Chapter 2 : Help Wanted
Paddy's Pub, South Philadelphia — Late July, 2005
"— can't just KEEP doing this, Dennis, because I am ALSO a member of this bar and my opinions —"
"Your opinions, Dee, are like your acting career. Technically they exist, but nobody's paying attention."
Griffin steps through the open door and into air that hasn't been fresh since the Clinton administration. The smell hits first — stale beer soaked into wood that's been absorbing it for decades, something chemical under that, and a faint biological note he doesn't want to identify. The lighting is dim enough that his eyes take a full three seconds to adjust, and in those three seconds the argument doesn't pause.
"That is so— that is so typical of you, Dennis—"
"See, you're proving my point. You're speaking and I've already stopped listening. It's automatic."
Four people. Griffin catalogs them the way you'd catalog traffic hazards: fast, instinctive, survival-first.
Dennis Reynolds stands behind the bar with the posture of someone who believes he's being photographed at all times. Hair styled. Shirt fitted. A glass in his hand that he's not drinking from but holding at the exact angle that catches the overhead light. He's prettier in person than on a television screen, and twice as calculated — every gesture is a performance for an audience of one, which is himself.
Dee Reynolds occupies the end of the bar nearest the door, arms crossed, jaw tight. Taller than Griffin expected. She takes up space the way people do when they're bracing for someone to tell them they don't belong in it. Her drink sits untouched and her eyes keep darting to Dennis for a reaction she's not going to get.
Mac — Ronald McDonald, but nobody calls him that, not even the man himself — leans against the bar with the studied casualness of someone who watched action movies and took notes. Biceps flexed under a sleeveless shirt even though nobody's looking. His posture says "I'm in charge of security here" and everything else about him says he has never been in charge of anything.
Charlie Kelly sits on the bar. Not at it. On it. Cross-legged, eating something out of a tin can with a spoon that doesn't look clean. His shoes are on the floor three feet away. He's the only one not engaged in the argument, which makes him the most dangerous variable in the room, because Charlie Kelly disengaged is Charlie Kelly loading a spring.
Griffin approaches the bar.
"Can I get a beer?"
Dennis turns. The assessment is instantaneous — Griffin can almost see it happening, the eyes scanning top to bottom, categorizing, filing. Customer. New face. Unremarkable clothes. Not a threat, not an opportunity. Filed under: nobody.
"We're not really... open."
"Door's open."
"The door is always open because Charlie broke the lock last month, but—"
"I propped it," Mac cuts in. "For airflow. It's a tactical decision."
"It's July," Dee says. "It's a hundred degrees."
"It's a TACTICAL—"
"I can pour my own if you point me at the taps," Griffin says.
Dennis pauses. Something in his expression shifts — minor recalculation, new data point. A customer who isn't deterred by the smell, the arguing, or the general atmosphere of institutional failure.
"You know how to pour a beer?"
"I bartended for three years." This is true of the old Griffin — the real one, the dead one. Two years at a sports bar in college and a year at a dive in Columbus that made Paddy's look like the Ritz.
"We don't need a bartender," Mac says.
"Yes we do," Charlie says from the bar, not looking up from his tin can.
"We don't—"
"Dennis hasn't poured a drink in two weeks because he's been working on his— what did you call it?"
"My personal brand initiative," Dennis says, and the fact that he says this without irony is something Griffin was intellectually prepared for but physically unprepared to witness.
"Right. So nobody's pouring drinks. And when Dee does it—"
"I pour drinks FINE, Charlie—"
"— she spills like half of it because her hands are all—" Charlie makes a gesture that's half bird impression and half something worse.
"My hands are NORMAL—"
"You guys seem busy with bigger things," Griffin says. He keeps his voice level. Casual. The voice of a man who doesn't care whether they hire him because he's got options, which he does not. "I can pour drinks. I'm cheap. And you'd have more time for... the brand initiative."
Dennis's eyes narrow. Not suspicion — interest. Flattery, correctly deployed, is the key that fits the Dennis Reynolds lock. Griffin knows this because he watched a man use charm as a weapon for seventeen seasons, and the first rule of dealing with a narcissist is to make them feel like hiring you was their idea.
