Harry took a seat at the bar. It was that magic window after lunch and before happy hour, when working people worked and the silence of sunlight was left to be savored by true drunks.
Dust danced in a suspended beam. A couple of deadbeats sat with endless dim suspended in their eyes.
The once pretty publicant lounged on her stool, the swan song of her dancing days playing in the background.
The color was starting to run out of her hair. She was still slim and stacked, though her stomach had recently begun to fold like an accordion whenever she bent over. Her faded-black tank top hung loose on her shoulders, having been washed a few too many times. Truth be told, so had she. Once joyful similes had lured a murder of crows to squat around her eyes.
She was slightly annoyed when Harry coaxed her off of her stool to order a drink, make that two — a shot of bourbon and a beer.
She plopped them down before him with a contemptuous sigh before returning to her perch.
There had been so many occasions, in this exact place, when bold men stepping up to get laid turned her into the end-all-be-all of a fleeting moment.
But what had once been earnest took a turn for the sordid. Affectionate gazes turned to lechery. So she bowed out and conducted other’s forgotten nights, which would likewise metastasize into misremembered nostalgia for days gone by.
But Harry, well, he had never had such dancing days. Spotlights were for another type. He’d always found himself an outsider when the swirling heart of revelry swelled to the jukebox jaunt, whisking working stiffs away from the everyday and into each others arms.
Roadhouse vultures of his ilk were relegated to standing back and letting the hawks swoop in, snatching beauty from the hardwood floor. He was content to pick off whatever carrion was left hanging over the stools at closing time. Sometimes they were the prettiest ones of all, but only when they were the craziest. The most broken. The most willing to break.
There was a certain type of lady who spit piss and vinegar at the big white smiles and owners of old-fangled letterman jackets hanging in hall closets.
Art school dropouts and English majors on a decade-plus of minimum wage fucking men like Harry to say fuck you to the natural order of things. They normally sobered up when youth was fleet of foot but not fully gone. That is, except, for the true acolytes of the end of the night.
Yet sex was sex. A biological drive contingent on mechanics. Acerbic wit can hardly make up for a limp dick with a 50:50 shot of being broughtout of a whisky coma.
Even when the coin landed heads up, Harry sometimes found himself going down on a tin of cat food peppered in cigarette ash.
Then came the same friction of headache thrusts and phallic numb seeking release and catching the clap instead. It hardly seemed worth all the effort.
Still, there was something left of humanity in that dyadic stumbling, fumbling in the abyss.
Once, he even thought he had seen the light, even if, in the end, it was just the esca of the angler fish luring him in.
And then one day, those serendipitous romps unceremoniously stopped.
All the sad smart girls his age had eventually chosen minivans or the grave. They were all just stopping by anyways, even those who never left town.
Cat scratches and oversized sweaters covered up teen-aged cries for help. For the others, harder drugs were found. Darker haunts. More expedient ends to the one-and-only terminus shared by wasted and well-lived lives alike.
Either way you sliced it, they came and they went. But Harry was still left on his stool, past the point of being anything less than rock bottom made manifest in the slumping shape of a middle-aged man.
The fact that his face had started to sag like the stomach of a fixed cat, or that his actual stomach distended like a Jiffy Pop bag, wasn’t helping his cause. His nicotine stained fingers matched the bisque in his jaundiced eyes. His hair was perennially tousled, his shirt stained, his heels uneven, his face stuck in the shadow of the working day’s end.
No, his once infrequent amorous romps were a privilege long lost. Luckily for Harry, he was sanguine about the whole thing. For today would be the last day of his life.
He tapped his fingers on the hard wood, looking to conjure a feeling that would not come. So he disturbed the bartender again, ordering one shot and then another, which he dispatched with efficiency. He sipped his beer and stared down the bar and over the empty stools.
There were only ghosts but not spirits lounging in the afternoon light.
A slight headiness came, albeit muffled by decades of serotonin drain. When drink finally lost its capacity to elicit mirth, Harry knew he was reaching the end of the line. But he kept drinking anyways, looking for the last drop of a feeling that made all that was not ok somehow ok.
There had once been a time when death filled him with terror. That wide-eyed adrenal spike at the very thought of his own demise. But such fears were the stuff of youth.
The bottom of his life didn’t fall out all at once. It was more like time elapsed erosion of soon-to-be dead man’s bluff.
He had his own share of minor hopes and outsized delusions. He just didn’t know how people kept on once nothing remained from the grind except the self-aware slave.
Probably family and friends kept them afloat. Probably not thinking about much of anything at all. Probably denying the fact that the night drive ends with a trip off the cliff. And maybe, just maybe love.
