Nick had been getting edgy all summer.
He is the lunchtime bartender and resident philosopher of the saloon that is owned by his father and a partner.
Some of us call it ”Nick`s father`s place.”
Nick had regrown his beard because he did not like his clean-shaven self. He said his cheeks were too fat.
At first he was going to keep the beard closely trimmed so he would resemble Don Johnson in ”Miami Vice,” but everyone at the bar said, ”Who is Don Johnson?”
The beard was fuller, and Nick`s stomach was fuller, and he was a young man in his early 30s facing the prospect of having his days marked out by the daily specials: Monday is Roast Beef, Tuesday is Smoked Butt, Wednesday is Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato and so on.
It depressed him because he is the greatest Italian philosopher since Thomas Aquinas and the only one who actually lives in Carol Stream.
Everyone could see he was getting edgy because he kept scratching his stomach and staring out the window at the passing parade of funeral processions.
”You got no troubles no more,” Nick would say as the hearse passed by at 11:45 a.m. on the way to the cemetery. ”You don`t got to worry about making a living no more.”
There are lots of funeral processions that pass the tavern.
It was this talk about making a living that was the most common sign of Nick`s edginess.
Nick has had an interesting life in the making-a-living department.
There was the time he sold pools.
”Pools?” Nick said when reminded of his past. ”I sold pools. I hate selling pools. I always get into business at the wrong time. I was selling pools about 10 years ago. So what happened 10 years ago? We had a drought,”
he said.
”The west suburbs were dried up. Nobody had water. Everyone was rationing water. So I`m trying to sell these people on putting a pool in their back yards,” he continued. ”So I told them they were not so much pools as they were reservoirs. You know, a place to store water. Water for bathing and washing dishes, though if they were going to use it for drinking, they shouldn`t put so much chlorine in it.
”But that`s what I mean,” he went on. ”I was selling pools, and there was a water shortage. Or take the time I was selling RVs. I get into the business of selling RVs in late June,” he said.
”Six weeks later–it was 1979–six weeks later the Arabs declare an oil embargo, and you can`t get gas at any price. ”Right away I said to myself,
`This is probably going to affect the RV business.` I can tell you a million stories,” he added.
And then he would look away.
At the passing parade of the recently departed.
At the same faces in the lunchtime bar crowd.
The Chiseler is usually there in his cowboy hat, and Sea Otto is there, spilling over a stool and a half and expounding on arcane points such as the German economy in the Weimar Republic.
The regulars in a neighborhood tavern are always wonderful, but even a consummate observer such as Nick can get tired of observing.
He can want to do.
And so he announced that he was leaving the bartending business.
The announcement did not have an electrifying effect on the regulars.
The Chiseler said that Nick wouldn`t last because he might actually have to work an entire 8- or 10-hour day.
The announcement was greeted with skepticism even by Jerry, who was named Designated Bartender.
Jerry is an amiable soul who landscapes for a living when he is not tending bar and who said that the over-and-under on Nick going into some other field of work was 50 days.
The Chiseler said he had examined the nature of the Designated Bartender and had found flaws.
”Jerry works crossword puzzles, and he cheats at them,” he said.
Jerry was hurt.
”So I use a dictionary,” he said. ”That`s what dictionaries are for, isn`t it?”
”Not for crossword puzzles,” said The Chiseler. ”It`s like playing solitaire and rearranging the cards so you always get black on red.”
”All right,” said Jerry. ”So I cheat at solitaire, too.”
But what was Nick going to do?
There was no oil crisis, so it was pointless to sell RVs.
And there was no scarcity of water, so pools were out.
”Used cars,” said Nick one day. ”I got an in, I`m gonna sell used cars.”
This took some getting used to.
On the face of it, especially the bearded face of it, you would not buy a used car from this man.
On the other hand, there is a genius at work here.
Nick has been driving bombs for years; in that sense, he has never grown up.
From teenagehood on, it has been one rusted-out overpowered barooooom of a bomb after another.
A man with that much faith in bad cars might just be able to preach to the heathen and bring them into the fold or at least the used-car showroom.
”I gotta get out of here,” he said to the lunchtime regulars at the bar. ”Everything in here is the same.”
”He won`t make 50 days,” said one of the regulars.
”Inflation was so bad in Germany that you needed a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread,” said Sea Otto.
”Roast beef with raw onions,” said a voice in the kitchen at the back, indicating the special was ready to be picked up.
Roast beef.
It was Monday.
But Nick was leaving anyway.
