Old Haunts by Christopher Ananias

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.

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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.

Christopher Ananias

Image: Drug paraphanalia – spoon, pipes, syringes, pills and powder in a baggie all piled onto a wooden background – from Pixabay.com