Drink and spirits
About a decade back now, I had a good buddy who tended bar at a dive in Queens. He’s kind of a quiet guy, and doesn't much like to talk about himself or his work life, but one day we were sitting around in his apartment, him in a big high back chair, me posted up under a palmistry diagram, slowly making our way through a six pack while the rain pattered down into the orange lit streets outside the apartment window. My friend, he’s very Italian, with long curly hair, and a quietly deep voice. We both had a taste for the weird, sharing creepypastas and the like with each other when we were kids, and musing about ghosts, cryptids, UFOs and other eldritch furniture of the fringe. So when he said ‘I had a weird experience at work a couple of days ago’ I knew it would be interesting.
He said it was later in the evening, not last call, but definitely heading that way. There were only a few people at the bar, and as a good barkeep does, my friend was making the requisite small talk with the variously inebriated souls on the stools. A woman, alone -looked to be mid thirties- called him over, asked for a drink. I don’t remember what he told me she ordered, but he hadn’t seen her come in. He made her poison and as he was handing her the drink she briefly locked eyes with him and started talking.
He could tell, he said, that she had been drinking. Her eyes were out of focus, but her voice was clear. It was simple enough drink talk. How was he enjoying the city? What did he think of the music scene? He answered with the usual pleasantries and conversed with the other night owl patrons. It wasn’t flirtatious at all, but felt strange all the same. Like there was intent just behind the small talk. Despite the booze she wanted to tell someone. Something, whatever it was.
When she called for her second drink, she accepted it and then looked him directly in the eyes and started talking about a loft party she went to in 2002. Now at the the time, this was about 14 years earlier but my friend played the polite barman and listened. How the Strokes were playing, yes THE Strokes she insisted and how good the drinks were. How she knew so many people and how she was invited, didn’t even crash it. The memories came out of her onto my friend. ‘And we went to a punk show in Williamsburg and the sound was just incredible… People loved having me around... X really does feel like you’re best friends with everyone…’ He could barely get a word in edgewise, beyond the ‘yeah’ or ‘oh?’.
On and on it just kept coming, memories of a life lived a decade past. Even as he attended to other patrons, she just kept going. It started off as strange and quickly became unsettling. My friend said he realized he was talking, or really was being talked at by what amounted to a spirit. A phantasm who for all intents and purposes had ceased to exist a decade and a half earlier. All her memories, all her focus was on a life that had come and gone. And she was so desperate to relive it she would share the highlights with random barkeeps like him. As if the act of sharing it somehow made it all alive again.
It disturbed him greatly, and as his shift ended, she was still sitting there. Silent now, after saying good bye to him.
The cliche about the meathead who can’t get past the big game he lost in high school is part of the pop culture establishment, but this was different. To see someone who had stopped living in their early twenties, and wanted only to be back there, rather than continue living their life wasn’t amusing. It came across as horrifying the more he thought about it. Living the rest of your life as a ghost. Haunting the living around you with the life you once had, rather than facing the world right in front of you. He called it a waking nightmare.
I thought about it too as I walked home through that murky autumn rain. Best to keep on living.