'Twas in Another Lifetime, One of Vomit and Blood

Once upon a time, I was a bartender. During the decade or so I did this, I worked in some nice places and I worked in some real shitholes. I remember one place where we had to pull up the flooring because we couldn't get the bloodstains or the vomit stench out of it. So we just pulled it up and let people bleed and puke on the concrete.

Classy.

I worked for a while at a downtown nightclub. I quit after the second shooting death. Slow learner is old Feemus.

Another place was right next to the methadone clinic. That was a strange clientele.

The customer I remember with the most skeeved-outness was this guy who would come in and drink endless cups of coffee. He never ate and he never had a drink. Just drank coffee. And smoked.

He smoked Top Tobacco, I remember. And for rolling papers, he tore pages out of a Gideon Bible.

No joke.

I don't know where he got all these Bibles, but every night there he was, rolling cigarettes in pages from the Gideon Bible. I remember that they were the kind with red ink for the words of Jesus.

Drinking coffee and smoking and writing feverishly in his notebook. God only knows what he was writing. Probably page after page of "I'm gonna knife that fucking bartender. I'm gonna knife that fucking bartender..."

I've always thought that if I were to write a novel or a memoir, I would change it so that he was writing all his thoughts down on ZigZags. I think that would be funnier.

No point to this post, just a random memory. Misty and watercolored. Sort of.