2 Bar Stools and Another

The woman was an attractive collection of wrinkles.  She had quit smoking 20 years before but the lines around her mouth still reflected all the long, deep draws that had given her so much pleasure for so many years.  There were lines from a million, million smiles and lines leading to her eyes.  She sat on her bar stool and was an easy laugh for the drunken boys telling stories and cracking jokes she had heard before.  Everyone there knew her name and even knew that that particular stool was her's.  And they knew the one next to it belonged to her brother Earl.

Earl sat beside her with not nearly so many lines.  She was older than him by three years but that didn't explain it.  Earl would have been the perfect poker player.  You could almost never tell what Earl was thinking by looking at him. You couldn't tell his mood and some folks wondered if he even had them.  He heard the same stories and the same jokes and if he thought one was particularly funny, he might purse his lips a little closer together.  But you had to be especially observant to notice.

They sat together every night on those same stools and had done so for years and years.  He usually nursed six or eight beers over the course of the night.  Sometimes, when work had been especially hard, for a whole week when the new plant manager started, he would sit and sip bourbon.  Whether it was the beer or the whiskey, it was a lot for a night.  It was especially a lot when you consider it was every night.

But he paled beside his sister.  Ruth would sit beside him drinking three to four beers to his one.  She would sip for a bit and then take a great gulp and then, when the bottle was running low, she would pull down hard on the last of it with her head turned up and bubbles running back up the bottle.  Some of the boys would buy her shots and she would nail them down one after another. She would eventually make soothing sounds to the one who eventually threw them all back up.  And then she would drink the shot that had been left in front of the poor soul.

That was her life.  Wake up each morning still a little drunk, drink coffee and water at work fighting against the inevitable hangover, and then killing the hangover back on her stool.  The routine varied only in the food - onion rings some nights.  Sometimes the mozzarella sticks.  The chili cheese fries if she was particularly hungry.  Of course she had half a steak and a baked potato slathered in sour cream on Thursday Night Ten Dollar Steak Night - always.  But otherwise it was the same night every night.

This night was different.  Her son sat down from her on the other side of Earl.  She had bought him a shot just to piss him off.  He wouldn't drink it but of course it wouldn't go to waste.  He had come to try to talk her into going to rehab again.  That would be a waste - of time and of effort.  But it was his time and his effort and she had his shot to look forward to so she let him go on.  Earl sipped his bourbon - she would have to remember to ask him about his day.  You couldn't tell that he was listening to them at all even though the words had to slide around him.

All the boy's words (she would always think of him as her boy) all the boy's words were the same and she kept playing with him by trying to change the subject.  She had learned it was better to let him get it all out until he had to start repeating himself.  Eventually even he would get tired of the same reasons and the same assurances and the same platitudes and he would run down and finally tell her that he loved her.  Then he would shake his head at Earl and he would leave.  The whole thing annoyed the hell out of her but she let it pass because she knew he genuinely loved her and wanted what he thought was best for her.  But he had been more fun back in his twenties when he would sit and have a drink with them.

This time played out much the same.  Almost.  He said all the same things and he repeated them all just like all the times before.  But this time he took the shot glass and slammed it down on the floor and the whole bar went silent and Roscoe the bartender had shouted, "Hey!" and had started to come down to their end of the bar.  Earl never raised his left fist from the bar.  He just extended his forefinger and pointed Roscoe back to the other end of the bar.

The boy saw the gesture and it pissed him off all the more, "And you, you just sit there watching her kill herself and you don't do a damn thing about it!"

Ruth found her voice, "I'm a grown ass woman you little shit.  What exactly do you think he is going to  do, Jimmy?"

The boy looked at her and then quickly back to Earl.  "You enable all this.  She can't hit rock bottom because you keep catching her and propping her back up! If you actually gave a damn, you'd put her out of your house and get her off that damn bar stool!"

Earl never looked at the boy.  He always thought of him as a boy too.  Earl had changed his diapers and had bounced him on his knee and picked him up from school and had watched him puke when he had stolen one of Earl's bottles of Beam.  Earl just lifted his glass to his lips.  But the boy grabbed his wrist and the liquor sloshed up to his nose and dripped down his chin.

