Beers and Fears by Meyer Tim & Buda Chuck & Edler Frank & Rosamilia Armand

Author:Meyer, Tim & Buda, Chuck & Edler, Frank & Rosamilia, Armand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

***

“Bullshit!” I say to the bartender, slapping the drink like it’s a bitch and deserves it. The alcohol spills all over the bar top. “What is this place? What the fuck is going on here? This ain’t no bar!”

The bartender sighs. He looks like he’s still trying to come up with an excuse for everything that has happened. He shakes his head, defeated.

“They want out. You want in.” He tells me.

Now instead of being vague, he’s being cryptic.

“What the fuck does that mean? Just level with me. What is going on here?” I beg.

“I can’t say.”

“What do you mean you can’t say? I know damned well you know what’s going on around here. You haven’t flinched even once with all these lunatics coming in the back door.”

A light clicks on in my head. The back door, everyone but me has come into the bar through the back door. I had assumed there was more parking around back that was the preferred entrance for regulars. Every one of them wanted me to open the front door though, the way I had come in. The only way outside I knew.

“Where does that door lead?” I asked the bartender throwing a thumb over my shoulder to the back door behind me.

“It leads in.”

More of the cryptic shit again. I want to scream and wring his neck. I take a deep breath, hoping logic and reason can win the day over violence.

“It leads in to where?”

“I can’t say.”

I grumbled like an upset grizzly bear, on the inside. On the outside, I changed my line of questioning.

“Why can’t you say? You don’t know or you’re not allowed to say?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh God,” I say, raising my voice but reeling it back into a calm demeanor, “Yes which? Yes, you don’t know, or yes, you’re not at liberty to say?”

He changes the line of questioning on me, “Why can’t you talk about gymnastics?”

He deflates me in an instant, “I can’t say.”

Son of a bitch.

“You’d better learn how to say. I can say that.”

“Why, what does it matter. How does that stop the insanity that comes through the back door? That doesn’t make an iota of sense.”

“The truth will set you free or you will set the truth free.”

I take another deep breath. The weight was too great. This is starting to feel more like therapy than drinking away my troubles. It would be great to peel off that bandage and let the wound ooze out the infected pus trapped in my mind. But the bartender at some hole in the wall dump is not equipped to handle the truth.

How does he even know about the gymnastics stuff? Nothing had gotten out about it. Yet I got the impression that he knew more about that stuff that he was letting on. Maybe talking it out with him could set me free.

I need a drink.

The bartender put a fresh mug in front of me. He knew. He knows everything.

I grab the ice-cold mug and raise it in salute to the bartender.

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