I stopped out front of the dive and let out a long whistled breath. Wonder. Fear and loathing. There was no sign or indicator of its use or occupancy, just the number peeling back away above the entryway. In the daylight, I’d have guessed it was maybe a cheap garage or traphouse or maybe a signal box off a switchyard, plain, mispointed block, sprawled squat and graceless as a drunk laid up in a dumpster, walls built for the sake of walls only and painted a worked-over blue two or three feet off the ground like jardineros will with a tree to ward off the sun. The paint was flaked and coated in a thin greasy residue of maybe organic origin and the one small window off the side was meager to say the least and latticed so tight with rebar it could hardly have let in enough sun to fill a thimble.
Here goes nothing. Pure experience.
I stepped up on the flag and went to open the door but checked a second; the slab was heavier than I anticipated. I tried peering through the inset lite instead, to see if maybe I hadn’t better wait outside. No luck. Too fouled with grime to make anything out. And besides, it felt unclean—like a letch gawping through the crack in the bathroom door. So, I set my teeth and, applying my shoulder, turned the lever once again.
The door swung open, then set to like it’d never open again. I let my eyes adjust to the dim. If anything, the inside was smaller and darker than it appeared from the outside. More like a bunker than anything aboveground. A bell went off. Every patron in the place swung round to see who it was. A few from my circle shouted their greeting.
Inwardly, I shrank from their beery calf-faces.
I steeled myself. Just nerves, I said.
But that was a lie. Truth was, I’m not at all afraid of people or places like this. No, it was something else, something altogether hairier crawling the pit of my stomach. Revulsion. And bits of sick.
I’ll preface this with a confession:
I don’t drink.
Never have.
Doesn’t make sense to me. Maybe it’s my OCD, but why would anyone with a mind worth a tinker’s dam choose to be outside of it? That I would even call this a ‘confession’ at all is, I think, telling, and that’s honestly how it feels. Try telling someone you don’t drink sometime. See what happens.
I’m serious.
I can tell you what’ll happen; they’ll put on a ‘yeez’ face like you’ve come out, or they’ll talk down their nose at you (as ‘allies’ always do) about that other friend they have that doesn’t drink, or they’ll just offer condolences. Like you’ve got yourself a condition … but thank goodness it isn’t catching. The truth is, drinkers run terrible risks. Bookie’s odds are ten to one you’ll do something dangerous, career-ending, or even criminal if you drink long and hard enough, and nearly a hundred to one you’ll do something stupid. Many, many times. Drunk dialing an ex, getting a face tattoo, wolf-whistling a priest. And for what? If there is a joy unique to the inebriated, I have yet to come across it. It’s just escape, pure and simple—that and the cheap solace that at least in a bar, no one notices you’ve just said something daft or contemptible ‘cause they’re all just as impaired. Unless they decide to hit you over it.
That’s also why drunks hate the designated driver. They love to repeat that delusion, that mass hysteria, that mermaid’s song of the articulate drunk, the profound tippler, the thinking boozehound, etc. almost as much as the one about someone’s grandma living to a thousand and smoking a pack a day. Humphrey Boggart they’ll say, Brick Pollitt. Frank Sinatra. After all, celluloid is chock full of those divine rogues; laconic maybe, but pithy, clear-eyed to a fault, with all the anthologized quips and punchlines. In real life, though, the best a drunk can hope for is originality through incompetence, and they can’t have someone hanging about the place that gives them the lie, someone capable of sound judgment or, (worse yet) remembering what happened the next day. People resent it, even when they’ve asked you out. I hadn’t willingly been in the company of drinkers since … well, since maybe never. And yet here I was, out for the ‘pure experience’ in this votive shrine to the cup and jug.
The taproom was dim and soupy with smoke except here and there, where it was irradiated with neon and halogen. I found myself blinking back tears at the nicotine fumes and the smell of sweat and fermentation and the strident glare of the infinity box over the bar proclaiming ‘unhappy hour’ and the stupid bigness of the gestures of arms and hands and the deafening throb of a chunky neon-noir-looking jukebox in the corner that (improbably) bore the word ‘Sapphire’ on its front in an extravagant profusion of cursive and lens flares and pumped the air so full of the loudest hits of the seventies and eighties there was no room left in it for speech. The walls were dark wood—stained, rough-grained and uneven as if we ourselves were spilt in the vat to sparge and boil and foment, each vertical inch covered in ikons, saints and heroes of the vat and still, their names etched across the spidery shields and badges and stopper labels in crescive typesetting reminiscent of the Appalachian romance of moonshine. Each worn and pawed-over in clumsy reverence as if there was nothing more in the world than drink and drink was salvation and our only consolation and sure escape. The floor was tacky, pulling ‘schlip schliip’ at the rubber of my soles. Why? WHY? It was like a blasphemy of walking on the sticky fingers of children. I felt like I couldn’t in good conscience put my feet down. I hurried to the bar and stood there, hopping from foot to foot.
