My debit card got hacked, probably from some unwise on-line activity, and I blocked my debit and credit cards for safety’s sake and cursed the world in which these thefts happen. Happily, my bank blocked all suspicious transactions (out in Californai), but I am left, at least for seven to ten days, without any plastic for a trip I was planning on taking down to Florida. I pulled cash out of the bank and went over to The Last Mile, a familiar place, to calm my aggravation and despair, pull things back into perspective and be diverted from that feeling that my life, in the short term, would be uncomfortable and complicated at the very moment I wanted to be at ease.
For some reason, The Last Mile is a good place to escape to — if one’s goal is the simple life, where cash is welcome, even preferred.
It was Friday, early into the new year and I stepped into the Mile around lunchtime, unusual for me. I rarely get there around lunch time. I was sad to see that the Christmas tree was gone. There were still some pine needles in that right-hand corner where it always goes up. There was still a HAPPY NEW YEAR greeting strung over the bar mirror. Life has resumed. There were about five people having either a hot dog or a burger.
The Mile is not known for its food, but owner Joe Barron (who flew back down to Miami this morning, probably on the same flight I was going to take) continues to give it a try from the 20×20 kitchen he added where there used to be a storage room. But he’s wisely continued to limited it to The Mile’s traditional fare of burgers and dogs. He just makes sure they’re good and that his cook buys only the best brands of beef and wieners and he only charges six bucks for them, with chips or fries.
Joe has to provide food under terms of the state Common Victualer’s license. State regulators don’t want people drinking without food available to follow it down and soak it up, although plenty of joints get away with it by just selling chips. Joe didn’t want his place to be such a joint. It would be a “family place”–with (some) food.
As I’ve probably told you in the past, Joe admits, when you happen to ask him, that he keeps this old establishment going sort of for sentimental reasons. But it’s a legend, this tavern with the seemingly ominous gloomy name and a reliable cast of characters dining and imbibing at any hour of the day or week. He owns the whole woodframe corner building. He’s got plenty of money, lives on the waterfront in Lynn when he’s not in Florida. The Last Mile is just one among his contributions to society and humanity, a warm place in life’s storm for some of the local world’s souls in search of comfort in the form of food, drink and community.
Joe’s cook is a young Hungarian-born guy named Andras who buys and cooks up his dogs and burgers and who lives in an apartment around the corner. Once upon a time, there was an unused old grill behind the bar, but that was an historical vestage from an earlier time — the early fifties when it was run by long-dead relatives of Joe Barron, catering to long-departed patrons who long-ago happily consumed dogs and burgers on the premises
Small kitchen, small menu — burgers, fries, fish sandwiches available on Fridays for the occasional Catholic still observing Friday abstinence. All the food goes in a big freezer that takes up a lot of the small kitchen space– big enough to handle the food supply adequate for a neighborhood establishment that doesn’t get a lot of lunch traffic.
But I know Joe has “food” dreams and would like to make his place famous for something you can eat there — some kind of special burger. He knows there’s a plain old sports bar in Norwood, Mass called Lewis’s and that it serves something called Lewis Burgers — I think it’s a fried egg on a burger.
I told Joe if he’s thinking about adding eggs, he should just serve breakfast.
“No, no, no. I don’t want Deano or anybody to have to open before daylight. This year, I’m thinking of getting my guy to make these Juicy Lucy burgers he keeps telling me about, stuffed with cheese. Can you imagine? And any kind of cheese you want.”
It didn’t send me, hearing Joe talk about it. I’m thinking of all the great and hopeful things I can dream about in the new year. A burger stuffed with cheese isn’t one of them.
As it was, I decided for the first time –believe it or not — to sample one of the Mile’s burgers, hand-shaped by Andres. My recent debit card misfortune was on my mind and I shared it with Deano, the bartender, who told me he’d been hacked once, too. He was going to let me put the burger and a ginger ale on a tab, but I paid from the wad of cash I had to withdraw from my bank to see me through until the new cards come.
* * * * * * * Anyway…enough about The Mile’s food history. * * * * * *
As I was downing my burger, Deano leaned in and said, “did you see who’s here? “
I thought I’d seen everybody who was there, but he indicated the guy we’d come to know only as Bill, sitting by himself at a table in the middle of the room. “Bill from Salem” is how we knew him. He had recently moved into the general area, was a salesman for a big international tech company and didn’t know many people. I’d seen him in The Mile just before Christmas and sat with him, just to be cordial. He’s a nice guy, but a bit of a mystery — like a lot of people who come into The Mile.
