Nobody Bats a Thousand Read Free Page B

tab.”
    “Well, uh, Junior don’t run this bar.”
    They looked at each other and again starting rummaging through their pockets. The entire time Randy was staring at the kid standing next to him, checking out the kid’s light tinge of eye make-up, his nose ring, and the several earrings visible as he brushed back his hair. As soon as they had piled five crumbled singles on the bar, I scooped up the bills.  “That’ll do. I’ll give you band prices.” As I turned to the register I heard Randy speak to the kid next to him.
    “You shore got purty hair.” Randy continued to stare.
    Refusing to respond or even look at Randy, the kid picked up his bottle and escaped with his mates into the banquet room.
    “Geez. ” Randy shook his head. “If you’re gonna walk around looking like that you should at least have a sense of humor about it.”
    “Good point.”
    Although from behind the bar I couldn’t see much of the dining room, I could tell the dinner crowd was building by the waitress traffic into the bar. A few couples, the type of people you respond to but later don’t remember, came into the bar for a single cocktail either before or after dinner. Randy split but Fatboy was still hanging in there, as was Jane, the vamp sucking down straight vodka over ice bought by the three salesmen still grouped around her; all three fueled up but trying to act sober and discreet as they drooled over her body deluxe.
    The sound check in the banquet room had been in progress for awhile before I noticed, because the noise wasn’t really bad with the room’s doors shut, j ust the bass rumbling the walls a bit, nothing Old Blue Eye’s, Garth, or Willie or Wayland couldn’t cover up with a little help from the volume control of the jukebox. It was then I became a little relieved and then a little annoyed. I figured we might now avoid the huge disaster I’d envisioned since I’d first heard of Little Al’s entrepreneurial scheme. But if so, then Little Al might get the notion to do this type of thing all the time, and the thought of having to constantly deal with a bunch of wet-nosed, weird, Generation X and Why’ers with two bucks in their pockets just did not appeal to me.
    Little Al, dressed in a dark purple corduroy suit, sort of a hybrid game show host/low-class pimp look, came in with a tall, thick-necked, muscle-head who looked like he’d been lifting weights since the moment he left the womb.
    Little Al went straight into the banquet room, and the muscle-head made a left turn and came up to me.
    “JR said you had a stamp I could use to stamp hands.”
    “The last time I saw that thing was pro bably sometime in the late 90’s. ” I started digging through the junk drawer—broken sunglasses, a deck of cards, several chipped dice—I found a magic marker that still had some juice in it.
    “Here, just make an X on their right hand, and I’ll know you checked them out.”
    He pantomimed the action on himself.
    “No, your other right hand,” I told him, though it really didn’t matter as I was not about to let this moron attempt to protect our liquor license. I planned to ID everyone after he did anyway.
    At about eight-thirty Lee came in to help. He was our backup fill-in who had a full-time day job selling plumbing supplies, so whenever he got the chance to tend bar he came in spif fed up, reeking of cologne , excited and full of energy, vigor and wit, as if he were reporting not to a job but to an adventure, like the barman on the Love Boat . We weren’t busy, so I saw his appearance as a chance to take a break.
    I went out and walked around the parking lot smoking a cigarette. There were small groups of kids here and there, something you wouldn’t normally see around our building, dressed in their best or worst, depending on your point of view. There were a lot of strange haircuts and hair colors, enough pierced body parts that one might have thought some maniac had randomly attacked the crowd with a