Trent was the one who invited everyone, our little writers’ circle, and he is everywhere and in his element and clearly enjoying himself. He spoke to everyone, poking and interrupting and laughing and laughing until I thought it must be a convulsion.
‘Hey, look who made it! Glad you’re here. What’ll you have Chuck? It’s on me.’
‘Thanks. Thanks. It’s alright. I’ll get my own.’
If anything, Trent grows more jovial. He throws open his arms, slops something fizzy on the floor. Sticky floors. His voice is in full bellow, broad and over-articulated, and yet still slightly slurred and louder even than the music warrants. There is something performative about it as if calling the others to witness.
‘What’s that? Nonsense. No ceremony here—enough with the act. What’ll you have?’
‘Nothing, thank you. I’m Ok. Really.’
‘To the devil with your formalities, Chuck, and your stupid holier-than-thou airs. Enough. Tonight we drink.’
He gestures to all sides, indicating everyone else understands what he’s about.
‘Together. That’s how you make a tribe. You drink and laugh at the devil and carry on and spit in the world’s eye. Now what’ll you take?’
He’s succeeded in getting his audience now. Conversation along the bartop has drifted off and their eyes have wandered over, curious to see what follows. Trent has grown more belligerent, knotting his shoulders a little, steadying his frame against a table as if for a blow. I stutter.
‘Look … I’m sorry … I’m just … just not much of a drinker. I don’t mean to be a …’
He’s taken it as a personal affront; His brow darkens. There’s thunder in his eyes.
‘Not much of a drinker? Whatcha mean? Who doesn’t drink?
Looks around.
‘Who doesn’t drink? Whatsa matter with you anyway?’
He places a heavy finger on my chest, makes a move like he’ll grab my lapel, but thinks better of it. Or maybe just forgets.
‘I said I’m paying. Whydya have to do this, every time? You didn’t do this for Chris. We’re all in this together. Together. You’re no better than the rest of us!’
This, emphatically to the crowd. Het up.
‘You think you are. You do!’
By this time Chris’ stepped in, moved us apart a bit. I can breathe again but my head’s spinning. Not sure if it’s beer fumes or the emotions running high.
‘Yo. Reel it in man. It’s ok. Relax. We’re all here. Drinking. Having a good time.’
‘Thinks we’ve got dirt under our fingernails. If this were absinthe …’
He gestures with his right, anointing the floor again.
‘You can bet Chuck’d … But no, I get it, we get it ... We worked hard. No one gave me anything. I worked for it. What would you know about it?’
‘Chuck don’t know nothin’ man. Chuck don’t say he knows nothin’ either. Let it go, man. We’re haven’ a good time. It’s a good place. I know I’ll be coming back.’
Trent’s mollified now. Contents himself with a poisonous look and muttering something under his breath.
‘Well, since we’re all here.’
He casts me another wounded look, then it’s back to his writer’s circle spiel.
‘This is where it all began—literature in the vernacular. With the Danes. In a bar or longhouse or a mead hall. Thanes holding up the mead cups and skalds singing blood and thunder and the guests laughing and fighting, and sharing stories. Good stories are the great equalizer—soaked in shared danger, common feeling … not like those pricks’ll tell it … Pound, Joyce … ‘not 26 men in the world can understand my poem’ … No, you’ve gotta feel it. It explains itself in a room. The reader should be intensely alive. The word should glow hot in your hand. So tonight, we’re gonna be intensely alive. We’ll recite, read our work aloud to get the feel for it. So cheers, and drinks on me for anyone who wants a go at it.’
He raises his glass, the contents whooshing dangerously high, and the others follow suit with a good-natured shout. So far, I can tell it’s been rehearsed, writ out beforehand as surely as if he were reading off the back of a napkin. He continues, but now he’s looking me straight in the eye.
‘And if you don’t have the nerve, the penance is Karaoke. Classics only.’
This followed by another round of shouting and people pulling up this or that little piece on their phones and jockeying to go first.