So, after I finished my burger, I picked up my ginger ale and went and sat with him again. (I think that was why Deano was pointing him out — he looked kind of lonely and a little exotic in the middle of the room that in the last fifteen minutes and welcomed about six chattering Revere city workers.
I greeted him and we chatted while he finished his burger and Micholob draft. We talked about the weather (up and down — lots of ice and snow recently, and rain), sports, a little politics, then he said something that froze me in my tracks. He said, “my wife backed down the driveway this morning. Gone, I guess, for good. Packed up everything of hers, and our five year marriage was over.”
I said, “Bill, I’m so sorry.”
“I appreciate that.” He sat back. “We moved here with the highest hopes.” He laughed. “I wonder if moving into the city of witches jinxed us.”
I assured him that was unlikely. But he wasn’t serious anyway. And he’d never said anything about his wife being a witch, or anything unpleasant. He hadna’t said much about her at all.
“I’m originally from Texas,” he said (I thought I detected an accent), lived in twenty-two places growing up. My work took me to cities around the world and I’ve lived in ten places in this country. Married seven times. This was number seven. Those women shared one or more of the houses in those ten places.”
“Some unlucky numbers, there,” I said.
“All numbers are unlucky for some people,” he said. “But you know what I’m seeing in my rear view mirror now, speaking, ah, ” metaphorically’, as it were.”
“What’s that?” I was keeping a tone of sympathy, mixed with an anticipatory sense that I was about to hear a piece of a life story, that I should be glad a near-stranger would trust me with, whether I wanted it or not .
My sense was right.”
“Driveways,” he said.
Driveways! Well, that was unexpected. I suppose in the Automotive Age, driveways have come to be important. (But, really? Driveways?)
Bill from Salem-by-way-of-Texas explained:
“Watching Terry (that must have been his most recently exiting wife’s name) —especially watching her back down the driveway –and I have a nice house with a nice long driveway – I thought how often I’ve watched a wife back down a driveway. Always had nice houses. they always had nice driveways. I usually drive a good car, got a new Lexus out there, parked around the corner.”
“Don’t want to leave it out there after dark,” I said.
“No, I’ve just stopped for lunch. I’ll be making some business calls and then I’ll be home to my empty house by the sea, and my single bed.”
I hadn’t meant to drop a bucket into that deep, sad well. I sipped my ginger ale.
“No,” Bill went on, I guess I have to asked what’s up with me. Always worked hard, done well, earned lots of money, met lots of women, fell in love often. But I’ll always have to look out a window, or stand at the top of a driveway and watch them–always having their own cars — back down the driveway and drive away.
“Oh, sure, there’s contact with them afterwards, over the phone or at a lawyer’s office — usually, anyway, not always — but that particular trip down the driveway, backing slowly down and away from me — and imaginging myself a disappearing figure in a window or at the top of that driveway, always wanting to watch, sometimes going down to the sidewalk or curb and actually watching their cars go out of sight — over the horizon as it were, I guess that’s the moment I feel my loss. Somehow I always want to see that trip down the driveway. It lets me ask myself — what went wrong?
. Of course, it’s never just one thing, it’s always lots of things, but then there is this one thing — seven women have decided they didn’t love me or I didn’t love them enough or the way they wanted to be loved and that my money, my looks.”
Looks? not, I guess they weren’t bad. Classically American, not Lynn/ Revere/East Boston ethnic or mediterranean. No, they were good, kind of blond nordic/ Scandanavian. He has blond/gray hair, a tall man, looking fit, probably has a gym membership…
“No, I make a good apperance, I’m pleasant. But the women all announce they’re leaving — and they leave. Down the driveway backwards they go. They’re rarely parked facing forward, so between glancing at the mirror and maybe occasionally looking up at me, the final act in the dram is this act of reversal. It’s all hope –the Mercedes or the Escalade, the Jaguar– or one time, believe it or not, it was a Rolls Royce! fading away. It’s the end. Hitting the road! Out of here!”
