Day Drinking by Patrick Strickland

Day Drinking
by Patrick Strickland

That bar could put fear in your heart, or maybe just disappointment. You’d find guys mainlining junk in the bathroom, tying off with whatever they could get their hands on. Rubberbands, electricity cords, shoestrings. People had gotten stabbed with busted pool sticks right in front of me. A guy I knew got his forehead cleaved with a prosthetic leg someone had left behind. Hell, someone once even cracked my skull wide open with a mag light for some reason I never could pin down. 

No one there ever let that kind of stuff get in the way of drinking. Take that night, for instance. Blood all in my eyes, big birthmarks of it on my shirt, my buddy pushing my hair aside and saying he could just about see all my rotten thoughts through the yawning hole in my head. We just went out to the pickup and snagged a roll of duct-tape, pieced my splattered skull back together. What misery, I’d sometimes think, but I kept walking down there, kept sitting in that same goddamn spot on that same goddamn stool. 

Maybe it was because the bartender was a guy I grew up with. Everyone called him Toad, on account of him being just about deaf and never talking save for these croaks now and again. He looked different now. He had these faded blue tattoos, jailhouse art. He’d been an asshole as a kid, and he’d grown up into an even worse one. Beat on me once for lifting wallets. Without saying a thing. There he was teeing off on me, my blood all over his knuckles, and not a single fuckin’ word. Imagine that—I still count it high on my list of Worst Happy Hours.

I thought about asking for whiskey, but there wasn’t any use calling Toad for an order. He simply gave you what he thought you ought to drink. Right when he sat another beer down in front of me, this woman stamped in. Real sad case, hair all messed up, makeup running like she’d been crying. 

She sat a few barstools down from me, made a racket getting herself situated. Couldn’t have been more than an inch or two north of five foot. Legs didn’t even touch the floor. She pulled out a pack of Mores. She was still fighting with her lighter when Toad appeared in front of her, pointing at a sign hitched to the wall: No smoking before six o’clock. 

It’d been a while since I’d smoked. Kicked the habit at Mack’s request. I thought about that a lot. I was a great guy to be in a relationship with. Give me enough shit, and I’d just stop doing whatever it was that bothered you so much. But Mack, he wasn’t right. Didn’t appreciate all my sacrifices. Kicked me out that very morning. What for? Fuck if I understood it. Hardly worth trying to make sense of. 

The woman down the bar was huffing and sighing, putting on this big act. I studied her for a moment in the mirror behind the liquor shelf. She blew her nose into a napkin for a half minute straight. Goddamn mess, she was. 

Toad came and slid a Miller Lite across the bar top in front of her. 

“I wanted wine,” she protested. 

But Toad already had his back to her, wiping down the bottles on the shelf. Maybe he was deaf. Nobody could really say for sure. 

“Excuse me,” she tried again. “White wine.” 

Truth was, why Mack sent me packing wasn’t much of a story. I’d stretched the truth a little. Harmless stuff. White lies. But he lost his shit on me, clawed my face bloody. 

“Brenda,” the lady said. She said it out of the blue, while I was still flailing in the cracks of my mind, still leering at her in the mirror. She’d swiveled on the barstool to face me. “My name, I mean. It’s Brenda.” 

I gave her a nod. I didn’t have the stomach for company. The way I felt, I’d rather have wrapped my lips around the barrel of a shotgun than do small talk. The lady did another one of those drummed-up sighs, then stopped bothering and faced the bar again. 

By stretched the truth, here’s what I mean. We’d moved in together about five or six months back. It didn’t take long for me to start getting restless. Who can just watch TV and hold hands all evening without losing their shit a little? When I started slipping out late at night, Mack wanted to know what I was up to.

Christ knows where it came from, but I told him I worked undercover with the FBI. Didn’t even expect him to buy it, but boy did he. Any time I wasn’t home, I told him, that meant I was working a case. Staking out a stash house, building a file on some real lowlife. He got all proud of me, started telling his friends I was helping save our town, taking crooks and drug dealers and murderers off the streets. I was cleaning up the community and risking my life to do it. A load of shit that big, it was his fault for buying it. 

I killed the last of my beer. Toad snagged the remote control and flipped the channel to another news station. Nothing important, some bullshit about a new jobs report. An old man hobbled in. The way he carried himself, you could see a car crash in his past, maybe a divorce or two. I’d noticed him in there before, decaying at the end of the bar. He wore a US Navy hat and drank dark liquor from a glass that shivered in his hands. Toad didn’t so much as gesture to the man, but his face got soft whenever the old bastard walked in. That was some stupid business if I ever saw it, the way some people got sentimental about old folks just because they’d stuck around for so long. 

