Pete, Russ, Dusty, Bips, our cadre of booze and pills, distributing goods and sometimes services out of Dusty’s little roadside bar outside of Mentone just down the mountain from Big Bear, those days were in the past now, and I was in the present. With someone looking for me, a guy I knew a little about, seeming to promise answers when he showed up in Southern California. Fighting off memories threatening to suck me back to the past‒the bleary haze of misguided dreams and the haunting way we rearrange them‒it catches up to you with health problems, mental instability, when you check out for a few years to conquer shame and postpone living until it’s late, and your life skills and your will haven’t kept pace with the rough edges of wasted battles. I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself, rather coming to grips with my tin-box life on the edge of a feudal client’s land, and he held it over me like a hammer ready to pound me into the ground. And I was already there. I was already at bedroc...
Let’s call him Mario. He’s the bartender at this classic on Hollywood Boulevard, between Highland and Las Palmas. You’ve been there. The Maitre ‘d, Manuel, had ushered me into the empty bar around 11:45 AM, and while outside the sun blazed with mid-spring spring heat, inside seemed frozen in time. Mario was setting up the bar and had bottles of wine, some opened, some uncorked, cork trays full of highball glasses, wine glasses, Pilsner glasses, tumblers, large jars of green olives, stainless steel containers of white onions—the little kind used in gimlets or martinis if you like them that way—slices of lemon peel, lime, candied cherries, all across the bar, so much that the waiter who came by shoved clear a corner so I could sit. Mario brought me a Heineken and a glass dripping with shaved ice. Billie Holliday singing ‘It Had To Be You’, notes hanging around the wallpap...
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