Whiskey had never fascinated or enthralled him. When Briggs was much younger, when his tastebuds were sharper and his craving for liquid sanctuary not yet implicated by years of professional intervention and support group therapy, he had found the attraction of whiskey as a preferred victual to be a muted one. Briggs had been a beer drinker, perhaps unimaginatively so, or else he had gravitated towards Caribbean-branded rum, because the fuzzy logic of exoticism had held sway for him over the provincial timidity of homegrown imports. For him, American-distilled whiskey was a libation for an earlier mindset, one enamoured of history: those good ole’ boys whom fawned and deliquesced over their Kentucky straight did not drink to forget; they drank to remember. For Briggs, they were revivalists of a scattered confederacy, a grey covenant which decreed that drunkenness was the province of history. Briggs wouldn’t have been surprised to one day encounter a thousand thousand silver liars all assembled at the bar teak, conveyed in their Civil War Union sack coats, their pillbox caps, their brass buttons, riding boots, russet-coloured brogans, their gold-fringed epaulettes, their blood-spattered faces, their soot-whitened whiskers, their saber-scarred cheekbones. Sometimes he would come across a bald-pated ancient nursing a dram of whiskey, cupping his ear to the glass as if harkening through the centuries to the acrid rumble of cannon fire. Sometimes he would catch a wrinkle-sunken sentimentalist inhaling from his whiskey snifter as if responding to sulphur notes of cordite and decay. Some days Briggs would observe the whiskey-blinded hobos on the New Jersey streets, those rag-and-bone men hobbled by uncoordinated thirsts who tussled for change while clutching brown paper bags like Chinese lanterns before them, and he would think the drink was a cruel inheritance, like a nation-building bullet once lodged in the spleen during the heat of the fray and slowly disintegrating. Whiskey only ever seemed to eat away at a person's insides while the host deluded himself that it was the stuff of ceremony, of romance and Reconstruction. But it was closer to an autoimmune infection exclusive to American dynasties, Briggs reasoned, a thing which southern sons learned at the bottom of their daddy's bottle.
Briggs wouldn't have been convinced otherwise — would never have revised his soft loathing for the drink, or his once-adversarial disenchantment over displays of public sentiment — if not for one evening in which whiskey was redefined for him as a language he'd heretofore failed to discern. And not just any language, but a language of control. He had been twenty-five years old at the time, had temporarily relocated from Elizabeth, New Jersey, to the industrial exurbs of south-central Brooklyn only a gloaming of months prior, and had temporarily hustled his way into an imitation of liquidity, had wiled his way into a gig tending bar at an oak-staked hole-in-the-wall taproom called The Brass Tyrant. The place had proven popular among a certain set of men sporting dark complexions and distressing dentistry, and it was storied as a living relic of Gravesend: a nouveau-riche salon for piss-soaked libertines of a not wholly-fabricated standing; a chink in the pectoral of Cronos, where past intrigues had not yet been buffed by the sculpting of Time. It seemed anyone who frequented the Tyrant had a story, and not a negligible few threatened finding the facts to support them.
There were patrons who were all-day drinkers, mouthy old hellraisers baffled by loss or cirrhosis of the liver, they who would lounge against the banquettes of red leather like macaques in thermal waters. There were droll salt-eyed dockworkers who hunkered in a low mutter over the green baize of their wall-flocked tables like croupiers sharing a midnight cigarette between shifts. There were queer one-dollar Johnnies in zoot suits, overalls, jailbird castoffs, brickmakers’ knickerbocker breeches, who cashed their welfare cheques for another week delaying the making good of their egregious tabs. Amongst them sat veterans of at least three different wars, all graced with the look of souls wracked by saudade, an ache for a country to which they no longer belonged. There were aged black jazz romantics, galvanic pop-eyed journalists of New York’s symphonic frontier who now piloted taxis, serviced hotel washrooms, manned sidewalk crêperies, but who spoke of the maligned legacy of the clarinet in the bebop grooves of Duke Ellington, of joints in N’Orleans that still shivered with energy like lizards in spring. They would stake each jug of suds on a game of morra, would strike their hands against the luminous felt surface of their booth, would giggle wildly and purse their faces into an embouchure while sampling sweet horchata ale through moustaches of foam. There were one or two hipsters donning beards and beanies, pink-faced and blinking from their perches along the bar as they wrestled with assigned texts, clamoured over MFA coursework or ethical clearance collateral. A resident playwright would sometimes commandeer a table in the back, endure an hour hissing into a dictaphone, before evacuating his post to slink out into the rude Brooklyn winter. There were days when Briggs could just watch them all, this curious misbegotten clientele, and recognise them for what they were: folks in search of a haunt where they could be alone together, and therefore a little less alone.
The infrequent female patrons whom The Brass Tyrant might regard as its demimonde were few and far between, and Briggs likened them to day-pass visitors of prison inmates insofar that they were afforded access to even the most coveted tables reserved for regulars, could stalk the red oak floorboards with their baskets selling roses or their fresh-laundered housedresses in storage bags hoisted over their shoulders, and in minutes they were in orbit again, had tossed back a Manhattan or Pisco Sour or Perrier, before all assuming a compelling exit, a volley of feminine softness for the downwind lake-effect snow to swallow. They were like visitors, Briggs noticed, because when they left, there was a finality in their vanishing; one could not account for their return, and tomorrow would be as though such business, a freedom available in the sweetness of female company, was only rumour, not even that. Oftentimes it made him think of his sister, but this just excelled in aggravating his feelings of isolation and solastalgia, and he was certain it was harder on her end, so much harder, and he would short-circuit the shame by refusing to succumb to sentiment. He would merely watch the girls, and admire their vitality.
After a few weeks of familiarisation and suspected workplace hazing, Briggs began to notice that a small cadre of the cattier girls, with their smirking eyes and their wry delight in writhing confrontation — which were the ones he favoured, every one of them looking like a black-haired gypsy visitation, as if augured under the star of Lorraine Bracco or Catherine Zeta-Jones — would collaborate to spurn and needle the old geezers clustered at the bar, would whisper mocking invitations into their gnarled grey skulls, would simper and flash their teeth at the wheezy bench liars in a dance of intimacy and menace. If the day was a slow one, and the customers indifferent to his attention, Briggs learned to train his eyes on that coven of old geezers converged at the rear of the bar. The girls feigned to compete for their attention, but the wheezy bench liars remained unmoved. It was then that Briggs came to realise that the girls were performing their false flirtations, but not as he had first intuited; that is to say, the girls were pretending to bait the geezers not because of the thrill of the taunt, but because they genuinely wanted to seduce the ancients with their cobbled flesh.
