Chapter 3

I like this moment best.  It wasn't the drinking so much, but what it meant. It certainly wasn't the aftermath or the consequences that I relished. This was my moment. This was the time when I could feel my heart rate slow just by having it on the table in front of me.

It’s the curve of the bourbon as it sits atop the shot glass. I can see it now, resting, sometimes dancing from the blow of the air conditioner. I've missed this curve. This moment, when I’m going to be taken away from here. When I raise it up and throw it past my lips. The first place I feel it is the back of the throat, maybe the back of the tongue gets some too, but if it does, it’s fast.

And then comes the beer. It’s not a chaser. It doesn't chase anything. I let the bourbon, or vodka, or tequila, all the remnants rest in the back of my mouth and burn me up. And then I reach for the beer, and take it back. It goes down. It doesn't chase, it trails, it cleanses.

“Want another?” the bartender asked George. He looked up, nodded. “I changed my mind. I mean about dinner. That steak looks good,” he said nodding in Rich’s direction.

“Right away,” the bartender answered.

George reached for his second drink. He didn’t start it right away.  Maybe he was thinking about what Rich had said about drinking it fast. Oh Shit, who cares about this guy at a bar, and he took a big gulp.

He would tell me later that his daughters were on his mind. His two girls, now women, late in high school, well into puberty with breasts and periods and tampons. And moods. Oh, the moods. His wife had told him about the years of slamming doors from when she was a pubescent teenager. He didn't know from this. But he was getting a crash course.

Mostly the girls fought with their mother. He thought of himself as the peace keeper, but really he was the one they went to when they “hated” mom. He didn't try to keep the peace, he just wanted them to love him. He knew he wasn't there enough to play good cop-bad cop. What impact could he really have between 9 and 11 PM? Now that they’re more fully formed, did he even matter to them? The good and the bad, either way they carry his name. He knew he would never be father of the year, with all the business travel. He never made a conscious decision, but it was hard to be businessman of the Year and father of the year in the same twelve-month period. And so most years he chose businessman.

When they were raising the girls he could handle most anything, whether he did or not was his own decision. The poop, the diapers, even the middle of the night crying. But when his second child had a bad stomach, he couldn't do it. Not the vomit. That was his wife’s domain. “I’ll work one end, you work the other,” he told her.

So when we heard the gagging midway through his second drink he instinctively looked away, childishly avoiding, trying to plug his ears with his shoulders. At first the sound and commotion were an annoyance. The thumping of feet, the crashing of silverware onto the porcelain until they smashed into my table.

Rich staggered back from the bar grabbing his throat, backing into George forcing him to focus. The small, choking man, fell toward me, I reached for my drinks but couldn't save them from wetting my crotch. I lean forward trying not to get caught in the choking man’s path. His body slammed against the bar, his belly first, holding his neck, his face the color of cherries.

I always hoped in an emergency I would hear the call to action. But I stood there, dumb, too surprised to move, until the other man at the table next to me took Rich from behind and pulled. He pulled and yanked, trying to loosen whatever had lodged in his throat. Rich’s five foot seven inch frame began to slump, as oxygen slowed.

George was rubber necking at the action in the center of the bar, watching the third man continue his work. The real horror of it wasn't the dance between the two, but the sound, the gagging, the sweat, the colors, his face. The third man, skinny with carrot-colored hair and a face to match caused by the exertion, was losing energy as the bar noise grew. The bartender telling him to “pull up,” the high pitched screaming of the waitress, the shuffling of feet as people avoided the fight, the terrified looks through the glass partition as the diners watched the struggle to breath.

The carrot-topped man was out of strength, heaving himself, sweat pouring from his head as he pulled in, tugged up, pulled in. I moved closer, knowing I had no expertise in the matter. All I knew about life saving I learned from news stories where an 8 year-olds saved lives while shopping at Wal-Mart. And it appeared to me that the third man was doing everything right. The bartender leapt across the bar, unsuccessfully, catching his shoe on the edge and falling to the floor, holding his ankle. The waitress, now in full horror-movie scream, as the body slumped, with no clear way to revive him.

