One Night

The room was full of smoke, cigarettes tightly pinched were brought to mouth with squinted eyes, and a laconic haze sat on the bar not unlike the fog on the morning hillside of Browntown Rd, next to the cemetery. The brume drifting would fold around moving drunkards and often, as when you’d just so be happening to notice, they’d half-turn to see you, (catch you if you were feeling honest) and taking a deep drag with studied and probing eyes, return coolly to face their destination, emanating the greatest cigarette in the bar, or the entire world.

“You?” the waitress demanded.

I appeared at a table of some people I kinda knew, friends at times.

“Just another of-” I tried to find the bottle label.

She wrote something and left.

The table chuckled in their own confidence and made some remarks that seemed to help them or somebody.

I lifted the bottle and finished it with purpose, not more than three chugs, but it felt necessary, as if making a point. I still don’t know what beer it was, or care. Anything can make a point that’s within reach.

I set the unknown bottle beside a coaster and gave it a twist that made it dance with anticipation toward the edge. It stole everyone's attention as I stealthily stood up and walked away, hearing veiled contemptuous remarks.

In the bathroom I stood facing the mirror for half a minute then lifted the faucet handle to red. I thought of using soap (which I never do) and finding the soap dispenser empty, readily agreed that it was in divine accordance to my personality. The water was hot, chemically hot, quickly turning my palms and wrists a flush red while I waited for blood to flow into my anemic, white fingers. I swiped my hand across the paper towel sensor and it printed out enough paper to dry the back of one hand. I swiped four more times and dispensed with the towels on top of the overflowing, vomiting trash can. Suddenly a man entered (here I noticed a shriveled message scotch-taped on the door frame “lock not working”) and he proceeded to relieve himself indifferent to my presence. I stared through the back of his head, straight through it, and on leaving, flicked off the lights.

Back in the pub, with a muffled holler fading, I noticed the table was enjoying some memory and drinking fresh beers. Whatever the waitress decided to replenish my seat with hadn't arrived. I shrugged my shoulders and on a whim, sat myself, out of sight in an adjoining room, at some badly lit corner table. I then sparked up a cigarette without wanting or tasting it. Sometimes, there’s nothing better to do.

“Watcha doin over here?” a member of my table discovered me.

Concealing my hostility I replied, “Just getting some air.”

He sat down uninvited, “Where’s your beer?”

I simply looked at him.

He then spread himself out too comfortably for my taste, opening his body language that could possibly be inviting for others to join. I wanted to kick out one of his chair legs, watch him tumble over with beer in hand, and maybe he’d get so angry as to lay me out with a solid haymaker, but instead I aggressively scooted back my chair a few inches.

“They started getting into politics,” he began as way of explanation “and then he said this and she said that and no one knows any-fucking-thing I think”.

He took a long chug and his furrowed eyebrows revealed the intention.

“Every four years dumbasses come on that TV”, he continued as if I cared “and says what people want to hear. And every four years people defend their choice as if you’d insulted their family. Dumbshits. Where’s your beer?”

I put out my cigarette and did not answer, verbally.

He took one from my pack, lit it, and began again, “I mean, what do you think? I can’t keep up with it. Maybe if I could keep up with it or even if I could meet them, one of these candidates…and ask them questions and not have them skirt around the question. I’d stop them in their tracks with those trained responses and say ‘Hey!-’” he slammed his fist down and his beer rattled, eyes demented on me, as if I’m some candidate, “‘-answer the damn question!’ And I wouldn’t let him get out of it. I wouldn’t.”

In those last two words his eyes were less demented, an earnest pleading came through, as if a child had lost their parents and they stood gazing up at you for their whereabouts.

“You said they were getting into politics?” I asked flatly, maybe genuinely.

He looked at me blankly for a second, smashed the cigarette out, picked up his beer and left. I watched him go with relief and scooted my chair closer to the table.

For a minute or two I sat looking absentmindedly around, every now and then catching the hostile look of a guy who, because of his insecurity with a fresh new girlfriend, would give her butt a slap of ownership. A billiard ball then flung off the table and came bouncing violently my way, resting between the beer stained legs of my chair.

“Little help?” some voice through the smoke asked, and not pleasantly.

With a flick of my foot I sent the blue-number-two ball in their general direction.

A figure then approached, glaring, Mr. Cool with his pool stick resting on his shoulders and his arms dangling off on each end, “Problem?”

“Too many.” I replied, looking directly at him.

