Mimi's Bar, Jane Halpern, Page 2

Mimi built her bar in an uninhabited part of the swamp, about three miles from anything that could be called useable real estate, which was just the way Mimi liked it. She wanted no shopping malls or Piggly Wigglys anywhere near her bar. She was going to make a pearl in the oyster of existence. She ordered the Bud mirrors and pool tables ahead of time. She sunk telephone poles soaked in tar to the bottom of the swamp, guiding them with her own hands, not trusting the crane boat she'd hired at great expense to set the foundation pillars by itself. She stood in a little aluminum boat at the spot where the corner of the building would be and held onto the german shepherd colored column that was to hold up her building, scaring the daylights out of the crane crews who had never sunk a piling in this kind of muck before, screaming instructions, ready to go to the bottom with the telephone pole to make sure it got in straight. She insisted on four exactly straight telephone poles, one at each corner, and didn't let the crane crew go home to their wives and families until she was satisfied it was perfect.

She paid them all in the fading dusk light, writing out her name in black ballpoint on pale lavender blue cheques.

She built the rest herself, wobbling around in that slight and tiny boat with a level, a stack of lumber, and a coffee can of nails. No more checks were written. The crane that she had hired to place the pilings had put her in the hole over four thousand dollars. She could afford no more labor. She wore a piece of closed cell foam wrapped in orange cloth around her waist, and pulled herself out of the water twice by the ropes she had tied to the pilings. The water of the swamp looked more like mercury than water--as if, were you to plunge your hand into it, you would come away covered in some sort of reflective metallic goo instead of pond scum. If you fell into it, though, you discovered it was as clear and clean a water as you'd ever gotten up your nose. Mimi learned to kick extra hard when she fell in, to make up for the weight of her boots.

Every morning she drove to Denny's, nineteen miles away, for breakfast. Every few days she went to the grocery store near Denny's, bought baloney and sardines and five pounds of apples, and ate the lunch meat and fruit every day for lunch and dinner. She built a sturdy foundation out of two-by-tens on the four telephone poles, then laid down forty-two-by-sixes over the headers. She gauged the plumbness of each board with the level, which was sometimes hard when the boat was rocking. Soon she had a web so perfectly cornered and perpendicular it would have given Anansi a headache. She laid plywood and nailed it down so fast with her nail gun that beetles were sometimes trapped, legs flailing, by the nails - exhibits in scholarly plywood, sans the traditional scholarly cotton ball soaked in ether. She stood on her platform by sundown, hands on hips, comparing herself to the builders of oil platforms and coming out on top.

She put up the ceiling, roof, and walls. The bar was laid out very simply; there was a porch with Christmas lights wrapped around its supports and roof edge; then a door and then the main room. It was a simple, rectangular room, a grade school geometry question.

It sure wasn't a disco.

The shelf with all the booze took up the entire left wall. Mimi dealt in volume, not variety. The only wine there was in a jug. There was an ancient yellow calendar from a feed catalog and some pinups tacked to the side of the shelf unit, and that was the left wall. (Incidentally, Mimi's bar faced due south-west, so the left wall faced exactly north-west.)

The bar ran parallel to the left wall, interrupted at both ends by two waist-high swinging doors to allow for the comings and goings of the bartender and Mimi. There was a large wrought-iron stove with fancy Victorian moldings on its feet against the back wall of the room, a stove with five or six large cooking surfaces, each with covers, and a deep-frying tub in which Mimi would dip hundreds, thousands of pounds of breaded shrimp and Cajun-spiced French fries in the coming years. There was a small sink next to that with the plumbing exposed. No refrigerator was visible, though in a back closet there was a large top-opening freezer where all the meat was kept.

The bar was mahogany - the one place where Mimi had not skimped. She would allow her shingles to rot and all her other wood to go gray, but that bar was not gonna look like the pale yellow oak ones she'd seen in other redneck bars. People were gonna think twice before shoving a knife in this bar.

