The first real memory I have of manhood or otherwise occurred in a dive bar when I was 22. It happened at a point in my life in which my fledgling ideologies were lodged between the granular realities of uncertainty and fragmented mediocrity. In short, I was metaphorically adrift in a sea of alternating cerulean and choleric blues. Violent storms would give way to momentary yet manumissional bursts of sunlight. The girl who I had hoped to spend eternity with had just left me, citing my unadulterated bitterness and romantic cynicism as the cause. She left me devastated and chain smoking, holed up in the darkness of my room. I was angry, I was sad, I was fucking pathetic. I began to look at life in terms of cause and effect, a failed experiment in pragmatic utilitarianism. Like I said, fucking pathetic.

But as in all stories of youth dissolved - conquered, demoralized, browbeaten - I grew up. The fact that I grew up is not, however, the story. We all grow up, grow old, become marginalized. We find Jesus or we curse him. We smell the arresting and barbaric storm that accumulates on the horizon. In it, our fate is revealed through a show of fantastic and blinding electricity. It is brilliant and heartbreaking. It is at this point, when we shed our youthful uprightness for the comfort found in the armor of maturity, that the end exerts itself and, like a cancer, steadfastly eats away at away at the former clarity of optimism.

But my pedestrian musings on the subjects of life and death are trivial and unnecessary. They lack the brawn and the relevance of my story. So, we cut to the chase:

It is a Friday night in the middle of February. February is, perhaps, the most disturbing time of the year. Life loses its velocity, its crispness, its poignancy. The all too early abetment of daylight acts a serviceable yet poor camouflage for the doleful bleakness of winter. On this particular Friday night, I sought refuge, for a retrospectively unknown reason, in a disgraceful and ramshackle tavern then known as Swedes. It was the kind of place that kept the lights low out of necessity. The tables were stained with the sticky residue of spilled drinks, body fluids, and hopelessness. The ancient beer memorabilia that dotted the walls was not nostalgic or chimerical. Instead, it was decrepit and old and a reminder of how long this particular establishment had been serving as the catalyst of degeneration. Intoxication as an escape. Intoxication as a mechanism of achievement for a place where boundaries and realities are blurred and soothed. But above all, Swedes was nothing more than a mirage. A shit-stained cesspool of humanity and grit that gave the illusion of freedom but in reality did nothing but cement the fact that to be here is to be in the deepest and darkest place of the human psyche, the place where hope has finally, and often tortuously, been put to rest.

Halfway to disconcertion, the tangible benefit of intoxication, I sat in this insignificant bar in an insignificant small town in Middle America. With me, sat two of my friends. People whose faces and personalities have now become opaquely washed away in the polluted river of time and place. The jukebox, burrowed snugly in the darkest of the bar’s dim corners, was, fittingly, playing Merle Haggard. Haggard has always been someone whom I respected. He did not see life in terms of good or bad, merely in sequences of being drunk and being alive. He did not write songs with the borderline sense of mental retardation of his peers and he did not fuck around with attachment or reverie. I can appreciate that.

So, as my friends and I sat in this bar listening to Merle Haggard and shooting the shit about women with large breasts, women with loose vaginas, and women that had broken our hearts, the most inexplicable thing happened. It unraveled like a story out of some sort of white trash penthouse-ian fantasy, surreal and brutal, eloquent and smugly arousing. From the bar, directly across from the table where we sat, a woman rose and made her way towards us. She carried herself with a burlesque sort of crestfallen swagger. She wore her dirty blonde hair in a messy half pony tail. She looked to exist on a diet of cigarettes and small-mindedness and was dressed in the trashiest of attire – tapered blue jeans matched beautifully with a black leather vest and a Dallas Cowboys themed Looney Toons shirt. To even the most casual of observers it was readily apparent that this woman – a mess of booze and stupor – was a molten and tangible perfection of the white trash animal. She inched closer. Closer. Inside, I was wishing for nothing more than for her to abandon her foray across the bar, to break off eye contact, to leave us the fuck alone. This was like an encounter between an African and a crocodile, a dangerous juxtaposition between predator and prey that would have the most disastrous of results.

She addressed us in a cackling, enigmatic tone that reeked of trailer parks and casino parking lots.

“You boys,” she said in a drunken slur, “Seem to be pretty lonely.”

