The Kind You Start at the Motel Bar By Jenny Catlin

Thomas & Dianne Jones CC




The Kind You Start at the Motel Bar

I still think about love the way I did as a child: as something huge and ruinous, something that arrives like a thunderstorm and takes the whole sky. Love in all its forms. My life has been made up of little love stories and little heartbreaks, cheap versions and holy versions, some of them over before they were named.

During the pandemic, when Marie Kondo was telling people to get rid of anything that didn’t spark joy, I started with the people. People I had kept just to keep. Men I’d let linger at the edge of my life in case I needed to feel wanted. Men I answered weeks late, just enough to keep the line warm. It’s the kind of cruelty this era makes easy: right swipes, DMs, everybody half-available, everybody pretending a body is not a body if it only exists in a phone. Sometimes there’s no heart in it. Often there is. What, after all, is a body without a heart?

I started with the bench. Easiest place to begin. The men I never really wanted, or knew never really wanted me either. A few drunks too young for me who would have skateboarded to my apartment after last call if they had nothing better going on. Men I’d known since their boyhood who had since collected felonies and classic Impalas and children. A layer. A stand-up comic. A dentist. A CPA. A brick mason. A handful of others with decent forearms and bad timing. They didn’t bring me joy. I doubt I brought them much either.

Then the people with no flesh-tether, no future flesh, no real claim at all. Old bosses. Popular girls from high school whose lives had gone sideways in ways even they hadn’t predicted. A couple of mean mothers who made pity noises whenever they talked about a woman’s right not to have a kid, as if childlessness were a diagnosis instead of a choice.

On New Year’s Eve 2021, I fasted and purged. I deleted numbers saved under names like Russian Cocaine Guy and Good Pants Bar Dude. Hundreds of contacts. None of them brought joy. I drank green juice because some man with a rotten beard said it would help. I made a playlist full of old punk and post-punk love songs: Gaslight Anthem, the Menzingers, the Descendents, Tim Barry’s “No News From the North” on repeat because somehow it always sounds like exactly what happens when I don’t know what comes next. I did yoga. I took mushrooms. I masturbated on the floor of my apartment in the dark thinking of no one in particular. I’m lucky that way. I can still get off without Wi-Fi or a charger.

I was in love then. Right in the middle of the purge. He loved me too. I know he did. I also knew, and refused to fully admit, that he could never really love me in any durable way. His heart was strewn all over New Jersey. But he loved me as far as he could reach, and that counted for something.

Some of them have counted for something.

All those short-term soulmates.

I used to think I was unloved. Worse, unloveable. I bought the oldest lie there is, that love has one respectable shape and everyone decent recognizes it on sight. Velvet boxes. Permanence. Clean lines. I could not make myself fit that shape, though I broke bones and broke my own heart trying. Broke other people, too. I know I did. I made promises based on my own ability to shapeshift, and then acted surprised when the trick wore off.

I used to joke that I was a test. That the right-shaped women should have thanked me for softening men up on their behalf. Man after man married the first woman he dated after me, had babies with her, bought a couch, got a dog, learned to alphabetize spices. As if surviving me, my love, my body, made them newly grateful for goodness and order. Some of that was a joke. Some of it wasn’t. I wore people out. I still do. I know that.

I break up well. With a few exceptions, I stayed friends with almost everyone I ever dated for any real stretch of time. Not all their wives like that, which I understand. I’m the wrong shape these days to ask anyone not to speak to someone on my behalf, but I understand possessiveness. I understand dread. I look like the kind of woman people worry will set a clean life on fire just by leaning against it too long.
They aren’t always wrong.

One of the men I no longer talk to hurt me. Left me. Came back later promising change, and I was stupid or lonely enough to believe him for one night in the bar of a shitty motel. A few days later I called. The woman who answered said she was his wife and asked who I was. I cried. I apologized. I didn’t know he was married. I should have known. I didn’t. I’m loose in plenty of ways, but I have only been the other woman on purpose twice, and one of those was with a touring musician twice my age, which barely counts as morality so much as scenery. 