“Care to handle them?” he insinuated, inching closer.

His date intervened, “C’mon Ronnie, I wanna plaaayyyy”

In a flash of false submission due to false aggression, Mr. Cool relaxed his look and, turning away with the girl, pointed at me, his eyes running down the scope of his arm, believing that my life had just been saved by circumstantial luck. Walking away the girl threw a tiny glance at me and I remember wincing. I hate being wrangled into something. Slumped over the table, minutes gone by, I began scratching the surface with the edge of my lighter, haphazard scratches as when getting a pen to work.

“I think you’ve hadnuff.” My ex-tables’ most friendly waitress pronounced.

“I’ve had one.”

“I think it’s time for you to go” and she gave a knowing look to the bouncer by the door.

“I’ve had less to drink than everyone here. Has everyone hadnuff?”

She had gathered from my tone alone that I was resisting and signaled the bouncer.

A brick shithouse of a guy pulled me to my feet with one arm and led me out, much like unwilling children being dragged away by their parents, ignoring the cries and quite simply just over the day.

Mr. Cool could not have been more happy while his future ex-girlfriend looked lazily on, and passing the table where I began the night noticed they had all left.

I said to the bouncer, “Give me a good kickout. Send me flyin into the street.”

He feigned he didn’t hear as we went squeezing around patrons, through them, him essentially dragging me.

I repeated it once more.

He pretended to be deaf again.

I thought then said, “What are you, some sorta faggot?”

He looked at me with a controlled-sinister smile and I smiled right back at him, blew him a kiss if I remember.

With his clutching arm he chucked me into the door and the momentum kicked it open as I went tumbling onto the sidewalk, victorious.

I laid there for a few moments, exhilarated, while outside smokers asked if I needed help.

Ignoring them I began laughing and they didn’t ask anymore, murmuring something.

I pulled out a cigarette. Broken. I pulled out another one and lit it.

I scooched and squatted against a light pole, enjoying the equivalent of a post-cum smoke.

I looked around at the night and everything had a glow. The shadows even glowed.

The stench of a moldy dumpster smelled delightful. The carnage of a flattened cat on the road bewitched me. I hadn’t felt this complete in months. It was fascinating to watch the drunks inside the bar striving for the elation I now held. How stupid they all seemed to me. How simple it was to feel such a way. If only they knew.

I got up suddenly and came close to the window and when I had caught Mr. Cools’ attention, mouthed ‘Fuck. You’. Incited, he threw down his pool stick which in turn sent a few pint glasses crashing onto the floor. The bouncer had him by the arm instantly and as he was being dragged away he caught one more look at me where I mouthed ‘you’re welcome’.

I then found myself walking down some alleys and then stepped into another bar and waited ten minutes before my order for a tall beer was taken. I felt rested, content and all the more wanting so. At a nearby table sat some college students, parroting the semesters propaganda hailed as ‘higher-learning’, and eavesdropping heard the conversation go something like-

“He’s so misogynistic. Uh! I can’t stand him!”

“Didn’t he also say that masks are ineffective?”

“And the same with vaccines-” (big sigh) “-I just can’t stand people who don’t have any concern about others' well-being. It was a pandemic for godsake!”

“C’mon babe, let’s not get heated up. Remember, a nice night out.”

“Oh my poor little ex-republican” (without needing to look, I saw her pet his head) “one day you’ll have all that evil out of you.”

The girl continued addressing the table, “You wouldn’t believe the resistance he had to get the vaccine-”

“Babe, let’s not-”

“Quiet. All that Joe Rogan and other conspiracy-” her collegiate mind went searching for a word and settled with “-crap. But it’s all straightened out now. God, it’s so strange a person needs convincing to protect others.”

“Really bro?” (another boy’s voice entered)

“Oh you were the same '' (his date rebutted) “You doubted the science too. As if one can doubt irrefutable science.” (again, without looking, I sensed her look aside and reestablish her solidarity with her friend while a winning pause strode on.)

Sensing a lapse in conversation and knowing a good moment when it comes, I turned in my stool and asked them, startling them, “Pardon me, has anyone seen God around? I coulda swore He was just here.”

The group physically recoiled at the word ‘God’. The boy’s shifted uneasy eyes towards the girls and with a disgusted look the ringleader spouted, “What??”

I got off my stool and started scanning around the room. I crouched down and looked under the tables. I scratched the floor.

