bison in bathroom

I want to thank Will Diana and JLG Noga for giving this story some eyes before the rest of the world looked at it. Thank you to priya for admiring the cover art. Hummingbird Outlaw is a community production at its core. My big break in posting hasn’t coincided with a big break in writing; big, beautiful things are in the works. For now, enjoy this story my friend told me about this bar.

Ewan wants to go out, he calls me after the taste of my lunch has receded into the beige palate of my 9 to 5. Ewan doesn’t exchange pleasantries; unpleasantly he opens by calling me a boor, saying I never want to go anywhere with him, saying every time he’s been anywhere and invited me and I say no he has himself a blast, without me. It doesn’t have to be this way, this time I can come with him, a bar downtown has some music, four acts playing for the price of two. He’s invited the girlfriends. Not his, he clarifies before I can ask; not his girlfriends, but two of our friends who are dating each other, they’re girlfriends, not his, he’s not seeing anyone right now. He doesn’t miss the girl from before, not even a little bit, right now Ewan is forgetting her name; what was her name?
Ewan really wants to know if I’ll go.

Only if you don’t mention the girl from before, and only if you call the girlfriends by their actual names because I know them by those and not by arbitrary descriptors used in such a way that I; even though having spent a night and a bit of the following morning banging my head against the radiator of Leila’s studio as she worked on this clay-bound choral gramophone kind of thing, haven’t a clue who Ewan is referring to. Just say Leila and Viola are invited, no need to say the girlfriends.

Semantics all the time with you, you’re such a semite, youknowthat? Ewan chirps knowing full well I am one and he’ll need to guard his shins, his ears, various; I’ll be hitting him with whatever is closest to my boot or fist.

Ewan tells me to lighten up and I tell him I don’t like seeing him because he’s unhappy, a bore, bigoted in a metropolitan kind of way; he’s said that he doesn’t like people from a side of town and I ask why and he tells me that they have awful zoning laws and I haven’t a clue what he means. If it’s Mullen-esque bit or if he’s really jumping down another’s throat just to have a punch at the zoning laws. Ewan tells me that’s why I like seeing him, because it gives me stories to tell my other friends, to tell Viola and Leila; are they going? I cut in. I’ll go if they go, I promise.
They go.

I end up down the street from the address. Leila and Viola are out front, Ewan is nowhere to be seen. I almost turn a heel and dip out of outrage. Before I make up my mind, Leila waves out and her bangles clang together, scattering skittish. I approach as if I had always wanted to. I feel disgusted with myself for thinking of double ditching the pair; I embrace, dap, greet the two and we catch up to each other, running a bit from the obvious bait of “Where is Ewan” for fear that they’ll have seen the swivel, seen the hesitation, known that I did not want to be here and thought that I did not want to be with them, like Ewan was not with us.

Denial flees as Viola finally asks if I’ve heard from Ewan. I tell her not since he invited me and she says, well, not since he invited me either. Collectively we scratch our heads; Ewan’s enthusiasm for making plans is only bested by his joy for attending them, he’s rare in that way. We decide to call our John Doe, or rather we make the decision to call and then look at each other expectantly. Initiative paralyzed by the prospect of being the ones calling Ewan instead of the other way around.
“Do you think he’s okay?” Leila asks, genuine concern in her voice.
“God I hope not.” Genuine anger in mine.
“How could you say that?”
“He’s a prick, he called you two “the girlfriends” when he invited me, he called me a semite when I said I was busy.”
“Well he’s true both times.” retorts, dragging the first whiff of nicotine from two cigarettes and then passing one to me.
“Doesn’t mean he’s not a cunt.”
“Give him a break, he’s been having a rough time since he and whats-her-face broke up.”
I groan, pinching my brow “He’s always having a rough time, he just drinks it off! Doesn’t mean that I want to spend every night drinking it off with him. I’m sick of it.”
“No one’s making you drink tonight.”
“He will.”
“Then say no.”
“He’s really convincing.” I puppy frown and Viola scowls back, Leila just shakes her head.
I blush as we join the line for entry.

The bar, the club, the venue, is dim; strands of light droop from the ceiling, the glow they give off seems less useful for general lighting purposes and more helpful as a way to climb to the balcony, turning my head, looking for stairs I don’t find any; it leaves me wondering how people get up there in the first place other than using the light strands. The bar starts five feet from the entrance and doesn’t quit till it hits the opposite wall. The bar line winds all the way to the entrance.

