Postcard from the Beachcomber Bar
I only see it in flashes:
Stepping out of the car. Walking onto the sidewalk. Waiting in line. Hearing heavy stomps. An approaching figure. Pretending not to notice. Standing still. Looking down. Getting shoved anyway. Careening into the glass wall. Reaching out to regain my balance. Grabbing his shoulder. He turns; glared eyes, teeth bared. I didn’t even see him swing.
One second I was in the bar hallway, the next I was stumbling along the sidewalk. I had been knocked out on my feet. My live feed cut out for a moment. Bewildered, I watched security push him away, down the street until he escaped into the darkness. Red poured from my face and into my mouth. I cupped my hands, expecting to catch my nose.
I got a broken nose and chipped front tooth. And it really screwed up my graduation night.
But not my modeling career! The dentists did me right and filled in the tooth—honestly, they might have improved it. Now, if you look real close, my nose does lean a little left, so now my sneezes curve. When the black eye came in, my grandma said I looked “sexy.”
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.
“Those are your friends over there?” the cop asked me, continuing to write on his notepad.
“Yeah,” I replied, sniffling up a beer can’s worth of blood. At least I got one drink. I tried to focus on his questions and not the stars I was seeing. It was more like a cosmic worm, inching across my periphery.
“Just going out, then?”
“Just going out, then?”
“Yeah, we just graduated today.”
“Oh, really? Congratulations,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“What did you study?”
“English.”
“Well,” he paused to finish his note. “I guess now you have something to write about.”
Do I? Some huge Samoan dude decided to knock me out. What else is there to say? I had never met him, I hadn’t seen him before—I didn’t so much as look at the guy. But he lowered his shoulder into me anyway.
Far worse things have happened for far less reason. Besides, you go to a shitty dive bar enough times, chances are you get rocked at least once. I could have avoided it, and my earliest opportunity was six months prior.
*******
That December, I was at my computer, smacking away at the keys like I hated them. I’d holed up in a corner of Copley library, rushing to finish a manuscript. The deadline for the Iowa Writer’s Workshop was fast approaching. Oh, you hadn’t heard? It’s only the finest creative writing program in the country, having produced twenty-seven Pulitzer Prize winning authors and… ugh, shut up. And they have the audacity to say that “writing cannot be taught” while offering a course they teach. Even then, it seemed phony—but I wanted it. So I forgot about the world and started typing away. The library was silent but I had a rhythm going. I was making good progress on the manuscript until that point. You read the title, though.
I sighed, shut my laptop off, hopped up from the chair, and gave up on Iowa. The deadline passed and the world kept spinning. And although Iowa seems pretentious, and although I will (likely) have more opportunities as a writer, that moment—that choice—seemed symbolic. I traded my dream away. I traded it for five shots of cheap vodka and one shot with a girl.
That action had consequences. Over a thousand dollars worth of consequences. CT scans are expensive. So’s beer. Those seven-dollar Pacificos stack up. Uber fees, a subsequent trip to the club, my GPA, wasted time—there’s a price for everything. What exactly did I pay for?
If nothing else, I paid for two important lessons:
Dodge.
Do not, under any circumstances, go back to the Beachcomber Bar.
I considered all this atop the bed at urgent care. As I licked the jagged underside of my chipped tooth, I marveled at how fast things change. Up until then, that day was perfect. One moment, I was walking across the stage with echoing cheers from my family and friends—the next I was getting wheeled around the white, silent corridors of the hospital. The tangy taste of iron-rich hemoglobin was still fresh on my tongue. Sometime later, it dawned upon me that I had worn two gowns in one day.
*******
The Beachcomber Bar, apparently, is right next to the beach. I’d only ever been there while it was pitch black outside. Across the top of the bar are these large, colorful, but faded letters that read “BEACHCOMBER.” The lettering reminds me of those wooden building blocks in the preschool toy box, possibly indicative of their customers’ intellectual capacity. Naturally, I’ve been there about a thousand times.
Oh and, by the way, no one calls it the Beachcomber Bar, just “Comber.”
Before I take you inside, I should explain the “routine.” By May, we had it down to a tee. By “we,” I mean us writing center consultants. That’s right—by day we were critiquing mediocre essays and by night we were going out for drinks. Didn’t really seem like our scene at first but we made it ours. One of these friends lived in the apartment building across the street from campus. Comber was absolutely his scene. He hosted every pregame at his apartment.
