Why, This Is Glass
The bartender set two bottles of Heineken on the bar. Looked at her. Asked the question bartenders ask when a woman orders a beer in a country bar in Merced, California, on the day after Thanksgiving.
“Do you want a glass?”
She picked up that bottle by the neck. Tapped its side a couple of times. Looked at him the way only a South African woman can look at a man who has just asked an unnecessary question.
“Why, this is glass.”
Four words. A smirk. A Heineken held like a gavel.
That’s when I knew. Not suspected. Not hoped. Knew. The way you know a thing in your chest before your brain has time to build a committee and discuss it. This woman—blonde hair, blue eyes, wicked wit, South African accent, drinking a beer from the bottle in a honky-tonk where there were no tables—was going to change everything.
Somewhere in America tonight, someone is being offered a thing they didn’t ask for. A glass for a bottle that is already glass. A wine list with a backstory for every grape. A forty-dollar candle that smells like “Tuesday in Tuscany.” We have become a country that cannot hand you anything without dressing it up first, and we have confused the dressing for the thing.
She hadn’t. Four words, and the whole costume came off.
This is the American crisis of the unnecessary glass.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me go back. Back before the Heineken. Before Merced. Before I drove a hundred and twenty miles for a dinner I wasn’t sure I’d earned.
Back to the wreckage.
The Wreckage
I was on my second divorce. Let that sit for a second. Second. Not the first one, which you can explain away as young and stupid. The second one, which just makes you wonder what exactly you’re doing with your life and whether the common denominator in all your failed relationships might be the guy in the mirror.
I received my divorce papers on September 11th. That September 11th. The one where the towers came down and the world cracked open and every American alive remembers exactly where they were standing when they heard. I was standing in a moment that was already the worst day of my personal life, and then the whole country decided to join me. So that was a Tuesday.
Anyways.
I wasn’t doing well. I don’t say that for sympathy—I say it because it’s the truth, and the truth is where this story starts. I was in the kind of dark where you go through the motions because the motions are all you’ve got. Work. Come home. Stare at the ceiling. Repeat. The kind of dark where you start making decisions not because they’re good, but because they’re available.
Which brings us to the Australian.