Cheers

Bernie Wolski snapped the broom handle into the holder that hung just inside the tiny closet with the other cleaning supplies. No need to get out the bucket and mop. This was his last sweeping. The last time he’d switch off the lights. The last time he’d set the lock on the front door and pull it closed behind him. 

Bernie had hoped someone would have come by to share this time with him, maybe say a few parting words in recognition of the forty years he’d spent in this hundred-year-old tavern drawing down tap beer and pouring shots, mixing brandy old fashioneds and whiskey sours, hot toddies in winter, strawberry daiquiris in summer. He ran his hand over the solid oak bar that he prided himself in keeping polished and preserved, then gave the chrome and vinyl bar stool a spin. His son, Jeremy, would be in to take pictures of the stools, the old cast-iron cash register they hadn’t used in two decades, the hand-hewn back bar with its many shelves and mirrors, the pool tables, pressed tin ceiling, and whatever else he thought he could salvage and sell. Might even find someone to pull up the hardwood from the floors. 

For the last three years, Jeremy had worked to sell the bar with its apartment upstairs and dancehall in back to some enterprising young couple who’d do the restoration Bernie never had time nor money to do, make it into a nice little bed and breakfast, or even a theater like the old stage coach inn in Tisch Mills. But Jeremy’s efforts failed to bring in any buyers. The foundation was bad, the roof needed total replacement, and to bring the kitchen alone up to code would be eighty grand. There were no offers and Bernie’s nest egg cracked. He offered to give the place to Jeremy, though maybe he could find some historic preservation money somewhere, but Jeremy confessed that he had no good childhood memories there. The lot was worth more than the building and Bernie might get some money for it. Money Bernie needed. 

The door opened with Carl riding in on the cold January wind. Dressed in a parka Bernie gave him, wool hat, scarf, and mittens, Carl walked a mile and a half from his house because he lost his license long ago, and his wife refused to drive him.

“Happy New Millenium,” Carl called, stomping the snow off his boots. “Guess the computers didn’t end the world after all.”

“Carl, what the hell are you doing walking in that cold?”

“Nah, nah, Bernie. You know I’m used to it. Walking keeps the body warm. I don’t get cold.”

“Not until you slip and break a leg and that bottle in your pocket runs out, and instead of keeping you warm, what you drank brings the blood to the surface and you freeze quicker. But I told you that before.” Bernie wondered if Carl had come to help clean up, but then saw he was looking around for the regular crew and probably didn’t remember the party was the night before even though he was there that afternoon and Bernie had reminded him. 

“I’m closed up, you know.” Bernie’s legs were bothering him. He wanted to sit, but didn’t want Carl hanging around so busied himself walking around the room adjusting this and that, which didn’t need adjusting. Carl pulled off his mittens and hat.

“Well, what I got to do now anyway? I can help ya clean up.”

Bernie knew what Carl was after and pulled a bottle out of the box that Jeremy was going to take down to the Conservation Club for its next shindig and handed it to Carl. 

“Happy New Year,” he put the bottle on the table next to Carl’s mittens. “Go to it, but not here.” Bernie thought how a minute ago he wanted company to reminisce, but Carl was not the company he wanted. He looked up at the vintage Hamm’s Beer sign with its north woods picture lit up and remembered he had wanted to take it home, so got a chair and reached up to get it. 

“What ya going to do now, Bernie?” Carl asked, ignoring the hint to leave, pulling a chair out from the table, and cracking open the brandy. Bernie didn’t answer. He grabbed a glass from the shelf and set it in front of Carl, then opened a drawer on the bar that he hadn’t gone through. It was filled with cardboard coasters. He flipped through them. Kingsbury, Schlitz, Schaefer, the brands that had been replaced by Coors and Bud Light. On the back were names, dates, and events. Dang, he thought, he needed to look through these things. Maybe people would want them. 

“Patty Thiel and Jimmy Becker, engaged, 9-15-1963.”

“Tim Poppy, baby boy, 4-1-1970. April Fool.”

 “Jenny Grothman, off to Miami, 9-12-1994”

“Sgt. John Clark, back alive, 9-22-1968”

“Father John, retired, 10-10-1967.” 

“Dr. Jackie Meyer, graduated, 5-20-1975.” 

“Tim Poppy, fifth and final baby boy/vasectomy, 6-29-1985.” 

“John Leaman, celebration of life, RIP 3-22-1996”

“Mary Lee Cramer, divorced, 8-10-1999.” 

Bernie flipped through a stack. Yep, there it was: “Mary Lee Bowls and Tom Cramer, married, 10-10-1990.”

