Cult Fiction - Drunken People Have Always Made Me Sad

Drunken people have always made me sad. Not angry drunks or even alcoholics. Happy drunks, that’s what breaks my heart. I can sit with hardened, back-broken, alcoholics and drink steadily all day. There’s no real emotion to be nervous of in the company of the fringe, the yellow beer-stained race, skin discoloured by low light and vitamin d deficiency. With men like this there is no reason for judgment, yet more importantly, there’s no dignity in being the judge.

I could have drunk with John Wayne and Errol Flynn. I’d drink like a maniac, but they wouldn’t make me sad. No sir, I find hope in bars full of men with the detox shakes, buying the first or fourth drinks at opening time. This man has no secrets, his cards are face up and the dealer is bust, that goddamn dealer, what the fuck does he know . . .

It’s the pretty girls that do it the most. Pretty girls with big bright eyes, squeezed into thousand dollar dresses with scarlet ribbons in their hair. They sway lazily and without elegance, with a thin glass of bubbling champagne pressed between two fingers. Usually accompanied with the hopeless drunk, a man beside her, stumbling and laughing loudly, pulling his bitch closer to his chest.

Or it’s the old couple at the sweet sixteenth, or Christmas, or New Years. The dance floor swarming and squirming with a compilation of flailing arms and cottage cheese legs. Always adorned with the bald man, falling into the speakers and surrounded by a moat of woman avoiding eye contact, given a wide birth, even by the bouncers. He sways near the DJ and adds curse words into the slow strung words of the songs he sings to himself. He doesn’t make me sad; he pisses me off because he’s ruining the show, like talking too loud in a cinema.

It's early morning and I've finished work with my dad. A Sunday in June and the weather looks daunting with the promise of rain if the clouds get too sad. I’m hungover and covered in dust that sticks to my sweat, the smells of the septic tanks I was just painting, lingering in the breath of my nostrils. We are sitting in the work truck looking over the form guide. It's ten to 12 and, being a Sunday, the pub is waiting to open. Pubs weren’t always open in Australia on Sundays until Sunday Observance Acts were repealed during the 1950s, about the same time we went to war with Korea.

We wait in the car because we don’t want to look desperate. Not like the drunks hovering around the door, hands in their coat pockets. Their heads are bobbing up and down around the window desperately hoping to make eye contact with the bar keep. Smoking rolled tobacco and talking as if their throats were cut, and bleeding slowly down their red cross shirts.

Desperate.

Alone.

Thirsty.

When the door cracks open the crowd of three or four men pull back and their eyes begin to glow. The bottle shop door rolls open at the same time and a few of the men change their minds. They choose to purchase cask wine and drink alone on the park benches, these men are the seasoned fighters, the a-grade, crème de la crème’.

We make our move now; we need cold beer to settle our nerves and a warm place to sip it. It’s only a short few steps and neither I nor my father say a word. The door opens and the inside of the bar is washed with the blue neon glow from the teletex betting screens above the wrap ups for the morning race meetings. I know it’s my shout and I buy two schooners of beer, with lemonade, lemonade because I'm weak as piss. We are both of English heritage me and my father, he of 28 years and me of 4, so we hang to our traditions of pints, plus the meter to the gallon is of a greater percentage.

There was a monstrous tree that used to rip through the pub's beer garden, before it was removed to make way for pokies and slot machines. This tree was salvaged, however, cut into sections, varnished, lacquered and machined to create tables in the sports bar. A friend of mine’s father cut down the tree and another manufactured it into a table. That’s the way local bars work. We look after each other with labour, conversation and understanding, well maybe just company. We sit quietly and drink our beers. Behind me a gambling machine is punched feverishly by a short Asian man. There is a tremendously fat man with a golfing T-shirt standing behind the midget Chinaman, waiting for his turn to bet.

“Ay Wong, you having a bet or making a telephone call, mate.” It’s the most thick and amazing Australian accent you have ever heard.

The few men surrounding the bar, waiting for beer, laugh and the Chinaman takes his ticket to leave. I’m running a beer mat through spilt beer on the table and a grey-haired man beside me is shouting at the television screen. The horse that won was a 16 (sixteen) to 1 (one) outsider, first legs up in New Zealand or someplace not too far away. He looks very content and I congratulate him, attempting to make some kind of connection. He turns to me and his coke-bottom glasses tremble on his face as his body quivers and shakes. I can tell immediately he is from Corpus Christie, a missionary up the raod for drunks of all ages, and I immediately regret starting the conversation.

“Won by two lengths and a half head, you know, I knew it would,” he has maybe two teeth sticking from the bottom of his mouth, all tarred and yellow at their roots, poking out from pink and brown gums. His cheeks droop at the sides like a hound dog, his big red nose swelling and pickled with liver spots.

