I can’t help the past. Even if it would have been good, and sometimes it was… It’s gone. I met Angie where all transitory beings are met. I met her in a bar.
A cool basement bar, the “Das Keller,” scattered with peanut shells on smooth cement. Where a young demonic Hitler might thrive, but there were no demons on that bright, wasting-away afternoon. Unless you counted the ones inside me.
Red pouring spouts and brown liquors vibrating from the hollow thump of cars going over like sitting under a bridge. All that hallelujah bourbon just a couple of arm lengths away. Withheld, from people like me, like crowns and sacraments.
Bob Seger serenaded me with “Beautiful Loser,” as the third draft beer sloshed down my throat and climbed into my brain like a slightly stupid and crazy little demon. The excitement took a left turn into the waning reality of consequence. I thought logically, I thought hard, but the schizophrenic little Devil was saying crazy things like, “Get shiny balls over here and pour me a shot of Jim Beams.”
I realized I’d be drinking and driving again in my Dad’s Ford-100 truck. A three on the tree—fast rattling—junk machine. I’ll take the back roads. Be alright…
Tomorrow will be filled with lies and remorse. Certainly more consequences dancing naked up ahead: jail, state hospital zombies, maybe death. Drinking myself to death is all I know—there’s no other way.
“No shit,” said the bipolar demon who sounded about half sloshed already whispering things like, “Kill yourself. LOSER. You piece of shit.” Then after placating it with a warm belly shot of “Hot Dam,” it said, “It’s you and me now, Dickroy. I like my rib-eye galloping off the plate. I love the Devil!”
“What?”
Then it said, “Looky, Looky.” I turned and saw a pretty face smiling, sitting at the bar.
The insane thirst destroyed everything, but sometimes in the eye of this destruction, beautiful beings walked around the shiny rim of the abyss. I met one of those beauties at the Das Keller’s (The Basement), and she looked way down there with a lovely smile and pulled me out. I suppose she thought I was beautiful too, but things change, and doesn’t time—fragile—time. Fly.
I plunked out a little tune on the ivories. Angie laughed and sang along. Her hip bumped mine at the pool table. So it began…
So it ended…But there was the middle, and there was this… She said, “I’m sick of you coming up here—all depressed!” I sat scrunched up in the little kid’s chair outside the greasy patio window of her apartment. Earlier, I saw a novel brand of cigarette butts in the ashtray, right beside her Marlboro Lights—all cozy. The paranoid little Demon said, “Take my word, Boss. She’s fuckin that construction worker in 2B. You know him. Buff bastard. Remember, at the pool—bouncing her tits at him.”
She could see me, and her two little girls stared like the kids on a field trip when I was in jail. Those jailhouse kids even had their little “Spiderman” and “Care Bears” lunchboxes with them. Like they were going to eat lunch with the turnkeys and come back and stare, again. I saw the same giggling wonder on Angie’s two little girls like I was in the monkey house. A big silly monkey flinging shit at them or they were flinging it at me.
What am I doing out there? Am I crazy, and can’t hide it? What does Angie see through the glass? Then it’s over. That’s what she sees.
I’m back in the abyss. Everything is turning upside down. The demon doesn’t talk much now—completely satisfied that I’m on my ass, or stupefied by alcohol.
#
Gerry and I sat at one of our gloomy haunts in a sinking booth. Where I spent years drinking—maybe forever. I may still be inside that smoke-filled bar waiting for God’s decision. The bar’s name changed every five years, became smokeless, but the dirty carpets and red booths never changed.
Gerry was his jovial “Fuck it all,” self. I should take a lesson. He’s a genuine friend but I can’t see this or anything else. Nirvana’s, “Rape Me,” blasted from the jukebox. So different from Seger’s “Beautiful Loser.” The summer month with Angie was gone. Things were back to normal, things were bad again. A server danced through tables in a short black skirt, white panties flashing as she bent with two Budweisers on a tray—cold as ice sickles in a snowbank’s heart.
