Patrick deWitt - Ablutions

Traffic thickens in Covina and you exit the freeway looking around for gas station number seven. You drive past an old bowling alley and decide to wait out rush hour at the bar, swearing to yourself you will not drink a drop of whiskey, and you say it aloud: "I will not drink a drop of whiskey at the bar in the old bowling alley in Covina." You do not drink any whiskey but you want to terribly and you pour out two more white pills and lay these on your curling tongue (you shudder at their taste and fill your cheeks with beer). Time passes, an hour, and when you do not feel the pills coming on you know there are too many blocking up your bloodstream and that by taking any more you are wasting them, and so for the time being you cancel them from your mind and focus instead on your surroundings.

You do not bowl and do not want to bowl but find the sound of bowling therapeutic and also the sound of the baseball game on the television, which you do not watch. You noticed seven or eight classic cars in the parking lot and it is easy enough to pick out their owners: Men and women in their sixties, bowling and drinking and talking; the men wear matching shirts and are members of some type of car or social club. A few of the women, old enough to be grandparents, are made up like bobbysoxers, with poodle skirts and pony-tails. One is jumping and clapping at her husband's bowling ability, acting the part of the spry teenager. She is drunk, and follows her husband to the bar and asks in baby talk for a Long Island iced tea; when he refuses, she complains and you hear him say to her, "Goddamn it, Betty, if you don't settle down and shut your mouth up you'll be home with the cats next time we ride." The bartender winks at you and you look away, laughing into the flat of your palm.

Your right pants pocket is filled with blueberries that you eat with each sip of beer and a drunken woman at the bar is making fun of you, asking if you are eating grubs and potato bugs. "'M talking to you, Tarzan." She turns to the bartender. "The King of the Wild Bowlers," she says. You ignore her and she settles her tab and drifts away to the lunch counter and the bartender apologizes, saying in the woman's defense that her husband has recently died of "balls cancer" and that she is roughing it out these last few weeks. He brings you a beer on the house, and then another and another — he is drinking tequila shots but hides this fact from you don't know who; he initiates this apparent rule-breaking as a bonding point. Other than the occasional walk-up you are his only customer and he asks you friendly bartender things about your life and then he speaks about his and you tell a bad joke and he laughs too hard and lays a hand on yours as if for support and then strokes the top of your hand and winks again, and this wink is the wrong sort of wink and it makes you uncomfortable and you tell him to watch your drink while you step out for a cigarette and he balances a napkin on the beer can and you leave the bowling alley just as the social club erupts over some crucial bowling error. (Betty is sitting a lane away from her friends, arms crossed in frustration at a life passed too soon, and with too little excitement.) You try to sleep in your truck but owing to the heat and discomfort of the cab you cannot and so after stopping at a gas station for a beer, and again forgetting the phone card, you are shortly back on the 10 freeway, heading east toward the desert.

Discuss Las Vegas. It is eleven o'clock at night when you arrive. That you are here at all demonstrates ill will toward your goodwill trip intentions and eleven is a particularly dangerous time for someone struggling with whiskey jitters but as before you promise not to touch a drop and swear you will drink only beer and that you are stopping by only to wonder at the lights and also to duck into the piano bar at the Bellagio for their blue-cheese-stuffed olives, a personal favorite and rare treat.

You stumble climbing onto your barstool and the bartender — tall and leathery, his thinning hair bleached white and spiked for a ridiculous effect — dislikes you on sight. He looks to have been a cocaine addict in years past and is now the perennial desert bachelor. Sensing his disapproval and understanding the sensitivity of bartender-customer relations you do not ask for the olives right away but order a beer and tip extravagantly and he takes your money but gives no thanks and will not engage in any casino chitchat. You order another beer and throw more money at the man but can see he is steadfast in his opinions and so you go ahead and ask for a cup of olives as a side and he is glad to be turning you down when he tells you the specialty olives are not bar peanuts tossed around randomly but offered only when ordered alongside their top-shelf martinis. You tell him you had not meant to speak belittlingly of the olives and of course you will pay the cost of this special martini except you don't want to drink a martini but only eat the olives with your beer and the bartender cuts you off and says the olives as a house rule are not to be sold or given away as snacks and you cut the bartender off and loudly order a top-shelf martini with extra olives and no martini and the bartender is now truly unhappy and he brings you one olive and tells you to "eat the stinking thing and fuck off down the road," and walks to the end of the bar to regale a regular with this, his latest story: The drunk who really, really wanted some olives.

You are never angry and now you are angry and you do not know what to do about it. You want to attack the man but think with a shudder of your cellmates in a Las Vegas jail and so instead take four more white pills and hatch a revenge plan. You do not eat the olive. You squash it in a twenty-dollar bill that the bartender will have to clean before pocketing, and taking up a pen from your bag you write these words on a napkin:

You are forty years old, a bartender in a bar in the desert. You hate the customers and the work but are trapped in the life as you have no other skills and have had no schooling or training of any kind. You have wasted your life drinking and doing drugs and sleeping beside women with hay for brains. You are alone and of no use to the world, save for this job, the job you hate, the job of getting people drunk. What will you be doing in five years? In ten years? There is no one who will look after you and you could die tomorrow and the only people who would care would be your bosses, and they would not be sad at your passing but only annoyed about having to interview new staff.

Your hair looks impossibly stupid.

You place the folded twenty atop this note and walk away to hide behind a row of slot machines and watch the plot in action. The bartender picks up the money, peeling it open to find the olive, and raises his eyes to find you. He does not find you and you are proud of the revenge results so far and are preparing for the bartender's reaction to the napkin when he, without noticing the writing, balls it up and tosses it into the garbage. He drops the dirty twenty in his tip jar and resumes his work.

Your heart is broken; you sit there feeling it break. Your chin is trembling when a woman in tights and a bow tie taps your shoulder and points to her tray and asks what you want to drink and you say, double Irish whiskey no ice, and she walks off to fetch it and you, realizing what you have done, stand and leave the slots before she can return and you head for the exit and ask the valet how far it is to the Grand Canyon and he tells you, and you hand him too much money and drive quickly away from the shimmering, nightmarish town. (You try not to look but the casinos seem to be breathing, their glowing bellies expanding and contracting as you move past.)

You do not drive to the Grand Canyon but head north into Utah. There is no reason for this. Whiskey or no whiskey you are drunk and angry at yourself and you wonder why you are unable to help yourself and your mood is desperate and no pills will change this and so you take no more and you do not stop for single cans of Budweiser and by the time you pull over to sleep you are sick and in pain. You try and fish out four aspirin from the bottle but they have burrowed past the white pills to the bottom, and so you empty the bottle onto your lap and pick out the aspirin this way. You are parked in a truck stop fifty miles outside St. George, an expanse of dirt twice the size of a football field, and yours is the only civilian vehicle among the semi trucks. You gag down the aspirin before climbing into the airless shell of your truck and curling up with your blanket to sleep.