"Sleepless" Chapter 9: "House of Cards"

Pleasanton, California, March 2020

“I can’t believe I’m here, this is so surreal,” said Celine.

“Yeah, after all this time,” I replied.

“Gosh, we should have done this years ago, but you just had to reject me in San Francisco.”

“How many times are you going to bring that up?”

“Just a few more times baby. I just need to feel like it’s healed properly.”

“You can bring it up twice more, and not a single time after we retrace our steps.”

“Okay babes, fine.”

We were seated in the patio of Inklings Coffee in downtown Pleasanton. Pleasanton unlike Dublin was a real place. It’s one of the old Western towns I came to adore after a deepening of the love of my state’s heritage. It has a quaint downtown with overpriced shops that bored housewives spend money in when the economy is on the up. It has American gazebos, Protestant Bible churches, and 19th century homes littered throughout its premises. It’s one of the few places in the Bay Area that is openly right wing, which was always a nice reprieve from my hours in Marxist Oakland.

The town has two bars that moonlight as clubs at night full of girls who never worked on a farm a day in their life donning cowboy hats and glittered jeans I had seen on girls at my second high school. It is however, the last town before Livermore, the true gateway to the real rednecks that populate the majority of the state’s counties throughout the Central Valley and anywhere that isn’t The Bay Area, Los Angeles, or San Diego. People seem to forget that California was once the true red stronghold. Trump MAGA signs were all over this town at the time, and I suspect they are still there today and will be there long after he’s passed away. The leftover Reagan signs from the 80s make my bet safe.

Inklings itself is slightly left of the rest of the town. It has a dark academia aesthetic, but its clientele is “quirkier,” comprising of hipster adjacents and the type of girls who’ve read “The Perks of being a Wallflower” one too many times. The overemphasis on Harry Potter is also never a good sign.

“Why aren’t you paying attention to me Arthur, you should be kissing me babes,” questioned and declared Celine.

“Babe, I told you, I have to finish studying this new menu for the opening party tonight. I just need another twenty minutes, and I should have it down,” I replied.

“I see, okay, right I'm going to run to the toilet then babes,” said Celine before giving me a quick peck.

Celine spoke with a hybrid accent of sorts. She had been raised North of Birmingham in the lone, remaining nice neighborhood in Walsall. Walsall was once a trendy town in England that was the place to be in the West Midlands. It was home to unique shops, bistros, and farmer’s markets back in the 1970s. The 70s were kind to Birmingham by way of football, with Aston Villa securing their one and only European Championship that set the town fire with jovial and fanatical joy. But Walsall had since become a downtrodden neighborhood of Pakistani and Jamaican gang violence aside from its lonely island neighborhood where Celine grew up. She was raised on the highest end of middle class affluence and decidedly spoke as “posh” as she could which resulted in an accent somewhere between the dreaded Birmingham accent and an accent that is described by the British acting and radio world as “received pronunciation.”

With the founding of the BBC Radio, there needed to be an accent that could be understood by men as for North as Newcastle and as far South as Cornwall, and an accent that is watered down, lazy offshoot of the historic “heightened Received pronunciation of the Royal family was what fit the bill. When she was happy, fluttery, and feminine, she spoke more with received pronunciation. When she was upset, as she was the day prior, she spoke more with her native Birmingham accent. It was never more than a 70/30 ratio when it came to each extreme, unless she was trying to fit into a new crowd when she attempted to speak completely in received pronunciation.

I was studying quite a complex menu for the opening of Sobre Mesa, and the bar team of Alex Maynard and Susan Eggett put together a superb and cutting edge list of cocktails typically well above five ingredients that required many steps of prep and half steps in between full steps. Their mojito for example was not going to be a dive bar’s slothful effort at tossing sugar, lime juice, four wilted mint leaves, and white rum into a shaker for than ten seconds followed by an abysmal presentation. They were opting the original method of creation in Havana via directly building in the glass, with granulated Demerara sugar as opposed to pre-made syrup, eight crisp mint leaves, aged rum, and fresh-squeezed lime juice, put together with an old school, long, “dipping stir” with a bar spoon, before garnishing with a pristine mint sprig.

