Tag / drinks

by Alexander Sorondo

April 28

At an upscale pizza joint in South Miami there’s a woman working the door with long blond braids who looks in the candle light to be about thirty. Tell her you’re heading to the bar and she smiles, gestures teh way, and you go. Keep turning to see her walk people to their tables.

Couple weeks ago you saw her at a gas station on Old Cutler in a BMW with her daughter, a kid, wearing matching outfits. Cute. You find yourself glancing at her again and again because you saw her a couple weeks prior to even this

at a bar by herself, Monday night. It’s just past dark and you’re here with a friend. Men keep approaching her and she smiles, engages, sends them away. People by her drinks.

An hour of her sitting by herself and here comes an older guy sitting beside you. Salt and pepper hair, bearded, short and muscular. He orders a beer, gets absorbed in his phone.

She’s looking at him.

A shot of something bourbon-colored gets set beside his beer.

He looks up.

Bar tender points to the woman on the square-shaped bar’s opposite end. With the long blond braids.

He raises his glass to her and she comes over to him. Sits on the next stool.

You’re tipsy and delighted cuz this is gonna be the jackpot of eavesdropping.

Then the fucking Heat game starts and they switch the volume way up so you can’t hear a thing of what these two are saying.

They’re making out by the third quarter.

And a little over a month later you’re having a drink at the bar of an upscale pizza place, waiting to meet your brother, and here she is.

All these people around you. Their lives.

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by Alexander Sorondo

April 22. Never looks the way you thought.

At work your colleague shows you this book he just bought. A friend of his wrote it. Published by a small house. The author photo is a candid shot, kinda blurry, taken at an event where he’s wearing a suit and holding a microphone.

Start thinking about how the author probably poured his heart into this book and a few hundred hours of eager earnest work and how he probably pitched it to a hundred agents who all broke his heart before he came across this little press, a local outfit, that took his book and dressed it up and shelved it in stores and got him some speaking engagements around town where he sits on a panel or reads to a small audience so that he can feel some vestige of what he figured — while writing — it would feel like to be an author

Eventually you realize you’re being negative for no reason and hush yourself.

That night at the Brewhouse you get a text from your brother that rustles your feathers and you’re writing some long-ass text in response, “and this thing and that thing and how dare you” — pointless. Negative for no reason.

Just agree with him. And then turn your phone off. Have a drink and stop thinking.

by Alexander Sorondo

April 21

It’s late and you’re heading home after work and decide to stop at CVS for a fourpack of PBR.

Pull up to the store and fine the PBR’s all gone. Even the big 22-ounce cans you can buy on their own. There’s a few six- and twelve-packs of various beers and while you tell yourself you aren’t in the mood for that much beer tonight the truth is you don’t have that kinda money right now.

What they do have, over by the cheap stuff, is this lone can of Michelob Ultra. Fucking huge. Like 30 oz. Have you ever had Michelob Ultra? Can’t seem to remember.

The giant can costs $2.50.

That’ll do, pig.

Buy the giant Michelob Ultra and take it home, fix yourself a sandwich, reach for the big beer and suddenly you don’t want it. Feel the heft of this can in your hand and some weird gastric foresight tells you how it’ll feel in your belly. Not good. Put it in the fridge, eat your sandwich, go to bed.

Next night you come home with a fourpack of little plastic wine bottles. Go to put em in the fridge and when you open the door you almost recoil at the lone top-shelf figure. It’s a giant can of Michelob Ultra. Standing there like Homer Simpson’s silo of pig shit.

Take it out and hold it. Feels like a mortar round. Big as your forearm.

You do not want this.

Feels wrong to just throw it away, though.

Look around your kitchen as though for somebody else who might want it. A ghost. Some means of disposal. There’s the sink but you don’t want that. The trash, but ditto. Maybe take it to work tomorrow, give it to somebody? Or walk it down the road to the intersection and just stand it up on the sidewalk.

Imagining the young newlywed who stumbles upon it. “Hm. What’s this?” He takes it home.

His wife is there, stressing at the kitchen table with a calculator: all these bills. She sees the thing in his hand. “What’s that?”

“It’s a giant can of Michelob Ultra. I found it at the intersection.”

“Shall we have it for supper?”

“I should say so.”

Humble, loving couple. Struggling, but they have each other.

She clears the bills from the table and brings out two bowls.

He snaps the tab on this giant can of Michelob Ultra and out from it — a great purple light!

Twas a genie’s abode all this while.

The young couple are granted three wishes. They ask for wealth and good health and a happy life together among friends. The genie rubs his elbows, gyrates, and grants their wishes. Serenity henceforth, tenderness, comfort.

Even so: you don’t wanna drink this.

by Alexander Sorondo

April 17

Hungry at the cafe but you check your account and decide it’s probably safer just to stay hungry for a while, ’til Happy Hour, at which point you head south to the usual bar for a halfprice beer and a halfprice appetizer, big enough to work as a meal, and to read for a bit before heading home.

