Bars Poetica (Abridged)

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Anthony Velasquez

1. Think what you’re going to drink before you order. Have a plan, then execute it. Don’t be that
kid from A Christmas Story who gets the deer in the headlights stare when Santa asks what you
want. Nothing makes bartenders and mall Santas more pissed off than indecision.

2. Match your drink to the venue. This is how you fit in and make friends.
a. When in a dive bar, drink beer or drink cocktails that require no more than two
ingredients. CC and ginger, scotch and soda, vodka cran, gin and tonic will do.
b. When in a hipster joint, grab a can of PBR wrapped in a little brown paper bag or take a
shot of Fernet Branca with a ginger back. A call like that will help thaw the Seattle
Freeze you’re experiencing.
c. In a high-end “craft” bar, order a Prohibition era classic such as Ramos Fizz, Mojito, or
Corpse Reviver #2. Martinis are easy. Since they’re going to bleed you dry at these posh
bars, make the barkeep do some work.
d. Order anything you fancy in a gay bar. Your drink will be judged no matter what you
call. Just be careful; the stiffest cocktails you’ll ever get are always at gay bars. So, unless
you want to get shitfaced, engaged in a sword fight in the men’s room, or end up butt
naked in the swimming pool out back, stick to beer.
e. If you must go out on amateur night for a cultural appropriation piss up, don’t drink Irish
car bombs and green beer on St. Patty’s Day, Jose Cuervo and Coronas on Cinco de
Mayo. Don’t be a sheep.
f. And if you find yourself at a veritable hard luck dive bar on an actual holiday like
Thanksgiving or Christmas, please don’t eat the sandwiches or cold cuts. Save them for
those who will truly be thankful for the humble offering.

3. Learn wine. A degenerate drunkard can turn into a sophisticated bon vivant by waxing
poetically about wine. Yes, that will take a little while, but learn the big four: Sauvignon Blanc,
Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Cabernet Sauvignon. Then add four more to your repertoire:
Riesling, Pinot Gris/Grigio, Merlot, Syrah/Shiraz. Now you’re on your way to being a real
oenophile or crafting a clever disguise for your alcoholism.

Or practice faking it. When stuck in a conversation with a real cork dork, pick an obscure wine
and say something like (for a white) “Yeah , I like this ____________ , too. But for me there’s
nothing like the green apple esters, bracing acidity, and the sea spray salinity of a Txakoli
(pronounced chalk-oh-lee).” If it’s a red counter with, “This is good but I prefer the enveloping
heady aromas of dusty farm stand blackberries, old leather, and Band-Aid found only in an aged
Bandol. To each his own.” That ought to end the conversation right there.

Or simply pop some bubbles, if you can. I concur with the writer Roman Payne, “Wine gives one
ideas, whereas Champagne gives one strategies.”
* * *
“I never wrote so much as a line worth a nickel when I was under the influence of alcohol.” –
Raymond Carver

I should’ve heeded some advice from a few long-time expats in Busan, a besotted port city
where morning comes twice a day or not at all, but I had to learn the hard way (pushed down a
flight of stairs, emergency craniectomy, couple days unconscious, six months of recovery) —
nothing good is going to happen after 1:00 a.m. So go home and get some sleep. Then wake up
and write on. At your desk. On your sofa. On the floor. In the closet. Out of the closet. Over your
toilet. Write anywhere. Just not at, on, in, or under the bar.

Salud!

Author's Note: This piece was inspired by the author Wm. Anthony Connolly, the instructor of my MFA-Lyric Essay workshop classes at Lindenwood. The content of this essay comes from my experience in Sacramento where I spent ten years working in fine dining as a server/bartender/sommelier, and even more on the other side of the bar. I moved to Korea because I needed a divorce from my drug-addled, incestuous family (otherwise known as the Midtown restaurant scene), but it was the easy living and hard-drinking in the expat bubble of Busan that almost killed me. If it wasn't for my wife, my daughter, and writing, I wouldn't be here today to offer a little advice on this subject if needed.

Anthony Huerta Velasquez hails from California's San Joaquin Valley, but spent the last decade in Busan, South Korea. His essays have appeared in Hunger Mountain, Mount Hope, Concho River Review, Sierra Nevada Review, South Dakota Review, Stone Canoe, Touchstone, Panorama, Past Ten, and The Offbeat. He now calls the Finger Lakes region of New York home.

Where Are You? Here I Am, Here

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Rebecca Meacham

My German Shepherd waits in my front yard. This is unexpected. We killed our German
Shepherd a month ago.

Scarlet? I call. She’s doing that German Shepherd smiling thing you see in dog food ads.

Our German Shepherd wags. Her coat is black and tan and shining—it’s all grown back
—and she runs the way she did when she was alive: a creature too big for the human world, a
horse let loose in pasture.

Now my German Shepherd bounds to the backyard, to the woods full of the turkeys and
deer. When our dog was alive, turkeys were fun: my husband and I would stand at the patio door,
watching them mince their globed, slow way across the grass, and she’d stand beside us, tensed.

Ready? we’d ask. We’d open the door.

And our German Shepherd would bolt.

Turkeys can fly, even the young ones. They rise in an indignant, gobbling flurry, like
airless balloons, until they wobble to a branch. There, they cluck a quiet rollcall: Where-are-
you?-here-I-am-here.

