The Priest
I was sitting outside at a table at the Dahlak on Sunday with my friend Rich and this punk rock girl I had never met before. She had short blonde hair, and wore thick streaks of pink eyeshadow, almost a Blondie meets Benatar kind of look. She was pissing me off by making the same pointless, ignorant suggestions about how I should handle the difficulties surrounding Sam’s visits, given the 8-10 hour drive between Philadelphia and Montreal.
“Well, how far is it for you to drive to Canada?” she asked half-drunkenly, and as I started to answer, my voice got louder and sharper within a word or three: from the corner of my eye, I saw other tables glance over startled, and even Rich raised an eyebrow.
“Hey man, settle down,” he said. “She’s just trying to understand, trying to help, no harm….”
“Ok, that’s cool, ok,” I said, getting my shit together, having a sip of my beer. I’ve known Rich for about three years now: he lives in the general neighborhood, and while we don’t seek each other out, when we bump into each other, it’s always time well spent. Ever since we met, I’ve known the guy was out of his mind and self destructive, just like like me, but to a much worse degree, doing crazy drugs and drinking way more than I ever could. And like me, Rich has a little kid that he doesn’t get to see too often, little Calamity Rose. He’s also about my age. And a writer. So we have things in common.
Our friendship is an upside down situation: we certainly didn’t meet under very good circumstances. I was bartending at Fiume, a bar at 45th and Locust, where I also played music on Thursdays. Fiume has always been mostly a collective: the folks that run the joint drink there on their off-hours, and there I was one quiet night nursing a couple of beers, when a voice that cut the air like a cleaver came flying from the opposite end of the room.
“Hey JACKASS!”
I looked down the bar. Was this directed at me? I saw a skinny tattooed guy with a shaved head and coke bottle glasses, grinning at me. He looked like Kermit the Frog.
I turned back to the bartender. “Did that guy just yell –”
“Hey JACKASS! JACKASS! HEY JACKASS!!!
I turned to the guy. “Do you have some… some kind of problem with me?”
“No, no problem at all,” Kermit the Frog smirked back. He was clearly shit-faced. Hi ho, Kermit theeee Drunk here
“Do I know you?” I asked. He shook his head, and was about to open his mouth again when Kevin came up from behind the bar saying, “OK Rich, you’re cut off. It’s time to go.” He took the guy’s near-empty beer and led him him to the door. “Come back when you’re sober. You gotta go.” After kicking the drunk out, Kevin explained who Rich was, and I had a better understanding of why his daughter’s mom left him.
A couple of nights later I was back at Fiume, and who was there but Rich. He looked up and came right over the moment I entered, clapping his hand on my shoulder, saying “Hey man. I was pretty fucked up the last time I saw you. I want to apologize.”
I looked at him warily. He was obviously drunk again: I could see it in his eyes, which didn’t focus on me, or anything else for that matter. “Yeah, seriously man,” he went on. “I don’t, re- uh remember what I said, but I was totally…” He reeled back a bit, and finished his shot. “I was totally out of line.” He held out his hand, and finally looked me in the eye.
“Ok,” I said, shaking his hand. “We’re cool, we’re cool.”
“Awesome!” he said, and staggered back to his perch at the end of the bar. I bellied up to the register.
“What’ll it be?” asked Kevin.
“I’ll have a Har–”
“HEY JACKASS!” Rich screamed at the top of his lungs, and as my hands and eyes flew skyward, he laughed so hard he fell off his stool, and lay there on the floor, still chuckling at his little joke as he rubbed the arm he’d landed on.
“Serves you right motherfucker,” I yelled pointing at the hopeless sonofabitch, “serves your ass right!”
We’ve been friends ever since. On more than one occasion Rich has helped me get through some of the more depressing moments, just by his presence at the bar as I was drinking away the pain, just by being someone someone who’s batshit crazier than me. The guy tattooed his eyelids and a small dot on his chin, but at the same time has that one foot in reality, rationalizing his facial tattoos by saying “No one really sees my eyelids anyway, and the dot looks like a weird mole. Plus I can always grow a beard.” He’s omeone who’s been up to his neck in bullshit, hell someone who still IS up to his neck in bullshit, but a few years more acclimated than me. I’m glad we don’t hang out all the time, my god I would be dead in days, but when it comes to drinking and commiserating Rich is A-Number One.
I sat back and apologized to the punk rock girl for coming so close to losing my temper. “I get kind of antsy and sharp when it comes to my son,” I tried to explain. “And it’s such a complex situation, really, it’s so hard that I get snappy when I feel..”
“No, it’s OK,” she said. “It’s gotta be hard what with the distance. And you’re right, I don’t own a car, so the fuel thing…”
“No, I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to chill about it. The whole situation is fucked up anyway.”
Rich nodded, knowing the general details. The three of us drank and Rich and I talked about the way our roles have played out, and he told me some things to look out for. “One thing I’m worried about,” he said, “is being, you know, Santa Claus. I tell Ruth Beth, ‘I want to have fights with Rose, you know real disagreements. I don’t just want to be fun and games.’” He sighed.