Day one of my bar career taught me how to prep mint properly, and any time a barback messed up the mint, one of the bartenders would take the drooping display out of the glass, raise it up in the air, and say “who made this shitty, fucking mint?!” before throwing it on the ground and berating the culprit.

I was impressed by this menu with a tiki-centric take on afro-latino culinary and cocktail culture, but more importantly, this would hit the Oakland demographic across the face with fascination and obsession. I would be making far more money than my previous fine dining job in San Francisco that was failing to attract customers, and this would mean financial stability by Bay Area standards to fund my training as a fighter while allowing me enough time both to train properly and to begin establishing a practice as a freelance copywriter. It was the final piece of the puzzle I needed, and I couldn’t squander it. I had worked for a year to position myself for this shot at a life I wanted, and with it, Celine and I would have a shot at making it. I’d be able to fly her to San Francisco every other month or even take time off to visit her in London. All was coming into place, and I only needed one more first impression to secure the shifts I wanted. You only need one dazzling performance in the very beginning to get a bar manager to think of you as an “a team” bartender. As soon as they get that impression from three or four bartenders, they relax, and they let you have whatever shifts you want.

“Babyyy, are you done? I want to walk with you!” begged Celine.

“Five more minutes,” I replied.

“But I want to walk in this sun with you, this beautiful sun. Come on babes.”

“Fine, three more minutes.”

“Okay babes.”

I looked through the menu one last time, but I remembered I’d have another half hour to review the menu in the Uber ride to Oakland, so I shut my binder closed after one more glance at the “Hotel Creole” cocktail before standing up, putting on my black demin jacket, and saying “let’s go baby.”

“Yay!” chirped Celine.

We walked up the road from Inklings before a European import supermarket caught Celine’s eye and subsequent begging to cross the street and go inside. She jumped for joy seeing the wares of chorizo and prosciutto that she found behind a glass deli case. After purchasing them with dark Ghirardelli chocolate, we made our way down the remainder of downtown Pleasanton while she gleefully spotted shop after shop.

We walked into one of the shops most frequented by bored Pleasanton housewives that sold various useless knickknacks that one could never fully remember, and they played a record that peaked my interest.

“This is really good. Who is this?” I asked.

“It’s the latest Tame Impala album,” said a petite Filipino store clerk folding a sweater that was one of roughly six clothing items in a sea of nonsense.

“Oh okay. Yeah, I’m not typically the biggest fan of them, but this isn’t bad. I’ll have to give it a listen.”

“Yeah, it’s really good. I’m going to go see them at the Chase Center.”

“Nice. Yeah, a close friend of mine and I are going to go see the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction over in Cleveland in May. We’re both big Nine Inch Nails fans, and we were stoked to see them get the nod.”

“That’s really cool! Do you go to concerts a lot?”

“Not as much as I’d like, but I’m planning to change that this year. I’ll hopefully see Rage Against the Machine in May at the Coliseum, and I’m going to try to go see Krewella pretty soon.”

“Nice! I’m going to try to go to Outside Lands this summer.”

“Yeah, I heard it’s going to be a good show this year. Well, we gotta get going. Have a good day.”

“Thanks, you too!”

Celine and I exited the store through its green, wooden doorframe and swung right to go to a corner to catch an Uber to Oakland.

“What the hell was that Arthur?” questioned Celine.

“What was what?” I inquired.

“You were just flirting with that girl in the store just now.”

“No, I wasn’t, I was literally just asking about the record.”

“Yeah, but you didn't need to tell her your bloody life story now did you?”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah Arthur, I am serious. You didn’t say anything about me, you didn’t introduce me, nothing.”

