Aldus, my neighbor, and I made it out for a drink tonight.
We do this once every couple of months or so. We usually take his car, but since it snowed this weekend and the roads aren't completely clear, we decided to take my Wagoneer. Off we went, down the hillside and into the valley.
More often than not, we settle on my favorite pub, a place called F.D.R. and named, naturally, after our president of the same initials. The state banned smoking inside public areas about seven years ago, but there's still a deck on the back, looking out over the Tinton River, where you can smoke a cigar when the weather is warm. I do that only once a year. My lungs can't take it any more.
I worry about American pubs. It's a silly thing to say out loud, but I do. They just opened a new shopping center in the city down the highway from Confluence that houses seven bars of various themes. There is a cowboy bar, an Irish bar, a sleek, new-age bar, and so on and so forth. They are all very popular with younger people, and they are all very expensive places to drink. They are filled with pumping beat music, they smell like clothing stores where middle school-ers shop, and a decent drink will set you back eight or ten dollars. There are big screen televisions everywhere.
I'd better not get too wound up over this. There is no point. When I was a young person, there was a joint down on Lake Buchanan that played punk rock and served drinks that could potentially kill you if you absorbed too many. There was only one bar for service, and there were no televisions to be seen anywhere. They weighed too much to mount on the wall, and who wanted to watch TV, anyway? We were there to get drunk, to work on getting laid, to figure out something important in our lives that was missing.
One night we were at the lake bar, dancing to a great band, when I noticed, sitting over in a corner booth, was none other than Jake Lemmon. Since Lake Buchanan is on the other side of the state (I was ten years out of college before I ever stepped foot in Confluence), you might not have known this, but Lemmon kept a winter cabin down on the lake. I never got to go inside, but some of my friends did. We would sometimes go out there in the summers on my pal's ski boat because he wasn't there. I don't think he spent more than a handful of days there at any given point, but nobody made a big deal out of it when he came to town.
Anyway, he's sitting over in the bar by himself, nursing a drink, wearing a long tan coat, a wool scarf, and a hat. He wasn't hiding, but he wasn't out in the middle of the place dancing with the coeds. I had just enough beer in me to feel brave, so I went over to him. It was about this time of the year.
"Aren't you a bit warm with your coat on?" I shouted over the music. Keep in mind that the following conversation took place bit by bit, often repeated, and never with either party entirely certain of what the other just said.
"NOT YET," he yelled back at me.
I was sweating from bopping around with the music. I introduced myself.
"MY NAME IS JACK," he said. "GOOD TO MEET YOU."
I'll admit that I was terribly amused at the fact that I was hearing Jack Lemmon's voice in person. Much more so than that I was sitting across from him. He sounded exactly like he did in the movies, a point that is laughingly obvious to me now.
"I didn't think this would be your kind of place," I yelled.
"IT ISN'T."
"Well why on earth would you come here?"
"I GAVE UP DRINKING BY MYSELF FOR LENT."
"What?"
"LENT," he repeated. "I'VE GIVEN UP DRINKING BY MYSELF."
Nobody knew at that point in time that he'd battled alcoholism. But I had to admire his tenacity--coming out to the only bar open in the February off-season, filled with sweaty college kids dancing to beats that must have sounded entirely foreign to a man like Jack Lemmon. The floors were sticky and smelled of day-old beer, the lights glowed neon blue and red. The bathrooms had no doors. Yet there he was, together there with us, in the dead of a blustery February night.
We chatted a bit more back and forth, and he was awfully pleasant for a celebrity dealing with a drunk college kid. Before long I went back to dancing, trying my hardest to get this blond girl to come home with me. I even mentioned that I'd just been over at the bar talking to Jack Lemmon, but when we turned back to look, he was gone. Only his glass remained, with a crisp twenty dollar bill folded like a tent beside it.
I imagined him driving back around the lake to his cabin, leaving the lights turned off, dropping the car keys on the Formica counter top, walking over to the windows by the deck that looked across the lake to the bar he'd just been in, its neon lights melting across the water's ripple. Perhaps he could hear the music blaring from within, but I doubted he could still feel its raw energy. I don't think he felt it even when he sat inside.
I'm certain, now more than ever, that somewhere in Jack's mind, he thought to himself that he ought to be worried about the state of American pubs.
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