A Drink With Honesty

I slipped in from the cold, rainy streets that stank of garbarge and entered the warm confines of your local friendly neighborhood bar, the stench shifting right away to stale beer, cigarettes, and sex. This is a womb, and I have begun my daily regression back into its slick amphibian comfort, one pint at a time. Amongst some circles, this was truly heaven. Two in the afternoon, a jukebox on the lowest setting, quietly humming out some 70's power anthem, and the stiffest drinks this side of 3 dollars. There were no Ambercrombie clad elbows to bang up against here. No distracted young bartenders to scream at for your attention or your money. No harsh looks, and no stink eye. Just a lonely dank little dive bar nestled under the train tracks, it's only proof of establishment a flickering neon sign that flashed one magical word: OPEN. It's where I met you, that cold and dismal Tuesday afternoon, and there I left a little piece of myself, lost forever in a dusty old bottle of Tanqueray.

Perhaps Fate brought us together that day, or perhaps some crueler bitch like Eris decided to pull the strings and snip and tear and tie them back together in a slipknot, just waiting for one of us to stick our necks in and jump off the chair. I sauntered in there, not quite really wanting a drink but just really to BE THERE - sometimes the cool enclosure of a shitty bar is the greatest therapy for a man like me - Boozer. Sinner. Saint. The bartender was a great big burly bastard of a son of a bitch. Six foot tall and just as wide, his head and face shaven bald, eyebrows as well, making him look very much like some gigantic mutant baby born and bred to crack skulls and sling well drinks. Random characters straight out of a Dickens novel squatted and hunkered down in the darker corners of the bar, whispering secrets to themselves and paranoid warnings whenever they eyed me as I sat down on a tattered leather stool. The titanic infant / beast slid a dirty highball glass filled with liquid fire at me, and went about his business of wiping down the bar intersperced with periods of staring blankly at the news on the black and white television hanging in the corner, or coughing up bloody chunks of cancer cells into an ancient hankerchief. To hesitate is to slowly die a coward's death, so of course you chuckled to yourself as I toasted to nothing in particular and slammed it down my gullet, dry heaving and pounding the bar immediately afterwards.

What the fuck is so funny?, I laughed towards your general direction. "You. This bar. The motherfucker who stole my car keys. Iraq. Crack. And all that. THAT'S what's so funny, little man."

Oooooooh, you filthy little bird you. You had a voice like the sound of a dead cat smashing into a pane of stained glass, and a laugh like Death itself. How could I have missed you, sitting there at the other end of the bar, cloaked in the shadows behind a wall of cigarette smoke? Of course, my own indifference or lack of perception didn't stop you from walking on over and sitting down next me, not afraid to reveal yourself in the light. 40 odd years took a rough toll on you, that's for sure, but there still exists that beautiful 16 year old girl, clad in pink chiffon and dancing awkwardly on your first date...but now she hides behind a roadmap of laugh lines, crow's feet, and scars. But who am I to judge? You never once asked me for a drink, and that, I told myself the day after, is the only reason I kept talking to you. But we both knew better, now didn't we? I'm fascinated by human tragedy and misfortune, and you my dear, were the train wreck to brighten my day. Behind those bloodshot eyes, the color of azure flashed brilliantly when we spoke and laughed at my jokes, never once leaving my own, even to the point of uncomfortability. And nothing was sacred, nothing offlimits by the time my fifth gin and tonic hit my stomach. So when I asked you where the hell you got that ugly-as-sin scar that ran jagged across your cheek like a lightning bolt, you laughed it off like a woman possessed and told me it was an old trophy from carolling with Hells Angels in Pasadena one Christmas Eve.

You told me the tales of how you were used to be the highest paid prostitute in all of Reno back in the 70's, a high-speed drag race of a lifetime spent snorting crystal meth, shooting cocaine into the spaces between your toes, and dying alone underneath an overpass on the New Jersey Turnpike one winter night in the late 80's, only to be saved by a passing group of Jehovah's Witnesses looking to hand out clothes and food to the homeless. I loved you even more so when you told me you played along with their foolish self-righteous ways and stole each and every one of their wallets in the middle of the night before hitchhiking up to New York City to escape it all, finally settling into a telemarketing job in Jersey and living the rest of your miserable existance here in this squallid nameless bar. Hell, even when you dropped the bomb into my lap and told me your were dying of liver disease, and laughed it off by buying us both Lemon Drops, I knew at that very moment you weren't lying. You weren't trying to sucker me into giving you the contents of my wallet. You weren't looking for a shoulder to cry on and a warm bed to piss in. No. Nothing of the sort, my lovely.

You simply wanted to drink with someone. You didn't want to drink alone.

Dusk settled in quickly, as did the booze inside our heads, and I asked you if you wanted a ride home. Not out of wanting meaningless sex, no, neither of us had any desire, that much was clear. I just didn't want to leave you alone in the bar like that, and you the same. You declined, not wanting to taint me with your poison; not wanting to bring me into your misery any more than you already had.

Here's to Juniper Lee, may she forever find solace in death where life left her alone