He convinced himself that it was the geezers who were taunting the girls: their power resulted not from resistance, but from systematic disinterest. The longer he lingered in The Brass Tyrant, the less transfixed he was by the women and the more vested he became in verifying the allure of the old liars, in gaining their approval and so inheriting their secrets. They each possessed the whittled oblique face of a church fresco icon, a chalk-white bust like a Hans Holbein cameo clamped in a locket. Yet assembled together, they resembled an Early Flemish panel-portrait executed by the Brothers van Eyk, the Ghent Altarpiece of Time-eaten Gremlins. Their rickety pisshead clan behaved in such a way that Briggs was often privately reminded of the Muppets in the mezzanine, as if Statler and Waldorf had emerged with raspy scorn from the television set to crack wise about the state of his life. He didn’t need anyone to explain to him that these men were gangsters, the fathers of criminal progeny. Briggs was old enough to deduce that you didn’t earn a living by drinking: each of these geezers fraternised this humid oak taproom not to toast past triumphs, but to conduct their business. When the girls nuzzled close, they weren’t auditioning attempts at arousal but being whispered to; when the girls departed, they weren’t leaving to pursue suckers beyond the bar’s periphery, but doing as instructed, inheriting the dirty work of the geezers who would sit, wait, and forecast their gambles. These weren’t men who congregated to reminisce, Briggs saw. These were men who strategised to determine a virgin future.
And these men drank whiskey. It would’ve been reductive or conflative or uninterrogative of him to assert that it was the drink that endowed the men with their power, but as Briggs was the one frequently called on to fix their shots, pour their drams, agitate their preferred reserve, top up their sweating Glencairn glasses, he encountered some difficulties dissociating the locus of their authority with their poison of choice. When he suggested that the wheezy bench liars might try diversifying their palates once in a while, they eyeballed him like he’d just silently loosened a testicle into eyeshot. He knew not to nettle or filibuster them with campaigns of liquid betterment for too long, lest they call on the Tyrant’s proprietor to sort out Briggs's mouth or dock his wages; he wasn’t one of the girls with their foaming black tresses and cheap perfume, for he was no more valuable to them than the human furniture expected to shut up when a king pauses at the threshold to his throne room.
When they were in the throes of drinking their whiskey, the old geezers would suddenly disengage from their heated discussion, as if in hushed reverence. Or if not reverence, then admiration, the way a breeder inspects a pedigree thoroughbred. Briggs had never known any table-downed liquor to have that effect, not least the same drink for an entire sortie of dissimilar shrink-wrapped souls, but whiskey proved the great democratiser, because even a king might sit mystified by the play of light on breastplate gold. The geezers were in veneration of not merely how their beloved tincture tasted, but of the way it sharpened their minds at the moment of swallowing, the way it made a fist of their gut at a moment’s flowering, weaponising the fire in their veins until their bodies were dancing quick enough to evade the blow of betrayal.
For the old bloodhounds forgathered in the backrooms of The Brass Tyrant, whiskey in the throat was like divulging the scent of a fox. Blood glowed in their snouts. Hackles bristled in rebellion. Nostrils dilated to divine the tang of enemy sweat, the smut of a too-sudden exit. The drink restored their senses, before it clouded them and its temporary advantages had to be renewed. It was clear the geezers imbibed their premium 100-proof corn spirit session whiskeys because they’d persuaded themselves it enhanced their Bugsy Siegel-like insight, their inner Iago, a fortification which inured them to the quiet psychosis that every swinging dick within an immediate ten-mile radius was angling to fuck them. There were things foxes could hear which the old bloodhounds were ill-equipped to intercept or transceive, whispers which the gnarls of the corner stoop, the fissures in the manhole covers, the gutters like envelopes of light, the bleached marquee of the neighbourhood fruit shop refused to disclose. It took a convoluted web of spies, a skyline of hired eyes, what a single stave of syrup whiskey could divulge with the right acuity of mind. The geezers were willing to wait it out.
They’d nurse their steins and snifters, croaking in symphony like a grove of crows, and wait for the seed of inspiration to worm its way into their beady black skulls, a syzygy of their knotted minds, a clairvoyance activated from incidental articles. Then it’d announce itself in the way one geezer might trill to another: Did you see the way Little Giotto, Vito’s kid, flinched when Don Fabrizio inquired about his missing brother last week? And his balding consigliére would listen with a sage curl of the lips, while drawing a quart of Blanton’s between his teeth, before clucking: Who? You mean Nicky Santorini? That schecchino’s had it coming. And I’d trust that scocciamento punk, Giotto, about as far as a nickel’ll take a gondola in Naples.
The geezers tended to repel covert intrusion. At first, after a few weeks of concerted analysis from beneath the rack of wineglasses, it occurred to Briggs that the girls had been deigned the sole exception; they could move wherever their curiosity determined, and it rankled the geezers not at all: for a satellite to conduct a comprehensive reconnaissance it must be allowed a freewheeling orbit. And yet from the day Briggs had finagled his first shift at The Tyrant, he’d found his roving eye consistently entranced by the gold-lustred spinet piano stationed at the rear of the bar, a marled Wurlitzer organ which had sauntered out of esteem sometime in the 40’s, but which throbbed from within a matt-coat of red lacquer as though the Devil’s own pocket-sized armoury. It reminded him of something you’d find whittled in miniature, buried in the sand of a lionfish tank.