In immediate and near symbiotic unison, we replied that no lady, we weren’t lonely, we don’t need or want your company, please, lady, please get the fuck out of here and leave us alone. Go back to the bar, to your life, to your catacomb of desperation. But seemingly unimpressed by our alcohol inspired rudeness, she continued on.

“Look, I got something that might interest you guys,” she said. “I know I may not be the best looking girl you-all ever saw but…”

And then, she arrived at her destination. Here, she threw the knockout punch, the mother of all propositions, the most fucking ridiculous thing I have ever heard or ever hope to hear. She delivered it through an anxiously clenched jaw, her hot, stale breath whistling through her archeologically ignored teeth.

“I’ll suck all you boy’s dicks for twenty dollars.”

The comment cut through the night with the potency of assassination. It commanded response, demanded to be confronted, defied both plausibility and rationale. Her comment, her demeanor, and her ghastly smirk were all delivered with the finesse and sensitivity of rape. Her world invaded ours. The situation was volcanic, she erupting with a vesuevian current of scum and vice and we, the innocent and naïve townspeople below, running and begging for our lives. It was to no avail. I struggled to answer her. Her suggestion was beyond ludicrous. It was indecent, a comment of impenetrable dilapidation. In a strangled voice, heavy with a mixture of pity and acrimony, I responded that no, you fucking pig, I’d rather die than let you within spitting distance of my exposed, aroused dick. She took the comment with grace and, surprisingly, a simple sense of level headedness.

“Fuck you boys then,” she said. “You’re the ones missing out, I been doin’ this for longer than ya’ll been a-live.”

And then, as she turned to retreat to her bar stool, she was felled by a blow with a fundamentally monumental importance. A blubbery right fist, thrown with accuracy and meaning, hit her face with a meaty thump. She let out a harrowing sound, a vociferate bluster of a deep and trembling viscosity, fueled by beer and disaster and woe. She grabbed the left side of her face and feigned death. Above her stood a man, thick with brute sexuality and imbedded sourness. He wore his tattoos with a mural-like pride. This was not a man to fuck with, not a man to look, not man to acknowledge or celebrate or even consider human. He was beast, an animal, a fucking firebrand of carnality and laziness. Then, he turned. His eyes met mine.

“Sorry, boys, my wife’s a fucking whore.”

And that was it. He turned and kicked her in the ribs. His disposition was that of complacent normalcy. Like episodes such as were a regular occurrence, a simple marital disagreement that was a tolerated annoyance. He kicked again. Again, again. She looked up at him and screamed a series of unintelligible phrases laced with “fuck yous” and sobs. Pitifully, then, she picked herself up and walked across the now silent bar and sat in the barstool next to him. He ordered her a beer and told her to put it on her face. She did so under his watchful eye. And so they sat: He, the author of her welling bruises and she, the terminal skank. Good and bad, right and wrong, decency and vulgarity – these values had no place in either’s hearts or minds. These people simply existed, devoid of ideology, morality, and poignancy. They were real only because of their bones and flesh and blood and hair. Reluctantly, the bar’s patrons returned to their conversations and life, per normal, moved on. We finished our beers and disappeared into the snowy night.

Its now five years later. My broken heart mended, my life went on. I now live in a house, drive a car, have a job and a wife and a kid on the way. I’m happy. 3 years ago I found out I had cancer. 2 years ago, I beat it. I live the suburban life: I look forward to weekends and cookouts and waking up every morning wrapped around a beautiful woman. I’m at peace with who I am and who I was and I have a pretty clear idea of who I want to be. My life, finally, became what I always wanted it to be. In retrospect and revision, however, I look back on that night often. It haunts me, it makes me laugh, and it seems to have some sort of deep-rooted importance to who I once was and who I became. The night was the antithesis of rockwellian, a moment of wholesale sleaze and despondency. I’ve always wondered what drives human beings to such dark places, metaphorical battlefields that torture the mind and destroy the body. I still can’t figure it out. Deep down, I don’t think I really want to figure it out. I don’t want to know where all that pain and bitterness and unimportance comes from. Desperation of that magnitude and that ferocity must come from a place that is both bottomless and caliginous, cloudy with frailty and bereavement. It operates like a vector, greedily consuming the good in people, leaving the upright hobbled and crippled with weight. I don’t want to know that kind life.