Trent waves them down then wipes his palm on his front. I’m not sure what was on it, but I’m not going to shake his hand. He pulls a folded sheet from his pocket and begins to hum and unfold it, bit by bit. Ponderous thick fingers. Then he puffs himself thumping up like a chartist demagogue from a worked-up ambo.
‘This is it, folks. The skalds song. Pure experience for you.’
And he began reading, slowly, like a throatier, basso profundo Robert Frost.
I once had a piano teacher that’d stop me every other minute when I was playing for her. ‘nono’ she’d say, ‘you play like dog. Dog walking down the street and piss on every fire hydrant. He no care. When everything especial, nothing especial. Choose which fire hydrant you gonna piss on.’
Trent recited like dog.
‘We didn't live in apple country but everybody had a little apple, nearly everybody had a little apple orchard.
If there was ever any trouble, it seemed like, if there was ever any trouble,
anything that happened that shouldn't have happened it seemed that I— was right in the middle of it.
We used to, It seemed like in the family by the time we got to school, by the time we were school-age and went to school,
we used to steal apples, sometimes on the way home from school, and I was always for that.
Somebody would mention and all right we'd go steal a few apples, eat em' on the way home.
They didn't object to much— people, if you didn't start throw'n 'em and waste'n 'em They wouldn't mind if you'd get one to eat, put a couple in your pockets, they wouldn't say a thing,
but if you arms full an' started throwing them an' wasting them, they'd really, oh boy, they'd get mad at you. They were thrifty little people.
There was a general cheer and table drumming and drinks passed round and the sick and hearty meeting of flesh on flesh. It was, I admit, better than I had thought it would be. But the burr of his diction was so wantonly cornpone, so patently inelegant I couldn’t suppress a smile in my hand.
Like dog.
He didn’t miss it of course, but he’s in his cups now, exulting, basking in the commendation. His piggy eyes beam with malice.
‘What, Chuck, not up to your standards? What a shock! Too bad ... Everyone else seemed to get it.’
He looked around as if for a second, pantomiming. He’s already pretty far gone; there are four empty glasses at his elbow, besides the one he’s gesturing with.
Suddenly, I feel sick. The derision, the closed curtain of thick-lidded faces and gales of witless laughter. I grab the back of a chair to steady myself. I need air. Start coughing.
‘C’mon then Chuck, let’s see if you can do better. Jackson here says you can’t. Anyone like those odds?’
He almost spits it. Slams down the bill on the bar.
Someone breaks in. I think it’s Britt but I can’t tell.
‘It’s ok Trent. It was stunning. Brilliant really. Wow. Chuck doesn’t look so good. Why don’t I just ...’
Trent gets this wicked twist of a smile.
‘Karaoke it is for Chuck. Hope you’re not as uptight on stage as you are with a drink.’
There’s a tightness growing across my chest. I have to pull my shoulders apart.
‘No. I’ll go. I’ll …’
My fingers have gone pins and needles. I flex them, swallow. All I can think of is this silly little ditty, a nursery rhyme really, that I had written for my friend Elisabeth when we were teenagers. At the time, she’d been gushing about folk pathways and the genius of collective composition. Bylina, folksong, lullabies, clapping games, Inuit children stories. All too perfect, too archetypal to have been authored by an individual. So of course I wrote her a single-author nursery rhyme just to be a tick.
There is a lot that goes into a good doggerel. The rhyme scheme and scansion can be pretty demanding ‘cause you’ll want it to roll off the tongue (and easily) if a child’s to sing it. Thematically, it’s got to tie into something mundane and domestic—an image or activity that any child can relate to—and yet insinuate a larger, more adult metaphor at its core, sometimes with oblique references to infamous events or public figures, and if it can refer to a season or astronomical event, so much the better. Ah, I thought. Music lessons begin in the fall. Mortal discipline. The aphorisms of mastery. Don’t piss on every fire hydrant. Lizzy was so annoyed at the cheek she didn’t write for a month, but I thought it elegant in its own way. I still do.
‘One-y and a two-y and a three-y and a four up bow, down bow, aft and fore. Five-y and a six-y and a seven and an eight the cricket and the fiddle-man never play late.
Why does the cricket chirp at night? Because he hasn't resin'd right. How do you make him play his scale? Loosen his wings and tighten his tail.’
The room erupts in laughter.
‘That all you got? Ha! C’mon, Chuck, even you need a drink after a sorry showing like that. I thought you thought you were something special!’
