Chirps is a lightless den of misery, upholstered in dark velvet that further drains the light, the floor plan of which resembles the floor plan of a regular bar that’s suffered an earthquake, everything being one step up, two steps down, around a blind corner. It’s like a network of velvet rat tunnels. Also that night there were plenty of (nothing discourages the analogy’s extension) rats. Budweiser in hand, because the costume had to be thorough, I dissolved in the crowd. Walking my laps, or sitting on stray stools, thumbing my phone, I was a thread of the cloth in which Jamie and her friends swaddled themselves. I stood down the bar while they ordered shots. “Washington Apples!” one of the friends shouted. The room was noisy, but she’d shouted like she and the bartender were on the flight deck of a warship. “Talk louder!” he shouted. “Oh, Mr. Sensitive! Sensitive ears!” He produced a martini shaker, “Washington Apples?” The friend looked at Jamie and the other one. “I don’t want that. What do we want?” “Let’s get after it,” Jamie said. She nodded down the bar, where some people were hunched at a glass toilet bowl, sucking from a bouquet of straws. “We want that.” “I can’t give you that,” the bartender said. She looked at him. Then she leaned on the counter. It was a flirty pose, a coquettish pose, her chest perhaps swelling from her top (I couldn’t see), though working in Finance you encounter any number of what those of us who aren’t gesture collectors call gesture collectors, these timid hearts who think banking amounts to convincing people they’re a banker, and so at every opportunity strike some preposterous caricature of banking, like being impatient with waiters or squinting when they smoke, all the while oblivious to the fact they look nothing like the real deal, like yours truly, who’s impatient with waiters because they disgust him, and who squints when he smokes because that’s the look you get when you close in on cash—and fact was, she wasn’t convincing. She’d seen some
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