John Bruce

Pickup Bar

For a time, I spent most evenings at a pickup bar in West Hollywood. I got started on that because I’d broken up with a woman I’d been living with, and a friend from work decided that I needed some hair of the dog. If the problem was that I’d been getting laid, then obviously the thing to solve it would be to get screwed some more.

I was almost certainly working at cross-purposes with myself. Another guy from work – a different job, and a couple of years after I’d started going – went with me one night. “Here’s what I don’t understand,” he told me. “You’re a really interesting guy to talk to. So what do you do? You spend your time at a place where the music is so loud that nobody can talk.” This guy was no dummy, either. He understood pickups like Einstein understood physics. He was a bald, fat, middle-aged guy who could get a woman into a motel room in maybe a minute. He’d be on the road, spot some lady in a Denny’s, and they’d be off and running in no time. 

Some guys have that knack. I didn’t. My friend from work – that is, the first guy, the one who put me onto that whole parh in the first place – laid it all out to me. You had to work out a corny pickup line, something like “I love your smile,” or “Gee, heaven must be missing an angel tonight,” and if you used it on 50 women, maybe one of them would start a conversation, and you’d take it from there. That sounded like a really bad idea to me. I tried it a couple of times. The look they gave was pretty much, “Thanks, and sorry for the form rejection, but I get so many hits in a week that I can’t answer them personally.” My second friend, the pickup Einstein, certainly didn’t work that way. But I could never quite figure out what he did. In fact, I’m sure that if he understood it himself, he’d have been happy to explain it to me.

And in fact my pickup Einstein friend was wrong on one point: if people wanted to talk to me, they could. And often they did. We shouted in each other’s ears. One night a real babe was sitting next to me at the bar and started telling me, right out of the blue, about a nude photo shoot she’d done. 

I gave her the once-over, and it sounded credible. She had an obvious nose job, though, and it was like having a hole in the middle of her face: where some sort of character should have been, there was just a gap. I couldn’t get facial expression. And she was telling me all about this because it was the kind of thing you wouldn’t tell someone you went to bed with. You talked with people at a place like that, which is maybe to say you talked with them a certain way, or you went to bed with them. Not both. The babe who told me about the nude photo shoot understood that perfectly, and she knew that I understood it, too, or she wouldn’t have started talking about it. 

In fact, I met several people there who became friends. They weren’t the best possible friends you could have – I’d met them in a pickup bar, after all. But I did things with them outside the bar, and the friendships lasted several years, longer than many people keep cars or computers, so I can’t complain. The loud music, in other words, wasn’t necessarily an obstacle to getting to know people if they wanted you to know them. Most, of course, didn’t.

Mike Hadley was one of the friends I made there. The first thing you should know about him is that he had a knack much like my fat, bald friend from work. He didn’t have any more insight into how he did it than my other friend; like him, he had no need for cheesy opening lines, but since unlike my other friend he’d just gotten out of the Marine Corps, no other explanation for his success was needed. 

Mike kept a running tally of his conquests. He re-initialized the total each New Year’s Day, and every now and then he’d volunteer how he was doing. “I’m at 73 or 67, depending on how you look at it,” he’d say. How you looked at it depended on whether you factored in repeat business: the total number of dalliances for the year to date would be 73, but if you wanted the number of unique women with whom he’d dallied, that number would be 67. Clearly the object of the game was to maximize the number of unique women.

We spent many days and nights together; as friends, we knew each other about as well as friends could, yet I never actually saw him meet a woman at the bar and leave with her. We might spend four or five hours there on a particular Saturday night knocking back beer after beer, talking only to each other, but maybe 20 minutes before closing time he’d disappear, and I wouldn’t see him again until the next night, when the total would have incremented to 74. As it was with my pickup Einstein friend, the transaction was that fast, easy, and unobtrusive.

He had little to say about his experiences. Once he told me, though, of going home with a woman who had a large parrot, which she allowed to fly around her apartment and shit where it chose. She didn’t clean up the shit, either, so there was a layer of guano over everything. Even so, that didn’t interfere with the business at hand. When Mike was getting ready to leave, she asked him, “Will I see you again?” Mike saw the poignancy in that, but he in fact had no desire to see her again, which I thought was entirely understandable. “I just had to mumble something,” he said, and in any case she avoided embarrassment by never showing up there again. 