“It’s not working,” the third man pleaded, “it’s not working.”

I could watch no more, the near-lifeless body a hanging, gagging mess. The third man propped him against the bar and I stepped between the two.

Grabbing Rich I pulled and tugged, the body heavier than I expected, the face now alabaster. Fear drove me, but I too struggled to get my arms around his belly, stretched to lift him and force enough air with my tug to drive the obstruction free.

Pull, tug, grab, dry off sweating hands, pull, tug, grab, tighten, squeeze.

George winced, still trying to avoid direct eye contact, but recognizing that he was watching a man die. Finally, he engaged, pushing me aside with his big paw and grabbing the dead weight of the body, towering over the shorter victim. “Pull,” the bartender yelled from the floor, “pull,” and three mighty tugs led to a great burp and a chunk of rare red meat jumped from his mouth along with a teaspoon of red wine. The meat shot out hitting the side of the bar, falling to the floor.

George fell into an open booth, with the shorter man resting against him. Rich gulped for air. His airway now clear, his body heaving, his color returning, his chest rising and falling. He pulled at his tie, then his collar until the buttons looked like they would pop.

The carrot-topped man and I sat across from them in the leather booth. The four of us, strangers, sweating and exhausted from physical exertion and fear sat at the square table.

The table opened to the bar and was attached to a glass wall on one side. The bartender, the maître d and the formerly screaming waitress now crying, her hand over her mouth and tears dribbling over her knuckles, all stood around us. The bartender rubbed his injury, the maître d asked questions, offered services and apologies.

Rich waved them off inhaling deeply, as if breathing for the first time. His hands said don’t help me, he couldn't yet speak. The bartender and waitress stared at the four of us, sitting in shocked silence. Time passed, the recovering man’s eyes tearing from the physical shock. He took the glass of water in front of him and slowly drank, clearing his throat of further debris.

He coughed again. Resting his palms on the cool dark table. He reached for a napkin, the fork and steak knife slipping out the bottom rattling on the floor. He wiped his brow, looked up and squeaked: “Who the Hell are you guys?”

Chapter 2

Tuesday, Early January

Every town has its meeting place. Watering hole, tavern, pub. The earliest cities had them. You could find them on the oldest maps in the town center.  A cave where people gathered to share information and learn. In cities they were old, storied, tattered places with histories etched into the wood bars. The narrative scratched into the stools and under the tables.

In the suburbs everything is new. The stories go back weeks, maybe months, but not decades, not centuries. The tables are too nice to carve. And besides the heavily-lacquered tops made it impossible. The bartenders wipe them clean as if a water mark could rise. Often they are attached to a steak house. No pub food here, but large portions with presentations and discussion about where and when the lobsters were caught, what the cows were fed, the value of marbled beef.

But the purpose remains. It is a place for the lost to find comfort from whatever road they traveled to get there. A chance to be alone in the crowd. Find companionship in the other souls who sought out a place that wasn’t home. Maybe it was someone from the adjacent hotel. A salesman on the road needing a drink before going to bed. Nervous about the morning presentation. The businessman who wants a pause in his day between the battles of work and home.

Sitting in places like this I often make up stories about the patrons, wondering what brought them here.  The break-up with the girlfriend, the guy they needed to fire at work, the problem in accounting.  But sometimes the stories scream out to me.  I can't ignore them if I try.

“Vodka rocks, splash of lime,” said a large man with big hands. His baritone boomed, matching his six-foot-four frame. The bartender obliged with a nod, turning to grab a tumbler.

“A gimlet,” a voice croaked from the other end of the empty Tuesday night bar.

“I’m sorry?” replied the large man, in a tone that suggested the appropriate level of annoyance at the question and questioner.

The second man was short. Not just in comparison to the large one. But his almost stumpy shape and sausage fingers that barely made it around the glass suggested something between short and medically small. He stood with his back against the long bar, little arms splayed behind him looking out across a series of six mostly empty booths and stand up tables. He smiled and moved his wine glass and plate closer to the large man. “You just ordered a gimlet,” he said.

