Here's a story
Slurred Sagacity
The crisp, cool winter night seeped in through the windows of a bar on the corner of Fifth and Main, chilling the almost empty establishment and sending a shiver through the spine of the only sucker desperate enough for a drink that Wednesday night. He was a man about fifty, maybe sixty years old. Grey stubble hung from his wrinkled face like dust on an old car, chronicling the passage of time that took what was once in its prime toward its inevitable day of futility.
“Another one, would you please,” the old man requested, wanting to elaborate on what “one” actually was but too drunk to remember what he’d started with.
“Listen, sir,” advised the bartender, who looked to the drunk like a young college student begrudgingly working his way toward independence, “I think you’ve had enough.”
The old man laughed. “Enough. That just about says it all, Mac. That’s the nail on the fucking hammer if I have ever heard one.”
He’d never been a carpenter, the old sod.
The bartender shook his head and looked at his watch. He wanted to close early that night so that he could catch up with his girlfriend, who at this hour was probably already fast asleep. He gave in to the old man, splashing a small glass with whiskey and filling the rest with water when he figured his solitary patron wasn’t looking.
“There was a time when I could’ve owned this bar,” said the old man, oblivious to the requested glass that was resentfully clinked down in front of him by the barman. “The whole damn joint. Maybe even the place next door, if I didn’t like the neighbors.”
He took a swill of the watered-down drink. A fleeting look of nervousness passed across the bartender’s face as the old man squinted his eyes at the glass he held in his hand. “Can’t taste a fucking thing,” the old man complained. “Maybe I have had too much.” The bartender relaxed. “You see, kid, I was rich. Richer than a German chocolate cake, deep-fried and sprinkled with diamond dust sneezed out by Jesus-fucking-Christ and the rest of the bastards up there.” He sacrilegiously crooned “Ave Maria” and motioned toward the ceiling.
The bartender, opting toward the path of least resistance and conscious of the fact that his girlfriend probably wasn’t waiting anymore, decided to humor the old drunk. “You don’t say. And how’d you come to be so rich, mister? The stock market? Lottery?” The old man took another swig of diluted whiskey, spilling some down his chin and dripping the warmish liquid all over his dark blue jacket.
“Never took a chance I didn’t have to,” the inebriated miser stated as though it were a Twain quotation. “Too much risk involved.” The bartender was clearly annoyed, but the old man’s cantankerous and curmudgeonly stubborn way struck a chord in the remnants of the young man’s fading teenage affinity for sarcasm and subconsciously piqued the boy’s interest.
“So what was it, if you didn’t take any risks?” The old man scratched his chin and studied his young server with an unconcealed expression of nostalgia. The boy could have been him some thirty-odd years ago, standing at the mouth of the forked path of adulthood. He wondered if the youth’s choices would ever land him on the other side of the bar, where the old man found himself that night, wondering what to make of it all. He smiled a numb, drunken smile of sincerity.
“I made money the only honest way,” he stated with conviction. “I was born into it.” The bartender looked unimpressed. “And from the looks of things,” the old man continued, “I’ll be dead out of it.” Sadness suddenly overwhelmed his face, drawing attention to the pock marks and wrinkles that the general wear and tear time leaves on its travelers. The young man suddenly felt sorry for the grump, but he couldn’t exactly tell why.
“What happened to it all?” the barman asked, having now forgotten all about his own worries and enveloped himself in those of the drunken man in front of him. The old man’s eyes rolled back in his head as if to watch a smaller version of himself tear through old filing cabinets in his mind, throwing bits and pieces of his past to the floor while looking for the right folder and having little success in doing so.
“My life happened, kid,” the old man said without a whiff of condescendence. “I bought nice things, I went to nice schools, I drove a nice car, and then I settled down in a nice house. And at the end of the day, you know what I figured out?” The bartender wasn’t sure if he was meant to venture a guess as the drunken man took a few moments to answer his rhetorical query. “I wasn’t a nice guy. I never have been, and I never will be.”
The young man, now leaning on the bar with his elbows pressing the stiff, white collared shirt he hated to wear into the damp mixture of water and whiskey that didn’t find its way into the drunken man’s stomach, looked at the man with confusion. “I don’t follow you,” he said.
“Few have,” lamented the old man. “Which is part of the problem, you could say. I don’t have what they call ‘people skills,’ if you catch my drift.” The young man’s mind floated to his first impressions of the wrinkled old whiskey sponge that sat down at the bar what seemed like hours earlier. He began to understand what the man meant.
“Hold on a minute. You’re not going to sit here and give me some bullshit about how even though you had every privilege in the world, you could never find happiness because no one got close to you and no one truly understood you.”
The old man laughed and sent an 80-proof mist of saliva into the air between the two of them. “If that was the case,” he said with a face still getting over the unexpected laugh, “I’d have killed my own damn self a long time ago and saved you the trouble of this conversation.” He pushed his fingers through his brown and grey hair and stretched his numb face across his skull.
Afraid he’d dampened the man’s willingness to continue his story, the bartender prodded him on. “Then what is the case?”
The old man’s expression went dead and cold. “I never gave a shit.”
“About what?”
“About whatever. You name it, I was apathetic about it at one point. Call it dissatisfaction, disillusionment, disgust, but for one reason or another, I’d always find a reason to disassociate.” The man rubbed his bloodshot eye with the leathery flesh of his palm. “I went through life dreaming that I was something else, somewhere else, and while I did the whole of five decades went by without me. I missed the train because I was too damn proud to buy the ticket.”
The bartender began to feel a true remorse for the creature that was bleeding out in front of him. He didn’t have the heart to try and comment on anything the man had said. He suddenly felt young and naïve.
“Anyway,” the old man said, picking up a pair of black gloves from the stool next to him and haphazardly shoving his cold hands inside them, “I ended up buying my way toward happiness. Things filled the void in me left by my withdrawal. And now, at the end of sixty years, my bank withdrawals have let me with nothing more than this.” He held up a crumpled five dollar note. “A tip, from me to you.”
He laid the bill down on the bar and stood up in a wobble of dizziness. The bartender tried to thank him but the old man interrupted before he could get a word in. “Don’t mention it,” he said, waving his gloved hand dismissively at the young man. “Use it to dry clean your fucking shirt.” The bartender looked down what used to be pristine white sleeves, now soaked brown by the man’s spilled Jack Daniel’s.
The door banged shut as the bartender’s last patron stumbled out onto the cold pavement of Fifth and Main, drunkenly quivering toward God knows where. The young man, ready to leave work and collapse in his warm bed, wiped down the bar and prepared to close up for the night. As he slid his booze-dampened arms through the sleeves of his thick winter coat, he paused and noticed that the five dollar bill, the tip the man had given him, still sat crumpled on the bar.
He picked it up and examined it. Above Abraham Lincoln’s head was a crudely drawn speech bubble, circumscribing the words “Don’t spend it all in one place.”
The young man stuffed the bill in his pocket and went home, and that night, as he settled down into bed, he held his quietly sleeping girlfriend closer than he ever had before.