Tonight is Pub Quiz finals at Molly Malones, a local Irish pub that caters to the ... seedier, shall we say ... denizens of the city. After all, they accept me as a regular so how high can their standards really be? No matter that, fact is the heat is on for the Last Place Team to come through with another victory. But we're okay with that. It's the cold that often does us in, a bone numbing cold like we had for so long last winter. So bring on the heat tonight. At least we won't have to worry about a...


Brain Freeze

You say it’s only Pub Quiz? Maybe. But sometimes Pub Quiz is so much more. And whether it happened this way or not doesn’t matter, because even if it didn’t, it should have. Some of the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

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It was a dark night in the city—-a mediocre mini-metropolis no one ever described as a city that never sleeps. In fact, from what I could tell, this Podunk burgh sleeps just fine. Not me, though. Not this night. It was the questions, always the questions, gnawing at my brain like a horde of rabid rats savaging a salt-cured ham wrapped in a fake leather coat. That’s what I donned--my best … hell, my only coat; some might say as cheap and fake as me--when I went out the door and down the street toward the place where I figured I could lose myself on such a miserable night. The mecca of rat-brain questions: Molly Malones Irish Pub.

The night was cold, with a wind-driven chill that bit deep, sliced to the bone, cut clear to the quick as brutally as a dear-John letter to a love-drunk teenager who still had visions of sliding in safe at home when he’d only ever barely gotten past first base. I turned up my collar and walked fast, right up to Molly’s door. It was a Wednesday—-Pub Quiz night. I couldn’t avoid the rat-brain questions; never intended to. They were waiting for me inside. That’s why I was there. I took a deep breath and stepped in to face them.

Inside Molly’s even the shadows had shadows, but that was nothing new. Some said the low-light ambience matched the manager’s IQ level, but I knew better. Yeah, Lenny may act like he’s not the brightest bulb in the socket, but I keep my eyes open, know what I mean? In the dark quiet moments, when people don’t think anyone is watching, when they believe it’s safe to be who they really are, that’s when I see things. I’d seen enough of Lenny. And when I let him know what I’d seen, we came to an understanding. Now we both know what it means when I order the creme brulee. And I know what it means when Lenny tells me, “The creme brulee, it ain’t happenin' tonight.” That means no back room sugar available for daddy’s entertainment. It means I’ll most likely be going home … unsated, shall we say … again.

Lenny wasn’t around. But speaking of sugar, my server this night was Ginger; a tasty little morsel, but in that wholesome girl-next-door sorta way. Definitely look-but-don’t-touch material, ya know? At least that’s the vibe she gives off if you don’t know what to look for. You see, she has these eyes that can sometimes pierce the usual grey cigarette-smoke-haze inside Molly’s in a way that’ll make you feel like a starving man seeing an electric sign in the distance, blazing through the dark, flashing ‘All You Can Eat’ in bright red neon letters. But I had a feeling the starving man Ginger would choose to feed couldn’t be just anyone. He’d have to be THAT guy: a concrete wasteland Prince Charming who could make her magical small town dreams come true. Just my luck, I’m no prince.

“The usual, Baby Cakes?” Ginger said when she sashayed up to the table I’d taken, in front, by a plate glass window so big you could have watched an orca through it if Molly’s were an aquarium. It was the only table available.

“Yeah, the usual.” Glancing around at the other patrons clustered in the shadows, I had to wonder, Is this Pub Quiz night or a support group meeting for Perverts Anonymous? And what did that say about me? I slipped on my best ex-insurance-salesman’s smile and said, “Hey look, Doll, is Nicki around?”

Nicki is another server at Molly’s. But then she’s more than a server. While Lenny runs the back room action, Nicki minds the legitimate side of the business. A sharp little bundle of dynamite. A few days earlier, while I was bellied up to the bar enjoying a liquid afternoon snack, she told me that since winter had settled in it was apparent the furnace in her new apartment wasn’t up to the task. I told her, ‘I got somethin’ that’ll keep you warm.’ Told her about my space heater. She sounded plenty interested. So this evening I stuffed the thing into a plastic shopping bag and packed it all the way to Molly’s, hoping to place it into her hot little hands.

“Sorry, Nicki’s off tonight. What is it?” Ginger winked. “I ain’t enough for ya?”

“Enough? You’re too much, Doll. No, I just got something for her, that’s all. Mind passing it along?” I was melting under those eyes, those eyes I knew weren’t flashing for me. I was just in the line of fire.

“Sure, Babe, I’ll take it off your hands at the end of the night. Now let me get you that drink. You look like you could use it.”

