Nurse the Hate: Hate St. Patrick's Day

1) He stood in the long line to get into the Irish Bar.  The bar was a shit hole.  The owners kept it going just to cash in on St. Patrick’s Day.  Everyone in the area felt it was authentic to go to a place called Sullivan’s on St. Pat’s, as if this grim little tavern was somehow magical due to the Irish American descent of a long forgotten past owner.  The current owners were of Polish descent, last names an impossible array of consonants.  He had seen the young man behind the bar a few years previously hit a 25-foot jump shot as a Gannon College guard to impossibly beat Georgetown by one at the buzzer.  Now he struggled to fill an unquenchable thirst for green draft beer in small plastic cups.  His fingers were stained green from dropping the food coloring into the Stroh’s coming off the assembly line run by his older brother and mother.  This was a long way from that Georgetown buzzer beater…

2)  He went to the parade with his friends from school, all of them too young to drink legally.  They crammed themselves into a downtown bar where the girls convinced some men to buy them beers at the bar.  The men grew visibly irritated when they learned the girls were not unaccompanied and they would have to buy beers for him and his friend lest they appear too transparent in their motivations.  Horrible music blasted well past the limits of the sound system, the distortion from the overhead speakers making conversation almost impossible.  One of the men dismissively handed him the beer he had paid for and turned his attention back to the girls.  He drank the cup of beer with his elbows pushed in to his sides, the crush of people in the bar making any movement impossible.  They went to the parade.  It was cold and windy.  High school bands marched past proudly.  Black hustlers from the inner city hawked plastic derby style hats and blinking shamrock buttons.  Teenagers lurched on the sidewalks, drunk well past their previous experience.  They tried to get into the “cool bars” later.  With no fake IDs, both he and his friend were stopped.  Despite no IDs either, the girls were waved in.  The girls ditched him and his friend, laughing at the lark of it all as the crowd swallowed them up. 

3)  As an attempt to distinguish himself from the other “great unwashed” that crammed into his usual local watering hole, he ordered Black & Tans.  Though he didn’t especially care for the taste, he believed this would make him appear more cosmopolitan.  This seemed optimistic at best, as his Philadelphia Eagles jersey he wore was his only green item of apparel.  This shirt did not suggest a young life being spent traveling the British Isles.  Fate smiled on him though as a young woman in a green top hat noticed the bartender preparing his Black & Tan, and they struck up a conversation.  She was quick witted and confident.  They bought each other Black and Tans.  They left the bar together under the guise of getting something to eat at the nearby gyro cart.  It was swamped with almost comatose college students hoping the garlicky sandwich would soak up their poor judgment from earlier that afternoon.  Without further discussion, he walked her to her apartment.  She lived in a second floor walkup above a downtown boutique.  She sat him down on her couch and walked to her bedroom down to hall with the clichéd promise to “slip into something more comfortable”.  This was the first chance he really had to look at her clearly.  Her body was well out of what he had considered to be his league.  She was beautiful.  He waited for her to emerge from the bedroom.  Time sluggishly clicked off on her kitchen wall clock.  It seemed she had been gone forever.  He slowly walked down the hall asking if she was OK.  There was no response.  He opened her bedroom door.  She lay on her back on the bed with her feet on the floor.  She was passed out.  He kissed her on the forehead and walked out the door, making sure it was locked behind him.  He never saw her again.

4)  He worked in a job that placed him in bars on St. Patrick’s Day managing beer promotions for the rock radio station.  Many of his co-workers joined him at the bar that afternoon for the promise of VIP treatment and free beers on the station.  One of the young salesmen from the station was crippled with the insecurity of having to constantly prove he belonged with the crowd.  The Salesman was the one that did too many shots, shot off his mouth too often, and bragged about questionable exploits.  Not surprisingly The Salesman started doing shots upon his arrival.  The Salesman sought out female co-workers and did shots with them all.  The Salesman was a big man, and though still in his early 20s The Salesman bore an odd resemblance to the Browns current head coach.  He saw The Salesman starting to fall off the rails, but thought nothing of it.  The atmosphere would help his deteriorating behavior go unnoticed.  Well, until he noticed The Salesman standing against the bar facing the crowd in the room with his pants unzipped and his penis hanging out of his pants.  The real issue was not so much that the penis was out flapping around.  No, the real issue was that many people in the bar had noticed and were pointing at him, yelling much like if a dangerous African mammal had strutted into the room unexpectedly.  The Salesman was whisked out of the room by bar security.  He spent the rest of that St Patrick’s Day explaining to the bar owner that this was an isolated incident that didn’t bear any further conversation and could be swept under the rug without further adieu.  There was no reason to call station management to talk about The Salesman and how his prescription medicine had unfortunately interacted with a friendly drink provided by a stranger.  Why perhaps that drink had been laced with something? (As if a young woman wanted to take advantage of a balding overweight man in his twenties…)  The bar owner settled down and The Salesman later passed out in the lobby of an apartment complex, though not before calling station management himself to confess to the horrible crime.  His time at the radio station would quietly end shortly afterward.