Final Draft
My most recent creative writing effort:
Tour of Duty
The man at the bar with the tequila shots, lined up all neatly like pale amber ducks in their row, had been in the war. None of us were sure which war. We came to the conclusion that he was two young for World War 2. Yakov tried to correct us and called it the Great Patriotic War, and we called him a dirty communist and ordered another round and forgot the whole thing for the next ten minutes. Yakov laughed with us, but inside I think he really calls it the Great Patriotic War.
Laura suggested Vietnam when the topic came up again, and we considered that for a while. Eventually we decided he was too clean to be a Nam vet. All the ones we’d ever seen were grizzled or scarred or crazy or had splotchy skin from the Agent Orange or sat in the corners of subway trains shitting their pants. The man at the bar, aside from the untouched tequila shots, looked fairly ordinary. So Vietnam was out.
She shrugged it off, and got up to go to the other end of the bar. The rest of us hunkered down over our beers and watched as she and her halter-top, in a spectacular display of teamwork, convinced the executive-looking fellow in the unbuttoned blazer to buy her an eight dollar cocktail. For his efforts, he was rewarded with twenty minutes of her company and a kiss on the cheek before she rejoined our table, at which point the executive man made some derogatory comments about Laura’s sexual orientation, parentage, and promiscuity, and made for the door after settling his tab.
Somebody brought up the idea of Korea during a lull in conversation. By then we were all a little buzzed, so the thought of that man at the bar having been in someplace as hilarious as Korea had us rolling in the figurative aisles. The logical progression of ideas, according to Alec, went that since the man had fought in Korea, and all the Koreans he knew worked in taco stores, the man at the bar must make a damned good taco. That got us started on the relative merits of soft tacos versus hard tacos, and then quesadillas got involved, and it was all downhill from there. The tirade continued, probably louder than we would have liked had we stopped to think about it, with the general consensus that Mexicans should make Mexican food and Koreans should make Chinese food. None of us really knew what Korean food was like. Eventually Alec threw his arms up, shouted ‘POHK FRI RICE’ at the top of his lungs, and wound up tipping over his chair and falling flat on his back. He spilled his beer, too, but we were all laughing so hard we didn’t see the harm in buying him another one.
Through all of this, the man at the bar, the one who had fought in the war, didn’t look over to us. He was down to two tequila shots, having knocked back the first pair while we weren’t looking. Alison made a note of this, and we found it inordinately interesting. So interesting that we each duplicated half of his feat, ordering another round of shots and sending the empty glasses back within a half a minute.
For all the guilt we weren’t feeling at our voyeuristic tendencies, the man who had been in the war was providing a good amount of amusement for our evening. The challenge of deducing his service history, when coupled with the fact that we, to quote Alec, were by now ‘bloody soused’, was proving increasingly difficult, and as our conversation found itself in another lull, we all let our eyes wander back to the man and his tequila.
Over the course of the evening we’d invented all sorts of fantastical, barely plausible experiences for the nondescript veteran to have. These ranged from escaping a VC ambush outside of Hue, to holding back the North to the last bullet at Pusan, to traipsing through the Nicaraguan jungles in some CIA-sponsored clusterfuck, to riding around with his head poking out the top of an Abrams in a Mesopotamian desert. The stories got more and more fanciful as the liquor flowed, casting the man in the roles of embattled defender, singlehanded rescuer of his company, bitter prisoner of war, and valorous leader of men.
Alison finally got tired of the stories, and pushed back her chair a little unsteadily, standing and announcing her intentions to go ask the man just what conflict he served our country in. We followed suit, got up, and made to flank her on her way to the bar.
Our parade was thoroughly rained on. The bartender was in the process of taking back the four empty shotglasses and wiping down the section of bar where the quiet veteran had spent the last few hours. He’d left while we were recounting tales of his heroism, not even having the decency to say goodbye.
We took it pretty hard, in retrospect. Alec let loose a string of expletives, flowered and slurred by the night’s activity. Alison just sighed, and started going for her purse to pay her share of the tab. Laura didn’t say anything, but she looked disappointed. Yakov looked more frustrated than anything else. After we paid for our drinks and gathered up our things, we split. We left a decent tip, and took our fantasies with us.
I'm pretty happy with it, all told. And I don't have to be in class until 1pm today. Rawk on.