May 21, 2005
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Please bear with me while I play with tense. Plus, I’ve added a couple characters.
Sipping my Jack and Coke, I am the only stranger in the room. I take a closer look at the decor, wondering why this is so comfortable. Behind me are the Keno players but instead of being depressed they seem happy. They are winning and not smoking. That’s different.
I am sitting in the small bar of a Chinese restaurant, writing this on a to-go menu. The drinks are cheap and they have Coke, not that awful Pepsi. What I really like is that they bring you this particular drink in a small juice glass with no ridges and hardly any ice, so it seems reasonable to order a second. Someone turns the jukebox on and there is so much crap on the walls it feels like a high-school boy’s bedroom with OSU and UofO memorabilia everywhere. TVs grace the corners and buxom blondes work the bar.
The less attractive one with the shorter skirt comes out from the back room and turns the lights up slightly. They are on a dimmer and I regret the shift in mood.
“Isn’t this better? Now I can see what’s going on.”
I’m not used to the bartender being a control freak but I like the feeling that we’re at her house.
The only bar I’ve ever frequented was near my old house. They had pretty good food and my neighbor would encourage me to take him to lunch there when he was pouring concrete for me or building fences. Toward the end when I was staying out of the house, spending the day landscaping, I would eat dinner at that bar and wait for rush hour to be over before I drove back here. Tuesdays they had really god ribs and Thursday was reuben night. It was at least a month before I got the yard done and the house finally sold. I gained ten pounds and can still recite the weekly menu. It was a huge cavernouse place with serious alcoholics lined up on stools and young guys playing pool. But I liked the cocktail waitresses. They always seemed curious about me.
Anyway, I am sitting at one of the five comfy, nogohide booths. It’s that perfect, aged burgundy I’m fond of. The cute young couple at the booth in front of me — The booths run the length of wall opposite the bar stools — is done eating and begin to smoke but my table sits directly across from the swinging doors where you enter and which foster an air current.
The heavy man at the bar seems popular with the women. He has a house for sale “on the national historic register.” Three ladies in their late 50s stop by his stool, on three separate occasions, to inquire about the status of the sale and to wish him well. His house is down the street from me so I am tempted to ask how much.
It has just occurred to me why I am so comfortable here, I mean besides the fact that I am on my second drink. Except for the couple in front of me, and they’ve left, everyone is my age. I probably went to high school with all these people and don’t recognize a soul. People say I look the same so maybe they recognize me.
Someone puts The Dixie Chicks on, a CD we played on a road trip once, and I go home to call the oldest. We had sort of a crisis today. Well, she did. I had forgotten how stressful her world can be. We spent the better part of the day together which she seems to want to do lately. When I got home I told her about one of you: goddessfourwinds. I told my daughter about what a lesson in attitude this woman is. She impresses me as someone who can handle anything. No matter what comes her way, she plugs ahead, one foot in front of the other, flourishing no matter what her world throws her. And I could tell my daughter was listening and thinking.
It’s funny what you remember after an incident is over. For example, the characters I focused on where probably chosen because they were the easiest to write, as I could overhear the conversations. But the characters I was more interested in were out of range.
I’m going to call her Char because she seems a little different. I am sitting and she breezes by me pretty fast but I bet she’s 6 feet. She dresses like she works in a shop that sells artistic things. I imagine she watches a lot of people and keeps a running dialogue which means little by the end of the day. She goes straight to the end of the bar and sits next to a guy who has arrived maybe 10 minutes earlier. His hair falls halfway down his back and he is the reason I think maybe I grew up with some of these people.
She orders a drink and it’s another five minutes before I notice they are together. Maybe I was busy writing but I don’t think so. Because I watched her closely to see what she’d order, if she smoked, if she knew the bartender and that’s why she was here. The thing that’s interesting to me about the women here is that, except for the one with her kid, eating Chinese, none of these women were people I’d expect to see in a bar.