My parents didn’t know what a pregame was, so in case you didn’t know:
pregame (prē-ˌgām)
noun
1. A social gathering before the actual event; centered around drinking to attain a “buzz”
2. The leading cause of headaches among Uber drivers
They’re fun, but it’s partly a financial decision. As I mentioned before, the cheapest beer at Comber is $7. You can get a 10 pack of fireball shooters for $9. One time I hid those shooters in my socks, but that’s another story.
Here’s an example night out from May:
We agreed to meet at the apartment around 8:30, then actually get there at 9:30, and then leave for the bar once I had difficulty reading the clock. I’d catch up with the host’s roommates, fellow students I’d only see on Friday nights. And then for the shots. Arriba, abajo, adentro. We sat on the floor and played this evil card game called “Cabo.” Arriba, abajo, adentro. I call it “evil” because I suck at it. Arriba, abajo, adentro. Then someone gets the idea to recreate George Washington crossing the Delaware. And we did it, because that’s a great idea. Drunk or sober.
After enough adentro’s, the host and I call the Ubers. It was either that night or the one before where I was sitting in the front speaking to the driver in Spanish. My friends thought we were having a genuine conversation, but in reality I was giving him unprompted apologies for being un poco borracho.
We hopped out of the Uber and onto the sandy sidewalk. To get into Comber there’s a narrow glass hallway. What goes in that glass hallway does not come out the same. Although, the glass felt more like plastic when I crashed into it.
Through that glass hallway and past the chill security guard whose name I forget, ye have reached it, the unholy land. Creaky wood floors, purple lighting, sticky table countertops from dried drinks. The bar is placed in the center of the room. The TVs were playing sports games no one was watching anyway. They put limes in every drink and it takes forever to find the trash.
To prove I’m not an alcoholic, let me tell you about “Comber challenge.” I never did it, but if you go to Comber thirty days in a row, you become immortalized with a framed photo. Behind all the framed photos, if you look closely, there is a wall. There’s a billion. There’s a photo of three guys with their pasty white asses hanging out, placed right outside the women’s bathroom. I don’t know why I bothered to describe anything else, I could have just said that and you’d get the gist
That’s sort of the company Comber attracts. We met some people there. People who’d make nasty comments. People who put their arms around you like they’ve known you for years. People who don’t understand what “no” means. Other times I made friends I never would have otherwise. Box of chocolates, or something.
Anyway, we’d order a drink or two, hang around on the tables on wobbly barstools, and maybe I’d see that one girl who I’d only talk to at night. Other nights, if it wasn’t busy, we’d go and play pool. I suck at pool sober; drunk I am a danger to society. I will not tell you if that means I’m good or bad at it.
Then we’d take another Uber over to go dancing at Moonshine. I’ll explain what that is later, but it almost deserves to be in the title. Then everyone goes home. Except for me, though. Lots of the time I’d crash on my friend’s sofa. Other times I slept in my car. And then I’d wake up to 17 notifications from my bank, 11 from Uber, and a recording from a friend who fell for my prank voicemail message.
I miss that life. My wallet doesn’t miss it, but I do. When I first started writing this, I put down “I still have my friends, even at a thousand-mile distance,” but I guess that’s not true anymore. One’s a little further away than that. I’m happy I got the time that I did.
There was also another reason I kept going back to Beachcomber.
*******
So there was this girl I liked.
In April—only a month before graduation—I wanted to make a move. She said she’d bring her friends, I said I’d bring mine. But then they bailed on me. They had “Easter plans” with “family,” something like that. Appalled that they would not accompany me for a third consecutive night out, I had to improvise. No options, no plan, time running out, who’s the one guy I can count on? Will Lennan.
(I told myself I wasn’t gonna name drop anybody, but the guy deserves his flowers.)
Anyway, he and I had never gone out before. The terms “Beachcomber” and “Moonshine” were foreign to him. Will knew none of my other friends. I texted him that same afternoon. “Why not?” he replies, within ten minutes. Game on.
The rest of the night I gotta tell you in present tense—it’s too vivid not to.
We get there. She gets there. All of her friends are there. We all sit around a small table. And, although I have near-zero social intuition, I can just tell nothing’s gonna happen. There’s no zap, you know? You need zap. I feel like an acquaintance around her and a gnat around her friends. Still, I doubt my instincts and wait for a clearer sign.
Then, from behind the clouds and through the glass hallway, she shows up. The one I only talk to at night.
