No Tomatoes

It’s one of those mornings where 8 o’clock feels like 6 o’clock; the sky is still and streets unusually empty giving the illusion of time to write about bike bar. It began when Sean hollered ‘Mack!’ and Mack replied ‘Yo’. That was entry, and was, before its license, simply alcohol in a living room. I don’t know how he ever discovered it: presumably Sean doesn’t spend his evenings shouting names in the hope of pirate bars, though with his Irish blood I won’t rule it out.

To approach more quietly, one walks in the direction of Ping Pong’s, but don’t turn right after the bridge, take the next left and walk under Hibiya-sen for eight minutes. It’s somewhere along there, though as Mack has moved on, forget about shouting for directions -you wouldn’t want to wake this peaceful neighbourhood anyway. Despite its proximity to nowhere, people still cram the rafters of this attic room, cigarette smoke circling the bike frames that hang like metal skeletons of outsized bats. More surprising was meeting a girl I’d once had a random picnic with on Hampstead Heath. Flashes of white teeth see-sawed with petty flirtations that were I single would have mistaken for attraction. She was a friend of Nathalie’s, someone who I would love to come out and visit, not least so we could go to bike bar.

This time, however, it is Peter who is visiting. Having emptied my wallet in Ping Pong’s too recently with Oriol, I avoided a repeat and clankered up the black steel fire escape that leads to Mack’s dorm.

Three paragraphs so far is quite a lot when the sum of my recollections of that night is avoiding the cherry in my drink, Mina taking it instead. Peter probably had a Mule, or maybe a Sour also; whatever, it was fantastic, looking like a slightly creamy, curdled lemon, with three razor-edged cubes of ice and apparently a delicious cherry, probably worth a shot on its own –at least that’s how my olive tasted after an earlier Martini. There may have been some whisky in there too. We had seconds and then thirds around the corner, but as that came with a hefty cover charge, I prefer to lay what memories I have with Mack, whoever he is.