She was a hard worker who didn’t take shit from customers. She hated Gerry too. She had told Tommy about the way he would snap his fingers to get her attention. She even told him that Gerry had offered to take previous servers up to the top floor apartment of the building for “a drink and a view.” Even if she was front of house, every pirate crew needs an Amparo. Tommy knew that much. If she wanted to bust his balls for carrying around his knife bag like an amulet, that was fine.
“I just like to have my own tools. That’s all.”
“Oh, your tools. I see.” Amparo smiled. “You gonna call out behind, with knife! Every time you gotta take a piss or go out for a smoke?
Martín leaned over. “Poke fun all you want, but that man is the human julienne. Everything even, everything the same. It’s crazy.”
Amparo looked at him for a moment. “You’re drunk. And Juan Carlos? Drunk. We gotta go. I’m calling it.” Martín was usually pretty temperate, but it seemed to Tommy that this was not the first Amparo had wrangled the drunken crew to a responsible exit.
“You coming with us to the bus, slicer?” Amparo asked Tommy, while counting out cash for the tab. “Wait, what’d Martín say? Human julienne? Nah, I’m not doing that.”
Tommy laughed. “You’re on a noble mission, getting these pirates home. I’m gonna have a nightcap and then walk it off.”
Tommy ordered a whiskey neat, insisting on paying full price now that the mutual acquaintance had left. Old paneling, cheap string lights, neon beer signs with Bulls or Hawks or Sox or whichever team—Tommy loved the familiar uniformity at bars. A good bar needed these outward markers, needed some signal that wouldn’t judge a 10 a.m. beer drinker or corporate schlubs sneaking in a couple shots before catching a bus home or sex workers trawling the night crowd. If the atmosphere established those sorts of signposts that misfits were welcome? From there, you get specific, and that’s where character comes in. Jimmy’s Pub had its lecherous flamingo, Cunneen’s had its Mayor Daley clock, Old Town Ale House had Bruce Cameron Elliot’s paintings—any decent tavern in this city had some marker of its own character. At Squier’s, it was a candy apple red Stratocaster full of autographs. Celebrities? No. Bartenders, and regulars approved by bartenders. Martín and Amparo were on the guitar. So was long-dead Olly himself.
Tommy wondered if he could be the defining character trait at Olly’s.
He took a sip of his whiskey and when he set it down he could feel eyes on him. A scratch at the back of his neck, the same feeling of a server staring him down for the order they fucked up. Tommy’s hand covered his knife bag. He looked around, but tried to be discreet.
A woman, maybe a decade older than him, was the watcher. She was beautiful in an almost acidic way. Tommy couldn’t tell if her boobs or blonde hair were real, and her high black boots and denim shorts looked like something out of a music video. Tommy didn’t want to stare—that was a low-cut orange tank top—but he knew she was staring at him. Had they worked together?
She met his eyes and stood to approach him.
“You work in a kitchen?” she asked, gesturing to his knife bag.
“Yeah,” he said. “Have we, uh, been coworkers before?”
“I’ve never worked in a restaurant.”
“Oh. Huh. Surprised you recognized this for what it is. Most people think I play flute.”
Her laugh was slightly too loud to be authentic, but Tommy didn’t mind.
“I used to go out with a cook sometimes. He had one of those in his apartment. I’m Alexis.”
“Tommy. I work a couple blocks over. You live in the neighborhood?” Tommy didn’t usually chat women up, but. What’s the harm in a little drink and some polite conversation? With a woman who approached him? Tommy felt the bar blur around the shape of Alexis, her blonde hair haloing her like a lemon wedge atop a gorgeously poached haddock. Tommy almost felt like he could dance.
“You don’t look like most cooks, at least you don’t look like the one I dated. He was all grease burns and tattoos. You look too—well.”
“White?”
She laughed for real this time. “No! Well yes, kinda, but I more meant, you look like your brain’s working too fast. Like you could be anywhere, not just stuck in a kitchen.”
