Out of all the places, I have built a routine in a bar. This happens usually—oh, it doesn’t really—on days when the thought of drinking crashes into my head like a collapsing dam. There are a few rituals which make this routine; first is that I always show up before the bar gets all busy and people-y. I show up by 1900, stop the doorman from opining/holding the door for me. I race for the door handle and open it in a collaborative effort, sometimes with my hand reaching the handle and sometimes his.
At any rate, I/he open(s) the door and I take a right turn, just shy of 90° and climb up the stairs. This is when my heartbeat goes up and the mind resembles that of a six year old child opening their Christmas present. Would I see an empty bar or a bar choke-full of people occupying the tables far from the AC and from the counter alike? Or would I be greeted by empty tables and the waiters checking off columns from on a sheet of paper to tally their weekly tips? Would I chance on one of them out of their usual smocks and sporting a black and red jersey, making me do a double-take?
I am at the verge of this excitement and rapture as I climb the last six or so steps leading to the banister at the end of the staircase. I am treated to two long tables empty of people and my heart quickens with the prospect of having an entire bar to myself, I free to observe the stuff in their natural habitat. Or, I am alerted to possible human presence by voices breaking open the air like icing on a cake, crumbled up by a plastic serrated knife.
I ascend the stairs, and this time I take an almost 90° left turn, scanning the counter, the seats which are half-obstructed by a pillar zebra-striped by red, yellow, and ocher colored stripes of sand-blasted glass. Instead of scanning the two tables to the immediate left—or divining the absence/presence of people in those midst-of-crowd tables next to the toilet—my eyes snap to the tables at the end. I imagine this ‘snap’ to be a quick movement of the eye from the right to left that travels at the speed of a synaptic crossing; something that travels quicker than a pang of lose, of embarrassment. But frankly, fuck if I know the exact movement of my eye when it does this trans-Atlantic Charles-Lindbergh flight. All I know is that I’m anxious to know—by sight—whether the two tables to the extreme end, near the AC, far from the door, are unoccupied. Those two tables are my haven, where I don’t have to pay taxes for being myself, where I can sit and drink and eat and nod my head to the beat of TM Krishna make magic out of the air.
If the coast is clear, and usually it is, because I am early—remember?—I take a calculated set of strides—from my seat I calculate it to be seven strides or so—and advance towards the seat where the AC sometimes hits hard because it is always busy tilting its head left and right.