Inebriated

“I’ve lost a lot of life…”

He said to the wooden bar, just as much to me, pausing to take a swig of whatever amber-colored alcohol it was that he’d asked for.

“…to that bitch.”

His voice cracked at the last word. He was far too inebriated at this point to notice how closely I was surveying him.

 

See that’s the reason I became a bartender. Most bartenders will tell stories, and preface them with “the type of shit I have to put up with at work…”, To me though, that’s what makes it desirable. I realized once, the God-like properties of alcohol, and it’s allure to those with broken, bleeding ,and fucked up hearts. I wanted to be there for those people, not to help them (I’m not nearly altruistic), I just wanted to witness it, to study the human heart in it’s worst condition, and without a scalpel.

 

The most apparent thing about him, I thought, was that he was rich. He was wearing one of those suits that you can tell cost as much as your car. I guessed that he was probably in his fifties, judging from the amount of grey in his hair and the wrinkles on his face and hands. His face though, I thought, wasn’t one of a desk riding, corporate big-wig. His hands aided that theory as well, they were rough, blue-collar hands.

 

“It’s the good ones, hurt the worst. The right one you left. The one you had first. You should’a kept.”

 

This, I thought, was the beauty of liquor, and the weakness of the human heart. A man who’s been alive for over half a century, who worked his way into a five-thousand dollar suit, reduced to whispering poetry into a half-empty glass.

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