Bozo Cocktails

How is a short story like 'Bozo' going to turn out? It's about a young woman who starts visiting a bar regularly every other week for about six months because she likes one of its bartenders. Often, these stories don't end well. There might be exceptions. 

'Bozo' is written by Souvankham Thammavongsa, and published in The New Yorker on April 1, 2024.

The narrator enjoys the cocktails that this bartender makes. She likes how he looks as well. She is content to simply admire him and watch him work. She doesn't seem to want to make a concrete move to ask him out. He doesn't wear a ring on his finger. She found out that he was thirty-eight, a few years younger than her.

I could see him in any light and at any angle. It was possible to know him. But, really, I didn’t want to know him. I liked him at exactly this distance. They all disappoint, eventually, when you get to know them. I just wanted to look and make up stories. I loved that I knew where he was every evening. That I didn’t have to wait for a call or a text. If I wanted to see him, I could, and I knew exactly where to go.

The story is thankfully, not one of tragedy, petty jealousy or trickery. If you're single and available, then it's simply one of those 'nights in our lives'. Some dates happen, and some dates don't. There're men aplenty, and it's a matter of which one is for you. Hopefully, sane. The narrator is perhaps forty-one or forty-two years old. At this age, she would know exactly what type of men she prefers, and experienced enough to suss them out. Dating the wrong guy for you will create chaos in your life, and bring about unnecessary emotional turmoil.  

The narrator finally asked the cute bartender out to the aquarium. He declined and told her he has a girlfriend whom he has been with for three years. She doesn't sound too sad. She seems to want him to be happy, and for this relationship to make him happy. 

He told her that his girlfriend comes in on Fridays. So the narrator came in to see for herself. She seems to want her to be beautiful, for him. On a Friday, she heard the bartender's girlfriend call him 'Bozo'! Awwww. To allow someone to call you 'bozo' as a term of endearment, I suppose that's really being indulgent, and they must be really in love with each other. The narrator arrives at the same conclusion.

Then, alone, I got up and left the restaurant. I walked down a dark alley nearby. And there, with my back up against a brick wall, I closed my eyes. I said the thing she’d called him to no one in particular. I wanted what was in her mouth to be in mine, too. 

In an interview, the author said that she intended to reverse the stereotypical dynamic of gazing at beauty, to have a woman look at the man instead:

The bartender is a man who’s used to being watched. He tells her that he previously worked as a model. We’re probably more familiar with this story being told the other way around—a woman is the object of the male gaze, and desirable for her beauty more than anything else. Did you make a deliberate decision to reverse this dynamic?

Yes. Men don’t let you look at them like this. They think it’s creepy. But it’s actually powerful to look and to decide what beauty is for yourself. We often think that beauty is about what we are looking at, but beauty is actually about the person who is doing the looking. The bartender may not be beautiful at all. It’s really about the beauty of the narrator. It’s tricky because, the way the story is written, I disappear what we usually do with character. We don’t get to see what the narrator looks like or even know her name or what her job is or where she lives, yet we are drawn in to her life and what she sees and feels by her voice alone. When we are in the story, we realize it’s really the narrator who is beautiful. She’s just someone who wants to go to the aquarium. She could be angry with what’s happened to her, but she imagines the narrowness of a man’s circumstances. She cares if he’s happy, and even if it turns out that he’s not happy she leaves that alone because that might be what he wants, to be unhappy, because “no one is going to come for your unhappiness.” When she learns about his girlfriend, she doesn’t do what we are socialized to do and imagine a rival or imagine something ugly for him; instead, she sees his girlfriend as a woman just like her who wants good things for this man. When she imagines his life outside the bar, the thing she longs for the most is just to cross the street with him in New York. I get to give this beauty to her and to make readers see her. In real life, such a beautiful person might be called a lonely loser. As a writer, I can make real life feel better than that.