Tommy chose not to be offended. Not everyone saw the culinary arts for the noble profession that it was. “I guess I choose to be in the kitchen. It’s long hours and hard work, yeah, but it’s beautiful. It’s important. It is work that provides a good for the community. Nourishment, fellowship, craftsmanship. You know—I don’t work at, like, Trencherman or Girl And The Goat. I make honest food for real people, right?”
She looked at him for a long time, sizing him up or maybe his answer. She smiled and put her hand on Tommy’s arm. “Do you want a smoke? Maybe take a walk?”
They exited the bar and turned into the alley. Rats scurried from the dumpster and a siren blared a block over. The night was hot, sticky in a way that made Tommy feel like the protagonist in some spy novel set in South America, like he was El Cocinero Asesino, the line cook with a mysterious past who lived in a shack on the beaches of Cartagena and whose country had a shady mission for him.
“I don’t really smoke, but when I’m drinking—” he said.
She kissed him. Intently. Her hand on the back of his head. Her mouth tasted of stale gin and lime. Tommy reached for her hips and pulled her closer. After a minute, she broke the kiss off and whispered in his ear.
“It’s usually $100 for the hour, but I’ll do $80 for a sweetie like you.”
Tommy froze. All the city sounds disappeared and his ears filled with a sound like a wooden spoon on a heavy Dutch oven. Of course this woman wasn’t into him.
Obviously.
He brought his knife bag to the bar. What woman would be into that?
He pushed down his anger at being so foolish. The only course of action was to embrace the waves of embarrassment.
“Oh. I, uh, sorry that’s not what I was—”
“Come on, Tommy. You seem so stressed. I have a room right around the corner.”
Tommy realized he left his knife bag at the bar. Shit. “Um,” he said.
“You work with your hands all day, right? Why don’t you let me show you what I can do with mine?”
The fucking knife bag, the knife bag, the knife bag. His tools. His recently-sharpened arsenal of kitchenware. It was sitting in some dingy tavern with some smug bartender. Tommy could hardly see Alexis anymore, even though her hand was sliding up and down his inner thigh. Wait, Reggie knew that bartender—what was her name? Maybe she’d be savvy enough to see the knife bag for what it was, not as some flute or whatever.
“I’m so sorry. Here you go, sorry for wasting your time.” Tommy hurriedly pushed $40 into Alexis’ hand and jogged back into the bar. The bartender saw him and grabbed his knife bag from behind the bar.
“Wondered if you noticed you left this. Where’s the lady?” The bartender gave him a smirk.
What the fuck. Had she known all along who Alexis was? Was this some kind of sick game, let the gullible guy stumble out with the sneaky sex worker, laugh when we take all his money? Tommy felt a fury beginning to pop like oil left too long in a pan, but when he stepped toward the bar, he tripped. Legs not totally out from under him, he caught the back of a couple high-boy chairs. He hoped the music covered the sound of the chair scraping, the sound of his slight gasp, he hoped all the other patrons wouldn’t notice, but he didn’t look around the bar to check.
“You good?” the bartender asked.
“Going home,” Tommy said.
He took the bag and grunted a thank you. Stopped at the door, considered a shot for the road. Not right now. He made his way out of the bar and down the opposite alley, back towards Olly’s.
The embarrassment had passed and now he felt only rage. Not really at Alexis. Tommy didn’t hate sex workers, or bartenders, he remembered. A person like Alexis, she was providing a service—nothing shameful in that—but he had thought she had really seen him.
He crossed a street and Tesla almost swiped him. Fucking scum.
Tommy considered that it’d be nice to have a cigarette, that he’d had the kind of night that justified one, and that an alley was a nice place to smoke a cigarette. El Cocinero Asesino smoked cigarettes in alleys. Whatever. He was almost to Olly’s back door, which meant he was almost a seven-minute walk from home. It’d be nice to walk past Olly’s, touch a base before heading home—he needed something to reorient himself after ditching his knife bag in a bar for a sex worker. He still couldn’t believe he’d done that.