Underwater Heartbeat

Underwater Heartbeat - Saturday Looks Good to Me(listen in new tab)

You could pass it on the street if you weren’t looking for it.

The neon sign above V. I. Lenin’s hasn’t been lit since the late 90’s, when the tubes’ noble gasses gave up their spirits, flickered and darkened. These days the silhouette of the bar’s namesake, traced abstractly in dead glass, keeps a dim vigil over the regulars and intrepid new comers.

Few except the bar’s owners, two failed band mates who took up the cause when the first owner disappeared, remember when opening the faded and scuffed, peeling red metal doors meant passing under the sign’s stern glow.

Tonight the doors swing open. A cluster of girls come out for a smoke. The door drags shut behind them, dampening the sounds brazen enough to escape into the night. The loose corners of hanging gig posters flutter in the spring night’s lazy wind.

Two 30-something men, bearing the clothes and meager wages of their self-absorbed, unending liberal education arrive. One pulls open the door, while the other makes quick eye contact with a skinny blonde as she casually lights her cigarette. He follows his friend inside. The blonde watches them enter as she gently waves her match in the wind to extinguish it.

Inside the music is cranked up and loudly echoes down the short hallway that leads from the door. The walls there are lined with gig posters of various currency and importance.

The two men walk past the folded-up table where cover is usually collected and passed the dormant empty coat check. They pass a few people who came into the hall so they can hear their cell phones, straining ears against the noise.

As the two enter into the main part of V.I.’s, they crane their necks looking for friends, their faces etched in a vain look of confident frequency. They are regulars - capital R regulars. With practiced ambivalent looks, they peer through the crowd milling back and forth from the bar to tables or the slowly filling dance floor. They mark paths through the complex valleys of necks and shoulders.

One looks with disdain at his watch. It’s still relatively early, only 10:00pm. Friday night is still getting into its swing. The other waves to someone off at the tables where a large group sits crammed in on the raised floor along the far left wall. He taps his buddy on the shoulder and heads in that direction. The other follows, and in his inattentiveness, shoulder-checks K.

K, pint in each hand, does his best to dodge, executing a 180 degree turn to avoid spilling. It ends up being more of a 140. He stops short of colliding with a heavy set man in a varsity football jacket.

G.T. leans against the rail that hems in the dance floor, watching K’s evasive maneuvers. He laughs to himself as K mouths a silent curse when the football player turns to tell him to “watch it”.

G.T. finishes his current glass. The slightly warm beer catches in his throat, causing him to cough into his fist. He places the empty glass on the wooden ledge behind him without looking.

A cluster of women walk by back from having a smoke no doubt. They’re maybe 23. G.T. eyes them discretely, but but not so covertly as to prevent himself from making eye contact with one of them when she looks back.

He’s not on the market. But, he loves that moment, the brief second when you meet eyes and your mind ripples. That second of tangible mystery. He lets it pass unchased and chastened.

He loves this bar. He met K here during an undergraduate pub-crawl way back when, and they latched onto it as favourite watering hole. G.T. does not view himself as one who is in the habit of living in the past. But he enjoys his history in place.

He likes the gentle wash of his past indiscretions. When he’s here, he gets to wade into them. Like tropical waters, safe and warm near the shore, but they drop off quickly - more often than he’d care to admit. And then you’re out to sea…

G.T. is also not in the habit of reliving his mistakes.

K finally navigates his way over. He hands off one pint to G.T.: “You’re up next.” It has been almost eight years that they’ve known each other, and K insists still on reminding G.T. whose turn it is.

G.T. taps K’s glass with his. The fragile clink is lost in the bar, washed over and under by a sudden burst of “Wooos!” from the dance floor.

K: “You hear from the girls?”

G.T.: “No. You?”

K doesn’t feel his phone vibrate in the pocket of his windbreaker. A few moments later, G.T. PDA, tucked into the pocket of his jeans start to ring. He barely hears the little jingle, but somehow senses. He pulls it out, looks at the display, his face lit blue-grey in the LCD glow. He takes on an unintended pallor. He smiles, shows K the display. “Hey, it’s Claire.”