She agreed to meet at his favorite drinking stop** spot—and he was suspicious to think even his favorite place to be at all times—the abbey. It was around two fourty-ish, casual bar flies were coming in and out, but no consistent parties. Tuesday nights, his favorite nights, they were all his favorites, even her.
“What’s been happenin’ to you baby? Come on baby. I don’t understand. I treat you so well.”
Placed on their table was an order of twelve degrees and two cold sipping cups, but she wasn’t even looking at hers. He held the stem of the cup lightly while his fingers lifted the beer leveled to his lips and significantly drank faster than her, but it wouldn’t matter since they were both buzzed, and both driving out of there.
“You know you’ve been callin’ me less and less, and yes, I don’t pick up your calls all the time, but still, you know I love it when you call. You know I care. You know I don’t mean the things I say, I just like to play around with you.”
They were sitting in the little table booth with the ‘Frog & Toad’ sign. It was his favorite.
“I’ve been thinking about all the things we’ve been agreeing on, you know, the decisions we’ve made about how we’re not going to get serious, and I’m thinkin’ maybe we should change that, you know? Maybe we should get a little more serious."
The ‘Frog & Toad’ sign depicts a frog and a toad with their arms over each other’s shoulders. They are dressed like young Americans from colonial times and they strut around an old fashioned town with beer mugs in their hands. It always seems to him that the frog and the toad are not aware of who they are, but always imagine they are the other. They look into each other and see themselves. The handsome frog believes he’s an ugly toad, and the wise toad is under the impression of being an immature frog. They’ll probably never realize the differences between them. He always thought his trip to Europe would be something like the ‘Frog & Toad”, and it really was something slightly similar. He also thinks and tells people that he's the toad. His explanation for this is that he feels as if he ages at a rapid rate, so by the time he reaches thirty five he'll be more around sixty years old. He'll be the toad with the warts on his face while his friends are the handsome frogs generating success as they proceed from one accomplishment in the work force to another in their local community, and they will fall in love with beautiful girls that make them dizzy, and they’ll have kids.
“Who’s this guy you’ve been seeing? Come on now, don’t fucking lie to me. I’m not your joke. You think I’m an idiot? I know what’s going on. You don’t sleep over anymore and you’re always over this guy’s house doing drugs. You’re always too fucked up to even remember you owed me a call.”
‘Frog & Toad’ carries miniature, dim lights above it that barely give any illumination at all. They really just shine each other and create warmth in a bulb. They justify one another, both little lights unaware of the darkness that surrounds them. The table is cut to fit the wall on one side, and the side next to the aisle cuts off with the seats, and the seats become long benches, each bench serving one side of two booths at a time as long as two booths were dependent on each other. The people sitting in one bench might never see the other people sitting on the same bench, yet they are right next to each other. You could go an entire abbey night without even bothering to look behind you and see who’s sharing that bench with you. People might never discover how close they actually are, or could be, and their backs reinforce it.
“We first started seeing each other because you pursued me babe. I didn’t start this. I should be the one pissed at you. See baby… I don’t want to see other girls, really. I’m fine with you. And I don’t mean the mean little things I say to you. I really don’t."
His first glass of “twelve” had been long done, so he filled it up again from the pitcher. Hers was about three quarters of a way done. The pitcher method to drinking creates a sort of dual effect when two people decide to split it. You keep certain track of the other person’s drink, and, well, you start to ask questions about yourself and the other person that lacks correlation to drinking, like which of the two is the greediest or most impatient. But sometimes you really can tell a person by the way they drink.
“I don’t understand how the interest you had in me could have died so quickly.”
Their booth is one of four, and it’s the third from the entrance of the bar. They’re all lined up to the immediate left from the entrance, and a long stretch of aisle could accurately describe the bar. When you first enter, there is a small square area to the right that holds a darts board, and if you ask the bartender, he’ll lend you the darts to play. When a person has a certain procedure to drinking, and they name it, and people know how you will drink before you’ve even started, you’re a usual drinker, usually there. There is a “flow” system to drinking, where, in a way, you filter flows of sips individually while you gulp. You take a gulp, and in three flows you will separate the gulp into three different swallows. You also take continual gulps, so you'll always be one of the trashiest by the end of the night, plastered to the wall, inebriated type of stuff. She was taking small sips, but at a very quick pace. Some people just let their drinks sit all night.
“You know, everyone, including your own little friends, has been coming up to me and telling me that I shouldn’t be with you. Yeah, believe it or not, they’ve been coming up to me and telling me I’m a good catch and all, and that I could and should do way better than you. I tell them they really don’t know you.”
After the square area with the darts begins the line of booths, and next to the booths on the other side of the aisle stands a walk-in freezer that isn’t very long, and next to it rests a bar, a mixture of bright and dim lights at the top and glass window shelves and drawers, and the popular stained glass painting of the friar underneath the apple tree with twenty five apples, but you only know there are twenty five when you have been there so many times, or if you've let your drink rest on the table, leaving a ring for a mark on the wood. The ones who let their drinks sit longer than others always come out on top at the end of the night because they are sober, and have the ability to function properly, and could even take advantage of the drunks, mostly because they give the impression of being one of them.
“Remember when you opened up to me? That first time I slept over your place, you really opened up to me. You told me all those secrets that most people don’t know. But what I remember the most is you telling me you were trying to become a nicer person. When I first met you I really didn’t like you, and now you’re trying to become a better person. It really doesn’t look like it Cleopatra.”
