Neil Richter is a part-time tutor, part-time nursing home orderly, part-time baker, part-time writer.  Neil Richter likes good food and good scotch.  He also likes pasta, preferably served in a punch bowl with a comically large spoon.  Do not taunt Neil Richter, his temper is well known.  Neil Richter has two uvulas (the bongy thing in the back of the throat).  He also has an alphabetic knowledge of film trivia.  Neil Richter is not to be trifled with.

Publican (February 20, 2009. Issue 15.)

I was built on the American plains at the dawn of a new century by a man who called himself a Publican, one of many holdovers from his days eking out a living as a Longshoreman in Manchester. He laid the bricks himself, cut the wood, and spent almost every penny of his savings on the fixtures and enough brass to create a bar. The Publican told his wife that man had been drinking for 3,000 years, and that he’d be drinking for 3,000 more.

The first to pay me visits were men in waistcoats who nervously checked their pocketwatches, as if perpetually late for some vague appointment. They drank ale and gin, rarely to excess. For the first few years not many of these men came in. The Publican grew angry and afraid. Oftentimes he would waste away the evenings drinking up his own supply and kicking the brass bar until he’d dance around on his wounded foot. His wife was not much better in terms of disposition. She was a devout woman, steadfast in her temperance and, with it, her hatred of everything I stood for. She wore a dark bonnet and had a pinched, sour face that confronted the world with unrelenting scorn.

So it went: a weak stream of nervous, well-dressed men who reached a snootful after one drink, if that. The Publican grew old before his time, his face lined and gray. His wife lectured him from the good book on a nightly basis. She told him that it was his own fault for going into business with the devil.

Then there came a change. It was gradual at first, but picked up speed with the seasons. Factories began to spring up around me. With them came the whirring of countless machines and long lines of gray men, each with a seemingly unquenchable thirst. They came to love me more than their children or their wives. Their paychecks filled my coffers and the scuff marks of their boots tattooed my floors. The Publican’s cheeks grew rosy and his weight increased to generous size. He thought the love of his patrons belonged to him, and it swelled his heart, for he had never felt such tender feelings from his wife. But he was mistaken, they did not love him, they loved me. They loved my promises. If modest, I occasionally delivered. If grand, I remained impassive and with time they ceased to care about anything.

Then came women with rouged knees, ragged dresses, and the close-cropped hair of school-aged boys. There was dancing, the painful burden of high heels and bodies in constant motion. I became a site of celebration. They celebrated births, marriages, and the lives of those deceased. Babies were conceived in my bathrooms and birthed by midwives across town. This was a happy time, and I felt youthful and strong.

The temperance movement arrived like a gathering storm. It was led by women not unlike the Publican’s wife, wraith-like apparitions with weathered faces and deep-set eyes. They were jealous of me, jealous of the love their husbands and sons lavished on me. They were angered by the lust that their daughters emitted like fine perfume when in my presence. Wooden podiums were erected outside my doors and church-going men as desiccated and pinched as the women lectured the town square on my ‘true’ nature. Signs were pasted on my windows and warnings were cruelly nailed into my sides.

My home was a flat place, surrounded by barren plains beyond the factories and tenements that sprung from the earth as if on their own accord. One cool spring a cyclone touched down and, without anyplace to go, the gray men and women who slandered and demeaned me found themselves cowering within my stout walls. One or two even partook of my spirits during the long night, the wind howling outside in sharp bursts like cruel laughter.

The salad years reached a definitive end. The banks failed and my stools filled up faster than ever before. The floors were covered with more tears than vomit or scuff marks and everyone drank deeply and with great abandon. I listened to their pleading, their steadfast resolve, their shattered dreams, and I eased their pain in the only way I knew how. It wasn’t enough. One evening a man, fully fortified with bourbon, put a pistol under his chin. The stain he left was so deep that a section of the woodwork had be cut out and replaced. A woman brought her children to the Publican’s son, who by now managed the coffers, and begged for him to have mercy and take them in. During this period he was the only man in town whose bankbooks showed any profit, and this type of request was frequent. He shook his head and said no with a sad smile that faded as she shuffled out my front doors. My insides grew shabby and worn out. There was no more love for my services. The brass bar grew faded and discolored from the many hands that grasped it with trepidation and fear. The ceilings, once lily white, now showcased a washed-out beige from thirty years of tobacco smoke.

Even as the landscape around me grew vibrant and colorful once again, my place in the world became increasingly shrunken. The men who once lavished their affection upon me went overseas to fight the Germans and those who stayed behind were too busy to pay me much mind. The Publican’s son gutted me and installed new plumbing and fixtures. He tore out my prized brass and replaced it with heavy oak. The doors, handpainted with Griffins and fleur-de-lis, were coated with a garish red. Crude advertisements blocked off my view of the outside world. There were many times when I thought I wouldn’t make it. The Publican’s son was of a much cooler temperament than his father. He would do away with me before he’d see the rest of his money gone to waste.

