A lull hung over the Cantina starting in March. Maybe it was the calm before the summer storm. Folks came and departed like clockwork, as if on tranquil drugs. They drank their booze, ate nachos and shrimp enchiladas, and paid their tabs. No drama. No kidnapped women or unusual sex on the docks or in the parking lot after hours. Even the hot-looking lesbian cop strolled into the Cantina from time to time for a drink after work. She and Nyla shared furtive glances, but no fires ever burned.
Marko noted a new term used by the girls, Mandy, Nyla, and Sheila, “Cliff hangers,” for Clay, Jerry, Mickey, a new pudgy biker with red hair pulled in a ponytail, and Dismal Dan. The same crew started meandering into the bar every night and parked their lethargic asses against the northern wall under a mural of the Vincent Thomas bridge. The glowing airbrushed panoramic contained a couple of chopper riders on sparkling motorcycles flying over the expansion steel and cable architecture.
The crew sat specifically positioned, as if they were ordained with all-access passes at a Grateful Dead concert, or the television judges at some barroom talent contest, facing the remainder of the saloon and into the dining room, so they could watch anything or anyone who moved in or out of the Cantina. During the week, they drank consistently, assessing all the action. The redhead with alcoholic eyes, Mickey, guzzled Coronas, and when they were empty, if Nyla wasn’t on the case, he’d tap the thick glass, longneck bottle against the edge of the bar lightly.
“Dan,” Jerry said, watching Dan finish off his first pitcher of cheap beer, “how’s your FXR? I don’t see you riding much.”
“Won’t start,” Dan said. His ploy to draw Nyla’s attention was to shove his empty plastic mug closer to the edge of the bar. If she didn’t come to his aid quick enough, it would tip precariously on the edge until it fell off the bar and clattered against the hardwood floor.
“Fix the motherfucker!” Jerry spat. He didn’t drink alcohol. He was the local pain pill dealer.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with it,” Dan said as Nyla rescued his teetering pitcher and replaced it with a fresh one. “I rode to Walkers Cafe the other day, and it quit. We jumped it, but it just spun. I had to have it towed home.”
“That must have cost a pretty penny,” Jerry snickered. “You could have bought a new starter for the cost of the tow.”
“She has such a nice ass,” Red said while tapping his fifth empty Corona against the hardwood bar top.
Nyla came to his rescue, but she was losing patience with his routine.
About the beginning of April, another patron made the Cantina his home, but he sat in the dining room, in a corner booth, drank little, ordered a side of guacamole with his chips, salsa, and requested the Chinaman’s special hot sauce. He was a slight man, but neatly dressed in a clean white t-shirt and clean Levis. He wore polished, classic leather black engineer boots, and a worn traditional, multi-zipper, black leather Bates jacket. He rode a mid-‘70s restored FLH with stock plastic saddlebags. It looked much like a cop bike as he rumbled into the parking lot wearing a vintage black and white half-helmet.
After he locked up his pride and joy, he opened the same saddlebag each time and removed a sketchpad and a small soft deerskin leather pouch packed with artist’s pencils and pens. His thick black hair grayed at the temples, and his delicately cropped gray goatee had long passed the time of black touch-up dyes. He let it go. Chris, married for over three decades, was passed the age of impressing young broads. His wife was still very hot, but they reached another more staid level in their relationship successfully. Chris sat in his corner booth and drew sketches.
From time to time, he spent a few moments on his cell phone, sketched some more, crunched on the warm salted chips and salsa, and sipped a singular Corona, touched with a squirt of lime juice.
Marko didn’t pay much attention, but the corner crew gawked and snarled. Without leaving the far recesses of the bar, they whispered amongst themselves, accused him of being a homo, a flighty gay artist. Marko noted that, except Jerry, he was the only one with a running motorcycle. Another week passed with the Cliff Hangers sniveling in the corner, making snide remarks about the girls and critiquing the artist in the corner.
“At least he rides,” Jerry said, selling a handful of Vicodin painkillers to Mickey.
“I’ve stood in line at the dealer parts counter longer than he’s ridden,” Mickey spat and handed Jerry a twenty.
“I bet he never gets outta town,” Dan muttered.
“Still, his bike is running,” Jerry said. “Have you checked it out? It looks almost showroom new.”
Dismal Dan never rode to the saloon, but sniveled every night about his FXR. It didn’t run, but every night he explained the mechanical predicament to another patron and sipped his beer as positive suggestions flowed, from checking his grounds, and or hauling his bike to Bennett’s Performance on Signal Hill for a tune-up. He listened, bitched and spent his money on booze.
As a month passed, then two. Marko could see the color leaving Dan’s cheeks. Night after night, Dan drank until his face was a puffy translucent watery mask. The guy was drinking himself to death. Red, on the other hand, was an emotionally bitter soul who had lost most of his belongings, if he ever had any, in his last divorce. Each beer pushed him towards a nasty belligerent precipice.
“You’ll never ride again,” Red said to Dan. “You don’t want to fix it.”
“Yeah, I do,” Dan said. “I need that long 5-inch, starter jack shaft bolt.”
“Bullshit,” Red slurred the word.
“What about your bike?” Jerry asked, slipping a patron a small bag of valiums.
“I had to sell it to pay that fuckin’ cunt,” Red said, tapping his Corona against the bar top edge incessantly. Dan shoved his plastic pitcher over the edge of the polished bar top. It’s smacked the deck with a disastrous sound. It perked up everyone in the bar, except Nyla.
Mandy came to the rescue, since Nyla was in the kitchen retrieving a platter of nachos for another patron.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Mandy said.
“Why not?” Red snapped, defending Dan, while glaring down at her gathered top as she bent over to retrieve the chipped plastic container. She tossed it in the bar sink, grabbed another one from the freezer, and filled the frosty mug.