“What’s your point?” asked the large man, stepping back, trying to maintain distance.

“I used to do the same thing,” the short man said. “A gimlet sounds too, I don’t know, feminine. So I’d order a ‘vodka rocks, splash of lime.’ It sounds slightly more masculine.”

“I’m not gay,” the large man said into his glass, between gulps.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” said the short man, laughing now. “I’m not either, I was just saying.”

“That’s not why I do it,” said the large man, making clear his lack of interest in continuing the conversation.

The bartender passed the drink across the dark cherry wood bar.

The large man took the small straw from his drink and threw it angrily to the floor and began drinking, without stopping until his glass was half drained. He closed his eyes as the vodka drew down his throat. The tartness of the lime mixing with the burn of the vodka was the combination he looked for. This was the moment he’d waited for all day, but it wasn’t pure. The interruption.

“I’m sorry,” the small said, pulling back. “I was just making conversation.”

The large man turned toward the bar, looked to the shorter man and confided it “had been a long day,” and raised his glass to his bar mate in faux toast.

The large Man continued drinking, watching the television on a shelf above the bar. “You gonna join us for dinner,” the bartender asked, his accent slipping in only on the word dinner. The large man was unclear if it was British or Australian, hell, it could have been South African.

“I don’t think so. Just liquid for me,” he replied.

“We serve that too,” the bartender said leaving him to finish his drink.

The large man, who would later reveal his name to be George, tried to focus on the television but couldn’t ignore the chomping and slurping noises coming from the man at the other end of the row. 

I don't know much about scientific theories, but I've spent a lot of time in a lot of bars on a lot of business trips. And my experience brought me to the following conclusion:  There are two kinds of men under five-foot eight. The first is the guy who always wanted to be six-feet tall and still can’t believe the bad hand he was dealt. He doesn't discuss it. Doesn't joke about it. There are moments where he believes if he doesn't talk about it, it doesn't exist. But for him it's always there. In pictures he feels his heels rising til he’s on his tip toes. If there is a step, he is apt to climb it. Anything to give himself a raise.

And then there is the person who doesn't realize he was smaller than the rest. Nobody told him growing up that he was shorter and so in some way inferior. He talks big, thinks big, acts big. He is big.

”I'm Rich” the short man said, his arms barely reaching across the space. Even with the overwhelming support of body language suggesting he didn't want to have this conversation, George politely introduced himself and expecting it would be the end of their relationship. Quelling Rich’s interest in his drink choices. But Rich wasn't that kind of person. If there was a void he would fill it. If there was a moment to make a personal connection, Rich would seize it. His eagerness to connect could be construed in any number of ways. Not all of them good.

“You feel better? You seemed to need that drink,” Rich said. George’s previous reaction was meant to shut off further questions, comments and all communication. Rich was impervious. But even Rich couldn't mis-read George’s latest glare.

“No judgement,” Rich said. “I just.  You seem better now.”

Next to George, Rich was a shrunken mass. Both men in blue suits, ties, each resting a foot on the bar iron and leaning in, their entire weight on their elbows and right knee. But the difference in the figure they cut couldn't have been more stark.

“I don’t mean to pry,” Rich said, “I'm just interested in people. It’s a Tuesday. I’ve had two drinks. I downed my first faster than you did. You've got a wedding ring on, but it appears you’re not meeting your wife or your mistress. You’re just a guy, at a bar who needed a drink. Alone.”

“Alone, exactly,” said George. “I’m not sure why you think I want to discuss my drinking habits with you. I'm actually surprised you’d think I want to discuss anything with a stranger at a bar.”

“We’re all strangers,” Rich said. “We just happen to be people at a bar who don’t know each other.” Without a response to this he added: “I'm not looking for trouble. I just thought,” and he trailed off.

