Bar Fight: Revisited

One of the cooks I liked has been fired. It's his own fault, I suppose. He was a bit of a drinker. He was quite a bit of a drinker. I sat with him in a bar one night and watched him drink down at least ten drinks in the span of forty-five minutes. He drank so much he couldn't get up in the morning, couldn't function, couldn't get to work on time.

The last time we were out he bought us shots and told us about what a tough guy he used to be, how he used to get in so much trouble when he drank. He told us about this one time he got into a fight and put a guy through a window.

"The first real bar fight I saw was actually in this town," I told him, "and a guy went through a window in that fight, too. It happened up the road. One of the guys crashed through the carpet store's front window."

The cook looked at me. I looked at him.

"Oh my God," I said. "Was that you?"

"I was the guy who put the other guy through the window," the cook said. He squinted at me, trying to see if he could imagine me being there, if he could somehow remember where I was standing. "You were really there? You really saw that?"

I told him yes, I was absolutely there. I was with Josh and one of his friends, and we were just coming back from a night of visiting as many of the small-town bars as we could. We stopped at that last bar--where the fight happened--on a whim, because Josh had a cousin who lived above the bar and he wanted to stand on the street and yell up to her. We were doing that when the action started.

I told the cook that not only was I there and not only did I watch him fight the loud mouth who was asking for it, I also went home and wrote about it.

"You wrote about it?" he asked.

I did. I went home and wrote a long blog about it. I wrote:

I am secretly thrilled. I've never seen anyone go through a window. It's
interesting to watch. Especially when Riverside, who is trying to salvage his
dignity, rises up from the ground and brushes off glass. Riverside's head, which
is bald, is now stained with small red rivers of blood that are trickling
everywhere. Into his eyes and mouth. Onto his shirt and pants.

"I'm okay," he says.

The cook couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. It seemed impossible that he and I had been sharing that air, with its crisp smell of blood and adrenaline, on the same corner in the same town over a year ago, when I wasn't even living in the state. Who knew that much later on I'd be standing in a cramped kitchen with him, listening to him explain that, earlier, he'd peed blood or that he was trying to find a date for a wedding he had to go to and did I know anybody who would want to go if he promised to not drink too much and get rowdy?

I didn't know anybody, and I don't know if I'll ever see the cook again. But I do know I'll miss him and the way that he was the only cook who warmed the dinner rolls for the customers, the way he assembled a seriously delicious almond cheesecake, the way he didn't mind so much pouring shot after shot after shot at the bar.

There have been things this summer that feel strange and a little like fate--like the universe is having a good laugh at how things fall into place and how we all relate to each other, how we are all running in circles that are smaller than we think, circles that are bound to intersect and overlap and get all tangled up together. This was one of them. One of many.