Clifton’s Place
THE SIGN outside the bar had appeared only recently. It announced the bar’s name and hours of operation, clear indications that this was not just another townhouse basement. Still, despite the listed business hours, no one got in before the sun went down, even in summer, even if you stood right outside the locked gate, peered in, and waved. The ones who stood waving by the sign—twilit, ignored—were the newest of the new, the people whose need for signs and schedules and business cards and happy hours was most acute.
Only when night fell did the gate to this other world open. An old man in his eighties, Julius, checked IDs from his chair by the door. Julius saw himself as he had been decades earlier, a tough and wiry young man, still every bit a bouncer. Once they got past him, the newest of the new sat where everyone unaccustomed to the place sat, at the tables lining the paneled wall across from the bar. Rarely did newcomers of any kind come alone; mostly they arrived in pairs or in larger groups. They commented on the Christmas lights strung wildly across the low ceiling and nodded to the music playing faintly from the old hulking jukebox. These people amused themselves by pointing out the outdated appliances massed in the corner near the kitchen: an enormous microwave oven, a rusted hot plate, a few coils detached from an electric stove, a clock whose remaining hand twitched at the number 9, things many of them couldn’t even name. Until they learned better, they sat as if they would be waited on, as if they would be handed menus. At Clifton’s Place there were no menus.
Neighborhood people who had been coming there for years—regulars, or “the folks,” as they called themselves—knew that no one named Clifton had ever been formally associated with the bar. They knew that the owner, Sadie, had fallen for a man named Clifton back when she still turned heads on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Their love affair didn’t last. They fought for weeks until Sadie, known for her reckless tongue, told him she never wanted to see him again. So he left her and then, they said, he left the city too. But Sadie came to realize she had made a mistake, and the name she gave the bar when she opened it was her way of letting Clifton know he could come back to her. The folks knew that Sadie’s friends chided her and said he would never return, that she would feel like a fool owning Clifton’s Place after her feelings for him had gone cold. Her friends had predicted the humiliation of the days when she would have to fill out the forms to change the name. “Good thing for you there’s no sign to replace,” Julius had said. Forty years later, however, there was a sign and the bar was still called Clifton’s. Sadie showed up any night she felt up to it, wearing heels and one of her many colorful dresses. But she didn’t feel up to it as much as she used to.
Ellis was one of the folks. One summer evening, at his usual place near the door, on the stool where the bar counter curved and met the wall, Ellis tapped his fingertip against the sharp point of his pencil and held the eraser in his mouth, the ferrule giving easily between his teeth. As he often did in those days, he wondered about Sadie. It seemed true, as folks said more and more often, that her mind was no longer right.
Her nephew Sharod, who had become the bartender, heaved himself into motion and settled his bulk on the slabs of his forearms, directly in front of Ellis, covering his stack of drawing paper. “You stay sucking on that thing like it’s your favorite titty,” Sharod said.
The pencil had been taken fresh from the box before Ellis left his tiny apartment, turned in the sharpener until the graphite peeked out just the way he liked. The eraser, out of his mouth now and as yet unused, gleamed in the bar’s irregular lights, the solid pink nub slick with his spit.
“Don’t look all confused,” Sharod said. “A man likes what he likes on a woman. Even though what’s best about those things is that she got two of em.” He held out his hands, cupped to suggest breasts. Ellis noticed how often men used their hands to suggest the bodies of women. “Just last week,” Sharod continued, “I got yelled at cause my crazy ass don’t know how to spread the love. Then her crazy ass up and decide she got jealous parts and kicked me to the curb. How you gonna be jealous of your own self?”
Ellis wasn’t sure if he was supposed to answer this question.
“And how’s a man gonna play favorites with what a woman got?”
“I don’t know,” Ellis said, but he could imagine it. He heard what men said to women out on the streets. He sometimes felt he should say something to the women too, something nice to correct what the men said, but he never did.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Sharod said. “All of a woman is too much woman to love.”