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The bartender emerged from a door behind the bar, forcing a smile that told me he wasn’t happy to see a customer at this hour. He looked young, clean-cut and tall, with a sunny handsome face and biceps that showed in his whiteEllen’s Eaterypolo. Everything about him made me miss Porty, the chubby Vietnam vet who used to own the place.
“Can I help you, sir?” he asked.
“Miller Lite, please.”
“You got it.” The bartender set anEllen’s Eaterynapkin in front of me, and I was already sick of the logo.
“I remember when this place was Porty’s.”
The bartender picked up a pilsner glass. “I heard it was a dump.”
I let it go. “Do you know what happened to Porty?”
“No. I only work here two nights a week.”
“Who owns this place?”
“It’s a franchise, there’s two others.” The bartender poured me a Miller Lite on tap, which I watched as if it were liquid gold, then he reached over and set the beer in front of me. “Here ya go. I gotta clean up in the kitchen. Tomorrow’s my day off and I wanna get out of here. Call me when you want another.”
“Come back in eight minutes.”
The bartender chuckled like I was kidding, but I wasn’t. He left through the swinging door, leaving me alone.
I picked up the glass and paused, torturing myself. I could smell the hops. My mouth watered. I hated that I was about to drink, but I was weak, and I hated myself for that, too.
So I took a good long pull on the beer, then swallowed, closing my eyes, maybe so I wouldn’t see myself. The chilly taste exploded on my tongue, a clean lager flavor, slightly malty but not too heavy, everything in one gulp. It tasted so good and so very, very bad, both atonce. I’d just blown almost two years of sobriety. I was drinking again. I’d never felt more disgusted with myself, so I took another sip.
The sensation, the taste, and the toxic mix of emotions brought back the last time I’d been here drinking with Jesse, and the memory ambushed me. I hadn’t even been thinking about him. I hadn’t allowed him to surface in my consciousness. I’d been pretending he’d never been alive, much less dead.
Jesse, we should go into business together.
We absolutely should.
We won’t, but we should.
Okay, but we’ll talk about it and that’s almost as good.
We’d both laughed, having been friends for nine years. I’d met him when I needed a cheap muffler, and we both loved cars. He could fix anything that ran on gas, and we had the same sense of humor. We always talked about new business ideas, our conversations fueled by beer, dreams, and denial.
Jesse, we could flip cars. You wanna try?
We definitely could. We know cars and we could sell anything.
Totally. My mother says butter melts in my mouth.
My mother says get out of my sight.
That was the last time I saw him. One week later, I left Carrie’s daughter, Emily, in the car and deleted Jesse from my phone. I knew I’d drink if I called him, so I didn’t call him, and he didn’t call me, either. He’d hear about what had happened with Emily, and he’d know I’d want to get sober, but he didn’t want to go there himself. Getting clean was the one thing Jesse Fife never talked about, in our pie-in-the-sky future.
Jesse had a body shop, and everybody knew him as the guy who could get you a motorcycle part, a fake license plate, and any pill you wanted, which was where he went wrong. He died while I was inprison so I couldn’t go to his funeral, but I’d mourned him in my cell and chipped in for the headstone. His mother didn’t have the money, and nobody knew where his father was. I missed him every day and hadn’t wanted to know how he died, but then I found out from somebody else inside.
“Jesse, man,” I heard myself say, aloud.
I had no one to drink with, so I drank with a ghost.
•••
I woke up on my back, aware that I was outside and wet. I opened my eyes but closed them again. My head pounded, and I wanted to go back to sleep. I didn’t know why I was outside. I was going to have the mother of all hangovers when I woke up, which was not yet.