“She’s literally someone I’m never going to see again, why would I introduce you?”

“So she doesn’t get any fucking ideas Arthur, that’s why!”

“Are you actually serious right now? I literally just asked her about an album, and she said she was going to a concert. So I just said I’m going to some shows too. I didn't ask her for her number, I didn’t ogle her, I didn’t flirt with her, I literally just made conversation.”

“You could have just asked her about the album and said thanks when she told you and had that be that. I seriously can’t believe you just flirted with that girl in front of me, this is just so typical of you Arthur. You know you’re flirting, and you just play dumb. Every man flirts and plays dumb.”

The truth was, I was not a part of a cast of characters that made up the general idea of what men do and don’t do in these scenarios. I was simply a man who returned to an old flame after she had been cheated on. I’ll never forget the day I received that text from her. I was working in a bar in San Jose as a receiver and assistant operations manager in the mornings both at a craft cocktail bar and their sister Irish pub. She had come out of the woodwork multiple times since our time together in England when we first met. From 2015 to 2016 to early 2017, I shut her down each time. But when I reached a form of homeostasis in June of 2017, the memories all began to process, and suddenly I was a bit more open to her reaching out.

From the time of 2016 until 2018, she had dated another actor in London who was originally from Manchester. Harry Lyndon was a typical “Mancy boy” who had a bit of talent and leveraged it enough to get into a top five drama school in the UK. He had pale skin, spiky black hair, seedy green eyes, and a slimy grimace you can’t help but notice. He was an “ah, it’s me bird” type of guy when Celine showed up to the bar after he ghosted her for a couple days, as if he wasn’t aware she’d texted him. If he had any growth as an actor, it wasn’t noticeable. Some people get to a certain level in the industry and just begin to coast off of the slight dopamine hits from the some odd plays and film scenes while being a hit with the lads at the pub. I never understood being so wasteful with these kinds of things.

Celine had sent me a screenshot of him texting his side girl, and the typical actress response ensued. She posted a picture on instagram with a mean, enticing look on her face with eyes slightly red from tears, while wearing a black blazer to give her an extra bit of edge in her appearance. She could never quite shake Lady Macbeth’s influence on her psyche. She then deleted her instagram and started another one a day later.

This all came as a bit of a surprise to me. She was on tour for a play across the European continent while I was in the Bay Area throwing kicks by day and slinging drinks by night. It had seemed all but over between the two, yet she seemed in and out of distress. Had she done the breaking up like she wanted to, she would have been relieved. But the cheating was a personal note that struck at her core and pressed the buttons of her origins. Those months in 2018 were more erratic than any I had ever experienced in my life. It was all so bizarre.

When I saw her again, I saw the damage of the man, the man who openly called for Satan in woods of England, Germany, and Pennsylvania. He had sung in death metal bands, and I saw a video of him prancing around the woods calling for Satan like an imbecile. He spoke with an off brand, “Loki” trickster wannabe voice in doing so, but on a visceral level, there was something real that he was interacting with. And whatever that entity was had noticeably rubbed off on Celine. She was more bitter, more suspicious, and far more scathing, a quality I only saw once before in England when she had truly been wronged.

I hadn't sought to get her back, but I found that in 2018, my prayers as an Orthodox Christian inquirer included a somber prayer for her to convert by some miracle of God’s grace. After these prayers commenced, I found her advances coming out of the woodwork with increasing frequency. But when I did get her back, I didn’t get the same girl.

“She’s not going to get any ideas cause she saw I’m with you, and I’m literally never going to see her again,” I told Celine.

“Fine, whatever Arthur, deny all you want. I’m just not that stupid, and you need to know that.” replied Celine.

Our Uber picked us up from the corner of a side street, and I spent the ride to Oakland going over the menu for the opening once more.

Celine didn’t say a word the entire car ride whole glued to her phone with the exception of periodically taking in views of the East Bay.