I set the bag on the floor, under the table by my feet, without once taking my eyes off Ginger as she walked away to get my Glenlivet. That's top shelf stuff in my book, both the Glenlivet and Ginger. I could afford the single malt, just barely. It wasn’t a matter of affording Ginger. It's more a case of me not being THAT guy.

But I am the kind of guy who could waste a little time considering how Nicki and Ginger were suds sisters, beer-babe buddies, on-tap tootsies who went way back together. Now, I’m not saying they had ever been anything more than friends. But I am a guy, so you really can’t blame me if there were times I saw them in my mind’s eye as more like special friends, if ya know what I mean. You can’t blame me for that … right?

“Hey, D-Man,” someone said. I looked up. Michelangelo—-a budding painter whose real name is Greg—-was standing there grinning at me. He had caught me red handed, mentally drooling over the idea of Nicki and Ginger together. On the outside, Michelangelo seems like a mild mannered artiste. But under that calm smooth exterior he harbors a soul as twisted as a pubic hair riding a tilt-a-whirl.

“Hey there, Mikey. Take a seat.”

And he did. Including me, that made half our trivia team present and accounted for. We call ourselves the Last Place Team for a reason. Thought it was hilarious when we would be leading after a round, and the Quiz Mistress had to announce ‘And in first place is the Last Place Team’. Says something about our sense of humor, right? Maybe about our maturity? Could have just as easily called the team Peter Pan’s Peters for all I cared. Either way, I never want to grow up. But then we can’t always have what we want.

So we sat there and bs’d while Ginger catered to our every alcoholic whim--another single malt for me, a beer for Michelangelo--until another team member walked through the door.

“High, Steve,” me and Michelangelo said in two-part harmony. Then we busted out laughing ‘cause that’s his nickname.

High Steve is a pill-popping, doctor-feel-good med student whose brain is missing its inhibitor chip. The guy is always telling inappropriate vagina jokes--yeah, I know, are there any appropriate ones--in a voice loud enough to be considered a sonic weapon. At the same time, he’s such a straight arrow, he can’t even lie for his little five-year-old daughter’s sake when he goes home after our team’s latest unsuccessful Pub Quiz skirmish, wakes her up for a goodnight kiss, and she asks him if he won. ‘No, honey, not tonight,’ he says on those occasions, causing her to collapse into his arms, still half asleep and blubbering, ‘Oh, daddy, I’m so sorry!’ Sometimes, honesty can be a tear stained bitch.

“Did ya hear the one about the vagina that--” High Steve began when Ginger showed up to take his drink order, but I cut him off.

“Give the girl a break and let ‘er do her job, okay, man?” I looked aside to see if Ginger was giving any indication she appreciated my gallantry. She wasn’t. I guess she’s heard it all before, from a thousand sloppy drunks, and can handle herself, but still I had to finish what I’d started. So meaning his drink of choice, I added, “Take it easy, and you’ll get what you want.”

“That’s what she said!” High Steve slapped the table. That guy can really crack himself up. “Bring me a hard cider,” he said to Ginger. “In a dirty glass.”

We were catching up on shits and giggles while we waited for Pub Quiz to start, when out of nowhere High Steve said, “Jesus Freakin’ Christ, it’s cold in here!” He held his hands under the table. “Feel that?”

Me and Michelangelo leaned forward and held our hands under the table like High Steve was doing. To someone at another table it probably looked like we were playing some sort’a gay grab-ass game, but asses weren’t what any of us would have been able to grab from that position. The air was colder under there … a LOT colder.

“Yeah… It’s like an icebox,” Michelangelo said. “Must be comin’ in off this big window. We could sure use a little extra heat.” High Steve agreed.

I was on the verge of calling them both pussies when I realized they’d each driven there while I--being a real-life macho man--had walked. Since I was dressed for the weather and they weren’t, I let it go. Besides, Pub Quiz was about to begin. And that meant questions. Seven rounds of ten questions each, including pictures and matching and particular subjects, and we knew we were screwed if any of the rounds were about sports or current events. Don’t ask me from nothin’ about what happened out in the world in the past week. Hell, on a good day I can barely remember where I live.

At 8pm on the dot, the Pub Quiz questions started coming as hot and heavy as the air inside a fogged up jalopy at the drive-in movies on a Saturday night. That’s when the last member of our team finally showed up. Joe, known as Joey ‘T’, is an artist like Michelangelo. Unlike Michelangelo, Joey ‘T’ is a stoner who’s always running late ‘cause he has to meet up with some shadowy character he euphemistically calls his iced tea connection. Joey ‘T’ is a walking encyclopedia when it comes to cartoon trivia. A regular Looney Tunes idiot savant. Too bad none of this night’s topics concerned cartoons.