Not now. Why now? Out of options, I turn away from her. (Really, I did. Like a turtle hiding in its shell.) Childishly, I hope she won’t see me. When I turn around, the coast is not clear. There she is, two feet away, wedged between me and my crush. Hang it in the Louvre. If I wasn’t so bent out of shape, I would appreciate the irony. I can’t play with this hand—I was shitting the bed before, why risk it with these odds? Game over.
Funny enough, she doesn’t even appear to notice me. She just keeps smiling and talking to someone across from me. I wonder if she had stood there on purpose, if she knew I had the hots for that other girl. What was really killing me was how, after two minutes, she was still ignoring me.
“Oh! Anthony. I didn’t see you there!” Man, that pisses me off. She’s not even two feet away from me.
“Yep, I’m… I’m here,” I shrugged, sounding disappointed with myself. Wait, she was being sarcastic. I’m rusty.
“Ah, is that a new jacket?” she asks, admiring it. I’ve never seen her so spritely. “Did you get it recently?”
“Well, uh…it’s just, um… something, I uh…fished out of the closet.” I was blubbering like a fish, that’s for sure.
Then she runs her finger down my shoulder. “Well, it’s nice.” She tilts her head. Suddenly it’s December all over again.
No. Fuck that. Am I really gonna crumble at the slightest bit of interest? Is that all it takes? I worked hard to be this happy, I’m not gonna piss it away now. All of the sudden, I smile like a stranger.
I shift the conversation. Three beers in and I’m speaking like middle management. I tell her I can’t wait to go to that presentation she’s doing. The topic makes her less spritely. After a brief moment of silence, I drop the act and stop pretending we’ve only ever been friends.
“Hey, listen if you prefer I not be there, that’s fine I will fuck off, no problem.” I don’t know why I swore but she seems to appreciate the sentiment.
“No it’s fine, I’m just… you know me. I’m an anxious person,” she says, as if that’s somehow her defining characteristic.
“Ah, you’re selling yourself short,” I replied. “That’s not what I see.” She smiles. Zap.
She asks me where I was going. I say I might go to Moonshine. She says she might go to Moonshine. “Well, maybe I’ll see you there,” she says, and then disappears behind some clouds.
What have I done?
Ten minutes later, I was holding the pool stick with both hands, like a decrepit wizard holding his staff—but I was the one who’d had a spell cast on me. My jaw hung open, my eyelids were heavy, horrified that, yeah, that really is all it takes.
Earlier I’d told Will that we would play pool, but you have to remember that this was fifteen minutes ago, and I had become a completely different person. I wasn’t even thinking about that other girl.
Now I’m staring at the eight-ball, like it’s about to give me an answer. Don’t count on it.
We’re playing with this married couple, maybe three or four years older than us. They’d invited us to our game and so we don’t have to pay a dime. Thank God, I’m really running up my tab. Speaking of which, how many beers am I on now? Ask again later.
But the couple didn’t care at all. They were so friendly. They’d told me about how they got together, broke up, had other relationships, and years later got engaged. Signs point to yes. If they can pull that off, this would be cake, right? Better not tell you now.
I thought that maybe by going to Moonshine, I’d be giving up all the progress I’d made over the last two months.
So there I was, at Moonshine.
Moonshine is a live music venue slash dance club slash line dancing scene. And it’s less than ten minutes away from Comber. They give you a stamp on your wrist before you go in. When you pay the $10 entry fee there’s an option to tip the person who took your payment and stamped your wrist. Some nights they sell free hot dogs. I have never tried them, because some things are free for a reason. Past the bar and behind the clear, plastic tassels, is a multicolored warzone.
People who strongly dislike large crowds or who are completely sober should stay away. For everyone else, it’s pretty great.
Backing into strangers. Pretending to know the lyrics to “Messy” by Lola Young. Hitting people on the head with light up foam noodles and then look away like I didn’t do it. For a while I forget about it. But it doesn’t take long to remember. As everyone jumps up and down I stand still. The whole club is bouncing, except for me.
Then, painted by pink and blue lights, my expression changes. My jaw hangs open, almost to the point of drooling. An idea infects my mind. A smile spreads across my face like a rash. You see, I had been overcome not by great sadness but a sinister greed. I was happy—but I wanted to be more happy. I giggle, then scramble for my phone. I type in the first three letters of a name.
“Oh no,” says Will. “I know that look.” I glance up at him, wide-eyed and caught red-handed. How? How can he know that look? He’s never seen that look on me. Somehow, he knew exactly what I was up to.
