Mimi's Bar, Jane Halpern, Page 8

Three years later

"This is Danny Simon on WQXR radio, your home for the best rock n' roll. How're y'all doin' out there ... good? I hope you're all having a nice and ... pleasant day out there ... here's "Down on the Corner"."

Danny had improved a little bit. His voice was smoother. He was more relaxed. His boss was roaring into the control booth much less often, and sometimes even let it go completely when Danny got the station call letters wrong, which was a great load off Danny's nerves.

Mimi's was doing fantastic. The bar was now the busiest in the tri-county area, and Mimi was raking in money hand over fist. Every night the bar was filled to maximum capacity, which by Mimi's definition was a lot of people. People sat out on the boardwalk leading up to Mimi's, heels swinging over the water, just to be near the party and drink and watch the phosphorus on the water surface undulate below them. Sometimes they were looking at alligator eyes and didn't know it. There were bands every night, local bands with names like The Good Silver and Water Landing. There was also Clyde Owens and the Ocelots, Grammy Material, Limmonade, and Until Further Notice. These bands were all good, believe it or not.

Mimi was looking taller. She was now the head honcho of a very high-traffic place of business, and the responsibility had rendered her silent and quick on her feet. She had lost much of her hearing in both ears due to the loud music, and had instead developed a powerful stare she was completely unaware of. She could move like a rumor when it was to her advantage, and could vault over the bar in two seconds flat to stop fights already in progress. Most fights never got a chance to develop - Mimi was escorting the contestants out before they'd even become aware they were having an argument. Mimi could smell trouble like a thunderstorm in the air.

Her eye became a critical and appraising tool, her eyebrow a focus that only narrowed. Her face, when she was not concentrating, was blank. Her skin was white - she rarely left the shelter of her bar. She was a fish, hiding among the weeds and rotten timbers sunk to the bottom, all pale belly and oxbow mouth. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that she did not have an inner life. When the bar closed for a day, when the morning sun tilted at an eleven o'clock angle, she would walk out to the small personal porch she constructed for herself on the south-east side of the bar. She would let her foot dangle down into the water in its Carhart working boot, protection from reptiles and gators. From underneath, the dark aquatic weeds covered in their fur of silver bubbles reached up to caress the sole of her boot, and the small minnows flashed in and out among the trailing laces.

She would think. In these few years, she had fixed her moral compass on some new stars in the sky. In order to salvage what was left of her own personality, she had stopped putting it out as a freebie, along with the pretzels and beer nuts. She no longer pandered to her customers as she had to those first few who came in her door. She assumed a public face that did not change noticeably from one patron to another, as a bartender, or any public figure, must if he or she is to remember what their true face is. Mimi was by nature an antisocial creature, and the relative absence of others in her true personal life confirmed this. Karen was still a good friend, though she didn't come to the bar on Saturday nights. "Too dangerous for me," she confessed. She had a point - you had to have your wits about you when you went to Mimi's. The local chapter of the Hell's Angels had taken a liking to the atmosphere, even claimed a table for themselves which the other patrons (or at least the smart ones) steered clear of. The Louisiana Vikings, another biker gang, showed up every once in a while to ruffle the Angels' feathers. The state troopers became intimately aware of the hairpin turns on the road to Mimi's, and there were one or two who claimed they could drive there blindfolded.

Mimi's also got the reputation of being something of a meat market, and lots of young ladies came there of a Saturday night, many of whom were involved in long-term relationships with men who were commonly referred to as "the jealous type". These young men had a habit of showing up late at night, wielding bats, crowbars, and other implements with which to get their sweethearts back. Usually Marty could explain things to them. He was good at the "let's go outside and have a man-to-man" thing, at listening to their long and doleful stories of love for one Doreen or Louisa or Candy, and at sympathizing and offering manly advice until they packed up their toys and went home. This sometimes took hours. But it was worth it if it avoided a confrontation; because when you came right down to it, Mimi was a small woman, Marty was a small man, and they did not make for the most convincing of authority figures when pitted against rage and/or an astronomical blood alcohol count.

Now, there were about thirty men well known in the area as "the jealous type", and twenty of them were Jackie Wallace. He was a local character much known for his relationship with Leia Higgins, a beauty all of twenty two years old. Jackie was fifty, or sixty, or seventy. No one could tell. He was that type. Possibly if he had learned anything during his fifty, sixty, or seventy years on this earth, it would have been possible to carbon-date him by his wisdom, but there was none of that in evidence. He had spent hundreds of nights in jail, all separate because he possessed the ability to ingratiate himself to the local judges, and they never gave him more than one night in jail for beating up Leia when drunk and disorderly. Leia did not possess this talent - she was rather aloof and inarticulate, (it might have had to do with being twenty two) and none of the judges could dig up much sympathy for her. Jackie, on the other hand, was colorful, funny, and threw barbecues famous throughout the county. He was a living legend. Anthropologists came to his doorstep to hear him tell stories and record them on little black tape recorders, publishing them later in hyperventialting articles about the "rapidly vanishing oral traditions of Louisiana". He was that charming.

Mimi was not fooled by him for a second. She said to Marty one night after the bar closed, "If he ever comes in here, call the state troopers right away. Not because he'll be out of control. I will." Mimi was not the world's number one fan of Leia, but she hated wife beaters with a passion that far exceeded any other moral indignation she felt. No one deserved that, she thought. Whether Mimi herself ever had any close-up experience with abuse remains unknown.

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