"Bar Talk" (pt 3 of 3)

Harbor House Hotel, Salt Spring Island, 1990-something

Anu's girlfriend arrives, Ivana, a real sweetie, young and cute as all get out. Her red-headed pretty girlfriend Zoe in tow with Devon a cousin of one of the island’s more prominent families, fresh from the oil fields of Saskatchewan with a wad of cash and a new 5-litre Mustang and a look and persona that says he is not like most of the other kids his age, he, I think, has a touch of respect, a touch of morality, not unlike his cousins who I know from the softball field. He is related somehow (everybody on this island seems related to somebody down the street or up the hill) to Dave, one of the nicest guys I have ever met and one guy who went out of his way to make me feel comfortable as the new guy on the team; his brother Chris, always friendly, always greeting you with a smile, and the youngest Drew, just like the others, though a little wilder as young kids of 18 or so are now. They have an edge now that has got to be a natural cultural phenomenon as much as anything else and if you think about it, the future is scary.

They sit then move to another table. I fly between the two tables, softball Fred and the two drunken ladies one minute, then Anu, Ivana, Zoe and that table, mad for conversation, caught up in the liquored atmosphere of Friday night Karaoke at the local bar, crowded, ages ranging from 19 to 60, all ages mixed together, just having a good time, no roosters in the barnyard posturing in here, no threat of fists and testosterone, just fun, I'm actually enjoying myself, knowing all the time my ex-wife is at home, my home, my old home, with the guy who came between us and I'm not dwelling on that painful thought, instead I'm deep in conversation with Zoe’s cousin, who has a darker complexion and I notice her and see beauty in an exotic way you don't often see out here in the farming/hippie/redneck community, and we waste our breath on religion as she tells me about the B'hai faith.

"We really take a lot of the good things from all the other religions...bla, bla, bla" she reveals in a serious tone that is purely the product of her young age, a tone that will surely diminish as she gets older and tastes life's illogical insanities that wait off in the dark, like a mugger waiting in the bushes, they will get her too, poor young thing.

I pretend to take her seriously and just wait to get my cynical question in.

"But is there consequence in the B'hai faith? Is there a hell of some kind that waits for those who don't pass judgment?”

"Yes, but no..."

Her explanation I cannot comprehend nor remember much of, except that she was kind and full of wonderful smiles. She did not drink and I regret not speaking with her further but we are interrupted as the Karaoke is over and the lounge is closing so we shuffle to the pub in the back.

Immediately the atmosphere is changed. Edge is prominent, menace hangs thick in the air. You can feel the place all over you. A band called "Auntie Kate" is jamming on the small stage and I recognize many faces among the crowd including the cute little waitress who looks a lot like a girlfriend I once had – a drop-dead gorgeous strawberry-blonde first love who broke my teenage heart, ah life - right before I met my wife (and whom I often dream about – a decade or so later - in the middle of my lonely nighttime tortures), who a few weeks back flirted with me, only to tell me she wasn't "wearing her ring", that she was married, and I said to myself what kind of man sits at home while his wife is out without her ring drinking with other men, many of them lonely, looking for companionship, teasing in an innocent way, some more direct, whatever I thought, how could they do this? Are they that secure? I think I once was but cannot be for sure it seems so long ago.

This place holds more drunks than the lounge and here people are openly inebriated. Many people look down and out, some sit open-mouthed, eyes shut, just passed out in chairs, others crowd the tiny dance floor, the band is almost mute to me as I blast conversation with Stan the "man with the van" who introduces me to what I think is a girlfriend and her friend, and I somehow feel the need to make the comment "he's just as degenerate as the rest of us," to which the taller, prettier one agrees, adding, "and he sells real-estate."

Seconds later, or was it minutes? I can’t tell in these frantic alcohol-fueled music-blasted moments time just accelerates, in any case I find myself face to face with a person who's been an irritation to me for a while now. Vern, a friend of the guy who stepped between my wife and me, and a guy who has become her friend and talks with her regularly, visiting her in my house often, until late at night, and who until this meeting made me really uncomfortable. I had nothing personal against him, just jealous of the time he was able to spend with her, and uneasy at the "friend" scenario, as it was used before and the results were catastrophic to me.

"Listen," he says, averting eye contact, "I don't know you but I think we should clear the air."