The door to the Steak House was darkened by a canopy lit only by a flickering candle perched high on a table. The darkness continued into the restaurant and the dimly lit maître d stand which led into the bar area to the right. The broad wood expanse swung around and was densely populated Wednesday to Friday night by groups of 40 to 60 year olds trying to bring some life back into their marriages as their children and bodies aged.

Friday and Saturday nights welcomed a younger crowd in slightly the same predicament. They were newly married, maybe a child on the way. Their evenings were fuelled by fear that their youth was ending, and their freedoms slipping away. The freedoms of a world that began in college or late high school. The world where sex and drinking were new. And once the Christmas morning newness wore off they moved on to new partners, different drugs, more adventurous sex, trying to reclaim the thrill of the first time.

When they realized they couldn't reclaim it, they settled into their lives, with one partner, a drink or two a few nights a week and the acknowledgement that more than two drinks would bury them the next morning. Although they kept up their Sunday basketball games and girls night out, the recovery period was longer. The highs were less so. And the lows were harder to climb out of.

Mixed in with the crowd was an older set, post-sixty, mostly men looking for something new. Sometimes they earned it, sometimes they paid for it. Either way they went away unsatisfied.

The Steak House closed Sunday and Monday and, like some of its patrons, it took a while for the scene to get going when they re-opened Tuesday night. This Tuesday in January was particularly quiet.

Tuesday was the wildcard. The owners debated whether to open, and when they did, they closed up by 10:00. Sometimes a group would come in and make their night. During holiday time companies wanted their office parties early in the week as the latter part filled quickly with business and personal get-togethers.

This was one of those Tuesdays that made the owners wonder. The drinkers were scattered. Some dinner guests. Enough to keep the waiters from checking their cells phone, but not enough to make anybody real money. Just enough to give them time to complain.

The restaurant area, situated behind the bar through a glass partition had a mix of couples and singles, mostly celebrating birthdays that got caught in the New Year’s net. Quiet songs of “Happy Birthday” were sung over chocolate cake, vanilla ice cream and 4 forks.

At the bar, George and Rich stood near each other, finishing their drinks in silence. The stand-up tables were mostly empty. I stood at one end of the bar in my own head deciding how to take down the shot of bourbon on the table in front of me. The anonymous men were watching Wolf Blitzer.

One more patron stood alone at a table like mine, a tall half empty beer flute on top of a cocktail napkin. He appeared to be watching nothing, just scribbling notes on another cocktail napkin.

I ignored the blare of the televisions or the different games, focused on the drink in front of me my hands sliding up and down the shot, warming the liquid inside.

I've been here before. Not to this particular bar, but places like it in dozens of cities. I had certain expectations for tonight, but watching a man die wasn't part of it.

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

Late December

“How much is enough?” The others on the gondola didn't recognize the sharp edges to the question. But coming from my brother-in-law it came with attendant arrows. And I didn't have to ask, how much of what.

The snow fell in fluffy piles, like baked marshmallows atop sweet potatoes. They looked so light, but were piling into what would become Aspen Mountain’s 200 inch base. The gondola swayed in the howling wind. It was day five of our annual seven-day Christmas vacation. All ten of us in the immediate family plus assorted relatives, cousins and those people we called Aunt and Uncle, but had no blood relation. In the evening, when the cold outside made the chairlift up more unpleasant than the thrill ride down the mountain, the “family” would fill the hotel bar. Even those that didn't ski showed up for drinks. My father-in-law was paying.

And while the week was supposed to conjure up visions of late nights by the fire watching “It’s A Wonderful Life,” it resembled “Call of the Wild,” where the mountain lions looked beautiful walking across the snowy tundra until they charged, ripping off the head of an unsuspecting deer. Our annual family stand-off always took place amid a scene of natural beauty, where animals tore each other apart attempting to fend off extinction.

My wife, Christina, stood behind me in the gondola and squeezed my arm until I felt it. A credit to her strength, fighting through the Under Armour long underwear, the thinsulate sweater, the North Face jacket. I turned to look at her as we stood in the crowded pod, leaning on each other for support, an odd metaphor for her family.