“I think we both get that later,” I said, and I started talking about my brother’s kid Floyd, and how Christina moved in with her dad and his wife. The punk girl was really nice, and I felt bad for being such a bear. I don’t really remember when I got home, but I was pretty shitfaced.
I was in the Dahlak on Tuesday night and Rich was there drinking with a guy he identified as the drummer from his band Humanasaurus. I said hello, but I was in the middle of a solo mood, so I pulled up a stool at the bar and ordered a Harpooon, and turned to the tv to catch the end of the Daily Show. Rich came over, draped his arm over my shoulder and said, “She’s gone man, gone. She’s dead.”
All I thought of was his daughter Rose. When I was in first grade my friend got hit by a car, she’s at that age where they run into traffic without thinking.. “What? What happened. It’s not Rose is it?”
“No man, it’s that chick Ashley.
“You know, the girl you yelled at last night.”
“What.. well, hey I apologi–”
“Oh yeah, it’s cool,” Rich said. “You guys were cool when you left, I just meant to identify her…”
“What the fuck Rich? What the fuck happened?”
“Dude, she… she didn’t want to die, she didn’t mean to die. She…” He took a breath, sat down on the stool next to me and scratched his head. “She overdosed on heroin. She overdosed on heroin and I did CPR on her, dude I was pumping away at her chest.” He mimed his hands pushing futilely on her chest, grunting, sweating. “I was just pumping and pumping, yelling at her to that it would be ok, that she could do it.” He stretched his shoulders at the memory. Sweat beaded up along his forehead.
“At one point she opened her eyes and I yelled ‘Come back come back’ and I said it, ‘come back come back’, and she knew, dude she heard me, she understood and I thought I had her and then her eyes rolled back and shut again.
“And that was it. Dude she was fucking gone.” Rich wasn’t crying or anything. He was just staring straight ahead, into nothing, watching the replay. I know that stare: I wore it the day Melissa decided to stay in Canada with Sam. It’s the stare where your system has been overloaded, your brain, your emotions, your whole system gets thrown, like a circuit breaker in a thunderstorm. Rich stared at me, past me.
“So I called 911,” he said finally, with a weary shrug, “and they told me to keep doing CPR until the medics got there, and so I did it, even though I knew.
“I kept pushing away, but I knew she was gone.”
And so he spent the night down at the police station, answering questions about this girl named Ashley, filling out forms. I didn’t ask him if he’d been shooting up with her: I’ve seen him on the tail end of a weeklong meth binge, seen him too drunk to talk for days on end, and don’t need any more information than necessary.
“Was she your girlfriend?” I asked.
“No, no,” he said, “and that makes it worse. She was– Ashley was just my friend. Just a nice girl, you know?” His eyes were shocked behind the oval rims of his glasses, punch drunk, but clear. No tears.
“Ashley wasn’t ready to die,” he said, matter-of-factly, shaking his head. “She didn’t want to die, that wasn’t in her plan.”
“Well, what was she doing heroin for?” I asked. “How long had she been on it?”
“I don’t fuckin’ know,” he said, wiping his brow with the back of his hand,taking a hit off his beer. He shook his head and looked at the ceiling for a minute before sighing. “I don’t know. But that wasn’t what she wanted. Not… not that.
“I’m going to California next week,” Rich said suddenly, looking askance across the bar at the same old fucks I see night after night after night. “I’ll be out there for a week. When I come back?
“Man I’m gonna be a priest. Seriously Brendan, seriously. I am so fucking sick of my friends fucking dying. All of them are dying. I’ve come close to that myself!”
“I’ve seen it,” I said and gestured to the bartender for another beer. “I’ve seen you so fucked up, I thought you were gonna die. That meth binge a couple of weeks ago man, I thought that was the end for sure…”
“When I get back man, I tell you. I’m gonna be a priest,” Rich said. “I’ll still love you, all my friends, but no more of this. No more of this dying.
“I can’t take this shit no more.”
Rich wandered back to his table. I sipped at my beer, and glanced up at the television. The girl was dead. I didn’t know her, and I didn’t care about her, she was gone like any number of freighthoppers and squattrs who pass through West Philly: but the knowledge that it was death-cold-death, so sudden and permanent, those final choking hours, sent a shudder up my back. I looked at the tv again, trying to settle the buzz in my brain. Here today and gone tomorrow, literally two days prior, Rich had watched this girl cough out her last spasms of life, her death rattle.
“A priest, man,” he was saying to his friend behind me. “I’m gonna be a fucking priest.”
3 Responses to “The Priest”
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August 14th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
[...] A slice of Brendan’s world: I was in the Dahlak on Tuesday night and Rich was there drinking with a guy he identified as the drummer from his band Humanasaurus. I said hello, but I was in the middle of a solo mood, so I pulled up a stool at the bar and ordered a Harpooon, and turned to the tv to catch the end of the Daily Show. Rich came over, draped his arm over my shoulder and said, “She’s gone man, gone. She’s dead.†[...]
August 14th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
Great piece, Brendan.
August 16th, 2006 at 7:46 pm
Nice. Nice writing, man. Very cool.