Janus Coins: John's Story - Ch. 03

Act 1, Chapter 3

You kids today with your cellphones, you have no idea what it was like back in the 90s. You're always accessible, but back in the day, when we went out for the night, if your friends didn't know when and where you were going to be, their chances of finding you at some point along the way were next to zero, especially in a college town with a few dozen bars. Sure, occasionally your friends would be determined in enough that they would forgo the drinking until they met up with you, but most of the time?

Nah.

If you were late meeting up with your friends, and they left without you, you had to decide which was more important -- meeting up with them, or getting a good start on drinking. And, worse still, if you were like me and habitually five to ten minutes late to your friends' places, the decision was inevitably made for you some nights.

Saint Patrick's Day? Yeah, they weren't waiting for shit.

I know you're young, and you think you kids go pretty hard at Saint Patrick's Day, but let me tell you, in the 90s, in a college town, it was its own little Bacchanalia, with shitfaced twenty-somethings as far as the eye could see. For that one night, the bouncers at the bars mysteriously got worse eyesight, and the cops generally looked the other way for a bit, as long as you weren't too out of control.

(The gold standard of "too out of control" was set by Tommy Malloy, who, I shit you not, somehow managed to get his car stuck up in a tree. In Iowa. I can imagine how you'd do it somewhere hilly like Colorado or Canada, but Iowa? I mean, Jesus, we're still trying to figure how the fuck he managed to get it that far off the ground with enough speed to wedge it into the tree, but not enough speed to take the tree down. That's some next-level drunken buffoonery there. And he was unharmed! I mean, talk about your shit things to be epic at.)

By the time I got over to Lee and Billy's rented house, they'd already left, and I was basically fucked in terms of trying to track them down, so I decided to do the best possible thing I could think of. I drove back over to campus, parked my car and then walked towards the bar district, looking for the first place that looked like it was having a good enough party for me to start my evening.

I purposefully steered clear of Greek row, just because I knew enough about the fraternity and sorority culture to know that I wanted no part of it. The merciless winter we'd just come through had given way to a particularly gentle spring, and so a bunch of the fratheads were running around campus without their shirts on, or with button up shirts that they let go mostly unbuttoned. I even heard some doofus telling ladies they were invited to "the gun show!" And while the idea of half-dressed sorority chicks was appealing, I knew who they'd be keeping company with, and the last thing I wanted was some dude named Chad trying to pick a fight with me because I wasn't one of his bros.

The reason I was on foot was that... well, it's hard to explain to you kids these days, but the enforcement of drunk driving laws has been ramping up consistently since the early nineties, but in the late nineties, it was still pretty hit and miss, and you had to be really swerving all over the place for the cops to pull you over on Saint Patrick's Day in the Midwest.

(Thank god I wasn't in school when my sister Abby was, because drunk driving was a goddamn epidemic back then. There's a comedian named Bill Hicks who joked around that in the late eighties, if you got pulled over for drunk driving, it would go like this: The cop walks up to the car and says, "Son, you been drinkin'?" "Yeah?" "Whoops! Sorry to bother you! Didn't mean to bring your buzz down! Let's go, Billy, it's just a drunk behind the wheel of an automobile! Bye bye!" Abby told me he wasn't really exaggerating that much, and that frightened the shit out of me.)

Walking also let me scope out some of the house parties along the way, and while I wasn't personally invited to any of them, back then, that wasn't much of an issue. It was a guideline that you should be invited to parties you showed up at, but it wasn't a hard and fast rule as long as you were charming enough. In fact, there was even a subsection of kids who just enjoyed drifting between parties they weren't invited to, seeing how long they could hang out before they got caught, if they even did. I wasn't one of those kinds of kids, but I'd met a fair share of them along the way.

I was about half way to the bars when I was passing by a house that had quite the party going on, and the stereo was blasting the Bodeans at maximum volume, so I guessed that it was going to either get shut down soon or they were going to have to turn the music down. It looked like there were thirty or forty people in or around the house, and my first thought was that maybe I should try and be a party crasher, see if I could just slip in among the crowd and pretend that I knew somebody there, or that I'd been brought along by a friend who'd just abandoned me.