“Made it! And before the end of Round One,” Joey ‘T’ said, as proud as if he’d just painted an exact replica of one of those Picasso women with three breasts.

Ginger automatically brought him an iced tea. She got away fast enough to avoid his pawing hands.

“Hey, Joey,” High Steve said. “Did ya hear the one about the vagina that--”

“Let it freakin’ go!” I interrupted him. Michelangelo was grinning like he’d heard that vagina joke before and knew the punchline. But Christ, High Steve was talking so loud that people at the nearby tables were starting to throw us the stink eye, and I didn’t want to get banned from Molly’s … again. “C’mon, we gotta concentrate on the questions.”

Yeah, that was it, the questions. It was always the questions. Like “What’s the chemical symbol for ice?” and “In what year did the War of 1812 begin?” and “How many parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is considered unhealthy?” When I heard that last one, I thought, ‘Nicki would probably toss out some crazy number off the top of her head--like 350, maybe--and be dead on.’ She was always doing things like that. Like I said, Nicki’s a sharp little bundle of dynamite. With that in mind, I checked. Yep, the bag with the space heater was still on the floor by my feet.

Now our team has a rep at Molly’s when it comes to Pub Quiz--like a cold sufferer’s nose on a sub-zero day, we’re always in the running. And this night we did hit some high points. But basically we were flailing around like a fat Ohio drunk in lead shoes trying to swim the river to get to the cheaper liquor stores in Kentucky. And the questions kept coming. And we kept flailing. And no matter how many times Ginger refilled my shot glass I couldn’t understand why we were flailing. But I could watch her walk away. Yeah, I could do that. Isn’t the unattainable always the most desired?

But what I really desired at the moment was to figure out what the hell was wrong with us. It was crazy, like we were sick or something. The guys were shaking like they were laid out side-by-side on one of those coin operated vibrating beds you find in a cheap motel. You know, the kind that always seem to stop vibrating two pumps too soon. Even though dressed for the weather, I was jiggling like a dashboard-mounted, spring-action hula girl.

“Shit!” Michelangelo said between rounds. “My brain’s freezing. It’s that big damned window. I can feel the Polar Vortex … vortexing off it. Convection can be a frigid bitch, boys. We need to get some more heat from somewhere.”

“Speaking of being frigid,” High Steve began in his bullhorn voice. “Did you guys hear the one about the vagina that--”

“Yeah, we already heard that one.” I cut him off. Joey ‘T’ giggled. Okay, so I chuckled a little too, ‘cause I had heard that vagina joke before. I knew the punchline. But this was Pub Quiz, and it was time to get serious because we were down. That was all right, though, we’d been down before. That didn’t always mean we were out. One time we were six points down going into the last round and came back to score the win. Well, the last round of this night was about to begin. “C’mon, guys,” I said. “We can still do this. We just need to concentrate.”

But I’d forgotten we weren’t alone at Molly’s. There were other teams lurking in the deep dark recesses of the bar, scribbling down guesses like clusters of squeaking bats splattering pseudo-intellectual guano onto their answer sheets. And they were all only too ready to kick us while we were down, while we were too busy fighting the cold to fight the questions.

And the rat-brain questions never let up. But for us, on this night, it was a frozen rat brain. To make a long story short, on the coldest night of the year so far, the Last Place Team crashed and burned. And to make matters worse, we managed to do that not with a bang but with Joey ‘T’ whimpering, “I can’t feel my fingers,” as he tried to write down our last useless answer. Although, I believe that was more a case of him tripping out on something rather than being near to suffering frostbite. Still, it was pitiful.

Pub Quiz was over, and the Last Place Team had lost. There was nothing left but for us to nurse the last bitter dregs of our drinks and pay up. And the only thing that was going to add a bit of light to that gloomy scene was Ginger. As she came by with the checks and walked away to make change, I had a ringside seat for the show and made the most of it.

With our tabs settled, Ginger swung by one last time, nodded at the plastic shopping bag under the table, winked at me and said, “Okay, Baby Cakes, give it to me.”

“You got it, Doll.” I handed the bag over.

As I watched her walk away--hypnotized by the sway of her hips--High Steve said, “What’s in the bag?”

“Space heater,” I said offhand, still distracted by Ginger’s retreating form.

“No, really,” High Steve said. “What’s in the bag?”

