A dead aunt at the Appomatox courthouse

DATE: Thursday, July 28
PLACES: Hilltop, Harrah's
POISON OF CHOICE: Vodka and club soda
CAST OF CHARACTERS: Cathy, Emma, Billie, Nina, GTO, Hailey, Gavin, Alison


"My fuckin' aunt died today," are the first words I hear out of Billie's mouth when I reach the Old Hilltop.

Billie is my favorite bartender, for several reasons. She hooks up my drinks, and that's never a bad thing, but she's also just a down-to-earth, hilarious character. Vulgar and tough yet heartfelt and fragile. I've spent a lot of hours listening to her personal drama, from fights with her (currently incarcerated) boyfriend to the little daily stuggles of raising three kids in half of a cramped duplex. And plenty, plenty of gossip items involving her extended family. Sisters, cousins, her mom and - all of a sudden - a dead aunt.

Hilltop's Monday and Tuesday evening bartender, Cathy, is grabbing drinks for everyone. She's up here on her night off to hang out and drink, but she's stepped in deftly to fill Billie's shoes while Billie takes a break. It's a valid excuse, a death in the family. And, as she'll point out five times in the next three minutes, we're talking about "a close, tight-knit fuckin' family, where everybody's real close to everybody else." She looks close to tears.

"He's got a tab with me," Billie says as Cathy sets a fully charged 16-ounce plastic-cup vodka and club soda in front of me. I'm one bar stool to the right of Billie - I have two pushed-together tables of friends sitting next to the shuffleboard table. I just came up here to get a quick drink when Billie sprung this on me.

So now I'm sitting down to talk with her for a minute, I think more because it's expected of me than because I want to. I've always been fairly shitty at consoling people. But Billie actually spends more time talking with the amiable crackhead-stoner sitting to her immediate left, and I return to a spot in the middle of the two pushed-together tables of friends.

Emma is to my left, eating a reheated bratwurst from Hilltop's buffet, which consists of one foldout-legs rectangular table with a couple watermelon-sized Tupperware bowls with potato chip and Fritos crumbs, and a small aluminum tin with four brats in it. If you're lucky, you happen upon a Crockpot with a ring of dried-out sloppy joe meat around the inside.

You see, there's a bottlecaps league* on Thursday nights, which equals a special event of sorts at Hilltop and thereby necessitates a food table. But, by the time we get off work and to the bar, the food is hours-old. This did not deter Emma - a minute in the back room microwave and the brat has been revived, oozing grease drops from its pores.

* = I'd never heart of the bar sport of bottlecaps until
I'd been coming to Hilltop for a couple years. It's a
rudimentary form of baseball, played in asphalt lots,
where batters wielding broomsticks attempt to hit
beer bottlecaps whizzed in their direction
by the other team's pitcher.
And, after Thursday night games, the bar's side lot
is littered with hundreds of Bud Light and Busch
caps for the next few days.

--

To my right is a table with three of my female friends from work. To my left, past Emma, is another pair of friends, a married couple. Greg and Hailey Oakes. Greg's dad owns the restaurant I work at, and their personalities are similar. They also speak similarly - Greg's voice sounds just like the impression I do of his dad. I'd developed the voice long before Greg moved back to St. Louis with Hailey en tow.

This was last fall Greg and Hailey moved back, and they almost immediately became an integral part of my social life. Since then they've been converted from the service industry world to the 9-to-5 world, so now I pretty much only see them on the weekends. They've designated this Thursday a special occasion, though, because Greg's college friend Gavin is in town.

I wasn't going to go out tonight, either... And, yes, before you snort at that statement I'll admit "I wasn't going to go out, but look, here I am drinking at the fucking bar again" is a total cliche social-alcoholic catch phrase that only gets more laughable the more you repeat it.

But this time I actually meant it... And, yes, before you snort at that statement, I'll admit "but this time I actually meant it" is also a total cliche social-alcoholic catch phrase that only gets more laughable the more you repeat it.

Greg seemed insistent about me committing to come along and do my part, however trivial, to ensure his guest from out of state had a memorable party experience. Which, I don't have a whole lot of job skills I can list on a resume, but "able to provide a memorable party experience" would go toward the top. In boldface 24-point type.

