(no subject)
The other day, I privately told myself that I’d tell one bar story a day. That my job is interesting enough to write about at least one occurrence or character/customer per day. That was Tuesday morning. Of course, during the course of the day, I had several little funny nuggets to drop, like the story of the guy who asked if I was going to have the time to check out Yankee Stadium when I go back to Chicago to get married. What? Yes, someone is that ignorant of U.S. geography. There were others that have slipped my mind due to the last major event of the day. That was the feeling of Mark betraying me when he told me that he called Southern Wine and Spirits to try to land his son a job. The place I’ve been asking him to call for me for six months.
But yesterday there was another. It seems that I’ve waited too long to start the Giusti’s diary. You see, all the main characters are leaving the show. My friend Rayma passed away a couple of weeks ago. A few others have moved. My good buddy, Larry, left yesterday for Los Angeles. So if I tell the last conversation he had, it won’t make as much sense, because there’s no basis for the character.
Larry is about seventy-five years old, give or take. He use to live up in the hills, and would drive down once every couple of weeks to get away from his wife. Then his wife passed away. Like my friend Chuck, he was older than his wife, and it was always believed that he would go first, so it was very shocking for him. Jill, Larry’s wife, died of a heart attack in her sleep. She was his third wife. To get to know Larry, he was an interesting guy, like most. He was never the most loyal man to his women. At least numbers one and three. The first one he married young, and one could argue times were different. The second wife he left the first one for. They both left their spouses, eloped to Tahoe, and moved to Mendocino where they kind of lived like hippies. They both were a bit old for the hippie thing, but felt that need to drop out of the society they once knew. Larry called the various stages of this life his “former lives”. Number two was eventually taken by cancer, and I believe, he craved the companionship. So he found number three. I know he respected Jill, a former Catholic nun turned Buddhist social worker for the state, but I’m not sure he “loved” her in the in love state. But maybe he never got over number two. Or maybe he isn’t capable of it.
The other thing about Larry, never formally educated, but very well read. A huge vocabulary, he donated an old dictionary to the bar, I believe so we could look up words he liked to drop, just to show off. He also had an amazing knowledge of classic Hollywood cinema. Mostly trivial stuff, like Tim Holt was the fasted draw in Hollywood westerns at drawing in something like eight frames, which is less than a second.
So in his final conversation, Larry, Mark 2 and I are discussing why I cannot give him a break on his lobster dinner a la carte, to go. Mark 2 likes to believe he knows everything. I always say that if you don’t know the answer, just ask Mark 2. If he doesn’t know it, he’ll make it up. Larry said that since it’s to go, it should be cheaper since he’s not using a table or the napery.
“Napery. That’s not even a word”, said Mark 2.
“I believe it is”, Larry asserted. They agreed that I would look it up. Mark 2 tried to qualify it saying that archaic meaning didn’t count. I said that if it’s in the dictionary, it counts, but we agreed that napery had to refer to the napkins.
Napery: Any linens, especially ones from the table.
Some one got Mark 2. And it was Larry. In his final exit, I don’t think he could have been more proud.