‘The fuckin’ thing won’t go’.
The stink had only worn off the morning and already Alby was having a day he would class a ride-off. The hereditary pinch on his brain stem had its grip as tight as it ever would, the path of last nights tornado still lay across most of the floor as it seemed sure his subconscious self was hell-bent on knocking all his treasures off their pedestals of ‘as new’ and the soup of too much loneliness, those clammy skins of depressants and stimulants, still furnished the place better than he ever could.
He torched another and tried to turn the bastard over again. Just the endless click of the ignitions electric tongue, taunting and frustrating, the agony of a little girl waiting for an in to skip rope. Waiting for the wave of stunted perpetual motion that was the internal-combustion engine, the miracle of our time apparently. Why couldn’t the motherfucker conk on a work day?, he thought, smoking the butt like it was a straw out of an ant hill.
Though for once he was glad for some usual rough-luck. The perforations in his windshield and the ice-licked air, as there was nothing worse than climbing into the fog cage in the blazing heat. The cold bit on you just nice and gave the satisfaction of a deodorant or breath-mint commercial. Though catching his knuckles, themselves having caught a wall or refrigerator in the bedlam that were now his nights, it stung like bleach.
Stubbing the butt and firing another he slumped back into the tattered drivers seat. From the outset his options were frighteningly limited; he’d broken one neighbour’s jaw and broken the others will, he’d shorn enough wing-mirrors off friends cars that he wouldn’t get a loner no matter how deep in crisis he was and anyone with enough old-world wisdom knew to leave their cars but not their keys around Alby.
Under the stress, under it all, Alby felt the rattle within him. He took the rattle and could only accept it under the bandied around promise that he would stay sober on the weekdays the following week, or the week after excepting nights with football. Football and beer were too good a match to abandon. One was never quite as good without the other. But it was these kind of promises, whether honoured or not, that kept him from turning into a real drunk.
He slammed the wheel with his palms and the reverberation sat with him. Amongst it he fished the second last from the pack and torched it. He tried to think of another way, but couldn’t. He tried harder to think of a reason why not, but finding that was harder still. There was almost nothing in that crowd but reasons why.
Turning to the overweight grey-haired woman sitting patiently in the corner of his eye she just said ‘have one, have ONE’
And to the bespectacled man on the bridge of his nose he just said ‘whatever makes it easier’
Then a child with blonde hair blanketing her small head huddled in his biggest pore ‘you are a bad man when you drink, maybe you are just a bad man’.
The consensus was clear. Alby fondled a warm beer from the half-drained slab. He thought more on the crowd and then cracked it. He took a long pull from it and felt it stretch his skin, many small hands pushing it out to how it looked in his twenties. His brain bit on him, he knew it wouldn’t help him start the car but it would make him more OK with the car not starting.
He took another pull and felt that feeling that had got him started in the first place. That his lungs had just started pulling in nourishment, that all that sleep had replenished him, that his heart was pumping around pure sunshine. It was the feeling that all the drunks on struggle streets around the country had and not a one had learned the trick to living in that little pocket.
On the third pull he felt the warmth and sat the can on the ridges of the sink. Alby thought about pouring it down the plug hole, but knew more than most that this was not how one acted in a liquid economy. He slid into the bathroom and took a shot of toothpaste and then went next door.
His neighbour, who’s jaw had met with his fist, seemed the more reasonable option. He was cut from old cloth, like Alby. Physicality didn’t bother men like that, of guts and gristle, grudges were not held. Alby actually admired him as one of a dying generation and wished it had never come to what it had, though it probably made a lot more sense when he was leathered.
He brought a busted fist to the door for a gentle knock that stung with the cold. Those doors opened by enemies or loathers took a solar age to swing open and were typically not that pleasant when they did. But to Alby- the career drunk, the perpetual apology machine, the decadent derelict who could only snub regrets by birthing more, there were harder rows to ho.
What could he do to protect what was left of his teeth? Figuring, with some precedent, that a fist would fall through the threshold before a syllable. What was he even doing here? He hated all those cunts who knocked on his door when they needed something but didn’t want to know him when the sea was calm. He was one of them now but it was of a deeper desperation than had never fired in him before, he didn’t have anywhere to go, but somewhere to be.
The robust and quickening thuds of a big mans footsteps were briefly interrupted by the penny-arcade revelry of an animated fire-truck and was quickly extinguished by a slide to the wall. The footsteps, frustrated and staggered, moved on.
Alby held his jaw ajar with his lips sealed, hoping there was enough horizontal play to let it absorb the frying pan fist. He reconsidered and tightened every muscle, his teeth tight together. He reconsidered again.
The door swung open.
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