Trent pounds my back with all the violent friendliness of a sore winner. I can’t feel my fingers at all. I try to laugh it off, not to shrink from the pressing hands, the sounds of wood and glass and giddy horse laughter. I sniff, sit down, head spinning. The recitation goes on, but I can’t hear anything. I smell sweat and rot and fermentation and salt and stale and used gum. It’s on my hand from under the chair, and the room is swimming like a bomb went off in my head, and I’m sinking, and I think I’m going to be sick. People are leaving me alone now. I breathe. Slower. SLOWER. I can recognize the faces now, but there’s still a rubber band around my neck and I still think I’m going to be sick. Some time has passed. A couple of people have recited now. I’ve registered some banter and applause between bits of relative quiet and self-seriousness. I feel for all the world like my head is inside their mouths, like their words are licking the roof of my own. I move to go to the bathroom, get jostled hard. Someone helps me break from the crowd. Britt. I thank her. Let go of her hand. Just going to the bathroom. As soon as I get away from the closeness my head clears a bit. I have a headache, but my pulse comes down and I’m more or less myself again. There’s just the one bathroom, and it’s occupied. I lean my face against the door, thanking it from depth in my soul for being so solid and real and so cold on my forehead. There is no handle, just a round hole where one should have been. I can hear the person inside. It’s Trent talking to himself, dialing, calling someone on his phone. My ears perk despite themselves. I have nowhere to go. So I listen a bit.
‘Hey momma bird. It’s me, peanut.’
His voice is so tender, so unguarded. Purring like an organ wren wrapped in velvet. I can’t make out her response, but it sounds thrilled and he laughs, high and natural and sweet. I’m imagining his face, but I can’t get it to jive with that voice.
‘No, of course not. Well, maybe a little. But I’m a big boy. I can hold my drink. Of course, I can. I’m a Gill, aren’t I? Well, that’s not why I called. I just missed you momma.’
This last is delivered in a voice so saccharine I snort a little before I can stop myself, but his mother takes it in stride, goes on and on in that doting, hennish tone every teenager loves in secret but won’t tolerate in front of friends. And he just takes it. A grown man. All ‘yes momma’ and giggles and preternatural naturalness. It almost feels like he’s stroking the phone in his hand.
‘No, it’s ok. I told you. Yup. I’m eating alright. Sleeping. And they’re good people here … stout hearts.’
He laughs.
‘I know, I know, you were anxious they’d turn up their nose at this ‘Idaho farmboy,’ but they aren’t like that. It’s the ideas that count, momma. The community, just like you always told me. Like the story with the bridge ladies … by the way, did Fey make it out …?’
At this, she goes on cooing for some time, starting in on talk of this and that on the homefront. What with his bullheadedness, I’d never have guessed he had so many friends moving or getting married or having kids. After a while, he brings it back to the present.
‘Y’know, I brought them out today, momma … My turn for the circle. Took them to Joe’s. I told you—it’s like Five Corners back home ... No, momma, it’s not just a writer’s group. It’s a society. You can take’em to a bar. It’s something special ... You’d love it, hear’n them read and laugh and cheer. I gonna tell you, I miss you and pop SO much, I don’t know if I could bear it out here without’m … No, they’re all nice, I told you … Well, there’s always the ONE, right? Thumb up their ... you know, like Dirty Grandpa.’
It’s her turn to laugh.
‘It’s too bad. I like’m, I try to get’m to come round but so far it’s no good ... I know mamma, you’d get’m to see. You’d get’m to come round.’
At this point, I step away. It’s getting too personal and I don’t really want to hear how it continues. He just goes on and on. I’ve never heard him talk like this, like there is just so much waiting to spill out. It’s time for me to go. No one really notices.
Trent’s voice—that soft, sweet voice—keeps echoing in my head as I make my way home. And his mom, you can tell from how she stroked and fretted all over him she’s not the drinking kind. But if gets him to call home, if it gives her back her sweet little boy, well … maybe it’s ok. She’ll live with it.
I find I can’t find it in me to despise him like I did, and it burns in my chest. He’s changed, or maybe I have, because not ten minutes ago I couldn’t help it. No, there’s something there that wasn’t there before. Something hidden, but none the less real. And what is it in him that can’t share itself sober? That thing that needs unlocking, permission to go free and breathe the outer air, to live in its own skin? Has that thing always been there? Waiting? Pinning away? Whining in in the dark of the morning to stretch its legs and take in the fragrance of the passing night? Is this the hair in his throat, the unscratchable itch behind his claws or closed look? The soft and curled and beautiful inward thing that cannot be touched perchance the miracle tremble and fade and be lost to memory like the flare of Fátima’s sunfire parhelion?
