Against the Wind...workshop essay rewrite

Against the Wind

     It was Friday night and the wind was warm against my skin. My week was done and I needed a drink. The local pub was within walking distance. I walked in, looked around, and headed for an empty chair far at end of the bar, away from the end where the waitress stands, away from the mob drooling, hoping for a wink, a smile, or a flash of skin. Sheila was young and blonde, tall and supple; her hourglass figure and smooth face sent sparks into extinguished fires that once burned inside the ancient men who flock at that end. She laughed and played with them, flirted and wiggled for them. Her breasts strained to escape their straitjacket, her slim waist and flared hips moved in opposite directions when she strutted off to her tables…her admirers leered hopelessly, their eyes glued to her, silent desires from youth cloud their vision. Beautiful losers who haven’t touched a naked female body in years; if only they were forty years younger. Sheila made them remember those days.

     The out of balance ceiling fan clicked like an old wind-up alarm clock. A layer of dust bonded to the blades with a yellow pasty crud. Distorted music floated from the speakers of the run-down jukebox. Flat screen TV’s hung from the nicotine covered ceiling; each tuned a different snowy channel. A few tables and chairs filled up the sticky stained floor in the back room. Five dark booths with worn vinyl seats and red vinyl backs lined the wall. Tattered tablecloths covered the scratches and gouges in the cheap wooden tables.

     The bar tender, Mary Lou, smiled as she walked to my end carrying a Coors. She asked how I was. She was tall and thin, older than the waitress. Her blondish brown, shoulder length hair was pulled back into a loose but sexy ponytail that flipped and danced when she walked. Her voice was gruff and scratchy from years of stale cigarettes and burning shots of whiskey. Her cheeks sagged a bit, her eyes saddened from too many punches; her left finger heavy with a ring. I told her I was fine and smiled warmly. She took my fiver, and reached for my hand. She asked if I would stay a while. She would be done in a couple of hours and had a few minutes to spare. I told her I would.

     They are all the same…neighborhood bars. The name changes, but they are the same. The same sex starved waitress, same lonely bar tender, same ancient collection of customers spewing out bullshit, same wooden bar, bar stools, sticky and filthy floor with black broken linoleum tiles, the same back door leading to a dark and dangerous alley; and the same nicotine stained mirror in back of the racks of dusty bottles of top shelf liquor that no one can afford. The mirror—every bar has one. Bob’s Bar and Grill has a mirror,  Blondie’s Beer Bar has one. The Old Coach, The Zoo, Sam’s, The 469, Anna’s, Murphs, Ollie’s, The Harvester, The Willow Bend, they all have that filthy mirror hiding in back of the bottles. And that mirror has faces; imprisoned faces, thousands of them. If you search the mirror, you will find your face in there too—right next to mine.  

     I sat quietly watching the mirror; there was my face between Crown Royal and Jose Cuervo like an old friend I hadn’t seen in a while. I smiled, the face smiled. I sipped the beer watching, listening. The waitress was laughing, her admirers hoping for a glimpse down her ever widening cleavage. Old Big Bob tossed a quarter down her bra. She slapped him childishly across the face, pulled the quarter out, licked it, and put it back in Big Bob’s hand. The music drowned out the laughter, the clicking fan kept time. The songs isolated and insulated me…the face and me. Every song summoned another face, they were mine from a different place, a different time…and I remembered.

     It was many years ago in November when I left for Denver. Leaves had fallen to rot under the snow that covered the dirt. The holidays were coming. I didn’t care. I tossed a few possessions into my rusted Chevy, loaded the bike in the back, and headed west. The radio was blasting out, the window was down, and the winter wind was rushing in. I had five hundred dollars to my name, and a heart full of scars…a failed marriage, three failed live-in girlfriends, no job, no time to heal, and running from another home.

    In Denver I found the local bar easy enough. I spent most nights until closing at the 172 Club. Lisa was the bar tender, Nancy was the waitress and the red vinyl on the booths was black. The rest was the same as every other stinking bar tucked into some shitty corner of Main Street. Nothing ever changes in there. It’s like a black and white Twilight Zone, an antiquated version of Starbucks. Three months had passed since I left New York. The money was almost gone, laid off from the job at the concrete factory, I stayed at a run-down motel and ate Caesars Pizza. I crashed with Lisa a couple of nights before it happened.

    It was late on Wednesday night, about one thirty. This big drunk guy was bothering Lisa, butt-grabbed Nancy. He was trashed; staggering, falling into chairs, he had drool dripping from his nicotine stained beard and fat hanging out from under his ragged tee shirt. Lisa told him to fuck off and He started yelling. I stepped in and escorted the guy out. Lisa yelled to toss him into the alley in back. She led the way and opened the heavy wooden door. I shoved him through the back door and into the dark and narrow alleyway. Trash cans heaped with garbage lined both sides. A stray cat howled and leapt from a can slipping in the slime covering the broken blacktop. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, adrenalin replaced the beer. My arm was all but yanked out of my shoulder as the oak door slammed on my back. That big bastard wasn’t drunk, neither was his partner. I went hard against the trash cans, smashing my head against the brick wall on the other side. I was knocked senseless, but not so much as to feel hands pulling at my pockets. All I remember before blacking out was reaching for my hunting knife tucked in my boot and swiping blindly. I heard a scream as the knife went through fat and flesh and buried deep into bone. The fat fuck went down hard on my leg. I don’t know where I hit him, still don’t. I do know I stuck him deep.

