Scum

I saw rows of bikes everywhere and after observing some that looked like the one I had stolen from me, I realized it was no use.

I needed another drink. I wandered some more and finally stumbled upon this alley with nice houses on one side, and a solid brick wall on the other. I’ve passed here hundreds of times throughout the months and really admired the homes. It was only a ten minute walk away from my apartment, but these homes really stirred some emotional attachment in me. They reminded me of my childhood. I knew that it didn’t matter how much money I would ever have, that I would never move into these homes. Though they looked perfect in every sense of the word in my mind, I wouldn’t want to destroy the feeling they evoked in me, and I knew if I lived here and created new memories within this premises then those old feelings would completely disappear.

And just around the corner of the alley, I found myself a bar called Café Pollux. I walked in and right away I felt a nice vibe coming from the environment of the place. I realized instantly that everyone here knew everyone else and everyone here was always drunk. Time stood still here. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t been here before and that it was so close to my place.

“I’ll have a beer,” I told the middle-aged bartender as I took a seat at the bar.

“Big or small?”

“Big. Always big,” I said.

He nodded and poured me one. I sat there, drinking. One after another after another. And after a solid three hours of strictly drinking, I noticed that this place had stayed exactly the same; no one new had come in and no one had left. The bald guy on my right was still talking to himself in Dutch, which felt like he was talking trash to me, but after the first ten minutes I stopped giving a shit. Then there was the younger blonde woman across the bar from me talking to some pale skinned bloke weighing double my weight who had less hair on his head than he ought to have. Then of course there was the sly looking fella on their right who didn’t speak to anyone and just kept to himself. He was miserable with life and it had looked like he had missed work just to come here in the afternoon and stay until it was closing time. He had a thin moustache and an old looking suit jacket. His shoulders hung low, but his eyes were lively. Then there was the beauty queen of the Bay of Bengal. She was the drunkest one in the place and she was hideous, obviously destroyed after years of constant boozing, yet this one drunk geezer kept trying to make any half-decent advancement at her as he could. This geezer was around sixty and a very vigorous drunk. He kept hugging her and then trying to reach in for a kiss on her cheek. She kept resisting but always doing it flirtatiously. It was a bizarre sight up until I was drunk as well. Then it seemed all the more normal and all the more appropriate.

Then after a good number of pints, I asked the bartender, who I occasionally chatted with about random things that came into my head, for some paper I saw lying next to his cash register, and a pen. He gave them to me willingly. I felt a wave of inspiration in this accepting place of lost hope and heartbreak.

I jotted some things down, page after page. I wrote about what I knew and I wrote about what moved me. These people, these places, these honest scum, these maskless whores. Time was the enemy for these people. Alcohol was their friend who made things pass without them noticing. It was a mix of desperation and unwillingness to search for any sort of peace in anything but the glass in their hands.

“A scotch on the rocks,” I told the bartender, not looking up from my page.

“You some kinda writer?” he asked, pouring me my drink.

I finished writing a sentence, paused, and then said, “Some kinda writer, yeah.”

He placed the drink in front of me.