“Please don’t tell me that.”
“A really good TikTok.”
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.” But I’m almost smiling, which is annoying. She caught it. I can tell because she catches her bottom lip between her teeth, a quick bite-hold, and looks down at her mug like she’s hiding behind it.
I’ve served hundreds if not thousands of people at this bar. I’ve flirted with some of them, slept with a few, forgotten most. I notice faces and hands and mouths because that’s what proximity does when you’re standing two feet from strangers for eight hours a night. It’s professional observation. It’s pattern recognition. It’s nothing.
But I keep tracking her mouth and I don’t have a professional reason for that.
“Can I ask you something?” she says.
“You’re going to anyway.”
“The patches on your jacket. How long have you been collecting them?”
I glance at the hook by the back door where my jacket hangs during shifts. She followed my eyes there before, I remember that. She looked at the jacket when she was leaving.
“Since I was sixteen. First one was from a punk show in a basement in Fishtown. Some band I can’t even remember. The show was terrible and the patch was free and I sewed it on with thread I stole from my mom’s sewing kit.”
“Is it still on there?”
“Bottom left, under the BLM patch. It’s faded to hell. You can barely read it.”
“But you kept it.”
“It was the first one. You don’t throw away the first one.”
She nods. Not like she’s agreeing with me. Like she’s filing it. Putting it somewhere in that busy head of hers next to the Pretenders and CBGB and Patti Smith and whatever else she’s been collecting since last time.
“I looked up the Buzzcocks,” she says. “And the Clash. And the Pretenders.”
“And?”
“The Clash is incredible. London Calling is on my running playlist now.”
“You run?”
“Every morning. It’s a firefighter thing.” She shrugs. “Also a can’t-sit-still thing.”
I picture her running. Early morning, clean sneakers, London Calling in her earbuds, all that restless energy burning off block by block through the neighborhood we apparently share. I stop picturing her running before my brain starts filling in more details, like how good she'd look in a pair of tight leggings.
“The Buzzcocks are fun,” she continues, “but I think I like the Pretenders best. Chrissie Hynde’s voice is—” She pauses, searching. “It sounds like she knows something you don’t and she’s not going to tell you what it is.”
That’s maybe the best description of Chrissie Hynde I’ve ever heard, and it came from a twenty-two-year-old who learned the word punk less than a week ago.
“You’re a quick study,” I say.
“I’m a good listener.” She finishes her mule. Sets the mug down. “One more?”
I check the clock. It’s ten-thirty. She’s had one drink in an hour and a half, and she’s not drunk or trying to get there. She’s just here. Sitting at my bar, drinking at a pace that says she’s staying for the company, not the alcohol.
I make her another mule. She puts a twenty on the bar before I set it down.
“Stop overtipping,” I say.
“Stop deserving it.”
I take the twenty. She’s a regular now. I don’t know when that happened exactly, somewhere between the Shirley Temple and the Patti Smith lecture, but she’s a regular. She has a stool and a drink order and she knows where my jacket hangs and she put the Clash on her running playlist and she’ll be back.
