I was a young man unused to visiting bars, but I was curious. I visited a tavern touted by my fellow art school students and sat at the bar to observe the social interplay. As I looked around the crowded pub, a woman took the stool next to me, and asked me, “Are you looking for me?” I was a shy man, shocked and flustered by the woman’s beauty and boldness. I managed to stutter, “No: I’m waiting on someone.” I fled soon after. Over the years, I developed a scenario in which I was the romantic lead and hero that explained why the woman had asked that question of me.
Years later, I was shooting pool in a bar. Though less shy, I was still reserved with strangers. I was playing 8-ball against a man, and missed a shot. The man, whose upper body was thickly muscled and whose arms were heavily tattooed, paused before he took his shot. “No one messes with you here, do they?” My answer was delivered in what I believed to be a quiet, yet forceful manner: “No.” For many years I assumed that the man’s inquiry was about my status in the bar, the respect that my presence demanded.
In a conversation with a friend about memory and memories, we discovered that we had both listened to a NPR program on the subject. A study had found that our memories are altered by ensuing experience. I used to “triangulate” my memory of childhood events with my brother and sister. Each would accept the basic circumstances of the memory, then offer slight corrections of the details. But, while I did not have the benefit of having another person at the two events I noted above, it is possible that I may have misread both situations.
The bar that I frequented in downtown St. Louis was close to a transient hotel that catered to ex-convicts, parolees and those unwelcome in most neighborhoods. The owner of the bar once told me the residents of the Mark Twain Hotel — “the Twainers” — kept him in business when he first opened, so they were always welcome. “Everyone who behaves is welcome.” I never saw anyone mistreated, though I backed the owner on a couple of occasions when he had to break out the baseball bat to discourage misbehavior. I was sitting at the bar one evening when the man on the stool next to me raised his head from his drink and said, “No one cares. They don’t care who you are, or what you did. They don’t care.” It took me some years to connect the comments of the man at the pool table to what the man at the bar said.
In his short story “Araby,” James Joyce wrote about a young man’s aching love for a neighbor girl. In an effort to incur favor with her, he tries to attend a bazaar that has come to town, where he will buy his love a trinket. Life trips up his plans and he realizes that he is “a creature driven and derided by vanity.” My young and blushing ego had blinded me to the possibility that the woman who asked if I was looking for her was looking for a contract with me. And a muscular hubris convinced me that the pool player was acknowledging my status in the bar, when it is likely that he was commenting on the peaceful nature of the establishment. I came to better understand those events, not in “anguish and anger,” but by viewing them through a different lens.