At the cafe when you were hungry the barista got up from behind the counter and came over and sat beside you at the communal table, bored in this lull between busy patches, and without mentioning her son she says she might have to look for a new job soon. This sudden candor. Talks with spotty eye-contact, unprompted, about how she’s only just barely meeting her expenses. She refers your eye to the counter where, a few minutes ago, that empty and red-stained Tupperware was full of pasta and she was doing damage to it.

“Made that fucking pasta two nights ago, big pot like a witch, and I’m still eating it now and I’ll probably have it again tomorrow. Like…” Her breath catches and she shakes her head, closes her eyes, sighs. Opens up and looks immediately more flippant and cool. Says, “I feel like it’s fine in the end cuz I’m, what?, I’m twenty-eight. I’m just starting out, like, in life. So I know it’s fine, that this is like my Struggle Period and that eventually shit’ll be good cuz I’ve got like the work ethic, the brains, whatever whatever. It’s just…” mouth agape, pawing for a word, she finally just laughs, “it fucking sucks right now.”

And a cuple hours later you’re here at the bar, finally getting your Bliss, and you’re thinking of her life and of yours. Her attitude and yours.

You’re comparing, which people say not to do.

by Alexander Sorondo

April 16. I remember you.

You’re about to go for a walkthrough at an efficiency in a convenient part of town and, being too excited, you get here an hour early.

Can’t go knocking on the door right now. Gotta be punctual, make a good impression.

So you go to kill time at a bar about five blocks away. Bring a book.

The bar tender walks up to you with this head-tilted squint, and so you start squinting right back at her, and bending your own head. She does seem familiar…

Then she calls it, smiling. For eight or nine months she tended bar at a big corporate chain next door to the nearest movie theater to your house. She saw you every Friday afternoon back when you sustained that six-month habit of catching a show on your day off.

You ask why she left the big chain.

“Got fired.”

(You have to stop asking this.)

She closes her eyes and tilts her head again and shrugs, like no big deal. “It was a shitshow there. Got fired on a technicality. It’s a long story.”

You ask for the story.

She tells it.

You drink two beers in the time it takes her to say that she didn’t card somebody. The customer was clearly of age, maybe mid-thirties, but rules are rules.

“I don’t really mind, though.” Again with the closed eyes and the big shrug. “This place pays me just as good. And we don’t have roaches here.”

by Alexander Sorondo

April 13

Only other guy at the bar is thirtysomething and says to the bartender, tall woman all frecklespeckled with red hair, he’s surprised by how relaxed it is in here. He says this is his first visit.

“Place looks so fancy,” he says, “everytime I get near it I feel like I gotta book.”

She shrugs, wiping the counter in fast circles, “We’re not so fancy.”

He asks where she’s from.

“Virginia. What about you, you’re Cuban?”

“Yeah but I was born in New York.”

“I lived there for a while.”

He grins and does some clicking thing with his mouth. “It’s the best, I miss it.”

Bar tender puts a tender hand on the small of her back while straightening, and tossing the rag into the liquor well, exhaling. Strain of work written in her posture, her breathing, sweaty face. “Ahdunno.” She shakes her head slowly and looks either tired or defeated. “Wish it wasn’t so expensive.”

by Alexander Sorondo

April 12

You’re in here for happy hour just to sate a two-year curiosity, even though it’s clear from just the front room that you can’t afford it. The place has thick green carpet and emanates class and the meals seem to start at $22 but all the men here are in shorts or jeans or t-shirts or fairly-casual button-downs.

Sit at the bar with your $6 Miller and flip through your phone after a quick glance around. Photos of famous people and of newspaper clippings are framed and hanging everywhere. Some loud guys in shorts at a corner table are talking about a judge. Golf is muted on a TV over the bar. Pink Floyd playing from overhead speakers at so low a volume it’s almost pointless. Take out your phone, start scrolling. Couple minutes later one of the grayhaired bros int he corner slaps the table and lets out a clipped cackle.

“It’s not Smoke,” he says. He’s remonstrating a friend. “Snoke. Lord Emperor Snoke.”

by Alexander Sorondo

April 5. Fans, Cooling Off.

Wouldn’t have thought college basketball was this popular but there’s a game on between Duke and some other school and everybody’s pretty tense about it, focusing on the massive TVs over the bar, even the servers and the bussers pausing to look, trade remarks. Everytime somebody’s closing in on a basket you’ll hear a chorus of muted “come on come on come on” and two bussers pause right beside you and one of them’s gripping his hair and sighing and talking about his bracket.

Whenever somebody makes or misses a basket the reaction is explosive, disappointment or joy, and all the tension along the bar melts off in a loopy uneven way. Like ice cream in a microwave. Then it all picks up again, just as slow.

It’s 7 on a Sunday and you’re only halfway through your first beer but you feel like this’ll be the only one and then you’ll go. Nothing to do with the game or the shouting. This just happens lately, in a way it never did in your early twenties. You’ll look at the remaining half of a beer and something in your stomach, some vague overhead cloud with mixed-up silent words about sleep and the next day’s responsibilities, tells you in no unclear way that you’re done. It’s time to go home.

And so that’s where you go.

You find a safe behind the painting.

04 left, 24 right, 91 left.

Pull the door open and you’re transported to the Thousand Movie Projects.