When we arrived on 17th and Franklin, I pulled Celine by the hand out of the car while thanking the Uber driver.

“Celine, I wasn’t flirting with that girl. Maybe it’s a cultural difference. In California that doesn’t mean anything. I literally just wanted to know the album okay?”

“Okay baby.”

“Great, I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Well, welcome to Oakland baby.”

“Gosh, I’m really here.”

“I’m really happy you’re here cause I’ve really grown to love this place.”

“It looks really cool babes.”

“Yeah, we’ll take a walk when the opening is over.”

Celine and I walked into the lush greenery that lined the hall into Sobre Mesa, Oakland’s then latest and greatest.

The interior of Sobre Mesa’s primary color is forest green, with the bulk of the walls and the base of the bar donning this hue with the walls of the back bar and the bar top being made of black tile and black marble respectively. There are spherical, pink paper lanterns hung from the ceiling to illuminate a room full of tropical colors and touches of wood and gold both at tables and on the finishes found on the bartop. The art was of tropical foliage, making it all see you were entering some form of festive, tropical oasis.

If one is to walk to the back of the room and into the hall, they’ll find a wall to pose in front of for social media photoshoots with a pink neon sign saying “came sober, left sober.” Chef Nel knows Oakland well enough to know Sobre Mesa would be a smash hit, and everyone would want to post the receipts on their social media profiles. It was smart business and smart marketing.

I walked Celine over to Susan and said hello before saying, “Susan, this is my fiancé, Celine, is it alright if she stays put before the opening while we set up?”

“Well hello there Celine, it’s so good to finally meet you! Of course she can stay. Can we get you anything?” replied and asked Susan.

Susan was a 5’4 petite, Caucasian woman in her late 30s whose brunette bangs framed a sweet face that gave off the aura of somewhere between an approachable aunt and a kind grandmother. There was joy in everything she did, and you could tell she cared for every last one of her staff members in her illustrious bar career by San Franciscan standards.

“Hi! it’s so good to meet you, you know what, I think I could really use something fruity if Arthur could make it for me?” inquired Celine.

“Sure! Arthur, why don’t you get back there and make your lady a drink before we really get going. We’re having you on the center well, and there should already be some ice in it,” stated Susan.

“Sounds like a plan,” I responded before briefly pecking Celine and pacing around the bar top to clock in.

Alex Maynard, Susan’s partner in management was already behind the bar helping some of the other staff members. Alex was a slim, light skinned black man standing roughly 5’10 with a chilled demeanor that paradoxically gave a striking presence. His father was the editor in chief of the Oakland Tribune, and after briefly seeing a picture of him with a linebacker’s build, strong mid-sized afro, and infectious smile, I could see where Alex got his presence and his business savvy from. Alex took Starline Social Club to the moon in Oakland before handing it off to his protege and moving into consulting. He was born in Oakland, was raised by one of Oakland’s VIPs, grew up idolizing Rickey Henderson at the Coliseum, and he created an essential part of Oakland’s fabric. He is a true son of Oakland.

“How’s it going Arthur?” asked Alex as we engaged in the “Oakland handshake” of a “dap up” into a handshake.

“Im good man, how are you doing?” I replied.

“Good man, good. I’m happy we’re finally doing this”

“What do you need from me?”

“Clock in, and then help David fill the rest of the wells with ice. I have the barbacks on other jobs while we gear up to do a test run for some of these menu items.”

“Copy that.”

I took my denim jacket off and thew it into a cubby of my well and then went over to shake hands with David Harlins, a dark-skinned black man with glasses and a sunny disposition who lived all over the world, spending a significant time in Italy to become fluent in the language due to formerly being married to an Italian woman. His list of skillsets was impressive, and after conversations we had in the weeks prior, I was excited to work with him for his brief last hurrah in bartending before committing to real estate full time and flying.

“David, how’s it going man?”

