Short Story: The Tip

The killer brooded, as always, over a woman bartender. The service economy seemed female dominated, always had, to profiteer off lonely men, o make a quick buck on their frustrated sexual needs and to make a buck off his problems? That was always the way it was, that had always been the case. That’s why they had the beautiful twenty-something women with breast implants at the blackjack tables on Freemont. That was too transparent to work on the killer.
His visits to the sports bar next door had become more frequent, even though he found sports boring. He’d heard her say something he thought about not having a boyfriend, so he got excited and started coming more frequently, and then he heard her make reference to seeing someone and heard from a bartender down the street she was. He would play video black jack and sip diet coke because he didn’t drink, but really he knew why he was always coming back. It was the bartender Clara, who had the perfect breasts and the full tattoo on her back. He did not have full tattoos. He was in that sense unassuming.
Stacy was the name of the bartender on Freemont who had 86ed him as they said. “I’m sorry sir we cannot serve you tonight” said a bouncer. What was curious about that was that it was not fully clear why. He had not touched or asked for her phone number even. If it was something sexual it could only have meant the way he looked at her, or some other kind of persistence he didn’t register. That was actually the first time he contemplated bringing his handgun into a bar. The bouncer approaches, he resists, the bartender becomes physical and then the gun goes off in the bar. He might be clear on self-defense. Could it work? That actually might work if he had a really good lawyer. It wouldn’t work if he pointed the gun at Stacy’s head, so it wouldn’t achieve what he really wanted. He’d have to let it go. He hated it all.
He had no choice but to take what the service industry, what women bartenders had done to him very seriously. He knew that they did not do what they did to him so much out of a purposeful attempt to break him, so much as they just put on a fake smile to get tips and they simply weren’t attracted to him, he was invisible.
They always have the beautiful girls out front, but then they always have some boyfriend tucked away somewhere. He’d be ruined for days when he’d uncovered them. This time round he’d won and lost 400 dollars in less then twenty-four hours. He had heard about bars that only hired male bartenders because it created “less drama”. He remembered he was job hunting in New York meeting a woman bartender and asking her what it took to be a good bartender.
“Well, if you’re a man you have to be a super good bartender and if you’re a woman you have to be able to pour a glass of wine.” She’d told him. He wished that he could smash a wine bottle and hack her face up so good she’d never get a dime off it again.
That’s the service industry, that’s their game. He’d calm himself down by reiterating that maybe it was a character flaw of his and that he had taken it all way more personally and seriously then anyone should. Still, he dreamed of walking into Clara’s bar with one of his guns and taking a nice little shot at her head. He’d be screwed after that of course, he’d have the choice of taking his own life or going to prison for the rest of his life, but after all that the service industry had done to him over the years, first-degree murder was not off the table.
It wasn’t about sex fully. It had only been a few weeks since he’d dropped by the Green Door and shot cum on that one woman’s face twice. At Green Door you could get laid on a good night, but it was a hundred dollars to get in the door on Saturday is you were a single man, and if nothing was going on, you were shit out of luck. It was twice as much for a single man to get in, and areas of the club where off limits to single men. That was to say nothing of the fat people and the old people strutting around naked. Then there was the dog couple. Still, it was not that he absolutely could not get laid. It hadn’t been that long. Sex was part of his problem, money was part of the problem, but there was a synergistic effect that made him go ballistic.
He had access to firearms without serial numbers, in fact he owned one legally, they are rare but they are around, the old twenty-twos that never had serial numbers on them. You could guns without serial numbers illegally, too.
He was working on it, he was working on it in his brain, even if he wouldn’t do it, he was working on the details of how it might be accomplished.
The building was still left over from Crazy Horse Too, which had been closed a few years ago in what was essentially a mob bust. It was just recently the guy who supposedly was selling M16s and AK-47s for only two-hundred three hundred bucks, but when someone asked about something involving the serial number, the guy vanished, supposedly he was Mexican mafia. The apparent explanation was that these were guns assembled from spare parts. He'd heard there were right-wing survivalist webpages that had instructions on how to do this. It made sense, he ran into them in various situations from time to time, not every day but they were around. The thing was, he was out of work, making some money as a blackjack player, so he didn’t have the cash to front for a hit man. But if he ever did, he would have to consider it very seriously.
It would have meant nothing if it was just Clara, but it had gone on for years, most of his adult life he didn’t live with a woman. If it was just Clara, there’d be no struggle at all. There’d be nothing, no big deal. But it was always the same, and whose expense was it at? It was at his expense, literally.