I feel immediately better in some weird way. Weeks before in a drunken haze I tried to instigate a fight with him in the bar by repeatedly bumping him, but he did not bite. And in a way I'm glad. With my luck I would have been sued, and my wife, ex-wife, whatever would have hated me even more, and for the little release I would have gotten from feeling the rush of participating in violence only people who do it regularly can explain, it would have backfired and caused more harm in the long run than any stupid "animalistic" release would have provided in the short term. Besides, maybe I get my nose broken or something even more painful and embarrassing.

"Really, I'm glad you came up to me because you know the other week when I was bumping you that was just the alcohol, I'm not like that, I was sort of at one point a long, long, time ago when I had things to prove and all that but I felt really stupid afterward and told her to tell you I wasn't like that and that I felt bad, really." And that was the truth, although my primal ego got off on the fact he wanted no part of me that night.

"I didn't even know it at the time," he says, which I think is total bullshit and a guy’s way of saving face, which he obviously feels he needs to do, being 25 and maybe not quite there yet, but I have no face to save I think to myself and he continues, "I just want you to know me and your wife are just friends, really, she's a great person and really her friend is the one I like."

Whatever, I think, but I'm happy to clear the tension, as I do not enjoy the negative aspects of male possessiveness. It is the center of my shit and I don't need it and spend too much time pondering it and asking the why over and over again, without ever getting close to figuring any of it out.

I try to shed some light and give this Vern some indication that really I'm an OK guy, so I continue, perhaps saying too much and even knowing it as I speak but I go on anyway.

"My problem is jealousy, I'm jealous of the time you get to spend with her, that was my time before and I'm still hopelessly in love with her and I'm miserable and shit happens...but I'm glad you introduced yourself, it'll make life easier for both of us, and maybe even her."

He agrees. I offer to buy him a drink and he says he can't because he's trying to find some people and that he'd catch up with me later. Fat chance. Off he goes. In my jaded paranoiac way I now wonder if it was a set-up or a contrived meeting designed with another purpose altogether. I think of the time a couple of months back when I made the mistake of talking to a girl, a cute little thing and a hell of a softball player - she made a catch on a line drive I hit that most guys would have ducked under, it was screaming and she just casually reached up and snagged it, thing of beauty - anyway, this was the first time in a while I just opened up and told my story, which was known around town anyway because this place is small and the grapevine active. This is something that didn't bother me until the humiliation of having to be felt for and told how sorry people are and the many "oh yeah, I thought so" comments and so on and so on until it began to tear me up and I finally got sick of it, so I tell her, and she immediately tells her best friend, Vern, who then tells my ex, who launches into a tirade about me and my mouth and how our business isn't anyone else's and all I can think of is hey, shit happens, you made the first ripple in the fishbowl honey, not me, and now you may not like, or agree with, or be able to control what people do, say, or think, just ask me about it, I know all about it, in fact if they gave out degrees for this shit I'd have a PH-fucking-D in the field.

So the evening gets more drunken and I see the guy who put together my car about eight years ago, Kyle, card carrying member of the Gunnit Church, and I just ask him out of nowhere about my motor to which he responds, in a complete drunken slur, "Fuck! Shit! Man I don't give a shit about nothin'. I got a 400 horse truck that'll blow the doors off..." the rest of which I block out. Here I stand next to a total drunk whose got an edge about him, and his mouth is moving and nothing's coming out, and I back away slowly until I blend into the blur the room most surely is to his glassed-over sad eyes, eyes that will never know anything but what little this place has to offer, but right now I want his sorry ass outta my face, and I move on.

I find myself talking to another girl I know from softball, a real nice girl who has a reputation people like to bring up when I mention her, and then suddenly my heart stops. There in the crowd is the guy who's A-listed my nightmares for the last nine months and I immediately feel sick, awkward, and a million other things all at once and I curse that someone can do this to me and I wonder what my ex-wife sees in him and wonder how he conned his way into her life. Earlier an older gentleman somewhat well-known in the community, with a high-profile job, told me it was “none of his business” but that he hated that "fucker, when I heard he was your friend and all that, man I just hated him even more...I know he's done this to other people too and the guy's as rotten as they come...bla, bla, bla negative bla."

All of this is blending and weaving now into a continuous stream of images and commentary. I can't think forward and I can't think back, I can't plan and I can't remember, I just move, everything automated, reacting to whatever ends up in front of me.