When he’d initially spotted the spinet piano, Briggs had decided that it must’ve been installed out of a last-minute scuffle for ornamentation, because there was nothing else like it in the bar, and there was no evidence to suggest the owners of The Tyrant were the inheritors of a musical legacy. But once a day, sometime after 12, the rear door to the establishment would chunk against the grille of frost outside and admit entrance to a short man with august features attired in a linen suit of coolest lilac. His eyes were flinty, his cheekbones were strikingly faceted, his whiskers were bouquets of white-and-black barbs, and his brow stormily clove by the brim of a teal bowler cut from Japanese felt which he would collapse against his knee the minute the Gravesend winter manifested him at the threshold. Threaded in his lapel, the man in the linen suit would promenade a different blossom for every day of the week. When Briggs set to mentally cataloguing these, however, he quickly surmised that the man gravitated towards fragrant perennials, fluted specimens like violets, irises, cyclamen, long-stemmed roses. Once, he’d adorned his buttonhole with a French marigold, which made him look as though he’d been shot in the chest, its tufted petals like the fuselage exposed when a bull gores a gaucho. These seemed only to correspond to the mood of the man in the linen suit; if there was a criminal semaphore being implemented here, Briggs could not decipher it, leastways not without a floral calendar to study; but it did not matter, for the man in the linen suit would telegraph how he was feeling on any given day to the assembled clientele of The Tyrant by his ministrations at the piano.
The man would call on Briggs or, if he was not available, any of the bartenders able to disentangle themselves from flirtations with The Tyrant’s female patrons the quickest, and he would order an iced finger of whiskey with a slap of coins on the bar, before pivoting toward the pianoforte with drink in hand, to assume his command post from behind its sleek cherrywood contours. He’d relinquish both his hat and his drink to its firelit simmer on the gabled edge of the piano top over a silver handkerchief of silk. He would remove the gold band from his wedding finger and ensconce it in his waistcoat pocket, permit his hands to linger over the keys of the dormant instrument, and sleepily close his wry grey eyes.
On certain weeks, Briggs might have to work both the morning and the evening of the same day, and instead of returning home in the interim he would occasionally resolve to occupy himself by frequenting the local Korean repertory theatre, secreted on 6th Avenue in Sunset Park, before his split-shift kicked in; it was there in the rumple of warmth afforded him by the suppurated cinema upholstery, while without the city was jack-o’-lanterned by snarls of ice, that he first discovered the films of the storied Japanese masters, of Mizoguchi, of Kurosawa, of Yasujirō Ozu, in sensuous 35mm monochrome restorations: and it was to the venerable and mercurial souls populating these silver satiny-grained dreamscapes, to Chishû Ryû in Late Spring or Takashi Shimura in Ikiru or Masayuki Mori in Ugetsu, that Briggs quietly likened The Tyrant’s own man in lilac. To Briggs, the pianist at the spinet possessed something of the same equestrian gravity, the same porcelain features and condemnatory gaze, the same untroubled brow and yet the same dark torqued jaw that he associated with the sumptuous screen dramas of Nihon’s Golden Age. When the man in lilac had succumbed to his startled fugue state before the piano’s teeth, he would slump forward with a nearly indiscernible servitude and slowly, as if in the throes of mystification, his face would soften. Only then would he play his music. Somehow, in the magicked impetus of such a moment, Briggs could swear that the glyph of whiskey left untasted on the piano’s vertex seemed to glow still more brightly as the man in lilac commenced to perform; and Briggs understood this to be both asinine and nightmarish, yet still the impression prevailed, that the man summoned up a colour in the liquor he’d installed on the spinet top which had not been heretofore observed. As he played, the tiny gargle of toasty bourbon went about its alchemical moult, became endowed with the gold optics of a saber drawn at sundown, less drink than trinket, the heart carved out of an angel. The man in lilac played on, the sockets of his cheeks seized in a frowning rictus, and the old bloodhounds at the bar would retire their drunken calumnies and listen in with appreciative faces, sweeten their mouths with a drop of favourite oak, and disarm their ears of their spikier secrets, submitting their minds to nocturnes which seethed in minor-chord like bells used to navigate gator-clouded waters.
There swelled such a maelstrom of sound from within the fretwork mechanism of the whirring pianoforte, such a sound of pine-cradled gladness, of woodpeckers in frissons of quarrelsome lust, of squires in chainmail twinkling in tandem beneath the domed ceiling of mist-swathed redwoods, of swains and archers brisking the heavy foliage as they disbursed, of dragons and armadillos making home in temperate auracarian roosts. The tinkle of the pianist’s fingers summoned up quivers in the skulls of the old priestly listeners. The music flushed Briggs of his expertly-rehearsed stoicism; love for an unadulterated simplicity, for a sound of light seething, for the first instance of a poet being weaned on the coil of the rain, seized his insides until he felt free and obedient, miraculously free. The pianist incited a fever in Briggs, a glow he’d resigned himself to no longer linger in, now that he was brave enough to settle for a life of small significance.
He’d been okay with it, too, until now; had been teaching himself how to succumb to smalltime suckitude, to a plight of sedate dereliction. After the pain of his family falling apart, of losing his sister, of vacating his home city, Briggs had fancied a spell of inconsequential amusement would be enough. He’d permitted himself to first defy, and then recoil at the thunder of ambition, its ominous light show in the eyes of strivers and coat-tailers. He’d resolved himself to invite contentment from behind the teak of a Gravesend bar, had reckoned with it annulling any unshaken and unplumbed designs he might have retained for himself from before his sister was taken by the state, and his life changed. Briggs had even discovered in New York a semblance of prevailing anonymity. He could’ve rewritten himself as a wallflower, as a cipher seeking quiet surrender. He would’ve only needed a few more months of counting change, waxing floorboards, pulling beers, reconciling the register, loping home after midnight in the snow. But the music summoned by the man in the linen suit compelled Briggs into fits of reeling temper; he found himself harried by renewed aspirations as he listened to the sveltely-attired minstrel at the spinet piano, possessed by remote notions of eminence, of danger, of arrogance founded, of masculine grandeur elegantly tailored in lilac.
The man’s music shucked him clean as he listened with a squint beside the rheumy old geezers, flensed him of a jellied grey substance that was probably his peace-of-mind. Briggs felt newly cloven; there was plenty of room beneath his ribcage for more of the pianist’s ivory, heat and steel. Of course, he recognised the man in the linen suit as a gangster like the others — the one thing the Jersey streets hadn’t fostered in Briggs was selective blindness — but no incognito crook subsisting on embezzled annuities and New York mozzarella slice should be capable of apprehending such airy and evanescent melodies, no heavy hands so precise in weaving rhapsodies and overtures and sonatas in miniature. This was the genius of the man in the linen suit: he appeared to straddle worlds in stark contrast with each other, and expertly too: as a hand-to-mouth malefactor he was refined; as a patrician member of the New York cognoscenti, he was a little unscrupulous, a little cloak-and-dagger in his demeanour and his business for any other socialites to compete. The man arrayed himself with a gothic longevity at the coralline red piano, a Hammer Horror rapacity which conveyed likenesses of vampire maestros in Briggs’s mind, the swimmily-coiffured kin of Karloff, of Lugosi, of Vincent Price enveloped in the wings of an instrument which seemed to dribble and buck beneath his diffident petting. Briggs got accustomed to folding his arms at the bar, with his eyes narrowed, a surliness about the mouth while he remained witness to The Brass Tyrant’s transformation.
