I don't see the sense in lying. It's 3:49 a.m. as I sit in front of the glow of my computer monitor in my otherwise unlit apartment. I've had a few drinks — gin as I recall — and I've been thinking, the way I always do this time of night (or morning if you feel like being anal about time, and if you do, perhaps you should have joined me for a drink or seven) and this time of year.
Drinking and thinking. Have any other two rhyming words gone together worse? Don't answer.
Don't worry, though. The drinking never impairs my ability for recollection. It only enhances it, makes the memories more vivid, makes me more capable of ascertaining details — both real and imagined. But when you're thinking back on the past, don't "real" and "imagined" usually become wrapped together in an indecipherable blur? Maybe it's just me. Maybe when you think of your past you're capable of putting everything together in a neat, perfect, linear form. Maybe I'm the only one who has a hard time remembering. Maybe I'm the only one who forgets — or chooses to. Nah. You forget, too. Even simple details gets washed around in the cleansing of time. Even if you don't want to, you forget. Smells. Tastes. Background noises. Right? No one can remember those things all of the time.
Of course, part of that has to be the way we look back on the stories we tell, the way we know what happens next — and after that and after that. The story is always spoiled when the narrator knows what's coming. There's no way to look back at a situation and remove those things that have happened since and allow yourself to just tell the story. Everything between the occasion and the narration contaminates the story, altering it forever, making sure that no telling of a story is ever the same as the one before, pushing each rendition further and further away from actuality until every story, without fail, is fiction to an ever-growing degree.
All obituaries should come with this caveat: Based on actual events.
Fortunately, though, this isn't an obituary (fortunate because I'm not just yet ready to be done with the joys and pains of life). No, it's just a story, a man remembering as best as he can, accepting his limitations, that he's but human and therefore capable of forgetting. Of course, some things we don't forget, sometimes to our unending benefit — I happen to be fantastic at trivia games — but often to our detriment.
So, then. Let's take a walk. Well, you stay seated and read. I'll walk.
She did always enjoy going for walks.
*********
-December 17, 2006-
You know what I love most about bars? It's not the booze; after all, it's always been cheaper to get drunk at home. It's not the noise or the terrible songs people play on the jukebox. It's not the bartenders being nice for tips, the waitresses occasionally remembering to stop by your table when they're not busy arguing with their boyfriends on their cellphones or flirting with the hot new busboy. It's not the smoke or the food, not the beer or the whiskey or anything else.
It's the crowd. I love a crowded bar more than I love anything, and that's saying a lot, because I've got a deep passion for baseball games, for cheesy music from the 1980s, for lip gloss, kissing in the rain and eating breakfast at 10 p.m. I love bad action movies and doing crossword puzzles while waiting for my laundry to finish in the dryer. But I don't love anything the way I love the crowd in a bar. I'm a people-watcher, always have been, hope to always be. And there's no place in the world better for watching people than in a crowded bar. I've had people tell me that shopping malls are better. For lack of a more articulate and intelligent sounding argument: Fuck that. Bars are where it's at, where the different people all mix together, everyone looking for something: a release, some relaxation, a one-night stand, to get so drunk they don't remember her, to relive glory days. Something. And watching people when they're looking for something, man, I'm telling you. It doesn't get better than that.
So that's our setting. A bar. It's a Sunday in northeast Ohio, cold as imaginable outside, but that's why we're all inside. Let's call it a sports bar. You know, lots of shit hanging on the walls, jerseys and pictures of guys playing kids games and baseball bats and autographed this and that. If they were clocks and bells, we'd call them knickknacks, but they're memories of serious tough guys, so we call it memorabilia. Whatever. Keep your semantic debates to yourself.
Why is a sports bar crowded on a Sunday? Well, for one thing, it's Ohio. What the hell is there to do once the sun goes down? And also, it's December, which means colleges are out, college kids are back home, and people are at bars. Does that really matter?
Characters. Well, there's me, and goddamn if I didn't just realize I hadn't introduced myself. You sure stuck around a long time for a story with a main character you didn't know. Anyway, I'm Christian. That's my name, not my religious affiliation, otherwise I might have more useful things to do than be sitting at a bar on a Sunday. You need more details? Well, then I was 24, two years removed from my undergraduate studies, six months removed from telling graduate school to fuck off and four years removed from moving out of state. Got all that? I graduated high school, went to college around home for two years, skipped out of town, and as the story picks up, have only recently returned. (And the professor in my freshman "Intro to Fiction Writing" class said I needed work on foreshadowing. Pssh.)
" 'C,' I still don't get it. If they offered you a better job, for more fuckin' money and your own office and everything, why the hell would you come back ... here?"
That's Paul. Calls me "C," has ever since we were kids and he got his teeth knocked out and couldn't say my whole name. He's my cousin, same age, same school, same hometown. He's like a brother to me. He drinks a little and gets philosophical, thinks he knows what everyone should do all the time. Good guy, though, loyal as hell and that's really all that's ever mattered.
I just smiled, shaking my head, looking at Damien and shrugging one of those "he's drunk again" shrugs that friends can share. Damien is my best friend. We met my freshman year in college before I left the state, just one of those things where people click.
"Whatever. I'm glad you're back," Damien said, looking around the bar, shaking his nearly empty glass softly in his hand, wondering whether we'd ever see our waitress again. "Three and a half years of drunk text messages about indiscretions and rare visits home didn't cut it, you know?"
"I know. You've been saying that for six months," I said, smiling at Paul. "What? You're not happy I'm back? You'd rather be drinking with your asshole brother at your apartment?"
Paul shrugged silently, looking down at the table. I knew what he was thinking. Before I left, we'd had a long talk, one of those talks where we'd had a few beers and gotten real deep and meaningful. At the end of it, we both decided that there wasn't anything here for us except bad memories and worse futures. He hated that I left, told me so, in fact. But he hated more that I came back.
"Anyway," I said, my gaze drifting around the bar, looking from one group of people to the next, looking for familiar faces -- not people I knew, just people I'd seen before in here, wondering if they were doing what they'd been doing before, noting habits and momentary lapses in general demeanor.
"Damien, we still on for tomorrow night?"
He wasn't looking at me. His eyes were narrowed — not in the angry, defensive way, but in a curious, pensive manner. He didn't respond, eyes following whatever target they'd locked onto. I looked in the direction of his stare, not seeing anything that immediately grabbed my attention, no tremendously beautiful young woman, no perceived enemy of his.
"Damien!" I snapped my fingers, eyebrows raised inquisitively.
