drinks ..

by peterbowes on June 7, 2023

Bob has been looking after the public bar for over twenty years, thick and thin, good cops and bad cops, drunks and dickheads, ladies on the game and game ladies, boys like girls and girls like men, and in the midst of this overwhelming throng of misfits sits an 82 year old woman and her 79 year old husband, she’s playing Keno and he’s watching the heavyweight World Championship of Strong Men on a wall-mounted TV .. wondering what they eat to grow so big, so massive, so lumberingly bear-like. So incredibly strong.

Game 83 – We win $25.00

One of the girls working the room has piled her tightly coiled hair so high upon her head she appears to be almost toppling over as she bends to clear a nearby table, then, almost like she knows we are looking at her, she turns and smiles at us. This woman but child seeing two old folk drinking chardonnay in an empty room watching cable TV, playing Keno and wishing Bob would shut the street side doors to block the cold wind that blows hard through the room from its end to end.

Game 84 – We win $10.00

The old man walks up to the bar and re-orders his and his wife’s drinks, noticing not for the first time that the chilled beer taps and bottled spirits mounted on the mirrored shelves behind the bar offer a limitless array of choices.

‘What will it be it be?’ asks Bob, his mind half on the job, being a barman.

The old man and his wife have been coming to this hotel for months and they never vary in their choice of drinks – being two regular chardonnays – every time. Clockwork.

‘What do you reckon,’ the old lad says to Bob, ‘ that you put a bottle up there on the rack labelled The Usual, how would that go?’

Bob grins, then laughs, puts his hands on the bar and laughs some more.

Thick and thin has Bob seen, but today is a better day.

‘Two regular Chards, is it then?’ he asks, grin almost suppressed.

The old boy’s wife smiles as he walks back to his wife and their table, drinks in his hands, ‘Guess what,’ she says without looking up, ‘we’ve just won fifteen dollars.’