“Cam, is that a metaphysical question or a rhetorical one?” I asked.

“I'm just wondering Wade,” he said. “It seemed like a lot coming out of the business, especially in a tough year.”

“Thanks Cam, but I believe your check was bigger this year as well,” I volleyed. “So I'm not sure there is much to complain about.” I said it loud enough so Cam could hear me and way too loud for a small cart of 10 increasingly uncomfortable strangers swaying 150 feet above the fluffy, frozen pillows. The kids were at ski school, other members of the family took various routes to their day I had the good fortune of making the 20-minute ride up with an angry Cameron Wander.

Three generations of Wanders had run the family media business, but none had done it as well as me. One other note, all those who ran the business were Wanders. “I'm not a Wander, I'm the son -in-law.”

Cam didn't see it that way. The credit for the company’s double digit growth five years in a row seemed to flow through Cam’s blood lines, but it never made it to my desk. It stopped and settled somewhere on the graves of the previous generations of Wanders.

After the morning incident we didn't see Cam and his wife Laura for the rest of the day. The benefits of a ski vacation, you can be separate in your togetherness.

Apple Jacks, the après Ski bar at the bottom of the big mountain was quiet, the crowd of young skiers had done their damage. Arriving fresh from the slopes, slamming beers until they couldn't walk, then slipping away to their under-stocked/over-crowded rooms of shared housing. They left their skis, snowboards and assorted paraphernalia including, but not limited to gloves, boots, jackets, socks and depending on the day the occasional bra, strewn across the re-fabricated tables made out of the old bowling lanes.

By the time the Wander clan arrived the place has been restored, cleaned up, ready for a more mature crowd who wanted imported beers, the kind they don’t have on tap. We wanted Scotch, a 12 year not six, maybe a Kahlua and cream. Our crowd was the middle aged group of skiers who first retired to our rooms for some clean up. We stowed our skis to ensure their overnight safety, massaged our wives sore feet hoping for something more. We took hot baths or Jacuzzis. We removed our various braces and supports so that we could come back tomorrow and “ski hard” and feel young. We were careful not to overdo, watch the back, and that reconstructed knee and the tail-bone that was hurt from our one attempt at snowboarding.

My wife and I were the last of the family to arrive and it was clear Cam had started early. My wife calls him an ugly drunk, but he’s not, he’s an angry drunk. He’s angry sober for that matter and I couldn't blame him. If my father overlooked me as heir to the family business and gave it to my brother-in-law, the first non-blood member of the family in three generations, I’d be pissed too.

I managed to avoid him while making my way through every one of the other family members for whom I feel varying degrees of regard. In hindsight this was a strategic error. It gave him more time to drink.

Sometimes he has more tact, but the shots of Patrone had loosened whatever inhibitions were left and turned up a flame on the fuse from the morning. He was ready to blow.

“How much was the pool you put in last year?” he shouted to no one in particular. “Do you still put those hockey tickets through the company?”

I tried to have a discussion with my wife over his increased heckling. But he was a boxer, chasing me, jab after jab. Ignoring him became impossible.

“And the bonus, was it more than your salary?” Bam!

Circling me, seeing what I would take. What I could take.

“What was the criterion for that monster bonus?” Pow!

Like the challenger, wondering when I’d respond and unleash the terror behind the champ’s punch, he taunted. Everyone was listening. They all saw the fight rising in the distance, coming our way. A morning mist traveling across the horizon, cutting through the mountains.

They heard my mother-in-law’s voice climb and then everyone else battled his volume. And soon everyone was talking louder, shouting in an attempt to drown him out, but they sounded like idiots each asking inane questions in voices more appropriate for a tarmac.

He kept coming. “How much is enough? The money is for all of us.” The others stopped trying to compete. Mouth spitting, words flying, everybody looking at the two of us. And finally Cam went for the knockout. The words that had been forming in his mind for years. The thoughts that laid there late at night in the back of his skull like a tumor:

“I could do a better job running this company. I could do it. And I’m a Helluva lot cheaper.”