“I’m good man! It’s good to see you!” replied David as he returned my handshake with a firm grip.

“It’s good to see you too man! I see you already have the ice buckets, do you want me to go with you to get ice, or do you need something else?” I asked.

“I think we’ll only need these three buckets to finish off the three wells, but if you want to, you can set up the tools?”

“You got it man. I’m just going to make a drink for my fiancé real quick if that’s cool?”

“Oh for sure man, go for it.”

I grabbed some watermelon juice and some lime juice and double poured them over ice in a collins glass before swinging the bottles back into their spots on the stainless steel rack of the well before taking some Hendricks gin and pouring an ounce and a half directly into the glass while pouring a half ounce of brown sugar syrup into a jigger. I tossed the brown sugar syrup directly into the glass before long stirring the drink for ten seconds and garnishing it with an orchid.

“Hey Susan, can you give this to Celine?” I echoed to Susan who was not far from the bar top and much closer than Celine who was seated in a secluded front corner of the bar surrounded by foliage.

“Sure!” replied Susan gleefully before grabbing the drink and asking, “what is this exactly?”

“Oh, it’s just Hendricks with watermelon, lime, and brown sugar. The cucumber notes in Hendricks play nicely with the watermelon juice, and the brown sugar gives it a bit more body.”

“Sounds great, I’m sure she’ll love it!”

Susan took the cocktail away and walked to the corner Celine was seated, while I went to the cubbies and found the remaining golden cocktail shakers, strainers, and jiggers, distributing them evenly between all three wells. Every well had a set of three of each tool in under a couple minutes.

My theory of bartending was that fast hands weren’t enough to be the fastest bartender. Fast feet conquered all, and the only way I could have fast feet to carry over to martial arts was to wear a second pair of boxing shoes behind the bar to mimic the same footwork from the mats. I came to Sobre Mesa with them already on, and I felt I had missed out on a comforting ritual to prepare for work. I wanted my life to be increasingly ritualistic, although the base for such rituals appeared to be lacking in the past two years.

“Hey Alex, David is getting the ice, and I’m all done with the tools. Do you want me to start distributing the vermouths and the cheater bottles?”

“For sure man. Here’s the breakdown of the setup,” replied Alex while handing me the laminated bottle map.

I took the bottle map dipped down to the low refrigerators behind the bar to grab the fifteen cheater bottles of various liqueurs and syrups needed for the extensive cocktail menu along with a dry and sweet vermouth, completing one well before David came back with the ice to fill each well fully.

“What’s up Arthur, what do you need?” asked David.

“I’ve got the right well fully stocked, so can you work fully stock the left well, while I take the one in the center?” I requested.”

“For sure man.”

As we finished setting up the bar, our third bartender for the shift, Sade came behind the bar and clocked in. Sade was a larger black woman from Baltimore with dreadlocks and a shy but sweet demeanor.

“Hey, you’re Arthur right?” asked Sade.

“Yeah, you’re Sade right?” I replied.

“Yeah! You remembered!”

“And so did you, it’s good to see you again Sade.”

“You too!”

David, Sade, and I completed the bar setup before Susan brought the barbacks who doubled as servers behind the bar while Alex made his way in front of the bar.

“Alright guys, this is the first of three soft opening parties. We’re opening doors in twenty-five minutes, and we’re only going for three hours. David, you get to leave first, since you were the first opener, then Arthur, then Sade.”

“Actually Alex, Arthur and I agreed he could go before me since his lady is in town,” replied David.

“Actually, sorry about that Alex, I should have asked first, is that alright?” I inquired.

“Oh yeah, for sure man, you guys can mix and match as you like it, as long as you don’t go over 40 hours in the week,” stated Alex.

“Okay great, thanks again David, I appreciate you,” I said.

“Anytime brother, I know you have my back,” replied David.

“Alright y’all, let’s get to it,” decreed Alex.

