Bad, Bad Tang

Sometimes a drink is as dry as sand,

But eventually it will leave the glass

To find the wall hiding the monster

Then vibrate hard enough to turn into diamond

And set it free

“You’re my best friend, you sour bitch,” said Jackie Mayne to her bottle of Lemon Candy Gin. There was just something about a grapefruitted vice she loved. Something unique to her. Every day she’d go down to Gerald’s Lucky Liquor, a five minute sober walk (or a half hour if she’s sauced), buy a bottle of Gin Quack, and hurry home. Because the secret to her drink was in her blue marshmallow cupboards. Which is quite fitting to her potion because she puts in melted dollar store blue peeps, liquified blue cotton candy, and cinnamon for some reason.

Sometimes, like tonight, she’d put it in a comically large glass beer mug with a tone of ice and add a little pink umbrella with shimmering red rhinestones. Just to feel special. But it wasn’t her first drink. Not her second or third but her tenth. For her desire to be under bitter spirit water was unusually deep tonight. To which she bought four bottles of gin and seven bottles of vodka.

The vodka was long gone and the gin soon followed.

In her mind, when she said “best friend” it was the drink. But a part of her she didn’t recognize was longing for something more. For behind the mug, beading with condensation that dripped the blue sinful candy river down her freckled pink fingers, was a man’s blurry silhouette flickering into a dreamy focus of his 80’s romance novel glory in the moonlight proudly strutting it’s stuff through the glass sliding doors at the balcony.

“Hello, my dove,” he said in an echo that tickled her tongue and flushed her cheeks hotly more than the sugar and alcohol.

“Who are you, devil?”

“Oh, I’m no devil. Devils have agendas for the sinful. I’m just a man waiting for his dove to stop crying and calm his dragon.”

“I’m not crying,” she said, beginning to drool and feeling warmth in her lower abdomen. “And you can take care of your dragon yourself…you fuckin’…you…a fuck it. Mamma’s hungry.”

She downed her drink, sloppily slammed it on her night table, which was filthy with dried globs of the candied remnants of her drink, cocaine on mirror shards, an apple green ashtray with cigarette butts still lit, and a lamp in the shape of a woman’s plentiful ass. Shamelessly presenting itself with a red g-string. To which the man had taken a few steps forward and said:

“That yours?”

“Wha…what?”

He pointed to the lamp flickering red and purple.

“Oh, that’s not my ass. It’s right here.”

She turned around and mooned him. In which her ass danced stupidly in the mirror behind him.

“Not what I meant, but I’m glad my dove thinks highly of herself.”

She put her pants back on and in the whip of her turn back to him, gave him the finger. But where her finger landed, he had left his spot and stood by the front door.

“We need to leave.”

“I ain’t going anywhere with you, devil. No matter how big your dick looks in those black skinny jeans.”

“These are dress pants.”

She looked at him. Struggling to stand still. A trilling sound shook her skull. A piercing ringing like a tuning fork banging around the inside of a church bell made her crunch her eyes shut and spew blue bile into her ashtray. She breathed heavily and brought a shaking hand to her mouth. Flinching so hard when the man snapped his fingers so loud, she nearly gave herself whiplash.

“How about now, my dove?”

Her vision, still swimming in a heavy current of hot water shelled over her eyes, couldn’t quite make the details out of his face but she saw her beer mug brimming with her drink in his left hand.

“Gimme…gimme…gimme back my drinkypoo.”

“I haven’t taken it from you.”

“Yes you…uh fuck…you did. It’s right there in your hand.”

When she pointed, the drink had found her sticky hand. She twitched at the sight of it acting as a barrier between her and the man. Terrified of stumbling on herself and losing her precious drink, she downed it all in one long drowning gulp. Dribbling at the sides of her mouth.

The second she allowed herself breath, the man had gripped her by her double XL yellow shirt and pushed her. Her fall lasted far longer than she anticipated. The second his hands left her, she wanted to knock his lights out. Break that handsome and sharp jaw line that made his five o’clock shadow adding pepper to his smoked almond skin. In the space where her drunken anger left her, there was an icy drop in the air of her apartment. She shivered at its grip on her bones. She thought she’d land on the red pine flooring or get pegged in the ass by the corner of the other night table on the opposite end of the couch she was sitting on.

