The Bar.

There was a small bar a few blocks into the darker part of town that I always liked to go to. I lived on the upper east side, but the bars over there always seemed to be full of people still putting on airs. Too many fake people. Not enough reality. Sure, there was your good amount of bar fights, and the beer was warm, the food was cold, but the people were real. And sometimes that what you pay your hard earned money for.

I had lived in the city for some fifteen years now. It was a big, crazy place that I hadn't ever quite wrapped my head around. But It seemed to me that the best place for someone to get lost was in a big mess of people. Someplace like the city. It had seemed to work.

Sure, I had my friends. There was Barry, who worked on the upper east side as a janitor for one of the big apartment complexes for actors and stock brokers and the like. He and I would head over to the Old bar across the tracks at least a few nights a week. It was our special bit of enjoyment: to see real people acting out their lives in a real way. No more prada glasses and coach bags and people keeping up with their neighbors for no god forsaken reason. We were both tired of that bullshit, we saw it all day long at work.

Me? I work as an accountant for a stock brokerage on Wall Street. Its damn hard work, and I'm there late many nights, but it pays well, and with the money I'm saving I'll be able to move away in a few years. Go buy myself a cabin in the woods somewhere else. Or a bungalow on an island somewhere. Something a little more slow paced. I could never understand folks who thought of the city as a destination, as a place to retire and grow old. Maybe that's just me.

So Barry and I went on into our favorite bar on the west side. We ordered two buds with no intention of drinking the skunked garbage they called beer, but with the intention of paying patronage to a small section of the city that seemed to have folks that were still alive. Still here and thinking about their lives and their families and their friends, and not just about themselves. The bar was seemingly out of business when you looked at it from the outside: the lights were barely bright enough to see your hand in front of your face. There was no music playing, and the ancient jukebox in the corner was unplugged, with a huge hole in the speaker on the front of it from a fight long ago. The bar was cracked, although cleaned meticulously by the old lady that must either own the bar or just have worked there so long she had started to purchase stock in the company. Come to think of it, she was the only person who ever seemed to work there.

The front door was always shut tight, no matter how hot or cold it was inside the building. There was no air conditioning, and the heat didn't seem to work so well, either. In the winter, you could see your breath until there were ten or so folks in the small room, and then it would start to warm up.

As you looked around the walls as your eyes adjusted to the dim light, you recognized that there wasn't your normal bar wall decor here. There were strange pieces of taxidermy on the walls: animals merged together  in strange ways: The head of a raccoon on the body of a dog. A deer's head cnnected to a platypus were the two strangest ones. The thing that made them even stranger is that whoever bothered to make em had spent a damn long time making the eyes on them look near perfect. You would swear these things were alive. Some nights you could swear you could cath them moving out of the corner of your eye.

There were a number of old books on bookshelves as well. a large, long collection of them. All leather bound, and all in languages that nobody there seemed to understand. They were put in odd places around the bar. Some on a high shelft behind the counter, thers stacked in a corner and made into a tabletop for folks to sit at. There was also a number of walking sticks hung around the room as well, but each one seemed to have some type of marks ground into it. Not by whittleing, or even with a dremel or something, but it seemed as though someone had burned the symbols into each one in a violent, quick manner.

Barry and I got there late one Friday night, ready to enjoy relaxing in our favorite spot. The lady behind the bar scoweled at us and said nothing.

"Two buds please"

She slid them across the counter and instantly went back to ignoring us, watching her recorded soap operas on the Tv across the room from her. People were already in here talking. There was a couple in the corner who seemingly were just passing through, and knew they had come to a place they weren't ready for yet. They finished their beers quickly and left. Everyone else were regualrs: Two guys who worked the docks nearby were here and still smelled of the ocean and of pneumatic oil. Three old ladies that always came and ordered tea were chatting at the bar, the old lady behind the bar would join in from time to time. And there was one other man here. He was in a dark suit, and was extremely tall. He was the only man in the room on his cell phone. He was talking to someone, seemingly about business as he looked about the room.

He had only been there five minutes before the old lady's loud bark from behind the bar came to reach his ears.

"Ey, " She bellowed " We don't allow phones in 'ere"

The man stood up, and placed the phone on the table without finishing the phone conversation.

"Ma'am, I would like to buy your bar"

"Ain't fer sale"

"I'm willing to pay any amount you like, name your price."

She looked him in the eye, hers gleaming, and repeated herself exactly "Ain't fer sale"

The bar went silent as they locked eyes with eachother for a long time.

The man picked up his phone again to continue the conversation, ignoring the old woman.

She snapped her fingers, and the man looked down at his phone. everyone in the bar could see that the battery had died.

"No Phones" she said. eyes gleaming.

The man looked down at his phone and laughed. It seemed that that was exactly what he had been looking for. He pulleed out his checkbook.

"The Bar ain't for sale!" Barked the old woman. the two shoremen in the corner stood up and made their way toward the man in the suit, the old lady held up her hand to tell them to stop. They did.

"Now ma'am," Said the man in the suit." I'm sure we can come to an understanding, I'm willing to pay any-"

"It Ain't for sale, now get outta my bar before I throw you out" She coughed the last word violently. It seemed to shake the walls of the building itself. the glasses on the wall rang slightly.

The man in the suit smiled. He looked around for a long moment, now at the perfect center of the bar. with a flash the man pulled something from the inside of his suit coat and pointed it at the old woman. before I could make out what it was, the old woman had one of the staff's from the walls in her hand, and the man  in the suit had dissappeared completely. It wasn't so much that the staff had made him dissappear, or that he had evaporated, more that he was never there at all. Everyone looked around for him, and noticed he was gone. Nobody said a word. The two men in the corner who had stood up slowly sat back down, and went back to their beers and their conversation as if nothing had happened. The old woman shuffled slowly over to the wall, and put the staff back in its rightful place. She slowly sat down.

The room was quiet as she caught her breath.

"Everyone out" she gasped eventually. "we're closed" She looked extremely sad. The ladies sipping tea in the corner helped to pick up glasses slowly, and shooed us out of the bar.

A few weeks later we decided to venture back to our bar. The door was locked. We looked inside the windows, and the room was empty. No strange taxidermy, no walking sticks on the walls, no nothing. There was construction gear in there, and it was seemingly getting turned into a fitness studio. There was no sign of the old lady anywhere.

Barry and I will never really understand what happened in that bar thatvnight. but we learned one thing for sure. There's some type of magic in this world, and some of its bad, and some of its good. I have no idea what kind of magic the old lady had, or the man in the suit. But one of them won that day. I'm still not sure which one.