Redheads and Bad Attitudes [characters] Jean Grey, Logan. [setting] The White Horse Tavern, Greenwich Village, NYC. [content] No warnings thus far! [summary] Someone tries to tempt Logan away from military service.
There were few dives in the city that still hold any memories for Lt. Major James Howlett, who still preferred simply 'Logan' to anything more formal. Urban renovation continually claimed his favorite haunts, one after the other. First, the Arcadian. Then, even E.W. Beck's. But nestled in the cozy corners of Greenwich Village, there was still the White Horse. Closing in on the familiar joint, Logan remembered that winter night back in 1953 when the poet Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, right on the fifth stool from the end of the bar. What a guy, Thomas.
Shouldering open the door, Logan couldn't help but dwell on how much things had changed. The tavern always carried with it a timeless sensibility, its well-worn furnishings coupled perfectly with creaky floorboards and dim lighting. But since Logan last ordered a beer here, some thirty or forty years ago, the place had seen a few changes of ownership and, with them, a few upgrades. The classic black walnut bar had been painted recently, the wood now mucked with several coats of a dull gray-blue. The stools were new, as was the chalkboard menu behind the bar. The door to the men's room no longer swung crazily on one hinge.
But there still wasn't a television to be seen or heard, only the muffled playing of a decades-old jukebox. And the patrons scattered throughout the main room were all in their forties or fifties, blessedly a generation older than the hipsters and artists who now infested Greenwich Village. Small comforts, Logan thought. Dressed in his plain army fatigues, the short man staked out a stool at the end of the bar. The bartender was unfamiliar, but sensible enough to not ask the gruff stranger many questions.
"Molson. Tap, if y'got it," Logan put in his order.