“Have you seen God around?” I repeated standing up, “Jesus, He seems to just slip off his shoes and go playing off somewhere, the little rascal.”

The leader straightened her back, “We’d like to be left alone please or-”

“No no, for real, He was just here.” I began inspecting the top of their heads and peering into their craft beers, “I really could use your help. He’s been missing for some time now.”

“God is a construct of the mind.” one of the boy’s said.

“Listen mister, please leave us-”

“Oh! I found Him” I exclaimed and leaning into their space picked up a used napkin centered on their table, stained and wrinkled.

They sat aghast and speechless as I gently brought the napkin away back to the bar.

While I sat parched, waiting, they tried to find where the conversation was before I had interrupted. Suddenly one of them complained about some banality and the others jumped in agreement. They paid their tabs and left.

A young looking woman then appeared beside me, standing, looking seriously bored, and sensing my eternal wait for a beverage, found the link to initiate conversation that's borne from shared deprivation.

“How long you been waitin?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Ten minutes.”

She sighed heavily and I then noticed an astrological tattoo on her wrist.

“Capricorn.” I said aloud not meaning to.

Without looking at me she dryly affirmed, “Yup” and rested her forearms on the bar.

“‘’Men at some time are masters of their fates’,” I began without knowing why, “‘The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves’. But if Caesar woulda listened to the soothsayer, he might’ve not been murdered by the senators.”

She looked at me quizzically, unsure whether to smile or scowl, and asked, “What?”

“Or maybe he knew he was to be killed. Agreed with the stars. Went ahead with the assassination like a martyr. Stranger things are done to be remembered.”

Her blank look revealed her disorientation but following the last sentence asked, “What will be remembered of you, Robert Frost?”

“I carved my name in a tree once-”

She laughed richly and the bartender arrived languidly, as if summoned by a bell. She ordered a pitcher and three mugs and the bartender went to work.

She turned back to me and went on trying to decipher when something flashed across her eyes. She intuited, “Do I know you? You seem familiar.”

“You’ve probably seen me in here before. Exactly like this.”

“Maybe. Yeah, maybe-”

Thing is, I knew that she knew me. I just didn’t want to remind her and have false apologetic airs smog the conversation the way they always do.

“So, what are you?” she asked.

Now I was lost.

Reading me she cleared up, “Astrological sign. Lemme guess. Hmmm, Virgo? No, wait. You seem to be…are you an Auqarius?”

“What do they do?” I asked. How often do we ask questions and not care for answers?

She started, “Well, an Auquarius, they’re definitely the most strange, unpredictable, and often when certain-”

She continued on, proud to share, and I nodded to prove my listening.

She suddenly interjected herself, “Hey, you’re bleeding.”

I came to and followed her eyeline down to my elbow and there was indeed blood streaking across my forearm. Grabbing the Napkin, I then blotted the scraped wound.

Her pitcher and frozen mugs arrived and she invited me to join her table but I declined, making something up.

Departing, she left the invitation open, “Well, if you get bored we’re over here. Hope your beer arrives.”

Standing up to leave myself the bartender asked, “What’ll be?”

I stared at him then left without answering and he went about wiping down my area vigorously. The napkin fell into a trashcan.

Outside the blackened-purple sky gave backdrop to swifting clouds with city-lit bellies, each one spreading thinner than the next, and a certain tree, with its obstinate craft for thriving, growing from its allocated sidewalk patch, stood painting-still, printing its thin-branched silhouette against the gliding and glowing night, and I reaching-

“Scuse me” someone rushed by demanding, interrupting my thoughts.

I looked back up to the tree and thoughts came no more.

I began walking again, just to be in movement, and didn’t bother glancing into restaurant and bar windows.

Half an hour passed before I entered a park and, following a walking path, I came to a familiar trail leading downhill through a small group of trees. The path opened to a small stream where a single large white oak tree hung arched branches over the water. The branch tips almost touched the stream and I saw how trash debris had been snagged by the limbs from flooding currents. Its roots strove out from the eroded bank, vulnerable and dry. I approached the trunk and had to step extremely close in order to see if it was still there. I found the initials though now there was a plethora of initials carved. It all blended into a myopic mess. My initials, AJ’s initials, KW&DR’s initials, they all fought for a place. There was hardly a blank spot left. I turned my back to the tree and leaning against it, slid down its bark, plopping onto the dirt, and dropping my head into my hands, began to cry. Afterwards, I pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Sometimes, there’s nothing better to do.