Tag / beer

by Alexander Sorondo

April 27

Pretty tipsy and it’s Karaoke night again, the music’s crazy loud, and while reading somebody launches into a Linkin Park song at the mic and — maybe this is you being drunk and hypersensitive — the vibrations through the bar, through your stool, are running through your torso and seem to be tracing the outline of your organs. Your organs are buzzing.

It’s awful.

But also might not actually be happening.

Except it feels like it’s happening. You feel through vibrations every bunched-up contour of your intestines and you hope that this song ends immediately.

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by Alexander Sorondo

April 26

Karaoke. You didn’t know.

A middle-aged guy in blue jeans with red suspenders and his shirt tucked in takes the stage with a melancholic rendition of “Love on the Rocks”. You see him at Barnes & Noble sometimes. He goes there with a backpack and a baseball cap and stays for hours. Reads a lot.

His voice is deep and he talks with a cadence that sounds aloof, and every step he takes looks a little too deliberate. You see him sometimes with a friend who’s shorter, slimmer, has more hair. They talk and talk and sound like close friends. This other guy sits while the big guy reads, never cracks a book himself. Just looks around, plays on his phone. Now and then he’ll interject with a remark. Big guy responds as though he weren’t preoccupied.

Next guy on stage is tall and white and bald, wears a sleeveless t-shirt, and he raps and even though the on-screen read-along has substituted the n- and f-word for something else he supplies them anyway. The room is uneasy, and he descends the stage with a smile. A shitty dude, powerless, takes what joy he can from making people uncomfortable.

by Alexander Sorondo

April 25

She was a bar tender at one of the bars in the mall near your house, still is, and since you were going there on a regular basis she got in the habit of striking up conversation. Especially on weeknights. Friendly, smart, compulsively adopting animals. Good company.

Call her Rebecca.

One night you stop at the bar with a friend. It’s a weeknight, quiet. She buys you both a second round. Some beer that isn’t selling.

Thanks, Rebecca.

Last call comes so your buddy and you head a few doors down and keep drinking.

An hour goes by and, what’s this beside you?

Rebecca.

“Hey,” it’s nice to see her, “where’d you come from?”

She got cut early.

And she’s not wasting any time.

Rebecca orders three shooters that taste like Cinnamon Toast Crunch. One for herself, one for you and the friend.

[chorus] “Ariba…”

Then she buys another shot — just for you. You drink it. She tries to buy you a third but you refuse it. Stick with your beer. Drunk.

Rebecca sets her phone down in front of you with the keypad open. “Put your name and number in.”

You do it.

Ask for the check and she tries to keep you planted but you end up paying and leaving.

Next day she’s texting, asking if you wanna hang out You don’t. Come up with an excuse. She asks again a couple days later. Thanksgiving is a couple days away so you’ve got an excuse.

“So much to prepare…”

Here comes the day. Do some prep stuff at home with family and tehn take off for a relative’s place where the platters tower and the booze runs quick. Get yourself plump and drunk. Go off to the TV room and fall back in a recliner.

Deep breaths.

Fat and sleepy.

Phone buzzes. Buzzes.

Reach for it, and see a text from Rebecca.

Says, You obviously don’t give a fuck about me so don’t even bother.

by Alexander Sorondo

April 21

It’s late and you’re heading home after work and decide to stop at CVS for a fourpack of PBR.

Pull up to the store and fine the PBR’s all gone. Even the big 22-ounce cans you can buy on their own. There’s a few six- and twelve-packs of various beers and while you tell yourself you aren’t in the mood for that much beer tonight the truth is you don’t have that kinda money right now.

What they do have, over by the cheap stuff, is this lone can of Michelob Ultra. Fucking huge. Like 30 oz. Have you ever had Michelob Ultra? Can’t seem to remember.

The giant can costs $2.50.

That’ll do, pig.

Buy the giant Michelob Ultra and take it home, fix yourself a sandwich, reach for the big beer and suddenly you don’t want it. Feel the heft of this can in your hand and some weird gastric foresight tells you how it’ll feel in your belly. Not good. Put it in the fridge, eat your sandwich, go to bed.

Next night you come home with a fourpack of little plastic wine bottles. Go to put em in the fridge and when you open the door you almost recoil at the lone top-shelf figure. It’s a giant can of Michelob Ultra. Standing there like Homer Simpson’s silo of pig shit.

Take it out and hold it. Feels like a mortar round. Big as your forearm.

You do not want this.

Feels wrong to just throw it away, though.

Look around your kitchen as though for somebody else who might want it. A ghost. Some means of disposal. There’s the sink but you don’t want that. The trash, but ditto. Maybe take it to work tomorrow, give it to somebody? Or walk it down the road to the intersection and just stand it up on the sidewalk.

Imagining the young newlywed who stumbles upon it. “Hm. What’s this?” He takes it home.

His wife is there, stressing at the kitchen table with a calculator: all these bills. She sees the thing in his hand. “What’s that?”

“It’s a giant can of Michelob Ultra. I found it at the intersection.”

“Shall we have it for supper?”

“I should say so.”

Humble, loving couple. Struggling, but they have each other.