Instead, she landed on a waterlogged patch of grass. Rain pelted her as she grimaced in pain from a thumping feeling at the back of her head. She had whacked on something made of either concrete or granite. She rolled over onto all fours. Hardly able to steady herself. But her vision was clear. Which became alarming when she craned her head up and saw a tombstone with her name on it.

She screamed then sprung up in terror then threw up a comically blue jet of bile.

“I’m glad you made the choice to come, my dove,” said the mystery hunk.

She turned around. Confused as to why she could see every detail of his body but his face. Which remained shadowed.

“Where the fuck am I? Where did you take me, you piece a shit?”

The man didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. For in the ferocious descent of rain, winds picked up fiercely. Stinging her nose with the smell and even taste of sea salt. She turned back to the tombstone with what she believed to be her name. The rain showering over it turned as blue as her lemon candy gin. Sluffing black grime off an I next to her name. Her eyes widened.

“Mom?”

“That’s not your mother.”

His voice had now become more of an echo. As if the bump on her head that turned into a migraine could speak.

“Then who is it? And how the damn hell am I stone sober already?”

To this he said nothing. Annoyed and a bit pissed, she whipped her head to the right to look at him.

He was gone.

She turned back to the tombstone. Which was now blank and the rain had turned green. There was a magnetic power drawing her attention beyond the tombstone. She walked moonily towards it. Not noticing fat earth worms crawling over her toes, fire ants biting at her heels, nor the earth squelching more and more with every step she took.

“My dove, if you take a step further, the ale that only speaks to you, the only one who protects you from the pain you hold dear to your charcoal coated heart that can no longer pump blood freely, will leave you in the shackles of darkness you created years ago. The very thing you feared yet depended on to feel nothing. To not see light.”

“Shut up.”

Those words echoed until the man swung in front of her with one foot pressed against the tombstone and one hand with a bronze bowl filled to the brim with lemon candy. In which every drop of rain glowed red against the sickeningly sweet blue that called the part of her heart she couldn’t ignore. The part of her she’d rather listen to than his speech on her feelings.

“Who are you?”

She asked this question while her eyes sunk into the depths of the bowl.

“Drink.”

The seconds past slower now as the effort to stay steady became exhausting. What do I do? What the hell do I want? She asked herself. The man, whose face remained a light deprived void, reached out to her left hand then placed it on the side of the bowl. Without a second thought, she placed her right on the other side as he helped her bring it to her mouth. The man cradled her hands as she gulped it all down. Ribbons of this deadly river she never dared to leave or let anyone take from her, bled down her chest.

Tears waterfalled down her face when the bowl was empty. Her hands dropped and the bowl descended as if gravity had left the spot she stood on. The man’s face became clear and ethereal right when the earth became sodden and fell apart beneath them.

“You’ll never be able to drain the tavern in your home again.”

As he said this, she began to free fall down a tall rocky cliff. Her eyes went wide at the initial surprise of solid ground being gone. But when he spoke one last time, free falling with her in that moment, she had a sense of relief and something squishing her chest.

“I hope you drink from the river that welcomes all that we sing, all that hurts, all that makes us glad to be alive and hold death’s hand when we are ready. And please, when you see light for the first time since I left…”

She opened her eyes and saw her father’s gaunt and grey face. Her lips trembled at his gouged left eye, his decaying flesh and broken shins.

“Forgive yourself. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault that you couldn’t save from that bitch from driving into us.”

She wanted to pour her heart out to him, share in his anger. But the free fall ended and she was back on her couch with a needle in her left arm. Eyes flickering as paramedics tended to her. One cleaning up her vomit and one carefully taking out the needle. While they went about taking care of her, she looked over at the door. Her father, who was nothing but a ghost now, waved at her with a smile then faded away when a red headed cop came in with two more behind her. Jackie looked down at her right hand. Which held an old picture of her and her father sitting on the cliff of where the small cemetery was that her mother was buried. She smiled at it as if satisfied in the renewed sense of satisfaction that her mother was long gone. But the pain of knowing she couldn’t save her father stayed with her as she drifted off to sleep. Welcoming darkness of peace, and at least for that moment, to leave the tavern behind.