---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue of cc&d (v232) (the May 2012 Issue You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5" issue as an ISSN# paperback book:

Order this writing in the book the Mission (issue edition) cc&d 2012 collection book		get the 228 page May - August 2012 cc&d magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Into the Breach

Robert D. Lyons

    With close examination, I can see the years of my life absorbed into this bar stool like the rings of a tree. I had been drinking a cheap malt liquor from a forty ounce bottle, periodically a swig of bourbon, and any pill I could get my hands on. Mostly the oxy that I looted from my grandpa’s nursing home. I was so high my head was bouncing off the ceiling. This bar was an excavation site for the two years of my life that vanished without a trace, after that I couldn’t get drunk anymore, but I sure did try. I glanced around the bar in a blurred haze, looking for artifacts and clues as to where I vanished. Where did I go? What on earth did I do? I always run into people on the streets who claim to know me. I go with it, not wanting to hurt their feelings, and try to piece together the lost days of my life. I hear stories about the bonfire in Saint Charles where I drove a truck into a tree, or the whorehouse downtown where I threw up on a hooker and cost everyone five hundred dollars for service. It was an accident, but I guess they see enough vomit fetishists to subsidize the market. I had brief thunderstorms of post traumatic stress in this bar, and I had flash backs of a certain situation in the bar bathroom stall. Other than that, I was at a loss.
    It’s Friday night, and all the drunks are crawling through the woodwork. Like fools we get it anywhere we can. The Island Bar was a clichéd cesspool, but they didn’t have a kitchen so you were allowed to smoke. As always, I’ve been wandering from bar to bar with eyes closed. Like Odysseus fighting for his way home. It seems like I have been heading down the wrong road; like I lost my bearings in a darkened miasma of drunken night. I thought I would find my way by now, but I’m still roaming the damp caves buried bellow loves soil and haunted by subliminal longings. The shots of whiskey rained down from heaven above. This was my Odyssey. Forever damned to roam the beer stench corridors of my cowardice in the face of love. We played with the devil’s mechanisms of chance: you might lose a friend, you might fall in love anew, but at the end of the night you will never leave satisfied. I fell on the floor in a pharmaceutical frenzy, and watched the lights burn, seeing two of every neon sign, and the room spun around me as I lay motionless in apathetic indifference, but if you squint real hard and stare deep into the bottle of your condemned horoscope, you realize it could be so much worse.
    I made it home that night, but was afraid to go to sleep. I had been for weeks: nightmare after nightmare, each more ghoulish than the last. This is why the pills were essential, or any drug for that matter: if you went to sleep completely wasted out of your mind you were alright, but if you fell asleep only half wasted, or worse, sober, then the dreams began to haunt every wink. The problem was, you were never sure whether you were sleeping or if the terror was actually taking place in the room, for when you slept the entire room entered your dreams with you, the dirty dishes, the empty bottles, the cum dried socks, the typewriter, the panties some whore left on the floor, the moon burning out the window, headlight peering in from car loads of well fed laughing people, and you were trapped in some dark corner, without solace, starving, hysterical, naked, no reason, no hope, just a dark sweating corner, a corner of flies and filth, the stench of the rotting corpse that is reality, the stench of everything: spiders climbing the walls, eyes through the doorknob, grimy bars, loose whores, malt liquor, cheap cigarettes, madhouses, trees and no trees, light and no light, and realizing that what might as well have been the only woman in this world would never belong to you. I saw myself, covered in blood, with the blood dripping like a leaked faucet from my hair and eyes, but the eyes were black, and it held a whiskey bottle draining in all in an ongoing chug while pacing a lit cigarette just above my chest as I laid in bed sweating, unable to move or cry out in help. And then I awaken to an empty room and the sound of echoing silence.
    I remember waking the next morning and finding everything tarnished with the color of forgotten love. I threw on some clothes, lit a cigarette, and walked back to the bar. Harry was still in there, and he had been waiting for me. Harry and I had a lot in common: we were both cowards. We wanted to survive so we would talk wild and drink our wine while the seconds passed away and the outside world became one of nightmares and gambles. We wanted to live so we avoided anything that could crack our shells. We didn’t want to live too badly, but we still wanted to live, and that meant hiding away where no one could touch us.
    “Back again?” Harry said sitting next to me and motioning the bartender for two beers.
    “I couldn’t sleep too well.”
    “Yeah, I’m the same way. That’s why I don’t bother, I just stay here.”
    “What time is it?”
    “Seven twenty in the morning.”
    “Christ, it feels like three in the morning.”
    “When it comes to the dark nights of the soul, it’s always three in the morning.”
    “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. I got a real bad case of the Saint Louis blues.”
    “Believe me, brother, you don’t want to know the real blues. The real blues is where you lost your job, starving, no woman, no mind, no nothing, and you haven’t even got enough to buy a beer. That’s the blues.”
    “It’s starting to look that way.”
    “What’d ya say we do about it then?”
    “What is there to do?”
    Harry leaned in closer, “We work together.”
    “Alright, what do I do?”
    “Now listen, kid: you’re a good talker. You tell a lot of crazy-ass stories, it doesn’t matter if they’re true or not.”
    “They’re true.”
    “Alright, damnit, I’m just saying that it doesn’t matter much. You got a good mouth, that’s all.”
    “I won’t blow you, Harry.”
    “Shut up and listen, smart-ass. Now here’s what we do. There is a class bar down the block. You know it, that one where one of your girls kept running off with those tight-ass military cunts. It’s a sex joint of sorts. They fill it to the brink with minors, not just girls, and those perverts go on parade. It’s still a class place though. Red7 is the name of the club. I’m sure you remember. Just get a little dressed up and move on in there. All you need is money for your first drink. We’ll pool for that. You sit down, nurse your drink, and look around for a guy flashing a roll. They get some real fat ones in there.”
    “Fat guys or fat rolls?”
    “Both. Pay attention. Okay, anyway, you spot the guy and go over to him. You sit down next to him and just turn on that bullshit of yours. He’ll eat it up. You even have a vocabulary. This is the good part. He will buy you drinks all night, and he’ll drink all night. You have to keep him drinking. When closing time comes, lead him down the alley on Second Street. Tell him you will get him some nice young pussy, or cock if that’s what gets him hot and dumb; just tell him anything to get him down that fucking alley. And I’ll be waiting at the end with this.” Harry reached down under the table and pulled out a huge solid wood baseball bat, something a hood might take to your teeth. I wonder if anyone in this city buys a baseball bat for baseball.
    “Holy fuck, Harry, you’ll kill him!”
    “No, no, no, you know as well as anybody, you can’t kill a drunk. Maybe if he was sober it would kill him, but not drunk, it’ll only knock a drunk out. Then we take his wallet and split it two ways: drinks for everyone.”
    “Harry, I can’t do that shit, I’m a nice guy, and I’m just not like that.”
    “Who cares if a fucking perv coughs up a bit of blood? Besides, you’re no nice guy; you’re the meanest and toughest sunovabitch I ever met. That’s why I like you.”
    It only took a few minutes of sitting over my scotch and water before I found one: a big fat one. He was a priest, or at least dressed like one. He probably got tired of the altar boys, and took a spin through the underworld. He had a nice Rolex wristwatch, a handful of gold rings and a full stupid wallet. I sat down and just started talking. He was listening, nodding, laughing heartily and buying drinks. He was a bishop. All my life I have been at the mercy of fat cretins like him. My parents were pastors, and these guys have held my life in their finger tips, moving me around from state to state, losing friends, and pimping out superstitious old ladies at the offering plate and keeping it all for themselves while we struggled to keep the lights on and stay off the streets. I had even been fired from worthless, dull, underpaid and life sucking jobs by fat stupidities like him. It was hard work to keep my hatred from showing. I told him stories about my brief stay in prison, about the gangs, and about the whorehouse on the riverfront. He liked the whorehouse stuff.

