chapter one - familiar feelings
Somehow I find myself back here time and time again. A bar, a hotel or motel or some godforsaken place or another. I’m the typical loner, drifting, drifting. Knowing not where I’m going or where I’ve been. I have no purpose, just move on, move on.
In this bar like a thousand bars before it, I’m viewed with mild curiosity. No. That’s too strong. With a little disgust, pity, acceptance. A familiar sight is the bar fly even the female bar fly. Even the female, fairly young bar fly. Am I fairly young any more? I stopped caring long, long ago.
In this gloom, the mirrored deterioration of intoxication blurring anything recognisable, I down another shot and then another. I don’t even know anymore what it is I am drinking, I can’t taste it and I don’t care. The two other bar flies nod and dip in their barely there consciousness, we have no camaraderie we have no connection. And then I see him.
I have a split second of shock and then am surprised that I am shocked. It is so recognizable that I wonder why I am always taken aback by the appearance of him. Charlie. Oh Charlie. My wonderful, brutal Charlie. He stands in the half-shadow looking at me and shaking his head. He too knows this scene only too well. I half smile as the tears well up. There is love in his eyes but it barely spills past the coldness that has lived there for far too long. Nothing, no history, no shared moment can shake that emptiness. It is this void that destroys, toys, tortures. It is enough to snuff the romance in me. I know what I have to do.
My head bows momentarily as I gather myself. The sobs welling up are neither help nor hindrance. My hand finds a nearby beer bottle, bringing it down onto the bar and with a voice I do not recognise as my own I scream out, ‘Charlie!’
The severed glass finds his throat and his head lolls back, the warm red gushing onto me and I release my tears. I am not crying for him nor for myself. I no longer know who matters in this scenario.
The bar flies barely respond but the bar man does. Before long as I watch Charlie slumped on the filthy floor, oozing his existence into a spreading pool, the lights - blue and insistent - flash outside. They are here for me, as they should be. As inevitable as this scene is, this next one must follow. I smile at my escorts. I throw money onto the bar, a little bit more for the trouble I’ve caused.
In my hotel room I pack my case. My bloodied clothes discarded, freshly showered and sober. I must move on and to where I neither know nor care. Somewhere in a police station puzzled cops are staring into an empty cell unable to recall just who should be incarcerated within. They know something happened, something unusual even for a Saturday night in a dive. But for the life of them they cannot recall what it was.