She clears the bills from the table and brings out two bowls.

He snaps the tab on this giant can of Michelob Ultra and out from it — a great purple light!

Twas a genie’s abode all this while.

The young couple are granted three wishes. They ask for wealth and good health and a happy life together among friends. The genie rubs his elbows, gyrates, and grants their wishes. Serenity henceforth, tenderness, comfort.

Even so: you don’t wanna drink this.

by Alexander Sorondo

April 20

Use the garage today because it’s pouring rain. You know it’s a bad idea because they charge a weekend surplus but for some reason you go along with it.

At a bar upstairs the notebook comes out and you do a good amount of work in the sapce of two beers. The bill is $6, plus tip. It’s been about two hours. This is fine.

Leaving the garage a twentysomething in the cashiers’ booth tells you the price of your stay was $7. Frustrating. Guilt-inducing. Embarrassing, too, that you can’t go out to do some work over just two cheap beers without then incurring some peripheral expense that throws your supper into question and sets you on this nervous-angry thought track (made worse by the booze) about when you’ll next be paid and how embarrassingly meager a life you’ll have to lead until then.

The machine isn’t working.

Dude in the booth asks if you’d mind backing up 20 feet, changing lanes, and going and paying in another automated register.

Bafflingly, you say, “Yeah, I mind.”

Of course you don’t mind.

This dude with the glasses sighs and then apologizes but says that this is the only way for you to get out.

Of course he’s not sorry.

Two twentysomethings at an agitated standstill not wanting (not being able) to say what’s really got you both here, in this mood.

  1. He’s just doing his job, and embarrassed to be working here.
  2. You’re just broke, and embarrassed to be so.
by Alexander Sorondo

April 19

Her name’s G. Whenever she shows up and you’re here already, reading, she’ll come over and sit, talk, and on the one occasion you told her you really needed to get through this book she told you to go to a library. She’d leave you alone if you really pressed it but you never do.

She has a brazen sense of humor and talks in a growl, sarcastic, her eyelids are heavy like she’s always exasperated but she gets softspoken and earnest after a shot. Sips her beer from a plastic cup instead of a glass cuz she’s constantly in and out for a cigarette. Prides herself on intelligence. Every problem she has at work comes down to her colleagues being stupid. Says she likes talking to you cuz you’re one of the few smart people she knows. You figure what she’s praising as intelligence is probably just your willingness to listen. But don’t say that.

G.’s in her early fifties and looking for a new job, maybe in the same industry, and tonight she’s talking, laughing, about french fries (her favorite food, surrendered for lent) and soliloquizes, in a way that suggests years of serious analysis, the french fry situation in Miami. The Cuban influence. The absence of White Castle. The flexible but relatively consistent supremacy of skinny fries over wedges.

She will not eat them curly.

After the first beer she goes for a smoke and comes back for a shot of Fireball, refill on the beer, and then, slowly, weariness encroaches.

“You remember the guy I was talking about?”

EMT, ex-military, she was hooking up with him while his divorce was being finalized a couple months ago. (Took forever.)

 

The guy feels guilt about sleeping with somebody else while he’s still married.

After a while, as the divorce inches toward a close, he keeps going over to G.’s place but he’s emotional, reflective, doesn’t wanna have sex.

His conscience.

G. tells him it’s fine. She scratches his back in bed while he vents. (Makes a point of telling you she could see him getting hard through his shorts. Closes her eyes and raises her hands, palms out, innocent: “I didn’t touch.”)

“Now…” she says. Just that. Leaves the word hanging while she sips her beer, looks away, shakes her head. “He won’t answer my texts for like ten hours if he answers them at all. Not answering a call, or returning it — I can understand that. But a text? You can’t text me a yes or a no for six hours, seven hours? You don’t shit? Can’t step into the bathroom and take your phone out?”

She says, “For two months we had literally everything I could have wanted. Simple shit. Someone to send a text: ‘Goodmorning.’ Send a text: ‘Goodnight.’ Little nice updates during the day. Meet up once or twice a week to get a drink, sleep over. Not even to have sex, if he wasn’t in the mood. But just that…shit, the company, man.”

You nod.

She drinks. Shrugs. Orders another shot and takes it outside in a plastic cup. You can see her lighting up outside and she doesn’t come back for a while.

by Alexander Sorondo

April 17

Hungry at the cafe but you check your account and decide it’s probably safer just to stay hungry for a while, ’til Happy Hour, at which point you head south to the usual bar for a halfprice beer and a halfprice appetizer, big enough to work as a meal, and to read for a bit before heading home.

At the cafe when you were hungry the barista got up from behind the counter and came over and sat beside you at the communal table, bored in this lull between busy patches, and without mentioning her son she says she might have to look for a new job soon. This sudden candor. Talks with spotty eye-contact, unprompted, about how she’s only just barely meeting her expenses. She refers your eye to the counter where, a few minutes ago, that empty and red-stained Tupperware was full of pasta and she was doing damage to it.

