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Lost and Found at a Bar on the Edge of the World
by Tim Sultan
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I considered the forlornness of the area and of the night. I had entered a lot of bars in my life and rarely with hesitation. An early bloomer of a sort, I had my first tavern beer at fourteen and I graduated high school with the inglorious honor of being voted by my classmates as the student most likely to be found not in a bar—that distinction went to my best friend—but under a bar. While I had gotten dissipation out of my system by the time I was an adult, I still knew my way around bars in the way a person raised on a farm never forgets how to cross a livestock yard. I reached forward and pulled open the door and stepped inside. Every one of the two dozen faces in the room was turned toward me. Pale faces, male faces, their attention to my entrance so complete, I might as well have burst into act I, scene 2 at the Delacorte. It was too late to turn around and exit stage left without feeling the fool. And so, I let the door softly close behind me.
In the brief time it took for my eyes to adjust to the dim light in the room, I realized that the collective gaze was directed not at me but a movie screen that hung to the left of the door. A projector hummed in the rear of the room, its beam cutting through the gloom like a locomotive headlight. On the screen, opening credits were just beginning to appear. Martha Graham. Aaron Copland. Isamu Noguchi. Soon dancers in pioneer dress were swirling in black and white. Tinny classical music played. To the right, stools lined the bar. I slid onto the third one in and swiveled toward the screen. Among the several scenarios I’d considered moments before as I had paused on the stoop outside—most involving a roomful of repeat offenders as glad to see me as their parole officers—a collection of men quietly smoking and watching a classic of modern dance had not been one of them. Encouraged, I waved to a figure leaning back against a counter behind the bar and, in a low voice, asked for a beer.
“How about a Rheingold?” whispered the shadowy form.
“Sure. Rheingold,” I replied, and returned to the dancers.
My neighbors up and down the length of the bar and dotting the room were as absorbed by the show as an orchestra-row audience. Following suit, I, too, let myself be drawn in to the story of newlyweds starting out life on the American frontier. Appalachian Spring, like all of Copland’s cheery music, had always had the approximate effect on me of sour milk, but after a few minutes I decided that beer and a crude sound system improved him. Ballet, too, was made more tolerable when observed from a barstool. The pangs of torment I usually began to feel at such performances didn’t begin to set in even as I watched for a good twenty minutes. After the screen at last went dark, a middle-aged, bookish-looking man with a trimmed white beard and glasses quickly began exchanging reels. Before anyone had much chance to stir, the projector started up again and we were watching a documentary on Brooklyn bakeries that was narrated with the earnestness of a middle-school social studies film on the catacombs of Rome and appeared to have been made around the last time a general was president of the United States. As bread baked and yeast rose, seemingly in real time, I wondered a little where this night was headed. Not two hours earlier I had been sitting in an ordinary movie theater in a familiar part of town, taking in a light crime caper with a bucket of popcorn in my lap. Now I found myself in the dark of an entirely different kind of theater, one where the program seemed to have been chosen with the help of a roulette wheel. By the time the next selection, an abstract short by Stan Brakhage made with moth wings and leaves, was under way, I began to speculate whether there wasn’t a method to the madness. Ballet, bakeries, Brakhage—if we remained in our seats long enough, would we eventually move on to cabalism, calligraphy, Caligula . . .
Excerpted from Sunny's Nights by Tim Sultan. Copyright © 2016 by Tim Sultan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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