Dreamland Social Club(80)

Leo went behind the bar and slid open a bin refrigerator, then took the bottle cap off and slid the bottle on a coaster onto the bar in front of Jane. She took a sip and waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. “What are we doing here?” she asked finally.

“He fessed up about not paying the rent, and about the rats, too.”

Jane just waited.

“And did you know you can get shut down for ‘excessive fruit flies’?”

Jane shook her head. He wasn’t drunk, she didn’t think. But there was something sort of off-seeming about Leo. He shook his head and looked around the bar. “I think this might be the Anchor’s last hurrah. You and me right now.”

“I’m really sorry.” She wiped condensation off her beer, then wiped her wet finger on her jeans.

Leo said, “It’s okay. I’m the one who owes you an apology. You can’t help those who don’t help themselves. Isn’t that what they say? I mean, he could’ve done something, you know? Cleaned up?”

Jane just nodded in agreement, and Leo came around and sat on the stool next to her. “I’ve been thinking a lot about this place lately, and I figured out why I’m so messed up about it all.” He sighed. “This was my Trip to the Moon, this place. My Elephant Hotel.”

He shook his head. “I used to build forts behind the bar and pretend we were under attack by some evil foreign navy. I used to pretend I had records of my own, songs I’d written, in the jukebox. I used to build igloos out of the toilet paper supplies in the storeroom.” He paused and seemed sadder for a flash. “I was here on nine-eleven, even though I didn’t really understand what was going on.”

He hung his head now and said, “I’m sure it sounds awful, but I grew up here. At the bar. It’s the one place I remember my parents together and happy.”

“It doesn’t sound awful,” she said. “It sounds fun.”

“I used to think a lot about growing up and being old enough to tend bar and take over from my dad, you know. I guess that ship has sailed. I’ve never even gotten drunk here. It just seems”—he laughed—“wrong that I never will.”

She was so happy that they were talking again—and like this—that she had to fight the urge to smile, to dance.

“We could get drunk now,” she said. “We can build a fort out of toilet paper. Whatever you want.”





They stocked the jukebox with songs, and almost every time one started Leo would say, “Oh my God, I almost forgot about this song” or “I love this song” or “I hate this song,” but Jane didn’t really recognize any of them, didn’t care. She remembered dancing—that had been her earliest memory—so there must have been music, but she couldn’t remember any songs beyond “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland,” just a feeling. Some of these songs sparked that feeling again. Others, not so much. And then the song that started with “Hey! Ho! Let’s go!” came on and Jane felt a sort of explosion in her brain. This was a song she knew. Even though she didn’t know it by name.

They danced in the bar and on the bar and had a few more beers and went to the storeroom, but there wasn’t much in the way of toilet paper, and then they sat up on the bar, facing the wall behind it—feet perched on fridges of beer—and looked at all the old postcards and signs on the wall.

“I just can’t believe this wall is going to be gone,” Leo said as they read from old postcards and bar tabs and IOUs, studying pictures of people who’d been to the Anchor—celebrities, the mayor, but also just a woman who’d gone into labor while walking past and tourists who’d gone home to faraway lands with tall enough tales that they’d sent postcards from Peru, Amsterdam, Berlin.

“This is one of my favorites.” Leo pulled a postcard off the wall and read from it. “Everyone has a holy place, a refuge, where their heart is purer, their mind clearer, where they feel close to God or love or truth or whatever it is they happen to worship.”

“I like it,” Jane said. She’d just spotted a stack of postcards advertising the Anchor itself, next to the cash register. “What is it?”

“It’s from some book about a bar, I think.”

Jane studied the attribution on the card—J. R. Moehringer—and read the quote again.

“That’s what this place is for me,” Leo said. “Not just the bar. But Coney. And this wall is a sort of monument.”

“You should talk to the museum,” Jane said, still high on the fact that the museum was going to have its very own Preemie collection. “Maybe they’ll move it.”

“Move the wall?”

She shrugged. “They’re coming to get the Claverack horse on Thursday.”

“They are?”

She nodded. “Or they could re-create the wall. Just move the stuff.”

“I don’t know,” Leo said. “I don’t really see the point if the rest of the place is gone.”

Jane didn’t want the place gone either. Because she never wanted to forget this night.

“I heard you have an extra ticket,” he said. “To the presentation?”

She surveyed him, with his tired lollipop eyes and anemone hair, and said reluctantly, “I promised it to Legs.”