Then, like a cool breeze, the profiteers arrived, the businessmen with razor-sharp lapels and cufflinks in gold and ivory. The Publican’s son regained his faith in me, and did his best to accommodate their three-martini lunches, adding a grill from which the smell of hamburgers and pancakes, corned-beef hash and sausages spread outward and brought in more people than ever before. He even hired a band. Men in striped shirts with starched collars played Jazz and once again there was the not-quite unbearable burden of dancing upon my floors. Once again I was loved. Once again, all the dramas of life played out under my roof. More marriages began, and ended. More babies were conceived, although in those days it typically took place in the backseats of cars out front. The casualties of the Great War were celebrated with highball after highball, glasses perpetually raised in salute.

The music changed over time, with electric guitars taking over the bass, and tight-fitting t-shirts replacing the starched collars. Older men and couples were replaced by young people who let their ashes burn my floors, fornicated ceaselessly in my darker recesses, and peppered their speech with slang and words whose meaning I did not know. The Publican’s son, now a man easing past middle age, gave up on mending all of the holes in the walls. He tried to off-set the constant haze of smoke with multicolored candles which he placed in various nooks. He was a businessman through-and-through, the only such man at the local Rotary club who viewed himself as ‘forward thinking’. If anyone could make it through this strange invasion, it was him. He adopted their music and their strange customs. He grew his hair long and began mingling with their women. They embraced him with wayward glances and concealed scorn. Long Friday evenings passed with him manning the bar, strenuous work for a man his age. He was lonely, being unmarried and childless, and it soon became far more than an act, a businessman’s ploy. Closing the front doors in the early morning, the Publican’s son underwent a transformation. His entire frame seemed to shrink. All the cumulative aches and pains of the day seemed to come over him at once. He shuddered, his back curved into a hunch, and his face began to droop. His hair, which nearly got him thrown out of the Rotary Meetings, hung about his face in greasy clumps and looked more sad than anything.

Then, one Saturday night, the Publican’s son was operating the bar at a pace that would kill a man half his age. He talked constantly, no doubt loosened by cans of Strohs and the strange, earthy cigarettes that the young people brought with them. Pulling a young woman in a multi-colored halter to him, he proclaimed that they were his true family, that he had never been happier, and promptly dropped dead of a heart attack. The young woman had the presence of mind to call an ambulance.

Another young woman, one with unshaved armpits and the perfume of those earthy cigarettes, purchased me for a not-unreasonable price, given the damage inflicted upon my interior during the final years of my previous owner’s tenure. She did away with the grill, the band, and most other frivolities which I had become so very proud of. Once again, I offered one comfort and one comfort only.

She was British, the same as the man who originally bore me so long ago, and she cursed constantly.

So began a violent and turbulent period. She pushed my tenure into a new decade, one in which the streets around me became filled with trash, and one couldn’t tell whether the patrons who utilized my services were men or women. Everything became as one. There were barfights. A woman with a feather boa and a prominent Adams-apple slashed another woman across the face with a straightrazor outside my bathroom. she bled profusely, and for a second time my woodwork was replaced because of a deep crimson stain. The police raided me several times, painfully kicking in the front doors and going to work on the patrons with truncheons and cruel words. This was not a cyclone, and I could not protect them. Then there were protests and there was shouting and more fights and more beatings. Still, between these often-violent bookends, there were moments of joy. The woman with unshaven armpits loved her patrons far more than the Publican’s son. She gave them money when they were stooped and tired, cleaned their wounds when they were hurt, and treated them like relatives.

The years kept going by and I wondered if they would ever end. The woman’s tenure ended quickly under mysterious circumstances. Two-toned shirts, red suspenders, and financial talk replaced feather boas and faces that had long ago become familiar. Drinks changed. Clothing changed. Music changed. Soon they were listening to the rage-filled beats of hip-hop and dark alternative recordings composed entirely of electronic feedback and sound loops. My innards were replaced over and over, ad nauseum: wood became linoleum which in turn became a hardened plastic shell containing gel lights of a dark maroon.

But in the end, it will all stay the same. This much I know. Until the last of my bricks are ground to dust, until the last of my fixtures burn out, until the last plank of wood rots to nothing, they will come to me. They will bring their happiness and sorrow and their insatiable desire to feel the bodily warmth of those who, several moments or drinks ago, seemed so different from them. They will cry over unfaithful wives, lost jobs, ungrateful children. They will come to make love or to make violence or to numb themselves from the terror and loneliness and responsibility that lay outside my doors. They will seek something indefinable and I will stand impassive, offering the only solace I can. More often than not, it will be enough, at least for now.