The pool table is covered with a varnished piece of plywood so that now it functions as a proper table. Or, at least, as proper as a table can be in a place that sells 25 cent hot wings on Wednesdays and has the most flat screen televisions in the whole city. Across the table there are two petite Mexican girls with braces on their teeth. They are either best friends or sisters, and they smile and laugh at whatever their male companions say to them, which is not very much. Mostly, all eyes are glued to one of the many screens, all tuned to ESPN but not all in synch. One side of the bar cheers about five seconds before the other side when a particularly exciting play occurs.
The guys across the table are in t-shirts or sports jerseys, which would be oversized on anyone but these guys, who are oversized themselves. Two pitchers of Bud Light on our side of the table are nothing compared to the two mini-plastic kegs of Budweiser—not light—that they methodically consume, along with buckets of wings and a quesadilla with goopy orange cheese that doesn’t have a chance to spill from the sides of the tortilla, because the guy eating it finishes the triangular piece in two quick bites.
There’s a guy with a closely clipped mohawk wearing clear framed glasses. He’s talking to a dark haired girl with perfect boobs and tanned skin, licking sauce off some wings and wiping his fingers on a napkin. When someone across the table cheers, he raises his hand in a high five to the large man in a maroon jersey sitting to his left, who obliges. Then the guy with the mohawk turns back to the girl, shifting his chair ever so slightly. The large man turns to him, all solidarity gone, and tells him that he needs to move his chair because they are sitting too close to one another. He’s touching his back, he says. The rules of masculine contact have been established: Hard and fast, not soft and slow.
At the end of the night, a french fry pudding of hot wing sauce and cheese congeals in red and white checkered paper trays lit by a blanket of fluorescent bulbs.
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