The thing was, Clara was for all his dreaming of her screams, was going to get off easily. Most likely all that he was going to do was to stop going to that bar, and he thought Clara was unlikely to make the connection or even notice. It was physically painful.
As he passed by the bar with his groceries, some derelict homeless looking type asked him for a cigarette. He told the derelict he didn’t smoke, and kept walking.
The women he wanted least in the world to see stormed through the door.
“Where did that motherfucker go?”
He was taken a back at first. It was a funny moment, it took him a second to realize that she didn’t know of his violent fantasies towards her, because he’d said nothing to anyone about them. It had nothing to do with him. She meant the homeless looking guy, and so he politely pointed towards him for her.
Clara turned around and followed after the derelict.
“Hey, why don’t you do me a favor?” she yelled at the derelict. “Why don’t you stop coming in my bar? Why don’t you stop fucking coming in my bar?”
A couple stopped watching in the parking lot.
“What did he do, steal a tip or something?”
He shrugged his shoulders and watched on briefly as Clara cursed at the derelict. Then he walked back home with his groceries, wondering if what he had just scene made him wish to commit violent acts against her more or less. It was ironic, that she had much a bigger problem that she had no awareness of.
It was also way all too ironic the next night at the Green Door-ironic but very painful, and was followed by some serious gambling loses to add to the problem. He had to laugh at the irony of it though.
They always had the discriminatory practices at those places towards single men, which came in the form of everything from how much you paid, how much security breathed down your neck, and where you could go in the club. There was very one of those assholes that treated him as a threat, the husband or boyfriend, who told him to get away. “You creep me the fuck out. I’ll be straight up with you. You creep me the fuck out.” He dreamed of course of blowing the man’s brains out, but instead went down to the hot tub to reflect on this reoccurring problem, which gave him a flair of emotion which he resented, for he resented emotion generally.
Of course, the couple that liked to fuck dogs was there, in fact across the room when the asshole said “you creep me the fuck out” but he did not comment on this irony. What was their names, the two with the dog and pony bit? Skippy and Franny, that was it. He nearly vomited the time they started telling him about it. It had meant his penis had been in the same vagina a German Shepard penis had. He felt the whole next day after learning that. They were always at the Green Door.
He watched this one multi-racial couple in the hot tub. The black girl who wasn’t too bad gave her white boyfriend oral sex while he watched. It was alright they made some polite conversation but he’d reached the point where he couldn’t really take satisfaction out of watching only, so the itch or fever, very similar to feelings he had when losing at blackjack, persisted and made him more inflamed with rage at the club's policies towards single men. He had never, after all, fucked a dog, but that couple not only did so, they encouraged that one woman that worked there to go home and fuck her boxer hound. But of course, they were a couple.
He himself had picked up a little bit on this prejudice even though it was directed at him. Climbing the stairs to the second floor he overheard a security guard talking about a guy in a buttoned shirt and became paranoid but then realized his shirt only had the three top buttons, and so the fat security guards weren’t going to give him any shit. It was some other guy they had a serious problem with. That was good because he didn’t have a sexual fetish for tension with fat security guards.
Then he saw Metro officers downstairs, armed and all, right there in the orgy. He assumed that it must be something about a sexual assault, or more clearly that a woman had been touched without invitation in a sexual area, constituting sexual assault, by a single man.
However, when he walked out of the club, walked around, came back down and sat on the bench in front of the Green Door and lit a cigarette. The two young couples talking to the police hardly looked like they could have been the subject of a violent sex crime, being relatively not that traumatized looking. Then he overheard them talking about a black couple stealing one white chicks’ purse. That made sense. But who was the suspected threat? Why,he was.
He twitched with rage thinking about it sipping a coffee at the sports bar. Along with the expenses of a bad gambling run and swingers club going, the combination was much like being on drugs, which he didn’t use but could still recall. It was a terse and restless alternation of opium cycles. And when things didn’t go well at the swingers clubs, his game was thrown. But if he let it go, his thoughts would turn again to blowing off a woman’s head for having a boyfriend that wasn’t him, so it continued. And when his game was on, he would have extra money to go to the swingers club, and then if he got some then he was okay for a while, but if it was a slow night, a shit night at the swingers club, then he would continue gambling hard, and he’d lose whatever he made. His existence revolved around blackjack and tits, in particular tits filled with silicone. He’d sit at the video blackjack machine trying to look down the bartender’s cleavage. It all revolved around that, that and his guns. But if he had a bad night at the swingers clubs, he’d remember that all you needed for financial stability in Vegas if you were a woman in your 20’s to 30’s was a breast job. With that a woman could always get a service industry job, and pray on his lack of a wife or girlfriend to get his money. Such parasitic whores needed to die flopping round in a pool of their own blood and entrails. But such thoughts at this stage remained only thoughts, he hadn’t acted on them. The dog fucking couple really were into fucking dogs, the black couple really did steal the woman’s purse. Did the assumption of, the precaution against his criminality create in him a criminal mindset? It was starting to float somewhere in that direction. After all, he was, according to the rules governing Green Door, beneath the couple that fucked dogs.
