If
the ALEWIFE ever had life it was dead now. It was like walking into a damaged
lung. It was a dark and dingy crevice stained in nicotine. The owner of this
‘lung’ had pretensions of making his bar a respectable place but his patrons
were sure to make him fail. The dirty, amber light made the walls heave like a
large man in mid-July which must have caused the slow peeling off of the rancid
wallpaper, itself, 20 years out of style. It was as if the wall were doing it a
favour. It was a prison and, like most of them, sadly occupied.
The man made his way into the bar with a sense of self-consciousness written all over his puffy, ruddy face. He had been on the wagon a full six months to this particular day so he felt a heavy conspicuousness even in his attempt to keep a low profile. If he was even seen briefly it would raise suspicions. But no worries with this crowd. Hardly a head rose from the drinks. All the same, he knew it was important not to be seen drinking vast quantities these days. There was a whole new generation that frowned on such a thing. They even had a name for it: Alcoholism. But despite his attempt at stealth, this was the seventh bar he had patronized today.
His first stop this Sunday was ‘Our Lady of Immaculate Grace’ where he took a sip of the communion wine. Yes. A sip of the sacred blood of the Redeemer reinvigorated a thirst that he managed to stave off for a full half a year. He never did take the body. At fifty, he was a man for whom life had given up on because he had given up on it. He kept up appearances, putting on the brave face to strangers and non-strangers alike but this was less hiding pain than it was a poor actors attempt at pretending it was not there. Even on those days when he managed to muster an articulation of his pain, as he had with his Priest this morning, he never heard the advice because he was already in a hazy daydream at the bottom of a glass. Looking through the bottle of a glass was a fantastical thing for him. He could feel the booze run through his veins the way spilled water in the dessert finds the sun-cracked arteries of scorched earth and rushes to fill them. As the booze worked the magic, he would peer from the bottle of the glass reveling in his world made softer and rosier by the optic of the thick glass.
No lesson was ever absorbed. But his body was absorbing something, right then and there on the patched and peeled cushion of the barstool as he finished his last few drinks. These were the ones that gave him the courage to go home. He headed out the door into the harsh spotlight of the sun and stumbled on his way. It was a stumble only the inebriated can make. Despite the manner that seemed to scream that all energy of thought was put in to it, his gait was one where his torso seemed to precede his legs whereby his legs, like small children with a parent, proceeded to catch up to the rest of the body. He looked like a pathetic martyr carrying a cross too heavy to bear. But rather than a stigmata on the palms, this afflicted thing that so sacrificed himself for the bottle, was stigmatized with newly healed slashes right on the underside of both wrists.
The wife was taking a bath. Six months older than he, she was up to her breasts in bubbles and looked a vision. She piled her dry hair high on her head like a beautiful nest which showed all of her slight, heart-shaped jaw line and swan-like neck. There was the faintest sort of blue-grey vein running up the side of the neck that was appealing. One would not have wished it anymore prominent or any fainter. She had a working-class beauty but it was beauty nonetheless. Despite her grace, it seemed obvious this was a woman for whom the only pampering life granted her was this bath. The man, wholly inebriated, barged in, like most drunks, with good intent, but none of the grace to match. His eyes went straight to the vein in her neck.
“Jesus Christ, I don’t believe it!” she exclaimed at once.
The jig was up the moment he turned the corner of the bath door.
“Be-Be-Believe what? How are ya?” he asked cheerfully in that poor actors way of his.
“Did you not think it would be this obvious?” she asked incredulously.
”What?....But…I’m”
“Drunk!” she screamed. It was better to finish the sentence for him. The actor sometimes had to have his lines fed to him.
“I only had a few”
“Believe what? Believe what? Oh! Only that I’m sitting here with the lovely scents of petunia and now you walk in and it all of a sudden smells like a fucking petroleum factory in here!”
The lies of a drunk. This was not necessarily by deceptive design. He was in no state to even be that clever. He was lying but so many unformed thoughts swam around in his booze soaked head that it was hard for him to make any sense of what he could get away with. Subtlety was dead. Drunkenness does not make you lie. It just makes you incapable of the cunningness necessary to know what will work. It was an unfair fight and she knew it. But possibly due to the fact that nakedness can make a person feel vulnerable, there was something in her that would not hesitate to go in for the kill if she needed to. For a moment or so there was silence. But the silence only made him feel awkward and he started to feel the same feeling when he walked into the bar. A guilty sadness welled up like thick air. He searched for something to prove well-meaning but all he gave her was a confusing non-sequitar.
“Lo-Lo-Look. We’re both in-in-in the same boat”, he stammered sadly.
This wasn’t washing with her. She pounced.
