Jack With a Beer Back
“Alright. Maybe a bar was the worst place in the world for me to be at that point. It was late, real late, and there were only shambling bar wrecks there. And me. Me, with a Modern Lit paper hanging over my head—remember, I was actively striving toward a degree back then—and no idea, no idea at all, how to do it. Except that I figured on doing Kerouac or Fitzgerald because I liked drinking.
“So I got to talking to Kevin, the bar-keeper, about it. Mostly about Kerouac and how it was impossible to know the real man from the lines of all the books and biographies. I railed against the biographies in particular. Telling Kevin about how they were written in such adulatory states that all the grit of the man seemed to be cleaned away and replaced with some sani-clean aura that no linger smelled of old kitchen tables and Benzedrine sweat.
“I was really adamant about it. As adamant as a half drunk sophomore can get. Drunks shuffled by. More beers came and this guy sat down across from me.”
I waited a moment. For effect.
“He didn’t look like much to me. Big homespun face, boilermaker slack, hanging pale and vaguely ham-like above an old faded red-flannel shirt. His hands were swollen, his eyes were sort of half shut. He looked like every hero of every Bukowski poem ever written. He leaned over the table that divided us—an old, beery, dinged-up wooden table with the shellac coming off—and he whispered:
“‘I am the grit that lies in all the gutters of all the streets that sprawl crazy over the earth. I am the old beer and creepy graveyard dim cold blast of smelly sweaty workingman’s bar that hits you BAM! in the face when you walk by and some crazy old bum opens the door.’
“He breathed his drunk’s breath on me during this. Beer, spit, germs of uncoughed coughs, old sour teeth. That breath came over the table. His face leering closer and closer, mine leaning further and further back against my chair. I didn’t want to MAKE him go away, I wanted him to just FORGET ME and drift away. To leave me alone. To zero in on some other sucker.
“He inhaled. He put both hands—big fleshy hands, the hands of a gone soft drunk—on the table and sat back. Quiet. Looking at me. Then, with that exaggerated dignity drunks assume when they feel patronized, he said:
“‘Ask me some questions.’
“And he put his hands down on his knees.
““Ask you what?” I was tired. Too tired for what looked like an alcoholic sermon on life’s lessons and grand schemes gone bad.
“’You wanted to know me. Smell me.’
““No, I can’t”, I said “I’ve got a really—“
“’Smell me!’ He pushed forward in his chair. ‘Kitchen tables. Benzedrine. Old typewriter ribbons. Smell me.’
“That tooth-beer-spit breath combo hit me again. I picked up my lighter. He grabbed my hand. I jerked. He lurched forward into my face.
“’It’s me.’
“’Okay.’
“’You want to know me? Ask me.’
“He sat back suddenly, his eyes steadier than his hands. He turned to Kevin.
“’Two Jacks with beer backs.’
“’You buying?’
“’I know what you’re thinking. You’re looking at me.…and you think I’m just another bum. Just a bum with broken down shoes and stinking breath. A stinking breath drunk that sits in bars and breathes his stinking breath…’
“He was getting loud. I didn’t want him to know that I had been thinking about his breath. So I quickly disagreed.
““No. No. I didn’t think that.”
“And I smiled warmly so I’d look honest.
“He waved his huge hand in front of his chest.
“’S’okay. S’okay. S’long as you find out. …you find out who I am.’ He coughed, and stopped talking—politely—as Kevin put the drinks on the table and dumped the ashtray. Kevin moved on. The guy picked up the shot glass and raised it. Not a tremor. He said:
“’This is to me. This is to all that is left of me. Jack with a beer back.’
“He laughed a sort of snort/chuckle/cough laugh and he threw back the shot.
“’Benzedrine and wine bottles and little dead cats in Mexican streets and now…now here….here it is.’
“He slapped the shot glass down.
“Then he started talking slow and started to sway. He pushed at the little glass in front of me.
“’C’mon. Drink. Drink it in. Jack with a beer back…’
“He burped. Rubbed his lips with the big knuckles of his hand. And then he threw up. Threw up stuff that looked like rotted baby food. Clots of phlegm. Beer yeast. I don’t know what it was. And the smell. The smell of it coming up past the rotten mouth, over the rotted teeth… It was like every bad smell molecule in the world coming together to tug at your stomach’s pit and test your gag reflexes. It smelled so bad it hurt trying not to throw up, not to look, not to breathe…
“Instinct carried me up and away. I was at the far end of the bar—by the jukebox and the popcorn machine where the other bums were—before the first drops hit the floor. Most of the bums didn’t notice, but a couple of them looked at me. I pretended I had no idea why.
“Kevin was throwing bar towels and disinfectant over the bum and the table. The barkeeper looked over my way, held up my beer. Not the shot, the beer, I don’t even want to know what happened to the shot. And he said:
“’Do you want this?’
“He was being serious. My throat pulled with a gag jerk.
““No.” I said.
“A little after that I went home.”
Jo lit a Marlboro, dragged at it and exhaled.
“Jack with a beer back, huh?”
“As God is my witness,” I said, “Do you want another beer?”
Horror Sleaze Trash 