Soon, no sooner than it took for the pianist’s hushful glosses along the spinet’s keys to swell into their chiming refrain, no sooner had the bar’s cowed clientele withdrawn to memories of yesteryear’s threnody, a music to remind the half-deaf of half-ripe music which sweetened the air when they were younger and given to quick brooding lusts, no sooner had new chords become subsumed by a bath of calm white fire, that the venue was enveilled in a golden arch of surf-hewn sound, a glowing bower of wind-combed clangour which carved a roof overhead, beneath which Briggs felt his body lighten and begin to hover of its own free logic. Briggs saw how the man in the linen suit imprisoned his listeners with golden lassitudes of colliding octaves; he drew up the plans for each jail of the mind, and praised you with pretty fugues as you built up the walls to contain yourself. He kept you castellated in reverie, fucked-up with mute stupefaction. Everyone allowed themselves to be beset by a guileful beauty. Then the man in the raiment of purple linen and grey nankeen would fell his own bower, would stand and desist and reclaim his fingers with a surgical clap of the lid. The piano would discover itself muffled, like a bear kept captive to perform its grotesque dance and then return to its tortured confinement. Bang would fall the whiskey dram, warped would work its passage down the pianist’s neck. Slap would go his knuckles as they scorned the piano’s armoured hide! Up would work the rosy moods from their alveoli sacs beneath the skin. Red would blaze the brilliant heat of the drink scaling his aged face. Wide would oscillate his bright evil eyes. Sure would curl his odious grin, and to Briggs he would point, and to Briggs he would beckon.
‘Well colour me astonished if this sump-hole of sin hasn’t yet collapsed with you foul colony of rat bastards gnawing out its foundations from under it! I should say I’m glad I braved the snow to check in on this warren of pestilence, because it’d be a little indelicate for the NYPD to have to come bag and tag body parts when they’d find chewed-up articles of your neighbour mixed amidst walls of shit. Let’s suppress those cannibal instincts, you gummy old vermin fucks, and apply ourselves to administering the cure! Barkeep! A whiskey apiece for the toothy sewer-jockeys and wriggling waste-tasters at the bar! And don’t schtupp me on the quality there, muscles, because I mean to gargle down your house barrel blend too, and I don’t wanna be hoiking up rodent droppings like pomegranate stones!’
The Brass Tyrant would entertain this same bellowy exegesis, or a variation of it, every second or third day. It never failed to bore and antagonise Briggs in equal measure, nor erode his ever-resonating interest in gaining the man in linen’s approval, nor diminish his ambition to ensnare the man in a quiet inglenook and demand somehow to be cut in on the action. Briggs would nod and keep eye contact, would decant the perfect shot, would exhale like an obedient horse, would jot down the tab with a scholarly flourish, would continue waiting in eyeshot, would contrive it so that he always appeared busy enough not to be reprimanded but disposed enough to appear dormant, in need of a secret directive. One day Briggs decided to risk it; he figured he’d never curry favour with the bloodhounds if he didn’t at least demonstrate the appetite to be recognised, to be granted an audience at the heart of the pack. An hour before the man in the linen suit was due to materialise for his daily interlude at the spinet, Briggs scrawled a handwritten note and sandwiched it between the hairline crack of the piano lid and the organ’s glinting teeth.
Though the culmination of several weeks’ vacillation, the decision that day had been a spontaneous one, and had thus stymied Briggs for any Damascene in-the-moment inspiration; he found he didn’t have much to say when it got right down to it, so he deliberately sought not to court embellishment. His envoy to the man in the linen suit was therefore shocking in its economy. It read: My name is Briggs — I tend bar. You call me “muscles”. You seem to know your way about. I intend to work for you. You hiring?
That afternoon, the gangster in lilac arrived on the limens to the Tyrant in a smoking jacket, conjured with a boutonnière of a single red carnation in his breast, his arm snaked around the willowy waist of a woman so extraordinarily beautiful Briggs felt something chunk inside him like a token palmed into a nickelodeon’s coin slot. A whirring seized his innards, a scratchy song installed in shellac and vinyl commenced its tinny orchestration in the spaces between his ears. He wasn’t one for identifying or acknowledging beauty; he’d been born a romantic in the airiest sense of the word, but not, it had appeared, for admiring feminine grace. Oftentimes, Briggs was more attracted to ugly girls, or at least girls whom the world or the women themselves had conspired to uglify in some way: he didn’t believe much in poetry, and preferred studying the other sex for their earthy realism, for the lengths to which a grown-ass female would revolt against the fawning of the patriarchy. He was consequently aroused by women who neither appreciated his affection nor warranted it: they were frequently either academic in their application to love, and therefore disinterested in Briggs’s overwrought gestures of tenderness; or else they were boastful fucks, anti-monogamists who invited a rutting with pacts of exclusivity that were rarely redeemable outside the day they were forged. So the Farrah-headed vision on the lilac gangster’s arm was something to behold for Briggs — beauty that refused to be equivocated in poetry.
She emerged into the light backlit by the tempest white of Brooklyn’s snowy skull, vespers rising off her body as though her trespass had sprung from the eye socket of the city. She moved like the Devil’s answer to a barn owl, eyes like sulphur-blown glass facets in her head, cheekbones like marble wings, rasps of dragon breath swathing her honey complexion as though arrayed in autumnal plumage. Briggs watched on as she shook herself free of a leather lambskin stole, her head crowned in a cloche hat knit from a silver fox pelt, her hair slinking round her throat like the twined talons of a raptor of the desert sands.
