Saturday Night Relics

Saturday Night Relics

I threw the bottle out in the dumpster in the alley behind the bar. The green wood siding and the cracks in the asphalt were visible in the florescent light and I thought right then I would puke, but I held it down and swallowed what came up. My gums green and black, my teeth caked with lettuce and anything else that surfaced once the whiskey and all of that coffee came back up, I spit a thick wad of something into the grass on the other side of a chain link fence. The people beyond that fence have been asleep for hours and I’m just now getting off of work with the last swallow of drug store whiskey gone in two strong pulls from the neck of the bottle in a locked bathroom at the back of the bar.

I look back inside to see if I've forgotten anything. Study the beer-taps and the drain-traps and run a filthy grey towel once more over a picture of a beat up, fat lipped face some joker scribbled onto the bar with a pen. I try to scrub the face clean but it won't come off. The connection I share with this rag is not lost on me. Both of us are soaked with a whole night’s worth of liquor, and neither of us is cleaner than the image we're trying to polish.

Ten minutes of sidewalks and grass alleys stand between me and the fifth of cheap whiskey chilling on the inside of my refrigerator door. Before my shift began I finished what was left in a green glass pint-sized bottle whose Jägermeister label had been peeled off weeks ago, standing over the kitchen sink and wiping my mouth off on the shoulder of my sleeve. Half of the fifth fit in that pint bottle and the bottle fit nicely into my hip pocket. It shattered just now in the dumpster out back when I tossed it in, off camera and unseen. If I had a word for it I’d call it defense. To call it medication is a cop out. The truth can’t be faced until the face has had its fill… in one form or another. It’s unclear what’s wanted from us, here in the only thing we know, where even the sharpest eyes cannot see through mud.

This ride. It’s too long and it’s not long enough. It’s all we remember, and it probably ends when we’re looking the other way. I peel another breath mint off the roll in my pocket and push on the swinging door to the kitchen. Amidst stainless steel freezers, dishwashers, stovetops and deep fryers I hover, watching out the glass window in the door between the kitchen and the bar. A human sump pump is out there cleaning, sucking down cigarettes and rolling up the last of a stacked up pile of rubber floor mats. This is her world now. Under the neon beer signs and flashing television infomercials on thirty different flat screens bolted to the walls, she pirouettes with a whirling buffer over an empty dance floor.

The music done and the money spent, the beer spilled and the chests puffed out and the thick necks fueled with testosterone and Jim Beam; and the beer kegs drained and changed, and the doors locked with keys hanging from a wooden block, she’ll sweep the party from the floor and have the ashtrays sprayed for the coming day of smokers that will fill them back up before noon.