Notes from the Bar with No Name

Chasing down spirits, with inspiration from Anaïs Nin

Happy October! I’m writing this post from “The Bar with No Name” in the city of Agatha, NJ.

The name of this establishment really is “The Bar with No Name” – just the way it’s hand-painted on the glass pane of the swinging alcove door. The name makes me smile, as do the cocktail napkins, embossed with a blank line followed by a question mark: “ __________? ”

The place is quiet tonight. There are just three patrons at the bar, including me. There is one couple conversing at the corner table. There is one bartender - an aproned, mustachioed man named Horatio. And next to the bar, there is one powder-blue parrot nipping at the slim bars of his elegant cage.

I never knew you could keep parrots inside a bar, but hey – here we are.

My reason for coming tonight is simple. A little birdie (not the parrot) told me there’s a relic of my grandad here – a physical, non-fungible token of his patronage in the ‘70s, when he smoked cigarillos at the corner table while jotting longhand first drafts of his novels on legal pads. That was three owners ago, when the joint was still called “The Inkpot.” Back then, grandad was a respectable sports columnist who wrote novels by moonlight. Grandad’s first two books (both historical romances) failed.

Then came “The Return of All Sparrows” (1973), his contemporary novel in which the main character Siobhan leaves her Wall Street job to hunt full-time for an obscure treasure her mother buried in the tunnels of a never-completed subway system below the sleepy commuter city she grew up in.

“Sparrows” became an unexpected literary smash, and Grandad successfully pivoted from sportswriter to full-time author – releasing six more novels and three short-story collections before his death. His books continue to attract readers today, four decades later. 

Some fans even make pilgrimages to the places he wrote his stories – places like this barroom. Legend has it he wrote most of “Sparrows” here, at that corner table. 

On the wall behind the couple parked there now (Geez, they’re flirting up a storm), there is a framed photo of Grandad scribbling at that same spot – brow furrowed, left hand clutching a cut-glass tumbler.

Horatio told me earlier that there’s a signature in the bottom right corner of the photo from the man himself. As soon as Romeo and Juliet depart, I’ll walk over and take a closer look. Then, if Horatio and Polly don’t mind, I’ll take that portrait off its hook and hold it between my hands – not as a starry-eyed literary pilgrimage, but rather as a long overdue family reunion.

Mom and Dad always warned me off Grandad’s stories and haunts. They each had their reasons. But I’m looking at my watch, and whaddayaknow - it’s exactly ten years and one old-fashioned past the time I would have heeded their warnings.

As I wait patiently for the couple to finish-the-fuck-up, the epigraph from “Sparrows” flutters across my mind:

“Had I not created my own world, I would have certainly died in other people’s.”

- Anaïs Nin

Once upon a time before I was born, a man with my same face and my same long ears sat twenty feet from this bar stool and created his own world between the blue lines of a legal pad. Maybe it’s the drink talking, or maybe it’s Horatio’s gesture to alert me that the couple has finally left the table, or maybe it’s Polly’s warm squawk - but something has shifted in my equilibrium, some sliding door has parted in the space-time continuum, and damn it, if I’m ever going to create my own world… Well, this moment sure as hell feels like the right time and place to start.

Goodnight from Agatha. I’ll write again soon.

*** 

Thank you for checking out today’s post! This is an experimental “prelude” for a new fiction series I am working on: “From Agatha,” a story about one man’s return to the mysterious town where as a child, he witnessed a miracle - or so his influential mother claims. Determined to unlock his past once and for all, Rian moves into his family’s old Agatha townhome and begins to investigate the early experiences that, until now, have defined his life.