I ate a couple of painkillers for breakfast, brushed my teeth, combed my hair, and got dressed.
Finally, before heading out, I picked up my phone from the ground. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” I said. The phone worked, but the screen was cracked.
Outside, the sky was overcast. Decaying leaves marked my path as I walked to the bus stop.
15
After I stepped off the bus in the city center, I bought a hot dog and some cigarettes from a nearby kiosk. I still felt hungover from last night, although it hardly bothered me at this point because I was so used to feeling like shit all the time.
As I was walking towards Old Town and eating the hot dog, I considered the question: what kind of a bar does one go to on a Monday afternoon? I wanted a place with as few humans as humanly possible. Something cozy and small. Somewhere where they didn’t judge you. And there was indeed a place like that in Old Town. Since the bar had no name, people took to calling it “the place”. It had been my favorite bar once. Although recently it tended to be a little crowded, as it had gotten a bit too well-known. Not on a Monday however.
I finished my hot dog and lit a cigarette. The Gothic spires and towers of Old Town came into view in the distance. I had always liked Old Town for its winding cobblestone streets, ancient passageways, narrow little side streets, and extravagant medieval architecture. What I didn’t like about it were the endless overpriced restaurants on every corner and the thousand-and-one pointless little souvenir shops nestled in between. The place had become a tourist trap and would often get quite crowded. But thankfully on a Monday there were very few people around.
I soon arrived at the place. It was hidden inside an archway. I stepped inside. The ceiling of the bar was arched like a vault and the furniture all looked like it was from the 19th century.
To my surprise, there was somebody already there, drinking a beer by the fireplace. It was a gray-haired old man reading a newspaper. He also had two little dogs with him who were walking around the place. I crouched down to pet one of the dogs. I didn’t care for humans much, but dogs I liked.
I then walked to the counter and sat down on a barstool. “Good day,” I told the bartender. She was an older woman.
“Good day!” she said cheerfully. “What can I get you?”
“A good strong beer wouldn’t hurt.”
“A good strong beer, huh?” She thought for a moment. “How about that one?” She pointed towards a picture on the wall. It was a beer with an alcohol content of 8.6 percent.
“That’ll do.”
She took a beer from the fridge and began pouring it. Near the bar counter was a small aquarium. Unlike the last time that I had visited the place, I noticed that there was no fish inside it.
“What happened to the fish?” I asked.
“Oh, the fish? It died.” She handed me my beer.
“A shame.” I handed her a banknote.
“Yes, well, everything dies eventually,” she said matter-of-factly. Including hopes and dreams.
Our transaction complete, the bartender went to the fireplace near the old man and began building a fire. The fireplace had large carved columns on either side that looked like lion’s feet.
I sipped on my beer and looked around. One of the ceiling arches near me was covered with banknotes from various faraway countries—a common practice in bars which showed that the only true citizen of the world was a drunkard.
I recognized the figures on some of the bills. Mass-murdering Mao. Queen Elizabeth, the parasite. Lincoln, the melancholic. Washington, the slave-owner. Khomeini, the inventor of suicide bombing. Churchill, the bastard. Tesla, who died broke and alone. Ghandi, the enema aficionado. As well as the severely overrated Nelson Mandela.
Despite what we were told in school, there never were any “great men” in history. Their achievements were ultimately embellished, they had a dark side which was rarely mentioned, and some of them were even monsters. Even Mother Teresa, who had over time become synonymous with the word saint, was in truth a fucking fraud. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, as Kant said, no straight thing was ever made.
The wood was now crackling in the fireplace and it was getting warm. I took off my jacket and pulled out my copy of Will O’ the Wisp. I ordered another beer and began reading:
“How is it going?”
“Terrible.”
“Will you stick it out?”
“What for? What the hell’s to be done with life?”
I read for a while until my mind started wandering off again and I put the book away. Having read it before, I already knew that it didn’t have a happy ending. That was one of my favorite things about it. The main character didn’t magically overcome his difficulties like in some sappy Hollywood movie. The world didn’t work that way. People didn’t always overcome their difficulties. Often, they succumbed to them. Or they lost their minds and turned towards something illusory, like God. Or they turned towards drugs. But few made movies like that because these themes didn’t appeal to most people. Most people wanted to be lied to. Everything will be all right in the end, they wanted to be told, regardless of how bad things may currently seem. Yet it rarely turned out that way.
Another book that didn’t lie about these things was Leaving Las Vegas, which was another favorite of mine. Like Will O’ the Wisp, it had a doomed protagonist who was inspired by real life and there was no happy ending to his story. I learned that its author John O’Brien had been an alcoholic since his early twenties. And they said that the reason he ended up blowing his brains out was because of his alcoholism. But what was the reason for his alcoholism?
Most people thought alcoholics were alcoholics because it was an addiction and that’s it. But they were wrong. Addictions sprang from trying to fill a hole in your heart. Until you realized that you had to fill it constantly. And it worked less and less over time. That’s where an addiction came from. It had nothing to do with chemicals. Nobody who lived a happy life decided to suddenly become an alcoholic or a heroin addict. Nobody. It was always broken people. People who had been fucked over by life.
John O’Brien must have thus been suicidal from an early age. But he just couldn’t go through with it right away. Either he was scared, or he still had some hope left. And his novel reflected his inner torment. In the novel, the main character went to Vegas to drink himself to death. And he succeeded. There was no happy ending. No overcoming. Nothing. Just the blissful peace of death, wherein all of life’s problems were finally solved. Which was what the author wanted and got in the end. Even though his last shot came not from a shot glass but from a gun.
But I didn’t have a gun. And I doubted that I could ever drink myself to death like the protagonist in his novel did. Or could I? I had started drinking alcohol at the age of fourteen. Of course, I wasn’t a heavy drinker at first. But eventually the disappointments of life got the better of me and I often found alcohol my only companion.
When my first girlfriend—with whom I had been together for four years—broke up with me, I drank wine every day for half a year straight. I was only eighteen at the time. The amounts weren’t nearly as big as I was capable of now, but it was drinking with a fixed purpose—to numb the pain. And believe it or not, it worked. Alcohol worked. But only as an alleviative, never as a solution. It was like a painkiller that took the pain away, but only for a while. That’s why you had to keep on taking it. That is, unless you fixed that which caused you pain. But what if it couldn’t be fixed? What if it was always there? How did you escape from that which never went away? Temporarily, by drugs. Permanently, by death.