One Winter Night in Western Pennsyl-fucking-Tucky, 2012                                  Bob Pajich

 

It was nigger night at my local bar and the regulars were not happy. Three black ladies sat at the open end of the U-shaped bar and played the Magic Touch machine looking dour and miserable, leaning on the old orange Formica, drinking Grey Goose vodka slowly, which is just about the best kind of vodka found there and the only way to drink it.

The women didn’t stay long. The gang of regular ghosts at the closed end of the U, facing the silent television strapped in the corner, erupted as soon as they picked up their coats and left.

“Drinking Grey Goose and no fucking tip,” shouted the bartender. With over-exaggerated anger, she scooped up the glasses then dove in up to her elbows in a sink full of blue disinfectant. She looked like she was trying to drown a cat.

“Hey,” the owner said. “Next time they come in, wash their glasses like this–”

He took an imaginary glass and cleaned it with his armpit, his eyes wide and moustache hanging over a huge smile.

Uncle Billy, in his flannel, a 20-year maintenance worker from a town a few miles away, laughed and pulled his mesh baseball hat down.

“Niggers,” he said, drunk, stupid and happy, sounding exactly the same way when he shakes his head and mumbles “Steelers” to himself after a great win.

The bartender slammed a case of beer down on the cooler top and her hand jumped to her back from a nagging muscle twitch. The bottles shuttered. She ripped the box top open. A piece came off in her fist, chapped from the blue water in the sink and the winter wind, no matter how much lotion she squirted and slathered.

“Fuck,” she jumped, looking at her cracked hands. “I hate niggers.” She stomped her feet for emphasis.

Earlier in the month, a snowstorm keeping everyone away, we downed shot after shot together on the house. One after another. She laughed when I worried about the owner coming in, as he always did, no matter what it was like outside. She punched me in the arm and said, “Don’t worry about it.” On the way in, I re-stuck a sign into the ground that the wind knocked over: “25 Years on the Pike!”

I sat and drank with her for a good two hours of simple conversation. Her kids. My wife, her two jobs, my in-between everythingness. Sitting in a house on a bluff in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania were two human beings getting drunk and nodding and being soft.  She did shot after shot with me and driving slowly home, the tires muffled from all that snow, I felt genuine hope and happiness that sometimes covers my skeleton with honey.

I really don’t respect just how much of a fucking sentimental dope I am. It has cost me over and over, both real money and the other kind.

Now I wished the next Big Bang would start right now, deep in my chest, wiping this place off the galaxy map first. I sit and smolder, clueless, feeling the ashamed fool. Here in this bar in an old house that has a ghost in the basement. Free juke box Mondays. Original ass-hole dipping sauce. Good wings and not the little kind, the big kind.

I had a little less than a pint left so I told Kim to get me another shot of Jack. I knew this was it for the place. I’d miss the shark on the wall in the back and the bowling machine and these dollops of white blubber, the bellies, but not the tobacco smoke and not the anger.

I looked over at Dwayne, the only one here I know who works in the city, a pure alcoholic, his mouth hanging open, looking like he was getting ready to say “we.” Dwayne sat very still, transfixed on the scene. He shook off an inch of ash that accumulated and pushed his empty cocktail glass forward and shrugged. A guy I hadn’t seen before stayed hunched over a plastic basket of wings, his eyes glued to the “ass-hole sauce” that cost 35 cents extra. My guess: Red Hot, Old Bay, garlic salt and onion powder.

Dwayne looked at my shot. He worked at the court house, Department of Court Records, Wills/Orphans division, about 12 miles from here, the center of the city of Pittsburgh.

He shrugged.

Speechless, as always, I gagged down the Kentucky bourbon, poured in a cocktail glass, at least two ounces for the price of one. My jacket was already on my back and I had a fleeting moment, it flashed in my head, like a picture in a View Finder, I’d turn at the door and tell them all off.

The owner is good friends with the only neighbor I really like, a man who I admire from my back porch for sneaking cigarettes from his cardiac nurse wife. He only has one lung.

Of course I didn’t. I nodded at Dwayne and walked out the side door. All that snow that had quieted the world a few weeks before had turned everything into a muddy shit patty.

The insides of my abdomen are coated in rust so old people draw on it with their fingers. The orange dust they knock down has already filled both of my feet and is working up my legs so no wonder I am so tired.

 

Bob Pajich’s first book of poems, The Trolleyman, was published by Low Ghost Press. His work has appeared in many literary magazines, including The New Yinzer, Nerve Cowboy, Chiron Review and elsewhere. His poetry chapbook, Everyone, Exquisite, finished in second-place in Nerve Cowboy’s chapbook contest. Pajich has worked as a community newspaper reporter in towns around Pittsburgh since 1999, and as editor of Card Player Magazine.