The bar was quiet now. He was trying to hurt me. Or his father. Or the universe. But he was also providing his audition tape for the other board members, who were now standing awkwardly with my in-laws.

“You’re not even a blood relative,” he said. “You’re doing nothing but gouging us? Nothing’s gonna be left.”

He looked around at the other members of the family and concluded: “Enjoy it while you can everybody, because the bank account is running low.”

“That’s enough,” my mother -in-law said, angling at my defense. But it wasn’t really me she was defending. She was protecting the family from the embarrassment of the situation. Trying to tamp it down before word got out that perfection had a crack in it.

“Why didn’t you ever ask me to be in the business?” he said, his voice now a hoarse whimper. “Why didn’t you ask me to be on the Board? I can do it.”

I’d pictured the moment for years and I always saw myself growing six inches and looking down at him and saying: “I think the fact that your father never hired you is a pretty good indication that you can’t do the job. Frankly, you’re unemployable.”

Maybe it was the raging fire that lit the room and pulled the colors from the paneled walls, or the snow falling silently on the blue mountain. Or maybe it was because the chairman of my board, my father-in-law, was sitting six feet away. Whatever it was I wasn’t in the mood to elevate things. There amid the contrasts, the whole family, tucked together into a corner of the world. Me, my wife, our two kids, Cam, his wife, their two kids and my 77 year old in laws. It was their time to show the family off, their time to prove to the world that we could do it: A family business, family vacations, all perfect.

In their world the slightest flare up gets smothered in a wet blanket of gifts, chocolate chip cookies and heavy doses of small blue pills drowned in mouthfuls of colorful vodka drinks.

No fights, no disagreements. The family motto was: If money could solve it, it’s not a problem.

So I didn’t retort. I didn’t fight back. I let Cam continue because I’d found that once he got going only he could stop himself. Challenging just got him more animated. He was a volcano that began with huge hurls of energy, exploding, convulsing, actually erupting. And then that phase stopped and another began. He oozed miles and millions of pounds of hot lava. Ever so slowly it ran over everything in its path. Killing it all. This was Cam.

But he made it tougher and tougher to ignore. He moved closer to me. I could feel his breath and his hands were in my face and then it slowed and continued and slowed and continued and then, like a windup toy whose batteries had run low, he slowed, almost to a stop.

I hadn’t even had a drink, but my face was the color of overripe tomatoes. And he gained energy again, started coming, he kept coming. My wife, her head in her hands, my father-in-law looked like he was gonna have a stroke, his hand over his mouth, my mother-in-law crying, ‘no Cam, no, no.’ My sister-in-law reached for his hands trying to pull him back down into his seat, embarrassed by the scene, but more than likely thinking this public lecture was long overdue. Our kids were playing Frogger on a 25 year-old video game stuck in the corner next to a Pac Man machine the size of a phone booth.

Cam, five eight and skinny as a ski pole with a belly full of beer was not a terrible threat. But I was done. Done being his whipping boy especially on this topic and I turned and began walking out. And then he started pointing and I couldn’t hear anymore because of the distance and the din and then I heard it. At some point he screamed it, something, something, something, “You pussy.”

That’s right, a pussy. For walking out I guess. I’m not fighter, but what forty year old taunts another man with an epithet last used in a fraternity house?

And he screamed it and everything stopped. It got deathly quiet and I felt all the eyes of the room on me. So I turned back around and unlike my reaction in college when I would have charged him, the consequences be damned, I walked back toward the table where he was standing, and my wife somehow made her way between us, thinking I was gonna hit him, which I wasn’t. But she was pushing me away and I began to tell him what a piece of shit he was, and that if it weren’t for me he’d be on food stamps.

Suddenly he changed course. Maybe his better judgment said to flee rather than fight. Or maybe it was his wife’s inch deep nail marks in his arm (a manicure I helped finance). And he stormed off.

And right on cue my mother-in-law jumped in: “Where shall we go for dinner?”