Red was round. His face was corpulent, his body rotund, his thinning red hair tied in a long ponytail at the base of his neck. He had darting menacing eyes, and no smile.
“Nyla always takes care of you guys, doesn’t she?” Mandy said, returning to her station.
“She’s a fuckin’ dyke,” Mickey said, since Mandy was out of earshot. “I don’t care what she does. She’s not doing me. What a fuckin’ waste.”
Clay, who sat in the corner and didn’t say much, nodded his head. He shifted from Coronas on the weekdays to double shots of Patron on weekends, with just a single cube of ice.
It was a foggy weekend night, and the harbor smelled of salt and dead fish. The usual offshore breeze didn’t make muster, and a dark calm consumed the harbor. The bastards at the bar sniveled from one drunken evening to another. Weekends took their toll on the inebriated quartet, except for Jerry. He had a job in construction, a new FLH, and child support payments from two mothers. When the depressed trio reached a narcotic nirvana, laced with incoherence, he said fond farewells, and slipped out to his blacked-out twin cam.
The remaining trio buried him each night with slanderous slurs. Jerry also had a young girlfriend, who attended the local community college and lived with her dad. Once in a while, when Mickey got fighting mad, Jerry would slip him a Valium and take the hot wind out of his sails and save him from an ass-kicking, or worse, going to jail.
The artist continued his creative regime. Once in a while his phone conversations turned into lengthy discussions. Frustrated, he hung up, ripped a sheet of soft paper off his tablet, crumpled it and threw it away, and started anew.
It was just after midnight when a young RUB couple rode to the Cantina and slid up to the bar. His girlfriend was a bomb waiting to explode, at less than 5’3” with a double D rack, a narrow waste, voluptuous hips, and a crocked smile that would melt the chrome off new exhaust pipes. As soon as her buttoned up biker date disappeared into the head, Mickey made his drunken move.
“Hey baby,” Mickey said staring at her bubbly cleavage overtly. “What’s your name?”
The tanked crew was deep into their chips. The dining room was full, but the air smelled of irritation.
She attempted a civil response. “I’m Anna, what’s yours?”
“Who the fuck cares,” Mickey blithered and his red eyes flashed as if she called him a faggot. “You’ll never have anything to do with me, you…”
“Hold on,” Jerry interrupted.
“Isn’t it time for pudgy boy to run to his fat girlfriend’s house,” Mickey snapped. “You need another girlfriend like you need a hole in your sorry ass. Go pay your child support.”
Jerry, a squat, construction worker with tightly matted closely cropped hair, and stubby strong forearms, grew up on the streets of San Pedro, and was a bully most of his life.
He jumped off his barstool and planted two palms in the center of Mickey’s chest, driving him against the wall. Just then, there was a commotion at the front door. It burst open and another fireplug of a man stood in the doorway holding a baseball bat in his iron fist. It was midnight, but the old graybeard still wore prescription Ray Bans.
“Where is he?” Arnie snapped. He owned a small dive bar a few miles away. He was an old-school ex-clubber with a myriad of faded tats, a scruffy beard and short, mussed, graying hair. He wore a tank top from Daytona 1980, and Levis almost that old.
Dismal Dan, his face sullen and dark, suddenly flushed, his eyes snapped wide open and he stood up knocking over his teak barstool. “Oh fuck,” he said.
“You owe me, motherfucker,” Arnie shouted across the bar, assessing his target, swinging the bat from a single left-handed grip, to a batter’s stance. He moved towards the bar, while patrons scrambled to clear the way.
The phone started to ring on the corner of the bar. Nyla tried to gauge the situation on two fronts. She turned back for the phone and yanked it off the black cradle. “Bandit’s Cantina,” she said.
“Can I get another double, goddamnit?” Clay said. “I’ve been waiting…”
Nyla slammed the receiver down, spun on her delicious legs, and her bountiful tits almost bubbled out of her gathered Mexican top. She snatched a polished hammer handle out from under the bar, and headed for Clay. Her precious warmth and usual bubbly demeanor cracked and she started to jog around the liquor island in search of the cliff hangers in the back, one in particular.
Mickey’s torso slammed against the bulkhead. His head spun with the realization that he couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag. He was four-and-a-half sheets to the wind, and the room wavered like the swell in the channel.
Marko stepped out of his corner, reached for his H&K 9mm, but knew this wasn’t hardcore violence, just drinking induced mayhem. Still, danger lurked. On came Arnie, mad as hell, and he ratcheted back to make take a swing at his long overdue patron, Dismal Dan.
Dan was petrified. His heart hadn’t pumped at over a slow idle in months. Suddenly, it was in third gear and pushing towards redline.
Out of nowhere, a voice called out over the calamity and the music of Carlos Santana. “I’m finished,” Chris said, bumped Arnie and shoved a 100-dollar bill in his pocket. “Check it out.” And he spread two magnificently detailed line art drawings on the bar top. “They are concept drawings for Bandit’s next bike build, the Mudflap Girl FXR.”
Suddenly all eyes were on the carefully drawn renderings. Some of the patrons knew Bandit was building something new, but they hadn’t seen anything yet. Chris’s talent brought the notion of Bandit’s mental concept to vibrant, inspiring life.
As the crowd’s attention turned to the fine art, Chris moved around the bar to where Dan leaned against the oak hardwood panting, and slipped him a slender 5-inch starter jackshaft bolt. “This might do the trick for your FXR,” Chris said. “See that Bandit gets the illustrations, will ya?”
Chris slipped out of the gathering crowded, snatched up his art supplies and sauntered to his classic FLH outside. Marko heard it fire to life and rumble out of the parking lot.
Marko holstered his 9mm and stared in wonderment. Usually, only a woman’s scream or a gunshot will stop a barroom brawl.
