Hrast

You can’t trust the damn groundhog. And why would we ever think it was logical to even consider having confidence in the meteorological predictions of a rodent from an unpronounceable town in Pennsylvania? Six more weeks of winter was bad enough, but here it is, another seven weeks past that, May first, and the sleet is pounding down like half melted Italian Ice. What was worse than the cold and wet was that the likelihood that Teg’s ride would never arrive. Teg had not yet figured that out.

Some events moved linearly, some cycled over and over again, some lives resembled a spiral. Teg’s life, insofar as romance was concerned, was more like one of those graphs that purported to show how the economy was recovering even though no one was able to find a job. Or maybe it was more like a muddy road that never gets graded, with the ruts just getting deeper and harder to avoid. The provider of Teg’s missing ride could be described as the love of his life. Not by anyone with even a hint of objectivity or possessed of rational thinking skills, but this is how Teg described her. The fact that they had never gone out on a date, never had coffee together, never “hooked up” in a drunken stupor, never friended each other on Facebook, or most importantly, that she did not know Teg’s name or that she was the love of his life…none of this fazed Teg. Or was it that he wasn’t phased? Homophones, damn pain in the ass.

On Thursday afternoon Teg, whose real name may have been Joe, sat at the bar where the alleged love of his life worked. He did not know her name, but he imagined that it must be something exotic, like Ariadne, or Manila, or maybe even Svetlana…or Joan. As usual, Teg sipped at one of a succession of Hrast- on-the rocks, Hrast being a brand of Slovenian whiskey that had somehow made its way onto the cheap bottle shelf. Maybe one of the out of work Bosnians got it off one of the Ukrainian hookers and traded it for some Kosovar cigarettes. It was cheaper than any of the more conventional brands and tasted just fine if you had somewhat negotiable standards of quality. After enough Hrast-on-the-rocks, Teg, who kept his bravery about ¹/₃ of the way down the bottle for safekeeping, began his usual conversation with the bartender. It was only a conversation in the broadest sense of the word, since Teg was talking and the bartender was as far away from him as was possible while still technically in the bar. From the bartender’s point of view, the words swirled around like rain-sodden clouds on a windy day. Or maybe it was like dishwater-soaked dishrags after a particularly wild night of dishwashing, dropping sodden onto the linoleum; pick your own overwrought metaphor. At any rate, she wasn’t listening; not really listening. It wasn’t that there was anything objectively offensive about Teg; he didn’t have body odor, halitosis and didn’t wear black concert t-shirts or crocs©. He didn’t play annoying songs on the jukebox and truth be told, he wasn’t anything close to ugly. But he barely rose to the level of visible, let alone interesting. At that end of an especially long ramble that could not even rate the excitement of a monotone, she heard, just on the precipice of hearing…”So, you’ll be there, right?” – She mumbled off a response and a nod, barely wondering where “there” was, and continued to search for tasks that would take her anywhere in the bar other than within earshot of Teg.

What was likely to make getting a ride from the love of his life, or from anyone else, statistically unlikely, was that Teg, not only hadn’t told anyone where he was, but he also didn’t know where he was…other than in very general terms. Hrast did that to him. Shit, Hrast did that to anybody stupid enough to drink it. Teg has a plan. Maybe “plan” is too strong a word for what was going on in Teg’s head, but there is a certain procession (or is it precession? – homophones anyone?) of loosely connected envisionings of potential actions that lead from the bar stool to a future point that included clean clothes, transportation, regular meals, and an address.  But the plan involves being out of the flow that he unfailingly goes with. Because letting the flow take him, with the Hrast, he’ll always be who he is. He’ll always be the guy standing out in the sleet. But at least with the Hrast he can picture a future without it.

Once he was someone different, once he had never heard of Hrast, once he was Josef Tarteglione-Kovač, once he was respected, once, once, once…but "once" was gone, and it’s not coming back. You take a lot for granted when you have money. The safety net that a bank balance provides gives you the illusion that you’re Master of Fate, that all of the good in your life is the natural result of your own drive, your own grit, your own greatness, because the bad can be made to disappear, drowned in a wave of cash. Josef Tarteglione-Kovač had always had money. Not Warren Buffet money, not Mick Jagger money, but enough money that he’d not needed to ever check his bank balance before making a purchase, enough money that problems ceased to be problems for him, enough money for him to be everybody’s friend. But now, now nobody knows you when you’re down and out. And he was, despite his inability to see it clearly, was down and out.

Don’t be fooled by the previous paragraph into believing that Teg thought about any of that. What he did think about was that the sleet had stopped, and that there was still some Hrast in the flask. And that surely the love of his life would be arrived soon to give him a ride home.