I watched that man for a second. Liver spots dotted his hands. You could’ve flicked a hole right through him. I felt about as old as he was, maybe even older. Truth was, I was tired, and when I got tired, just about anything drove me up the wall. Hadn’t slept at all, neither. The sun was just starting to glow that morning when I came home. Mack was waiting in the doorway. His face all tight with anger, the tendons in his neck like thick cables. He snatched my sleeve, yanked it up. Some girlfriend of his knew my buddy Craig’s old lady, and word got back to Mack about me and Craig shooting crank at a motel all night long. 

“That’s a goddamn lie,” I told him. Don’t know why I bothered. There was no use. You can try all you want, hatch a story Christ himself would shed a tear over, but you can’t hide track marks. 

I adjusted on the barstool, pushed my hand into my pocket. Craig had asked me to keep his dope safe while he went down to the police station to turn himself in on some warrant. I found the baggie beneath my keys. Not much. Not nothing, neither. I knew Craig wanted me to hang onto it for him, but what kind of a friend expects a thing like that? Hey, buddy, here’s my crank. Mind hanging onto it for fuck knows how long while my sorry ass is sitting in a jail cell?

My mind was pretty well made up. Whenever I got done here, I’d go bang the rest of the crank myself. 

To my mind, Mack should’ve been hugging on me and begging me to stay. When he confronted me, I came clean right away. Almost right away, at least. He didn’t buy my whole tale about how Craig was also a fed, how he was my partner through thick and thin, how we had to do terrible things to keep our cover. How are you meant to take down drug rings from the inside without getting a little dirty yourself? They figure you for a narc, I told him, might as well put the bullet in your head your goddamned self. 

After he raked his nails down my face, I didn’t even try to lie no more. Saw the Lord in that man’s claws. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I admitted. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t work for the FBI. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I made a mistake or two. But he dropped a cardboard box full of my clothes and old VHS tapes on the porch, punted it so hard everything ended up strewn across the yard. Fuck it, I figured. Left it all in the dirt and did what I always did when I had nowhere else to go. 

“This bar’s got that feel about it,” the lady said. 

It took me a minute to understand she was staring at me again, still trying to talk to me. I raised my empty glass to Toad, motioned for a refill. 

“What feel you mean?” I asked the lady, and a clot of regret stuck in my throat the moment the words fell out. 

She grabbed her pack of Mores again, seemed to remember there still wasn’t smoking, and dropped it on the bar top. “Like danger, maybe. Like might could something dangerous happen here.” 

“Shit, there’s no danger here.” I turned away and snapped my fingers at Toad. “You mind switching the channel? Put on the game or something, huh.” 

He watched my lips as they moved, probably reading them, and cut me a hard look that said I ought to tread carefully, then placed the remote control on the liquor shelf and got back to ignoring us. 

Maybe all the bullshit was getting to me. Maybe it was the day drinking. Part of me was still hoping the lady would shut her trap and leave me be. I had enough trouble on my mind. But another part of me was saying you can’t just cold shoulder someone like that. You didn’t need a great read on people to see she wasn’t right. Lonely, wounded, the whole gamut. 

I got to thinking about her question more, the times I’d lifted wallets in there, the others I’d gotten caught trying. When Toad hauled me out back, he jerked down my pants right there in the alley. I’d stuffed four or five billfolds down the front of my briefs. He stomped me good. Mack had to nurse my wounds. He was convinced it was about some prejudices Toad had, but I knew better than that. I wasn’t too goddamn dense to get it. It was bad for business, what I did, and Toad hated everyone. 

The news snapped to the next segment. The presenter was a nice-looking guy, had these big white teeth that could just about blind you. He was going on about some big drug bust the cops did down at the Super Bowl. Guys hocking junk to teenagers. Scenes of parked police cruisers with flashing lights. Blurred faces of men in handcuffs. Closeups of hands getting fingerprinted. That kind of thing puts fire to your nerves, you know? You get the feeling that you’ve dodged so many bullets, have done people so goddamn terribly, that there isn’t a chance in fuck your comeuppance isn’t lurking just right around a corner, waiting to bust your ass up. 

The lady tugged hard on my sleeve. She’d suddenly appeared on the stool next to mine. I fixed my eyes on the TV again. Now there was a church shooting somewhere outside of Austin, some nut with a hunting rifle and a pile of dead bodies. 

The lady leaned closer ‘til I could feel the heat of her breath on my neck. “You ain’t much for talking, are you?” 

I looked at her, really looked at her, saw how awful defeat soaked her through and through, and though I didn’t want to think about it anymore, I remembered the humiliation that crossed Mack’s face as he glared at me on the porch, learning I was nothing near the person he’d thought I was. And even then, it surprised me as much as it would’ve anyone else when my arm raised and I heard myself call out to Toad. 

“Another round for us both on my tab.” 

