Third Barstool From The Door.

The bar is the same, half shaded parlour trick it always is when the light still creeps past the slats on a sunday.  Down in the middle sits Frank, lumpy in that way that men who have lost their teenage obesity far too fast and shrouded are lumpy, as they bramble towards the middle age.  He sips his drink - a vodka and cranberry, because he's never liked the taste of alcohol, cannot let himself be seduced by the bar at hand, and has the tolerance of a twelve year old girl.  Who hasn't discovered the joys of premenstrual Midol yet.  You know, when the world closes in around you, your body gets fat for no apparent reason, you want to fight, fuck and eat everything and there is so much wind in you, you can't hardly stay held within your skin.  Frank's skin is folded, empty and lacks any of the graces of supposed manhood he was born into along the sidelines of his family tree.  He's stuck in the mud again, his brand new shoes clicking on the barstool, onto the hard, wet floor beneath him. 

Trouble with Frank is, he doesn't know women.  And he is a woman among men, begging and cajoling and clinging onto any shred of manhood he can summon up from those around him.  Even the red mouthed, tough talking whore seated next to Frankie couldn't bare to look at him, soft face, fat kid stance, sipping his red lady drink like a divorcee at a strip mall disco.  People like him who couldn't even see the strands of their own minds bothered her deeply; so much so that she had this immense urge to bully the former pudge and insult the size of his cock (which wasn't out of the blue - Frankie, speaking straight ahead in some non-committed direction somewhere between the bartender who kept himself busy enough to ignore him and the few, dozing former men around him at the sparsely populated bar on this sunday afternoon, was attempting in his best mildly drunk manner to boast about women with nice tits, and asses, and it was getting under this whore's skin like something noxious).  Point is, she was allergic to this brand of bullshit and was on the verge of yelling at Frank, about his surely undermined cock and how he's probably had as many proper drunk escapades in his adult life as women he made come - meaning very little to none.  She bit her lip so hard, it split in one mound to two, and she burned it clear and straight with one shot of her whiskey, sealing the injury and getting the hell out of there before he voice returned from the fire breath of her swallow.  And she was really good at swallowing. 

Her glass hit the bar hard, her ass out the door quick as you please, and Frankie was left there, alone with a bartender who wished also for his departure (one drink in 90 minutes, and a watered down one at that, what kind of money could he make off of a guy like this?) and the dozers, the men who at least were men once, and were tired out from years of boozing, fucking, lying and regretting.  Frank didn't know what any of these vices felt like.  He just sat there - inert - thinking about his friend who had betrayed him (you know, in that way only Italians can get betrayed).  Truth its, Frank wasn't as needful of any woman in his whole soppy life than this man who he had used as his sounding board, his cop to talk him down from the ledge.  When the needy are hung out to dry, they don't ever fall down dead.  They just swing there in the breeze, the noose they created for their own burdens and denials about who they are gently choking them, but never ending it all....not even a good choke like the whore liked sometimes was this sort of emasculation vehicle.  Sipping cranberry in the wind, and the dull sun fighting with the shade, in the land of drunks, untouched by their pain and drowning in his own.  He left no tip.

M. Lucia