When Mike got out of the Marine Corps, he had a wad of cash saved up, and he’d come to LA because he wanted to be a writer, or a standup comic, or a comedy writer, or maybe it was something else that just sounded like that.  Somehow I suspended disbelief, but I tended to suspend disbelief there with almost anyone. Maybe that’s why people wanted to talk to me. I told Mike that if he wanted to be a writer, he needed to read a lot of good writing. At that point I was going through Raymond Chandler, all of it, for maybe the third time, and the next night I brought in The Long Goodbye, which I’d just finished. He took it home. 

He came back the next night bringing the book with him; he’d finished it. And he’d memorized parts. I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it.

Nothing like that happened there. The place was hot and dirty from the time it opened, the bartenders didn’t wear ties, their hair wasn’t smooth, and the glasses weren’t lovely. But Mike liked the book. He should have, I guess: it’s about friendship and how friends can make you a chump. Since he wanted to be a writer, I lent him my Chandlers as soon as I finished each one. He took good care of the books, finished them usually in a day, and brought them right back. He memorized lots of passages. At some point, I’m not sure why, we traded phone numbers.

Not long after that, I was home with the flu, in bed asleep with a head full of cold medicine. The phone rang. I picked it up, but I wasn’t awake, still struggling to get out of the fever-dreams. 

”Jim?” said the voice at the other end.

I said something like “Yuh?”

”It’s Mike! Wondering where you are!”

I was still trying to figure out where I was myself, and I didn’t say anything for a moment.

”You know? Mike?
”Uh?” I said.

”OK,” he said, his tone suddenly changing. “Never mind. . .” What he meant was that he’d taken my incoherence as an unwillingness to acknowledge a relationship at a pickup bar, which of course was a completely reasonable conclusion.

”Hold on,” I said. “I was asleep. I’ve got the flu. I was just trying to get my head together.”

”Oh. OK. I was just wondering why you hadn’t shown up tonight!”

I didn’t think that much about the call when it happened, but since then I’ve come to realize how much it said about the different expectations that existed. You didn’t call people you picked up there. Moira Snell, who was another friend I talked to at Anderson’s (and thus not someone I went to bed with), told me one night about how shocked, and indeed frightened, she’d been when a former pickup called her. Apparently he’d copied her number off her phone when she wasn’t looking – she likely hadn’t given him her full name in any case, and maybe not her right name at that. And then he called her – he wanted to borrow money. The whole situation was unheard of.

Mike was living in an old brick apartment house at Third and New Hampshire, the neighborhood where Walter Neff, the insurance salesman in Double Indemnity, lived. Mike was in a one-room with a kitchenette and a Murphy bed. It should have been in a museum, except that it was too seedy for that.

The first job I’d had when I came out to LA was delivering phone books, and I’d delivered them to that building. It was rundown and roach-infested then, too. But it was what Mike could afford on the money he’d saved up. We got a routine going on Saturdays: I’d pick up some burgers and drive over to his place late in the afternoon. Then we’d walk over to the supermarket on the other side of Vermont Avenue and buy a fifth of 100-proof bourbon. The cheapest they had was something called Stonewood, and it was so bad that when you mixed it with water, it formed a scum on the top. Looking at the scum and wondering what caused it was part of our routine.

We’d watch TV on the old black-and-white set in his room and play cards and kill the bottle of Stonewood between us before we left for the bars. Once we got there, we switched to beer, which was much cheaper. 

A lot of the guys we talked to there – the ones who fit into the “friends” category, in other words – also wanted to be writers. At least, they said that was what they had in mind, though the clock was ticking, as it was ticking on everyone, and none did much reading. Nor did any do real writing. Mike was a little bit different. He at least was writing standup material and trying it out on amateur nights at the Hollywood comedy clubs. I’d go with him and sit in the audience for moral support. He wasn’t going to be famous anytime soon, and after a while, his grubstake ran out.

Mike was able to use the standup material he’d written to get a job back home writing gag lines for one of the big greeting card companies. But just as I never saw him actually pick up a lady at Anderson’s, he never showed me any of the gag lines, even though he must have written a lot of them. He could write that stuff more easily in Kansas City than he could in LA, and he did it for about a year before he got enough saved up to move back to LA. 

I didn’t lack for company while he was gone, which brings me again to Moira Snell. I met her the same way I met my other friends: one night she simply began talking to me. She was going to start a new job on Monday, she told me. She was very happy about it. That was great, I said, and it was about all we exchanged that first night. I saw her again a week later. “How’s the new job?” I asked her. She shrugged her shoulders and moved away from me. A few minutes later, she came back again, but she was hesitant to say anything. “So did you start your new job?” I asked her again, as cheerfully as I could.