Something in his voice caught my attention. But like an alkie watching the last drops from a bottle of Mad Dog 2020 dribble into his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s mouth, making him yearn for just one more taste of that evil bitch’s lips, I kept my eyes on where Ginger had just disappeared from sight and said, “A space heater.”

“WHAT?”

I did look at him then, him and the other guys. They were all staring at me. Joey ‘T’ was blowing on his hands. Michelangelo had this scary-weird psychotic gleam in his eyes. Mouth gaping like a baby python with delusions of grandeur that had just unhinged its jaw to swallow a full-grown wild boar, High Steve said, “You had a space heater here all the time?”

“Yeah… What?” I didn’t get it.

“I can’t feel my hands…” Joey ‘T’ blubbered.

“All. This. Time,” Michelangelo said real slow, too calm.

“We’d have had to … plug it in somewhere…” I mumbled while keeping a close eye on Michelangelo. He was starting to freak me out.

Slowly, they all turned toward the wall beside that big ass polar vortexing window. There, next to the ATM and under the wall-mounted digital jukebox, was a freakin’ beautiful pair of electric outlets.

“We could’a plugged it in there,” High Steve said. “We could’a won.”

“We could’a survived,” Joey ‘T’ whined. He stared at his fingers, which had turned blue, and added, “Intact.”

“You could’a survived,” Michelangelo said. He was well past freakin’ me out.

Like a rat clawing its way up onto the Sunday bonnet of a Titanic passenger already frozen in the water, I looked around for any likely life preserver. And thinking about that Titanic rat made me think about all the frozen rat-brain questions that had punched a hole in the hull of our collective intellect this night, and I found my salvation. “It was the cold, okay? Yeah, that’s it, the cold got to me.” The guys were watching me real suspicious like, but I plunged on anyway, just like the temperature was plunging right outside that big window by our table. “It got to us all, didn’t it? And I’m no better, no stronger than you guys, right? We were all lousy tonight, and it was the cold. Yeah, that’s it, I didn’t think about that damned space heater because of the cold.”

“That doesn’t make any kind of freakin’ sense at all,” High Steve said. “But I’m too cold to argue. I’m going home.”

He got up, and the other guys followed suit. With one last disgusted look from each of them, aimed square at the sweet spot right between my eyes, they turned and headed out the door. They were just walking away. I couldn’t let the night end like that, so I grabbed my coat and charged through the door after them. They were halfway down the block when I yelled, “Hey!”

They turned, waiting. And I made them wait, in the cold, until finally High Steve held out his arms as if to say ‘What?’ That’s when I let ‘em have it.

“YA BUNCH’A PUSSIES!” Yeah, that felt good. I’d let it go earlier inside Molly’s, hadn’t I, when they were bitching about the cold? Or maybe I didn’t really let it go. Maybe instead, I slipped that little number into my hip pocket for just such an occasion. Only I never expected that occasion to come ‘round so soon.

And the guys laughed it off, ‘cause they knew I didn’t mean it … not really … not the way you’d think. They laughed because we’re guys, and that’s how guys roll. Then they went their separate ways--High Steve, home to break his little girl’s heart yet again with news of another loss; Joey ‘T’, for one last stop-n-shop meeting of the day with his iced tea connection; and Michelangelo, well, Mikey was off to do whatever sick twisted shit Mikey does when it’s dark and no one is looking.

And me? I stood there for a while in the circle of light just outside Molly’s door, reflecting on the events of the night. And when I realized the effect the cold had on those events, it hit me. Knocked me flatter than a road-kill fritter whipped up by some big-rig gourmet guru whose cuisine mantra is ‘Ya gotta get it out’a the grill before you can put it on the grill.’

On this knife-edged night I realized, for once, that it wasn’t about me. It was about us, all of us who routinely gathered at Molly’s for a meager measure of simple human warmth. Like the guys of Last Place Team, everyone of them, including me, stripped bare by this city, made emotional orphans of the same bone-cold concrete wasteland from which Ginger’s Prince Charming would one day stumble; a guy who would be saved by her as much as she’d be saved by him.

And it was about Nicki, that sweet little bundle of dynamite, who would no longer have to worry about freezing her blasting caps off ‘cause now she’d have a space heater to keep the frost at bay. And I made that happen, or at least I had set it in motion. Yeah, that made me feel good too; even better than calling the guys a bunch’a pussies. With that in mind, I turned up my collar and stepped out of the light, into the night, into the city. And I smiled. ‘Cause cold as it was, I felt warm inside. Real warm.