The Third Man played on the overhead T.V. One of Jason’s favorites.
What happened to your hand?
A parrot bit me.
And they were drowned out by a loud squeal of a harmonica and it felt like the vision from last night and I wanted to start vomiting but looked for Dylan anyways because he wouldn’t give up. He knew the score.
“Sorry!” Jason yelled from the back room. The harmonica cut out. The zither chimed back in. I was looking at my feet and needed to get out of there. Of course I could’ve picked up the Kerouac. The Kesey. The Bukowski. The Magnum. The post-modern beat whatever.
The Chronicles of back roads America helped remove the now from here. It didn’t really matter, did it? Maybe it did. Dylan said it mattered.
“Robert,” I walked over to him at the countertop. “How’re the pictures going?”
“Good, man. I like it. Light is good. Camera is cooperating. A couple more and I can start assembling an essay or something. I donno.”
“But, why is this important? Why this of all things? I know we’re here, and it’s here, but why?”
“I just have this sense that we get stuck on shit like this. Like, we get held up. We are held up. The helplessness is our flypaper. We try to find something in the reservoir of memory. Of story. I don’t know. But the future is unknown. We know there’s going to be change. Maybe big change. You can’t stay on top forever, and that scares me and everyone else. I don’t want to fuckin’ live in some hollowed out sky scrapper, or return to an agrarian society. I like my CD player. I like cheap beer and concerts and taking god damn pictures.”
Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Scene changes and the music kicks back on. But this time it’s me sitting alone inside the bar. The bartender is still there. The whiskey is still there. There is no band.
“More whiskey?” The bartender asks.
“I … I don’t know. Where are the people? Why is no one here?”
“You tell me.”
“It’s … it’s not like I’ve never woken up next to someone I had no idea who they were. But … even in that lack of memory it all meant something in the moment. I knew there was something I was trying to grapple myself on to with yards of rope contact glued with a prayer that the pieces would hold through till morning. Rebecca, Meghan, Thomas, Tracey, Kevin - all holding just enough, but the pieces – the pieces dangling off as each one got a little wet and couldn’t hold together anymore. Wrap around again when the pattern shifts from tartan to plaid, and all I’ve got is nothing coming in and all of it going out while I grab hold of the sides and pray that this won’t be the last time even though I’m not quite sure I’ve had a first. Can’t I see why this’ll never stop?”
“Look, you want the whiskey or not?”
I thought about it for a minute. I stared at the empty glass and wondered if two is really what I needed. I guess I didn’t really know. Maybe three was too many, and two was just enough. I motioned for one more. It was warm. It felt good when the burn hit my stomach and the blood rushed to my cheeks.
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