For April 12th, 2004
Selena
The checklist's item number one was, to Selena, perhaps its most intriguing. To open and close a bar, eh? Life, with its endless challenges, hardly threw one of this caliber her way; could it be ignored? No, nay, never. It would either be a modern adventure sopping with potential for myriad encounters with strangeness most convenience-obsessed Americans preferred to avoid, or it would be a day mired in torrential boredom to be escaped only when last call had rung its final bell and the front door to her dive of choice was safely locked against her return.
Selena, with sleep still in her eyes, stumbled into a nameless saloon she'd found in the yellow pages under "Parlours of Casual Entropy and Selective Mayhem." It was the only listing. An address in red ink and an arrow on a map pointed to where she could, more or less, expect to find the place. When she got there, a seven-foot-tall neon martini glass (with an olive that had burned out decades ago) beckoned her into the seedy interior. When her eyes finally adjusted to the dim light within, they were rewarded only with faux wood paneling, a tiny stage half-supported by ancient milk crates, and a bar that threatened the careless with splinters. A booth upholstered with the same sparkly red material found adorning the seats of Tilt-A-Whirls in carnivals across the country seemed her best option for the stakeout.
Taking exception to the bar's poor pretzel selection, Selena wondered if it would be out of bounds to order a chilidog from the greasy kiosk down the street, as long as she didn't technically leave the confines of her selected boozebin. There was nothing in the rules that said anything about holding a growling tummy at bay by the power of liquor, alone. This was an endurance contest, sure, but the goal was to ultimately make it to the finish line. Not that Selena much cared for rules. She cared even less for the lusty glances thrown her way by some of the dive bar's less sentient (and even less hygienic) pre-noontime customers. 10 AM, and already the whiskey dogs were beginning to howl.
Selena was ready, and greeted the very first "hey, baby!" with a disarming smile and a quick boot to the unfortunate (and mostly toothless) barfly's groin. For the next hour, she was able to enjoy her own uninterrupted company with the newest Tom Robbins book, though her growing hunger still demanded satisfaction and after the last approach was so...reproached, she'd found no volunteers eager enough to retrieve meals from the aforementioned kiosk. The bartendress, a DT-ridden sourpuss who looked approximately early-hundredish in age, had cheered Selena's handling of the unwelcome visitor (since departed into later morning's hubbub on the sidewalk outside), but she ignored any questions beyond the price of hard liquor in Portland.
Bellamy, the famous pinball machine repairman, got there around noon to switch out one of the faulty flippers on the Funhouse game. Selena knew him vaguely from a drunken night at the last Fatal Beauty party -- he was well-known as a fellow sushi connoisseur, and Selena felt that she could trust him to her gastric salvation without giving the full game of her day's goal away...
Bellamy arched a knowing eyebrow and said, "you're doing the Modern Drunkard's checklist, aren't you?" When Selena nodded, he continued, "I did that last week. But you could've definitely picked a better bar. I know a place where they've got monkeys in tutus that serve you cocktails. Wanna go there?"
So they did.
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