The Bar Tender

As you all know who have read that article of mine ages ago, men in Croatia, in my experience of them, all have a watering hole, a bar, a pub a place they go and do that business men do, newspapers, gossip, gaping at boobs of female customers and so on. ..

Well my husband of course has his local hole, and its my business not to intrude too much on his watering hole, else he would no doubt change it for another. Its just the way thing are. Men go to these places to be safe from their wife's, and only bring the wife's to inspect the spots on special occasions.

So. If Intend to use his hole, I must do it when he is not there. Only that way can my husbands watering hole be mine to use at liberty. Duje and I adopted my husbands hole, around the 11th hour. We would go for coffee after park every day during the winter, for long enough to be missed when we changed our day plans.

But from time to time its fun to go to this hole. Because its the opposite to the watering hole I choose for my self. My day bar has lots of sunshine, lots of air, plants ,flowers, white , lots of while colour, hard pretty chairs to perch upon, and plenty of fancy, fashionable and arty people served by young and fresh skipping waiters

My husbands bar has lots of smoke, it lacks air, the air you breathe is definitely made of nicotine,  there is not much light in this place,  the colours are saturated and place is full of comfy couches. There you are served by a grouchy, owner, over dosed on  people in his life and thus dislikes them in general, so every drink he serves he serves with a cynical comment at the world.

But sometimes I like to have coffee there just for this. You escape the sunshine and enter this half dismal bar, you enter a world. The music is good. The man knows his stuff. The coffee is perfect. The alcohol is good too, the owner has experience. There are lots of regular men who use the bar as the living room. And than there are the women.

All kinds. I have to have noticed, its a thing I do as you know, collect the curious. So I noticed the women who enter this bar like bees attracted by that giant rotting flesh scented flower. These women may have got lost somewhere along the way , and ended up for coffee at this place, that is not a women kind of place. But once they discovered it for what ever reason, they keep coming back.

A law secretary. A nurse.  Aged post office lady. All kinds of middle aged, past their prime violets, dressed in clothes which mean to camouflage them into those flower printed lavender sacks. They pass and your brain for an instant thinks a country wardrobe passed you by, as they even smell of lavender. And they always have some sort of mission, a letter to give, pick up, something involving touching  the grouch owner . Exchanging something physically. Sometimes even money is enough. She pays for her coffee and greedily slurps up his fingers as he returns the coins.

Yesterday a woman of this description entered the bar from the back. She perched next to the loo  for ten minutes just staring at him, the greying, grumpy owner, slouched in his greying velvet armchair, sipping back his vodka hidden in soda water.

I was unsure whether she had gotten lost. Than whether she needed something. But I decided to just observe. He must have noticed her, as waiters do, and chose not to twitch. So she stared, like a giant jelly, all the flowery shapeless clothes erect and projecting her face at him. She than waved. He reacted nonchalantly, half irritated. As he came close to her, the woman simply blossomed. Grey became pink. Fireworks lit up her face from within. She recited , what ever reason, she invented for coming to see him , than died like a desert flower after a few moments, retrieved back into the darkness of the bar, and slithered away.

I realised than that this was not the only of the kind. There are a whole range of women coming to this very bar tender for a dose of a flirt. On a dailey or a weekly basis. All sorts of women. And he is the kind of guy, always complaining at the lack of sex in his married life, wistfully talking about the good old days when he could have had any woman, he could have screwed a fly in flight.

I suppose he gets his day's flirt fill too. He plays a roll in many a life thus. Of the women glad of some attention,  and catering to the men who need to have a bar like this to relax in from time to time.  The cantankerous , cynical, bar owner is a proper well in demand social function. There is no psychologist who could satisfy the needs this one man does , by simply being a grouch and doing his every day job.