I appreciated the older guy's company on my side of the fence, but that didn't matter now. He was here now, across the crowded floor, talking to somebody who I like and consider a friend, and now we're in this awkward situation, in the same room, and there he is, the guy I really truly hate, the only person I have ever really hated and nobody knows hate until they are wronged by evil, and that’s him, the guy who makes me physically sick, who not only appears in my waking thoughts all day long but also shows up in my sleep, as my tortured mind wrestles subconsciously in the dark with his overwhelming presence in my life, he, the source of my misery, so what do I do? What do I god damn do? I walk up and blurt out something about buying him a drink. Yeah no kidding, I actually did that. I now know for sure that I am going insane.

I have reached a low so low it was unimaginable to me in previous lives. I realize this and walk away as he tries to explain that he can't drink with me or something like that, but I can't, don't, or won't hear him and walk away in a state of utter confusion.

And then the lights are turned on. Last call is announced. The sad reality the light exposes hits you like a wave of nausea. Sad, drunken people, struggling to the end of their evenings, shuffle about with rough faces and forlorn eyes. And I am one of them. I'm lost now, the evening hits me at once, and once again I am closing the bar and everyone there my age is there for awful reasons and I'm feeling like shit and once again I go home to my empty little place to spend the night longing for what was and remains impossible to recapture. The loneliness is killing me and I know it.

(c) AC James

"Bar Talk" (pt 1 of 3)

Harbor House Hotel, Salt Spring Island, 1990-something

"Just shut up already, get on with your life."

His candor I admired, even appreciated, although I kind of felt like just popping the son-of-a-bitch in the mouth because I'm so sick of the simple answers, but I know he is only doing what he felt I sincerely needed, a kick in the ass in a new direction I suppose, and really, he is my friend and I know that.

"Look," I said, "even though I'm as sick of this whole thing as you are, it's not like I can turn it off like a light switch, it's eating me, just eating me up. Do you really think I'm enjoying this miserable bullshit? Given a choice, I prefer happiness."

"I know you're not enjoying it, but it's all you know now, so you're stuck in a rut. But let me tell you, you're getting used to your role now as the Miserable Guy and you probably don't know it but your whole psyche has taken on that character and on some levels you're getting something out of it."

"You might be right. I guess I'm used to being sad and miserable and depressed and pathetic and all that and now I'm so used to it that I just continue to stay in this miserable space out of habit. Jesus, what a scary thought! Maybe people feeling sorry for me and throwing sympathy my way is where I'm getting the attention now instead of from her and I'm so used to this now that out of habit I just play the game?"

"Don't worry about it," he says looking away.

My head twirls with this new concept. Holy Christ, maybe I'm actually afraid to let it all go and get on with my life without her because the “depressed dude” has become a way of life and maybe I enjoy being patted on the head like a god damn beggar in Bombay? Oh the hell of it all.

"I think you may be getting it. You're not that out of it. You do know what's going on and you know what? I really do think it's all out of your control, you poor bastard."

"At least you realize I'm not playing this part because its fun. I hate this fucking place."

Just then the waitress, Geena, whom I know by name and who knows me by name - a certain feeling of bar status is measured by your casualness and first-name friendship with bartenders and servers, people who work the place, you know the line "where everybody knows your name"...well everybody can know your name in any skid row of any downtown Draino-drinking alley anywhere - anyway, Geena greets us and asks if we'd like another round of drinks and we agree without hesitation.

My mind is not on the drink, the place, the people, but on me, and my miserable situation. I have become the topic, for me and everybody around me, like it or not. I am going through the sad ending of a relationship that on all fronts appears horribly doomed and so incredibly out of synch after being the center of almost half of my time on this planet.

My life has been toyed with by evil. A warning of some kind would have been nice, I feel, the decent thing to do, although looking for decency in the universe is often futile. All I'm saying is maybe I could've seen a sign, like “Speed Bump Ahead”, or more precisely “beware...gigantic cataclysm will appear out of nowhere”. Nothing, nada, zip, zero. All of a sudden she looked at me like I'd stepped in something. And I did. My life. It was my life that was stuck to the bottom of my shoe.

There is a cloud, a dark billowy monstrosity following me and it came at me with the suddenness and ferocity of a massive prairie storm. It came from nowhere, at least I failed to see it coming. Like a tidal wave, the beach was calm, serene even, before the dark gloom rumbled forth from the horizon. Then boom, off the scale madness. Lost, totally lost.