After ten long necks, we were at a drug house. The signs of dilapidation and a giddy trepidation rise as a gray shingled house, from a garbage strewn alley. It was perfectly insane. Norman Rockwell on the glass pipe.
Some bald dude with a spider’s web, catching his Adam’s apple, opened up a funky little red velvet-lined case, smiling like his teeth went all the way to his deformed earlobes that were stretched out with enormous black gauges. A needle laid there. I said, “Godzilla.” Gerry laughed. Neither of us shot drugs—just smoked it. We got some to go.
Gerry captained an old 225 Electra that he drove like a blurry rusty streak a hundred miles an hour on bald wings. The river was coming up fast. Its polluted banks never quite froze solid. I feared the twisting River Road. I feared we may live, and we did.
I’m still thinking of Angie. She never took my calls. After I called from the psychiatric ward. A temporary respite that troubled drinkers find like a wellness community. I sent Angie a hate filled letter accusing her of being an AIDS carrier, from intravenous drug use, and whoring.
She screamed, “You belong in a hospital!” and hung up. When I dialed after that a strange electronic glurp answered. Beeping and screeching like I connected a Top Secret government facility like the NSA or STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND. I felt half afraid to dial again but of course I did.
We sat at Gerry’s yellow Formica kitchen table. He owned his house, where I sat in a chair owning nothing. Cigarettes sent twirls of smoke lassoing and diffusing into a general blue haze smoldering in the glass ashtray stamped, THE MIDWAY BAR. We were past midway heading into the deep bog-lands of the dark.
Gerry lifted the beheaded 7UP two-liter bottle we used to trap the meth smoke to get every snaking tendril. He toasted the milky chunk laying on tin foil with a small flamethrower. We sucked the hot little melting imp from under the globe of the foggy green plastic, like smoke coming from under a jinn’s door. Gerry’s pupils looked like man-hole covers. For a second, I saw golden beams of light being sucked into his eyes like a black hole.
The white caustic smoke coated my teeth in its acerbic fur. I singed my eyebrows, somehow, and my hair smelled like burnt plastic. After getting lost in a rush, I studied my orange fingernails like tea leaves. A gnawed off cuticle on my thumb held all the answers.
Gerry broke out the Jaggermeister. Like he was the helmsman of some doomed ship, and we sloshed around the galley, laughing, commiserating about nonsensical things that made perfect sense.
We soon figured out the identities of the JFK assassins. They were you and me. Then I exposed myself to the bone and showed him some poetry, feeling like a big shot. He scribbled one on the back of a dirty paper plate in about five seconds. It astounded and consumed me with the hyenas of jealousy. One line took me to the floor, feigning a cardiac arrest.
He said, “The creviced burrows of my soul,” (T. Jacobs). That line has stayed with me all these years. “The creviced burrows of my soul.”
A pepperoni pizza, the best thing in the world that we forgot, smoked up the kitchen at 500 degrees. The smoke alarm went shrilling, like DEFCON 1! We thought it was the cops. Gerry’s Jordan’s worked the faded green linoleum peeking out the curtains.
“They’re coming for us, Gerry!”
In the drunk and drugged interlude with light cracking the horizon. Like the first day of creation, silver seeping around the black curtains. I dialed Angie again and again only hearing the loud glowering glurp and screeching glitch of that electronic buzz. STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND was not at home.
I sat there at the table, slack mouthed and drooling, like I had an IQ of 35. The littered table looked like an emptied buffet where only suicidal heathens could eat. The Jaggermeister, beer cans, the beheaded 7UP bottle, the torch, blackened tin foil, cigarette butts overloading the ashtray, wanted to spin.
I was swimming back and forth in a deep black drunkenness, barely kept afloat riding the static white plank of meth. A blinding tower of guilt like God’s flaming sword condemned me and may have been the morning sun. My father’s face also condemned me, and he wasn’t even there but never left. Just like God. It took me twenty years to realize I had somehow been reaching a dial-up modem when I tried Angie’s number. I never knew her last name. I couldn’t find her on Facebook, a tombstone, or any places in between.
