And I neglected to wear a clean shirt

When I found McCormick’s, I thought: This is it. Here’s a dank, dreary, horrible little pit of a pub where I can medicate myself with liquid depressants with no distractions.

They don’t get the cheerful, after-work crowd in here. The sad, sallow faces in the mirror behind the bar all belong to dedicated, professional drinkers, winding down their careers. It’s grim. I like it like that.

I guess what I’m saying is that sometimes you wanna go where no one gives a crap what your name is. To the bartender at McCormick’s, I’m “bourbon neat.” That’s my name. That’s fine.

OK, but then the girls started coming in.

I don’t know what their story is. They moved into a nearby apartment or something. But for some unfathomable reason, they decided McCormick’s was going to be their place. And they’re ruining it.

See, these girls are happy. They’re loud. They’re bubbly. They gab. They giggle. They play “We Are Family” on the jukebox. Who even knew McCormick’s had a jukebox?

But the worst of it is the picture-taking.

I can’t imagine how voluminous these girls’ FaceBook photo albums are, because they shoot their every visit to the bar—MY bar—like it’s Lady Di’s first posthumous public appearance and they’re the paparazzi.

And they don’t even have to talk to each other about it. Like say if I was going to take a picture of myself with Floyd, the gray-faced alkie who occupies the stool two down from me—and don’t ask me why I would do such a thing, but if I was going to—I’d probably have to say “hey, Floyd, c’mere, let’s take a picture together.”

Not the girls. They’re so practiced at it that they read each other’s body language. One leans into another, and the one across the table knows to snap a photo. Another one turns her camera around to face herself, and the girls on her flanks instinctively lean in to the frame. Flash, flash, flash, flash. It’s non-stop, every time they visit. I swear, a typical Happy Hour exposes me to more duck face than the director’s cut of Treasure of the Lost Lamp.

Thank goodness for Samsung’s DualView digital camera. It’s got a one-and-a-half-inch LCD screen right on the front, so the girls can take self-portraits with each other without having to do a hundred retakes because “Jen wasn’t in the shot,” or “oh, no, I cut off our heads,” or “omigod, you aimed it right down my shirt!”

I’m telling you, everything that reduces the number of flashes is OK by me. A bar should be dark, you know?

The girls will figure it out. It’ll take them a few years, probably, and a few more disappointments. But eventually they’ll end up where I am. And where Floyd is. And where whatever his name is, the liver-spotted guy with the dyed-black Big Boy pompadour who sits at the end. After life beats down the girls like it’s beaten down us, they’ll quiet down. They won’t giggle so much. And they’ll leave their Samsung DualView cameras at home.

Because after you spend enough years in bars, and your skin slackens and your eyes go yellow? You come to a point where you really don’t want pictures.

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