IN NASHVILLE THERE IS a drinking-hole called ‘Multi Bob’. The deeper you go in, the harder it is to get back out.

Somewhere, I had a book of matches from Multi Bob’s bar. A folded white card thing; on it, Bob’s inane face ogling me, the piercing stare of his maniacal bug eyes and the leering slant of that raised left eyebrow.

With my British accent, I always say ‘mul-tee’ in my head, but it’s ‘mult-eye’, to be more accurate.

Bob had wavy hair with a side parting and one of those horrifically realistic expressions that cartoon faces sometimes possess — or rather, are possessed by. He grinned demonically. Just a head, no neck or body. Bob should only have been a stylised line-drawing; like one of those multi-purpose transfers used to advertise skinflint businesses in local newspapers. The ones that look hopelessly dated but cheerful — in a dangerously suburban kind of way. Clip-art junk. But there was more to Multi Bob than that. Sorry, Mult-eye Bob.

I still have Sam Kite’s postcard somewhere, too. Let’s see. Here it is, Bob’s fatuous black-on-white grin; on the other side, US postage stamps and a big smeared postmark obliterating half my address.

MULTI BOB. THE CHEWING PUBLIC. HILLSBORO VILLAGE, NASHVILLE: CALL AGAIN!

Dear Chrissie,
Multi Bob is just another bar — except for its name, the fish-wallpaper and the weird twilight atmosphere, which gives it a kind of surreal, David Lynch vibe. I overdosed on the Multi Bob ‘Rusty Nail’ (two fingers of Jack Daniel’s, one finger of Drambuie with a twist of lemon-peel and the glass filled up with shards of ice), struggling to break it to Mike that I couldn’t take his smoke-and-mirrors tactics any longer, was going to quit. This morning I puked on the exterior wall of Corporate Office. The unintentional symbolism of this gesture did not go unnoticed. Love, Sam.

Almost everything else about Multi Bob I found out by visiting it myself. When I got to Nashville I was amazed that it was still there. Like Sam on his first visit, I stayed at the cheapest joint in town, the Budgetel; where the water stinks of chlorine and there are no mini-bars or restaurant, just Shoney’s for breakfast, US style, across the road.

The strange thing was that Bob’s face had kept coming back to me; rising up in my consciousness like a slimy face from beneath the surface of a pond. And he still graced the glass outside. It gave me a strange, queasy feeling in my stomach to see him in the window; the real Multi Bob. Standing there gazing through him at a shoal of fish profiles, I could scarcely believe I was really there. Yes, the fish wallpaper was still up. It didn’t even look nicotine-stained.

Fresh fish?

*

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