Image: Drug paraphanalia – spoon, pipes, syringes, pills and powder in a baggie all piled onto a wooden background – from Pixabay.com
literally stories 
Christopher
The bottom continues to fall out of this situation. Yeats says the center doesn’t hold, but it is, for me, via observation and similar participation, the bottom that never settles. You got the world right (“world” is a generic term, no real word for it). There’s a special hell at sunrise here; better for a vampire because death ends; but not for these guys. A sort of “C’mon, wallow through this” circumstance that one thinks is as low as a thing can go–till one remembers that the bottom doesn’t hold.
Brilliantly depressing!
Leila
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Hi Leila
Love that line by Yeats… You really hit it when you mentioned the sunrise and not dying. After a night of the full blown wastrels of drugs and alcohol. Those sunny condemning mornings were the worst days. Watching people live their strange sober lives.
Thanks for your kind words! Glad it came across like that.
Christopher
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I thought this was superb writing and you have described a world that I am glad I haven’t seen but I see it clearly in this story. I can smell it. Layers of hopelessness which surely can only end one way. What a waste of precious life. Terribly dark and dreadful but really well done. Thank you – dd
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Hi Diane
I’m glad the hopelessness came through. And yes, it couldn’t really end in any successful way for this character, unless they got sober.
Thanks for the kind words!
Christopher
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Christopher
Holy shit, this captures the insanity, INTENSITY, wildness, tragedy, hilarity, euphoria, and elation of full-blown alcoholism as well as anything I’ve ever read. More heartbreaking than Hunter S. Thompson’s work, this captures the bars and the MOTION and the restless movement of addiction in a seamless, poetic way. I’ve never smoked meth (although I have a cousin who was addicted to it) but I did smoke crack cocaine a few times back in the good ol’ days, one time out of a bong with a bunch of black hookers and white sailors on the Great Lakes Naval Base here in Illinois (my friend was in the Navy because his other alternative was jail, given a choice by the judge). While smoking the crack cocaine out of a bong with wasted sailors and wild-eyed hookers on the Great Lakes Naval base, I was also on two hits of blotter acid and CHUGGING down hard liquor like tequila, vodka, and rum. I remember making jokes about the rum and sailors and I remember all the lovely ladies of the night in their beautiful fake eyelashes and wigs who propositioned me, all of whom I turned down in a very friendly way. Their presence was appealing but I was much more interested in the drugs and alc’. I also remember accidentally falling down against the gas stove and being berated by the black dude running the show, whatever he was making the crack with was highly flammable. Hard liquor, crack cocaine and LSD in vast quantities ALL AT ONCE. I only escaped such escapades by the grace of God, or pure luck, literally.
This is a brilliant and inspiring story! Its unsparing, raw honesty is both liberating and terrifying because so real. It reminds me of Lou Reed’s great, great song “The Last Shot” off his album LEGENDARY HEARTS. Your story also shows why some of the smartest people in the whole world sometimes engage in activities such as these. Like the title of Dostoevsky’s novel THE INSULTED AND INJURED.
Gotta run for now, more later! This story also comes out of an American lineage that includes Poe and Hawthorne! It also reminds me of Antonin Artaud’s great, great essay, “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society.”
Dale
PS
Seger is as good as Cougar, Tom Petty and Springsteen!
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DWB
Looks like my original reply to your comment trickled down beyond your name.
CJA
PS: Agreed. Seger is pretty awesome. “Fire Lake,” is one I listen to a lot, Something about “ol’ Uncle Joe and that chrome three wheeler” gets me.
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The ending is excellent. The whole tragedy in two sentences. The Gerry section is wonderful too, especially “Norman Rockwell on the glass pipe” and the jealousy over one line of poetry. Has a strong narrative voice throughout.
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Hi David
Glad you like the story. I was hoping Gerry and the ending might resonate.
Thanks for your kinds words!