She was Italian, he saw, blonde like the Milanese tryst-cravers who congregated in plazas, laundromats, lighthouse doorways on the covers of every erotic pulp novel Briggs had ever spotted in a subway spinny rack. She glided as she moved, and Briggs finally noticed that on her wrist there teemed a corsage of spider chrysanthemum florets and maidenhair fern sprigs; when contrast with the gangster’s carnation the effect was almost venomous, scarlet and green. They each gravitated towards the bar, the pianist and his sleepy-mouthed moll in her fleeced-fox hat, and Briggs knew then the threat of control invoked in owning to your convictions when he croaked an arid greeting to the couple and asked what they were having, and The Manticore’s face seemed to transform in an instant, and from within his tigerish grin there boomed a voice like that of a gondolier, and the voice spoke a single word, and that word was “Whiskey”.
Briggs wouldn't have been convinced otherwise — would never have revised his soft loathing for the drink, or his once-adversarial disenchantment over displays of public sentiment — if not for one evening in which whiskey was redefined for him as a language he'd heretofore failed to discern. And not just any language, but a language of control. He had been twenty-five years old at the time, had temporarily relocated from Elizabeth, New Jersey, to the industrial exurbs of south-central Brooklyn only a gloaming of months prior, and had temporarily hustled his way into an imitation of liquidity, had wiled his way into a gig tending bar at an oak-staked hole-in-the-wall taproom called The Brass Tyrant. The place had proven popular among a certain set of men sporting dark complexions and distressing dentistry, and it was storied as a living relic of Gravesend: a nouveau-riche salon for piss-soaked libertines of a not wholly-fabricated standing; a chink in the pectoral of Cronos, where past intrigues had not yet been buffed by the sculpting of Time. It seemed anyone who frequented the Tyrant had a story, and not a negligible few threatened finding the facts to support them.
There were patrons who were all-day drinkers, mouthy old hellraisers baffled by loss or cirrhosis of the liver, they who would lounge against the banquettes of red leather like macaques in thermal waters. There were droll salt-eyed dockworkers who hunkered in a low mutter over the green baize of their wall-flocked tables like croupiers sharing a midnight cigarette between shifts. There were queer one-dollar Johnnies in zoot suits, overalls, jailbird castoffs, brickmakers’ knickerbocker breeches, who cashed their welfare cheques for another week delaying the making good of their egregious tabs. Amongst them sat veterans of at least three different wars, all graced with the look of souls wracked by saudade, an ache for a country to which they no longer belonged. There were aged black jazz romantics, galvanic pop-eyed journalists of New York’s symphonic frontier who now piloted taxis, serviced hotel washrooms, manned sidewalk crêperies, but who spoke of the maligned legacy of the clarinet in the bebop grooves of Duke Ellington, of joints in N’Orleans that still shivered with energy like lizards in spring. They would stake each jug of suds on a game of morra, would strike their hands against the luminous felt surface of their booth, would giggle wildly and purse their faces into an embouchure while sampling sweet horchata ale through moustaches of foam. There were one or two hipsters donning beards and beanies, pink-faced and blinking from their perches along the bar as they wrestled with assigned texts, clamoured over MFA coursework or ethical clearance collateral. A resident playwright would sometimes commandeer a table in the back, endure an hour hissing into a dictaphone, before evacuating his post to slink out into the rude Brooklyn winter. There were days when Briggs could just watch them all, this curious misbegotten clientele, and recognise them for what they were: folks in search of a haunt where they could be alone together, and therefore a little less alone.
The infrequent female patrons whom The Brass Tyrant might regard as its demimonde were few and far between, and Briggs likened them to day-pass visitors of prison inmates insofar that they were afforded access to even the most coveted tables reserved for regulars, could stalk the red oak floorboards with their baskets selling roses or their fresh-laundered housedresses in storage bags hoisted over their shoulders, and in minutes they were in orbit again, had tossed back a Manhattan or Pisco Sour or Perrier, before all assuming a compelling exit, a volley of feminine softness for the downwind lake-effect snow to swallow. They were like visitors, Briggs noticed, because when they left, there was a finality in their vanishing; one could not account for their return, and tomorrow would be as though such business, a freedom available in the sweetness of female company, was only rumour, not even that. Oftentimes it made him think of his sister, but this just excelled in aggravating his feelings of isolation and solastalgia, and he was certain it was harder on her end, so much harder, and he would short-circuit the shame by refusing to succumb to sentiment. He would merely watch the girls, and admire their vitality.
After a few weeks of familiarisation and suspected workplace hazing, Briggs began to notice that a small cadre of the cattier girls, with their smirking eyes and their wry delight in writhing confrontation — which were the ones he favoured, every one of them looking like a black-haired gypsy visitation, as if augured under the star of Lorraine Bracco or Catherine Zeta-Jones — would collaborate to spurn and needle the old geezers clustered at the bar, would whisper mocking invitations into their gnarled grey skulls, would simper and flash their teeth at the wheezy bench liars in a dance of intimacy and menace. If the day was a slow one, and the customers indifferent to his attention, Briggs learned to train his eyes on that coven of old geezers converged at the rear of the bar. The girls feigned to compete for their attention, but the wheezy bench liars remained unmoved. It was then that Briggs came to realise that the girls were performing their false flirtations, but not as he had first intuited; that is to say, the girls were pretending to bait the geezers not because of the thrill of the taunt, but because they genuinely wanted to seduce the ancients with their cobbled flesh.
He convinced himself that it was the geezers who were taunting the girls: their power resulted not from resistance, but from systematic disinterest. The longer he lingered in The Brass Tyrant, the less transfixed he was by the women and the more vested he became in verifying the allure of the old liars, in gaining their approval and so inheriting their secrets. They each possessed the whittled oblique face of a church fresco icon, a chalk-white bust like a Hans Holbein cameo clamped in a locket. Yet assembled together, they resembled an Early Flemish panel-portrait executed by the Brothers van Eyk, the Ghent Altarpiece of Time-eaten Gremlins. Their rickety pisshead clan behaved in such a way that Briggs was often privately reminded of the Muppets in the mezzanine, as if Statler and Waldorf had emerged with raspy scorn from the television set to crack wise about the state of his life. He didn’t need anyone to explain to him that these men were gangsters, the fathers of criminal progeny. Briggs was old enough to deduce that you didn’t earn a living by drinking: each of these geezers fraternised this humid oak taproom not to toast past triumphs, but to conduct their business. When the girls nuzzled close, they weren’t auditioning attempts at arousal but being whispered to; when the girls departed, they weren’t leaving to pursue suckers beyond the bar’s periphery, but doing as instructed, inheriting the dirty work of the geezers who would sit, wait, and forecast their gambles. These weren’t men who congregated to reminisce, Briggs saw. These were men who strategised to determine a virgin future.