“Christ” I say in response to the bar line, I look back at Leila who’s still getting her hand marked from the ticket guy. His pudgy fingers are holding her wrist as he sloppily scrawls a glow-in-the-dark X on her hand. I’d call it a weird technique if he hadn’t done the same to everyone. All around freak or just dedicated to his craft, I wasn’t planning on thinking much more about him other than the way his insipid voice said “Ten dollar reentry.”
“At least he ended up in this job where all the people he’s creeping out are at least of age.” Leila glibs.

By the time we’ve made it halfway through the bar line we decide he could be moonlighting as a ticketman while working as a schoolteacher, or a financier. We’ve heard nothing from Ewan, only the beep of his voicemail. We stand in line for the bar.

The drinks are heavy. Mingling out into the crowd, slipping our way towards a forward center, irritated looks from gangly men realizing that I’m pinned onto the two pretty girls cutting a path past them. Viola slips me something to hit, I partake and only ask what it is after. Leila tells me it’s 100% fentanyl. The first band starts.

Halfway through the first act, a brachiosaurus belch announces Ewan’s presence. He’s already drunk, dreadfully so. It’s not anything new but that doesn’t make it good, he grabs onto my collar and pulls me into a sidehug, Viola finds herself on the other side. He whispers a low thank you and sorry in the same sentence, words sliding over each other. He’s so drunk. He’s so drunk. We circle up and he slumps down; we talk in hushed voices as the first band clears the stage.

Guy next to us is blowing his mango flavored vape into our circle, smoke sliding out of the slipside of his mouth, gasping for breath like a walrus with human lungs; lung damage so severe he’s unable to sustain even sedentary breath, the mustache sprouting above his lip solidifies the walrus comparison. He has one of those beanies on, the black ones, the ones that you see on dockworkers and software engineers, people who run Instagram music pages. I felt a sudden urge to push my friends aside and punch him, mid vape rip, punch his vape into his throat, pull the vape from his teeth; mangled from the impacts of my fist, pull his vape out, put it against his forehead, hold it there like as if it was a nail, and hammer my fist into his head till the metal in the vape, the plastic in the vape, the resin, whatever the fuck they put in those things, was squarely lodged into his skull. I discarded the bellicose not because I lost the impulse but because the second band was pulling themselves onto the stage. Eight guys without as many instruments as they have players. One of them sits down and starts crocheting, what the fuck. Another begins clipping toe nails, one in full mime suit starts miming which should have been obvious; even in that miming they decline picking up any imaginary instrument.

I hate medium mixing art, physical performance and music, or whatever they call this. I want to know what I’m getting into, I don’t want an experience, I want a show if they’re selling a show. Of the eight on stage only four have ended up holding instruments. The four not playing are kind of just doing their own thing up there, where do you even book these freaks. My jaw aches.

I make my way from the bar, and people are eager to let me do so, they fill the spots I push from as quickly as they can. Maybe crocheting at their shows is helping their marketing team, their reels are doing great. I don’t know. I don’t care. I just want a drink.

The venue seems to have swallowed more people, floor all puffed up like a chipmunk with a mouth full of grapes, stretched to the brim with all the folks who are out to hear the good word, the click-clack of crocheting, the of miming, whatever sound toenail clipping makes. I always wear my headphones when I clip my nails, I don’t like the sound.

My head is slipping off my shoulders and I keep it there, tossing back my newly purchased beer. I plan on bringing its friend to Ewan as a peace offering; an apology for the grievances I haven’t told him about, for being angry at him for having a hard time moving on, knowing he’ll move on anyway, knowing that I haven’t. Don’t remember what she looks like; I’ve gone as far as to decide that I’m not even stuck on her anymore, I’m stuck on myself, on thinking it’s going to be like this for the rest of my life. Chewed up, spit out, no one party more at fault than the other, devoid of any reason to be uncertain of where I stand, my own molars marking my fate.

I suppose I hated Ewan, to be honest, yes, I hated him. Hated how he was unashamed in his flaws, how he reveled in his misery, didn’t let it define him. His crude jokes and bartered faux pas seemed fine now. Who cares if he was a slob, at least he wasn’t a bore. I was a bore; head against radiator; I had asked how Leila and Viola had found each other, hoping I’d learn how to find someone of my own. Leila hadn’t had an answer, she’d said it was the best thing that had ever happened to her, that it was friendship but deeper than that. Started talking all enthusiastically and I just focused on leaving more of the radiator grooved into my forehead. I feel incredibly naive, nauseous.

