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High Tech Hemingway

Mark Scott

    It was about noon thirty when I walked into Jerry’s Sports Bar and Day Trades. It was a clean, well-lighted place where you could go and get yourself some free Wi-Fi, and watch the fights on closed circuit television for the price of a few drinks. Married women who couldn’t even get their links clicked at home could go to Jerry’s and get googled all afternoon.
    I saw ol’ Sam lying face down on the floor. He looked deader than hell. I asked the bartender, “What’s this?”
    “Sam’s dead.”
    I rolled Sam over and took out his wallet. A man could look dead, and a man could be dead, but that didn’t mean you didn’t have a responsibility to him. “Did you run his health-care card?”
    “System’s down. But he’s dead for sure. Heart attack.”
    “What happened?”
    “You want the whole story?”
    “Yep.”
    “Sam met Louise 20 years ago, on the shore by the snow-capped mountains of New Orleans.”
    “Yeah, New Orleans ain’t what it used to be. What then?”
    “They talked, went to bed, and got married. He started a dot-com, and made a fortune. She liked to talk and spend money. Sam, not so much.”
    “She liked to Ritz it up, huh?”
    “Spent all his money, and then some. He really loved her though.”
    “Heart attack, you say.”
    “Third one. And it killed him deader than hell.”
    I kneeled down and closed Sam’s eyes for him. It just wasn’t right to leave him there staring at the ceiling. “Did you call 9-11?”
    “They’re coming, but they pulled his cholesterol and blood pressure stats, and I described how he was lying there blue faced and not breathing. So they’ll be here when they get here.”
    I stood there and realized, then, that Sam was like the Lucky Man in that old English ballad from way back in the days when they didn’t even have MTV yet, and you had to jam something called an “8-track” into a contraption that looked like a toaster oven. Yeah, no money could save him, so he lay down and he died. “It’s a hell of a thing, a third heart attack.”
    “It’s an awful thing,” the bartender said.
    “Who do think will win tonight?” I pointed up at the tube, where the fight promoter with the electrified hairdo was plugging the big fight.
    “I think Mayweather for sure.”
    The bartender metered me out an ounce-and-a-quarter shot of my favorite whiskey. I asked him if he was still with his web-master girlfriend.
    “Yeah,” he said. “Best thing ever happened to me. Gives me a good scroll whenever I need it, and runs in background mode when she ought to. Like a real lady, you know?”
    “You’re a lucky man.” I downed the whiskey, paid for it, stepped over ol’ Sam, and walked out under a phosphorescent blue and gray sky, humming to myself that old English ballad about the guy who had white horses and ladies by the score. The Doppler radar said rain, but on this day the ol’ Doppler had it wrong.

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