Thoughts and ruminations on being a good for nothing drunk that everybody thankfully ignored.

I was not a very good barfly. Not to say that there is a single type of barfly as there are at least three that I can think of, and I neither aspired nor achieved the status of any of them in my days of wasting away in dingy dive-bars.

The first type of barfly is the classic one, he’s a statue on that barstool and he’s likely as old as dirt and his stillness has a soulless quality to it. When he does speak, he spurts words into the air like letting loose a bunch of flies from his mouth into the world around him, the words zipping out around and settling on the dust around him. From his age, you’d expect some sort of wisdom if he was not in a constantly semi-catatonic state brought on by whatever the cheapest liquor with the highest alcohol content he could afford. On lucky days, he’d enjoy a better drink than rotgut, pacing himself until reality brought him back down.

A lot of sober drinkers (those who could come in once or twice a week and “have a few beers with the fellas”) would try befriending him or even if they saw him on the street, would tell others that “yeah I know that guy” and they’d attach some unwarranted sentiment to his existence.

It wasn’t that the guy was a louse or lech, or that he even bothered anyone. He was a fixture of a place until he died at an abnormally old age for his daily intake, finally transitioning from a fixture of a person into one of homage like a photograph on the wall.

The second kind of barfly was a bit more dangerous, the snake of the bar. He was always there, and always right after work. So, he was like me, a working drunk. As a working drunk, you could tell yourself, “Well, my drinking can’t be that bad because I don’t drink at work” while at the same time a part of your brain was counting the seconds until you could escape the grind and drown yourself in whatever was cold and cheap.

This second kind of barfly worked hard, and he usually was either the butt of other’s jokes or the bully who made others the butt of his own inside jokes. In a way, he judged us all silently, and kept a cold reserved resilience against the idea that just because he drank himself half-dead each day would be some cause of concern or drain any pride he took in his otherwise normal life. Though cagey, and concerned mostly with self-preservation, the snake would be the first to assume the duty of unofficial bouncer if anyone was acting up or overly drunk. As someone who could hold enough of his own liquor, he was distrusting of the sober-drinkers when they had too much or got too mouthy.

The worse the bar, the gruffer this guy was and when things got hairy, the bartender usually leaned on him to do and say the things that they couldn’t do themselves in fear of a nuclear online review that would get them canned. For those of us that were there as much as he was, there was an unspoken connection that never went beyond the level of a nod or glance. There was no need for either of us to exchange pleasantries as we were both there for the same reason: to get drunk.

The third barfly is the most inconspicuous one, because they in essence ruled the roost: the bartender. They, above the other kinds of barfly, would be able to handle themselves no matter how drunk, how high, or how crazy they were because they set the tone for the whole place.

Most of the time, I had gone into a bar and there is a spiritual presence that hangs in the air when the bartender is the drunkest person in there. Nobody gets cut off, or told off, or put out in these cases as nobody else can rise to the level of intoxication as the person pouring out their own for. Usually – certainly not always, but sometimes – there was some level of discontent that had driven them to drink, they didn’t want to be there, weren’t getting paid what they should or paid at all. It was like the doctor had swallowed a bottle of pills and started handing them out to patients, you trusted them because it was their gig.

Since I’ve never been a bartender, I couldn’t be that kind of barfly. And due to my complete and utter fear of drunken confrontation, I never had the capacity to be the snake. Finally, since I was quite young when I started, I couldn’t be the old drunk, but even more because I barely said two words to anyone that wasn’t the person serving me. Sure, there’d be times when my isolation would drive me into conversations that, at the time, felt engaging, but I’m sure were as forgettable as they ended up being the next day. I had friends that would come around or find me and join my little world, but other than that I was on my own island with my headphones in, a G2 fine-tipped pen in my hand scribbling poetry into my moleskin.

One of my poems that I had written during that time (Gary) sums it up perfectly:

the thing about being 
at the same place 
every night is that only 
people there every night 
know that you’re there 
every night

Sometimes, when those sober drinkers mistook me for a barfly to be ridiculed or messed with, the bartender (who I would always tip well and be respectful and patient with) would come to my defense like a mama bird swooping in to scare off a predator. It wasn’t with pity that they did as much as they understood my reason for being there more than I did. They knew that I was just another alcoholic writer drifting off into the grandeur of poetry and utterly unconcerned with anyone else other than myself.

There were certainly exceptions, but overall, I was never banned or kicked out of a place or told off and those qualities were few and far between for someone that – as Lynyrd Skynyrd put it so aptly – drank enough whiskey to float a battleship around.