Category: 300

            I didn’t sneak out. It felt like I snuck out. No one did this anymore.

            “What can I get for you,” he asked, in a high-pitched voice.

            “Gray Goose on the rocks,” I answered. It felt like a good order. A strong order that made me not feel like I was skulking away from work mid-day to have a drink, but like I was someone who knew what they wanted from the world, and was taking it, like I was in control.

            “You got it.” I could hear the surprise in his voice. Maybe it was admiration at the solidity of my order. 

            The bar was quiet. The tables were a quarter filled for the lunch hour on a Tuesday. Heads were down digging into tasteless burgers on brioche rolls that were the real star of the show. The occasional beer dotted a tabletop, but most of the diners were too uptight to be caught with more than water with a twist of lemon at lunch.

            The place was neither bright nor dim, neither dirty nor clean. The bartender  personified the confusion of the place. He was bald with a bushy ZZ Top beard. His arms were heavily tattooed and the back of one calf had a skull with crossbones emblazoned on it. He wore a black Harley t-shirt and reading glasses hung around his neck. 

            He’d put them on to enter orders. He was out of place in this place. Or maybe the bar’s confusion was the perfect place for him. 

            It felt like he was a fraud. Just like the bar. But who was I to judge, sitting at the bar in my suit. A suit I wore with disdain because I’d smiled and nodded my way up the corporate ladder. 

            Maybe we were all frauds, just trying to get along.

He stumbled from the bar into the raw, wet night, pulling his jacket tight against him. He didn’t remember the rain. The day had been pleasant, with high blue skies and ample sunlight, which was why he’d entered the bar.

A car splashed past, headlights blinding him. He remembered the smell before he entered the bar: the air was weighted down with the scent of storm. 

He stumbled towards his car, then remembered he’d walked. He reversed course and moved off towards home. His feet carried him across the familiar streets as his mind spun with the Stolis.

He hadn’t meant to have more than three, but that number had doubled as the sound of the rain slapping the ground came through an open door at the back of the bar. He was comfortable there. It was warm, dry.

The bar stank of spilt beer, sweat and dying dreams. He loved it. It was so familiar. It felt like home. 

He didn’t remember reaching his front stoop. He did remember it was no longer his front stoop. He pulled up his hood to block out the night air, and set off towards his hotel. 

There were no lights on the street and the storm clouds had blocked out the moonlight. His feet found puddles in the broken pavement. He didn’t notice the cold.

He stumbled past other drunken revelers. He tried to read the time on his watch and regretted the shot of Fernet that made it illegible. 

Tears filled his eyes. He wasn’t sure why, maybe the cold? He couldn’t stop them. He wiped away the snot and the tears and stumbled onward.

He wished he was in a car. He wished he was home.

He stopped before a blinking sign reading ‘Motel.’ He wondered how he had arrived here.

It was time. Sometimes it took months. Others it was years. This time it was two years. Not bad all things considered.

It would start to come over him, not quite a wave, more a small itch. Despite all his experience, he would ignore the first signs. When he stopped to think about it, it was fear of change that stopped him. He only stopped to think about it after the fact; a fatal flaw he hadn’t yet managed to fix.

By the time he noticed it was too late. He’d be spending his nights in dark bars drinking bourbon and lamenting to Mick or Pete or Ben how “it would be nice to catch the top of the wave a little more often, rather than being stuck waiting for it to crash on me.”

He loved the idea of adventure and travel and new places, but he also yearned to find a place that could hold his spirit for an extended period of time. The idea of change scared him, even though he’d moved enough to know he would thrive wherever he landed.

On those nights when the bourbon burned his throat, he wondered if his restless spirit would ever settle. It felt cliché to think it, but he always felt like his soul was untamable, which wasn’t how he would have described himself, but there it was.

These thoughts came in the third or fourth week of nights in the bar. Not far behind was the nostalgic sadness of the bridges he’d burned on his ways out of other cities. The emptiness inside him would ache and he’d try to fill it and salve it with more bourbon, to little effect.

He would wake the next morning, head aching, lace his sneakers, load the car and run.