Started on one Friday night, after darkness descended over the city, and the denizens slipped in to have one or two to try to smooth the edges from a hectic day, an exasperating month, or a frazzled existence.
On cold, drafty evenings, if not closed all the way, the scuffed, wooden door flapped back and forth, clattering against the chipped frame. That night around 8 p.m., the tip of a cane held the door before it crashed, and he followed close behind, dragging his left leg in front of his right, shambling to the bar.
A pair of dark glasses obscured his eyes. A faded, gray Fedora covered his head—like the kind Bogie wore in those detective movies—and his pale skin looked like it hadn’t been introduced to the sun.
He ordered whiskey on the rocks, paid with exact change, left a two-dollar tip, and shuffled over to the empty corner booth, the one with the least amount of light, like he had done it a thousand times before. He positioned himself so he could see everything, and I wasn’t sure he could see at all.
After that night, he came in every day the same way, at the same time, and sat in the same booth, which always happened to be empty when he made his appearance. After four days, I introduced myself. “Hi, I’m Norman,” and he answered in a voice like gravel sliding down a hill, “Pleasure’s all mine,” never offering his name. I figured he was like me and so many others, marking time in their own personal calendar, not a people person, whatever that meant. Guarded is what a doctor once told me.
After a week, I poured his drink when he cleared the door. Whiskey, his preferred cocktail, preferred, because he never ordered anything else. Not a pretentious Scotch drinker, just a Jack Daniels man. Never ran a tab, only the one drink, and off to his corner, as if its gloominess belonged to him. He sipped his whiskey, which somehow lasted until closing time, hiding behind those dark glasses, hat remaining on his head.
Johnny, the proprietor, after a couple of weeks of this, got annoyed. “What are we, a goddamn Starbucks?”
But I thought this guy was the kind of customer who gave Johnny’s establishment, The Hideout, tucked away here in Astoria, Queens, not far from the Hell Gate, what they call character, panache, personality, the kind of place people pointed to and said, hey, we have to stop in.
But I didn’t bother wasting those words on Johnny.
Johnny wiped the bar, wiped his nose, glared over at the guy, and muttered, “That guy is a vampire.” And the name stuck.
Now, Johnny had a way of assigning monikers to people who didn’t meet his expectations—which was the entire human race. He plucked names from movies or comic books. Vampire, zombie, wonder woman wannabe. Then following his proclamation, he erupted in laughter. I often wanted to ask him if he wished for a world full of Johnnies instead. I found myself wanting to ask a lot of people that question about themselves.
When I muse on that old man these days, or replay the scenes in my head, I wonder if I actually witnessed these things or imagined them, or someone told me a story they read or saw in a movie, and it somehow became real.
I invented back stories for everyone who pushed through that door, fantasies full of dark secrets and tragic, wicked affairs. No happy endings in my circle, everyone trudging through their lives trying to make it to the next stop, or their last one.
Johnny kept the lights real dim in his place. Said he did it because the kind of people who came in here wanted to think they still looked good after life had washed most of the good right out of them. And the lights or lack thereof helped with that. I always remembered his words. “Everybody looks good in the dark.”
Johnny rigged it so these little lamps he picked up at some secondhand shop in Manhattan shone just enough light so us bartenders could read the register, or the card display. Most of the regulars still used cash, but the younger crowd who kept moving into the neighborhood, when they did venture in, wanted to pay with a card or their phone.
Drove Johnny nuts, a grizzled old timer whose family owned this place for three generations, back when everybody in the neighborhood knew each other’s names. Johnny couldn’t move past one decade into the next, but he broke down and installed those electronic readers.
Growing up in Sunnyside, Queens, being around a lot of people made me shrivel into a dark hole where I tried to hide and not speak to anyone. Most of the kids in my school and my neighborhood granted me my wish and allowed me to linger in anonymity.
But there was always a certain group of kids who found the prospect of torturing others who were different than them to be a sport. And they practiced their craft every day much to their enjoyment. Did it ever occur to them what their batting average did to the recipients of their sporting pleasure? I still hear people sniping about how a difference of lifestyle or opinion, evoking such hatred and venom. Does everybody really want a world where we all have the same opinion? You know what they say about opinions.
After about a month of the vampire coming in every night, it began. Dave, a regular, came most nights to The Hideout because home was not a place he wanted to inhabit after his wife walked out on him, taking the kids with her. So, Dave spent his quality time with us.
He got to staring at the vampire, until one night the old man—if he was old, if he was a man, because I still wasn’t sure—lifted his cane, which Dave took as some sort of sign. He sidled over sideways to the booth, and the shadows swallowed him, like he disappeared into a fog.
