“Yesterday, in a yellow geared-up official looking truck, I thought you waved at me. We passed each other on the only Boulevard between towns. You used to see me in my car, my black machine, and reach out soon after. Regaling my bright yellow spirit. My aura you first said. After disappearing for weeks.

You know me by my New York plates. We get along like children in a school yard. Where you grew up. Where you brought me on our first date. You move slow and disappear for weeks only to see me passing by and finally reach out.

You know me by my New York plates. I kept things from you. Like the way I feel you with me all the time walking in the forest, to the post office, to the beach. Finding my way through this small town that wants to be left alone.

Months go by and we are in a cadence of on and off, push and pull. We feel each other and see each other in our dreams. We talk this way and know what it means.

Then the last day, the last time. Ripping off each other’s clothes only to back away once we could tear our bodies apart. Eyeing each other like animals backed into a corner. Our thoughts in each other’s. What a rush.

A storm hit that night like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Like banshees and a priest going at it. The ozone and lightning, sexy, the howl of the wind, beyond. I told this to you, and you said the storm was portended by our potent rendezvous. My thoughts exactly.

I knew it would be so long before you reached back out. But now, the lightning that struck from the storm has grown into a great fire. A fire that threatens your home, your land. The trees you care for. They are all gasping at their brothers being swallowed by flames that come closer.

You know me by my New York plates. It’s a divide, this fire. I do not belong here. I am rich in transient, virtual currency. You are rich in trees choking on ash.

Yesterday, I thought you waved at me from a yellow geared-out fire truck. I asked if it was you. By your silence I guess it wasn’t. There was no missed connection to be had. But it was you.

You know me by my New York plates.”

“I sit at the detective’s desk, waiting for instruction at that lime green desk from the 70’s quietly as he writes up his notes for his report. We’re on a bustling floor of utilitarian carpet and these metal desks. Particle board lines their back and sides for privacy a couple inches up, barely doing their job. His has a pinned up picture of him holding a fish.

He asks me to clarify my situation with Donell. I tell him that Donell is a diagnosed schizophrenic and has had multiple breaks over the past two months. I suggest he refer him to the psych ward or I can put him in touch with Donell’s doctor and the social worker assigned to his case at Beth Israel. But this detective. This particular detective looks at me blankly for a second and then off handedly says, “Or you just like it rough.” And he goes back to taking notes.

Back to silence at that green desk. I take in that he will do nothing. A frozen rage blankets me. He won’t be contacting Donnell’s doctor or referring him to a psych department. Not this specific detective. Then he raises his eyes to me and smiles a smirky invitation.

I see my black lined eyes and bartender status from his green desk and realize I might as well be the entire cast of Shameless sitting before him. Only he doesn’t spend his money on streaming services. He spends it on alimony and finds very little fun except for fishing.

We’re screwed. Which I’ve known for awhile as what can only be called a split personality of partner and advocate contends daily with my inner lizard whispering, this will not end well. Donnell is fucked. But of course, he’s known that since he was young. My eyeballs relax way in the back as I zoom out and try to find an option. Would he had been assigned a different detective.

Coming out of the sun’s glare on Avenue B and through the heavy door instantly throws me into a darkness where I hear a woman’s deep cackle and smell rancid beer lines, fresh bleach and stale dreams. My eyes adjust to the dark and I see the short hair of a lone woman drinking a beer to my right. A pixie perching at a gummy bar leading a long ways back into nothing. I walk past her down the interminable length of the bar to where Rob is waiting to give me keys.

He comes towards me with a small hitch to his gait and we hug. I can’t see anything beyond him but a faint glare of the juke box far at the end of the dive bar’s back wall. “Break it up you two!” I step back and we all chuckle. Rob says, “This is Patty, Patty Mcguire.”

We walk up to include her and I notice blue twinkling out from her wrinkle laden eyes as if to say, either way, I’m gonna getcha! Rob tells me she was the first and only female detective in her precinct. She adds how many years she’s been on the force very loudly for a bar that’s not open yet. That’s awesome, I say, genuinely wanting to hear more. She doesn’t reply.