“Same boat?” she said quietly with a mock smile. “Same boat?”
Then she screamed with intent. “The only boat we’ve shared is this fucking bath!”
She sank back down again and quieted her voice. She did add in a whisper, “Only not as often.”
He missed it anyway but she felt a shiver of guilt.
His own self-pity rose to a crescendo. He attempted to raise his voice.
“You don’t gotta be sarcastic”, he whimpered, “I’m trying”.
He then stumbled past the door. She stopped the discussion there. He had tried for six months. Only there were a handful of six month failures. She thought of all the ways he might get help all the times he desperately needed it but he always tried it alone. So very alone.
She wrapped herself in her terrycloth robe hiding the once subtle vein that now throbbed with intensity. It was no longer as beautiful because it was no longer easy to miss. She left the bathroom a little shortly after and found her husband, a crumpled wreck on the couch. His torso was slumped over on the side yet he managed to keep each buttock also planted to the cushions and the soles of his feet flat on the floor. This man just could not seem to keep his body parts congruent with each. Drunks can bend all the wrong ways but never the right way. She was unfazed by the sight. She slowly sauntered to the couch with intentions of making him more comfortable. The anger had already shed away and she was filled with a resigned melancholy. But she was already sympathetic. Before picking his head up, she pulled the church program from his pocket which brought with it a stray bottle cap that fell to the floor with a small ping. She glanced at both of them. She lay the program on it’s side and with slight intent gave the bottlecap a small kick sending it a few feet from where it landed. She then took her husbands head and, with a bit of forced grace, slid herself under it like an overgrown child sliding into a small school desk. His head rested uneasily but unmoving on the side of her thigh. They looked like a modern day “Pieta”.
She looked like the grieving but resigned Mary under the dead man. She sat like this for many minutes absently stroking his hair as she whispered to herself,
“Maybe you oughta go alone. Maybe you should just go alone”.
Then in a strange moment, she slowly started thinking about a picture she saw on the church walls once in her past. It was a painting of the risen Christ with a few of the apostles. The central depiction was the doubting apostle Thomas in slight bemusement sticking his index finger into Christ’s wound on his abdomen, Christ looking on with the gentle intention of alleviating Thomas’s skepticism. Thomas’s finger in the wound resembled a a mother's as she might attempt to extract a foreign object from a child's mouth. She sat with a pondersome look on her face, her brow slightly furrowed, searchingly and longingly, peering straight ahead. As she sat in the rapt contemplation of her own minds musing of the painting, staring nowhere, she was unaware that she was sticking her index finger into her husband’s mouth slowly making him vomit in his own mouth stopping up his breathing.
The man made his way into the bar with a sense of self-consciousness written all over his puffy, ruddy face. He had been on the wagon a full six months to this particular day so he felt a heavy conspicuousness even in his attempt to keep a low profile. If he was even seen briefly it would raise suspicions. But no worries with this crowd. Hardly a head rose from the drinks. All the same, he knew it was important not to be seen drinking vast quantities these days. There was a whole new generation that frowned on such a thing. They even had a name for it: Alcoholism. But despite his attempt at stealth, this was the seventh bar he had patronized today.
His first stop this Sunday was ‘Our Lady of Immaculate Grace’ where he took a sip of the communion wine. Yes. A sip of the sacred blood of the Redeemer reinvigorated a thirst that he managed to stave off for a full half a year. He never did take the body. At fifty, he was a man for whom life had given up on because he had given up on it. He kept up appearances, putting on the brave face to strangers and non-strangers alike but this was less hiding pain than it was a poor actors attempt at pretending it was not there. Even on those days when he managed to muster an articulation of his pain, as he had with his Priest this morning, he never heard the advice because he was already in a hazy daydream at the bottom of a glass. Looking through the bottle of a glass was a fantastical thing for him. He could feel the booze run through his veins the way spilled water in the dessert finds the sun-cracked arteries of scorched earth and rushes to fill them. As the booze worked the magic, he would peer from the bottle of the glass reveling in his world made softer and rosier by the optic of the thick glass.
No lesson was ever absorbed. But his body was absorbing something, right then and there on the patched and peeled cushion of the barstool as he finished his last few drinks. These were the ones that gave him the courage to go home. He headed out the door into the harsh spotlight of the sun and stumbled on his way. It was a stumble only the inebriated can make. Despite the manner that seemed to scream that all energy of thought was put in to it, his gait was one where his torso seemed to precede his legs whereby his legs, like small children with a parent, proceeded to catch up to the rest of the body. He looked like a pathetic martyr carrying a cross too heavy to bear. But rather than a stigmata on the palms, this afflicted thing that so sacrificed himself for the bottle, was stigmatized with newly healed slashes right on the underside of both wrists.