The memorable experience, for the first hour at least, involves a few shuffleboard games. Emma and Gavin vs. me and Greg. I'm on the jukebox end with Gavin, and we trade some pretty funny banter. Mainly we riff on the idea that the red vs. the blue shuffleboard pucks are an analogy for the Civil War. Blue is the union, red is the confederacy, and only one will emerge victorious. The other will sign papers of surrender at the Appomatox courthouse. This is Gavin's line about the Appomatox courthouse, and I bust up laughing - I haven't heard the word "Appomatox" in the long-ass time. Pre-high school, maybe. The word will get tossed around for the rest of the fucking night.

--

I stuff the jukebox with six bucks, hitting more of the usual favorites. Stones, Petty, CCR, "Under Pressure," very early Santana, Al Green singing "I'm Still in Love With You." By the time the latter plays, I notice Billie is back behind the bar, singing along with all the lyrics. Even the dead last lines of the second verse, which is where I always get fucking stumped.

Three or four minutes later, we hear the bar phone ring. Hilltop is that kind of intimate bar ("intimate" meaning "fucking small") where you can always hear the phone, no matter where you are in the room. And it always kind of makes everyone involuntarily stare over at the bartender to see if the call is for the bar itself or one of the patrons in the bar.

This time, it's for Billie the bartender. I turn back to the shuffleboard game and make a shot or two. Then the music cuts out for a second and Billie gets on the CB-radio mic mounted to the wooden beam that forms the left corner of the bar.

"Everybody, that was my mom on the phone," Bobbi tells the 25 or so customers in the bar, at least half of whom get constant updates on her personal drama just like I do. "She said my aunt is still alive. My fuckin' uncle was trying to play a trick on our family, and I'm gonna kick his ass!"

The bar erupts in applause, I think half because the aunt is alive and half because of Billie's tongue-not-in-cheek threat of physical violence.

--

I rotate myself out of the shuffleboard game and take a seat in the middle of the horseshoe-shaped bar. Just to wait for a drink, at first, but I end up drawn into a conversation with Nina. She's the third bartender at Hilltop, and she too is here on her night off to hang out and drink. Nina is part of the seemingly massive clan bartender Billie and her dead aunt belong to. Her husband - a currently hyper-intoxicated graying man who has lost and/or broken his glasses three times since I got here - is Billie's brother. One of their other siblings, Ree-Ree (her given name is "Reba," as if this family wasn't country enough), owns the bar.

Nina is a terrific bartender - she always keeps up, she makes strong-ass, good-tasting drinks, and when she's light on bar traffic she'll come to your table and ask if you're ready for another drink, while carrying off armloads of empty bottles and rocks glasses. But when Nina's off-duty, she can usually be counted upon to be loaded in a staggering way. Blacking out, unintelligable but unable to shut up, more physically affectionate than you can comfortably handle. And so on.

But tonight she's damn near sober, and I'm pretty drunk already - it's a great conversational combination. We spend 20 minutes or so talking about a DWI she got last fall, on the night of her wedding anniversary. A cop car had followed her on the highway from St. Charles to O'Fallon, where Nina and her husband live. This is about 15 miles of being drunk and seeing the police in the rearview mirror, right on your ass but not throwing on the flashing red and blue lights. With your equally fucked up husband in the passenger seat offering constant paranoid driving advice. I imagine it would suck.

NINA: They booked me, took my fingerprints, all that, and they kept me there for 12 hours.
ME: St. Charles always keeps people for 12 hours. They want everyone to get a quick taste of what prison is like, to scare the shit out of them. They put my friend Charles in the orange suit and everything.
NINA: I didn't get the orange suit. They let me keep my clothes on.
ME: Did they put you in a cell?
NINA: Hell no, they cuffed me to a bench and kept bringing in new people to process. I had to piss for like an hour and a half before they let me up from the bench and walked me to the bathroom.

We also talk about the dead aunt who is actually still alive. It turns out she's 62 and practically on her deathbed, and the prankster uncle is known to be quite a prick.

--

Greg comes up to me before too long. "You comin' to the boat with ua?"

