Excerpt: The Man in the Fedora

The following is an excerpt of a recent story.  As always, comments and criticisms are always appreciated.  Jot them in the comment section or e-mail me [at] adamdistefano [dot] com.

I went back to observing the other customers.  Most were middle-aged or older.  Likely, they were trying to escape the wives for a few more hours.  They were all men.  I thought that on busier days, the place probably attracted a fair split of men and women, but these patrons would not be here on those days.
     Most of the patrons sat in clusters of two or three.  Despite this fact, they all seemed to know each other.  When one would get up from a table to walk to the bar, and pass by another group, he'd always either nod or wave.
     I had never minded going to bars by myself.  In fact, I enjoyed it.  There was something about sitting at a bar with a drink, a sandwich and your own thoughts that appealed to me.
If the bar was quiet enough, I would sometimes read a newspaper.  If I were in a chatty mood, I would talk to the bartender, or other customers.  You could always find someone to talk to in a bar.  Bartenders, generally, were great at having conversations.  They talked to so many different people in a single night that they always had interesting insights or funny stories.
If all else failed, I could always people watch.  People fascinated me, and I liked observing them and then imagining what their lives were.  I would never know if I was right or not, but that was not the point.  It was the act of observing and guessing in and of itself that was fun.
     That was what I was doing.  I was sipping my fresh gin and tonic and watching the different people.  Most of the men were uninteresting.  The stories that they inspired were of middle class lifestyles, with all the traditional rewards and pitfalls.
     I was about to down the remainder of my gin and tonic and make an exit, when one of the patrons caught my eye.  Sitting at a corner table, by himself, the man looked out of place and I don’t know how I’d missed him earlier. 
     Unlike the rest of the patrons in the bar, the man did not look like he knew everyone else here.  Quite to the contrary, everyone else in the bar seemed to give him his space.  So, perhaps they knew him, but wish they didn’t?
     The man in question was tall.  Exactly how tall was difficult to tell with him sitting down, but even in his seated position, his height was obvious.  He wore a grey suit that was clean and crisp.  The suit looked like it was stolen from the set of a Cary Grant movie, and yet it looked brand new.  The man wore a skinny black tie over a white shirt.  Less than four feet from where he was sitting was a coat rack with a single coat hanging from its branches.  The coat was a trench coat with a wide collar and a wide belt.  It was tan in colour, and long in length.  Even on someone as tall as the man in the corner, it would surely go down almost to the ankles.
     The man’s face was a mystery, though.  He wore a gray fedora that matched his suit.  The fedora had a small red feather tucked in the band that wrapped around the hat.  It was small enough not to be ostentatious, but big enough to add class and distinction to its wearer.
     The fedora looked as new as the suit, and in a way, even more dated.  I tried remembering the last man I saw wearing a fedora, and the only person that came to mind was my grandfather.  But my grandfather had his fedoras for decades, and he had first purchased them when they were a big fashion item.  Personally, I like the look of fedoras and don’t understand how they got pulled off the market.  Unfortunately, consumers today don’t have that kind of intelligent appreciation for finer things.
     The whole package of the mystery man looked like he was displaced from time.  A character from a 1950s crime novel who somehow ends up imprisoned in the 21st century. 
     The image of a character from the 1950s was further cemented when the man reached into the jacket pocket of his suit, and I tensed.  After a moment I realized I was being an idiot and was allowing my imagination to run wild.  There were a million other things that could have been in his pockets, and so there was no reason for me to be worried about it.
     When his hand emerged from his jacket pocket, the mystery object in it was revealed as a pack of Viceroy’s.  He flipped the lid of the pack open and withdrew one of the cigarettes.
     I sat watching this, fascinated.  My gin and tonic in hand, I openly stared at this man out of sync with time.  Part of me wanted to be him.  To be so unconcerned with the perception of others that I could live life at my own pace.
     The man in the fedora, put the Viceroy to his lips, his head bent forward, so that the lip of his hat obscured his entire face, and only the tip of the cig stuck out.  Returning to the pack, he removed a brush metal lighter.  Even from across the room, the thing looked heavy.  I quit smoking several years before, but still kept a collection of high-end lighters.  Call it a tribute.  The one the man in the fedora had extracted looked pricy.  It did not have an exposed flint, only a button that concealed all the internal workings of the fire-starter.
     With his right hand, he lit the cigarette, and took a long haul.  The tip of the fag burned red, and the red crept slowly upwards, until the whole part of the cigarette that was exposed beneath the fedora was transformed from paper containing tobacco to ash.  He stowed the lighter back in the pack and slipped the pack back in his jacket.  Cigarette still in mouth, he leaned back in his chair and brought about a newspaper that was laid out on the table in front of him.
     I was not the only person watching the man in the fedora.  The moustachioed bartender zipped out from behind the bar, faster than I would have thought he could. 
     “Hey, you!” he shouted.  He could only be talking to the man in the fedora, because it was apparent that apart from me, he knew everyone else in the bar’s name.  “What do you think you’re doing?  You can’t smoke in here!”