The Bartender

By Alex Lape

It was 1968, and Nicholas "Nico" Ritorno had just come home from serving thirty two months in Vietnam, only to find his country in a kind of war of its own. Sure, it wasn't the panic-stricken conflict he had faced in the remote jungles of Southeast Asia. Nico had come home to find his country in a cultural battle, where his generation challenged the conservative, outdated values of his parents' as well as protest against a "foreign war the country had no business in". A number of these protesters would literally spit in the face of men who'd just spent the last couple years of their lives serving their country's call of duty, trying to survive in a jungle they weren't used to against an enemy they couldn't always see. And coming home was a promise they couldn't count on. Even when they were home, the last side-effects of being in constant combat and facing the very real possibility of death had conditioned them to be on constant alert. Just the idea of always having to be on guard and never knowing what could happen next took a toll on many Nico had served with in the past years. All of that just to come home and get a group of college students in tie-dye shirts all up in your face, calling you a "baby-killer".

At the same time, many people from minority groups had really risen up over the last decade to stand against the inequality, persecution, and violence they'd faced for years. Of course you had good ol' boys decrying how these people were gonna "send us all to hell in a handbasket" by destabilizing the status quo by letting all these new radical thinking movements ethnic groups move into their neighborhood. Nico personally never saw race as divisively as others did, having been exposed to a little bit of racism himself in his own way - albeit never to the same degree his African American compatriots had. Nico's maternal grandparents, Shelby and Peter Westinghouse, weren't exactly the happiest in the world to find out that their daughter Paige had gone outside of her proud New England upper class Protestant roots to marry the son of a middle class Italian immigrant -Nico's father, Vittorio "Vic" Ritorno. For a while, his mother had found himself disowned by her own parents. In fact, for as much love and care Nico's Grandmother Shelby tried to show him (probably out of a sense of obligation due to her being his grandmother); Nico always knew that she always gave him more of the side-eye and a bit less warmth than she did his other cousins. Apparently, Nico's aunts had done the family proud and his cousins were lucky enough to be born to "good, wealthy, and highly educated" businessmen from Pennsylvania. Before Nico had gone off to serve in the Army, his aunts and his grandma were pretty worried that he'd grow up to be another "mafia greaseball". But as much as Nico thought he'd escaped stereotypes completely, working at the Sheriff's Star Bar in a town just outside of Reno. That was until he met his boss, Barry "Buck" Willard, at Sheriff's Star. Buck was an old school conservative country boy who had been a ranch hand down in Kentucky and wasn't the most thrilled to see Jews, Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics "breaking into the neighborhood like they owned the place." More than often not, Barry would simply refer to Nico as "The Eye-talian" and wondered if Nico knew anything about busting kneecaps, which Nico would politely laugh off and deny.

The ironic thing was that Buck did pay dues to a "businessman" from all the way up in Reno named Paul Moxx, also known as "Sleepy" for his incredibly unenthused manner of speaking and facial expression. The only details Nico knew about the business negotiation was that Buck had to set aside a twenty percent cut of whatever the bar made on every other Friday of the month. And for the most part, business went smooth. Most Friday nights, Buck would set aside his "alms", as he would call it, and the bar's business we go on as usual in their otherwise sleepy part of town. Young men would come in with their own crew of raucous friends to see who could get the most intoxicated for the weekend, working class men would come in to unwind from the troubles of the work week and home life, and the old timers would come in to whistle at a couple buxom waitresses and brag about how they felt so much younger; whenever they weren't bickering amongst themselves about one thing or another. Nico found their customers easy to work with, if not occasionally colorful enough to make life in a sleepy town entertaining. Sure, Nico had a couple occasions where he had to try his best to neutralize a situation where a patron figured himself a tough guy and sought to settle things "mano a mano".Nico had seen enough violence, real violence, in Vietnam to find it sickening overall and deemed it petty when an idiot tried to puff up his chest to try and start shit. Nico also knew enough violence to put anyone in the bar through a table if he really needed to, but tried to be reasonable and be the one to keep the peace as much as possible to help maintain the bar's generally friendly atmosphere. Of course, Buck wasn't the most thrilled at every type of customer that came through, but he did his best to keep his conduct professional enough to keep customers coming in. And business was business, right? Right. Apparently, business was also something Buck desperately needed to keep calm and collected everytime Sleepy sent three of his men by the Sheriff's Star to "pick up rent". Although he never said it publicly, Buck dreaded the day he couldn't "make rent". And Nico knew, Nico had an idea of just how much pressure his boss was under just by the sense of weariness on Buck's face and the fact that Buck's eyes would be honed in on the bar's door like a hawk every now and then.