As I considered my options, a gorgeous blonde girl in a green tanktop with a gray blazer on over it stormed out of the house, walking towards the front yard, leaning her back against the big tree there, holding one of her hands up to her face, clearly upset and shaken. Her other hand held a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in it, but she was gripping it tightly enough that the can had crinkled a little under the force of her fingers. She wasn't crying, but she seemed on the verge of it, her breath sharp and deliberately paced, like she was doing her best to keep from breaking down.

She was definitely thinner than my usual type, her arms and legs that overly slender and willowy fragileness that was popular among a lot of the girls, but what I'd seen of her face had looked pretty, and I thought to myself, maybe this was someone in need of a change of pace.

I literally had my hand in my pocket, and was fingering the Janus coin as I considered using it, when a big bulky looking guy came stomping out, heading her direction, a hangdog look on his bright red face, embarrassment having swallowed him whole. "I didn't kiss her, Rachel!" he said, walking straight towards the girl against the tree. "She kissed me and you saw me push her away!"

"After you let her put it on you for a good few seconds!" the blonde said, looking up at him, anger in her eyes.

"I... I was in shock!" the guy said, throwing up his hands. "It came out of nowhere and I panicked! Jasmine was right there and she saw the whole thing, and you know she fucking hates me, but she'll tell you the truth! I was talking to Joel about Professor Haney, and the next thing I know, Winnie's grabbing me and shoving her tongue in my mouth! As soon as I realized what was happening, I pushed her away! I know you saw me push her away!"

The blonde girl stepped up to the guy, grabbing his shirt. "Promise... promise me there's nothing between you and Winnie," she said, her voice on the verge of cracking. "I... I got all dressed up for you tonight, and..."

"Rachel! Babe!" the dude sighed, looking her straight in the eyes. "You are my everything. You complete me, okay?"

The girl sniffed, pushing back the tears inside of her, as she nodded to him and wrapped her arms around his neck, hugging him tightly. "Okay, Chip. Okay..."

I kept walking, leaving the moment of drama in the dust behind me. In my remaining year and change on campus, I don't recall running into either one of them ever again, so sometimes I wonder about what became of Chip and Rachel, if they made it or if they broke it off. Is it weird that I think about them, like, once a year or so? Not intentionally. I mean, I'm just doing something somewhere totally unrelated and out of nowhere comes the thought "I wonder if Chip and Rachel ever made it work." No idea why.

Right, back to the story.

The thing about college towns is that, around that time anyway, the downtown areas of them used to be an endless string of bars, and none of them would be any more or less popular than the others, except on a few key nights, those being St. Patrick's Day and Cinco De Mayo.

On Cinco De Mayo, getting into Casa De Gringos would be next to impossible unless you showed up insanely early. On St. Patrick's Day, the bar you couldn't get into was Paddy O'Rourke's, the Irish pub that did all the expected bullshit like green beer, but also went that extra mile and had a live band playing this weird combination of punk and Celtic music. I didn't realize it at the time, but a scene was forming out of that style of music, and it's entirely possible that some of the big names from that scene were playing in that shitty house band that Paddy O'Rourke's had every Saint Patrick's Day.

Most years, I'd get to Paddy's early, because it had the most interesting mix of people and sound, and the bouncer of the club, a giant biker named Sean who'd moved over from Dublin in the eighties to help his cousin manage the bar, was a master at breaking up a bar fight and ejecting drunks. As long as it wasn't you, it was glorious to watch. I'd once seen him throw a guy from the door of the bar over the sidewalk and all the way into the street itself. That's talent.

There was going to be no getting into Paddy's tonight, though, as the bar was already pushing well into the danger zone. At some point, bars tend to get over capacity, and most nights, if that happens, the fire marshal will come by and do head count, ejecting people until the building is up to code, but on Saint Patrick's Day, back in the 90s, all bets were off and they packed'em in as much as they could until there were college kids half way hanging out the window. Even with drink prices raised for the holiday, everyone was so intent on getting shitfaced that they didn't even care. I'd been told by a friend of mine who was a bartender that the insane level of tips people would hand out almost but not quite made up for the mess those same people left in their wake.

