F L A U N T
The corn was ready on the second Saturday of August. You could tell it was time because the silks had wilted dry, and if that didn’t make you sure enough, you stuck a fingernail through the exoskeletal husk to pierce a kernel and a milky white substance would flood into your cuticle. After this happened, you had an hour to get yourassbackhere because we have three days to clear this field, and whatever idiot game you had invented with your idiot friends and the loose gravel you’d been kicking around the soccer field no longer meant anything because the harvest wasn’t going to pick itself. The days following were the most glorious.
The AC in the combine cab was good but it could never inoculate you against the sun that whooped the skin on your neck, and the sweat would pool under your collar and sometimes it would find the strangest paths down your chest due to the bouncing of the tread, and you would take out your earplugs and they’d be slick with sweat and black with dust, and the roar of the engine would shake you too.
The wet heat from the day would stay in your chest for hours into the night, and the noise dampened your senses for weeks into the school year, but the physicality of it all made things the more pleasurable— the men would come collect it all from the elevator and cart it away to facilities where cousins and uncles worked, where it would be mashed with wheat from lands like ours further north, and you could stand outside and smell the empty field on the wet morning before sophomore year of high school and it would feel like the summer never happened at all.
And the uncles and cousins at the facility agitated these yields and cooked them down for the sugars, and they added yeast to the mix and let them simmer and sit for days and then transferred them to copper stills, and then in the end my corn sugars lay in wait, in robust oak barrels in cavernous Kentucky basements.
During the time they were sitting there I would have been tearing my ACL trying to cross Steven in gym class and sitting grounded for long winter weekends because Mackenzie’s older brother gave me the rest of his stash before he went off to college. During this time I left home for North Carolina and my sister left home for Colorado and my grandfather who bought the land from the neighbors left our Earthly kingdom for someplace better, and our combine broke and a season of blight delayed my mother’s retirement, and during the time my corn sugars from that summer were turning into something worth thinking about, I returned home and shaved my beard for good this time. And then they were ready and they were put into a bottle and delivered to a bar just outside the city, of all places, where they were plucked off a shelf by a bird-boned bartender and poured shakily into a small hard plastic cup with no ice because a girl in a dress that was frankly too orange for a work event really wanted a bourbon neat.
The drink was disgusting, and the desired air of sophistication was entirely negated by the miserable reality of the plastic cup. But, the company had paid for it—a heavy double pour of the top shelf aged bourbon—and she wouldn’t want to be caught without a drink in hand, so she accepted the offering from the exquisitely childish-looking bartender and shut herself up and pushed through the crowd. There was an eclectic mix here tonight—the new boss loved the idea of a happy hour somewhere where the younger employees (who occupied a minority share in the company’s demographic) could let loose, so she had her assistant choose a location far outside comfortable proximity to the office and dangled the promise of a limitless tab and compensated childcare in front of ravenous parents, and nearly everyone took the bait. So now, she found herself clutching the liquid, brushing elbows with college-aged strangers from the other side of town, making her way to a corner table full of medical salespeople and their loving partners.
The floor was a classless black linoleum. The tables and chairs, constellations that drifted more and more distant from one another as the evening became flush, stood stark and elegant against an otherwise middling nothingness. Aside from the regal equipment, it was a venue designed to be forgotten. The owner must have liquidated some valuable family asset to get these here, she noted of the chairs, fine sleek things with Art Deco stylings and velvet pads that didn’t rip at the seams. Just ahead, a guard hovered next to a couple sharing a seat. He bore down at them. She watched as he wordlessly gesticulated towards a pile of cardboard coasters on the table, insisting that the boy place his cup atop one.
The crowd was thickening and she was taking the leisurely way back to the table filled with her coworkers, dreading the inevitable endeavor to talk above the volume of the music. The emcee had on ridiculous headphones and a garish puffer jacket and a proclivity to interrupting a song by leaning closely into the mic like a president and saying things like “Put your fucking drinks up Los Angeles!” and “IT’S FRIDAYYYYYYYYY,” after which he would restart the verse from the beginning and turn the music up incrementally. It was nine o’clock. She was sure her coworkers would pretend to enjoy this for the sake of running up the mounting tab.
She skirted around a table that had made its inconvenient way between the dance floor and her group and didn’t notice the cluster of men enacting some sort of sports play, and loose limbs dragged across space and time and flung themselves into her back. The force knocked that cup of grain alcohol clean out of her unmanicured hands and across a table and a lush, velvety chair.