The bar’s bathroom door is covered in stickers, covered; all the layers must have extended the width of the door by a couple of inches at least. I already finished my beer, I consider downing Ewans as well; finding myself amusing the wallow I’ve assumed for myself.
The door to the bathroom swings open and it’s empty of any of the clamor between sets that you usually get at shows, everyone must be eager for the Crocheters. What the bathroom does have in surprising quantity; surprising in the fact that there was one when there should have been none is a bison; hair less wide than the room is.
I’ve never seen a bison in person. Sometimes when the algorithm was good to me I got videos of them goring people in the national parks out West. The bison in the bathroom has these beautiful, voluminous eyes, that from a distance probably looked like balls of soot; up close they sparkled with a kind of thrumming intensity, of contented nature. The world could explode, blow itself to bits and if there was a patch of grass on it this creature could call it home and not want for much more than the last spare nibbles of the world.

The bison considers me not with the shock I figured would have been mutual. My empty drink careering across the floor, sliding beneath the bison. I take a sip of Ewan’s beer, trying to decide if what I saw before me is a mirage. Humid, desecrated by graffiti, stickers on every surface, urinals stained by wayward streams of men with poor bladder control and even poorer moral control. The bathroom was filthy and here is this great big bison where the bowels of this building went to relieve themselves. All animals; be they cud chewing, or meat mauling, must think of filth as something that washes off at the next shower. For animals, filth must be something to be all cellophane wrapped up in, unafflicted by any moral play to make sense of oneself, all that is, is. For a human, filth is something that takes deliberation, consideration, understanding and repentance to leave the body. For a beast, filth is something you step in and step out of; it makes no difference because it is not you; matted fur, fur grows, fur sheds, fur can be washed, fur can be cleaned; for a beast, filth leaves.

I feel incredibly jealous of this animal, of this four stomached, cud chewing thing. The bison lets out a bovine belch. I still need to piss. I hazard a question; I ask for it to move and it just stands there. I didn’t expect it to say “oh my bad dude” and sidle to one side; it was taking up all sides. It, an animal. I, a man. I could squeeze past those horns but I had seen what they’d done to others in the open range. This range was much smaller than the plain.

I piss in the women’s room, it’s empty, no bison, no women.

I muscle my way through the crowd; all hopping around, knobbing forward and back on their heels, rowing their arms side to side. They all clearly want to dance but none do. All scared of doing it poorly, wanting to do it right so bad that they weren’t doing it at all.
I find Leila and Viola echoing the same movements as the rest, their saving grace being the way they lean into each other as they do them. I tell them there’s a bison in the men’s bathroom. Viola chuckles and says that I ripped that harder than she thought I had. I ask where Ewan ended up, I have a beer for him. They say he’s gone to the bar, or the bathroom, left muttering something about the singer.

Exiting the bar I find streetlights illuminating Ewan’s swinging frame sending a can spinning against the next door building’s stucco siding. I holler that he’s got to come see what’s in the bathroom, I stumble in my excitement. Ewan pouts at the wall, thwacking the can against.
I pull alongside, kicking the can away from him, batting his attention towards me. As he turns away out slips out an apology for showing up so late and so drunk, we should hangout outside of bars sometime he says to me, timbre low and shaky; he tells that he’s really sorry about the semite thing, that the bands playing suck, the one I had left during was chewing on the microphone; he quivers as he tells me he misses North Carolina; where he grew up, went to college. Now the big city is larger than he thought and he doesn’t want to let it slip past him or try to turn the city into something that it’s not. He’s got friends who’ve done that and they all look miserable; acting like they’re more formidable than the pavement and concrete. “I just don’t know who I want to be, man.”
“Who fucking cares. There’s a bison in the bathroom.”
I grab him by the arm and drag him towards the entrance before he can respond.