I look him in his warm blue eyes, and he reminds me of my grandfather. I don’t want to make him uncomfortable because I knew he didn’t have any money on the horse, so I ask him if he could pick a winner for me. I tell him, like a leprechaun with IBS, I’m shit out of luck lately. Under the table he has an old brown sports bag, the type they give you when you buy a pair of snazzy new running shoes. Inside the bag are a solo bottle, filled with cask wine and maybe three or four (4) warm cans of cider.

He leans over to pick up the solo bottle and some pills that look like dishwashing tablets fall from his jacket pocket and fall to the floor with his crutches. He can’t bend over so I pick up his things.

“The doctor said I have to take these with food” while he swallows them with a swig of wine. “I said to him, I said, what's that?” in reference to food, more about not eating because of the creature and not a lack of funds.

He picks number 10 – Word of mouth, or something like that, my notes from that day were written on beer mats and lotto tickets. I put ten (10) dollars on the nag, and a few drivers for a trucking company join our table and start chatting with my dad. Before the race me and my dad's mate Rabbit talk with the drunken man; his name is Bill, but I’m sure he just made that up. He is confident from drink and tells us stories about when he was a “young lad” and when he used to work at the races.

“I'd sell papers in the birdcage, the Herald Sun, and I'd sell each one at about 12 cents. Now what I'd do is wait until the very start of the race, when the bookies where scrambling for their last taking . . . Then I'd start screaming “Get the sun, 12 cents” as loud as I could. Book bloke’s used to lose their minds and send a scab to buy one or two from me, just to shut me up!”

He laughs quietly and looks away from me before I can respond; I’m slightly drunk now and my Jesus complex is flaring up, I want this to be a human connection, something different and real, I want him to be comfortable and happy. Now can you see why I get so blue?

“Yeah,” he says turning to me with a toothless grin and glazed eyes. “Then when the race started I'd start again, the punters would buy another dozen so they could hear the race!”

My dad disappears and returns with beer and a cheeky grin. The race runs and we all watch it together, the breakfast club. The horse bolts home, not shy of four or five lengths, it pays less than the first and levels out at around 6 dollars. I’m satisfied with the $60 I’ve won and I pat Bill on the back. I walk to the bar and buy a round of schooners, with one for my new mate Bill. But my dad is ecstatic and he smiles likes an ether-ridden clown.

“Buy him a beer, I'll buy you a fucking house mate!”

I knew why, he heard the tip and he silently put on a sneaky bet. My dad always does that. Never tells me his bet in case it loses, and he gets called the jinks. The poor bugger is kind of known as the horse sniper down at the pub and I’m pretty sure if Melbourne’s trainers knew about his renowned poor luck in horse racing he would have a price on his head. He is the best gambler I know though, he doesn’t give a shit if he wins or loses, its all about the ride, the crack of whips at the 600 meters and a jiggling mash of bobbing heads and raising fist as the thunder pounds across the Turf past the screaming sea of beautiful hats and colourful ties.

He puts a fifty dollar note in my hand and he looks at Bill, I know what he means and I’m more than happy to oblige . . .

but not just yet.

Bill is riding this winning streak and he looks to have a few more races left. Because he is drinking the beer we bought him the staff can’t kick him out just yet and he looks happy and content to be part of the crew. He talks candidly about doctor’s appointments, the drunks drinking at the benches and greyhounds. The best stories he tells are about cheap drinks.

“You guys ever heard of vanilla essence? It’s used in cooking and cakes and stuff like that. The drop is worth 50-percent alcoholic volume in some bottles! I know guys that have died from the shit, hell I heard a young boy around here died after a binge because he fell in the creek and froze to death.”

I know that’s true, I’ve seen at least two poor old beggars being pulled from the creek. Cadavers already, their wet clothes sticking to their grey and wrinkled skins. Kids on push bikes watching them exhumed from the bridge across the way. But I have no reason to doubt Bill, he is the prophet after all.

The next race is at Traralgon and it’s a large field of maybe 10 to 15 runners. It’s a tough race with no clear favourites, but Bill seems confident.

“Put you money on the 8 and 5, maybe throw in the 11 and quinnella them all to better the odds. Don’t go crazy, I’ve never been this lucky and I’m sure it won’t last long.” Bill says still smiling and his brown lips wet with beer and spit.

One of the guys from toll, Pete, pulls me aside where Bill can’t hear and says,

“Is this your new dad Benny, the prophet?”

He was always saying stupid shit like that, but he always makes me laugh. I make the bet and buy more beer from the female bartender. She is pretty but hardened in the face, almost masculine. You know the type, the beautiful woman beaten to death by life. Ravaged by man, weed and the sadness of the chance they never made good. Bill looks nervous for the first time, as the horses are ushered into the stalls. I’m worried too. I couldn’t give a fuck about losing my money, I just want him to feel like a hero, me and my Jesus complex competing against the randomness of chance.