He was put on furniture duty on Fridays because the Friday crowds tended to be scared of him. It was notoriously the most difficult shift, one that inevitably concluded in some sort of disastrous, half-apologetic early morning phone call with the owner, who monitored the floor obsessively from his Palm Beach apartment via the camera apps linked to his iPad. It didn’t matter how vigilant any guard would be, how inimitable, or how stringent—this was not the kind of establishment that encouraged careful behavior, but Paul was not the kind of owner that went back on his investment. Hence, every weekend there was a guard allocated to tablewatch. And, every weekend, there was a guard who could have spotted that spill earlier, or shouldn’t have let those drunkards sit there. The pay was fine, so he watched the tables while Paul watched him.
He didn’t spot the girl in the orange dress with the full cup of bourbon because the group of men who were enacting last night’s game had arranged their bodies in a way that mocked his favorite player and he was busy trying not to insert himself. Orange Dress snaked from view and suddenly bourbon was beading on the tabletop and absorbing itself into the velvet pads atop the chair. Despite himself, he glanced at the camera before reacting. He found his mouth forming shapes, an exaggerated wince, a tongue in the cheek. Sorry, he mouthed. He pictured Paul, legs crossed on a white leather couch thousands of miles away, going absolutely ballistic.
There isn’t an expeditious way to clean a wet vintage fabric, so the most one can do is put on a show. He pulled a white linen kerchief from his back pocket and threw it across the chair; forced the boys and their caricatures away from the scene. “Sorry sir,” one slurred.
Despite the mess, the guard liked it when people became careless. Made him useful, at least. There was a rhythm to it that he’d taken to: throw the kerchief, chastise the perpetrator, clear the scene, remove the damaged chairs and place them in in the closet behind the bar to dry out for the weekend. He was paid to make it look worse than it was. He was paid to make people feel guilty about their drunkenness. He was a professional.
He was midway through the dance, really relishing it this time around. The boys ogled. The girl in the Orange Dress nowhere to be seen. The scene was magnificent, the dance floor repelled by the bulky man wielding a wet, bulky chair. “IT’S FRIDAYYYY,” the DJ cawed.
He was getting cocky with the performance and he knew it. There was no need to be making this much of a show just to move a chair across the dance floor, but the Palm Beach apparition was watching and his gaze bore thousands of miles across the middle of the United States and into the back of the guard’s head. He turned around to face the camera. Look at this, he wanted to say, I don’t take bullshit. He craned his neck to face the camera and didn’t see the slick shard of ice on the linoleum floor so he stepped on it, and it guided his leg into someone else’s and he fell and the precious goods fell on top of him.
“PARTY FOUL!” screeched the DJ. Tonight couldn’t be any more perfect. He was having the best time of his life, absolutely reveling in the misery of the crowd packed in front of him. It was nights like these that he, shit-eater of the century, felt the most alive. How could one not delight in the ridicule of a group of businessmen in the corner? C’mon, you’re telling me that you wouldn’t feel like a God amongst men when you turn up the music just a smidge louder every time it seems like they’re getting into the conversational groove? How far could he push them before getting in trouble, this was the question. How many times could the airhorn be played before the timid bartender made a gentle request? So far, twice in a song hadn’t pushed anyone over the edge. As of yet, nobody had made a formal inquest into the creative liberties he’d taken.
So, one can imagine the buoyant glee that overtook when the security man took a Looneytunsian tumble in the middle of the dance floor. Wacked himself in the head, knocked a poor girl in an orange dress to the floor with him. The chair: broken. A wetness flooding into the seat of the bodyguard’s pants,
Oh this was so lovely. The guard was looking like he pissed himself. Perfect. “LOOKS LIKE SOMEBODY HAD AN ACCIDENT!! FRIDAY ACCIDENTS HAPPEN,WHO CAN RELATE?”
God was smiling on the DJ tonight. He could’ve kissed that poor security guard, who was now calling for “backup.” Backup! How shameful. The girl in the orange dress wasn’t having it either, peeling herself from the floor and retreating to her group of suits. Couldn’t pick on her, no fun, the gloating felt best when directed towards the establishment and the meek army that kept it afloat. His breath was hot on the mic, his nylon jacket starting to emit traces of odor from his own sweat. He was intoxicated by his own wickedness, delirious now. “I’ll have a cup of that liquor,” he beamed, gesturing towards spillage on the ground. Airhorn blast. Bump the bass. Volume up. “Raise a glass for our fallen soldiers!” It was all so beautiful. This bar was his.
There was nothing that could be done from the living room two thousand miles away, so Paul’s son kept telling him. But he couldn’t stop watching. It was addictive, a habit that had begun years prior in an effort to catch a sticky-fingered bartender
and had since blossomed into a consumptive ritual. A glass of bourbon, the newest generation of iPad, his condominium spotless. There were four cameras and he had arranged for the feeds to align neatly on a quadrant on his screen so he could make sure everyone was behaving properly. This was the only feasible way to run a business, he told his daughter. If he were to fly back to Los Angeles to manage everyone on-site, which he did occasionally and with immense trepidation, it would open up the opportunity for people to play tricks. Man only has two eyes. Paul had four.
