Please Make A Selection

"Sorry -- looks like I'm half a pint late."

"No problem. I was just washing the dust of everyday life off my shoes. Hence the preliminary nature of my stupor."

"Very good." [Slightly awkward pause.] "I suppose a cup of coffee is out of the question?"

I could build on this beginning and tell you the conversation went downhill from here, but it didn't. I really had been waiting for Andrew, and, in that meantime, I had been ignored by -- and thus freed to eavesdrop on -- talk passing between a black-clad fellow who looked remarkably like our own Alan Jones and another guy who looked unnervingly like me if and when I start showing the symptoms of male pattern baldness. The kicker, their subject? The problems of "making it" in the arts. There was some exhortation, as well as a goofy moment when a young lady poked her head around the Cock And Bull's creaking red front door. Without looking up, the regulars at the other end of the bar let out a warm, barely slurred "Come on in". The bartender signaled welcome with a knock back of his head and a wave of his silver bottle opener. "Oh no", she demurred, "I'm just looking to see if someone is in here." A specific someone, I guess. To which pseudo-Al made a strange, screwed-up Rat Pack face (squint one eye, raise the other eyebrow, curl the upper lip) and said, "I'm right here, baby." I did not note my unfortunate doppelganger's reaction.

The only conclusion I could reach is that all of us were trying to put a rough day in the rear-view mirror. Or at least squash it flat between one's arse (I prefer the King's English in this instance) and the naugahyde comforts of one's bar stool seat. (Male bonding malgre lui.) Wait; do not reach the conclusion that the conversation proceeded uphill from there, words unburdened of tension and recrimination. The establishment's jukebox saw to that.

Let me give you some examples. When I walked in, the coda to Shuggie Otis' "Island Letter" from 1974's Inspiration Information. While Andrew and I talked about the near-impossibility of ever truly re-reading Pynchon's V., John Lee Hooker was singing "One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer" -- and the first refrain hit right as I downed some more ale and shook my head in sad appreciation of The Whole Sick Crew. I spoke later about praying or, less ambitiously, hoping to be struck down with an incurable illness and the clarity that must come with knowing that one has only so much fleeting time left to one's self. It is not a sin, Andrew reminded me (though I did not apprehend his response as a reminder right away), but, suicide, that's a different story. I still cannot decide if The Cure's "In Between Days", a song so redolent of high school summer's so black and so hot with friendless depression, undercut our exchange, or whether it worked some white magic upon it. I do know that I feel that Van Morrison's "Into The Mystic" would have distracted me at that moment, and maybe distracted me into happiness, and that, in the great tradition of fiction, the song's occurrence then rather than later would have been more appropriate that Robert Smith's ghoulish hovering. And I know this to be true, but mysteriously -- that is, regardless of my taste or propensities to seek out a soundtrack for my life.

Are bar conversations inevitably sentimental, in that word's original, favorable sense? I don’t mean this as a rhetorical question; I am far too impertinent with questions in my writing. I mean this as sincere self-interrogation. Alcohol has something to do with it, but this explanation is so obvious it cannot be complete. Consider too the posture one adopts at the bar. You and your confidants face forward, staring into a mirror, or green, brown and clear glass bottles of various volumes. To actually talk to (as opposed to with) someone, you have to pivot into their space at the bar, and lean into their voice -- or their listening -- to make yourself understood by the multiplied murmuring around you. The bar crafts intimacy the way a Catholic confessional graces the confessor with remorse. One's posture causes one to become what those gestures only signal. The distances between does and is blurs, it is shortened that quickly.

I think it is the music that saves us from the maudlin. The jukebox plays, and those songs, both alien and familiar, assume the sound of one's own inner voice. Calling us back to ourselves. Siren-like? Perhaps; perhaps we always mistake the real significance of the siren's song, and we compute providence as myth, which, whatever myth's glories, is still an error. Hold on and back up. I'm waxing too rhapsodic, as another friend of mine says. I meant this to be about jukeboxes I have known, and the bars in which they reside, glowing like hearths, less insidious than televisions but just as ubiquitous. Like the machine at The Elbow Room, where Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Bob Dylan, Coleman Hawkins, Miles Davis, Dan Hicks And His Hot Licks, and Sinatra albums all sat on the menu. Or the nickelodeon that sat on the ground floor of The Ginger Man. I once punched the keys for Stereolab's "Metronomic Underground" and Sonic Youth's "Titanium Expose" on that baby. Or the booth selectors I found at Brownie's Restaurant before it finally closed its doors in 1994. (You've seen Brownie's, which sat at the end of East Grand Avenue just beofre you hit I-30 to Texarkana if you've seen David Byrne's film True Stories.) A decade ago, but I still remember the experience. Over a piece of runny, saccharine lemon meringue pie and a cracked cup of Nescafé the consistency of Valvoline, I flipped through the grease-patinaed laminated pages of these technological marvels that had last been operation circa 1969, marveling at the scope of blue-collar pop musics represented therein. Lou Donaldson's Alligator Boogaloo. Otis Redding's Sings Soul. Merle Haggard's Mama Tried. Roger Miller's Golden Hits. The original Cameo release of ? And The Mysterians 96 Tears. 007-themed exploitation albums. Richard Harris' A Tramp Shining. Stan Getz's Getz Au Go Go. Records I had seen priced with broad Magic Marker strokes in countless flea markets and at innumerable garage sales. You have to understand, this is Dallas, Texas, the South (geographically, culturally), and I was browsing through evidence of an eating establishment clearly adjusting to a post-segregation era in which white, black and brown are equal as consumers. Discovering that booth selector was like finding my birth certificate, and finding, moroever, surprising information recorded on it. What I would not have given to be able to slip a dime into one of those boxes that night and to hear those worn-out grooves, engineered to play back shrill and fast (replay value, you know), to have confirmed for me that the place was not as deserted as it seemed. But there was no stack of wax on the end of the jukebox line, no automated thing to respond to my programming... unless you take the end in question to be history.

That was a long time ago. I'm less of both a Romantic and a Bohemian these early days of the brave new century. When I drink, and when I listen to music, I do so with a purpose either in mind or at least not far underneath the surface of my consciousness. As I continued to talk with Andrew (about and around houses, safe neighborhoods, mutual acquaintances), I found more and more than I could not let a tune pass through the air with offering commentary on it. "Is this Souxsie And The Banshees?" (It was.) "I hear Grant Lee Phillips." "What was that thing that played before this?" I could not tell you precisely when it was I allowed the music to emulate, and then to supplant the conversation. Was it an occurence at which I for my friend should have taken offense? No. I remain confident that, finally and for all time, it was my conversation with my friend. Last night, I mean.

Up, down, over, under, sideways, down... You see, I'm not sure our conversation plateaued, either. Looking back, I can see that it stood by the side of the road with its thumb out, a drifter counting cars and bounded on every side by a hill obscuring every neon sign of civilization. Like VACANCY.