Johnny shook his head at this development. “Now, there’s a couple.” Dave’s voice hummed under the soft, jazz music Johnny insisted on playing so people didn’t have to shout at each other any more than they already did.
This continued every night, Dave waiting for his signal, Dave doing most of the talking, or so it seemed, Johnny always commenting on what the hell was going on, Dave coming back to pay his tab, and heading home much earlier than he was accustomed to.
One night before he received his invitation, Johnny, who didn’t understand why the old man enjoyed Dave bending his ear, asked him straight up. “Hey, Dave, what’s with you and the vampire?”
Dave, whose eyes were too close together, who always looked like he was about to cry, pointed his finger at Johnny, and something almost resembling anger flashed across his face. “Hey, don’t you call him that. He’s the opposite of a vampire.”
Johnny held his hands up and backed away. “Okay, okay. But, what’s up with the two of you?”
Dave, with still a bit of an attitude, which for anyone else was like having a meltdown, his gaze moving back and forth between me and Johnny, lowered his eyes and said, “He listens to me, and tells me the truth.”
Me and Johnny stole a glance at each other, and Johnny shook his head. “Well, Norman here listens to you. He listens to everybody.” Johnny laughed. “He gets paid to.”
Dave shook his head vehemently, locking my eyes. “No, you don’t really listen, do you, Norman.”
I remained silent because Dave was—I hated to admit it—spot on. Dave nodded, like he read my mind, and gestured over his shoulder. “But him, he listens to what I’m saying. He accepts me.” Dave’s eyes brimmed with fire, rendering me and Johnny speechless, and I nodded in assent. “You know exactly what I’m saying, Norm. That guy, he understands. You know how when you’re talking to someone, they’re not hearing you, because they’re thinking about something else, or they’re formulating what they have to say. It’s true because you’re doing the same thing when they’re speaking. But not him. He hears what I have to say, every word, even my secrets. Makes me want to listen too. It’s spiritual, fucking earth shattering.”
Then the raising of the cane and Dave bounces to the corner, Johnny muttering, and me wondering what the hell was going on.
In my house growing up, it was easy to conceal yourself behind what was expected. My dad worked two jobs, exhausted by the time he got home, and he would ask me and my two sisters how we were doing. We would of course say fine, though my oldest sister wanted to tell him she preferred the company of girls to boys, my younger sister struggled in school because of her dyslexia, and the school, and my parents, did not have the resources to deal with that heavy shit, and I dwelled in my hole in the universe. But fine sufficed for him.
My mom had a better understanding of our situation, and she did tend to our individual needs, but her relationship with my father overwhelmed her, and us kids kind of got lost in the deck.
Although she did take me to that shrink, which at first I welcomed. Finally, someone to talk to, but I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to say. I do now. And all that doctor did was ask me how I felt about this and about that. My problem, I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel about anything.
This phenomenon caught fire. Funny thing, we never heard anyone talking about it. But now all the regulars, one by one, started seeking counsel from the man in the corner. Word must have spread through the neighborhood because new customers came in to engage him.
I mean, the guy sat in the shadows, behind his dark glasses, sipping his Jack, holding court like some kind of priest, or guru, or—what is it they call them now—an influencer. Hell, he never got up to use the bathroom. Soon, a line formed to see him.
After sitting down with him for ten or fifteen minutes, spilling their sob stories, him giving an imperceptible nod and possibly muttering a few words, they always came over and bought a drink. Sometimes they told me not to pour it, paid, and left, a dazed expression on their faces.
Business was booming, but that didn’t satisfy Johnny. “Not normal,” Johnny would mutter every time his eyes went in the vampire’s direction. But Johnny never approached him, not once, like he was afraid of the truth.
“Come on, Johnny, this guy is bringing in a shit load of business. We should charge admission. He’s a—what do you call those people who—”
“A freak is what you call them.”
But that wasn’t true. Johnny fit that description better than the vampire.
My mother suggested I join the army, see the world, be a part of something, discover myself. It was okay at first, isolated by design, and I even made a few friends. But when I returned home, I floated through a few jobs, none of which I enjoyed.
One night while working construction at Rikers Island, I stopped in the Hideout with some coworkers, and Johnny asked us if anyone was interested in tending bar because the guy who had been working for him, his heart decided to stop beating.
I took him up on his offer. I’d never be rich, but people would talk to me all day long and they could care less about what I thought about what they said as long as I nodded my head and muttered encouragement once in a while. My life, hiding out in the Hideout.
