We Don't Need No Stinking Word Count

My dad didn't stay gone for long. After a few months he called my mom, and they worked out an arrangement for him to see me.
"What the devil were you thinking?" Nonny said.
"She's got to know him," Mama said. "I don't want this to be harder for her than it has to be."
There wasn't a schedule. In first grade there was a boy in my class who lived with his mom one week and his dad the next. The only other people we knew who were divorced then were my mom's friend Jean, and her kids saw their dad every weekend.
My dad wasn't really like that. He'd call on a Thursday afternoon to see if I could spend Saturday with him, or he'd call on Saturday morning to see if I could spend Saturday afternoon with him.
Once he took me to the county fair and won me a pink koala bear playing something called The Birthday Game.
It was a big square stall under a tent, with a wooden platform running all around the sides. The platform was painted with colored blocks that had a date of the year on each one. He put a quarter on Labor Day and won the bear.
Every few months he'd come pick me up on Sunday morning and take me to see Grandma Wells. When I was small, he'd let me stand up on the front seat, but when I was in high school he refused to teach me to ride a motorcycle.
Most of the time we'd go to the playground at the park or to a movie. A lot of the time he'd take me to the toy store at the New Mall and buy me a coloring book.
After the mall we'd go to a bar that belonged to his friend Al, called The Brass Rail. Later it belonged to his friend Marvin and was called The Silver Bullet. Last time I was home, it was still there, but the name had changed to The Gaslight. I don't know who owns it now.
He'd settle me on a tall bar stool with my coloring book and some crayons. Al or Marvin or whoever woulld bring me a Coke in a glass with ice, and I'd sit coloring and spinning on the barstool.
There was a mirror behind the bar over a cooler where there were bottles of beer. I guess there was a tap too, there always is in these places. It was mostly dark in there except for the neon Budweiser signs-- this was before you could get Coors east of the Mississippi-- and the green lamps hanging over the pool tables.
It was the middle of the day, but there were always a few guys wearing green John Deere caps and flannel shirts hunched a along the bar, which did not have a brass rail but was padded like Grandma Wells' toilet seat, except it was brown and cracked in some places.
The floors were the same dingy linoleum you see in locals like this everywhere. Cracked in a few spots, usually flecked black or green. The tiles here were green and maroon, which added a touch of class.
The air smelled like smoke even when nobody was smoking. Places like this will continue to smell like an ashtray for twenty years after the smoking bans go into effect.
My dad didn't smoke, but he drank beer and he'd shoot pool, sometimes for money.
"Wells, this your little girl?" said a blonde woman behind the bar. Her black t-shirt was stretched to maximum capacity all around, but she had a nice smile. It was the third or fourth time we'd been in there.
"This is Molly," he said, nodding.
"Well idn't she pretty?" the woman said.
"Molly, this is Al's wife, Betsy," Daddy said.
"Hi," I said to her, climbing up on the bar stool and spreading out my crayons and new coloring book.
Betsy brought me a Coke and advised me what color to make Barbie's dress while my dad started up a game with a fat man from the end of the bar. I saw my dad put twenty dollars on the side of the table, and the fat man did the same.
I always asked my dad to teach me how to shoot pool, because I liked the way the colored balls looked on the green table. He always told me I had to be tall enough to reach over the edge of the table. Then he fled from the IRS before I was tall enough, so I ended up learning to shoot pool on the table in Bruce Hadley's basement in high school.
From time to time I'll go down to the local in my new neighborhood place because it's got the same linoleum floor, but this one is black and white, and the same cooler under the mirror behind the bar. It's Boston, so there's a tap for Guinness back there along side the PBR and Bud Light.
The music on the jukebox is different up here. It's classic rock, a lot of Led Zeppelin and Bob Marley and Van Morrison. I think there's even some Pink Floyd and the Clash in there. At Al's bar (or Marv's or whoever) it was Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson.
When I was in college there was a place like this one down the street where I went with my friends. The linoleum was green and white there, and the jukebox had a lot of the standards, but also had the Talking Heads and the Cure and Radiohead. The taps behind the bar featured mircobrews, but the smoke was just as thick.
I'm not sure which one I like better.
Sometimes I can get a table, and I'll shoot a little for practice. Last time I was in there, a guy from the neighborhood asked me for a game, so I racked them up.
As we were playing, he said to me, "I love this place. You just don't find a bar like this anywhere else," he said.
I wanted to tell him I'd been in places just like this one since I was five years old, but I didn't want to add insult to injury as I sank the eight and took his twenty dollars.

Mama called the next day to check in on me and see if I was all right. "What did you do yesterday?" she said.
I told her the same thing my dad had instructed me to say when I was a kid. "Oh, I went to the park, and then saw a movie."