***

By the time the daylight was dying, Brenda and me were shooting the shit, putting back whiskeys like thirst might kill us. She was talking my eyes out of my head. That was alright. She was growing on me, and it didn’t bother me like before. Her man had run around on her, bedded her best friend, lied her into a bunch of heartache. But God was Brenda generous with her tab. And each time we killed a whiskey, Toad was already turning the bottle ass-up and pushing each of us another double across the bar top. He still picked the type, the bottom-dollar gut rot, but it felt like we’d all met each other halfway. 

Brenda rested her chin on her palm, propped an elbow on the bar top. She thought for a moment. “You believe there’s such a real thing as contrition?” 

“Contrition?” I asked, a little drunk. 

“You know, someone feeling remorse and really meaning it?” 

“You mean can someone apologize and it be the truth? Yeah, I do think that.” 

We went on like that for a while. The more we spoke, the more the guilt shredded my stomach. Looking at Brenda, her chipped teeth and the map of worry lines on her forehead, it hit me like a boot hard and heavy to the chest. How wrong I’d done Mack even when he took me in and held me and loved me. How low a liar I was. How ungrateful and wretched a guy I’d become. I made up my mind then and there. I’d ease up on the booze, give Craig his crank back and kick it altogether. I’d walk back home and beg Mack, swear up and down not to lie anymore. 

But by that time people had filled the bar just about wall to wall, and I figured I could stand another whiskey or two. A couple guys I recognized loitered in the back, switching between the pool table and the dartboard, and others I grew up with were bellied up and tying one on. We didn’t even have to ask Toad to bring us an ashtray. The bar stereo system didn’t work, so he brought out an old radio. The bent antenna meant it couldn’t pick up any stations, but the cassette deck worked. Roy Orbison was the only tape he had, which was always fine by me. 

We stopped taking the whiskey on ice. Brenda rolled her head back and sank a shot. Roy was moaning about broken hearts and longing. And even though loneliness was sinking its fingers into me, it felt good being in a place like that, with people like those. So, when she asked me about my life, firing up a More and passing it to me, I didn’t hold back. 

“I’ve got me a thing with someone,” I confessed, “but we’ve got problems.” 

“I figured that.” She snubbed out the tip of a More in the ashtray. “Folks in real happy relationships don’t spend the whole day drinking.” 

“That’s probably true.” I sucked hard on the cigarette, and Mack’s face stormed into my head, all injured and damp. 

“Little advice? Your lady probably don’t appreciate you calling what you got together a thing. It just don’t make you feel all that special.” 

I thought about correcting her, I really did, but there didn’t seem much point in spilling my whole life story. Besides, the whiskey was really knocking me on my ass. My brain rocked in my skull, and even when I pinched an eye shut tight as it’d let me, the bar still vibrated a little around me. When I wobbled on the stool, Roy crooning his heart out, I knew everything was different now. I looked at Toad and could’ve sworn he was smiling. We were friends now, brothers even. 

Between songs I snuck off to the bathroom for a quick pick-me-up, a little sniff of Craig’s crank. By the time I got back to the table, Brenda was ripping through whatever was left of that pack of Mores, sparking another as soon as she snubbed one out. I worried she’d finish them all before I could talk another off her. She tied her hair up. Though I had a deep, newfound loyalty to Mack, and though I’d never really taken to women, I couldn’t look past the fact that the dim glow of the bar lights had Brenda looking alright. 

“These problems,” she said, and waved at Toad for another round. “They about something specific?” 

I can’t tell you what did it. Roy holding that note on “Crying” that could lash a lightning bolt right through your heart? The way the whiskey washed through my brain? How Brenda’s face shone through the braids of cigarette smoke? Craig’s crank buzzing me up like a wire? I don’t have a clue, not really. Maybe it was all that. But even as my chest ached for Mack, I heard the words groan out of my mouth: “It’s just my job.” 

“That’s a real shame.” She reached over, patted my elbow. “What line of work you in?” 

Our knees brushed under the table. I chewed on her question, tasted the weight of it. The cigarette smoke stung my eyes, but I stared at the whiskey glass in front of me, nearly empty, like it might offer guidance. She pressed a napkin to her face, dabbing sweat away, and looked at me with those needy eyes, waiting for an answer. I can’t say what they wanted. Maybe to know me, maybe to heal me a little—hell, maybe even to be healed. 

I glanced up at the TV hitched to the wall. I get it. Truly. You want to tell me yeah, sure, it’s hard to be decent, but you still have to try. You want to remind me even the worst people sometimes really give it their best to do right by others. You ask what about those who change, those who turn to kindness, actual kindness. What can I tell you other than turn on the TV? Grown men sell poison to kids for a little cash. People maim and murder each other every day, sometimes for no good reason at all. Think about it. Would it fix the world at all if I said I told her the truth? Really, ask yourself why you need to believe there’s still hope for me. Would it put your heart at ease even a little? 

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