One night, these young people spilled into the place, too loud and probably already high or drunk or something, I guess. Five of them, pink, purple, and green hair, rings in their ears and everywhere else they weren’t supposed to be, tattoos from head to toe, the works. Johnny took a deep sigh and whispered in my ear. “Which ones are the boys, and which ones are the girls?”
After I proofed them, which they were amused by, they ordered their drinks. I had to search the internet to find out how to prepare two of them.
When they first burst through the door, I thought they graced our humble abode to check out the show. But they didn’t glance the old man’s way, and he sat in his booth the same way he always did. Hell, if he didn’t raise his glass once in a while, or move his lips every so often, I’d have to go check him for a pulse. And I’m not sure I would find one.
Johnny got to joking that he made a garlic necklace and bought a silver bullet for his gun which he kept locked in the safe, just in case. I started to tell him maybe I should sharpen a wooden stake, but he walked away in the middle of my sentence.
So, this one young person in the group saunters toward the rest room, which would take them right past the darkened booth. For some reason, like—what do you call that—divine intervention—the booth was unoccupied at that moment. When they got to where he sat, it was like a hand reached out and grabbed hold, the way their body came to a screeching halt. The vampire raised his cane, and this young person took a seat.
The friends gasped and leaned on the back of their chairs witnessing this until their friend returned, hands waving in the air, face pressed toward the group. They huddled together, the other four catching the words before they tumbled onto the table, and one by one, they went over for a visit.
Johnny laughed, “freak show,” and walked to the other end of the bar.
The next night, a guy in his forties who had been coming in for about a week, one of those financial types from the city, sat in front of me fidgeting, waiting his turn, all excited, stealing glances at the corner. After his session, he came back, plopped on the stool, asked for a beer, about to hyperventilate.
“You okay, buddy,” I asked him.
“Yeah, yeah, gotta go tell him another story.”
“That’s what you do, you tell him stories? Does he tell you a story?”
The guy stares at me and frowns. “You don’t get it, do you. You’re like all the rest. It’s a beautiful gift he’s giving. No one’s ever listened to a goddamn word I say. Ever. Until now. You ever tell a bunch of people a story, an exceptional story, something that doesn’t happen too often, doesn’t matter whether it’s sad or happy, but unusual. You ever notice when you build up to the end, someone always has another story ready to go to try to one up you. They deflate the whole scene. They weren’t even listening. The whole time they’re waiting for you to shut the hell up so they can tell their story when you just wanted to tell yours. Shit, I’ve done it myself. Not this guy. He’s with me, believing me, hell, believing in me. He—”
The woman talking to the vampire got up and the guy ran over.
I understood what the guy meant, which was the reason I never wanted to talk to anybody. I often wondered if I took this job because I thought these people were worse off than me, or at least as lonely.
I turned to Johnny to ask him what he thought about it, but he was busy yapping at Mrs. Davis, a regular who sauntered in once or twice a week. She nodded at what Johnny was saying but her eyes were on the vampire. Later in the evening, she made her first visit.
Johnny left early that night, so my turn to close up. I locked the front and back doors, finished cleaning up, wiped away the last bit of spilt beer, and checked the restrooms to make sure nobody mistook it for their bedroom.
I remembered thinking maybe there was something to this whole vampire thing, or as Dave said, the opposite. A vampire sucked the life out of its victims, but this guy—
Me and Johnny had been together for close to thirty years, and we spoke on a lot of things, but did we ever listen to each other, tell each other the truth?
I thought about that doctor asking me how I felt. I would tell him all kinds of things now. How I wished somebody loved me, and I loved somebody, and when I left my apartment every afternoon everyone I met would smile, say hello, ask how I’m doing, and I would say, great, and how are you.
How I wished that dreams would come true.
How I wished I could tell all this to the old man in the corner.
I laughed, my voice echoing in the empty room. Who was I kidding, this guy was just some novelty for lonely people to feel like they had some purpose or something.
As I grabbed my coat off the rack, the flapping of the door back and forth against the frame made me jump. I forgot to lock it again. Must be losing it, I thought. I swung around the bar, and he sat in his booth staring at me from the dark. The door banged and caught, the clicking of the bolt vibrating against my skull. I stood with my mouth agape, my eyes peering into those black pools, as he raised his cane raised above his head.
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Laurence Williams writes after many years in the Bronx Court system. His work appears in Short Beasts Lit Mag, Prism Review, Change Seven Magazine, and elsewhere. Born and raised in the Bronx, he now writes from western Connecticut.
© 2025, Laurence Williams
Halfway Down the Stairs 