    I told him about the time my girlfriend made me shave my pubes, and I got wicked irritated infected lumps all over my groin the same day as my yearly check up, and how the doctor refused to believe that I did this shaving and said that I had syphilis; she insisted on two penicillin shots up my ass and gave me some cream to take home, then my girlfriend went in the medicine cabinet looking for drugs and found it, she dumped me on the spot.
    “God damn.” He said.
    “Yeah.”
    I decided that I wouldn’t mind Harry’s slugger hitting a homer of this fuckers head. Damn, would it be one for the highlight reels. What a useless hunk of shit.
    “You like young boys?” I asked him.
    “You think?”
    “You’re a bishop, and in the red7.”
    “You’re a little old for me.”
    “What about around fourteen and a half?”
    “Oh jesus, yes.”
    “There’s one coming in off the train from Kansas City. He’ll be at my place around two this morning. He’s clean, tight, intelligent, and hard. Now this is a big chance, so I’m asking two hundred bucks, that too much?”
    “No, not at all.”
    “Alright, at two o’clock you come with me to my place. He will be there.”
    Two o’clock finally made it, and I walked him out of there towards the ally. I worried that maybe Harry wouldn’t be there. Perhaps the wine would get to him and he would run. Hopefully he wasn’t too drunk. A blow like that could kill a man, or cripple him for life. We staggered alone in the moonlight. We were all wolves. There was nobody around: nobody at all, it was going to be easy. We crossed the ally, and Harry was there, but as soon as he came out the fat pedo saw him and threw an arm up and ducked. The bat swung over him and hit me right behind the ear. I woke up the next morning on my face. There was dried blood everywhere. I checked my wallet, and the twenty bucks I had to my name was gone. Harry, that cock sucker, rolled me. I never saw him again after that.

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...