The stools were covered in red leather and studded with brass rivets. The floor was bare wood and already Mimi had started to break it in, to show it what it was in for. No varnish, no mops or brooms or yearly check-ups. This floor would be pounded on, scraped across, carved up with broken glass and steel-toed cowboy boots; soaked with grease and beer and swamp water, saturated with blood, spit, and tobacco, and finally danced upon. Mimi gave it one look as she walked in the door, as if to dare it to chip, rot, catch fire, or cave under the pressure. It shuddered once, then was still.

There were four or five tables out on the main floor, each one topped by ketchup, mustard, and barbecue sauce and surrounded by six or seven chairs all crowded together; and two pool tables luxuriant in their green perfection. No one looked just once at the pool tables - they were gorgeous. They glowed. They were unearthly. Mimi had ordered them from a company which soon went out of business, though nobody knows why; in fact, hers were the last ones made by that company and a very old craftsman named Hans. The pool tables would remain sexy even when those who stretched out over them were not. Their eventual scars would only make them more so. They kept, in the end, all their balls; except for one black eightball which disappeared one night and was never heard from again.

All this took up most of the middle of the room. On the far right of the room, the tables disappeared and a small dance floor was cleared. There was a tiny bandstand, a platform with a few microphones and amps for any band that wanted to come and sing in such a rough part of the woods, only six inches removed from the floor. It was a bandstand with small aspirations. The real star of the dance floor was the jukebox, which Mimi had pushed and kicked and swore at to get through the door. (Mimi was not a romanticist when it came to objects, though it might be argued that her bar was a flight of fancy.) The jukebox was a big one, pretty with neon lights and a curved strip that went all the way over the rainbow and curved down the other side, changing colors as you watched. It had a red velvet interior and had hundreds of buttons to help you choose what to play - Waylon Jennings or Shania Twain. Mimi knew her audience. There were fish, calendars and lots of Bud mirrors on the walls, and the stained-glass lampshades had rising ducks and Miller logos on them.

Midway through the room a hallway opened into it, a hallway with red rose wallpaper on one side, gray boards on the other, and a ceiling of white painted plywood. On the left side of the hallway there were utility closets and the big freezer with all the seafood frozen in white paper packages sealed with masking tape. On the right side there was the door to the restroom, several yards of boards with black and white pictures of old houses, silent movie stars, color photographs of an old Harley or two - Mimi's pictures, a subtle hint that you were getting into private territory in the building - and then a big, heavy, two-panel wood door with a brass doorknob and a lock on it the size of a coconut.

This was Mimi's room. No one else would have or could have gone here, so naturally the place reeked of pure Mimi, whose smell was pouring from the walls and seeping down the shower curtain. There was one thing you could say about it. It sure wasn't a disco. There was the rose wallpaper, for sure, but there was also a light, lemony sherbet colored design covering one of the walls, and the other two were light blue and white. The ceiling was the same painted plywood in the hallway, the seams between the sheets gaping open slightly in places and letting bits of dust, cobweb, and mouse hair down from the space between the ceiling and the roof. There was a set of drawers as high as your collarbone backed into a corner and another, lower set next to the bed. The lower set had a mirror and a jewelry box on it, with hairbrushes and bright red elastic bands strewn out across its surface. The bed was smallish, but had big posts on every corner and a mahogany headboard with stickers pasted way down out of sight proclaiming the name of the manufacturer, which happened to be the very same manufacturer that had years later manufactured Mimi's magnificent pool tables. The quilt was patchwork and beautiful. The blues glowed and the reds leapt with just as much verve as the little metallic flakes of green that flash in the water of swamps. There was an ironing board propped up by the door, an ugly ironing board if truth be told, one covered in bright orange and yellow flowered cloth that was very faded and dirty. There was a closet full of clothes she never wore - a leather jacket; a stretchy gray top and pants with some small, tasteful embroideries in green thread; a couple of dark pantsuits suitable for a funeral in L.A.; and one long white night-gown. Off in the far corner diagonal from the closet was the shower stall, a Spartan affair with one shelf (upon which sat one bar of green and one of orange soap, both of which smelled faintly of the grime that builds up on the exhaust pipes of pickup trucks and Harley Davidsons) and no door, just a shower curtain of indistinct color. This concluded Mimi's room.

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