And these men drank whiskey. It would’ve been reductive or conflative or uninterrogative of him to assert that it was the drink that endowed the men with their power, but as Briggs was the one frequently called on to fix their shots, pour their drams, agitate their preferred reserve, top up their sweating Glencairn glasses, he encountered some difficulties dissociating the locus of their authority with their poison of choice. When he suggested that the wheezy bench liars might try diversifying their palates once in a while, they eyeballed him like he’d just silently loosened a testicle into eyeshot. He knew not to nettle or filibuster them with campaigns of liquid betterment for too long, lest they call on the Tyrant’s proprietor to sort out Briggs's mouth or dock his wages; he wasn’t one of the girls with their foaming black tresses and cheap perfume, for he was no more valuable to them than the human furniture expected to shut up when a king pauses at the threshold to his throne room.
When they were in the throes of drinking their whiskey, the old geezers would suddenly disengage from their heated discussion, as if in hushed reverence. Or if not reverence, then admiration, the way a breeder inspects a pedigree thoroughbred. Briggs had never known any table-downed liquor to have that effect, not least the same drink for an entire sortie of dissimilar shrink-wrapped souls, but whiskey proved the great democratiser, because even a king might sit mystified by the play of light on breastplate gold. The geezers were in veneration of not merely how their beloved tincture tasted, but of the way it sharpened their minds at the moment of swallowing, the way it made a fist of their gut at a moment’s flowering, weaponising the fire in their veins until their bodies were dancing quick enough to evade the blow of betrayal.
For the old bloodhounds forgathered in the backrooms of The Brass Tyrant, whiskey in the throat was like divulging the scent of a fox. Blood glowed in their snouts. Hackles bristled in rebellion. Nostrils dilated to divine the tang of enemy sweat, the smut of a too-sudden exit. The drink restored their senses, before it clouded them and its temporary advantages had to be renewed. It was clear the geezers imbibed their premium 100-proof corn spirit session whiskeys because they’d persuaded themselves it enhanced their Bugsy Siegel-like insight, their inner Iago, a fortification which inured them to the quiet psychosis that every swinging dick within an immediate ten-mile radius was angling to fuck them. There were things foxes could hear which the old bloodhounds were ill-equipped to intercept or transceive, whispers which the gnarls of the corner stoop, the fissures in the manhole covers, the gutters like envelopes of light, the bleached marquee of the neighbourhood fruit shop refused to disclose. It took a convoluted web of spies, a skyline of hired eyes, what a single stave of syrup whiskey could divulge with the right acuity of mind. The geezers were willing to wait it out.
They’d nurse their steins and snifters, croaking in symphony like a grove of crows, and wait for the seed of inspiration to worm its way into their beady black skulls, a syzygy of their knotted minds, a clairvoyance activated from incidental articles. Then it’d announce itself in the way one geezer might trill to another: Did you see the way Little Giotto, Vito’s kid, flinched when Don Fabrizio inquired about his missing brother last week? And his balding consigliére would listen with a sage curl of the lips, while drawing a quart of Blanton’s between his teeth, before clucking: Who? You mean Nicky Santorini? That schecchino’s had it coming. And I’d trust that scocciamento punk, Giotto, about as far as a nickel’ll take a gondola in Naples.
The geezers tended to repel covert intrusion. At first, after a few weeks of concerted analysis from beneath the rack of wineglasses, it occurred to Briggs that the girls had been deigned the sole exception; they could move wherever their curiosity determined, and it rankled the geezers not at all: for a satellite to conduct a comprehensive reconnaissance it must be allowed a freewheeling orbit. And yet from the day Briggs had finagled his first shift at The Tyrant, he’d found his roving eye consistently entranced by the gold-lustred spinet piano stationed at the rear of the bar, a marled Wurlitzer organ which had sauntered out of esteem sometime in the 40’s, but which throbbed from within a matt-coat of red lacquer as though the Devil’s own pocket-sized armoury. It reminded him of something you’d find whittled in miniature, buried in the sand of a lionfish tank.
When he’d initially spotted the spinet piano, Briggs had decided that it must’ve been installed out of a last-minute scuffle for ornamentation, because there was nothing else like it in the bar, and there was no evidence to suggest the owners of The Tyrant were the inheritors of a musical legacy. But once a day, sometime after 12, the rear door to the establishment would chunk against the grille of frost outside and admit entrance to a short man with august features attired in a linen suit of coolest lilac. His eyes were flinty, his cheekbones were strikingly faceted, his whiskers were bouquets of white-and-black barbs, and his brow stormily clove by the brim of a teal bowler cut from Japanese felt which he would collapse against his knee the minute the Gravesend winter manifested him at the threshold. Threaded in his lapel, the man in the linen suit would promenade a different blossom for every day of the week. When Briggs set to mentally cataloguing these, however, he quickly surmised that the man gravitated towards fragrant perennials, fluted specimens like violets, irises, cyclamen, long-stemmed roses. Once, he’d adorned his buttonhole with a French marigold, which made him look as though he’d been shot in the chest, its tufted petals like the fuselage exposed when a bull gores a gaucho. These seemed only to correspond to the mood of the man in the linen suit; if there was a criminal semaphore being implemented here, Briggs could not decipher it, leastways not without a floral calendar to study; but it did not matter, for the man in the linen suit would telegraph how he was feeling on any given day to the assembled clientele of The Tyrant by his ministrations at the piano.
The man would call on Briggs or, if he was not available, any of the bartenders able to disentangle themselves from flirtations with The Tyrant’s female patrons the quickest, and he would order an iced finger of whiskey with a slap of coins on the bar, before pivoting toward the pianoforte with drink in hand, to assume his command post from behind its sleek cherrywood contours. He’d relinquish both his hat and his drink to its firelit simmer on the gabled edge of the piano top over a silver handkerchief of silk. He would remove the gold band from his wedding finger and ensconce it in his waistcoat pocket, permit his hands to linger over the keys of the dormant instrument, and sleepily close his wry grey eyes.
