After the movie on Saturday, my friend and I ended up at the Mars Bar. The place is a wonderful shit-hole, wallpapered in graffiti with strange photos of rabbits and words like "Smegma" written in magic marker on the wall behind the bar.
We sat down at the bar. I was intrigued by a couple of punk girls in rainbow faux-hawks but someone was watching us. He stumble-bumbled, stumblebummed into us and forced his way into our conversation. He looked vaguely like Sloth from The Goonies in a wine-spattered "I Love NY" t-shirt. He claimed his name was Zachary, that he was Australian (his "accent" came and went like the tide), and that he was in New York for his mother's wedding (for the fifth time, he said). He was creepy but, at that moment, harmless.
You could not engage Zach in conversation. You could only wait, looking at his blank, slack-jaw face, his body swaying like a tree with a beer-gut in a breeze, and attend to his oracular monosyllabic outbursts. He also played punk songs on the jukebox and gyrated in something approximating a dance. After awhile, we tried our best to ignore him.
This didn't work for long. When Zach pilfered a dollar from the bar under the guise of groping for an empty wine glass. We decided things could only go downhill from there. Rather than risk provoking ersatz Aussie ire, we decided to retire to another establishment.
As I rose from my chair to go, I extended my hand in an honest attempt to leave on good terms. Zach did not take my hand. He just looked at me. His mouth was slightly open. The wine-stain on his shirt, in the dwindling afternoon light, took on the cast of drying blood. His body swayed slightly. His eyes, with only the merest glint of life in their dull depths, spoke of something like betrayal. I wasted no time making my exit.
I'm afraid that some way, some how, I have made an enemy on a far-off shore or, if not there, than in the East Village which, in some ways, is a far-off shore. So perhaps it's all the same. Whether I misplayed some dark custom of the southern hemisphere or whether he just didn't like the cut of my jib, I'll never know.
...No, I'll never know. The bar was pretty cool though.
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