“I'm twenty-two. And it’s not your bar.”
She says it without heat, just observation, and I like her a little for it. She must have noticed the name on the liquor license behind me. Carl Novak. Not Teague Moran.
“It’s my bar tonight.” I reach under the counter and set a glass in front of her. Fill it with ginger ale, grenadine, and a cherry. Slide it across. “Shirley Temple. On the house. Drink that while you actually look at the menu and figure out what you want like a grown-up.”
She stares at the Shirley Temple. Then she stares at me. Then she picks it up and drinks it.
“Good,” I say. “See? Tastes better than regret.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had regret.”
“At twenty-two? Give it time.”
She almost smiles. It’s there and gone, a flicker at the corner of her mouth, and I catch it because catching things is what I do. Eight hours behind a bar every night teaches you to read faces faster than words. Hers is easy. She’s sad and she’s tired and she’s trying very hard to be tough about it, and the trying is the part that makes her look young.
I go back to my routine. There’s glassware to polish, a keg to check, the playlist to manage. Right now it’s the Pretenders, Chrissie Hynde’s voice filling the room with the kind of restless energy that’s too smart to be angry and too angry to be sad. The bar is mostly empty. A couple of regulars at the pool table, nursing beers. A guy reading a paperback in the corner booth who comes in every Tuesday and never orders more than two drinks and always leaves a ten.
The girl with the Shirley Temple is watching me. Not in a creepy way. More like she’s trying to figure out where she landed.
“What is this?” she asks.
“A Shirley Temple. We covered this.”
“No, the music. What is this?”
I look at her. Most people who come into Anthem don’t ask about the music. They either know it or they tune it out. She’s doing neither. She’s listening.
“The Pretenders. ‘Back on the Chain Gang.’”
“I don’t know them.”
“You wouldn’t.” It’s not a dig. It’s just math. She’s twenty-two. She grew up on whatever was streaming when she hit middle school, which means she missed roughly four decades of music that mattered. “They’re from Akron. Late seventies, early eighties. Chrissie Hynde is the frontwoman. She’s one of the best to ever do it.”
“Best what?”
“Vocalist. Songwriter. Just — presence. She walked into rooms full of men who thought they owned punk and she took the whole thing from them without raising her voice.”
The girl leans forward on her elbows. The Shirley Temple is half gone. “Punk? This is punk?”
“This is punk-adjacent. Punk is a big tent.” I pull a glass off the rack and start polishing. “You want the real origin story? It starts in New York. CBGB, 1974. The Ramones. Talking Heads. Blondie. Television. A bunch of people who couldn’t play their instruments very well and didn’t care because the point wasn’t technique. The point was that music had gotten too big and too clean and too far from anything real, and they wanted to tear it down and start over.”
“Why?”
That one word. Why. She asks it like she actually wants to know, not like she’s making conversation. She’s got her chin in her hand now and she’s looking at me, and her eyes aren’t red anymore. They’re focused.
“Because that’s what punk is. It’s the reaction to being told to sit down and shut up and be grateful for what you’ve got.” I set the glass down. “It crossed the Atlantic. London, 1976. The Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned. Different energy over there. More political. More angry. The kids in London were broke andbored and the government was telling them their future was sorted and they looked around and said no it fucking isn’t.”
“And then what?”
“And then it kept going. D.C. in the eighties. Minor Threat. Fugazi. Ian MacKaye invented straight edge because he was tired of watching his friends drink themselves stupid, and he turned that into a movement. Then it went west. California. Black Flag. Dead Kennedys. Bad Religion. Then it went underground and came back up and went underground again and every time it resurfaced it looked different but it was always the same thing underneath.”
“Which is what?”
I stop polishing. She’s finished the Shirley Temple. The cherry stem is on the napkin, tied in a knot, and I don’t think she did it on purpose.
“Giving a shit,” I say. “About something. Anything. Loud enough that people have to hear you.”
She’s quiet for a second. Then she licks her lips, a quick nervous thing, tongue across the lower lip and gone, and I notice it because I notice everything behind this bar and because her mouth is soft and her face is open and she just sat through a five-minute punk history lecture without checking her phone once.
