The Panty Raffle

I was thinking back the other day to one of my first nights at the bar. I had just started to think I was getting the hang of things when, about halfway through the evening the bouncer had wandered into the men’s washroom to find a deer leg, hoof-up, protruding from the toilet bowl. I hadn’t really believed him when he’d told me and, because I hadn’t wanted to cause a stir in the men’s, I’d had to take his word for it until closing time. By the time two am rolled around I forgot that we’d acquired a bit of taxidermy and went home without checking it out.

In the morning I’d come to the bar to open up, and found that the leg was very much real. Someone had removed it from the toilet and placed it on a palate out back, rather than tossing it in the dumpster, as if to keep it as some sort of furry memento of the night before. I’d left it there, thinking it would add some novelty to the patio attached to the back of the building (something it very much needed as it looked out onto a gravel parking lot).

Later though the kitchen staff and I received a talking to—while the manager had been in the office taking care of the day’s bank deposits, someone had taken the leg and shoved it into the grill of her car. At the time she’d been having some trouble with her steering and so I suggested she go the old fashioned route and use the leg like a rudder (I’d always had a hard time seeing her as an authority figure, which I think she knew from the one year I came dressed as her for Halloween. Though at first she’d thought I was Snookie). She was less than amused. But when we all went outside to help her remove the leg, it was gone.

At the time I’d thought it was sort of like an omen of things to come, and I wasn’t wrong. Though aside from a few arguments with people over whether they should have to clean up their own puke (bachelor parties are the worst for this), things continued as normal. Until around Christmas time when we’d had a guy come in and claim that he was an auctioneer.

We’d had ads up around the bar saying that we were collecting money for a children’s charity and so it made sense that he wanted to help us out—trouble was that he intended to do it by raffling off the underwear belonging to the female staff members present. He had then lapsed into a tirade about how after that he was going to sleep with all of us—as if a bit of fabric was the only thing getting in his way—and had been thrown out a short while later.

After that it seemed like the weirdness ball had sort of been set in motion. We promptly had an infestation of tiny mice, which were adorably drunk when you swept them out of the puddles of beer on the floor, and the coffee maker became overrun with a pack of flying ants.

Though the most disturbing of it all was the smell that started to come from the washrooms, a rather serious sewage issue that they were always in the process of fixing but never actually did. At one point the city had dug a massive hole in the front lawn to try and rectify the situation and I’d spent the days afterward peering out the front windows, watching drunks goose step around the open excavation as I waited for them to fail the sobriety test of not falling in.

Full moons though were the worst, and I soon found a direct correlation between them and the nights we were likely to have fights. I’d stand agog as a sixty-something woman flashed a table of strangers and wondered how fast I could get her to clear her tab. My eyebrows didn’t even go up anymore when patrons said things like, “Honey, I’ve got grey pubic hair older than you.”

In the summer the same entertainer who’d been in the night of the auctioneer came to play a weekend gig. We’d stood around afterwards as he sipped his beer had tried to jog my memory about that night, “You know, the guy who’d tried to raffle off your underwear.”

“Oh, that guy. I’d totally forgotten about that.”

“How could you just forget something like that?” he’d asked me. And I found it hard to admit even to myself that all of the weirdness had just sort of started to run together.