And three of them were trained directly on his chairs. They were a source of pride, worth payingfull price plus shipping and delivery costs and regular maintenance checks, and they made what was otherwise an incredibly limp room breathable. He could hike up the price of his liquor more than the dive bar kitty corner because people would pay just that much more for the pretense of ambience. In the most shameful part of his brain, he held out an emaciated hope that one day a journalist would stumble into the bar for a nightcap and write about the sumptuous furniture, and the article would fall into the right hands, and slowly but surely it would attract the crowds he felt deserved to be there, and one day the bar would be a location that meant something to people.
Of course, that wouldn’t happen to Paul. Serendipity was never on his side. So, he watched as the manager invited trashy DJs and local rock musicians into the space, and didn’t say anything. He also didn’t say anything when he filled the bar with coeds, or when he threw tacky trivia nights. Nothing. He just watched. All that he asked, really, was that the chairs be preserved and monitored.
In his years as a watcher he’d learned how to read body language quite well. Paul could spot a cheating spouse from their gait. He could accurately guess whether two people, seated across the bar from each other in totally separate spheres, would end up going home together, usually before they had acknowledged one another. He could tell when someone was getting ready to puke, and on these occasions he would text his guard to instruct them to move the chairs out of harm’s way.
So, yes, he saw the girl in the orange dress with the full cup of his nice bourbon as she got a little too close to the group of men that had monopolized the table area. She was walking with too little purpose, which meant her grip on her drink would be tepid, and the boys were jumping around like they were in gym class. Too many factors for disaster and not enough time to text. The spillage was one thing but it was the hyperbolic performance that was another, the sweeping of the arms, the careless way his guard picked up his ten thousand dollar chair and looked him right in the eye as he slipped. Unforgivable.
So, it started on a brutal summer afternoon when everything had just ripened and the sunlight was growing stale. From there it took decades for Paul’s bar to see its downfall.
After all was said and done, he would sit with his son and watch years of footage like highlight reels. It was only logical that there be an inception to the slow, treacherous end, the liquidation of the furniture being the most dreadful death of it all. He’d nailed things down to a specific three incidents—one, a fight in the nascent months of the business in which a gun was drawn; the only time his establishment ever made it on the local news which was immortalized through Google search. That one could have catalyzed something.
Two, the thieving bartender. This was self explanatory. Paul installed cameras because of her, and his employees resented him because of the cameras, and his customers hated his employees because of their detachment from the place. His son had warned him that the surveillance was too much, that his obsession wasn’t warranted, and that if he really cared about the bar then he would live in the city where the bar was located. That it seemed like he didn’t care about the bar at all. Just the chairs. Maybe so.
The third was the night the chair broke. It made him so angry that he couldn’t think about it for too long, even to this day. He could only watch the tapes over and over in that clean condominium. That ridiculous DJ, what was he doing there in that hideous coat, and what was the guard thinking when he looked away from those boys, and what kind of bartender pours that much alcohol into a cup. The chair breaking was just the cherry on top, a knife in his side up until the dreadful day when he had to sell the chairs, because one was missing it wasn’t as valuable. No longer a set.
He cursed that guard. He cursed that girl in the orange dress and the person that convinced her to attend the bar that evening. He cursed the bartender’s weak hands, and he cursed the person that distilled the bourbon. Hell, he cursed the farmer that grew the corn that made the bourbon. Maybe, if they hadn’t crushed a kernel under the crescents of their fingernails on that Saturday afternoon, maybe if they’d just waited until Sunday morning, the corn would have been different and that bottle wouldn’t have been made, and his investment would have remained intact.
Just his luck, he supposed.
Photographed by Hannah De Vries
Styled by Britton Litow
Creative Director: Bree Castillo
Producers: Annie Bush and Franchesca Baratta
Hair: Marcela Osegueda at Celestine Agency
Makeup: Brandy Allen At Celestine Agency
Prop Stylist: Ruth Kim
Sound Design: Davis Stewart
Models: Jabari and Malik Williams at One Management, Ashley W And Slim S at Freedom Models. Jasmine Daniels and Lucy Tilden at Wilhelmina
Digi Tech: Ben Chant
Lighting Tech: Logan Dagnen
Styling Assistant: Berlyn Gonzalez
Hair Assistant: Stephanie Florez
Production Assistant: Kayla Hardy
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