Gentle reader: I urge you to read or review chapters one and two. This chapter will be easier to understand if you do. Small portions of the previous chapter will be included in this one.
Three years have passed since Paul walked out on his marriage of three years to Gail. Fate has not been kind but he is starting to put his life back together. I pick up the story with Paul and his boss talking ….
“Well, are we ready for ‘em tonight, Paul?”
“I believe we are, Mr. Miller. I can’t think of a thing we’ve missed.”
“Great! See you at six, sharp.”
That was Jim Miller, my boss. I’ve worked for him for almost two years. As bosses go, he was one of the best. His company sold meat to restaurants. I was currently number two on his totem pole of salesmen. If everything went as planned, I would soon be number one. We were going to wine and dine the owner of a very large chain of restaurants. A successful feast tonight would result in a contract worth several million dollars over the next five years. Everything had been done to insure success. I had made arrangements for our client and his four district managers to have dinner with us at the most extravagant restaurant in the city. I had reserved a large private booth that had an excellent view of the live entertainment. Our waiter only had one table to take care of, ours.
It was a little after nine when fateful event number one happened.
A place on the table was cleared, the contract spread out before us, and signatures were carefully written at the bottom. Toasts were made and we helped our five guests into a waiting limousine. They had a five o’clock flight the next morning, which meant they had to be at the airport by three thirty. Jim was in a celebratory mood and insisted we go back in and patronize the bar.
I had just finished my first non-alcoholic drink when fateful event number two struck.
SHE walked in! No! It couldn’t be, but it was. It was HER! I hadn’t seen GAIL for three years. What was SHE doing here?
“Good God, Paul! You’ve turned white as a sheet! Are you alright?”
“I … I … I’ve got to leave.”
It’s a damn good thing I was sitting on a stool and had the bar to lean on. I would have gone straight to the floor if I had been standing. Gail, beautiful Gail with long blonde hair and sky-blue eyes. The long flowing dinner-dress was well filled out up front with a slight flair at the hips. Damn! As glamorous as that dress was, she made it look better.
Thankfully, she was with a group of people, all fashionably dressed. I had to get out of there, now! I tried to stand and walk to the door before she saw me. I don’t think I would have made it if Jim hadn’t helped me. Insisting that I looked too sick to drive, Jim put me in his car and drove me home.
Jim, being the caring boss he is, helped me into my apartment. I managed to convince him that I would be okay and persuaded him to leave. I wanted to hide. I wanted to crawl into a hole and pull it closed behind me. How was I going to deal with this? I couldn’t face her. It would be too painful. Lying on my bed, curled up in a ball, the memories came flooding back. Memories I had tried to forget.
I hadn’t seen Gail since I walked out on her. Beautiful, caring, loving, Gail. Every man’s dream. The perfect woman. The perfect wife. The perfect lover. I had destroyed it. Yes, me. It was my fault and my fault alone. I was the reason my marriage had failed. I knew that now. Back then? Well, I was a different man then.
I had been an arrogant, self-centered, egotistical, over-bearing, womanizing jerk. I wasn’t like that now. I wasn’t sure just what I was but I wasn’t the same man now as I had been then. She gave me a wake-up call. She gave me every chance to change. She offered me whatever kind of life I wanted but I threw it all away. I made the biggest mistake in my life and walked out. Away from her. Away from the best thing that had ever happened to me.
Oh, damn! I was just getting my life together. I thought I was over her but I was wrong. I was in love with her. That’s something I had never told her. I had never said, “I love you.” I had never told her how much I cared. The man I had been back then couldn’t have said that. As for the man I am now, well, I’m not sure what I would say.
Three years ago, Saturday, nine thirty in the morning, I left with two suitcases and an attitude. The following Thursday night, I had the living shit beat out of me by four extremely jealous husbands. I had been screwing the wives of two of our satellite store managers and the wives of two other store employees. Four stores, four cities, four wives and four days in the hospital. It took me over four weeks to recover.
The last thing I remember one of the men saying before I passed out was, “Leave the country. If we ever see you again, we’ll kill you.” My boss visited me the second day of my hospital stay. He handed me my termination papers and my final paycheck. I was discharged from the hospital about ten in the morning of my forth day and by two in the afternoon, I was on a bus headed for parts unknown.
Several bus changes and a thousand miles later, I was in a large city and my money was almost gone. I managed to find a cheap, filthy room to rent on a weekly basis and started living in a bottle. It was there, at the bottom of a bottle, that I realized what a fool I was.
I envy those who know when they are in love. It was different for me. I had never experienced love. There had never been love when I was growing up and love had never been necessary with the numerous girlfriends I had experienced during and after college. Then, drunk, crying my eyes out, sitting on a curb in front of some no name bar, I realized I was in love with my wife. I had walked out on the best thing that had ever happened to me.
The suitcases and my clothes went to a second-hand store for more booze. I was kicked out of my room and started living in the alleys of skid row. It was there, in the alleys of skid row that I met Bear. I had no idea what his real name was. He was big, black as the ace of spades, about six foot four and probably weighted around two seventy-five. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. Bear owned the roughest bar in the city. It was also a place where, if you were really hungry, you could choke down a hamburger. There was always a poker game or two going on in the back room and there were some rooms upstairs where the street girls could take their clients, for a price, of course. Bear, never one to pass up an opportunity, put me to work. I swept floors, washed dishes, took out the trash, kept the bar stocked from the storage room, mopped vomit and blood from the floors, and did every other menial task he could think of. As a token of his generosity, he gave me a cot in one of the storage rooms to sleep on and a place where I could drown my sorrows in cheap booze.
I spent almost a year with Bear.
He came in late one night after closing, actually it was early in the A.M. and caught me crying in my booze. I had managed to keep a large envelope of personal stuff. In it were some of my wedding pictures, my wedding ring and my copy of the divorce papers. I hadn’t looked at any of it since I walked away that Saturday morning. That’s when I found out how much Gail had really loved me.
Paperclipped to the back of the divorce papers was a checkbook, with my name printed in the header. It was the old joint account Gail and I had shared when we were married.
Bear sat down on the end of my cot and asked me just what in the hell was so bad that I had to cry about it almost every night.
It all came pouring out. My college days. The easy girls. Meeting Gail. And finally, how I had done everything possible to fuck over a good woman and fuck up a good marriage.
He woke me early the next morning. He handed me a large paper bag and told me to go upstairs to one of the rooms and clean myself up. I was surprised at what was in the bag. Razor, tooth brush, comb, soap, toothpaste, and deodorant. New socks, shoes, blue jeans, and three white T-shirts. Embroidered on the pocket of each shirt was the name, “Bear’s Bar.”
I came down looking and smelling a lot better.
He told me he was promoting me to bartender and his bartenders weren’t allowed to drink, either on or off duty.