Harry had felt it once, at a time when he had enough patience and concern to attempt excavating the quarry of his own hardened heart.
Luckily it had been too fleeting, and too long ago, to feel like anything other than a dream. He couldn’t even fein a sense of consequence, an impetus to examination, a quandary over u-turns, retraced tracks and paths better taken.
There was enough culture built around the song and dance of choosing rye over the glint in a hopeful man’s eyes to let someone comfortably settle into their own shit.
Likewise, there had once been friends, hours-long phone calls, bar stool commiseration, shoulders over arms, atta-boys! and “it’s all gonna be alright!” lies.
But people got on with their lives. The calls shorter, and less frequent, before stopping all together. The drinks were still raised, but only in one’s own company. There was less to share anyways. Less interest in explaining the nuts and bolts of his quivering heart. Less patience to hear just how much the song remained the same.
So he did everyone a favor and shut up. And the they all got on with their lives. And he got on with his. And before he knew it, he was the aging, if not old man at the bar.
He had become Father McKenzie, writing the words of a eulogy that no one would hear.
Still, while all and sundry had been laid to rest, there was always one hitch when it came to the drunken art of forsaking that thing called loved.
Christine. He had met here right in this seat, 20 years ago. He would never understand how what was supposed to be a one-night stand ended up digging its heel in for life.
Hair the color of the night and breasts as pale as morning light, the blue in her eyes found the sun behind the grey clouds in his own. She was that perfect combination of indy girl cliche, sarcastic and vulnerable, contemptuous of her beauty and all it would have afforded her, if she’d been willing to pay the price.
But she paid a price anyways, one far dearer than whatever truth she was seeking against the grain.
Harry was her last serenade. Though for a moment their night seemed the prologue to a new day. Then she up and washed down that last delusion with a bottle of pills. And her eternal sleep ended up being Harry’s last broken dream.
An ersatz version of her or two would come and go. And the one day, no one came calling at all.
That was the thing about life. He’d meet a million ends without knowing it at the time. Perhaps those blows would be crushing if they came with harbingers. Better for the slow boil of regret to eat away at him one day at a time. Here comes the last loving hug, dick tug, sunset on the beach, morning on a mountain peak; plane ride, car drive, warm hello and cold goodbye. But what would he have done if he had known at the time? Perhaps today would have come much sooner than today.
Truth be told, Harry couldn’t remember the name of the first girl he had ever slept with. He couldn’t remember the face of the last. And overtaking all of the in-between, there was the unforgettable Christine, as much as forgetting could have set him free from the infinite stream of becoming.
He felt a pang in his booze-steeped heart and ordered another whisky. This time the barkeep’s look of scorn was slightly tinctured with concern. But this wasn’t the kind of place that asked you to slow down. No, it was the kind of place where people like Harry went to speed up the inevitable.
He took the shot and brought the glass back down. But rather than feel less pain, a slight throb settled in his head.
He got up and walked over to the juke box, searching out an old Tom Waits’ song. It was still there, just where he had left it all of those years before.
He poured in his change and pressed B4. The tune began to play. He and Christine had listened to it ironically that night. It was so “meta” as no one called it at the time.
Two kids at a bar playing a song about two kids eyeing each other at a bar. And they did what kids of their generation did, train their irony on the high crime of sentiment.
But then something came over them during the penultimate verse. The faux smiles straightened out as they burden of not being allowed to be vulnerable weighed them down. They made the mistake of looking each other in the eyes during an unguarded moment. And all that pained them came into clear focus.
Words about being lonely. About searching out that lost face that was nowhere to be found, when love for a ghost was found and drowned in another round.
And they knew deep down that was them too. They were staring each other in the eyes and yet terrified to be seen. They were desperate for love and disavowed it every day of their lives. But not that night. If only they had not reverted back to the cold comfort of cowardice. Maybe she’d still be here. Maybe he’d still be there.
The song came to an end. His headache did not. Harry walked back over to the bar and checked his wallet. He emptied its contents on the counter and thanked the bartender as he set off.
Whatever followed “Hey Mister!” was muffled by the swinging door. The blinding light hurt his eyes as the throbbing intensified. Harry shielded his face as he walked to his car and got inside.
There were no more songs to be played. No more places to be seen. No more appointments to be met. No more hopes. No more promises. No more lies. No more goodbyes.
He opened up the glove compartment and pulled out a revolver, raising it to his temple. Without a second thought he cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger, blowing out his brains on Heartattack and Vine.
The bartender heard the shot ring out just as she finished counting her tip: $74.79.
Drowning Tones & Death Notes 