Strange little night.

I leave the diner and start walking toward the bar. As I take my first steps the light summery breeze starts to swirl. It picks up speed and changes direction every few seconds. It cools off, shedding degrees by the second. The sky goes dark as black clouds roll in.

Well, I admit I thought to myself, that doesn’t bode well.

And then I got to the bar. And saw the official notice that they were closed “by order of the Commissioner of health and mental hygiene.” I stopped, in the little entranceway, while the wind picked up more and grew colder and the sky got even darker. I sent Hammerpants a text message, letting him know. I told him I would just be going home.

He didn’t reply. I waited some more, thinking I would wait out the first burst of the storm there and wait for him and then go home and get some work done, sad but what can ya do?

And then Moran showed up. Oh no, she told me, they were open tonight. It seemed that the woman who had been annoying them about noise for 11 years (seriously, she can’t hear them in her apartment at the end of the block, she wanders and bitches at all the bars) combined with new noise laws and an unfortunate run in with the cops (don’t ask) meant that the bar got shut down a few days ago.

And Monday it reopened.

So anyway, Moran and I are standing there discussing this when M’s Adam shows up. He had time to kill and was coming by. So we waited for M. Why was M late? She has a new job, see. Yeah. But we’ll get there. So M shows up and now we’re opening the bar. I swear I don’t work there. I promise.

M is teaching Moran to bartend and is waitressing at the same time. ‘Cause yeah, M has a new job doing non-bar stuff. And so she is training Moran to take over her bartending shifts. So next week it’ll be the same situation as this week and then M won’t be there on Mondays again. As staff. She’s planning on coming by fairly often to drink with us, instead.

M walking by and yelling out to Moran: “White Wine and gin!” to which I added quickly, “Not mixed together…” I mean it made sense to me. M agreed. Moran didn’t, really.

A while after Hammerpants showed up we (him, me and M) were sitting and chatting when Moran brought over a bag of gummy bears. M starts biting ears and limbs off them, happily telling us how she used to torture them when she was little.

“When you were little?”

“Well, I mean I’m still…”

“I didn’t mean size, I mean age. As in you did but STOPPED?”

“All right, I love torturing them!”

She spent a good twenty minutes slowly pushing a cocktail straw through a gummy bear (ass to head) to core it, and waved it around like a scepter. The one time she left it she then demanded it with “Gimmie!” and “Mine!” like a three year old. This woman has a thing for torturing gummy bears. She is also, she says, worse about animal crackers - but who isn’t?

After she cored it, Hammerpants said something and she told him to watch it. We realized she was pondering coring people, too. Lucky for Hammerpants she didn’t have a straw big enough. ‘Cause… ow.

So there ya have it. M is no longer our bartender. She may be our waitress sometimes, but really now she’s on our side of the bar. And she’s drinking. Things get stranger and far more hi-sterical.