“Why are men such goddamn assholes? Not you, honey. No, not you. You I would take in a minute if you weren’t so goddamn young.”
“Or so goddamn gay.”
“That, too.”
“I keep telling you, Carmella, just give it up. Become a lesbian.”
“Oh, if I only could, honey. If I only could.”
Carmella comes in here nearly every night, after some disastrous date or another. Every story she tells begins with a man. Each night there’s a new one, although once in a while, a guy will last a week or two. During that time, I hardly see her. Mostly, they last one night, and sometimes not even that long.
“Give me a hit, honey,” she says.
I pour her a generous shot of Jack Daniels.
“Who was it tonight?” I ask her.
She tells me the old story. The guy was a dick; a drunk grab-ass who started the conversation by telling her there was a motel around the corner that rents rooms by the hour.
“And I’ve done that, honey. You know that,” she says.
Carmella used to hook, before she hit it semi-big as a blues singer. That’s what she does. Or, that’s what she did. She sang the blues.
“Where do you find these guys?” I ask her.
“Oh, here and there. And I tell you, there’s no one out there like my Charlie. Not anymore.”
She was married to Charlie Edwards, the piano player. He died at 55, but left her with a brownstone in Brooklyn and enough money to come in here every night. After he died, she never sang again.
“No one’s sweet anymore, you know that? This guy tonight, he wouldn’t know romance if it ran him over with a tow truck. Charlie,” she says. “Charlie used to rent out our favorite restaurant. I’m serious, the whole goddamn restaurant, so we could eat and dance and talk.”
“And the man could talk,” she continues. “Not like these morons out there. All they can muster is, ‘Hey, so, um, you wanna do it?’ Charlie read the New York Times every day, cover to cover, plus half a dozen magazines. He always had something new to teach me.”
“At least you had a Charlie,” I say.
“Oh, honey, here I am yammering on. How’s your love life?”
I pour her another drink.
“He’s sweet,” I say. “He brings me flowers sometimes. He even sends me love letters. It’s kinda weird; I mean we live five blocks from each other. But he sends me letters telling me he’s thinking of me. It’s nice.”
“Fuck nice, honey. How’s he in the sack?”
I pause.
“I take it he’s not so good.”
I smile.
“You gotta dump him, honey. If a man can’t send you to the moon, he’s not worth having around. Charlie was all those things I told you, but if he didn’t know how to roll the eyes back in my head, I never woulda married him.”
A man stands at the end of the bar, waiting. He needs my attention, and he probably needs my ear, too. Carmella smiles and waves me away. I pour her another before I leave. By the time I get back to her, she has wandered to the jukebox. Etta James is singing. The sweet mix of Fifties ballad and bawdy blues fills the bar and Carmella is adrift, swaying to the music and finding the hope she needs for another day.
Lisa Marie Kelleher grew up on Long Island and later moved to the City to get her BA in journalism from NYU. Much to her horror, she now lives in Ohio, where she is studying for her Master's of Library and Information Science degree at Kent State.
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