“Do you want her?” he asks. What a cutting question. So right to the point, so unmistakable, and yet I could not answer it. So he does for me:
“Then she’ll come back.”
For a while I forgot about it. I put my phone away and stopped looking around. I went back to dancing. I became another one of the jumping bodies in the crowd. Later on we stepped outside the dancefloor. We talked about relationships and future trips. I had a great night.
Will and I walked back to the car. I thought it was gonna be a shorter trip but it took us forever. On the way, I realized her place was on the right of the sidewalk. Will got concerned when I stopped for a second. But then I kept walking. A new smile lit up my face. Not greed but gratitude. It was on that night that I understood the privilege of heartbreak.
When Will and I reached my car, the parking lot gates had been closed, locking me in until five in the morning. “There’s no fuckin’ way,” I scoffed, underneath a sign saying the gates closed six hours ago.
*******
I once told my sister I had a new crush and she replied “wow, you move on fast.” I do not move on fast. I really believed I had moved on from her. During the daytime, at work, we wouldn’t even look at each other. So we would only ever talk at night. I think the alcohol gave us both courage. Yet our last conversation proved that, even after a long and awkward semester, there was never anything to be afraid of.
So even though it stung to see her, I still went to the Beachcomber Bar every chance I got. “Comber II? Comber Part II?” people would ask, excitedly. After a long wait, my writing center friends and I went back for the second time. That particular Friday in March, for whatever reason, it started pouring rain. I mean, just pissing rain. This is coming from a Washingtonian, by the way.
After making another scene at one of those author presentations, I met up with everyone at my friends’ apartment. We either took shots or drank beer or in my case, both. We made fun of this one professor’s poetry. We took selfies from the elevator ceiling. We squished ourselves into the Uber and regretted our choices after every sharp turn.
The Beachcomber Bar was flooded. So was the entirety of Pacific Beach. But, as you can see, this paragraph continues. The Uber got us as close to Comber as he could without sinking the car. In addition to the ocean between the street and the sunken sidewalk, there was another problem. My host friend had recently injured his ankle, and he had on this big old footbrace. Braces can’t get wet. So I gave him a piggyback ride. I was nearly knee-deep in water when I carried him from the sidewalk through the bar hallway. When we got in, my beige pants were soaked tan, my shoes drenched for another month, and there were still puddles laden across the wooden floor. Later on, someone told us there was a back-door entrance that would have kept me completely dry. Our only regret was not getting it on video.
We would’ve walked through fire to get in there. I don’t think Comber, or any bar for that matter, really fit our group. I’m not saying we were a bunch of lame nerds, but we’re nerds. The only ones brave enough to attend a flooded dive bar were us, a posse of writing tutors.
Don’t get it twisted, though, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I dragged them along partly to make myself look cool. I look back at videos of my two friends and I dancing—or my pathetic attempt at it. Watching the three of us holding hands… it’s surreal, what can change in one year.
I wouldn’t trade the memories for anything but I’d like to be clear, that place is a shithole. So much so that I feel guilty for ever bringing my friends there. I’m glad it was me that got punched; just the thought of any of them getting hit like that makes me sick.
We kept coming back, though. What appeared so obviously inauspicious seemed, to us, undeniably charming. It carried the scent of opportunity. The promise of something magical, like the first time we went.
And, yeah, really, it was flooding in San Diego.
*******
It was December and the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” was playing in my head. I sat atop a barstool at the Beachcomber Bar—yet to be “Comber” because this was my first time. To celebrate the end of the fall semester, all of us writing consultants decided to go out to Comber. I had something else in mind.
So there was this girl I liked.
Earlier that day, I was sitting in the audience for my cousins’ ballet performance of the Nutcracker. When they were on, I’d watch, when they weren’t, I’d try to think of what I was gonna say. Three hours and an intermission—still couldn’t think of anything. Nothing going on in my head but Tchaikovsky on repeat.
I hear some squeals from my friends. She’s here. I waited for an opportunity to talk to her. But she found her way to me. Underneath those violet lights, we talked and talked and talked even as people had to go. I remember most of the conversation, but this I remember vividly:
She says my allergies are funny.
“What the fuck?”
“Like, you have to admit, it’s kinda funny how that happens.”
“But… I could die???”
“But like, you have to admit…” and she actually continued to argue the point. What an asshole. I mean, the audacity to say that. I had the biggest smile on my face.
