The Loneliest Corner of the World
The loneliest corner of the world sits at the edge of a nondescript town in the basement of a nondescript motel.
a short story
The loneliest corner of the world sits at the edge of a nondescript town in the basement of a nondescript motel. Only in an indifferent universe could melancholy gather in the manner it does here.
It is a place that opens not in accordance with the clock or calendar but by the loneliness of the patrons awaiting entry. There is never a shortage of this because there is always someone seeking to share their misery. To wallow and mope in good company not for the sake of unloading their troubles but in the hope that they may feel less alone. Like others I have had the misfortune to come to know, rarely does an evening go by that I do not end up at my usual seat in the loneliest corner of the world.
No matter how hard I try to resist, I always crawl back to Roxanne’s.
I’d be more proud to admit this if Roxanne was the name of a woman I know; but no. Roxanne’s — short for Roxanne’s Old New York Bar — is the name of the bar in the basement of a motel so unpopular and dilapidated that it’s known simply as the motel above Roxanne’s.
To give you an idea of the state of the motel and the kind of customers it receives: some years ago, the motel clerk switched to renting rooms per hour rather than per night because, and I quote, “it’s what the market calls for.” Most of the hourly patrons discover after their first visit that loneliness does not diminish by being with someone who doesn't care about you. Despite this, the “fellas,” as this sub-crowd is called, return over and over again, every cash tip plunging them deeper into their own isolation.
Walking past the motel office and around the corner, there’s a nondescript glass door on the side of the building. There is no sign above the door signifying anything in particular yet, somehow, people show up and know exactly where to go. The door opens up to a narrow, rather steep staircase without a handrail, the steps made visible only by the dull and reddish glow coming from behind the curtain at the bottom. Halfway down the stairs one begins to smell cigarette smoke; like evidence of sin, the fumes stick on your clothes and hair long after your night ends. The air is dank not from a bustling crowd below but because of the poor ventilation.
On weekdays it is Liz who greets you once you enter the curtain. Liz rarely smiles but I’ve come to think that this is really to everyone’s benefit. When she does let a grin slip, her yellow crooked teeth poke through as if gasping for air. Liz has a thin nose and severe eyes that always appear to be passing judgement; deep and gray wrinkles frame her face and exaggerate her age (she asserts she is 44 but, from her countenance alone, I’d venture she’s closer to 60). Her bony hands remind me of talons on a crow, unpleasant extensions of her emaciated figure. Of all the hostesses, Liz is the only one who addresses me with an impersonal “sir” rather than my name, despite the fact she is much older than I.
Tonight, however, I do hear my name because it is Sunday, and Jane works Sunday’s at Roxanne’s. Though Jane is not pretty, she is sensual and affectionate. Men find her attractive because she leverages her charm and a well-practiced wink (to her credit, I see her pull thick wads of cash from her tip purse every week). Unlike Liz, Jane is young; she couldn’t be older than 22. She smiles, banters and laughs with the giddiness of both innocence and one who seeks trouble. Jane always starts talking first, and the sweetness of her voice makes me sad to wonder what a young and vibrant girl like her is doing at a place like this.
“When are we gonna see you come in with someone other than your lonesome self?” Jane spoke with a slow and easy cadence, without a rush and without a care.
“C’mon now Jane. You know that’s not the point of all this.”
I like when Jane greets me. Her voice always sounds caressing and inviting. But I’m not much for conversation, especially not when frequenting Roxanne’s. Other than an occasional drunk soliloquy, hushed whispers and gently clinking glasses are the only things poking holes in the silence of the basement. I couldn’t escape the thought that Jane was part of the upstairs motel’s per-hour popularity. Liz, I’m not so sure. But Jane — I knew it had to be so. This thought made me mourn for the poor girl for a moment because, although I didn’t “know” anyone else at the bar, I knew the type people that visited Roxanne’s were just like me — and I was a lonely and decrepit son of a bitch.
With a passing nod to Jane I walk over to the bar to my usual seat underneath the pale neon-red light bulbs. The reddish glow mixes with stale clouds of cigarette smoke to create a vaguely spectral atmosphere. Like every other customer, I hold a distant and somber look in my graying eyes. I settled down into my seat.
Squeeeak. Squeak.
The bar stools have long needed replacing — they wobble and sing high-pitched notes, and the cushions are discolored and stained. The paint on the walls and ceiling are cracking bad enough that one can almost hear the ruptures. Decades of chewing gum adorn the bottom of every table at every booth, and the grime on the restroom door handle is enough to dissuade any sensible person to wait until they get home to relieve themselves. Then again, like the last stop on the last metro of the evening, Roxanne’s isn’t a place most sensible people would find themselves in the first place. These squalid trimmings I suppose remain neglected to lend some authenticity to the word “old” that’s listed in the original name of the bar.
Rumor has it that the original owner, Roxanne, was from New York. Roxanne sold the bar nearly two decades ago to Franky, long before my first visit here. Franky is from Dallas and has never been to New York. He speaks with a drawl that makes him sound like a black and white Western movie. The only remaining tie to New York seems to be the Jewish bartender who works weekends.
His name, as it happens, is also Franky.