He drained the last of his draft beer. It occured to me that he was a guy who could have been drinking Chivas Regal. Deano had a bottle at the bar. But I guess this Bill was humbling himself among the plebs.
I asked: “You alright, Bill? There’s a priest that comes in here occasionally, or maybe you’d like a minister or a psychologist Believe it or not, the last time I checked, we had one of each. You don’t look Jewish, but if I’m mistaken, I know a rabbi who’s been in here at least once. Maybe the need to buy places without driveways, live in luxury high-rises. When they leave out of the garage below –hell, you’ll never see them. And the hell withthem!”
“Funny,” said Bill, and, regarding his emotinal health, “no, I’ll be fine. Been through it all before, the reversal. They drive in, they drive out.” He sat back. “Maybe it’s time for me to think about living alone.” He looked around. “Of course, I’ve been in here just one time before. It’s not my kind of place, usually. But I stopped in that first time because the traffic was backed up out front. I felt like a quick beer, the place looked respectable. Small and respectable. The bar tender, what’s his name?”
“Deano.”
“Deano! He was on duty that day, very friendly and welcoming. So I vowed I’d come back some day if I needed company and a little cheering up.”
“Well, I’m glad,” I said.”I’m Greg, by the way.” At last I introduced myself! He shook my hand. “Pleased to meet you, Greg. Thanks for letting me bend your ear.”
“Kind of tough,” I said, “finding yourself all alone in the middle of y our life with the holidays barely over.”
“Holidays kind of do it to me–or to the women,” he said. “A lot of my separations happen in January.”
All of a sudden, the woman named Molly Faraway was standing at our table.
Molly — have you met her yet? — i real friendly soul, divorced, brunette, maybe forty-seven-years-old, a veteran flight attendant based in Boston, originally from someplace in Rhode Island. And she’s pretty. No doubt about it. As I say, she was looming over us, smiling. She knew me slightly; knew my name, at least. “Hey, Greg,” she said, ” that your Lexus out there on the street?”
“No, you kidding, Molly? No,not mine. ” I indicated Bill. “This is the owner right here. Bill .” I turned to him. “You know, actually, Bill, I don’t know your last name.”
“Bill Harris,” Bill said, and suddenly stood up in a courtly manner and said to Molly, “Care to join us?”
Molly (last name Greeley), as it happened, had ended her shift, was holding a cocktail and was headed to join two fellow flight attendants at a table near where the Christmas tree had stood. I hadn’t seen them come in the side door where they often park (apparently near Bill’s Lexus). She explained how she was at the end of her shift, tired, just wanted a cocktail (looked like a rum and coke) and that her co-worker friends were over there waiting for her. whereupon Bill said, “then do you mind if I join you?”
And so he did. My last sight of him as I left — glancing first over at Deano behind the bar, who merely send a knowing look my way — was of Mister Bill Harris, properous but serially and now seriously lonely high-end traveling sales executive, seated with three flight attendants, all in uniform. And I wondered if one of them would become the next Mrs. Harris -and one day make her apperance backing down some future driveway somewhere in America where a man of Mr. Harris’s means would be likely to move her.
I walked down to the beach afterward, following a circuitous route, electing to walk down the winding little side streets, passing more than one houses having a short stub of a driveway of ancient broken pavement and macadam next to some humble woodframe working class soul’s domicile, sometimes with a dented and weatherbeaten car parked in it. These were driveways of ordinary people who probably rarely traveled but felt lucky to have a place to stow their cars when the snow piled up and the parking bans kicked in. Maybe there had been sad exits on these driveways, too, by men or women, husbands or wives, sons or daughters, bumping in reverse backwards down those mere ten yards or so, out into a cracked and narrow, over-familiar byway, shifting from reverse to drive — and driving off and away from the world or situation –or the person or persons — they were determined to leave behind.
Where. I mused, was the driveway in the heart of Texas that Bill Harris had backed down, probably at a tender age in his first care –some scarcely choice make-and-model he’d quickly outgrow — as he headed away from his world and into the world of corporate, monied isolation — in search of a wife ?
Sitting on a bench at Revere Beach, looking across cold sand peppered here and there with gull and pigeon feathers and the occasional cigarette butt — out at the cold blue winter Atlantic.
And I silently wished Mr. Bill Harris a Happy New Year.
19 Cent Notebook 