In the night, as I move through a crowded back street, I get a message from someone who used to be a friend but is now, after much time and distance, nothing more than a vague acquaintance.
“I need your help.”
A few minutes later I walk into a one-room bar that barely qualifies as a place of business, let alone an actual physical structure.
Bare floorboards and walls, stained by spilled drink and nicotine. Dim bulbs strung along one wall. Reek of sour memories and beer.
In the back corner, some men are—inexplicably—dumping out large bottles of cheap, bottom shelf gin.
Adam sits on a stool, clearly and wholly drunk. I sit next to him and wave off the offer from the clearly concerned woman serving behind the counter.
He does not and, as she pours, she tells him he needs to eat something. But if he has as much cheap liquor in him as I suspect he does, he wouldn’t be able to keep anything down.
“I have fucked my life,” he tells me. “All of it. My career, it’s fucked. All of it.”
The self-loathing is palpable and all I can say is that I am sorry.
The woman brings over a bowl of cereal, multicolored loops already fading and dissolving into a slurry of gray. He pushes the bowl away and it sloshes over the bar top.
A large man approaches, clearly in charge of taking care of the surly and unwelcome. But the woman waves him off, showing more sympathy than Adam deserves.
“I’ve got it,” I tell her, and help my friend try to stand. As he turns, he sees the bouncer there behind us as shoves him back.
It’s a mistake. The bouncer moves in and takes charge of him. Adam shoves him again, this time reeling back to punch the much, much larger man in his substantial gut to literally no effect.
With a quick, economical movement of his shoulder, the bouncer calmly folds Adam around his fist.
I take my cue and help him stumble out of the back, back onto the street.
I bring him home. My wife isn’t pleased by this intrusion but there’s nowhere and no one else. I set him up in a cluttered back bedroom, telling him to sleep it off. But he is restless and starts talking about a writing project he’s working on, asking to see some old comic books I have.
I tell them that they’re all boxed up in the basement and he stumbles his way downstairs to find them.
–
As I write this now, I recognize that somewhere in the course of the dream, the person changes from being my friend Adam into my son Sam. This is troubling to me.