I still haven't decided. I'm in an end-of-month mad scramble to gather my rent, and the boat is going to cost a lot more than sitting in this chair at Hilltop. Besides, Emma's not going to go, and she's my guaranteed ride home at an earlier time. I've already worked all fucking day today, from 10:30 in the morning to like 10:45 at night, with a half-hour off in the middle.

I was offered bribes before I left the shuffleboard table. Greg first reminded me that I made $215 today, a hell of a lot more than I was expecting. I reminded him that the rent money was still a long way from being gathered in full, and he offered to buy all my drinks. Which, with my tolerance, is quite a gamble even at the casino. And especially for Greg, who is usually the type to attempt to have drinks purchased for him.

"Are you guys leaving right now?" I ask him. He says they are. I say hell no, I'm staying in my seat. We're also waiting for another friend, from the table with the trio of female work friends, to get back from driving the other two female work friends home. Greg leaves and Emma comes over to see what I'm going to do. I say probably leave with her and go home.

--

Twenty minutes later, I'm in Greg's wife Hailey's red Honda Civic with them and Gavin, the friend from out of town who is telling us about a drinking episode at South Padre Island, Texas. Essentially, he was with a group of guy friends and was trying to find a girl to hook up with.

"And I found a hot-ass girl sitting by herself at the bar," he tells us. "Just smoking hot, blonde and totally into me. About ten minutes or so into the conversation, things are looking completely promising. And she excuses herself to use the bathroom. A couple of my buddies come over to me, tell me, 'Dude, that chick's a hooker.' I tell 'em to fuck off, you know, I figure they're just giving me shit. They spot the chick coming back from the bathroom and head back from the bar, and I can hear them laughing, the assholes. And I'm talking to this blonde for the next five minutes and, sure enough, she starts wanting to talk in code and negotiate prices."

We're all laughing. "One of the few seeming sure things in my life, and she turned out to be a goddamn hooker." Hailey asks him what did he do next. "I got my ass off the stool and thanked her for her time. I don't have that kind of money."

--

We're at the boat for a couple hours, about a third of which I spend watching Greg and Gavin try their luck at a roulette table. I'm always fascinated watching the roulette dealers, who must calculate the payouts in their heads and pass the corresponding amounts of chips to their proper recipients with split-second precision. It's also fascinating to watch the amount of losing chips that get swept off the table in relation to the much smaller stacks of winning chips.

One man with several massive stacks of cobalt blue dollar chips is placing 60 to 80 bets per round, never appearing to get too far ahead or behind. The casino Muzak is on the "Party Favorites" channel. "Step it Up" by the Stereo MC's is followed directly by Alicia Bridges' "I Love the Nightlife." I'm starting to get bored.

I end up playing slots with Hailey, losing a quick five bucks in five pulls on a dollar slot and then breaking even on the quarters while Hailey loses ten bucks. We're not high-end gamblers, to be sure. Greg and Gavin join back up with us within minutes, each having lost their buy-in money.

The four of us head to the main bar. We play quarter-denomination video poker, and I make more small talk with Gavin. I spit out a preamble I've given lots of people lots of times, which goes something like, "Everyone has a celebrity or two that everyone says they look like, and I want to guess yours." I'm usually right at this game, and this time is no exception. Gavin fucking reminds me of Owen Wilson, without question. He doesn't have the fucked-up nose or sucked-in cheeks, and he has a baby mohawk, but he's otherwise a dead ringer. Gavin says yeah, a lot of people tell him that.

--

Last call comes and goes at the bar, and the female friend from work finally does show up. Her name is Alison, and I've known her since she was 17. She used to have a foolproof fake ID and come out with us all the time, but a serious car accident involving alcohol and Vicodin changed that.

The car Alison was in was nailed by a drunk 19-year-old, and she and her two friends were on Vicodin and had a couple beers in them. Some physical therapy, a six-figure settlement, and the purchase of a house and new Chevy Trailblazer later, Alison is back hanging out with all of us at bars and the casino. Now that she's 21.

I end up riding home in the Trailblazer, and Alison and I have a quality conversation about - among other things - a guy she used to be with. I won't remember a lot of the details later, but good chit-chat, definitely.

I get home, grab my Discman and take a walk around the apartment complex. Come back, smoke a little weed and listen to more headphone music until I pass out around 4 a.m. or so. And sleep for about ten hours.