Moving on quickly, Rob proceeds to show me around the back bar. He is an old friend. I already worked at his other locations in the neighborhood. He wanted me to take over the Wednesday day shift here because he wants to give me enough hours in the hopes that I will quit my other, swanky cocktail gig and work for him full time.

That and the fact that the woman who held it previously slept with too many regulars and was giving away the bar for free. I was essentially there to clean up and grow the shift.

I can feel Patty’s eyes as Rob points out some light switches amidst the vintage barshelving and dusty tchotchkes. This particular pixie was part of a handful of day regulars that had been there in terms of decades. Word at the other bars was they would eat you alive.

Rob showed me where everything was and gave me the keys. On my way out Patty noted she was very excited to see me the next day on my first shift.

“Don’t worry baby, you’ll be ok.”

That’s when I knew that she knew I would be here today getting keys from Rob to take over the Wednesday day shift. And that she thought I was green and pretty. A true yet common mistake.

Rob and I said goodbye as he picked up the mail on the end of the bar. I hear Patty give him shit for his AARP letter as the door swings closed behind me and I’m back in the sunlight.

The next day I showed up for my first shift 20 minutes early because the gate was hard to lift and I hadn’t quite gotten the hang of the lock that made your hand smell like metal the more you sweated opening it.

I pull the steel gate up and shoulder open the door to get in. I hadn’t met him yet, but Donnell loved this bar. Besides his best friend working here on the weekends, I didn’t understand why. It was haunted with heavies. My eyes immediately search for ghouls down the long darkness until I can find the ten thousand obscurely placed neon lights and click them on.

But the phone starts ringing. I make my way to the other end of the antique rolled edge bar to get behind it and find the phone in the dark. The humid wood, thickly stained and scummy, sticks to my hands as I grope. I answer and it’s Pat.

“Put Heineken on ice for me and I’ll be there soon.”

We weren’t open for another hour. I tell her I didn’t have ice yet behind the bar but when I did I would certainly put some Heineken in it for her!

She knocks on the door 20 minutes later. Despite the pissing contest, I let her in. She tells me the beer isn’t cold enough but I’ll get the hang of it. She has an adorable toy poodle in her arms but it still shared her owner’s short white hair cut. Then she begins to flirt in a way that reminds me of the dirty old midwestern men where I come from. Every sense of mean and always tooling.

The regulars come in and form their crew, talking and expecting me to listen but not to join just yet. Hawking every individual interaction and transaction I make but then aloof when nothing is needed. We share the stage back and forth like this. But Patty. Oh Patty likes putting me on the stage as often and as loud as she can, right down to how I pour a Guiness and if that’s how I get into my jeans in the morning.

Just kidding. Her lines weren’t that good or I’d remember them. But you get the gist.

As more regulars came in to talk, Patty’s interjections sped up along with her drinking. She interrupts me talking to a customer they don’t, gasp, know and tells us and the bar that she has to take her dog outside before it pees and she’d be back and to keep her tab open.
Her dog had already peed on the floor in the back. I just didn’t know it yet.

Our registers were antique and there was only one man left in Queens who had the parts and knowhow to fix them should they fail. So our tabs consisted of writing stuff down on a post it note and tally marking next to it. I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt and she left to take her dog home. After I saw her disappear outside, I thought about having to deal with her every week and I wondered what I was going to do about her toxic ass. Like every bartender knows, descalation starts before anything starts.

I went to open the back for the night shift and slipped on her dog’s piss puddle seeping down the concrete cracks under the pool table.

I got a mop. How much piss can one small poodle hold?

She returned without her dog and any fluffy cuddles buffing her rough were gone. She’s basically just being nasty to everyone and its comical but registering too frenetic for the drinking pace of the group. I ask her questions and try for a tete-a-tete about general stuff and she laughs at me with the hard blue sparkle back in her eyes. I walk away and start drinking a beer with coworkers who came in. My shift is almost over.

Interlopers start appearing for the night and the front bar is filling up and spilling into the back. I lose track of Patty for awhile and then, for what I guess was lack of attention, she stands up and announces she’s buying a round for the entire bar.
I ask if she means like this half of the bar or the whole bar? Now that she’s back in my focus, I want to find her switch. Flippantly she tells me the whole bar and to just do it and I’m not getting the beers fast enough. It’s all very fun and exciting but some of the regulars don’t want another beer from Patty. Bingo.