"How cheap?"
"Whatever you're paying now minus twenty percent."
"We're paying nothing now," Mac says.
"Then I'm a bargain."
Mac looks at Dennis. Dennis looks at his reflection in the bar mirror — brief, automatic, a tic Griffin has seen on screen a hundred times and now sees in person, the micro-check that he still exists and is still perfect. Then Dennis looks back.
"Fine. You start now. The taps pull left — Charlie rigged something to the pipes and I don't want to know what."
"You don't," Charlie confirms.
"I'm Dennis. This is Mac. That's Charlie. And that—" he gestures at Dee without looking at her — "is my sister Dee, who also works here, technically."
"Technically," Dee repeats, and her voice carries a weight of accumulated dismissal that no laugh track ever captured.
"Griffin," Griffin says. He doesn't extend a hand because nobody else has moved to shake, and in this bar, that tracks.
He walks behind the bar. The floor back here is sticky in a way that suggests years of accumulation rather than a single spill. The taps are labeled in handwriting he can't read — Charlie's, presumably. The glasses on the shelf range from beer mugs to what might be a repurposed jelly jar. The ice bin is empty. The bar towel is gray.
Griffin picks up the least questionable glass, runs it under the tap, holds it to the light. Dirty. He washes it by hand, dries it with the cleanest section of the towel, and pours himself a soda from the gun.
The carbonation bites. The glass is cold in his hand. He drinks standing behind the bar of Paddy's Pub while four people who don't know they're fictional continue an argument about whether Dee's acting headshots need to be displayed on the wall.
First moment of calm since waking up in someone else's body.
The afternoon passes in a kind of structured chaos that Griffin recognizes from the show but experiences like weather — you can know a hurricane is coming and still be wet when it arrives. Dennis leaves at 2 PM "to attend to matters" and doesn't come back. Dee stays until 3, drinking vodka sodas and rehearsing a monologue from a play Griffin doesn't recognize, then storms out when Charlie suggests she sounds like "a bird trying to do Shakespeare." Mac spends two hours describing a "Project Badass" video he's planning to film, which involves a bike ramp and what he calls "controlled explosions."
Charlie stays. He's always here — Griffin knows this, has always known this. Charlie Kelly and Paddy's Pub are a closed system; you can't separate one from the other without breaking both.
"You're pretty quiet," Charlie says around 4 PM, after the only customer of the day — an old man who ordered a Yuengling and left a dollar tip — has gone.
"Just getting the lay of the land."
"There's rats in the basement."
"Good to know."
"Don't worry about 'em. They're mostly friendly. I named the big one Gerald."
Griffin files this under the growing list of things that were charming on television and are mildly horrifying in person.
He wipes down the bar — the real work of it, the kind nobody's done in months. He finds the spare keys in a drawer under the register, learns which lights have burned out and which just need the switch jiggled, maps the exits in his head. Back door through the office. Front door with the broken lock. A window in the bathroom that's been painted shut but could be forced.
Exits matter when you're two blocks from the blast radius and standing behind the bar.
The sun drops. The bar stays empty. Charlie eats something from behind the toilet tank — Griffin doesn't ask — and Griffin polishes glasses that haven't been polished since they were bought.
Mac comes back at closing, still in the sleeveless shirt, a light sheen of sweat on his forehead from whatever "training" he'd been doing.
"So," Mac says, leaning on the bar. "Griffin. That's a weird name."
"Yeah."
"You know any martial arts?"
Griffin sets down the glass. The first of a thousand questions he already knows the answer to.
"Not even a little."
"That's fine. I can protect you. It's kind of my thing. I'm head of security."
"The bar has a head of security?"
"Every bar needs one, man. It's like — it's basic. You got your bartender, you got your security, you got your... Charlie. The system works."
Griffin nods. Mac's eyes are bright and eager and desperate for validation from a stranger who's been here six hours.
"Sounds like a solid system."
Mac grins. Griffin locks up.
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