Mimi's Bar, Jane Halpern, Page 3

Outside the swamp was green and sloppy, and washed up against the piles with a distinctly heavy sound, as if it was thicker than ordinary water. The mats of green lichen which sparkled with metallic flakes crumbled into little pieces against the lowest rafters supporting Mimi's room, and the sloshing sound calmed her to sleep.

This was Mimi's bar. She named it "Mimi's" after herself. There were always Christmas lights strung around the entire perimeter of the roof, serving as a beacon to all who came by boat. The nearest trees were either dead or strung with Spanish moss and nearly leafless for most of the year. You could not see in except by the windows to the side of the front entrance; and by then, anyone inside had seen you. The one window in Mimi's room was covered with a piece of faded red cloth, and when her light was on at night, a sinister square of red shone against the blackness outside. The wind blew through the trees on moonstruck autumn nights, and one could not hear a boat until it was within twenty yards.

One more thing.

You had to walk the plank to get to Mimi's. The last bit of solid ground was a leaf littered outpost of forest about an eighth of a mile from Mimi's. This muddy acre, surrounded by palmettos, served as a parking lot for all of Mimi's customers. They then had to walk along the long and zigzagging pier she had built to get them across the water and to the bar. It was like a boardwalk, though alligators and gigantic lily pads cruised underneath it instead of surfers and sunbathers. She erected a hasty railing to satisfy basic safety concerns, though the safety of anyone was never Mimi's primary concern. In retrospect, it's a miracle she managed to get that bar built at all, much less up and running, without any visits from the authorities. Lord knows she did not wash the dishes in water that was hot enough, keep the glasses in cupboards that were sterile enough, or keep the books in conditions uncooked enough to withstand a visit by federal inspectors.

Not that any of that mattered to Mimi. The human tragedy did not affect Mimi; nor did the human comedy or drama or blockbuster action adventure; to her it was all similarly beautiful and similarly remote. If she wasn't looking at you she'd forget your name, and that was true. Only a few people could break her trance.

One was Danny Simon, the DJ of WQXR, the local radio station Mimi listened to as she built her bar.

He had a thin, high voice not suited to his chosen profession. He was young and twitchy; Mimi could tell as she listened (or at least she imagined) that he had thinning brown hair and a worn-out, pleasant face. He had no idea how to interrupt callers and often let them rabbit on until the cows came home. He was not good at doing the lottery numbers - he got nervous and got the numbers wrong. The weather, when read by him, sounded like a recipe for hurricane stew. WQXR would have fired him if they could have afforded anyone else, but they were a backwater station with a very small budget and one advertising contract - every forty-five minutes there were six back-to-back ads for the National Guard.

Danny stayed.

But he had a horrible work environment. When he got the station call letters wrong (as he often did), his boss would come roaring in the door of Danny's booth, paying no attention to whether or not Danny was on the air, and proceed to ream Danny out with a supreme disregard for the sensitive ears of listeners. When this happened, Danny would be caught off guard, and during the moment it would take him to slip the needle into the groove of another record, Mimi would catch a snippet of dazzling obscenity culled from a vocabulary of obviously breathtaking extent. This always put a smile on Mimi's face. Danny would come back on later, sounding like he'd been attacked by bedding come miraculously to life: processed through an entire set of Maytag appliances, and wrung out. "Here's Lynryd Skynyrd," he'd pant, then collapse on the control panel. Danny enjoyed a wide variety of rock-and-roll to choose from and send out to his listeners, whom he always treated with the utmost courtesy. "Hi, how you doin' out there," he would say, in his soft and nervous voice, "I think it's a nice day, how about you? Here's some Stones." Danny played the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, Kenny Wayne Shepard, Sheryl Crow, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. He kept people moving. He played John Mellencamp, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Three Dog Night, and Dire Straits. He kept parties partying. He played Creedence Clearwater Revival, Black Oak Arkansas, John Fogerty, and Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. "People," he'd say; "when you live in a swamp; it helps to keep a sense of humor about things."

Mimi didn't have much of a sense of humor, but she believed that. She sang along with most of the songs on WQXR as she worked, and her voice, while as untrained as a heron's, was not altogether disagreeable. (When she pounded her thumb in the middle of singing, some old classics got some new lyrics.) And when she ordered her jukebox, she made sure the playlist was almost identical to that of WQXR.

Mimi's Bar [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]