A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE

I WAS SITTING AT THE BAR at the Billy Goat Tavern, letting Kenny, the bartender, buy me beers, when Armando Garcia came walking into the room. He was flashing his big teeth, decked out in a thousand dollar suit from Mark Shale, jet black hair slicked back tight to his skull with that goop that the Cubans with money like to smear on their heads.

I was at the bar because Kenny was a buddy of mine and I didn’t have anywhere better to be, sitting in my old jeans and the hoodie with the holes in the elbows. I kept my hair long, pulled back with a rubber band, more because I didn’t like wasting money on a haircut than out of any fashion sense. Kenny was buying me beers because I had ten bucks in my pocket and there was the little problem of feeding my family to consider. I needed to stretch that ten a long ways and I didn’t have any immediate prospects for increasing my net worth.

“Hola, Pendejo,” Armando said, nodding at me. Then he looked at Kenny, standing behind the bar. “Hey, Camarero, get this bum a beer.”

Excerpt from a short story to be published in an anthology of short works by Chicago fiction writers in the spring and fall of this year (2008).

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