I now feel I can relate in some zen-like way to those little sad laboratory mice. I feel like I've been singled out for an experiment of some kind, somebody or something is studying me, and my fall, one human being so wretchedly ill-prepared for life's peaks and hellholes and I am now the rat in the cage and I know it.

I'm talking with my friend Anu. I respect this guy. He is loyal, and does not make a habit of discussing your business with others. Anu is cool. His walk, his talk, his whole trip is casual cool. The first time I met him he pulled up in his lowered 5-litre Mustang with a thousand-plus watts blasting "Low Rider" to everybody within a two block radius.

He and I are sitting at the Harbour House Hotel, on Salt Spring Island, population around 10,000 and change. We're in the lounge, one of the Island's more popular bars and the one we frequent most. We know everybody here, and we're comfortable. He continues his analysis of my situation, which is the topic most of the time even though I'd give anything to change that fact.

"You," he says looking stern and true and really wanting me to get his point, "need to let go. Kick some ass, man. Forget about everything and go forward."

I listen. I know. I understand what he says, and I have known this for some time now. But I can't stop the feeling and I cannot control my heart which just toys with my emotional being. It's like a Twilight Zone. I'm a Rod Serling character controlled by a sad old puppet master and I'm his sad old rickety puppet, with a torn little jacket.

My life was a good life. Moderate successes, health, family, material things, all the goodies. Then it all turned into a hellish nightmare and almost a year later it continues on its path, without logic, without meaning, without explanation, and I get bitter and more cynical and more jaded as each day passes. I want another drink.

I replenish the alcohol, and turn my attentions to Anu. “I know you're right, believe me I know, but I've tried everything, from drinking myself unconscious, staying up for days on end trying to figure out the whole thing, I've punched doors, walls, trees, whatever in fits of rage and frustration, I've bought her flowers, and hand written cards pouring out my soul, I've put my heart on the table for her, I've drowned in my own tears like I never imagined was possible, I've tried flirting with other women, I've partied and I've been distracted briefly....but it always comes back to her...I can't explain it, and I can't stand it anymore..."

"I don't know what to do man, I'd love to help...like I've said I think a trip to Monty's would help"

Monty's is a strip club in Victoria, and Anu is convinced it would be good for me, but I have a problem with this whole concept. After having a partner for what seems like forever, when it comes to women, love, sex, and that whole world, I now feel like a hungry child, like a poor kid starving for attention, for recognition, for anything. I don't think it's a good thing to take a love-starved lonely broken man and let him see beautiful women dance naked around him. Sorry, but I cannot see the good in this and so I refuse.

I try and explain to my young friend that yes I do like naked women, hell I like all women, naked or not, but I tell him and try to relate to him that I've had a partner steadily for the past decade. Most of the people he knows and most of the people I will party with tonight were watching Scooby Doo and playing with G.I. Joe dolls when I was feeling my first tit and for them the true understanding of sex and love over a long period of time just cannot yet be imagined.

I miss it. Damn I miss it more than I thought I would. I miss it on many levels too, and I try to explain this to Anu who is now using his strip of celery to wipe off the salty rim of the drink Geena has just plopped in front of him.

"Look, I don't want to tease myself," I continue, hoping in some kind of way he doesn't think I'm strange because I do not want to watch beautiful women take their clothes off...but really I don't, "but I've been having sex since you were seven years old...the last decade or so with the same woman...let me tell you practice makes perfect...you know the Kama Sutra and all the sexual-mystical bullshit? Sex is more than getting off, and it can blow your mind in ways you never knew it could."

He agrees with a nod, but I don't think he really knows what I mean and I think he's eyeing a group of locals who've entered the lounge in a loud way. I continue, not wanting to break my little soapbox speech, my passing of the wisdom to the next generation.

"When you really love somebody on a very deep level you can turn physical contact into a god damn experience that rivals any high. I'm telling you four hours of intensity releases endorphins and it opens your eyes to a place you didn't know was there...they didn't bring this up in Health class, they don’t teach you this here in our part of the world, and once you hit this peak you realize how incredible the whole thing can be...never mind your wham-bam-thank-you-mam act....you'll never go back to that boring shit and that's why I will be alone tonight...its a manifestation of love in the highest form and its real.”