”It fell through,” she said. 

”That’s bad. Do you have work? Would your old job take you back?”

”That’s no problem,” she answered. “I work in the family business. They had to take me back.”

It took me a while to piece together what had happened from the fragmentary explanations she gave me. “This guy was really enthusiastic about having me come to work for him,” was how she started it, and then she changed the subject. Then, a couple of nights later, she let on that she’d been to bed with the guy, too. And some time after that, she gave a hint about the chronology: the guy had been saying lots of stuff about giving her a job, and then she’d gone to bed with him, and after that the job fell through.

There was no sense in being judgmental about it: if someone had caught her before that chain of events, it might have been possible to say, “Moira, first you start the job, then you sleep with the guy,” but it seems nobody’d been available to give that particular bit of advice. And even if someone had actually told her that, there wasn’t any guarantee she’d listen. Moira, you understand, was a graduate of Bennington or Reed or Antioch or someplace like that, which means she knew everything, or at least everything that was important to know.

By this time, since she’d confided all this information, I knew I was beyond any chance of scoring with this chick. I’d become a friend, while she was determined to take her chances with the assorted pickups, grifters, and BS artists who really turned her crank. One night I saw some really bad bruises on her upper arm. They were in a pattern that made it look like someone had grabbed her and held her much too tightly there. I couldn’t help but notice them.

”What the heck happened?” I asked her, looking at the bruises.

”Nothing,” she said. “It was just the cat.” Subject closed. 

Moira has already mentioned the family business. Her brief apostasy notwithstanding, the family looked on her as the one to run the business in the next generation, except that they knew enough about her taste in male companionship to have worries about her judgment. That was where she gradually began to realize that I might play a role. Here I was, unattached, straight,  with at least a verifiable work history and acceptable manners in polite company – the sort of person her family might see as a mensch. 

I became her beard. She began to invite me to various family functions and let the family conclude whatever it might from my presence. I’m not completely sure why I tolerated this. Certainly I ate and drank well, and I met new people. But it was plain to me that Moira had no intention of actually changing her preference for unreliable, flaky, even dangerous guys. If I wanted to go along with that whole charade, it was my business, as far as she was concerned. She was also happy enough to have my ear to bend, as long as I made no demands otherwise.

Meanwhile, Mike had been plugging away at writing greeting card gag lines – he specialized in the ones about turning 40. The card company loved him, in fact. They loved him so much that they let him take a leave to go back to LA. He gave me a call: could he stay at my place for a few days while he looked for a place of his own? I was happy to have him come, of course. 

Mike came back out to LA, but I gradually began to realize that things had changed. Although he started out staying at my place based on the promise to get his own apartment right away, he kept putting that business off. I didn’t mind it that much; we were friends, after all. 

But he’d become satisfied with what he was, a writer of birthday gags on greeting cards. In the time he’d been away, he’d lost even the ambition to be a standup comic. And he’d come out to LA as a glorified tourist, with money saved up. He was going to party in partytown for as long as he could make it last. I lived here full time and held jobs to pay the rent. When you’re around someone all the time, little differences like that start to create friction.

The scene at the bar was something I could leave behind at closing time. Having Mike sleep on my couch with no sign of moving out was different – as was Moira’s idea that whenever she needed a respectable escort who wouldn’t make demands, she could call on me. I finally got so fed up with Moira that I began to avoid her, or maybe I should say I began to try to avoid her, since she showed up as often as Mike and I did, and she felt entitled to join us. But I slowly cut back on our interaction, to the point that she finally began to see that I didn’t want to talk to her. Once she got the message, it made things a lot easier. She stopped coming over to Mike and me as soon as she got a drink, and I began to think I was accomplishing what I wanted to. 

But then one night she did come over again. She batted her eyelashes at me, touched my arm with a “you dog, you!” expression, and said “panties.”

”Panties?” I asked.

”Only you would say ‘panties’.”

I shook my head, not understanding. “Panties?” I asked again.

All of a sudden her expression changed. “Oh my god,” she said. “I thought it was you.”

”What?” I asked.

”My phone rang, and it sounded just like you. I thought it was you.  I thought it was your way of making up.”

But I had no intention of making up.  And with a fair amount of effort, I was also able to shoo Mike off the couch in my living room, and not long after that, I went cold turkey on the bar. That was easier than I expected.  As human relationships went there, I was beginning to see that Mike and Moira were going to be about as good as it got.  And I was starting to get just a little old to hang out in that place.  To my credit, at least I recognized it.