So Char is smoking and still hasn’t looked at the guy but now I see he is talking to her. She replies and sneaks a quick look at him out of the corner of her eye, not moving her head. He’s still looking straight ahead, too. He’s like one of those half-wild dogs you can’t look directly at. You gotta take your time, like you have no agenda. She’s halfway through her drink before she turns to address him but she’s become more animated and he has, too. These people are close but there is distance. And this is the most compelling thing about the hour I spent there: watching an almost palpable bond between two people trying to ignore each other.
Wait, I lied. There’s one more person. And I have no idea what to call him since he was half Caucasian, half Asian, and so Americanized that, even though his physical characteristics were more Asian, I am calling him Joe. Short, clean-cut haircut, beautiful skin, he strode in with a briefcase and took out his laptop and phone. Sitting in the back, he positioned himself under the TV. I never saw him drink or eat, just smoke and do business. I wondered if maybe he was a bookie. Don’t laugh, I don’t know anything about betting on games but a couple guys who didn’t seem to know him went over and visited shortly. You could tell that was his table. He put his sneakers up on the chair, settling in for the duration of the game. He came in with his flunky who would come and go. The guy doing what I thought looked like business had a very nice smile but there was something sinister about him.
The first one of these later recollections was written in the present and the second in the past tense. Do you notice any difference? I am having a hard time with tense but I seem to be drawn to present even though I keep mixing it up with past. And I see more and more writers using first person, even though I was warned not to. Help!
Comments (6)
It may be a moot point, but when you said, “sitting in the small bar of…” I read it (twice now) as _at_ the bar… don’t ask… and then both times got confused when you said you were in a nogohide booth. Even though you have been clear, I’m not reading it that way. Perhaps say ‘in a nogohide booth on the far wall of the bar’ or something, for ditzs’ like me.
The tenses, I barely notice that sort of thing – probably because I have equal trouble with them myself – struggled, for instance, with the tiny poem I just put up – tense change in 2nd stanza, and I tried, but couldn’t write it any other way – poetic license, then.
In poetry, you can sometimes play with grammar a bit, not so much in prose, though. The rules are stronger.
3rd paragraph from the end is in the present tense, “So Char…” But you are telling it as if you relating an evening spent in a bar… and that particular section would be in the present tense, it’s not possible to write it any other way since the scene changes through time…
As I said, I’m not good with tenses myself. You could probably do a better job of tense difficulties with my writing than I can with yours!
I like the addition of more characters, only now it has left the short diary entry, the quick sketch, and wants to be more than a couple of sketches, surely. Now there is a plot begging to be born, a build-up, climax, denoument of some kind… even if it is only the narrator’s expectations.
Hmnn, I wonder if this’ll turn into a short story? It looks to be heading in that direction…
Wonderful writing, too. You create such vivid and real characters with such few words, I am always impressed by your talent. *hugs
Very descriptive and nice. The tenses… I can see it working in both depending on where it’s going. The action, I think, could be in the present if something is about ot happen and then the shifting backwards to lead up to the present. It’s hard to write totally in the present I think.
i too see it working both ways - like life, which is is past and present, or was the last time i checked…..
i suck with tenses, so …
I like the descriptions, of being able to imagine along with you the setting…
what kind of people do you expect to find in a bar?
…people watching can be fun …and i know you mean well…you always seem to run with a “wild” crowd…
Hey Pru, it’s good to be back reading you.
That all works very well. I had a hard time even recognizing the shift of tense, which should tell you that you used the right one at the right time for what you were describing. Where does it say you can’t slide back and forth between? Our brains certainly do.
Beam and Coke for me, please. And god, no Pepsi. Had that at a cheaply-rigged company party the other night and it sucked.
Deft, that’s what I would call your word-strokes. Perhaps it helped that I’ve been in bars like that so much (I could actually feel the nagahyde creaking against my back!) and have seen so many of those kinds of characters. Perhaps that’s why I was right there with you after the first couple of sentences. Smelled the place, felt the warmth of the drink start rising to my cheeks, heard the music, the banter, the occasional loud laugh from the man with the house for sale. Looked across the table and shot you a grin. That’s pretty good, you putting me there like that with what, a couple hundred words?