The Bartender from Another Planet
Alan Catlin
It isn’t readily apparent what this post graduate course in life I’m taking is going to be called. No academic graduate course I’ve ever encountered prepares you for the kind of in depth research among the lost tribes that I’ve had to endure. Little did I know that the most useful course in college I ever had would be Abnormal. It wasn’t as comprehensive as it could have been but, at least, it gave me a framework to work within.
No one tells you what to expect at 2 AM in the morning, looking into a room full of out of control wild life, hell bent on some kind of personal Apollo Mission to the dark side of an unseen moon, wired on Angel Dust, Magic Mushrooms and Tequila Sunrises. That’s a special kind of crazy and you’re just, somehow, supposed to recognize the signs and know what to do.
And you do find out or else. Or else, you’re another casualty in the cosmic game of Life there was never any hope of winning in the first place
So when they crash land in front of you, face down on the bar, wide eyed and unconscious, their simulated flight plans unraveling in the barren hemispheres of their brain, attempting to reestablish contact from ground control to space command, requires a specific kind of expertise that an MA in English doesn’t provide. Stomach pumping goes a long way to solving the immediate problems but dealing with the body afterwards is another problem.
A vacation in a rubber room usually helps for awhile.
Still, a rubber room is not forever, the way some things are, like death, for instance. Those desolation angels usually begin weeding themselves out, in a spectacular Karmic board game, played out on the highways of life. The Late Night News is enlivened by tales of their passing. Mere photojournalism cannot do justice to motorcycles launched into tree lines, failing to negotiate a graduated ESS turn at the base of an unlighted Altamont Horror hill. The remains, in the morning, are of burnt Harley fluids, ravaged spare parts and scorched rubber, silently smoking, clouding, the stilled dawn.
Fellow soldiers of misfortune gather at the scene, staring through thick black lensed aviator glasses, smoking impossibly fat joints marveling,”Man, that sucker, Really was flying when he hit.”
Still as Darwin observed, the process of Natural Selection is a slow one. The highly adapted, garden variety psychotic is a truly rare creature. Somehow, he has managed to elude confinement for the rest of his unnatural existence. He is waiting for whatever twisted manifestation his particular brand of personal pathology will eventually take.
In the mean time, as the keeper of the spirit, it is your duty to provide the rocket fuel for the next leg of the journey. You are the sky pilot in charge of the spirals for the severely deranged, charting the ebbing and flowing of his declining orbit as he cruises on for the final crash.
The options are many and varied and when you say, “Name your poison.” It is with a kind of sincerity and simplicity that
borders somewhere between pure cynicism and reverence. There is no other explanation as to how you can justify providing what the Psychotic wished for. “Liquid Death, tarbender and I want it like now.”
And you make it like now. A double that reduces him to a staggering moron, bereft of reason, on an automatic pilot, with badly scrambled operational fatal error messages.
Years later, seeing this particular psychotic face on the front of a newspaper is no surprise. He is the accused in a merciless killing his sister-in -law, found strangled, wearing a coat hanger necklace, wired to a car handle door for life, in a new kind of cold storage. Oddly, you feel very little, having brushed up this close to death. Over the years it has just become part of the vast continuum of everyday life.
Still, the Alien Nation, is everywhere expanding like a vast human, black hole, an event horizon, waiting to happen every time the barroom door opens. The walking dead weave in and out, between parked cars outside, describing an almost perfect arc to the door and somehow arriving at the bar, miraculously standing And speaking in the general direction of where he thinks you should be making drinks and says, “I’ll have a Bass Ale. Make it a pint.”
And you make the drink just to see what will happen. None of the creatures encountered thus far have sprouted tentacles, glaucous membranes bursting from pale as death skin demanding human blood, in pitchers, please, to go with the beer on the bar.
Not yet, anyway.
This one orders a t-shirt with a shamrock, bearing the name of the bar inside the leaf, worn in extra large sizes directly over the heart. Dead center in the middle of the T in Tavern is where the silver bullet goes.
Still later, on a particular slow Monday morning, in the wee hours just before the time of the wolf, the pre-dawn raiders are released. They come clutching their bags full of pennies, stolen lunch money, containers returned individually and the loot hoarded for a last one for the ditch. The latest lost leader says, “Give me your cheapest draft beer and a shot.”
The temptation is to dispense with the formalities and just blow her away with the Saturday Night Special under the bar but that will still get you a charge of Manslaughter in this State no creative writing class will ever explain away. Instead you say;
“Pennies. Very nice. You have to wrap them before we might consider taking them as legal tender.”
“What’s the matter with you? It’s money.”
“Yeah, and so are Bleeding Virgin Hearts, in Pre-Colombian Mexico.”
“Since when don’t you except money for drinks?”
“Try something a little larger, like a quarter. If you want, I’ll show you what one looks like. Four of them will do nicely for a beer.”
“All I got is pennies.”
That was one drinking problem, I could do without so I directed her to the door. I told her, to report back to the mother ship for further instructions.”Tell the powers that be up there that you need to work on the Basic Training Manual before unleashing the advance forces.” I don’t think that she got the message but someone did.
The next wave was lead by an old woman, sort of the wife of a janitor in a drum, leaning on the edge of the bar, with a draft beer in one hand, and, a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon gravity beers, weighing her down, in the other. Somehow, by laughing at the right time at a series of stupid jokes and by occupying space at the end of a series of rounds, she’s pounding Gin and Tonics with the best of them. Four quick pops and a surreptitious move, polishing off the remains of her boon companions leftovers on the bar, she’s ready to navigate the treacherous wasteland spaces separating her and the home planet, blocks away.
Stepping out into the frozen midnight wastes she dimly recognizes the iced over paths of Western Avenue, the poorly lighted moons of Jupiter, the out of control asteroid belts of her life, clouding the spinning navigational screen before her eyes. Unsettled by the weight of the gravity beers, she goes down , crash landing on the ice, a soon to be frozen casualty of the outer space walking expedition, lost in mid-mission.
Calling Emergency #911 doesn’t always help. Somehow, it’s all my fault, who wandered in here from the house kitty corner from the Block that God forgot, was spitting blood all over her apartment now. I said, something to the effect that, “That house had been haunted for twenty years, at least, and that anyone who lived there was subject to the laws of out of control Physics.”
She said,”That’s my roommate, I should have done something about her.” I said, “She had no teeth. I don’t trust raving people screaming about how I stole their teeth, used hot pokers to inflame their brains late at night and that I was an agent for the Devil. I especially don’t trust them when they claim to come from that house.”
I heard, later, that when someone else finally got around to calling #911, she was probably dead or worse and that it was all my fault. And, maybe it was.
I guess, it was like the guy who assumed I was supposed to be an inexhaustible source of a certain kind of useless information. When the noise finished on the infernal jukebox machine he asked me:
“What was that, how many minutes is it and who was the artist?”
“First,if you’re referring to the noise, I have no idea, I wasn’t listening. The blocking mechanism in my brain screens out those kind of messages. Second, if it’s music you’re interested in, I especially like Classical Music, Mozart is very high on my list and I know for sure that, whatever that was,it wasn’t one of his. Much too modern. Lastly, if we’re going to do trivia, let’s do something more interesting like, how many symphonies did Hayden compose? If that’s too tough, let’s try literary trivia, like what do all those initials of famous writers stand for?
I’ll go first Thomas Stearns is the T.S. in Eliot.”
The look he gave me suggested I wasn’t the type of bartender he was used to. In fact, he was looking at me as if I were the legendary bartender he’d heard about for years. The one from another planet.
