New In Town

NEW IN TOWN
Well, she was standing in the bar
I said, hello, how do you do?
She handed me a beer
with a kangaroo
She spoke of places I had never been
that she had traveled to
and we slow danced along
I made a laugh
I made a pass

Four days.
James Neal had been in Pittsburgh for four days. Everything was different again, and once again, he was the new kid. On the ice, he’d watch his new teammates as they laughed and joked, pushed each other along—laughed about old jokes that made no sense to him. Off the ice, he didn’t even have a home, just a hotel room and a TV and a bed with cold white sheets. The weather was different than back in Texas—there was no sun, just gloom and rain and frankly, it matched his mood.

All of his friends were back in Whitby or in Dallas. But all that was left behind again. The only one he really had to talk to was Matt Niskanen, who’d share the odd glance with him when the Pittsburgh guys would joke about old times on the ice. It wasn’t that they were being left out—they just had some adjusting to do, and James wasn’t even twenty five yet and he was already getting tired of the adjusting. He had been excited to move to Pittsburgh, to be a Penguin, to be on a team with an enormous fan base, a team that always made the playoffs and was captained by the NHL’s superstar himself, Sidney Crosby. But then he got to Pittsburgh and he saw the gritty city and the cloudy sky and he was left to live in a hotel room until he found a place of his own.

Tonight the boys were going out again, but James wasn’t in the mood to try to fit in. He just wanted some peace and quiet, have a drink and go back to his hotel. So he found himself at a grungy bar somewhere that was possibly too far away from his hotel, in the grittiest part of Pittsburgh, he thought, where the buildings looked dilapidated and were kind of crumbly looking, where the graffiti was on almost every building and the streets were dotted with tattoo parlours and bars. This one was across from a little tattoo parlour with bikes parked out front, with an obnoxious neon OPEN sign flashing. The bar smelt of cigarette smoke and surprisingly, some kind of music with a twang was playing. He took a look around and saw that mostly biker looking guys were around and despite being a hockey player, James felt like the pretty boy there—or worse, the nerd who walked into the locker room while all the jocks were still there, feeling small and awkward and somewhat vulnerable.

But James squared his shoulders and told himself not judge. He wasn’t there to make trouble but if someone wanted to try something, he knew how to fight. The thought took him back to his first fight in Dallas, against Brassard, when he’d gotten a whole lot of credit—the new kid on the block who won a fight in under maybe thirty seconds, but it wasn’t a fight James took a whole lot of pride in. The guy had thrown out his shoulder, and despite the fact that James and his right hooks and drawn blood, James knew that it wasn’t all him. There’s no point in being cocky about a fight against a man with a dislocated shoulder. Still, James was brought back to the ice in Dallas, and he shook his head. He was in Pittsburgh now, there was no point in missing a place he’d never go back to.

He took a seat and the bar and pulled his hat a little lower over his eyes. Not that there was much point. He was new in Pittsburgh, one of the new guys on the team, and he probably wasn’t much of a big deal anyway.

“Hey,” a voice said over the bustle. James looked up and saw a girl behind the bar, her eyes on him as she passed off a beer to a guy a few seats over. She nodded at the guy and went closer to James, leaning slightly over the thick wooden bar. “You look like you could use some cheering up.”

He gave a sad half-smile. “I’ll have a beer.”

She smiled and asked, “Any preference?”

“Surprise me,” James replied. “But I’ll pass on a Guinness, though.”

She tossed her head back and laughed. “I’m not surprised,” she said. “You don’t seem like the type anyway.”

James looked around the bar as she got him his beer. He made eye contact with a few people by accident, but he got no response: no surprised eyes, nobody who tapped their friend on the shoulder to point and him subtly and say, Hey, that’s James Neal!

The bartender came back a minute later and passed him his beer. “You know,” she said, looking slyly at him, “you look pretty down. What’s up?”

“Nothin’,” James sighed. “Just new in town.”

“Really?” she said, her bright eyes lighting up. She flicked her ruby red hair—obviously dyed—over her shoulder. “How do you like the Burgh? Where did you move from?”

“Dallas,” he said, ignoring her first question. He saw it in her eyes: she was Pittsburgh born and raised and she was proud of her city, and he didn’t think that she’d take too kindly of him saying that he hated the rain and the grit and the crappy buildings.

But as if reading his mind, she said, “You must miss the sun, huh?” He nodded, tight lipped and sipped at his beer. He was picking at the label when she said, “You don’t sound like you’re from Texas.”

