A hundred years ago, I dated a guy who worked at my favorite dive bar.
I met him on Easter Sunday, in the afternoon. I was with M and F, we'd come from brunch to kill time before a movie. Or maybe to stretch out the day. I don't really remember. We just wanted someplace dark and cheap.
Inside it was empty, save a scatter of professional drinkers who'd been there so long you took them in like the wallpaper, or the pool table, all part of the whole. This place opens at 8:00 in the morning; aside from vending machine snacks sporting last-generation packaging, it never serves food.
The Wire was playing on the television behind the bar. I can talk about The Wire all day, and that's what I did, or would have done, if it wasn't time for the movie before I knew it*. He told me to come back for trivia night and I did. Sometimes it doesn't take much.
He was smart and funny and weird and probably not quite as outstandingly handsome as I remember. And best of all: he was wholly, resoundingly, viscerally damaged. The first night we hung out, he told me, on the way to buy papers, about his terrible adoption, concluding with "so I really can't trust anyone". At 31, I'm yelling 'Oh, honey, NO' at the computer. At 25...you might as well draw in cartoon hearts for my eyes in whatever mental picture you're painting.
Our schedules were entirely incompatible. We'd meet for breakfast dates in the middle of the week, lovely suspended early mornings in fancy restaurants, playing pretend, baby grown-ups in leather booths surrounded by people on real business.
On weekend nights I went over to his place after the bar closed. We'd lie in bed smoking, watching the clouds float silvery across a navy ceiling. I'd think about the ocean at night, trace the outlines of tattoos on his arm while he told me things that made me sad, made me feel bad that inside my head all I saw was a glorious sleeping ocean. We could do this for a very, very long time. He'd talk over the movie playing as background noise, some 80s romantic comedy he'd act offended I hadn't seen, before putting it on purely for pretense. I've seen Lover Boy half a dozen times; I have no idea what that movie's about**.
In the mornings, I'd walk him to the bar, where there'd already be at least one greasy-haired man in a rough cloth army jacket leaning against the wall outside. It felt weird to kiss goodbye in front of them, we'd both laugh and he'd get his keys. I'd walk home, across the Common, picking my way over the loose bricks in City Hall Plaza. I'd go home to get Bay and we'd wander North End side streets, and I wouldn't feel happy, exactly, but like I'd helped someone else be less sad, and maybe that was important.
There were some red flags. I mean, in addition to the four paragraphs of red flags preceding this one. I didn't even notice. It's almost charming, in a nostalgic, Horror Home Movies sort of way. In the end, I learned some important things about myself, about life. I learned that any conversation beginning with the words "Baby, I have a third job I haven't told you about" is not ending any place good.
It really didn't last long. One weird thing happened, then another. We both acted like children. Like I said, it was a hundred years ago - we practically were. It was over by the summer, and I never saw him again.
The job I started a few months later involved a new commute, one that required me to walk by that bar. (Of course, it wasn't a requirement, just the simplest way to get from the T to the office.) It was three months before I took the direct route in the morning, six months before I'd walk by at night. I'd duck my head, scurry by the green door, try to steal a peek through the window. It was almost a full year before I worked up the courage to go inside. Of course, once I finally did, he wasn't there.
It's been a long time. I still go back to that bar when I'm in town, it's still one of my favorites. The same woman owns it, and she's always behind the bar. Every time I'm there, at least a little part of me wants to ask 'whatever happened to...' I'll never ask, though. He's vanished, essentially, the kind of person you can't even find on the internet. Who's nowhere on the internet? It doesn't seem like a great sign. I've made up my own ending to that story, and I hope it's close enough to the truth.
I don't have a lot of regrets, but I do think about that green door sometimes. The one I skittered past in the evenings. I think about what would have happened if I'd opened the door earlier, if he'd still been there. I've had the conversation in my head a hundred times, a hundred different ways, but the core is still the same. Nothing changes - there was nothing to fix, and no way to fix it, it was just the end. But we both say 'I'm sorry' and we hug. Then we laugh about something, and he makes fun of me and I swat at his arm, and then we're both quiet for a second, and then we smile. And then I say 'I have to go', and I go. And it's better than it is now, and it's better than the other way it ended.
Q: Wherever you are, I hope it's wonderful.
Everyone else: Open those green doors.
*I remember now, it was before the movie. We saw 'No Country for Old Men'.
**Patrick Dempsey's a teenage gigilo, right? I'm pretty sure that's what it's about.