Sade, David, and myself took our respective wells and moved around our tools as we saw fit for our respective ergonomics.

The fray of the shift came as quickly as it went, and after the first hour, everyone was satiated. Sade seemed to get a giggle about how fast I was moving behind the bar even signaling a bit of a startled fright at times, thinking I was going to run into her.

“Stick and move, stick and move,” joked Alex.

“For real though!” said Sade, chiming in.

“Sorry about that, don’t worry, I won’t bump into you,” I promised.

“Oh no, don’t you apologize now, I like your motor. We need that behind this bar,” stated Alex. “You keep doing you.”

“You got it, I can do that,” I replied.

I noticed that Sade and David were referring to the recipe cheat sheets more often than I was, slowing down their otherwise fast bartending skills. In between rounds, I made sure to help wash their tools that were in their respective bar sinks to help them reset faster. After about the fifth time I washed David’s tools, David said, “man I gotta help you too bro!”

“Don’t worry man, you will one of these days when I’m slow as hell after a bad sparring practice,” I joked.

David laughed and said, “alright man you got it, I’ll be on the lookout for that.”

The bar shift was a success, and a few boomerang instagram stories were taken of myself and my fellow bartender behind the stick. After an hour and a half, Susan came up to me and said, “Arthur, it looks like we’re on a pretty solid cruise control, and we had some guests not show up for the event. Do you want to clock out now to go spend time with your lady?” she asked.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Of course! You’ve been great! And she is lovely by the way. My fiancé and I have been having the most wonderful conversation with her. Do you want to bring some shots over for all of us?”

“Sure, what are we shooting?”

“Lets do the Mosswood rum.”

“Can I actually go ask what Celine wants? I think the Mosswood would knock her out.”

“Yeah, go ahead!”

I made my way around the onyx bar top, and walked over to Celine who had been nursing the drink I had made for her, with a quarter of it remaining.

“Yayyy!” exclaimed Celine as she motioned for a hug while I walked over to her.

She put her drink down and caressed by face with both hands and kissed me twice before asking, “do I finally have you all to myself?”

“Yeah, just about baby, but we’re going to do a shot with Susan and here fiancé before we go. What do you want?”

“Oh gosh babes, I think a shot would kill me when I’m this jet lagged. Maybe a half a shot of the gin baby?”

“Okay baby, I’ll be right back.”

I made my way over to my well again, saying the obligatory “behind” when walking behind David making drinks at his well before reaching mine.

I grabbed four shot glasses to pour three whole shoots of Mosswood and a half shot of Hendricks.

Alex came over and put a hand on my shoulder saying, “hey man, great job today. I love your motor, your mechanics, and your rapport with the customers. Really happy to have you be a part of this team.”

“Thank you so much man, I’m really happy to be here. I can’t wait for the real thing next week.”

“It’s gonna be lit my guy,” said Alex before one more Oakland handshake and walking off.

I stopped for a second to collect myself and briefly reflect. I finally made it. I likely had the shifts I wanted, and I had the money and schedule I needed. Three years in the bar world finally granted me the coveted perfect setup for a fighter, and I had the means to finally fulfill my destiny with Celine that seemed bleak and beyond repair in so many instances. I bet on an iron will, and I made it through.

I looked up and saw Celine eyeing me from across the room, smiling and pointing at me before a sensual “come here” motion while dancing to the latin trap music blasting in the background.

"But you didn’t cultivate an iron will,” said a voice from elsewhere.

“You sleepwalked through every action for the last two years with no sentience at all.”

“You were a zombie, a husk.”

“You think you have this perfect setup?

“What good is your little setup, when your will was broken?”

“No, you’re not ready to bleed, and you need to be ready to bleed again. If you don’t find that again, you’ll have nothing, and you’ll be gone forever.”

“No, this is all a house of cards, and it will all come crashing down.”

“Because all men must bleed.”

“And that’s why you need to bleed.”