The New Sense

Friday, March 15, 2002

This would have been an average day. I showed up for work right on time, but Olga was already cranky. She was complaining to Terry about the bad job Lisa had done the night before. Honestly! When you do a Thursday night and it's packed and Dave only does a half-assed job of helping in the kitchen it's going to take you till 5am before you get out of here. You're so tired by the end you're bound to forget the odd detail.
But Olga loves details. She goes nuts when the matchbook holder hasn't been refilled. She went on about it all day. Didn't even mention Dave. No wonder she's been married three times. Her staff is her family now, so she just has to bug them instead of her husband and kids.
At the same time, you have to admire her. 57 years old, she decides to come to Montreal, she doesn't even speak French, and spends her whole settlement on buying a run-down Portuguese restaurant and converting it into a bar, which she's never done in her life. I don't know if she had that lumberjack-punk look in Toronto, but it sure makes her the hippest grandmother on the Plateau here. She's not beautiful (half a 20 of vodka a day and three packs of smokes for god-knows-how-long) but she's attractive. That bluebird tattoo on her ankle says it all: she's free. She does what she likes. And one of the things she likes is to complain.

I decided to put on some Beatles. That's what I do when she starts bugging me — put on some good music. That's one thing she never complains about. So Abbey Road started and I went about my morning business: grating the cheese, taking the deliveries, serving coffee to the reporter who sits by the window, serving beer to poor old Dan and poor weird Phil. They're co-dependent bar hounds. They need somewhere to go and they need someone to talk to with half a brain and not a bit of…judgmentalism. That's not a word. Should be. That's what happens when you grow up an anglo in Montreal — you're never one hundred percent sure of your vocabulary. Is that a real English word, or a French 'false friend'? C'est pas évident — it's not obvious!

The album was getting towards that great finale of one song leading into another. 'The Weight' starts. The door opens and in walks this guy. He's cute — early twenties, black, bed-head hair, kind of tired-looking. He's not wearing enough clothes for the weather though. We had that one day of fuck-it's-warm early spring last week, but now it's cold and we know we're in for a dumping of snow pretty soon.
He sits down at the bar, smiling. Two chairs down from Olga. She smiles at him and raises her glass (first one — 11am — not bad). He says, "Funny song!" and kind of laughs to himself. Some kind of personal in-joke, I guess. He's definitely cute. I don't know — there are plenty of guys like him around the Plateau, but not too many of them laugh a lot, and most of them have those stupid pinch beards or white-guy dreads now. This guy seemed normal. I ask him if I can get him anything, a coffee? and he says he never drinks coffee. No caffeine, no nicotine, no stimulants. Olga raises her glass again and takes a puff of her smoke. Now I'm starting to think he's pretentious. Which twenty year-old guy doesn't smoke or drink coffee? I give him a menu and go about my business. He's talking to Olga. I come back. He orders a Guinness. I ask him how come he's fine with alcohol in the morning if he's so clean-living. He says something like, "Oh, I'm not clean-living at all! I just don't need any stimulants. Alcohol, however, is just what the doctor ordered right now."
I kind of felt like finding out a bit more about him, but I had stuff to do, and with old eagle-eye at the bar, I couldn't chat much. I was waiting for Freddie Fruitcake to come in and for them to go off on their rounds, but they guy left after his Guinness. I never even saw him leave. Sure enough, Olga calls me over and whispers to me, "I think he likes you!" She was fishing, this whole time. She's such a busy-body. As I said, we're her family now. I do the usual, "Oh, come on!" but she insists. Then Freddie walks in and she forgets all about me. Another co-dependent. They're good people though.
The rest of the day was pretty average. Come to think of it, it was a very average day, in the true sense of the word. But there was something about that guy. He was a statistical blip. Somehow out-of-the-ordinary, and I don't know why.
Went to the Wellington after my shift with Polly and Molly. Drank like a bloody fish. Never seen a fish puke like I did though.

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posted by Sara