“Nope, they’re for sure customers!”
“Gettin’ weirder,” I say.
“Ain’t over!” he said.
“I can just imagine the ‘facilities’ that this place must have. That’s got to be an adventure in itself.”
“You do need to be a little careful in that department, he said, “some of the equipment in those places looks dangerous; but it’s all pretty well marked so’s you know where to go to go; if you get my meaning.”
“I do!” I said. Knowing I didn’t, couldn’t imagine and maybe didn’t want to.”
He paused for a good slug of his drink, belched softly and said, “Well, anyhow, they all tell good stories. Everything that comes to Tuit’s tells good stories or they won’t be comin’ back again.”
“I’ve got that part. What kinds of stories do these …ah… things at Tuit’s tell anyhow.”
“You never know, sometimes they’re personal, funny or not. Sometimes they’re about things that happened on trips or the weird worlds them story tellers come from. All sorts of stuff; they just have to be good stories.”
“Who decides what’s good?”
“Tuit does, he’s the one what decides if’n you come back or not.”
“Uh huh.”
“Look I’m just telling you how I think things work, I only been there three times myself and I damn sure don’t know everything about the place; I just know I want to keep goin’ back!”
“Speaking of Tuit, you’ve never told me about him. What’s he like?”
“For starters he ain’t human, not by a candle! He’s the owner and the barkeep and he rolls back and forth on this here track in the middle of the bar.”
“He’s on wheels?”
“Nope, he is a wheel! See, that’s his little joke, he’s a round Tuit. Guess there are other shapes of Tuit’s but he’s a round one. He looks like a wheel with arms and eyes a couple of mouths on both sides. He’s about a yard and a half tall, maybe half that thick and there’s a rim that moves like a snakes belly but the center with the arms and eyes and mouths stays put. He works both sides of the bar at the same time.”
“Four mouths? …Four?”
“Yeah four, two on each side.”
“Why in the hell, four?”
“Dammed if I know, but he only talks with one on each side, the others are for eatin’ and drinkin’ I think. Anyhow that’s what it looks like to me. Who would know, there’s weirder things all over that place.”
“You said ‘something’ told you that the backside of a Round Tuit is a star map.”
“Oh yeah, it was one of them big blobs that don’t sit, they just stand at the tables over there on one side of the room. It had huge legs, no neck and no arms, only this cluster of a dozen or so different size octopus tentacle lookin’ things on its chest and at least six eyes around the top of its head, if it was a head? Hell, who’d know? Told me it was a pilot on a starship and that’s why it knew the diagram was a map but it had no idea where it was either.”
“How can you talk to something like that, a blob with no arms, six eyes and tentacles waving around all over?”
He looked at me like I had asked a stupid question, but he answered me with a straight face, “English,” he said, “you speak whatever language you speak and they do too, but everybody understands each other. Got no damn idea how it works but it does. Some of ‘em don’t even speak to you, they think at you and you hear ‘em anyhow.”
“Pretty strange,” I said.
“Yup, it is.”
“So how do you pay for your drinks?”
“Not with paper! Tuit don’t take no damn paper. You got to pay with metal. One basic unit of your money, whoever or whatever you are, in metal; in our case that’s a dollar. I usually carry a coupla’ rolls of quarters with me, so’s I can pay.”
“Quarters? Like the nuts in California who were waiting for the spaceship?”
“Well, you could carry them Susan B. Anthony dollars or whatever the government’s passin’ off on us now I suppose. Maybe them nuts heard about Tuit’s somehow; hard to say.”
“Dollar a drink, doesn’t seem like much when you think about him, Tuit, I mean, taking you all the way out there and back. He’s got to be getting more out of it someway?”
“You know,” he explained, “I think the money don’t matter, it’s your story; if it’s not good enough your coin won’t come back and you’ll never see the place again and there’s nothin’ you could do about it. I mean, even if someone believed you about going there, so what?”