"Don't sit there getting drunker and drunker while I'm talking to you old man!"

"Jimmy," Earl replied, "I get that you are upset.  You see your mama drinking herself to death and that gets you one pass.  But I am an old man.  I ain't got time for bar fights and rolling around on a dirty floor with somebody.  You just might be able to kick my ass, maybe.  I doubt it, but maybe.  But, boy, I will hurt you permanently while you are busy kicking my ass.  I swear I will bite something off and you won't ever get it back unless you pick it out of my shit.  Now get your damn hand off of me."

The boy slowly removed the hand.  There really wasn't any fear on his face.  But there was embarrassment that had seemed to cut through his anger.  "I'm...I'm sorry Uncle Earl.  I shouldn't have done that."

Ruth was still quiet and Earl simply looked the boy in the eye and nodded.  The apology was something.  He was at least a good boy and Earl felt a certain amount of pride at that.  Ruth had never been much of a mother and she had never told anyone who the boy's father had been - if she even knew.  Earl had had no idea how to be a parent but he had tried to get the boy to be accountable for his actions.  And that thought, the idea of accountability, made Earl take a deep breath.

"Boy, if I was here or not, she would still be on that stool."

"Hello! I'm sitting right here - you ain't going to talk about me like I ain't even here."

Earl looked at his sister.  She started to say something to him and he leaned his head to the left and brows came together just enough to show he was getting angry and she turned back to her beer.

Earl turned back to the boy,"She ain't ever going any where but from that stool to bed to work and back to that stool.  She's gonna do it again and again until she leaves that stool and goes to the grave.  I come here with her.  I make sure she don't get robbed or raped or killed.  I make sure she don't freeze to death in the winter and I make sure she eats something at least once a day.  I know she's killing herself - it may be slower than a bullet but I still can't stop it and you can't either.

But you keep trying.  It is what a good son does.  You  try to stop the bullet.  I'm just doing my best to make sure she don't die alone.  Neither one of us has it easy."

The boy sat there with his mouth just a bit open and that squint a man gets when he is trying to hold onto a tear.  He finally closed his mouth and turned to the other end of the bar, "Roscoe, how much do I owe you for the shot glass?"

Roscoe shook his head and waved his bar towel at him.  The boy left and gradually sound returned to the bar.  Earl took a sip of this bourbon and looked up at the game on the silent television.

"You really think that?  You really think I am just sitting here every night killing myself? What the hell does that make what you're doing?  How are we so damn different?"

Earl never looked down from the game and took another sip of his drink.

Ruth found she had to swallow a little harder that normal.  "Well then," and she took a deep breath, "Roscoe, let me try one of those bourbons."

Stray Thoughts - Haven't Done This in a While

Baked Walking Dead

Never thought of this before after reading a whole lot of the Walking Dead comic books and watching every episode of the TV show.  But this idea has finally struck and won't let me go.  All kinds of folks and societies have sprung up following the zombie apocalypse. But there has not been a story, to the best of my knowledge, a single story about a pot head who has hit the mother load. 

 Why didn't a hard core pot head go around to his dealer and take that stash and go to his dealer's supplier and take that stash and then go to the supplier's, um, supplier and come away with, like, 800 pounds of pot?  You just have a guy in a bomb shelter with case after case of Doritos (or which ever company is willing to tie itself to chronic drug use by paying for product placement in a post-apocalyptic television show) smoking weed with an AK-47, giggling his ass off while Negan twirls Lucille around and round?

And I thought of that having never smoked marijuana in my life. I know.

Really, Really Good Underwear

So I found this underwear by Reebok that is amazing!  It is a type of boxer brief made of breathable material that, honestly, is so panty like that a cross dresser would plotz over these briefs.  But it minimizes moisture accumulation in a sensitive area, I never have to clear the area, and I never have to adjust the mechanism any more, if you know what I mean.  They are a super expensive junk support technology that I love. I don't think Reebok will ever use this bit as an endorsement on their website but I LOVE their product.