“Bud Zelinski, fuck the draft, 12-1-1969.” 

Bernie pulled a liquor box from the stack Jeremy brought up from the cellar and tossed the coasters in. It was nearly full. Now he had his first retirement project – looking up these folks and reuniting them with their coasters. He opened up another drawer and pulled out an old phone book tossing it on top of the coasters. Bernie figured he’d find most of them there. 

The tap handles must be somewhere, Bernie thought. Getting on his knees, he dug through cupboards pulling out boxes he didn’t know he had and didn’t care to look through, then found the handles. He’d tell Jeremy he could keep whatever he made selling this stuff. He pulled out the Hamm’s with the bear on it and the one with the Kingsbury crown.

“Aren’t ya gonna take that dollar ya got framed up over there?” Bernie had forgotten Carl was still there. He turned and looked at the wall above the register where his wife, Ruth, had hung the first dollar they made when they bought the place in 1960. He said then he’d run it into the next millennium, and he damned well did. He was 30 then, Ruth 28. They already had their two kids who were school age. He and Ruth had always joked about buying the place since they spent so much time there. It just seemed the natural thing to do when it came up for sale at the same time Ruth’s unmarried aunt died of breast cancer and left her enough for a down payment. They moved into the apartment upstairs, which Ruth quickly made into a home. Bernie kept working days with Ruth opening up after school, putting the kids on a bar stool in front of the TV or letting them mess around on the bowling game or pool table until Bernie got home. Then she’d get supper and put the kids to bed, coming back at ten to closing at midnight or one, depending on how busy it was. They did that for seven years and whenever they got behind in paying the bills. Bernie was well liked, so he could always pick up some work when he needed to.

There were a few rules he emphasized with Ruth; never take a drink that hasn’t been bought for you and never buy a round until four were bought from you. Also, you don’t shake bar dice because it’s betting against the house and later the same applied to the electronic gambling machines. Play the radio, let the customers plug the jukebox. 

Ruth had one rule for him: don’t screw the customers. It was OK to flirt with them and make them feel pretty, but when they got drunk enough to grab your ass and try to get you into the broom closet, you call in a single wing-man to take her off your hands. 

Bernie never once broke Ruth’s rule, even though he had had many opportunities, especially when he was under forty with a six pack, not a beer barrel, around his middle. 

Ruth, however, was another story. By the time Bernie realized how much of the hard liquor inventory she was sucking up on the sly, she was getting her nutrition from the bottle, which caused multiple trips to the doctor who finally called him and said his wife’s real problem was alcohol. Three weeks of in-patient treatment ate up the money for the renovations they were planning that would bring the kitchen up to code so they could serve Friday fish fry and Sunday chicken dinner. Ruthie stayed sober for a year. They talked about getting rid of the bar, but Bernie was 55 by then with no training in anything but pouring drinks and listening to bullshit. Then there was the recession on top of a couple factories closing, so work was hard to get. The bar business was up with guys laid off and collecting unemployment.

Ruth died at 58 of breast cancer, like her aunt. Bernie felt relief and guilt.

“Let me get ya another box,” Carl stood up from the table where his bottle sat, walked unsteadily across the room, and set another box on the counter. “There ya go. Guess I forgot the party was last night. Closing up after all these years. You’ll be missed, Bernie. I’ll miss ya.” 

Bernie tried to remember when Carl became a regular. Anyone would call him as being older than Bernie, but Bernie knew he wasn’t. Carl had worked for the county highway department. Repairing roads, grading the shoulder, mowing ditches, plowing snow. He started at six a.m. in the summer so would come in around three in the afternoon. Winter hours depended on the weather, but he was pretty much on his bar stool every day and all-day Sunday pretending to watch sports. Two DWI charges and a tipped over snow plow cost Carl his job in spite of union representation. Carl’s wife would join him on the weekend, but only for a few hours and then drive herself home after trying to pull him away. Bernie thought how he hadn’t seen her for years.

Bernie didn’t want to venture into conversation with Carl. He wanted Carl to leave, but the weather was getting worse, and Carl was getting drunk, so Bernie figured he would be stuck with giving Carl a ride home so his freezing to death wouldn’t be on his conscience, even though Bernie no longer had that business liability. 

“Carl, how’s Nancy? Haven’t seen her for years.” 

“Ack, Bernie. Your memory goin’? She moved out four years ago. Ya remember, don’t ya? I told ya about her not paying taxes on the house no more. Won’t divorce me neither cuz I could get part of her teacher pension. Fuckers can take the house, all I care.”

