Writers in a Bar

We fled the heat last Wednesday.

It was the last day we had free before Bernie was to return to work, and the unseasonal heat (all the weather has been unseasonal this year, hasn't it?) and the damned gnats (have I ever mentioned that I hate gnats?) drove us to the blissful Bay.

There the fog was rising (that's fog in back of the boat, not clouds) and the air was cool and sweet. San Francisco is a wonderful place to escape to when the Valley weather is crummy.

We sat at the bar in wonderful Sinbad's and ate the usual exquisite calamari tempura over glasses of wine; mine, a pinot grigio (big surprise there) and his a pinot noir. The bartender, whom we had never met before, was named Mike, and he was smooth and strange, like a good whiskey with a squirt of lime and a hint of Louisiana Hot Sauce. He was both mellow and embittered; efficient but somehow lackadaisical; most polite yet more than willing to parry verbally in a low and non-carrying voice.

A "Writer" came into the bar, and suddenly, the atmosphere galvanized into some strange fellowship. The writer's name was "Dan," and after he casually dropped the information that he just happened to meet someone doing a film who needed a writer and thus, in his retirement, was working in films, it somehow seemed to require that the weary office manager on her third gin-and-tonic, the bartender, and Bernie and I ought to speak up.

The bartender confessed that he was into studying world religions, and had a book to prove it. The office manager demanded to see it, and read aloud a paragraph after opening the book at random. The book was entitled, "The Tao of Pooh."

"Sorry, Mike," she said, "this is shit."

I was on my second glass of wine by then, and I completely forget what Dan the Writer said that prodded me to suggest to the bar at large that Dan had written the shitful book under a pseudonym.

Thereafter, Dan the Writer ignored us as we examined the Tao of Pooh (an interpretation according to a Reader of Milne) critically and irreverently -- and turned his creative effort to hitting on a woman who dropped by Sinbad's for a quick drink. She was clearly thrilled to have a writer hitting on her.

An interesting feeling. I sat there, knowing I've written a lot of stuff, knowing quite well that I am a writer, but I had no desire to broadcast it. The poor fellow was just a bit pathetic once you waded past his ego. He obviously puffs about telling all and sundry he's a writer. Yet he is no more well known around the world than any Filthy Piker who writes for the Press.

It wasn't that he was a writer. It was that he was putting on a big, hokey mask with a neon sign above it that said, "I am a Writer!"

Well, yes, I intended to poke him with a stick by suggesting he'd written a shitty book under a nom de plume. I know what pisses off writers.

Ah, but the Office Manager on Gin -- now there I let myself down. She was genuinely funny, and bold, and inventive, and prodded Mike the Bartender into arguments about Winne the Pooh and Lao Tse. I should have stayed for one more drink and invited her to write for the Press.