     The cop said it was four am when he shook me. He asked what happened; I said I didn’t know. He asked my name; I told him John Crow. He shined the light on a puddle of blood and looked at me for an answer; I said I had no idea. All I knew was that my head was split open, my ribs hurt like hell, my pockets were torn from my blue jeans…and the rest of my money was gone. I knew too where Lisa lived. A slit gas line and a wooden match evened that score.

     It had been three days since I had eaten last and a week since I’d slept in a bed. I found a dime buried in the glove box and made a phone call to a biker I met at the bar, he said would buy the Harley for two thousand. I dropped the dime into the slot and dialed. He was home and was still interested, but only had seventeen hundred. I agreed. I stilled looked like hell when I pulled up to his house. He asked what freight train hit me. I wasn’t in the mood for jokes. I parted with the bike, stuffed the roll into my pocket and said I was off the Vegas. I wasn’t, but he didn’t need to know what I was doing…neither did any of his friends. I stopped at Burger King and got a bag full of burgers, rented a room where I took a long needed shower, filled the gas tank of the Chevy, and headed for Dallas where fifteen hundred bucks didn’t take take long to spend. I still hadn’t learned.

     Mary Lou brought another beer. I thanked her and slid another five across the bar. I watched as the face in the mirror lifted the bottle, pulled heavily, then lowered the bottle, my lips still wet with beer. I asked the face what is was that kept me going, kept me living, trying, pushing forward when it seemed so much pushed against me. The Boss and the E-Street band wailed My Hometown. The face laughed…my hometown.

     My hometown is a shitty little village situated along the Erie Canal that long ago was a thriving farming village. Hunt’s tomato factory was the main employer with Birds Eye and Bemis Bag closely following. Soon Lipton’s built a bustling tea packaging plant in town. During WWII, German prisoners of war were transported by boat to ocean ports and distributed across the country. Albion was one of those places. Part of the barbed wire fence remains today. It stands holding up 70 years of vines, bottles, and rust. Soon, it will fall and rot like everything else. Everything dies and rots; houses, people, pets, love affairs, marriages, homes. Homes rot before houses rot. The windows grow dark at night with tears falling to the porches. Then after the family dies, the windows break, they look like hollowed eye sockets in a skull with the busted down front door for a boney nose and the falling down porch, a crooked toothless frown with one corner crumbling into the dirt…they always do, they always die and rot—just look into that fucking mirror.

     Dirty politics took root in Albion…stinking greed. They were ruthless, crooked, and filthy. A few “people in the know”, narcissistic elitists milked, stole, and pilfered the town out of millions. So deep rooted was the corruption, payoffs, bribery, favors. Like the hospital where I was born. At twelve, I lay on the operating table dying from poison surging through my body from an exploded appendix. A million dollar grant was awarded to that hospital for new X-Ray equipment. Within a few years, there was no X-ray equipment, the administrators were gone, the town lawyers were properly bribed, and the million dollars just disappeared. Soon, the hospital disappeared. Businesses and factories closed and boarded up their doors, those politicians disappeared, rich and laughing, and in the wake were poor, stunned and out of work farm families stuck living in a dead and rotting village. My first impressions of politicians wasn’t good and still isn’t.

     Yet there are roots there in Albion, history, my history. I keep going back there, to my hometown. I remember when hot rods and muscle cars cruised Main Street looking for another race, another way to pronounce superiority, prowess in battle. Fights would break out between drunken friends who would share a bottle of Boones Farm later. We hung out in Grants parking lot until the cops kicked us out around midnight. Bob’s blue ‘70 GTX would ease across the train tracks and maybe Jimmy would jump in his Mustang or I’d fire up my Z-28, follow him down Main Street, and touch one off, just outside of town. We never thought about crashing, dying. Wagering with death was easy. How fast could I go and survive? There was always competition whether it was racing or gambling, it didn’t matter. How many drugs could I do, how much could I eat, drink, puke, smoke, how many women could I seduce? We were always trying to outdo one another…or trying to outdo myself. How many homes, lives could I break? How fast could I run against the wind?

     These days I find safety within solitude, I find security within myself, I find comfort with my face into the wind. I live alone and sit at the end of sleazy little bars looking into grimy mirrors sharing secrets with the faces from long ago. Some are neither pretty, nor wearing halos. Many are ugly, fierce, and frightening. They do however, have an air of honor, honesty, and pride. As I search and remember, I think about who I am today and the faces I will look at in years to come. I ask myself why have I lived that way. The answer is always the same: There is something spiritually special about lifting my head into the wind and wiping away the tears from the biting cold, and loving my life… and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

     The silence is broken when Mary Lou slides another Coors across the bar. She asked if I was watching faces again. I laughed and nodded. She told me to gather up the faces, she would be off in thirty minutes and walked away with her ponytail bouncing along behind...God I love to watch her strut. I made eye contact with the friendly face peering from between the beer and the bottles—and  Bob Seger reminded me, though I am older now, I’m still running against the wind.