You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The little Con Artist on Lower Broad.
The juke joint is packed with a rainbow coalition of excitement.
The hockey club is the toast of the town, having just secured a post season birth in the playoffs.
Yellow Predators Jerseys fill the hall.
As I walk in I also see a smattering of Red, Calgary Flames fans who have made the trek from Canada to be in this Music City Honky tonk.
The game is scheduled to start at 4pm.
I have two hours to enjoy a beer, a sandwich and the NCAA game currently on the tv over the bar.
I see Louisville and Michigan State University are playing. It’s the 2nd half and the game is close.
Man this is great, I think to myself as I begin eyeing a spot to settle down.
Every seat is taken. Every table is full. Why not? We’re in downtown Nashville on a gorgeous 65 degree Sunday. Hockey is on the horizon, basketball in the air, and the twang of Country music all around.
Wow.
I look at the stage. It is pulsing with music from two musicians both playing guitar. They are cranking out a countrified Eagles song.
It sounds great.
The musician playing the acoustic guitar knows me and waves.
I wave back. I don’t know if I’ve ever met him before. It doesn’t matter.
The bar is packed. I look at a table of Preds fans. One guy is all in. He has dyed his hair purple and gold.
Just then the fortuitous winds of opportunity blow by. I watch as a man picks up his beer and moves away from the bar.
I feel that tingle you get around Christmas when a parking spot near the front of the mall becomes available.
It’s a tiny spot at the bar, just enough for one of us. So my friend takes the seat and I stand.
That’s when I see the little black man with the effervescent smile to the right of us.
He is in his late 50’s with skin the color of coal.
He is wearing a black baseball hat with a gold rattle snake. I think it is the logo of the Arizona Diamond Backs.
The little artist has a goatee that is white like snow. His teeth are stained yellow from a lifetime of smoking unfiltered cigarettes or not flossing regularly.
He is drinking Budweiser from a bottle with a partially torn label.
Before him, scattered about the bar like spilled tooth picks are an assortment of sharpened pencils.
He is working feverishly finishing up a portrait of a woman.
“Hi you doing?” he says looking up.
His smile is infectious.
“That’s very nice,” my friend says trying to be polite.
“I can draw you,” he says.
My friend smiles politely. “That’s ok.”
I look at the man’s white sketch pad with the shadings of gray and black pencil. The lines are thick in spots and hardly visible in others.
I stare at his drawing. I want to like it, but I am not drawn to it. It makes me yawn. It looks tired, like it needs a nap. I think he needs to drink more beer or get some colored pencils working.
Is it good? Is it not good? It’s a bar. Who cares.
I watch Louisville go on the fast break. The guard spins in the paint and lays it off the glass.
“Whew! 2 point game.”
There’s a little eruption from the crowd.
Just then the waitress moves to us. I expect a big smile. The bar is packed. She is making money hand over fist.
She glares at me like I owe her rent money.
“How about two pulled pork sandwiches and a couple of beers?,” I say.
The woman stares at me. Did she hear me? She is angry and makes me uncomfortable.
I feel awkward. Did I not get the memo that my bar maid was on the rag.
“Do you want me to pay first?” I ask trying to thaw the permafrost that is her personality.
“I don’t care,” she says nastily.
I DON’T CARE.
Her words are so abrasive I am shocked. I DON’T CARE!
For a person who relies on tips to actually say that is startling.
“OK,” I say laughing.
She walks away as if I have Ebola.
“What a bitch,” my friend says.
“Yeah. did you notice that? I mean, I’m sorry she has to work on a Sunday. But since she does have to work, wouldn’t you be happy that your bar was packed and that you are the only bar tender?”
“”You see that?”
My friend points to a glass jar over the bar. It has a sign that reads: WORK FOR TIPS.
The jar is empty.
“You think that’s symbolic?”
We both laugh.
Just then I stare back at the little artist. He is pushing lead onto white paper in a ferocious dedicated manner. He smudges the pencil line, obscuring it, pushing the dark lead into the fibers of the white paper.
I stare at it. I guess it’s art, but it feels so forced. Something about it to me just feels wrong.
I stare at the image. It’s a white woman with big hair.
Her hair goes up in gradients of black and grey. There are smudges along the top of her head where the artist pushed the lead into the paper.
I don’t like the picture. It’s just not good. If I didn’t know better I would say it is a bad etching of Tammy Wynette from the 60’s.
“Whose that?” my friend asks.
“That woman across the bar.” The little artist says indicating a woman 20 feet away.
I look at the direction he is pointing. There is a group of people on the other side of the bar. They are past the TV’s, beyond the beer bottles, sitting against a brightly lit window that opens to the Bridgestone Arena.
I look at the woman I think he is drawing. She is an unremarkable brunette talking with a bunch of friends. She has no idea he is drawing her.
She certainly looks nothing like Tammy Wynette.
I get a twinge in the back of my neck. It’s an electric pulse that wakes me up.
It’s that feeling I get when something’s not right with the universe.
I look at the little artist man finishing up his work. I’m suddenly a little critical of his effervescent smile and his forced bar art.
His aura seems less than pure to me. I suddenly decide he’s not here like I’m here.
I’m here to enjoy a beautiful Sunday afternoon and watch a game and drink a beer and listen to some music.
He’s here pretending to be enjoying those same things.
But in reality, I think he’s another Lower Broad con man drawing pictures in rapid succession, machine gun like, with no heart, with no feeling.
He’s a CON-ARTIST, is what he is.
He just wants someone to give him money.
I could be wrong. But my neck quiver rarely lies to me.
Just then the bar maid with the bad attitude arrives with two beers.
She looks like her Midol PM has failed to ease her pain.
She slams two beers down violently on the bar top.