I can imagine his face now. Relaxed around the eyes and in the jawline, smiling, open, deaf to fear and judgment. I doubt I’ll ever see it that way, but I know it’s there now. More important, I know I’ll see the shadow of it in his every flinch and haw.
I’ve made it to campus now. I’m passing people on my way up the quad towards home. The dusk is glowing. Fireflies dip and rise, weft keen and amber gold spun off the warp of the night. Little dippers, we called them back home. The air is soft, and my tongue has shrunk back to its normal size. It’s still light enough that people are moving along slowly, catching each other’s eye, nodding here and there, perhaps smiling. They look the way they always have, I suppose, and I’ve never much loved the faces of strangers. But tonight … tonight it seems some part of that revelation has wedged itself in each glance, each little smile, illuminated as if some invisible cantle of their soul, tucked far back and away is secretly humming Dôme épais to itself low and lax and inviting like slackwater turning under the keel, promising force and compass and change of the tide. Maybe it’s imaginary. I don’t know. It feels different—physically different. I can feel it in my skin and in the way my breath moves in and out of my lungs.
I’ve arrived back at home. Tino is out. It’s still a pretty early night. I push open the door and make my way back to the bathroom. It’s open a crack and I catch a chance reflection in the glass. I move in. In the back of my eyes, it’s still there, I can see it. That same secret and fragile and beautiful joy that’s holed up inside too precious to hide away, yet too precious to let them touch. Just like Trent.
When I used to visit my grandmother, I’d always stand nose-pressed and marvel at her hutch in the great room. It was a room for entertaining, so it followed that it had the nicest things in it, but that hutch, with its rich brass trim and old shaker charm, held the nicest things of all. Silver souvenir spoons all hanging in rows from their bright enameled handles, perfectly round and smooth, the stems braided or scalloped, stamped with the names of far cities, landmarks, and native sons. Depression-era glass, blue delphite and monax. Bibelots wrapped in hot-pressed felt. Best of all, the gold-plated cutlery, opalescent, delicate, and exquisitely formed as a Nicobar pigeon. The queen, I thought, must eat with such things. And never once were they used, not even for Christmas. They were too nice to touch—or so said my mom, usually when I tried to touch them—but I never did, and neither did anyone else. The hutch was always locked. Many a time I imagined taking them out, stroking them, turning them in the light, and I knew (we all knew, though no one could ever prove it) that late at night when the house was quiet, grandma must take a key off some secret chain ‘round her neck and unlock the case and take them out and eat a piece of cake ooooooh so slowly. All by herself. No grandkids. Just her.
I still think drink is revolting, but I see now how they need it, need to give themselves permission to be uninhibited, to be something they love and of which they are afraid. Sometimes, late at night, after the kids are in bed, we all need to take whatever it is out of the hutch and eat midnight cake.
I go into my bedroom and grab my phone out of the drawer of the dresser, but catch myself. That’s right, I’d told them I ‘don’t have a cell.’ Easy there. I pocket it and walk out. There’s a booth round the corner, a real museum piece. It’s an unclean thing, to say the least, but it does work. At least according to Saoirse and Tom. They joke about it all the time, trying to figure out ways to get someone to use it. See, it smells exactly like crotch, they say. Always. No one knows why. Well, somebody probably knows, but who’d confess to that? They offered me a hundred bucks to lick it once after they’d seen me polish the kitchen as hard and bright as the buttons on Nurse Rached’s blouse. They knew I wouldn’t take it. They knew. It could have been a thousand. I pocket some change off the counter, walk out, around the corner to where it sits in a dirty halo of smudged glass under the streetlamp. I get a flashback from the bar, pause, then open the door with my elbow. Thank goodness I’m wearing long sleeves. I pick up the phone and yank it outside the box. Smells as advertised. Arm’s length. Deposit quarters and thumb through my phone for the number, dial 267-SLYDIAL, and then:
‘Hey Trent, just wanted to say sorry for being such a killjoy tonight … wasn’t feeling myself. It was a good time. I had a good time, so thank you. Loved your poem – took me back … y’know, summers, picking peaches and fighting with crab apples and watching the wasps get drunk. That’s the stuff that makes us, isn’t it? Anyway, just wanted to apologize and say thanks. Anyway, see you in class.’
I know it won’t change anything, really. He’ll keep his thorns and drumfire. We won’t be any friendlier. I doubt we’ll even speak of it.
But I know. Now I know.
I think I’m going to call my mom.