“Made that fucking pasta two nights ago, big pot like a witch, and I’m still eating it now and I’ll probably have it again tomorrow. Like…” Her breath catches and she shakes her head, closes her eyes, sighs. Opens up and looks immediately more flippant and cool. Says, “I feel like it’s fine in the end cuz I’m, what?, I’m twenty-eight. I’m just starting out, like, in life. So I know it’s fine, that this is like my Struggle Period and that eventually shit’ll be good cuz I’ve got like the work ethic, the brains, whatever whatever. It’s just…” mouth agape, pawing for a word, she finally just laughs, “it fucking sucks right now.”

And a cuple hours later you’re here at the bar, finally getting your Bliss, and you’re thinking of her life and of yours. Her attitude and yours.

You’re comparing, which people say not to do.

by Alexander Sorondo

April 16. I remember you.

You’re about to go for a walkthrough at an efficiency in a convenient part of town and, being too excited, you get here an hour early.

Can’t go knocking on the door right now. Gotta be punctual, make a good impression.

So you go to kill time at a bar about five blocks away. Bring a book.

The bar tender walks up to you with this head-tilted squint, and so you start squinting right back at her, and bending your own head. She does seem familiar…

Then she calls it, smiling. For eight or nine months she tended bar at a big corporate chain next door to the nearest movie theater to your house. She saw you every Friday afternoon back when you sustained that six-month habit of catching a show on your day off.

You ask why she left the big chain.

“Got fired.”

(You have to stop asking this.)

She closes her eyes and tilts her head again and shrugs, like no big deal. “It was a shitshow there. Got fired on a technicality. It’s a long story.”

You ask for the story.

She tells it.

You drink two beers in the time it takes her to say that she didn’t card somebody. The customer was clearly of age, maybe mid-thirties, but rules are rules.

“I don’t really mind, though.” Again with the closed eyes and the big shrug. “This place pays me just as good. And we don’t have roaches here.”

by Alexander Sorondo

April 15. Even when you’re not talking about money, you’re talking about it.

Dad calls to say he doesn’t want you to go on a road trip you’ve planned and the fact of his getting in touch just to say so is enraging, more than it ought to be, and probably mostly because of money. You’re short on money and when you’re short on money everything is worse than it is cuzza the Money Cloud.

You’re currently on your way to a birthday party for which you’ve just spent 10% of your paycheck, and you’re wondering how you’ll float until the next one.

There’s a silence on the phone after he says what he wanted to say. A silence in which you’re pretty sure (angrily then, shruggingly now) that the response he’s waiting for is compliance. But there’s a teenage voice in your chest, militant and angry with a beret on its head and a fist in the sky, talking about NO MORE and RESIST. Talking shit.

You let the silence go on and on until he asks if you’re there.

“Yeah.”

Another long silence.

“I just don’t think this is a good idea.”

Whereupon you assure him that his preference isn’t a governing factor in your decisionmaking.

And the teenager inside you folds his arms and smiles and nods.

Another silence and then, feigning a meek matronly bafflement, he says, “…OK…have a good night.”

Upstairs at the party you’re the first one to arrive (sun hasn’t even gone down) and you pop one of the beers you brought and sit brooding on the balcony while the host takes her dog for a quick walk before the guests arrive.

Angry drinking, defeated drinking, worried drinking. Feelings all over the place like you should apologize — or no, cuz the gesture really was annoying — and what if a silent treatment ensues from this, another ten-day standoff like the last one? And what if this, what if that?

The intersection under her balcony is empty. It’s Passover. You spit into the road and lean your face on a post and take an enormous swig, half the can, and with the gulp comes a chill, a shiver, goosebumps. An immersion into this moment and space, here and now on a Coral Gables balcony, where nobody wants anything of you.

A nice feeling. Fake.

by Alexander Sorondo

April 14. La Quinta.

This particular La Quinta’s in a shady part of town and there’s bad lighting in the parking lot so when you get here at 9:30 it’s almost pitch dark. You walk inside with the McDonald’s bag and the Pabst Blue Ribbon in one hand and your keys in the other, clutched in a jumble, unclear whether you’d swing or stab them at an attacker.

The elevator is wood-paneled and smells like 2002 and the hallway is narrow so you can hear laughter and coughing and arguments and all different sorts of TV while walking to your room. You’re on the second floor and two guys are having a heated argument in Spanish under your window so you draw the shade and turn the TV on and eat your fast food, drink your beer, stare at cartoons but focus mostly on money, jobs, where to go from here. Family drama. Issues with money again. Where will you live next month.

Something next door crashes into the wall behind your TV and you spill some beer in your lap, trying to stand up. Snatch the remote up and hit Mute.

Crouching by the window in your boxers and dress shirt, some vague inflexible imitation of a karate pose, rivulets of beer on your arm and crotch, you stand perfectly still, listening closely.

But your neighbors are dead quiet now. Not even a TV.

Blood’s pumping in your ears.

Creep over to the door and open it slowly and look both ways down the hall.

Just the white noise behind other people’s doors.

In the arm chair over the next two hours you watch cartoons with the volume low, taking small sips, going rigid and muting the TV whenever you think you hear something from next door. At some point you get into bed and at 9 am wake up with a gasp from some dream about a sniper.