A Jigger is 1.5 Ounces

One of the things that you do on Weight Watchers is measure most everything that you consume.  To that end, I had to learn, prior to consuming my favorite bourbon, just how many ounces were in the large side of a jigger.  To do that, what do you think I did?  Yep.  Googled it.  (As and aside, I am shocked that "Googled" is a word that this blog site does not underline in red as a misspelled word the way it did "misspelled" the first time I typed it ).

Back to the stray thought.  I had to Google "jigger".  I must have done something wrong.  And the search engine, Google, does not offer a red line.  So I guess I screwed up.  I was shown all these websites for Alt-Right websites.  Wonder what I typed?

Fear of Racism

So I am one of those white people who is afraid of being considered racist.  Like, if I make eye contact with a black person as I get out of my car and then lock my car, I wonder if that person thinks I am racist.  

But I am at least a little racist.  All white folks are.  And I think you can make an argument that all races are a little.  I know that the argument is that only white folks have enough power to implement their racism into a political reality.  But I also know that a big black dude who thinks you said something other than the word "jigger" at the bar will beat the living fecal matter out of you because he is predisposed to think of you as an oppressive prick based on a few hundred years of oppressive white prickishness.  

But a lot of white people are afraid of being considered racist.  Especially a lot of racist white folks.

Really Weird Religious Thought

There is a passage in the Bible that says that the church, the totality of believers, are the bride of Christ.  I have had this odd thought since I was a pre-teen about that.  What if that means that humanity was meant to be a companion to God?  Yeah.  Weird.  But listen.

Humanity is screwed UP.  Like, we are not the girl you would marry.  As Rick James famously sang,  we are not the "kind you take home to mother."  But there is an example in the Bible of a guy who not only married that type of chick, but was COMMANDED by God to deal with her issues.  God literally commanded Hosea to marry a prostitute. Yep.  Prostitute.  And  a prostitute who grew restless with the married life and cheated on her husband multiple times and each time he took her back and forgave her.  Sound familiar to ya, my church reared friends?

So my thought, one I don't really believe, is that humanity as a whole will become a single entity that is the ultimate companion of God.  I think that is the most hippie thing I have ever thought.

People Change

They just do.  No matter the smart ass saying and no matter the years of who they were before.  People change.  You can't be a Christian and not understand that.  People change because they are changed.  

Lessons and Repercussions

My mama was scared for us.  My daddy provided the lesson.  My mama always wanted us boys to find something stable. My brother Mark found the United States Postal Service and I found Walmart.  Both of these places of employment will be around far longer than our need of them.  My daddy could not stand the idea of having a boss.  He never told us that.  He just lived it and let Mama tell us about it.

He started a sawmill and pallet making company with a friend and it never really went any where and then lit up the sky from Douglas, Georgia to at least Alma, Georgia in a fire.  You have Googlemaps like the rest of us and can look that distance up or you can consider my considerable skeptical pride in the fact that a substantial portion of my youth went up in a pyre that would have made all the kings of antiquity jealous.  It was a GLORY.  

Daddy started a trucking company on his own that left him with less than nothing. Literally.  There was no profit and the debt he had to leave behind was amazing if not exactly glorious.  It just didn't take his money.  It took a chunk of his pride and maybe a bit of his soul.  

We boys never graded him on economics.  But he judged himself by it.  And it hurt him and that hurt me.  The man taught me to think.  He regretted that too sometimes and enjoyed it at others.  He was a challenge as a husband.  I never realized that until I noticed that some of the qualities I share with him have made Priscilla purse her lips.  And he had his faulstsas a father just like all fathers do.  But he loved my brothers and me the best way he knew how.  

Told us once when I was already a teenager that he realized that he had never hugged us often. He was an orphan until he found family with Mama and so hugging was not a nature for him.  So he explained he would hug us from time to time as the thought struck him whether there was a reason to or not.

He taught me to be irreverent.  So few people are.  And almost all of them chuckle at those of us who are.  And people need to chuckle.  Sometimes desperately so.

He told me once that he liked talking to me.  That I did not look at the world the way everyone else does.  That was awesome.  And as good a place to end this as any.