Bernie carefully set the Hamm’s sign and framed dollar in the box, then continued to pull out drawers checking for any other keepsakes. 

“So, who all came last night?” Carl asked, pulling himself up on the bar stool. “Tom? Pete and Jean? Your kids?”

“Aww, just a handful of people. Probably not the best thing to have on New Year’s Eve.”

“But you was saying you’d run it to the next millennium and that you did. Rang in the new year, did ya?”

“Not exactly. Petered out about eleven o’clock. Jeremy and Emma hung around ‘til midnight.”

“Yeah, that Jeremy, he’s a good guy. You raised a good kid there, Bern.” 

Bernie pulled out another drawer and put it on top of the bar. It was filled with photos. 

“Now look at that,” Carl pulled a faded five by seven out and held it close to his face, squinting to recognize the group in the picture. “There’s Ruthie,” he pointed with his bony finger. “Don’t know the rest.” He handed it to Bernie who immediately recognized the pool league he sponsored for nearly 20 years. The date on the back was 1976. He ran through the names in his head. Remembered them all, but couldn’t recall the last time any of them had stopped in. A couple of the guys moved up and out of the area, but most of them were still around. He’d see them coming out of The Tap Dance down the road on Friday night after he’d locked up early. It was a new place, with a full menu of bar food and Friday fish fry. You needed food these days. Frozen pizza, chips, and candy bars just didn’t cut it. 

There was Ruth in the middle of the guys, smiling and pretty. Bernie looked closer. Whose arm was that around her waist, grabbing just below her breast, nearly grabbing her breast? The guy was looking down at her, not at the camera. Jimmy Whitman. Ruth and Jimmy used to banter a lot, but Jimmy sniffed around all the women. Bernie remembered Jimmy’s wife came in one afternoon screaming and hollering about the whores around the place and how she was going to divorce Jimmy because of it. 

“Some people believe in fidelity in marriage,” she hissed at Bernie. “I know that may not be the deal with you and Ruth, but it was the deal with me and Jimmy.” Bernie thought she was just blowing off steam. Ruth agreed when he told her about it. Looking at that picture, though, Bernie wondered if Ruth broke her own rule. Was something going on and none of those guys told him? 

Bernie pulled more photos out and went through them frantically setting those with Ruth in them aside. Then he looked closely at each. Were those just friendly toasts and pal hugs or had he been a fool? He always thought she was too old for serious playing around. Never showed him much interest, so he figured she was past that stage in life. She flirted with the guys, but, like she said when she made the rule, make the customers feel good about themselves. Was that all it was? Most of the guys were younger than her. What’d they want with an older married woman? Jimmy? Well, he wasn’t that young. Bernie knew men to be men and more when they got to drinking. 

Well, Ruth’s dead and I’m old and no one is going to speak ill of the dead or break an old man’s heart with the truth, Bernie thought. He’d have to forgive her that like he forgave the drinking and gambling their profits. If she had been sneaking around, he hoped the kids hadn’t known. Hoped she’d kept it from them. Hoped nobody in town threw it in their faces. But then he’d thought that the kids hadn’t known about her drinking, but when they got older, he found out they’d covered up for her. Hid the bottles she’d left out. Washed up the glasses and put them back in the bar. Maybe that’s why Jeremy has bad memories of the place. He rarely came in and never with the kids, not even for the closing party.

Bernie dumped the photos on top of the coasters. Maybe he’d match them up. He moved to toss those of Ruth in the garbage, but held himself back. Have those guys been laughing behind his back all these years? Keeping their mouths shut like he kept his shut whenever one of his married regulars snuck out a minute after the girl he’d been buying drinks for all night walked out the door. Bartenders know all and tell nothing. 

“Carl,” Bernie pulled a glass off the shelf and filled it half full of ice. “Give me that bottle of yours.” Carl shuffled over to the table, brought the brandy bottle to the bar, and filled Bernie’s glass before his own. Bernie gave his head a good shake, trying to clear out the crazy thoughts of Ruth. Past is passed. He and Jeremy had agreed that when he locked the door tonight, he wouldn’t be back. Jeremy had encouraged him to close long ago. Jeremy’s wife, Emma, called it putting “closure” on that part of his life. She told Bernie there were things to look forward to. A new millennium. A good time to start something new. Maybe even with new people. 

Carl held up his glass, then broke into a drunken song. “Should old acquaintances be forgot and never brought to mind.” He clinked his glass on Bernie’s. “We’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.”