The wife was taking a bath. Six months older than he, she was up to her breasts in bubbles and looked a vision. She piled her dry hair high on her head like a beautiful nest which showed all of her slight, heart-shaped jaw line and swan-like neck. There was the faintest sort of blue-grey vein running up the side of the neck that was appealing. One would not have wished it anymore prominent or any fainter. She had a working-class beauty but it was beauty nonetheless. Despite her grace, it seemed obvious this was a woman for whom the only pampering life granted her was this bath. The man, wholly inebriated, barged in, like most drunks, with good intent, but none of the grace to match. His eyes went straight to the vein in her neck.
“Jesus Christ, I don’t believe it!” she exclaimed at once.
The jig was up the moment he turned the corner of the bath door.
“Be-Be-Believe what? How are ya?” he asked cheerfully in that poor actors way of his.
“Did you not think it would be this obvious?” she asked incredulously.
”What?....But…I’m”
“Drunk!” she screamed. It was better to finish the sentence for him. The actor sometimes had to have his lines fed to him.
“I only had a few”
“Believe what? Believe what? Oh! Only that I’m sitting here with the lovely scents of petunia and now you walk in and it all of a sudden smells like a fucking petroleum factory in here!”
The lies of a drunk. This was not necessarily by deceptive design. He was in no state to even be that clever. He was lying but so many unformed thoughts swam around in his booze soaked head that it was hard for him to make any sense of what he could get away with. Subtlety was dead. Drunkenness does not make you lie. It just makes you incapable of the cunningness necessary to know what will work. It was an unfair fight and she knew it. But possibly due to the fact that nakedness can make a person feel vulnerable, there was something in her that would not hesitate to go in for the kill if she needed to. For a moment or so there was silence. But the silence only made him feel awkward and he started to feel the same feeling when he walked into the bar. A guilty sadness welled up like thick air. He searched for something to prove well-meaning but all he gave her was a confusing non-sequitar.
“Lo-Lo-Look. We’re both in-in-in the same boat”, he stammered sadly.
This wasn’t washing with her. She pounced.
“Same boat?” she said quietly with a mock smile. “Same boat?”
Then she screamed with intent. “The only boat we’ve shared is this fucking bath!”
She sank back down again and quieted her voice. She did add in a whisper, “Only not as often.”
He missed it anyway but she felt a shiver of guilt.
His own self-pity rose to a crescendo. He attempted to raise his voice.
“You don’t gotta be sarcastic”, he whimpered, “I’m trying”.
He then stumbled past the door. She stopped the discussion there. He had tried for six months. Only there were a handful of six month failures. She thought of all the ways he might get help all the times he desperately needed it but he always tried it alone. So very alone.
She wrapped herself in her terrycloth robe hiding the once subtle vein that now throbbed with intensity. It was no longer as beautiful because it was no longer easy to miss. She left the bathroom a little shortly after and found her husband, a crumpled wreck on the couch. His torso was slumped over on the side yet he managed to keep each buttock also planted to the cushions and the soles of his feet flat on the floor. This man just could not seem to keep his body parts congruent with each. Drunks can bend all the wrong ways but never the right way. She was unfazed by the sight. She slowly sauntered to the couch with intentions of making him more comfortable. The anger had already shed away and she was filled with a resigned melancholy. But she was already sympathetic. Before picking his head up, she pulled the church program from his pocket which brought with it a stray bottle cap that fell to the floor with a small ping. She glanced at both of them. She lay the program on it’s side and with slight intent gave the bottlecap a small kick sending it a few feet from where it landed. She then took her husbands head and, with a bit of forced grace, slid herself under it like an overgrown child sliding into a small school desk. His head rested uneasily but unmoving on the side of her thigh. They looked like a modern day “Pieta”.
She looked like the grieving but resigned Mary under the dead man. She sat like this for many minutes absently stroking his hair as she whispered to herself,
“Maybe you oughta go alone. Maybe you should just go alone”.
Then in a strange moment, she slowly started thinking about a picture she saw on the church walls once in her past. It was a painting of the risen Christ with a few of the apostles. The central depiction was the doubting apostle Thomas in slight bemusement sticking his index finger into Christ’s wound on his abdomen, Christ looking on with the gentle intention of alleviating Thomas’s skepticism. Thomas’s finger in the wound resembled a a mother's as she might attempt to extract a foreign object from a child's mouth. She sat with a pondersome look on her face, her brow slightly furrowed, searchingly and longingly, peering straight ahead. As she sat in the rapt contemplation of her own minds musing of the painting, staring nowhere, she was unaware that she was sticking her index finger into her husband’s mouth slowly making him vomit in his own mouth stopping up his breathing.