The wife was beautiful. Of course she was. A stripper at a nicer club than any place I could afford to spend time in. Blonde, silky, manicured, expensive in every visible way. I know because she found me.

My first instinct was to protect her.

She came into the bar where I worked on day shift in a crisp pressed shirt, looking like she’d taken a wrong turn out of a much better life. The tension among the regulars rose so fast it might as well have changed the pressure in the room. Women did not come into My Bar in daylight unless they were dragged there by a boyfriend or looking for a client. 

Women with blonde barrel curls and expensive tits did not stop in that neighborhood at all.

I looked at Donald, one of my favorite day drunks, loyal but deeply unstable. “Be nice to her,” I muttered, wiping my hands on a bar towel as I caught the blonde’s eye to let her know I’d be right there.

Then to the rest of the room, day laborers and hustlers and men who had long since pickled whatever softness they were born with: “Stop. Leave her alone.”

I could feel all those rheumy eyes traveling the length of her.

“Hi, sorry,” I said when I got to her. “Ignore them. What can I get you?” I wiped down the bar for no reason except to have something to do with my hands and slid a napkin in front of her.

She looked at the back bar, the two draft taps, the sad little choices. “What do you have in a bottle?”

I gave her the short list.

“Corona with lime,” she said, glancing at her pink phone case. “With lime if you have it.”

“I got it.”

She didn’t belong there, but she also wasn’t fragile in the way some pretty women are in ugly bars. I tried small talk. She didn’t bite. Kept her attention on her phone in a way that said she had not come to make friends, especially not with me. So I moved to the other end of the bar and kept an eye on Donald. He had the kind of delusions people stop naming once they become familiar enough. I knew the pretzeled gestures of psychosis by then, the twitch before the swing in mood. He wasn’t flirting with her. He was getting mean. He didn’t like her.

I missed her leaving. One second she was there, the next there was a nearly full Corona and a five on the bar.

“You guys, this is why we can’t have nice things,” I snapped. “Why can’t you just act right for once?”

“She was taking pictures of you, Jen,” Donald said.

“Oh my God, dude, no she wasn’t. Do you need to go home? Are you drunk?”

Only he was right.

She had been taking pictures of me. She’d been looking for me all up and down Colfax. She left her name and number at the Lion’s Lair, where I spent enough time to be locatable, though I still don’t know how she knew that.

The wife.

I was fearless back then, or drunk enough to counterfeit fearlessness, which in practice is close enough. I called her. We made a plan for me to come see her at work that night. She said she had questions. I talked a seasoned friend into driving me over there in his big green Cadillac, which felt like the right car for a night that already had the logic of a dare.

She was working. She comped us each a shot of decent tequila. Between sets, she sat down beside me and shouted questions over the bass-heavy house music. What did I think of his dick. Was it the biggest I’d ever fucked. Had we fucked this time. A few other things in the same vein, things women ask when what they really want is scale. Damage assessment. Whether the thing that hurt them was at least worth the trouble.

She was nice. More than nice, really. She was relieved.

I was unthreatening.

“I just thought you’d be...” she said, slipping a French-manicured nail under the string at her hip to shift it back into place. Then she stopped, looking for the word.

“Pretty?” I offered.

She did that thing beautiful women do when an uglier woman names the hierarchy before they have to. A little flustered kindness. A little panic. “No, no, no,” she said. “Just... I thought you’d be more like me.”

She meant prettier. Cleaner. More in line with the story she’d been telling herself about what happened. Something worth fearing in a way she recognized.

​But that’s the trouble with these little love stories. They rarely look respectable when you drag them into the light. Usually they look cheap. A motel bar. A half-drunk Corona. A wife in stage makeup asking forensic questions over house music. Relief where jealousy ought to be. Pity where pride ought to be.

Then the song , somebody goes back to work, and that small doomed thing you called love is over before you can name it right.

​

​

Jenny Catlin was awarded a Pushcart in 2023, a Lighthouse Book Project Fellowship in 2024, and has been a BAE notable mention.  She likes to pick through the wreckage of what others leave behind.