He's just finished his second cup and had gotten the blurry eyes. Most times when he gets the blurry eyes, he really wants to kiss someone, so you could say he has blurry eyes most of the time. Where the booths end the bar keeps going. There’s a little counter behind the booths with three chairs and some ashtrays just to fill the empty space. Where both the counter and the bar stop stretching stands a wall with a hole in it for a doorway that leads to yet another wall. This wall has a design of an upside down cross, and Mary, mother of Jesus, splattered against it. Looking straight into this thing is like looking into an x-ray mirror, a reflection of your inner sickness, and you feel as if it brings out all the sins in you, the sins you wish you didn’t commit, into display, for you to see how far you’ve gone lost. All the darkness that circles and shrouds your life, that you bring about yourself by shooting out those lights, all the lies you tell and the people you fuck over and the dirty, rotten and shameful things you do but don’t tell your family and friends about. This Mary, so melancholy and morose, waits for an explanation, but you can’t give her one so you stop staring and continue.
To the left of Mary is the men’s bathroom with saloon styled swinging doors and a sink, and then another door to the toilet, and a urinal and wooden walls covered with scratches from drunks who have to let you know they were there once too, and the occasional proverb from some self-proclaimed modern prophet. On the opposite side is the women’s bathroom, but you never think of that while relieving yourself. As you break the seal, you never think of a woman's space, and how it’s across from you, and you never bother to find out that heart-shaped tiles cover its floor. Both existences, both rooms separate in their thoughts, yet similar in their purposes and almost exactly in the same location, have an unnoticed connection. And those who hold their drinks the longest, they sometimes bother to sit on the bench next to Mary in between the two bathrooms and spot out the drunks.
“You know, your weird obsession with your father is alright with me. Because, you know what, you really like him and if you think I’m like him then that’s fine with me. I just don’t understand why I bother with you if you’re just going to disappoint me. You tell me you want to see me, and fuck me, and all of this, yet most of the time you either don’t call or you’re fucked up. I don’t want to deal with this shit, because I really am starting to get tired and annoyed, and worried too.”
From outside you can’t look into the abbey because of the blinds, and the windows are stamped and littered with stickers. Inside, the walls stand tall and near the ceiling hangs a small counter that holds an expanded assortment of bottles of beer, and the bartender tried to tell him once that some drunk counted them and it was something like one hundred and thirty-four or one hundred and five, or something like that. Every time he goes to the abbey he will stay for too long and drink too long, too fast, and tip too much. He never remembers leaving though, but I’m sure those who held their drinks back long enough do. That’s a skill one needs to learn to get ahead in life.
“Why have you been lying to me about this guy? Baby, we’re supposed to be free to see other people, but if you don’t tell me about it then it sort of defeats the purpose, you know? Just tell me why you’re not into me anymore.”
At that point he poured her a second glass and she took a big gulp and he's convinced she was trying to imply something. And then she went on. She went on forever. She had so much to say. Every word licked at his face and slowed him down, more and more, and wrinkled him and created imaginary warts. The bartender, whom he knows on a first name basis, had some folk shit playing on his iPod on a stereo near the counter. This girl was crushing him, and he couldn’t believe it.
“You know I don’t mean that shit babe.”
She kept going. At that moment he wished he had kept his fucking mouth shut. He shouldn’t have said shit. He shouldn’t have cared or given a shit. He shouldn’t have spoken to a million people about her and he definitely should not have gone to this bar with her. She really served him up, and she's coming out a winner after this one. Once again, a girl makes him feel like a fool.
“Hm.”
He drinks quicker and quicker, more flows per minute than ever before. He orders another pitcher, this time of Imperial Stout, or Stout Imperial, if you please, in the middle of her speech, or lecture, to get a short breather. He has nothing to say. No wit, no clever slyness and it would really make him look bad. What a tactless idea to drive his car out here and meet her. He glares at his black razr on the table hoping, wishing for a call to interrupt her, but people barely ever call him at these times. She’s actually the one who calls him the most, so he keeps smoking cigarette after cigarette as he usually does when he drinks. She smokes Parliaments, but sometimes she smokes his reds and comments on how much she can’t believe that he smokes two packs of those a day. He tries to visualize what he looks like. He remembers the last time he looked at himself in the mirror, and every time he looks in the mirror in his bathroom at home he can’t trust that image, because he always look great. There is no possible way he can look so handsome, because things would be so much different, more girls would have him, and she would not have been saying all those things. You never really know what you look like, because when you look in the mirror you are making yourself look pretty, and you get into some poses in which you look good. But you never interact with the person on the other side of that mirror, you never find out what they look like when they laugh or say things, or move around or turn their face, or become embarrassed. That person staring back at you in the mirror is just as clueless about himself or herself as you are about yourself. How can you ever find out who you are? Do you ever get to know yourself? Will everyone always know you better than you will? Did this girl really describe him that accurately? Because the things she’s saying don’t sound right to him. Their glasses are coming close to matching; she’s slowly catching up to his drink.
When they finish, he has nothing to say, and feels stupid for not thinking of something while she was on her offensive. Takes a sip, looks at her eyes with a pensive stare, and then mumbles out something like:
“When was the last time you looked in the mirror? You’re exactly the same.”
And with those simple and almost unintelligible words he becomes a complete imbecile. The comment rolls off of her, a useless waste of English, takes no thought in it and tells him to drive home safely and to call her when he gets there so she’ll know he’s fine. At the other end there is someone who knows you better, but who has no light to see themselves, and if you could meet yourself and spend some afternoon getting to know each other better, things would be so much smoother for everyone. He drinks some more and then pays up, overtips, and drives home recklessly. And when he reaches his home he lays in bed, and before he closes his eyes he reaches for his phone and texts her that he got home OK, and then he falls asleep.