I sprint Ewan to the bathroom, pushing him at the door. He’s telling me he doesn’t need to piss so I’m telling him good, because there ain’t no room for it in there. You’ve gotta see it though. See what? What’re you on about right now? Oh just look.
The door swings open and the bison is there, same as before. It looks blankly at Ewan then shifts to me and I swear a glimmer in those big bovine eyes applauds me. Here I am!
“That’s a buffalo.” Ewan says shifting from foot to foot.
“Nah, buffalo are endemic to Afro-Asia. That’s a bison.”
“What?”
“I watched a PBS special about ungulates. Hooved mammals.”
Ewan says huh and then leans forward, getting face to face with it. I’m not really sure that’s wise but hell, if Ewan wants to play chicken with two thousand pounds of grazing animal, then sure, by all means.
“It’s beautiful.” I hum agreement and match Ewan’s lean. It’s hewn.
Ewan thanks me for showing him the bison and leans into me. He thanks me for coming tonight, he won’t apologize again because he’s already done it enough times for me to know he means it.
The bison grunts, uhhurghhhhheehhhhiguuughh; echoes out of its throat onto the bathroom tiles, the room shakes, it snuffles, snorts and pushes its snout against my hand, it sneezes. The filth it leaves on my fingers feels like a gift, one that even when washed off will leave a stain of well wished sentiment. In any other place I would have run to the sink in disgust but right now the only reasonable response was smiling cheek to cheek. Thank you Bison.
“Cool, cool, so cool. Wash your hands though.” Ewan whispers.
I’m civilized. I oblige.

Outside the bathroom we mingle our way out to the back of the frenzied crowd, leaping and slapping their palms together in preparation for the third band. Onstage, all of the members of the second act’s band have repurposed themselves into the third act. We try to get Leila and Viola out to see the Bison but we don’t have much luck pushing towards the front. Ewan sends them a text Bison in bathroom, check it out; we slide back towards the bar and then with new drinks in hand float to the ticket booth where the Scotsman beckons us over. The ticket guy asks what we think about the show. Ewan begins to ramble.
“I wasn’t too sure about putting the mic in their mouth when there are two other bands on after em, I mean they’re just playing again but maybe the group a after them forgot to bring their own mics; then instead of giving it their all, they spend the whole set thinking about how the mic was in someone’s mouth. Not just in your mouth but like really in your mouth. I’ve seen people get real close to the mic, spit all over it. Slobber; doberman you know? I’ve never seen someone really get their molars feeling the metal though, it’d be gnarly if I didn’t have hygienics to worry about. Made me want a breath of fresh air. Humans make me sick.”
The ticket guy looks back at him, blinking sow-slow. A toad framed guy, he could fold the world if he sat on it wrong, not out of strength but pure ignorance.
“Ah what’d you know, you just sell the tickets. You don’t go around chewing on mics like they’re gum, you’re too busy with your cud. Haha what’d you call them? Ungulates” he looks at me.
“Don’t talk to the staff like that.” the Scot yells, his heart clearly not in it.
“But the bands are alright to trash?” Ewan looks back at the Scot.
“Oh fair game.”
“What, what do you not like about them?”
“Same thing as you’re saying. Just don’t seem like they got much consideration for getting things they share dirty. The least you can do is clean it, they just threw it into the crowd, management got pissed. They won’t be back.”
“We won’t be either.”
“What a shame.” the ticketer snivels. “We’d love to have them back, they do great sales, but you can’t be endangering our patrons, or our reputations. In three months we’ll give them another chance.”
“Didn’t they play here three months ago?” the Scot asks and the ticketer just shrugs.
“You got a bison in your bathroom, by the way.” I chirp up.
“Pardon?”
“There’s a bison in the men’s room.”
“Like a buffalo?”
“No buffalo are from Africa and Asia” Ewan.
“Well it doesn’t matter where we’re from, we have a strict no pets policy.”
“That’s not our pet, what are you talking about?”
The Scot is returning from checking out the bathroom, shaking his head in wonder.
“Yea that’s one furry cow.”
“Bison.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” the ticketer shakes his head disapprovingly.
“What?”
“The no pet policy.”
“We didn’t bring it in, you gave us our tickets, you saw us come in, we didn’t bring a bison with us. Are you daft?” The ticketer just shook his sorry head, limp hair flopping to and fro.
“Thems the rules.” the Scot chides. He pushes us towards the door, shaking his head, chuckling the second his back turns to the ticket window. When the door closes behind us the Scot asks for our phone numbers, says he’s got no clue how we got a bison in the bathroom but it’s the funniest thing he’s seen since coming to America. “You guys are crazy. I get off at 1, if you’re still kicking call me up and I’ll get you a few rounds.”