(Seriously, he took a Polaroid of their puke-covered bathroom just after closing one year, and I told him that was the most grotesque crime scene photo ever taken.)

So with O'Rourke's out of the question, I had to decide where I wanted to go instead. I knew Lee and Billy had good odds of being at Casa De Gringos, but I had always hated that bar, simply because the bartenders there believed everything was better with tequila in it, and so they added tequila to any drink you ordered, whether that would work or not, they didn't give a shit. Rum & coke? Sure, add tequila. Mai Thai? Add more tequila. Shirley Temple, because you were the designated driver? Yeah, okay, but what if tequila? I hated the place, but Lee was always trying to convince Rosie, one of the bartenders, to go out with him, and she always shot him down. I didn't have the patience to watch that drama play out yet again.

Some part of me considered venturing forth into Tramps, but I had a bad feeling that it was going to be the Endless Parade of the Lonely and Despaired in there, and the last thing I wanted was to be out trawling for a date. The idea of using the coin again was bubbling up in my head, but I'd been doing some thinking and planning, and didn't expect inspiration to hit me, simply because while I had some possible candidates, nobody had really jumped out at me as someone I wanted to invest time in. Of course, in retrospect, I've realized that's partially what the damn coin is for, to help you have some time to get to know a person before you make a long term decision, but back then, I wasn't quite as keenly attuned to what benefits the coin offered me.

Eventually, I settled on a bar called The Speakeasy. Because it was the furthest from campus, I knew it would be the least crowded, and I could enjoy having a bit of fun without worrying about staggering into a bar fight, something that had happened last year.

What I didn't know at the time was that The Speakeasy had changed owners just a month ago, and that they'd chosen Saint Patrick's Day as the night of their grand opening, and with their new attitude. They'd even changed the name of the bar, I realized as I walked into the place. Where once the sign had said "The Speakeasy" in an art deco font, there was a new sign in its place, one that said "The Night Before The Morning After" in an old western saloon style font.

When I walked into the place, it was clear the change in name wasn't just for show. The interior of the bar had been completely redone in such a short period of time, just by mostly stripping away all the things the old bar had and leaving the raw woodwork exposed, if a bit polished and varnished. Where once there had been soft carpets and mood lighting, now the whole interior felt much more like a wild west saloon, with exposed wood just about everywhere. The booths were still there, but now the seats were the only parts of them with any padding. There was an old jukebox over in the corner that was supplying the music for the place.

As I walked into the place, the first thing I saw was that there woman laying on top of the bar, Daisy Duke denim shorts, a green button up shirt that was only about a third buttoned (in the mid section) and was tied into a knot below her tits to leave her belly and tops of her breasts exposed. A second woman, one of the bartenders, licked up a row of salt off her stomach and then sucked a shot of some kind of liquor from the woman's belly button as she laughed feverishly.

I distinctly remember thinking to myself "there is no way I am ready for this kind of bar."

I didn't even know the half of it.

As I headed to the bar, the woman who'd been laying atop of it slid off, and stood up in front of it, which was when I got a chance to recognize her. She had a massive mane of copper curls that hung down to the small of her back, and her face, neck and chest were covered in freckles. Her name was Shannon Mullins and she was in my History of Rock'n'Roll class, although she usually sat in the back, and at least one class out of every five she might have been sleeping behind her sunglasses. I didn't know her all that well, but we'd had to do a class project together and she'd struck me as someone I'd have been interested in, if she hadn't had a boyfriend.

"Fuck Derrick and fuck anyone who looks like him!" Shannon shouted, drunkenly running over to the jukebox to make Meredith Brooks' "Bitch" spring from it, filling the room.

'So much for the boyfriend,' I thought to myself.

Despite her love of partying, Shannon had struck me as a very smart girl, aiming to graduate around the same time as I was, and I'd always wanted to fuck a redhead, so I figured, fuck it, why not, let's do it.

As I got over near the jukebox, it was clear Shannon was a little tipsy, but she wasn't anywhere near as drunk as I thought she'd been based on that run across the room. Clearly she'd been play acting, amping it up so that she looked more drunk that she was, maybe a defense mechanism to keep people from buying her drinks. She was, however, wearing a large "Kiss me, I'm Irish!" button on her shirt.