On certain weeks, Briggs might have to work both the morning and the evening of the same day, and instead of returning home in the interim he would occasionally resolve to occupy himself by frequenting the local Korean repertory theatre, secreted on 6th Avenue in Sunset Park, before his split-shift kicked in; it was there in the rumple of warmth afforded him by the suppurated cinema upholstery, while without the city was jack-o’-lanterned by snarls of ice, that he first discovered the films of the storied Japanese masters, of Mizoguchi, of Kurosawa, of Yasujirō Ozu, in sensuous 35mm monochrome restorations: and it was to the venerable and mercurial souls populating these silver satiny-grained dreamscapes, to Chishû Ryû in Late Spring or Takashi Shimura in Ikiru or Masayuki Mori in Ugetsu, that Briggs quietly likened The Tyrant’s own man in lilac. To Briggs, the pianist at the spinet possessed something of the same equestrian gravity, the same porcelain features and condemnatory gaze, the same untroubled brow and yet the same dark torqued jaw that he associated with the sumptuous screen dramas of Nihon’s Golden Age. When the man in lilac had succumbed to his startled fugue state before the piano’s teeth, he would slump forward with a nearly indiscernible servitude and slowly, as if in the throes of mystification, his face would soften. Only then would he play his music. Somehow, in the magicked impetus of such a moment, Briggs could swear that the glyph of whiskey left untasted on the piano’s vertex seemed to glow still more brightly as the man in lilac commenced to perform; and Briggs understood this to be both asinine and nightmarish, yet still the impression prevailed, that the man summoned up a colour in the liquor he’d installed on the spinet top which had not been heretofore observed. As he played, the tiny gargle of toasty bourbon went about its alchemical moult, became endowed with the gold optics of a saber drawn at sundown, less drink than trinket, the heart carved out of an angel. The man in lilac played on, the sockets of his cheeks seized in a frowning rictus, and the old bloodhounds at the bar would retire their drunken calumnies and listen in with appreciative faces, sweeten their mouths with a drop of favourite oak, and disarm their ears of their spikier secrets, submitting their minds to nocturnes which seethed in minor-chord like bells used to navigate gator-clouded waters.
There swelled such a maelstrom of sound from within the fretwork mechanism of the whirring pianoforte, such a sound of pine-cradled gladness, of woodpeckers in frissons of quarrelsome lust, of squires in chainmail twinkling in tandem beneath the domed ceiling of mist-swathed redwoods, of swains and archers brisking the heavy foliage as they disbursed, of dragons and armadillos making home in temperate auracarian roosts. The tinkle of the pianist’s fingers summoned up quivers in the skulls of the old priestly listeners. The music flushed Briggs of his expertly-rehearsed stoicism; love for an unadulterated simplicity, for a sound of light seething, for the first instance of a poet being weaned on the coil of the rain, seized his insides until he felt free and obedient, miraculously free. The pianist incited a fever in Briggs, a glow he’d resigned himself to no longer linger in, now that he was brave enough to settle for a life of small significance.
He’d been okay with it, too, until now; had been teaching himself how to succumb to smalltime suckitude, to a plight of sedate dereliction. After the pain of his family falling apart, of losing his sister, of vacating his home city, Briggs had fancied a spell of inconsequential amusement would be enough. He’d permitted himself to first defy, and then recoil at the thunder of ambition, its ominous light show in the eyes of strivers and coat-tailers. He’d resolved himself to invite contentment from behind the teak of a Gravesend bar, had reckoned with it annulling any unshaken and unplumbed designs he might have retained for himself from before his sister was taken by the state, and his life changed. Briggs had even discovered in New York a semblance of prevailing anonymity. He could’ve rewritten himself as a wallflower, as a cipher seeking quiet surrender. He would’ve only needed a few more months of counting change, waxing floorboards, pulling beers, reconciling the register, loping home after midnight in the snow. But the music summoned by the man in the linen suit compelled Briggs into fits of reeling temper; he found himself harried by renewed aspirations as he listened to the sveltely-attired minstrel at the spinet piano, possessed by remote notions of eminence, of danger, of arrogance founded, of masculine grandeur elegantly tailored in lilac.
The man’s music shucked him clean as he listened with a squint beside the rheumy old geezers, flensed him of a jellied grey substance that was probably his peace-of-mind. Briggs felt newly cloven; there was plenty of room beneath his ribcage for more of the pianist’s ivory, heat and steel. Of course, he recognised the man in the linen suit as a gangster like the others — the one thing the Jersey streets hadn’t fostered in Briggs was selective blindness — but no incognito crook subsisting on embezzled annuities and New York mozzarella slice should be capable of apprehending such airy and evanescent melodies, no heavy hands so precise in weaving rhapsodies and overtures and sonatas in miniature. This was the genius of the man in the linen suit: he appeared to straddle worlds in stark contrast with each other, and expertly too: as a hand-to-mouth malefactor he was refined; as a patrician member of the New York cognoscenti, he was a little unscrupulous, a little cloak-and-dagger in his demeanour and his business for any other socialites to compete. The man arrayed himself with a gothic longevity at the coralline red piano, a Hammer Horror rapacity which conveyed likenesses of vampire maestros in Briggs’s mind, the swimmily-coiffured kin of Karloff, of Lugosi, of Vincent Price enveloped in the wings of an instrument which seemed to dribble and buck beneath his diffident petting. Briggs got accustomed to folding his arms at the bar, with his eyes narrowed, a surliness about the mouth while he remained witness to The Brass Tyrant’s transformation.
Soon, no sooner than it took for the pianist’s hushful glosses along the spinet’s keys to swell into their chiming refrain, no sooner had the bar’s cowed clientele withdrawn to memories of yesteryear’s threnody, a music to remind the half-deaf of half-ripe music which sweetened the air when they were younger and given to quick brooding lusts, no sooner had new chords become subsumed by a bath of calm white fire, that the venue was enveilled in a golden arch of surf-hewn sound, a glowing bower of wind-combed clangour which carved a roof overhead, beneath which Briggs felt his body lighten and begin to hover of its own free logic. Briggs saw how the man in the linen suit imprisoned his listeners with golden lassitudes of colliding octaves; he drew up the plans for each jail of the mind, and praised you with pretty fugues as you built up the walls to contain yourself. He kept you castellated in reverie, fucked-up with mute stupefaction. Everyone allowed themselves to be beset by a guileful beauty. Then the man in the raiment of purple linen and grey nankeen would fell his own bower, would stand and desist and reclaim his fingers with a surgical clap of the lid. The piano would discover itself muffled, like a bear kept captive to perform its grotesque dance and then return to its tortured confinement. Bang would fall the whiskey dram, warped would work its passage down the pianist’s neck. Slap would go his knuckles as they scorned the piano’s armoured hide! Up would work the rosy moods from their alveoli sacs beneath the skin. Red would blaze the brilliant heat of the drink scaling his aged face. Wide would oscillate his bright evil eyes. Sure would curl his odious grin, and to Briggs he would point, and to Briggs he would beckon.
