Kyle’s Drunk
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
Kyle was drunk. He was holding himself on his elbows above his own handsome death reflection in the bartop when I sat next to him.
“Beer,” I said to the bartender. I scooted my stool to the ledge.
Kyle looked up.
“Budweiser.”
Dazed, he managed all this in one motion: he dropped his chin, raised it again, swung it back and forth from the bartender to me. He was moving his head the way his brain felt.
“Hey,” he said. He was talking to me.
“Hey.”
“You here alone?” he asked.
I said I was. He studied me. His eyes were washed over with alcohol and the corners were streaked with broken bloodvessels. I noticed a dark shape under a shirt sleeve that was the edging of a tattoo. His T-shirt was too small, too tight, and high on his arms. He looked less drunk as he sat up. He was collecting himself to concentrate on speech.
“You’re not here with anyone?”
“No.” I told him why.
“You need a shot,” he said. “I’m buying.”
He bought us both shots. He was right. I needed one. The bartender brought the shots and my beer at the same time.
“I got it,” he said, waving over my drink. The bartender raised his hands and stepped off.
“Hey, thanks man,” I said.
We tossed the shots back. I didn’t know what it was and couldn’t taste it. It was brown. I guessed it was Tequila, but the aftertaste never came.
“How old are you man?” he asked.
“I’m 32,” I said.
“Look at you, man,” he said. “You’re cut. You can hide it well. I’d play down your age.”
I thought about pushing him gently on the shoulder so he’d tumble off his stool on his pretty face. He made me feel old with what he meant as compliment, which is the worst way for an insult to come. They hurt more that way, when they are accidental and more honest. What he meant was that the bar was filled with young women and that if I stood any chance with them, I’d need to lie. But I was just out for a beer. I grabbed my stein and he picked his up.
“Cheers?” he asked.
We put the glasses together. The clink was drowned out by the music and the tables behind us. Long tables had been arranged perpindicular to the bar. We were upstairs on a landing above the main bar. Several large parties had gathered to see a couple guys strum guitars. Ten or 15 people sat at along the sides of each table, most in baseball jerseys. The season was just underway and a few groups had gone to the afternoon game. It was early in the season, before everyone gives up hope on the local boys.
We realized the building noise that was there the whole time and turned our attention to the conversations behind us.
“Some cute girls here,” he said.
I nodded.
“That one over there … see her?”
He motioned with his drunk head toward the corner. I saw her.
“She was just over here.”
The girl he pointed to was about his age, about 22 or 23. She had brown spiraling hair and a pretty face. She wore a sleeveless cotton top with a brown pattern across the top two-thirds and a white strip around her waist. Her pants carried the color from the bottom part of her shirt down to her shoes.
“I saw her talking to you,” I said. She was hard to miss.
“Do you want to go talk?” he asked. “Will you come with me?”
“Yeah, I’ll go with you.”
We went over and sat down. Kyle first. He was good-sized, not tall or imposing, but built. I couldn’t hear what Kyle was saying, but he sat down next to the girl he pointed to and the one I’d recognized. She drew right into him. Their conversation was close, between maybe a couple inches. They took turns leaning into each others ears and shouting.
I said hello to the girls across from me. They looked at me like I was about to rob them. Kyle didn’t notice. There were two guys at the table with the group of girls. They were boyfriends who belonged to a couple of the ladies and they said nothing to me, apparently not willing to protect anything more than the women they’d laid claim to. I didn’t talk to them and didn’t want to.
A few minutes passed. I asked the usual questions. Where they were from (didn’t care), what they did for a living (somethine boring), anything disingenious I could think of, the less I cared the better. I would have asked them whether the home team won or lost, but I knew they were fair weather fans. The jerseys they wore were excuses to drink, not to be real fans. All the while, Kyle worked the girl next to us. I kept the others occupied solely because he bought my drink.
After about 10 minutes, he abruptly looked at me and said, “I’m going to go smoke.”
“Okay,” I said.
“If you’re not here when I get back, that’s cool.”
“Okay.”
He got up and abandoned the definite progress he’d made with the girl. She liked him, but he was too drunk to realize it. She asked me to move over into the vacant chair.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Chelsea.”
She told me she was Italian which threw me given her name. She was a pediatric nurse and her voice was gentle, as I imagined her to be with kids. We talked for a bit and there was no spark. She excused herself to smoke. Kyle never came back. I fought through the bodies to the lower bar and saw him later on. We talked again as he made his way from crowd to crowd, and he was even more gone than before.
I sat at the bar and asked the bartender what led him to a career pouring beer. He worked as a server for three years and learned all the popular drinks and how to make them.
That is one way to do it, I thought. The other way to learn them is to drink them. Kyle could be on his way to something big. He could be a bartender, a more prosperous direction than drunk. And he could mix a few for himself and take a few sips in between visiting with the girls. He would have a real reason to talk to them, then, and an endless supply of the stuff that kept his confidence up and the pick up lines flowing. Kyle’s problem came after he’d gotten the women to pay attention. There wasn’t enough substance left in him to keep the ladies interested beyond introductions.
I thought this and smiled as I pulled the collar up on my jacket and walked into the cold spring night: Kyle is young and is going home, alone, without any wisdom about how his youth had let him down.