BAM!
She walks away without a word.
I look at my friend. The beers are not for us. They were pounded onto the bar in no man’s land, sort of near my friend, and kind of beside the con-artist.
Within seconds, the force of the angry delivery churns the suds like a washing machine over flowing.
I watch the golden brew in the bottle grow angry.
Like an apartheid march in 1980’s South Africa, the molecules of hops and barley fight one another.
In this angry moment of beer delivery, the liquid has erupted into a riot, a chemical reaction that cannot be contained by the 12 oz bottle.
I watch the brown liquid churn like a frothy sea in an escalating Noreaster.
A white foam forms and pushes its way up the neck of the bottle.
It explodes out the top like a beer volcano, running rapidly over the lip like a barrel diving over Niagara Falls.
Suddenly the bar is saturated with beer.
“What the hell…”
I grab ten napkins and place them under the beers to keep them from leaking onto my friend’s sleeve.
I watch as the angry beer keeps churning out of the bottle, clinging to the side and rushing down the glass.
The lake of beer is expanding toward the con artist.
But he is so deep into his artistic con, he doesn’t see the approaching stain that will surely destroy his work.
I doubt he would even care. This crappy big hair picture looks like the last big hair picture which will look like the next big hair picture.
With beer flowing steadily, the con artist suddenly gets up with his picture and walks to the crowd on the other side of the bar.
“Thanks a voice from behind me,” chimes in.
I look behind us. A man and woman are about to reach for the beers.
“Angry bitch huh?”
They smile nervously.
The couple is pure like corn field in Kansas.
Before anyone can laugh or comment, the bar maid walks over to us.
She stares at the lake of beer flowing across the bar top.
Her face is hard like an FBI wanted poster.
Most servers would immediately render aid and suck up the beer puddle with a trusty towel.
Most servers would say sorry I bitch slapped your delicate beers, let me get you two more on the house.
Most servers would at least say “sorry. I’m having a bad day, or my cat died, or I just don’t like my job.”
Not this bar bitch.
She stares at us and just walks away, as if this is the way she was taught to do it in bartender school.
I’m astounded. Is this really happening. In Hell maybe? But this is Smashville, damn it.
I wipe the bottles off with 50 bar napkins and hand the half full bottles to the Kansas couple.
They are eager to grab the beers and just leave the scene of the crime. They are so pure, I am not even sure they realize they got Punked without seeing Ashton Kutcher.
They move away perplexed.
That’s when I stare at the little con artist. His effervescent smile is lighting up the other side of the bar. He is holding the paper next to the girl’s face. Her hair is nowhere the size of Tammy Wynette, yet there it is in black and white.
Will they fall for his con?
The little con artist bothers me. He is the creepy ying to the bar maid’s menstrual cycle yang.
I think the con artist is invading people’s personal space staring at them and drawing them without permission.
He is drawing women assigning them generic big hair girls and rounded chins with no cheek bones.
He is a lower broad poser. He acts like an undiscovered Michelangelo who is struggling, starving, talented.
He is a con artist.
My neck twinges. I all ready know that if i do an NCIC search I will see a long rap sheet for petty crimes that include failure to appear, and petty theft.
I look up at the basketball game. MSU is leading.
“Who do you want to win?” my friends asks.
I don’t care. My brackets are busted.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say.
Just then the con artist sits back down.
I watch him unfold a few dollars and leave them on the bar in plain view.
This is part of the con. Make people see that he is a starving artist working for charity.
“I can draw you,” he says again to my friend.
His teeth are crooked as his art is bad. I can see a con man gleam in his eye.
He turns the page in his etch pad and begins drawing another woman across the bar.
A big round forehead suddenly emerges. There are dark spikes and the beginning of big hair.
I feel my stomach turn as the pulled pork sandwiches arrive.
The woman slaps the plates down.
She begins to walk away.
“Hey,” I scream.
She turns.
“I want two more drinks. And put them down carefully.”
Suddenly her face twists into a smile.
It’s as if she has no respect for a doormat.
Perhaps that’s her con. She is going to treat you like crap at your own expense until you call her out.
“OK,” She says.
I shake my head.
I watch the con artist draw a nose and cheek bones and then eyes.
The picture looks like the last one I watched him make.
He erases a line, and blows the pink eraser fragments onto the bar.
His pencils scatter and he signs the bottom of the page.
He gets up with a courtesy nod and walks to the group across the way.
And once again the con is on.
He makes you like him. He doesn’t ask you for money. But he does draw you without permission.
At best, He hopes you like his art. At worst he makes you feel sorry for him that he is resigned to drawing people in a bar drinking Budweiser on a hockey Sunday.
He returns with a few more dollars in his fist.
“I can draw men too,” he says to me smiling.
I look at him finding him more and more creepy.
“I don’t photograph well” I say shutting him down.
He laughs.
“I’ll make you look beautiful.”
I’m here to have a sandwich and a beer, take in a ball game and listen to some music.
Yet the little con artist next to me is hustling. It’s like I’m sitting at his work shop of lies.
“Every white girl looks the same,” I whisper to my friend.
And so it goes.
The PMS bar maid and the artist.
Both working their respective cons from both sides of the bar.
Just then the band plays a Buffalo Springfield song.
“Everybody look what’s going down.”
I take s sip of my beer. I stare at the Bridgestone arena and imagine the announcer firing up these Southern hockey fans.
As I slather my pulled pork with hot sauce, I watch the little con artist draw another fat faced girl.
I watch the bar maid rip the tops off 6 beers in succession.
Her smile is hidden under a fortress of attitude.
I bite into the sandwich. It’s delicious.
I swallow knowing that the con is on, as sophisticated as an etching of a big haired girl.
Life’s crazy™