"Misbehaving Quietly Among the Trees"

Friends gather on the porch at Peekskill Public Bar & Grill.

Sometimes you tell yourself—out loud, so the walls can witness it—that your wild days are over. You are finished with nonsense. You are going to sit down, complete your work, behave like a civilized citizen, and forget all the hoop-hola that leads you straight into distractions and that terrible after-effect where you can’t do much of anything because your brain cells have been used up like loose change at a carnival.
 
Then you see two attractive men on the Waterfront and every decent thought you had gets tossed out the window like yesterday’s newspaper. Next thing you know, off you go to a bar, this one close by on Washington Street called Peekskill Public Bar & Grill.

​You’ve been there before when there was hardly anyone there—nobody, really, in the middle of the day except a girl bartender, one other man, and you with your beer on the sundeck, looking out at the mountains over the river and the house tops sinking downhill toward the water. When you returned for one last beer, another man had come in for lunch. A sports game was on the television, though it is rare I ever look at it, not like the fun old days when the Jets were always playing to win on the TV at Whiskey River and everybody was watching, everybody was hoping, and we yelled in union when the Jets scored, then cried and laughed in the end when they lost. The Jets will forever be hopeless until they build them a stadium back in the City, and then, I tell you, they will be as great as they were with Joe Namath. A long shot, yes. I’d call it my own prediction.
 
This day was overcast, which is to say the sky had put on its gray thinking cap. The temperature was cool but not cold, and certainly not hot and sticky like the miserable weather we’d had for several days and nights. Yes, I sleep better when the weather is this way. In fact, everything works better for me when the temperatures are in the 70s or the 60s. I can take a few 80s too, as long as they stay in daylight and have the decency to fall back into the 60s at night for sleeping, dreaming, and not sweating like a sinner in church.
 
This time, Peekskill Public Bar & Grill was not empty because it was that hour of day approaching the edge of night, when people begin to believe anything is possible if the lighting is forgiving enough. The place had a decent amount of people and two girl bartenders this time, one with a derriere to match that Kim Kardashian woman. Only this bartender, with raven hair, was much taller—a big kind of woman with a pretty face and the authority of someone who could remove you from the premises using only one eyebrow. She sat me straight a few times when I got out of line. You know, by then I was on my fourth Manhattan, a journey that had started at the river and had not shown any interest in stopping. I bought drinks for two friends I hardly paid any attention to because I was too busy meeting a new acquaintance: a cowboy from the Poconos who works in Peekskill Monday through Friday, then drives back home to his peaceful valley. Or that’s the way he explained it to me, how peaceful it was down there in the Poconos of Pennsylvania, so peaceful that now I am tempted to go find out for myself and possibly misbehave quietly among the trees.

On the sundeck, a gang of people sat under one umbrella, smoking and drinking as I stared at the view. It wasn’t the Poconos the Cowboy bragged about, but I liked it anyway—the river, the cloudy sky, the hush of the hills pretending not to listen. I watched him and talked with him as he ate steak, potatoes, and vegetables like a real man, the sort of meal that says, I have chopped wood in a previous life and may do it again after dessert. And there I was, suddenly wanting to know him, while the Manhattan in my glass kept nodding like an accomplice.

Quietly Among the Trees