Next round’s on me!
This one was a simple watering hole for the working men and women looking for a chance to put up their feet, catch their breath, recount the day’s troubles and have a cold one, two, four or more, to help shorten the hours as best they could. The camaraderie was cheap, and for the most part you got what you paid for. As for gizmos and gadgets, the condom dispenser outside the “Gents” took first prize over the ATM affixed to the “Ladies.”
Jukeboxes had gone out of style long before the compact disc killed vinyl, but this one boasted an impressive relic, an antique by any standards, sitting over in the darkened corner behind an unused bar. Now and then, one of the faithful would walk over with a confident smile — This one’s for all the boys in shaft number 3! — fish around in his pockets and toss in a slug, punching the litany of numbers like Moses transcribing the stone tablets for God’s Chosen. Good old Sudbury, thirty years on and still happily awash in the cat-gut twang of Freddy Fender and Conway Twitty, second only to the power chords of Bachman Turner Overdrive. Three minutes and thirty-three seconds of pure golden oldie pleasure. Just another Sudbury Saturday night. Old Tom and his PEI stompers had it right: Inco, bingo, and getting stinko was pretty much all there was on the menu.
Dan took a seat in the shadows. He was too late for day prices, but that was probably just as well — he wasn’t planning on staying long. A drink or two at most. He looked around the room where his father had spent so many hours. How many drinks had it taken him to reach that place where it all stopped mattering, and the wife he’d killed without meaning to appeared before him with a smile and a forgiving kiss?
The bartender stood behind his dispensary, a dry cloth over one shoulder, pouring drink with the tireless faith of a priest in the confessional keeping watch over his flock by night. On the countertop a tray overflowed with dimpled beer steins, gold up to here, white froth above the cut, and all for a tinker’s dam. He added one to the count and pulled another.
Behind Dan, a fat blonde laughed a high glossy trill, her table covered in empty glasses. Her look said trash but her saucy eyes said she could see the cheque good at any bank. Her smile was a retina-blinding flash of good times and fun company, and maybe more if you played your cards her way. She reached for a cigarette, lit up, and tossed the deadened stick into a tray overflowing with burnt match ends and bent stubs like charnel house bones. What No Smoking sign was that, dearie?
A grubby one-armed man looked over at the blonde, calculating the moves in her direction. He paused, Casanova on the steps of the Vatican considering coming out of retirement to try his hand at eternal beauty one last time. A maturer man now, holding back a moment where once he would have pounced.
And suddenly Dan saw her, floating between tables, tray raised in a silent blessing. The Angel of Mercy who never spilled a drop as she poured her beatitude from one vessel to another: Marilyn’s cleavage, but with Maggie Smith’s face, and aware to the penny how much every inch was worth. A smile extended long enough to hear his request and return to the bar. Time for niceties later, if required.
He could still recall his last visit: he’d been thirteen, not quite fourteen. The doorman loomed like a refugee from a disreputable sideshow, looking him up and down before pronouncing Dan invisible and turning away in boredom. The whole time he was inside Dan waited for someone to tell him to leave, if not to pick him up by his scruff and toss him freeform through the door, while he scoured the room for a sign of the old man.
This was after his father had taken to drink again following the years of uneasy sobriety — the effects of a strike that had gone on past being amusing, the pleasures of idle afternoons long since worn thin. In their place, a bone-wearying boredom had set in along with occasional flashes of rage at “the man” — sometimes elevated to “the fucking man” — exacerbated by the bottle he talked to day and night. It had taken Dan a while to understand that his father wasn’t referring to a specific man, but a collective one composed of bosses and managers and mine owners who “day after frigging day” conspired to keep him from his rightful place of employment under the ground.
No matter that he cursed the very same man just as thoroughly when there was no strike on. What the young Dan suspected, and eventually understood, was that his father hated things as much when they went smoothly as when they didn’t. And when it came down to it, he pretty much hated all things equally, no questions asked.
That night, he’d found his father sitting alone in a corner nursing a whiskey on a table that held three empty glasses and a plastic-framed menu boasting that The Best Eat Here! A morose man, weaned in silence and hard times, sipping at his drink without a word. Now that Dan thought about it, it might have been around the anniversary of his mother’s death, probably why his aunt had been even more insistent than usual that he find his father and bring him home.
That night Dan found him wrapped in his all-weather coat, a no-colour garment that smelled of tar and fish, with rips along the seam where the insulation had fallen out, like something bludgeoned to death with a tire iron. Loneliness was never pretty, even when it dressed up for a Saturday night, and it was seldom inviting to anyone on the outside.
When Dan tried to coax him home, his father looked murder at him. To Stuart Sharp, home was never where the heart lay, no matter how dark and stormy the world outside. When Dan asked why he wanted to sit there drinking alone, his father replied with all the silence in the world. It was what he did best, after all.
Now Dan picked up his glass and took a sip. He had a few more to go before he caught up to the old man.
Even for alcoholics there is a hierarchy of drunkenness: drink, drank, drunk, and drunkard. The tag on the liquor doesn’t count for much. You don’t get there any faster on expensive cognac than on cheap red wine, or even dollar-store cologne if you have the stomach for it, though the first goes down a bit nicer. Put a smelly aquarium in the corner, fill it with bloated carp, and the crowd appeal goes up for some reason known only to God and His Angels. Something to look at other than the waitress’s titties and the busboy’s bottom, maybe.
It was as if there were two worlds, one for the perfect, privileged people in film and on television, and another for the rest of us who are neither perfect nor privileged enough to matter. But it was when you crossed over the River Merry into the Land of Shame that you knew you’d taken a very wrong turn. Especially if you couldn’t remember how you got there and forgot to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to plot your way back again. Drinking itself wasn’t the problem. The problem, Dan knew, lay in the degree that it took hold of your life and ran you about without your knowing.
Still, at its best drink could make you soar above the crowd. When the mood hit and the vintage suited, there was nothing better. You felt it in your veins, the way it lifted you up like a gifted amateur at a karaoke rally, turning heads with the talent you knew you had in you all along. It was the bird that flew high and took you, grateful, along with it, tucked beneath its spreading wings, till you touched the golden ball in the sky. At its worst, it carried a sledgehammer’s swing like those games at the midway, as you downed one drink after another without ever ringing the bell, when you knew with agonizing certainty that with the right drink you could slam that bell all the way home. Only you can’t do it, swing after swing, because the rhythm is always wrong, no matter how ballsy you get, how rotten with drink, and you sink without flying upwards, without singing the song in your veins, going down as fast as you’d lose a wager on a three-legged dog. Dan knew he was in for a night of lead boots.
The lack of a karaoke machine didn’t stop the optimistic or the desperate. From a far corner came the ragged improvising of one fellow who looked not long for this world, or perhaps he’d stopped in from the next for a quick one, blessing the living with his rendition of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” a laryngeal howl, raw as a fresh sunburn, and joined by an unlikely back-up from old times. Mick Jagger hungry for the glory days and Grace Slick coming
