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.
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