"Hey there Shannon," I said to her, my thumb already starting to rub over the surface of the coin in my pocket.

"John!" she cheered, raising one hand up into the air as she beamed a smile at me. "Can't you read the fucking button?" She grabbed my shirt suddenly, yanking me in close as she locked lips with me so suddenly, I dropped the fucking coin.

It was a good kiss, not overly affectionate or wanton, but exuberant, as if unburdened by anything for just a moment in time, and it only lasted a few seconds before she pulled back, a lecherous grin on her face.

"Jesus, has a girl got to do everything herself in this fucking town?" she giggled, flipping a large stack of her red mane back over her shoulder.

"Shit," I said suddenly. "I dropped my lucky coin!"

"Well, fuck! My bad! Lemme help you find it," she said, as we both crouched down on the wood floor. We started looking in different directions, and she bumped her ass against mine a couple of times, the first accidental and the second not as much, before she said, "This it?"

Sure enough, she'd found it, and as she had it extended to me, I said to her, "Thank god. A new beginning." The coin fell from her hand into mine, and it was warm to the touch. I moved to my feet and helped her up immediately after. When I pulled her to her feet, she overdid the getting up and moved in to press her body against mine suddenly, giggling into my ear. I could tell she didn't have a bra on underneath that shirt from just how stiff her nipples were pressed against me.

"I decided to come out tonight to get over Derrick by getting under somebody else, John," she purred into my ear, and at that point, I was starting to wonder if maybe my first read on her had been correct, and she was already three sheets to the wind. "You wanna be that somebody else, John?"

"I'd be a fool to say no, Shannon," I told her, "but I just got here. Can I at least have one drink before we take off and I fill the role of Mr. Right Now for you?"

She giggled, maybe a bit too enthusiastically. "Yer funny. Sure, why not? I can do another drink or two. Lemme introduce you to my roomie who works here," she said, sliding her arm around my waist, pulling me over towards the bar. "Hey Teresa!" she shouted to the bartender who'd taken the shot from her navel just a few minutes ago. "It's Half-A-Goth from my music class!"

"Half-A-Goth?" I asked her suspiciously.

"You're always listening to those goth bands... The Cure, Bauhaus, The Cult, Joy Division... but you, like, don't always wear black, and you don't put on make up and shit," she laughed.

"Oh, so what you're saying is I've got good music taste, but I don't let it define me," I said, holding out my hand to the bartender. "Hey there, I'm John."

"Hey John, I'm Teresa," she said, taking my hand in hers and shaking it. I'd find out later that she was the daughter of Cambodian refugees, born here in the States, but raised in a dual language household. She had Asian features, but spoke impeccable English and was as American as I was. Her black hair was cut shorter than Shannon wore hers, the bottom of it just barely brushing her collarbone, and she was dressed in a tight-fitting black tanktop and a green plaid skirt that reached down to her mid thigh, black fishnet stockings on underneath, and a red flannel shirt tied around her waist like a belt. She also had on the biggest, chunkiest black shoes I'd ever seen. "You drop something? I saw you and Shannon rooting around on the floor over there."

"My lucky coin," I said, making a split-second decision as I fished it out, holding it out to her. "My sister gave it to me, and she claimed it's magic, but I suspect it's probably just really old."

Teresa took it from me with her slender fingers, holding it up to the light. "Well, it's definitely really old," she agreed. "That's fucking Latin on it. I'm rusty but... 'Door of Every Heart?' Is that right?"

"My sister told me it was 'a new beginning,' but that's just something the guy who sold it to her told her," I said, seeing her freeze in place for just a half second when I said the phrase, before she immediately handed the coin back to me, as if it was forbidden for her even to be touching it.

"That's definitely not it," she said. "'Omni' is all or every. And 'new' is 'novus.' I may not remember much of my high school Latin classes, but I remember that much. And there's no such thing as magic, I promise you. Here, Shannon, have an Appletini on me," she said, sliding a glass to her roommate. "What about you, John? Green beer? Pint of Guinness?"