The men in this bar are by no means unkind. Just quiet. Their hats sit low on their foreheads. Flies buzz around their ancient ears. These men have been ruined, unraveled like an old shirt. Each of them destroyed in turn by the things that they had loved the most. Not by their contempt, nor the crooked hand of misfortune, but by the touch of women and a cold kiss of drink. Ask them for a story and they’ll smile. For what is vice if not love?
Not one among them can claim good looks at this age. The skin of their faces is cracked as stone, their palms grey and peeling.
What is it about this place that calls to such men? What is it about the night that drags them from their homes to meet here, to share one another’s silence? Aside from those buzzing flies the only sound that can be heard comes from above: a wooden fan creaking with every labored revolution. These men had once been poets, playwrights, professors of life; these men had driven through the night in topless cars with topless women, cigarettes wedged between wide grins, bourbon wetting the dash; these men had forced pedals through floorboards, twisting steel with the gravity of their certain will, hollering for no other reason than to holler. How cold the night air had felt against the stubbled cheek. Clear through the breeze they had driven, stopping only when the sky turned that mystic shade at once black and blue, unnameable by even these wise men, these men of forgotten letters.
In faded diner booths they gorged themselves on hamburgers, the radio waves bouncing between their temples. How the drums had pounded then, when everything was new and beautiful and terrifying.
How foolish they were to think it would last.
To have seen these men once, when their joints weren’t so stiff, when their bowels weren’t blocked, when their cocks still worked. The word ‘remarkable’ cannot do them justice. These were heroes. The struggle against death had pumped rocket fuel through their veins in place of blood, the way it had pumped ink into poets and lactic acid into marathon champions. How they had burned!
But each, in time, fell sick, and soon the infected men could no longer rise as they had.
Alarm clock fragments litter their floors. Darkness is their only signal now; but while the black expanse of night had once driven these men to demand the most out of life, it can now only muster a nudge toward the barstool, leaving them perched along the rail like clipped birds of prey. The men do not mind, so long as they can drink. And when the bar closes just past two, they stagger home on fissured bones, looking less like men in their pale grey suits than ghosts drifting across the lawn.