He shook his head. “I’m not.” He didn’t offer anymore.

She didn’t press. “So how long have you been in town for?” Town, James thought, was hardly the word to describe the big city.

“Four days,” he said. “Four long days.”

“New job?”

“New job.”

She grabbed a glass, wet with something, and started wiping at it with a slightly dirty looking dish cloth. “What do you do?”

Bitterly, he thought to himself, I stand around on the ice like a loser and act as though I’m important to my new team. So instead he said simply, “Nothing, really. I don’t do much.” He tipped his bottle back. “Nothing of real importance.”

She laughed a clear and bright laugh that matched her bright hair and eyes. “I could say the exact same about my own life,” she said. “Trust me, I wasn’t a little girl who dreamed of growing up to work in a bar for the rest of my life.”

“Then don’t,” James said simply.

“I’m not,” she explained. “I’ve already traveled around, you know? Took time off after high school and lived this weird, nomadic life and just…got lost in the world. Lost track of time and before you know it, I’m back in Pittsburgh, twenty-two years old and a freshman in college.”

“Well that’s cool,” he said, glad that the subject was off of himself. “What are you studying?”

She eyed him. “Nothing of real importance,” she smirked.

James laughed. He licked his lips and exhaled, the two of them just looking at each other. He was kind of lost in the world, too, and he liked this girl’s spunk. He was lonely, needed someone to just talk to and just by the few words that they’d exchanged, James knew that she was a talker. He looked into her bright eyes and asked her, “What’s your name?”

“Lizzie,” she said without missing a beat.

“Hi, Lizzie,” James said, “I’m James. When are you off?”

And Lizzie just smiled.

*~*~*~*

Hours later, James was still at the bar which had been empty for around half of an hour. It was two thirty in the morning and he’d been in the same spot since nine o’clock, but he was fine with that. He didn’t have any place to be and he liked watching Lizzie as she fluttered about the bar, making small talk with the others gathered around. She even got James talking, and he joined in on several of the conversations around him that Lizzie had dragged him into when she’d point at him and say, “This is James, everybody. He’s new to the Burgh!” and the bar erupted in a chorus of Hurrahs and Welcomes followed by a bunch of half-sober toasts.

He felt at ease. It certainly wasn’t like a Cheers episode—nobody knew his name. He was simply James, not James Neal the Right Winger! Just James, and he felt comfortable with that.

Johnny Cash was playing softly when Lizzie walked up to him and smiled. “You fit in well here, you know.”

“Not as well as you,” he laughed. “Social butterfly.”

She shrugged. “It was nice seeing you come out of your shell, at least, James,” she said with an easy smile. After a few heartbeats of silence, she said, “Art History.”

“Huh?”

She giggled that bell-chime giggle. “I’m studying art history. It’s not really going to get me far but I like art and I think I’m interested in being a curator and I’d get to travel around the world, you know?” She laughed. “My father was angry. He told me that I’d taken four years off and now I was just wasting money and that I wouldn’t go anywhere with art history.”

“Do you think that?”

She shrugged. “I’d rather not be one of those people working eight to five office jobs, falling into this daily grind that I hate just so I can make enough money to live my everyday middle-class life,” she said slowly, contemplating her words. “I want to live and love life and I want to spend the rest of my life doing something that I don’t dread, something that won’t make me feel suicidal a few years down the line because I’m so sick of all the normalcy around me.”

“Too much of a free spirit, then?” James asked, leaning on one arm. “Nomadic, I think you said. Tell me about the places you’ve been.”

But Lizzie shook her head and grabbed his hand, “I’ll tell you all about it if you dance with me.”
And so they did. They slow danced to Johnny Cash’s crooning as she told him all about the Maldives, Russia, Valencia, remote villages in Brazil and the beaches of Tahiti. He told her about Dallas, and his home in Whitby, and how he was still getting used to Pittsburgh. He never told her his last name, he never told her what he did for a living, but he was sure that if she remembered him, she’d know eventually.

James knew that Lizzie and her nomadic, free spirit were not forever. He knew that tonight would not lead to three kids and summers by the lake—he wasn’t going to be seeing her again. She wouldn’t be the woman he’d wake up next to every morning, she wasn’t even going back to his lonely hotel room. But she was company, and he was company to her, and tonight was all he needed, really: a place to fit in, to get lost in, and a pretty girl to talk to, to dance with, to listen to.

Tonight, that was all he needed.