I don’t know what to tell you, man. When it clicks, it clicks. Those night time conversations after the fact, those day time conversations before the fact—the puzzle pieces always fell into place.
“The world makes sense,” she once told me. It did. It really did. For about a month, though. We were over by February.
Anyway, this whole waiting around business had been really tying my stomach in knots. At one point, I went off to the bathroom. My friend was in the urinal next to me. Then I got an idea—one of those genius ideas you only get pissing adjacent to another dude. Before we headed out I made a wager with him. I told him if he confessed to his crush, I’d confess to mine. I didn’t even care if he held up his side of the bargain, I just needed to work up the nerve.
So I walked out of that bathroom with unearned confidence, sat back down, stalled a little longer, and then finally spit it out. And then I blacked out.
The rest I see in flashes.
Walking down Mission Boulevard. Admiring a pitch black view of the Pacific. Sitting on a sandy bench. Leaning in. Chickens exploding on the TV. Wearing fingerless gloves. Demonstrating double-leg takedowns. Letting her practice punches on my chest. At one point she swings at my face. Her knuckle kisses my nose. And as soon as it does, I wake up half a year later, stumbling out of the Beachcomber Bar, unsure if my nose is still attached to my face.
Now I can’t remember one punch without the other. Every time I play them back in my head, the scene cuts to the other upon impact. I never saw either of them coming.
Post-punch, the doctors diagnosed me as lucky. It’s true. My orbital bone could have shattered and hemorrhaged my brain (something I use occasionally) or I could have landed on the concrete and died. It’s true I was lucky, but not really what I wanted to hear right then and there. Not as I was sitting on the paper bed sheets, feeling naked and cold in that dixie-cup-patterned gown, getting wheeled around when I can walk just fine. I hate hospitals. Man, I hate hospitals.
But my friends stuck by me. They spent their graduation night in urgent care. A couple of them even volunteered to wait with me behind the curtain, too. Maybe they knew how much I hate hospitals. What stung even more than the punch was saying goodbye to all of them.
Anyway, I healed. Not completely, but enough. Sometimes, though, I try to push my crooked nose back into the center. But it’s stuck like that now.
My tooth got fixed. And me and that girl I keep yapping about cleared the air a long time ago. There’s not much to talk about, really.
(He said, a million words in.)
I guess I am still writing about it, aren’t I? I’m not interested in going back to Beachcomber. I’m not interested in getting back together. And I’m not interested in going back and applying to Iowa. I turned the page on those things; take my word for it, or don’t. I was, however, curious to know if a reread would give me a takeaway. What I wanted was a lesson. What I wanted was to make sense of it. What I wanted was for the world to make sense.
It does not. And it won’t. But it’s entertaining, no?
Paging through these increasingly distant memories makes me realize how absurdly poetic it all is. Getting punched on my first visit and then really punched on my last visit. Wearing two gowns in one day, meeting that couple who’d gotten back together on that particular night, raining in San Diego. I mean, her name means “the moon.” When I write all this down, it seems so contrived; it’s like some big joke and I’m the punchline ← there, you see what I’m saying?
That’s not to say any of it is implausible, but isn’t it just bizarre?
The way the world rhymes.
Only when I revisit these now bloodstained memories do I finally taste the iron on my tongue. My life is not meant to teach me anything; it is not meant to improve or worsen my condition—but to be as ironic as possible.
Perhaps everyone’s life is as ironic as mine, only my gift (or curse) is the ability to notice it. Yet it is because of this realization that I can say this with absolute certainty: I didn’t make a mistake leaving the library. I needed material.
When I was walking off her porch, when I was walking back to the car in April, even when I had blood running down my face, I was thinking about how I can turn it into a story.
In that same manuscript I wanted to send in to Iowa, at the very end of it, the main character gets punched. I thought of that scene six years ago. So when I went back to that document, I knew exactly how to write that scene. In intimate detail.
I can’t lose. Every experience, every moment, every thing is potential material. And in a world where suffering is guaranteed, I can generate infinite treasures. Broken faces, broken hearts; these are my riches. Parallels, contrast, rhyme, irony—the world is gushing red with irony. All I have to do is keep my eyes open and write it down. You get it now, right? I can’t lose.
“Now you have something to write about.” Pfft. When do I not? Remember: There are no bad things. There are no good things. There is only writing material.
So, to the Fates: bring it. Throw everything you got at me. I’ll turn your right hooks into small books. I’ll write and write and write until these wax wings melt. And then write something on the way down.