Christopher
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Hi Dale
Wow, love your anecdote of partying on the Naval base. It’s so vivid and halirous. I like how this is written too—your use fiction writing techniques. The black hookers add a bueatiful seediness. Your friendly rejection to their advances, but your eyes full of them all night paints, paints a good human picture. ( The reader wants you to succeed–even if succeeding is wild partying–well done) The crack and blotter acid, the near explosion with the drugs cooking on the stove is wild and full of engery. Then getting berated by the black dude during his dangerous stovetop chemistry paints a helluva crazy picture! That CHUGGING down hard liquor had me laughing, man! One of those good and real laughs that makes you feel like you are authentically yourself for a second. You write some really funny and great stuff–really good! It’s amazing how it just flawlessly flows from your keyboard.
Thanks for your super nice and well thought out and highly entertaining comments. Always a joy to hear what you might have to say!
Christopher
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Christopher
Your complete reliability and total consistency as a correspondent is cherished and valued by me. As with Leila. Thanks for lauding my all-true anecdote the telling of which was inspired by your story. I forgot that it was called free-base cocaine, not crack. I also smoked crack a few times back in the day, a separate thing from free-base; not that one can tell much difference with a head full of tequila and rum. And some people think I’m smoking crack all the time – metaphorically, that is.
The MOVEMENT and narrative momentum and forward motion in “Old Haunts” is so realistic it could be in a psychology textbook in the section that covers addiction! Literally.
The title alone is a fantabulous example of how to do the most with the fewest words (which is the kind of writing that lasts the longest, which has been proved as a scientific and historical fact). The title is haunting, hilarious, ironic, symbolic all at once. All combined and packed into a “simple” two-word phrase. This is not a cliche. It is a reinvention of language.
This story reaches beyond the third dimension, into the fourth, fifth, and even sixth dimensions. It stays with the reader within the mind. It haunts the reader in an old, and a new, way. It’s not one-time, throw-away trash.
Charles Olson was a six-feet, nine-inch tall, 270-pound American poet who called himself MAXIMUS (and others started thinking of him as that as well).
He said: “One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception” in great writing. Or it isn’t great writing. Your writing achieves that feat, which is far, far more rare than may be commonly assumed. Writing is not easy. It is the hardest, most draining activity humans have ever invented. That is why it has swallowed the lives of so many of its greatest practitioners. And, among other things, it DEMANDS that the writer IGNORE so much about the world while focusing on nothing but THIS as if THIS were playing for keeps (which it is). The ability to attain a zen-like focus, calmness, and concentration is the first requirement for good, or great, writing. One must act (at least for a while) as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist WHILE WRITING ABOUT IT.
Your story has mental, physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual movement within it.
“Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.” Said Bukowski. (One of his frequently quoted quotes that he spoke in a variety of ways. He was a philosopher with little gems he always returned to.)
Thank you!
Dale
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CJA
NIGHT MOVES by Bob Seger is also a great album. I lived in Detroit when it came out in 1976 and I remember listening to it thousands of times while staring at and studying the album cover.
DWB
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Christopher,
There seemed a point where the narrator stopped speaking to us, and the booze and the drugs and the world he was in took over telling the story. Very far down. Brilliant! — Gerry
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Hi Gerry
Wow that’s a great observation. And exactly how drinking and using drugs goes. It just takes over.
Thanks for your excellent comments!
Thanks, Christopher
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Hi Christopher,
In a weird way this story is all about understanding.
For the never thirsty, the old problem of knowing about the stupor that he was in can be an issue. How out of it do you get before you know nothing?? That beggars the question, how much can you relate or recall? Those with the never ending thirst know that this varies. When we are younger most can be recalled, when we get older, recalling can depend on what and with what. Sometimes events flood back, sometimes they trickle and sometimes they don’t. It all depends!
You cleverly used quite a few similes that stand out for me. How else can you describe something to someone who hasn’t experienced it?? I think that was a good way to do it.
Another excellent story my fine friend.
Hugh
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Hi Hugh
These are thought provoking comments… Interesting what you said about recall. It is hard to relate to people who don’t have the disease. They look at you like why don’t you just stop like they can. Then all the moral judgments. I’m glad the similes came through to help translate this to “normal” people.
Thanks for your excellent comments!
Christopher
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