In the month since we had our dog killed, the turkeys stroll the yard like, well, cocks of
the walk. The deer spindle towards our hostas, but we know it isn’t right.

Now my German Shepherd wants to play. She’s found her orange ball, the one we can’t
yet throw away. She trots past the memorial stone our kids made, working through their stunned
grief, embracing our lies (She got really sick while you were at school, we couldn’t make her
better), gluing on each glass letter: SCARLET.

When she was alive, we had to coax the ball from her jaws. She never dropped on
command, even at the end. Her obedience was selective—you could call it considered. She
chased the ball and kept it, awaiting your negotiation.

Scarlet, I call. She lies in the grass with the orange ball. Just like always, she waits for us
to go to her.

Such a dick move, my husband would say, going to her.

We would always go to her.

With our daughters, the exchange was play: they’d tug the ball together and she’d drag
along with it, a larky, choo-choo, tug-of-war. My husband, whom we called Pack Leader,
simply yanked. I did whatever worked. Usually, I placed my fingers inside her calf-soft lip and
pressed the ball away from her fangs: a modest, almost tender, extraction.

Not long before this, as a giant puppy, her teeth bruised the entire length of my arms in a
battle for dominance. She weighed as much as I did. We were equally committed. I raged,
consulted trainers, nearly returned her to the breeder—until I figured out a way to love her, and
she agreed to love me back.

It helped that we could tame her willfulness just by scratching her back.

Soon my hands knew her skin better than my children’s. It became exhausting, checking
for sores, shaving fur, rubbing salves on her raw-meat paws. Nothing quelled. I knelt and washed
her feet like a penitent. I am sorry for for your hungers for your wounds your sores your
miserable skin your endless, maddening itch, I whispered into her ears—ears the size of other
animals’ heads—before dosing them, shoving pills down her throat, stabbing her with syringes,
leashing her for another another another another vet trip, across town, across the state, until she
stopped following simple commands, this once-brilliant, still-giant German Shepherd of ours.
Forgive us.

We do not feel forgivable. Because last month, my husband, a man so loyal he keeps
receipts from 1999, said, It’s time. It was a school day. We’d tell the kids after. In the waiting
room, un-coned for the first time in months, she was gorgeous—a movie-star dog, drawing fans.
She’s beautiful! a woman said, because of course a four-year-old German Shepherd is vibrant,
alive. How could it be otherwise? The woman was the kind of person who rehabilitated blighted
orphaned dogs. We waited to murder our young allergic pet. We wept behind our sunglasses.

It wasn’t like when we took our 19-year-old cat, already half-gone. It wasn’t like taking
our pound-dog legend, named for a Grateful Dead song, grown stiff with tumors. Those pets
were put to rest, and you could say “put to rest” because they were doomed. No, a young, strong
dog will fight her death. We held her close and I couldn’t help but root for her. Hell yes, you
should live! I thought, killing her. Afterward, we couldn’t stop trying to make her comfortable. I
called through the door, Could someone keep her company, just keep her company, please? Two
vet techs carried a man-sized stretcher like medics from a war movie. We consigned her ashes to
a community garden.

A month later, my husband wonders if he’s a monster. Our friends say we’re “brave.”
Our kids are ready for a new dog, maybe a border collie, a breed you can dress up—it’s hard to
find Christmas sweaters in dog-size XXXL, although we did and she wore them all. Our kids are
ready for any dog that’s not allergic to grass, or leaves, or mice, or wool, or human skin, or every
kind of food.

But I don’t feel brave, and I don’t feel like a monster. I like dreaming of a dog we can
take on trips and give an easy life, of pleasure.

I’m dreaming now, in fact.

In this dream, I can finally walk out the patio door, into the yard, alone—even though it’s
the kind of yard a giant dog is supposed to bound through, giving chase.

All the snowballs of our winters hang in mid-air, waiting to be caught.

Now, my German Shepherd, my beautiful girl, lifts her head.

I open the door and ask...myself, I guess, Ready?

Neither of us moves.

My German Shepherd doesn’t come to me. I don’t go to her.

We stay like this, listening to turkeys in the trees.

Where are you?

 Here I am.

 Here.

Author’s Note: The thing about a family dog is they're everywhere: underfoot, on the landing, stretched across your beds, sneaking onto your couches, blocking the doorways from your cats, chasing deer and turkeys through your yard, hoovering poptart crumbs under your tables, barking at snowmen, rolling like a horse on new-mown grass, watching crows as you play guitar or ride bikes or read in the driveway. So it's not just your heart; it's your world that breaks when your family dog is gone. After we put our dog to sleep, I couldn't imagine these spaces without her— especially our backyard. I’d open the door and freeze. One night, I dreamt Scarlet was outside waiting for me, so I wrote this story. Eventually, in real life, I made it through that door as well. 

Rebecca Meacham is the author of two award-winning fiction collections. Her hybrid chapbook, Feather Rousing, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press, and recent work has appeared in Best Microfiction 2021, Hobart, and Wigleaf. Her prose has been set to music, translated into Polish, and carved into woodblocks and letter-pressed by steamroller. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where she is the founder of The Teaching Press and Director of the BFA in Writing and Applied Arts. Read more at http://rebeccameachamwriter.com.