Bobby got off work at the restaurant at 9 p.m. after finishing his 5th straight 10-hour shift. He headed for “The Chuck,” a bar he liked, because the bar served draft beer in 16-ounce milk shake glasses.
He had a powerful thirst.
Dim orange wall lights lit the dark barroom. Bobby lucked out, getting a stool at the crowed bar.
The Boston Red Sox baseball game was playing on the TV. Bobby had always followed baseball, right up until the last year or so when he had stopped following pretty much everything, his sole interests dwindling to drink and, out of necessity, work, though occasionally he did write something, something he knew to be bad. Sporadic efforts. Made so he could continue to think of himself as “writer.” The best of his stuff—a few things he knew to be good—had been written while he had been in alcoholic blackouts: short bursts of language, cut close to the bone, clear, concise…If only he could write more, he told himself, and more legibly, in blackouts!
The beer was going down smoothly. On his 5th glass, or was it 6th? When he felt a sharp poke on his shoulder. A tough-looking broad with stringy unwashed black hair, bangs like pencil lines on her forehead, stood by his side.
She wore a black leather vest and had a red pimple above the bridge of her nose.
“Hey Bub,” she said, “you are in my seat.”
“Hey Sister,” Bobby said, “go bother someone else.”
The broad took hold of Bobby’s hair and bent his head down toward the floor. Bobby sprung back up and slapped the woman across the face. She went out on her feet, falling backwards, loose as a Raggedy Ann doll, her eyes like two stars.
Falling back against the guy on the next stool.
“How dare you!” someone said.
He caught a sucker-punch in the face that knocked him off his stool.
“I am a gentleman!” the guy who threw the punch said.
The floor was dark and sticky. Bobby crawled along the greasy rubber mat toward the door as sharp toes of boots struck his ribs and arms, one kick splitting his face open along a cheek bone. He crashed through the door out onto a rain-slicked sidewalk; rising to his feet, he ran along the cobblestones under shining streetlights, slowly outdistancing people from the bar who had run after him.
A couple walking along the sidewalk ahead, toward him, lurched to the side; he imagined he did not look pretty. His face throbbed with a burning pain and blood trickled down his shirt front.
He stopped running upon reaching the shadowed bank of the Charles River. Fog drifted over the black water.
He took his pants off and then his underwear; he had made a mess in his shorts. He wiped himself then threw the shorts into the water where they glowed like some white fish before sinking into the murk.
Waves thrashed against the shoreline in a charge of white horses, fighting some kind of senseless battle, it seemed to Bobby. A battle he did not know the meaning of nor the reason.
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