The reasons the drunk make me sad. It’s the way I feel about happiness. You should never give anyone anything emotionally. It becomes expected and it hurts when it’s gone. It’s too hard to keep up to, to much pressure for a man who can tell the difference. Pushing a point high enough that it’s difficult to reach in everyday situations, or even in a continual conscious roll, as such.

Eight and five cross the line and 11 draws a close 5th. I have won about $200.00 and I’m well oiled and drunk. Bill has done it, he has picked 3 winners in a row, well, almost 4 with the quinnela. He hasn’t had any money on the horses he’s picked but he is on top of the world. I walk over to Bill as the rest of the pack split to buy beer and pick up winners. I put my hand on his back and he jumps a little bit, so I retreated to the opposite side of the table. I have a yellow fifty dollar note in my hand and I press it on the table and push it towards Bill's empty beer glass. I tell him in a quiet voice that this is not charity, that I have won a sum of money and he deserves a take, fuck knows I couldn’t pick a rose, let alone 4 winners. He thanks me once or twice and holds the note in his shaking hand saying things like,

“Are you sure mate? you really don’t have to.” or

“Bloody hell digger, this is my biggest win to date.” Or

“my god.”

. . . We shouldn’t have done this. Hope is a paradox, like the wealth of a church, or saying good luck to a group of interns. It’s often the worst thing that can happen to a man with nothing to gain, no golden elevation to wealth, structure and pot roast Sunday lunches. Hope is the belief that some day, none of what I do today, will be relevant to tomorrow. The perpetual kick in the balls.

The time had passed in a hurry, and the mid-day crowd of tradies and families on their way to the local footy are filling the room. Children are throwing billiard balls across the green felt of the pool table and eating star-shaped chicken nuggets. I, full of booze and a sense of impending victory, or doom, had filled my boot and I wanted warmth and bed.

We left Bill at the tote window, placing his first bet on a 12 to 1 out-sider in Hobart, his body starting to twist and melt into an intoxicated version of a Lewis Carroll cricket bat. I don’t bother him with goodbyes or sentiments and we leave into a overcast afternoon, slump into the car and high-tail home for coffee and showers and food and company and sex and brown bear documentaries and wide-screen monitors and remote controls and clean silverware and my laughing sister and pride and a pretence that I’m living the life. Really capturing the essence of the son or the father, or that sweet sweet holy spirit.

The next time I’m at the pub, Pete bundles me up in a corner and tells me everything I didn’t want to hear.

“Your mate the prophet. Your old man the prophet.” He laughs, shaking his head wildly. He won’t continue until pressed, so I take the bait and rouge him.

“I left after you on the Sunday, I had to pick up the miss’s daughter, you see.” Pete always fills his stories with inert references and pointless additions. I'm sure he does it to convince himself he is not going senile.

“So I dropped off the miss’s daughter at swimming cause she goes to the gym on Sundays. I had some time to kill so I came back down the broadie at about 5.”

He stops and looks at me like he is about to explode, waiting for the people at our tables to hush and listen to his story. Like he had an amazing joke that he didn’t want to waste on just me, he wanted everyone to hear this punchline.

“And your mate was asking everyone from Corpus if they would catch a bus home with him, he was well pissed by then and no one wanted a bar of him. So any ways, I have a few more beers and I don’t see him for a while.” He narrows a little and looks around so his eyes meet with everyone on the table, all leaning a little forward now.

“I walk outside for a smoke and old mate is sitting on the bus stop asleep. And he’s gone and pissed and shit himself! No wonder no cunt wanted to take the bus home with him!”

The table spins away from the story. A few men laugh and a few just make hissing sounds, like punctured inner tubes. Pete thinks this is hilarious and is kind of slapping the table with a dead fish hand.

“Poor bastard” says Jimmy, an old man with carpal tunnel and lazy cataract eyes. Who has maybe been there too once, he just didn’t get caught in the act. No one else takes any notice of the story and they continue talk of vaginas and golf trips.

But I haven’t reacted to this yet.

Right then I was just picturing Bill.

Laying at the bus stop with thick yellow shit caked all over his old man pants. The shit drying hard in the crack of his ass, all pushed up along his chest and mixing with the piss around his balls. An old man losing his bowels and bladder and probably his mind, wondering how the hell he was going to get back to that bed. That single bed in a room of old men pissing and vomiting.

Old men being pulled, frozen, from creeks.

The prophet and them blue eyes just like my granddads.

Poor bastard Bill with the 50-dollar note just burning a hole in his pocket.

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