OBSERVED: The Male Hostess

HABITAT
The Hip Faux Lodge
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It’s a bar that is wasted on regulars. To the neighborhood regulars, the lodgy mooseheads, authentic tin ceiling, and chunky memorabilia covering the walls go unnoticed. The atmosphere is a warm nostalgia that only twentieth century money can create. Have a margarita in a bucket with your Jack Daniels rib-eye, or a mountain of spicy onion rings with salsa ranch. Throw peanut shells on the floor.

The chatter and clicking is thick, but always just behind your ears; unintrusive; perfect for cozy conversation over the din. Clack! Someone breaks a game of pool in the next room. If you tire of watching the people—pretentious and young, academic and old, flanneled and local—there’s a basketball game on t.v. sets tucked into every convenient corner, like spiders.

Singles line the bar, swirling harder drinks. Couples meet in booths, sipping micro-brewed drafts they long to swig. A pair of women at the bar are very careful to display engrossment in their conversation, convincing themselves they are here only for girl-time.

The Soup Of The Day is announced in fluorescent green and pink: Minnestrone.
Four out of five women are generically blonde and aloof. The waiters take pride in their anorexia; they are perfect at their jobs.

And music holds it all together, just enough to fill the cracks, a beat that gels the cohesive whole. Evening’s volume increases to night's, and stiff-backed machismo guys strut in, hoping critically raised eyebrows and a bad attitude will make up for occasional bed-wetting; camoflage dim wits.
At the bar, a 36-year-old former flute prodigy adjusts her hair into casual cascades, hoping it will be enough. Next to her, a man who lives in his mother’s basement and ridicules others into not noticing, notices the casual cascades. The bartender tells his wife he loves her and he'll come right home after work, pockets his cell phone, and pours a shot for an underage goth chick at the end of the bar.


SUBJECT
Our Hero
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Middle finger over index, tapping an anxious beat on a brass rail. Straight-edged goatee-mustache combo—manly cosmetic strength and bravado, and a nose and chin that match in strength and pretty precision. But weakness is betrayed by an overbite, hinted at by protruding upper lip. Practiced narrowed eyes and pursed lips team up to conceal the overbite; the memories of being pushed off his bike, of eating lunch with the teacher.

Bangs pasted up in a picket fence atop his comely forehead, proud, keeping safe any mini-sheep that might roam the shiny black pasture of slick hair.

Professional, austere, he fashions this image as he mans the front entrance, chin pointing upward, asking, “Smoking? Or Non.” Married women can’t help but notice that he looks like the cover of a romance novel; they are smitten. They tower over him in their high heels. If they were to look past the youth, chisel, and pucker, a slight knock-kneed slant to his muscled thighs would be detected. A little boy kind of thigh-rub made worse by bouts at Powerhouse.

He would like to return the patrons’ smiles when he seats them, when they say thank you—he's a nice boy—but doing so would reveal him as ordinary.

A chubby waitress interrupts her bustle for a stress-releasing chat with our disinterested greeter, and he smiles, comes alive and human. They stand close with a non-sexual intimacy, perhaps from puking together last night after too many shots. He pinches at her playfully, pestering, revealing his overbite with goofy smiles.

When he’s not tapping out fast rhythms against the brass rail that winds over mahogany booths and down the stairs, he leans his hip against it, arms tightly folded across posture-puffed chest. Music beats loudly, and in front of him parade a line of adorable, hopping little kids. People smile at the little ones, but not our greeter. He’s too new to adulthood to notice children.

The greeter is cute, but probably kisses like a rototiller. It’s been tough for him, losing the football team and the cheerleaders to community college and alcoholic waitresses. An obnoxious drunk himself, he cries like a poet, and will always fear his father and fall for women who disdain him.