He laughs and sips his drink, perhaps really not understanding what I mean, but I know, god do I know, something in me makes me think about it every day now and it torments me to no end. Nothing, even knowing there are girls willing to sleep with me with little or no effort on my part, nothing and I mean nothing can replace what I've experienced and know as the truth and peak of all humanity. The inescapable misery is in the fact I know it's still possible, or at least I think its possible with that person, and that she is only a mile away we still speak and have contact. I am overwhelmed by the intense frustration of knowing what was and what can be and what might be, but not being able to go there anymore is eating me from the inside.

I have realized what many others have and do every day in every corner of this great big planet of sad souls all trying to find the same damn thing...love is the only real pleasure there is in life and once you've been there and felt your soul fill with the indescribable joys of it, you cannot help but feel life without it is a horribly inadequate waste of time...settling for anything less is to live without purpose, or so I feel...so I order another drink, this time a double.

I feel frustrated at the memories of pleasures that are now just that, flashes of the past, pictures in my head, stored next to and among odds and ends, memories countless in numbers, assembled without order, without sense, and I know in my torment among the endless remembrances of the past there are triumphs of the human soul, unbelievable human journeys that I miss so much now in my solitude the subject inspires anger and frustration and I let it out.

"Fuck!” A few heads turn but I don’t care, “you have no idea...and you grow so close to each other...we only stumbled into this over the last year or so...seriously, things just evolved to this other level...and then wham! It’s taken away, stolen from me...imagine thinking more about giving pleasure to your partner than to yourself...you want the other person to feel full ecstatic joy and full physical reactions that release things we don't understand in the brain, you can be the high, you can be the drug, you can inspire things that make the world stop and you can get off and experience pure soul, pure joy, no thought, just pure life....see I don't want some little girl who has no idea or whatever and besides even if she was good and skilled in this area I really feel like I couldn't enjoy it the way I know I can unless there was love involved."

"No shit...” he says, and I can tell I lost him. I just can’t express it and when I try I always end up in a tangle of words, a mess of converging thoughts and the point I am trying to make disappears like a puff of smoke.

The people who befriend you while you're in the depths of turmoil and misery really must be your friends, even if they have their own failures, faults and bad influences, even if they may make your own self-destruction a little easier, there is some kindness of soul in them to let the stranger with the fistful of problems into their own complicated and troubled lives. Why do they even bother? I don't know yet but I hope I can help somebody someday, I hope I can stand to listen to all the wretched bullshit and broken-heart drivel, I know I can't do it now, because I can barely take my own shit.

"Anu...I know I can't force it, I know I can't just jump into something with someone else, if there was someone else I really truly felt would fill the void, but what do I do to bide my time? How do I keep my sanity?"

"I don't know, man," he says, pointing across the room, “look there's that dude with the GTO. He's an idiot but that car is very cool. And you know the worst part is his girlfriend bought it for him."

Once again he changes the subject, for my sake maybe, more for his probably, and I follow. He is pointing at a local, one who is identified by his car, a 1965 GTO. This island has an old-fashioned infatuation with muscle cars, almost a religious-type devotion to fast gas-guzzling cars of decades past.

The people who take on this role are called "Gunnits" in local slang, and some go back a couple of generations on this island. The auto parts store is like the Vatican to them and if you're lucky enough to be in there when the old mechanic brothers are there, in their grease-stained coveralls hanging like papal robes, you really feel special and I mean culturally speaking it's not the symphony or academic kind of stuff but it's pure and real and there really is a gunnit subculture that is as valid in it's enthusiasm and truth as any more heady, snotty sort of hobby like pottery or theatre or art. I know I can talk to any one of them anytime, just talk four-barrel carbs and intake manifolds and headers, and if you have a Chevy it doesn't hurt either, and you've got a nice conversation, not too deep, but as real as any upscale pseudo intellectual talk over tea and biscuits.

"She's cute," I say, motioning to the GTO guy's girlfriend.
"Yeah she's a hottie," says Anu, "and she bought him that car. Damn, he must have done something in a past life to deserve good fortune."

At this moment the thought of good fortune baffles me. Why for some and not for others? What kind of place is this that harbors such imperfections, such imbalances? The muscles in my jaw clench shut as a surge of anger drives through my body. I look at the GTO guy and try not to hate him for all of life's inequities.

(c) AC James