‘Well colour me astonished if this sump-hole of sin hasn’t yet collapsed with you foul colony of rat bastards gnawing out its foundations from under it! I should say I’m glad I braved the snow to check in on this warren of pestilence, because it’d be a little indelicate for the NYPD to have to come bag and tag body parts when they’d find chewed-up articles of your neighbour mixed amidst walls of shit. Let’s suppress those cannibal instincts, you gummy old vermin fucks, and apply ourselves to administering the cure! Barkeep! A whiskey apiece for the toothy sewer-jockeys and wriggling waste-tasters at the bar! And don’t schtupp me on the quality there, muscles, because I mean to gargle down your house barrel blend too, and I don’t wanna be hoiking up rodent droppings like pomegranate stones!’
The Brass Tyrant would entertain this same bellowy exegesis, or a variation of it, every second or third day. It never failed to bore and antagonise Briggs in equal measure, nor erode his ever-resonating interest in gaining the man in linen’s approval, nor diminish his ambition to ensnare the man in a quiet inglenook and demand somehow to be cut in on the action. Briggs would nod and keep eye contact, would decant the perfect shot, would exhale like an obedient horse, would jot down the tab with a scholarly flourish, would continue waiting in eyeshot, would contrive it so that he always appeared busy enough not to be reprimanded but disposed enough to appear dormant, in need of a secret directive. One day Briggs decided to risk it; he figured he’d never curry favour with the bloodhounds if he didn’t at least demonstrate the appetite to be recognised, to be granted an audience at the heart of the pack. An hour before the man in the linen suit was due to materialise for his daily interlude at the spinet, Briggs scrawled a handwritten note and sandwiched it between the hairline crack of the piano lid and the organ’s glinting teeth.
Though the culmination of several weeks’ vacillation, the decision that day had been a spontaneous one, and had thus stymied Briggs for any Damascene in-the-moment inspiration; he found he didn’t have much to say when it got right down to it, so he deliberately sought not to court embellishment. His envoy to the man in the linen suit was therefore shocking in its economy. It read: My name is Briggs — I tend bar. You call me “muscles”. You seem to know your way about. I intend to work for you. You hiring?
That afternoon, the gangster in lilac arrived on the limens to the Tyrant in a smoking jacket, conjured with a boutonnière of a single red carnation in his breast, his arm snaked around the willowy waist of a woman so extraordinarily beautiful Briggs felt something chunk inside him like a token palmed into a nickelodeon’s coin slot. A whirring seized his innards, a scratchy song installed in shellac and vinyl commenced its tinny orchestration in the spaces between his ears. He wasn’t one for identifying or acknowledging beauty; he’d been born a romantic in the airiest sense of the word, but not, it had appeared, for admiring feminine grace. Oftentimes, Briggs was more attracted to ugly girls, or at least girls whom the world or the women themselves had conspired to uglify in some way: he didn’t believe much in poetry, and preferred studying the other sex for their earthy realism, for the lengths to which a grown-ass female would revolt against the fawning of the patriarchy. He was consequently aroused by women who neither appreciated his affection nor warranted it: they were frequently either academic in their application to love, and therefore disinterested in Briggs’s overwrought gestures of tenderness; or else they were boastful fucks, anti-monogamists who invited a rutting with pacts of exclusivity that were rarely redeemable outside the day they were forged. So the Farrah-headed vision on the lilac gangster’s arm was something to behold for Briggs — beauty that refused to be equivocated in poetry.
She emerged into the light backlit by the tempest white of Brooklyn’s snowy skull, vespers rising off her body as though her trespass had sprung from the eye socket of the city. She moved like the Devil’s answer to a barn owl, eyes like sulphur-blown glass facets in her head, cheekbones like marble wings, rasps of dragon breath swathing her honey complexion as though arrayed in autumnal plumage. Briggs watched on as she shook herself free of a leather lambskin stole, her head crowned in a cloche hat knit from a silver fox pelt, her hair slinking round her throat like the twined talons of a raptor of the desert sands.
She was Italian, he saw, blonde like the Milanese tryst-cravers who congregated in plazas, laundromats, lighthouse doorways on the covers of every erotic pulp novel Briggs had ever spotted in a subway spinny rack. She glided as she moved, and Briggs finally noticed that on her wrist there teemed a corsage of spider chrysanthemum florets and maidenhair fern sprigs; when contrast with the gangster’s carnation the effect was almost venomous, scarlet and green. They each gravitated towards the bar, the pianist and his sleepy-mouthed moll in her fleeced-fox hat, and Briggs knew then the threat of control invoked in owning to your convictions when he croaked an arid greeting to the couple and asked what they were having, and The Manticore’s face seemed to transform in an instant, and from within his tigerish grin there boomed a voice like that of a gondolier, and the voice spoke a single word, and that word was “Whiskey”.
Kirk Marshall (@AttackRetweet) is a Brisbane-born writer and teacher living in Melbourne, Australia. He has written for more than eighty publications, both in Australia and overseas, including "Vol. 1 Brooklyn" (U.S.A.), "Word Riot" (U.S.A.), "3:AM" Magazine (France), "Le Zaporogue" (France/Denmark), "(Short) Fiction Collective" (U.S.A.), "The Vein" (U.S.A.), "Danse Macabre" (U.S.A.), "WHOLE BEAST RAG" (U.S.A.), "Gone Lawn" (U.S.A.), "The Seahorse Rodeo Folk Review" (U.S.A.), "The Journal of Unlikely Entomology" (U.S.A.) and "Kizuna: Fiction for Japan" (Japan). He edits "Red Leaves", the English-language / Japanese bi-lingual literary journal. He now suffers migraines in two languages.