Etiquette Lessons

The door was held open a bit too long, so that the snow and cold like so many mice scurried across the floor, up my trouser leg, and under the back of my shirt. Angered, I readied a hot response and turned to educate this rude newcomer on the “why’s” of common courtesy. But it was well that the cold had caught my breath for the moment, giving my alcohol addled brain time to rethink my broiling verbiage.

He was a giant of a man standing in the doorway, wearing baggy trousers and a tent of a jacket that was both too lightweight for the weather and too large to have come off of the rack. His head was a squared block, it’s features rigid and ugly, his countenance irritated by the cold. He selected the barstool next to mine despite the abundance of available ones scattered throughout the room. I detected an audible groan as the stool braced under a weight which must have doubled my one-ninety. He ordered beer from a cavernous voice whose “boom” shook the barkeep awake even as it rattled the bottles behind the bar, threatening to crash them down into a sharded heap on the rough, plank floors. A ham-like fist bristling with wiry, rustic hairs made a tiny toy of the pint glass placed before him, throwing back its contents before slamming the glass back to the bartop in some sort of Neanderthal-like request for a refilling (which was hastily gratified).

Feeling a tad emasculated by his size, I figured to win back by wit what had been lost to his overbearing masculinity. “Hello, Neighbor!” But my voice, rather than displaying the natural ease I had hoped for, assumed an unnaturally high-pitch in the silent vacuum that naturally surrounds someone displaying such a fearsome mien.

He did not initially reply to my salutation. Instead, his puffed cheeks blew the frost from his second mug onto the mirror behind the bar. He then sucked the remainder down like a shot and slammed the mug back down atop the gleaming mahogany in a repeat request for another round. His great shaggy head rolled my way then until a startling pair of gray-blue eyes settled as heavily upon me as his ass had settled on that barstool next to mine. “I suppose you must be Baker?” He asked, the timber of his voice having dropped in consideration of a barman who was busily sliding his collection of half-empty bottles clear of the suddenly dangerous shelves’ edges?

Surprised that he knew my name, my response was voiced with not a small amount of pride. “Yea, I’m Baker.”

His voice, though quieter, still seemed to rise up from the bottom of a well. “I figured.”

He sighed after saying so, as though he was bored.

“Have we met? It seems unlikely I would forget someone… errr, like you?”

He continued staring at me, even as one of his eyebrows rose inquisitively.

“Yea, she said that I couldn’t miss picking you out of a crowd, that you were a real wise-acre.”

Intrigued, I straightened on my stool. “She?”

”Talulah.”

Unwittingly and disappointedly I slouched back into my former posture. “Ah, Talulah... my fiance’.”

”Yep, that Talulah.”

I chuckled into my glass. ”So, how does someone like you come to know a meek girl like Talulah?”

”She hired me.”

”Hired you?” I could not for my life think of a use that Talulah might find for a man such as this one? “Hired you to do what?”

”To give you some humility. It seems that she wants to love you, as you have been her only suitor up to now, except that she doesn’t like you very much… so she hired me. It was a small job for a man like me to accept, but she was willing to pay surprisingly well.”

”She paid well? To give me humility? I am not even sure what that means?” Yet, a flurry of butterflies in my stomach told me that I half-suspected the answer to my own question.

He gulped down his third pint as he climbed from the stool. “Here. I’ll show you.”

And that is all I can remember of the man who not only re-acquainted me with propriety, but who also made me aware of the lengths to which my darling Talulah was willing to go in order to help me become the man she’d always dreamt of having.