When I get back to her she asks for her tab. Our prices are always happy hour prices and I worked out her tab carefully in anticipation. I buy her back every third drink and buy her first and last on top of that and give her the number.

“I’m not paying that!” She asserts, ramping up for a scene.

I walk her through the tab order by order and her eyes glaze over. She tells me she’ll wait for the night bartender to come in and pay it with him. I tell her I will be here drinking with my colleagues all night. She tells me she left her wallet at home. I tell her it’s my first shift and I can’t have Rob thinking I gave away the bar to her.

I felt I had paid my dues. If she were a man I would be able to cut her off and Rob would have my back. I didn’t care that she wasn’t a man. But it made me think of how much shit she must’ve taken to be the first female detective in NYC. Irish, gay, in her 60’s. Well honestly there was no way of telling her age, but no parade marching here. She was the first and only female detective in a New York City precinct. I had really wanted to know her.

There was a pang of pity, and uncertainty, like is this really the hill you’re going to die on? Can I really just yank her out of the fabric of time and history this bar holds? Is it worth it? And yes. Hell yes it was. Because deep down whatever she saw in me that she wanted, I didn’t want to see in myself…the big Irish Catholic family who made sport of each other in rough and truthful ways, showing affection by belittling and pecking order by ridicule. I was ok at my job because I was good at this, and I didn’t know it yet, but I was good at my job because I fostered the opposite vibe.

So I picked this moment to pluck her from the garden of my Wednesday day shift. I told her to go home and get her wallet and pay her tab.

I distinctly remember that shift ending with me giving Patty her change and her snatching it out of my hand and putting it in her wallet and shouting “Oh you bartenders always cry poor!” and then turning towards the door, holding the back of a stool until she could steady her head to rightly see the exit and walk through it.

“Oh you bartenders always cry poor!” Every week it rang through my dreams the night before this shift.

The weeks ebbed and flowed. The regulars stepped in and out of the light as we learned each other. They always got friendlier on their third beer, the free one. As if cracking open all their problems for a looksee from me and then closing up again right before leaving.

During these third beer openings sometimes a regular would mention a park bench and laugh, furtively glancing at me to see if I was in on the joke yet. From behind the bar I show nothing and I notice how badly they want attention. But like a dog who’s pissed on your floor, they don’t know how to ask to be pet just yet. Their worries and life is so big. Most day regulars are like this.

Apparently after that first shift, the shift I made Patty pay for 7 hours of drinking and buying a round for the bar, and unbeknownst to me, Patty will bring liquor and cold-enough Heineken to a park bench in her apartment courtyard across the street on Wednesdays. There she would have her own happy hour and invite all the other day regulars, convincing them not to come to my shift in protest.

This went on for the better part of a year. A regular finally confessing to me out of the fact that winter was coming. I laughed and didn’t think about it much because my shift was still doing ok. I mean. It was brilliant though. And from what I can tell thinking back, most of them did go and then would come into my shift later undercover and now it all made sense. Patty may have been the first female detective in New York City but she may not have known that I had had a decade of working in this industry. She could have known. But she wasn’t investigating anything.

Years later my schedule had long since changed but I never once saw Patty on that shift or any shift I covered there. It was then that Rob let me in on yet another secret. That year Patty had repeatedly petitioned him and the other owner to fire me. Eventually they ended up having a big meeting with her in the office. The office of a bar being the absolute last sanctuary a bar owner has from the general public. Being invited there was a big deal.

When Donnell found this out he laughed a little too hard. And whenever the beef between Patty and me came up, he and his friend who worked there would giggle and look at each other. I couldn’t fathom that he wouldn’t take my side.

I tried defending myself one night because I didn’t get it, she tried to mess with my livelihood, why is that so funny? They both grew quiet. He hugged me and kissed the top of my head. From then on, in times when I would get a little arrogant, Donnell would gently say her name with great annunciation under his breath. Patty Maguire.

Rob didn’t fire me and didn’t tell me about her campaign for years. But they took her seriously and listened to her grievances in case there was something they were blinded to by my friendship. That’s how much she was respected.

Sitting on the other side of this green desk. I really wish I could’ve called Patty Mcguire.”