Then there was what he considered another ironic sign if there ever was one that perhaps our culture had become way to into the whole question of stalking and using the issue of stalking in nonsensical ways. It was to late for him, the damage was done, but it was something he was left to reflect on, the way he was now only taken to reflect on ironies as they occurred.
He was walking home when he saw a middle-aged couple arguing outside the casino, typical weirdness you try to avoid, there were pimps and whores outside that one casino always, and this time a guy with a mustache and a football jersey was yelling at some ugly and dilapidated hooker-looking woman, who shouted “fuck you” back at him.
He stood in the parking lot still for a second because the dude looked totally out of his mind and violent. The killer's handguns were still in the safe at home. When it looked like he might have calmed down, he kept walking.
Then the dude with the mustache and the football Jersey started yelling at him.
“You fucking pedophile! You fucking stalker! You fucking pedophile stalker. Get over here you fucking pervert. Child molester!”
He tried to avoid eye contact.
“You.”
“Yes, excuse me.”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m walking home.”
“Are you a stalker, are you a fucking pedophile?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“No.”
“You want me to call 911?”
He shrugged.
“Where do you live?”
“I’m not going to tell you. Why do you want to know where I live?”
“Because I want to know if you’re a pedophile. Let me walk you home.”
“No.”
“Your stalking girls. You’re a predator.”
“Look man, I got no problem with you.”
“No but I have a problem with you. You’re a predator.”
“I didn’t touch any girls, I’m not stalking any girls.”
“I’m going to follow you home, you’re a predator.”
“Go ahead” he said walking away. He’d called that freak’s bluff. The dude did not follow him home.
In a way it was just like the whole thing at Green Door. People just project the threat of a stalker or a sex offender on to single men walking down the street, didn't they? How sick of hearing the word “stalker” was he? When that became the insult that drunks on the street try and start fights with it, that’s when it should’ve been clear that the TV played all that up way too much. He was initially no stalker and no threat, but they've made him into a threat over time, ’t they?
Well, you know that was great wasn’t it, that this man who’d never seen him before and new nothing about him would come up to him and start calling him a pedophile and a stalker right there on the street for no particular reason. It’s great that people like that appointed themselves in positions of authority in protecting the streets from dangerous pedophiles and stalkers, from sexual predators.
It lay heavy on his heart as he lit a cigarette the next morning. “I have no sex offense convictions’, he told himself over and over again,” this man is insane”. But it was to no avail. He was tired of it, being cast in the role of the unwanted pursuer. Ultimately, it destroyed him.
After a losing streak was putting him down the hole hundreds of dollars, the swingers clubs he was fighting, trying to avoid at all costs. He was by now repulsed, but there was a good chance without them he would just have no sex life at all. Would he live as a gambling addict with AIDS? Not much of a future, none he cared to have to endure. But that could very easily be the direction he was headed with the casinos and swingers clubs. Well, that was all well and good, he couldn’t sneak away from them, because what that would mean for him is that he would just be dreaming of killing women every waking hour. Finally, he said fuck it and went and did it.
He decided to use the .45 that he’d just brought back from the shop. He walked into the bar, sat down and ordered a diet coke, slipped a few dollars in the black jack machine, played for a while, and then looked up at Clara serving him.
“Let me get the check please, Clara?”
“Here you go, love.”
If she had not said that there was perhaps some chance he would have let her live, but she said entirely the wrong thing, likely without ever understanding it. There was not time in her life left for her brain to process the information in any meaningful way. For him, it was the final insult- of course, the waitress did not mean it when displaying affection, his well being meant nothing to her, nothing whatsoever, correct? She chose some other man above him but had to appear pleasant and affectionate to get a tip. That’s all that shit with the women bartenders ever was, wasn’t it?
He pulled the .45 1911 out from under his sports jacket and point it at Clara’s head.
“Here’s your tip. Keep the change.”
As he pulled the trigger, her brain matter scattered across the bottles of liquor behind her.
There were witnesses present, a metro officer even. He placed the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The police never gained a full understanding of his motives. This was in large part due to the isolation with which he lived his final few months.