Pall
Mark Coleman
I sat there nodding agreement
to I know not what in my drunkenness. My chin would drop to my chest then the
whole works would shoot upright again. Like a marionette controlled by a
palsied hand, I struggled to retain consciousness. The banter that flowed from
one end of the barroom to the other staggered me in its wake. My slanted eyes
would struggle to make out an accusation or invitation before the lids would
again descend to pall a troubled dream.
A nameless old-timer approached
the perch on which I contemplated the endless night within. I jostled up and
out at him. A moment of lucidity that nevertheless barred words. How could one
explain the starless void in which I swam, however intermittently? His gray eyes communicated something vaguely
akin to concern. They sent a few tracers down my spine, and I strove
fruitlessly to readjust my frameless glasses somewhat further up my nose. My
index finger slid up and down it as though rubbing away an itch, unable to find
and hook its target.
I’m sure all this would seem
rather comical in one of those blasé dives where youths rendezvous out of
boredom rather than desperation. Here there was finality to even the most
platitudinous of the regulars’ movements and occasional bits of broken speech.
This was an end-of-the-road sort of establishment. A place in which to drink
until you keeled over, and the Devil came with his ice wagon and an order for
collection rather than delivery.
The wizened barfly stood in
front of me with his mottled flesh losing its fight with gravity. He stooped so
far into his glass of ale that you thought he’d drop in like a quarter, and
never surface. His lips drew back from his rotted teeth in some simian attempt
at humanity. “Shot,” he barked out as much to me as the bartender. It was not a
question, but an unquestionable demand. The man thus addressed finished a few
drinks as spiked as iron maidens for patrons at the bar proper before
retrieving the spigot-less well. The nonchalance with which I threw back my
shot convinced the man of some sort of mettle and right, and he moved on. His
eyes trailing behind him like smoke.
The nod resumed in earnest. Disappearing
at every sign of the glimmering of a fish’s scales. Back up, each time, with
nothing but a lingering aftertaste in the beak. French-inhales and German
billows dividing the room in two. A warring of nationality and ideas. Here
where the bucolic meets the bacchant in lackadaisical droop. The bleating and
the whines everywhere at once. A massive
evisceration. The insides spread out like a lifetime of passed-down china,
polished and prepared for entertainment purposes. The guests with their breath
fogging over glasses of mirthful self-destruction. Eyes lowered to the head
that sits in eager anticipation, clouding the gold beneath. Duckweed floating
over everything, webbing vision and dragging mind.
A cackle from the adjacent
table. A middle aged cad pondering the gem his hands had fallen upon. Up the skirt
where they found no resistance. The moan in mid-sentence from a pair of dreary,
painted lips that part with the creak of those floorboards in haunted mansions
and their suburban models. Hangings and stabbings and shootings and screaming
cancers that eat away facial features and youthful beauty. Bed ridden patients
with portacaths and photo albums that seem better than mirrors given the
circumstances. Patched over bullet holes in bathroom ceilings and plastic pints
in water tanks.
Meandering staircases often
mistaken for Jacob’s Ladders in the anxiousness to reconnect. Dreams not just un-realized
but wholly forgotten beneath the weight of sorrow and the never ending funeral preparations,
some of which are for those still technically alive. Bar stools with casters
for the valetudinary tipplers and dipsos. Cherubs strangulated with their own
haloes, asphyxiated by their twice-earned wreaths of laurel. There are tears of
blood on the cheeks of the statue of the Mother Mary.
Leaning on the oak and looking
for reflections where there are only deflections. Barkeeps with one good eye
out of two to take in your sulking, pathetic form as you draw the bones out for
the bottle. Genies on hiatus and sprites weeping over each other’s bodies in
the thickset brush of forest and restive, tender rugs of sward. Black
processions that suck the color from the already fair complexions within them.
Skullcaps solemnly worn and night caps hastily taken.
Anxiously surveying the
dwindling alcohol supply. The wrenching pains beginning in the stomach,
throwing their contortions to the face. Not enough for the night. Not enough
for the morning. And then there are the days beyond. They stand with their
impish grins and sharpened pitchforks. Their tails laid out at your feet like
red carpets to Hell.