Franky the Jewish bartender grew up in the Bronx, and his accent, too, remains heavy as an anvil. He pronounces boss like “bwoss” and coffee like “caw-fee.” He had a mop of dark, thinning hair on his head, a beaklike nose and an unkempt silver mustache. Sometimes he wore a faded New York Yankees cap, and all the time he wore a serrated knife sheathed at his hip. Plain of features and without passion, Franky’s actions appear tepid and perfunctory, as if he were an automaton controlled from afar. When Franky wasn’t working — on weekdays he sold antique cars at a nearby dealership with what I imagine to be a similar lack of verve — there really was no sense, trace, or feel of New York at Roxanne’s. The parlor was certainly old, but without any obvious decor, persons, or menu items to match the place’s namesake it felt spurious and without sincerity.
Franky, with a nod and a gruff hullo, slides a tumbler of whiskey without ice down the bar. The glass has stains of someone else’s lips on it, but instead of objecting I raise the glass and finish the drink in a single swallow. Whiskey is my usual drink, though had the glass been filled with anything else I’d have drunk it all the same.
“Thanks Franky,” I mutter as he pours me a second.
I usually leave after I lose count of my drinks. It’d be easier if I could leave a credit card tab open indefinitely, for a period of weeks or months, but they only take cash here — less personal, less traceable to life outside of Roxanne’s.
There was no glitz, no celebrity, no vibrancy. It was a tawdry establishment for people with nowhere else to go. But this was the selling point: Roxanne’s was a place without distinction, for people looking for a drink without society or pretense. Nothing and no one garish or ostentatious made it through the front curtain. Customers drank and kept to themselves. For a first-timer, it would certainly make a strange and eerie sight — a bar full of silent individuals, drinking to themselves, enjoying the company of everyone and no one at the same time. An intimate crowd of strangers. Even for me, six years after my first whiskey neat at Roxanne’s, a sense of foreboding was not all uncommon — the dim lighting, the unsettling basement locale, the sheer weight of the silence.
Nobody said it aloud but of course everyone knew what it was — lonely people came to Roxanne’s to be lonely, together. It was not necessarily a place for nobody’s (though they were always welcome), but to show up meant you resigned yourself to being a nobody for the duration of your visit. People showed up alone and remained alone, and the same people showed up week after week, for years. A place where no one knew who anyone was besides the quiet and lonely soul that appeared each night at the bar.
Outside Roxanne’s, people went to work, fought with their spouses, coached little league baseball; inside, misgivings are left at the door alongside your coat and hat. By stripping you of your baggage upon entry, the only option left was to have a drink without it.
What keeps each of us coming back is the sense that, although our lives outside may be unraveling, our responsibilities growing, Roxanne’s grants us a certainty in life. An immutable solace, temporary immunity from nuptial troubles and auditors and catastrophe in all its forms. Year after year passes, relegated to the haziness of memory, and yet here nothing changes. One could visit this sad and surreal spot only once, and then return a decade later to find everything untouched since the previous occasion. In this sense, the basement bar beneath the dilapidated motel proves comforting and quaint like a visit to a childhood home (though beyond this sentiment of nostalgia one would hope Roxanne’s does not actually resemble anything from anyone’s childhood).
Loneliness is what pushes me to Roxanne’s each night. Sadness is what gets me to stay. I find grief in running away from reality, and then more grief comes from drinking with others who are doing the same. The first time I went to Roxanne’s, I learned that I did in fact have a place to hide from the world. And, better yet, I could commiserate with others doing the same thing as I — imbibing in sorrow, alone but distantly together. The allure of this resonates with me still; I’ve become addicted to sharing my loneliness in this strange and detached way. The impersonal, physical closeness is a cheap fix, an artificial remedy, for an inner turmoil that yearns for something beyond mere physicality.
But the artificial will have to do for now. I’ve gone to Roxanne’s for so long that I cannot imagine life without it. It haunts me, with its dim red lighting and promise of a shared emptiness. To lose my seat in the loneliest corner of the world would shut me out of the only place I’d ever felt I belonged to. Though it is but a shell of me that goes to the bar, without Roxanne’s I’d become a thinner carapace still, one without a distraction from the reality that I must live with who I am. It does me no good to continue on like this, but in my estimation I’d be worse still to stop coming.
There’s an old Woody Allen skit about a guy and his psychiatrist. He says, “Help me out here doc — my brother’s crazy, he thinks he’s a chicken.”
“Well, why don’t you tell him?” the doctor replies.
“I would, but I need the eggs.”
And that’s how I think about my seat in the loneliest corner of the world. It isn’t a seat anyone thinks they would ever long for. And, once you’re there, there’s no obligation to ever revisit it. The sad truth is loneliness is more palatable when it’s shared not with friends but with others who feel exactly the same way. Roxanne’s gives me recognition that my misery is not unique. I end up at Roxanne’s for the same reasons everyone else does: my failures become our failures, my dejection becomes our dejection. And in an indifferent universe, what more could someone ask for? The void is cold and unforgiving but at least it grants those at Roxanne’s a sense of togetherness. I don’t go to Roxanne’s, night after night, because I do not know that it does me no good.
Like all the other lonely and sad souls that sit on those squeaky, stained bar stools under the dim red lights in the loneliest corner of the world, I go because I need the eggs.