-- Ben Carlin

"Give me a scotch." That was the sentence that would echo in my head for days. I was scheduled to work at seven, but I was ten minutes late, so I didn't really have time to get oriented before jumping behind the bar and into action. It was surprisingly crowded for a Wednesday night. Most of the people were not regulars, which I attributed to the full moon, but there were, as always, a few constants. One of them was Mike Flannagan, a fifty-eight year-old (jackass-of-all-trades) who wrote the occasional short story for a literary rag that was based in the bar. I had a pretty good idea that he had been at the bar for a good portion of the afternoon, but he didn't look too far gone. That, combined with the fact that the daytime bartender sat next to him and bought him a beer, led me to believe that one little shot of scotch was a harmless enough request. I was wrong.

The bar was slowly filling up. A small group of pool players in the back room was getting larger, and the few empty seats at the bar were being claimed. As I got busier, I started hearing the familiar repertoire of witty one liners: "Brian, you fucking idiot child." "This song sucks," and the occasional "go fuck yourself."

"You see, Mike? You were so pleasant before you had that scotch. Why can't you be nice?"

"Fuck you." 

I'm not quite sure why I was amused by this behavior -- perhaps because if I wasn't, it would have made my job that much harder. In any case, I allowed it to continue. After a few minutes of ignoring him, the volume dropped to an inaudible mumble, which was just fine. 

Things calmed down a bit. I was at the end of the bar chatting with a customer when I heard a murmur travel down the length of the bar. I looked up to see Mike attempting to walk to the door and not doing a very good job of it. He was using the bar stools, unoccupied or otherwise, as leverage. I froze for a second, not quite sure how to handle the situation, but just as he banged into two guys, pretty hard, I raced out from behind the bar. Out of pure reflex, the guys he had banged into shrugged him off and he was headed for the floor. I managed to get my hands under his arms when he was about two feet from hitting rock bottom. I stood him up. "Get the fuck off me," he said cheerfully.

"Where do you think you're going?"

"I'm going home."

"You got that right. But you're going to sit down until I can call a car service for you."

"Fuck off. I'm walking."

"I don't think so."

"Fine." I walked him to a chair and sat him down. A bar stool, I thought, was too high off the ground and far too dangerous. Within seconds, he was asleep. The best thing for him, I thought. I called the car service base and they told me it would be ten to fifteen minutes before they could have a car for him. Again, I thought, ten minutes of shut-eye before stepping into a moving vehicle is not such a bad idea. So I left him in the chair, sleeping peacefully, and went about my business. 

My first order of business was apologizing to the two guys that Mike had banged into. I had never seen them before. They were drinking heavily, and tipping generously; the kind of people I wanted to come back. I poured them each a beer and said "These are on me, fellas." They seemed pleasantly surprised. Before I could apologize or give a reason for my generosity, I looked down and noticed that one of them was reading a copy of the bar magazine (the "Stupidity" issue). "Hey," I said, "what do you think?"

"It's pretty good," was the response. Then I noticed the particular story he was reading.

"What do you think of that story?"

"I like it," he said. "It's the best one I've read so far."

"Well, the guy who just fell on you wrote it." I couldn't resist. They both laughed and the guy reading the story looked impressed -- like he was sitting in the Whitehorse Tavern and Dylan Thomas had just puked on him. I thought that an apology on top of that would have been overkill. They took the whole thing very well.

In all the excitement, I realized that I had been neglecting the folks in the back room. So with everything seemingly under control, I grabbed a bar rag and went back there to empty ashtrays, bus tables, et cetera, giving one quick glance to Mike, who was still snoozing peacefully in the chair. 

As I had expected, the back room was a mess. I had to make two trips to carry all the bottles and glasses back to the bar and when I was done I turned my attention to the rather large stack of glasses I now had to wash. Before I went to work on my task, I glanced around the bar to see if anybody needed anything. That was when I noticed the empty chair by the door where Mike had been sleeping. 

"Where the fuck is Mike?" I yelled to no one in particular. The initial response was a synchronized murmur of "I don't know"s, but then a voice chimed in with "he left." "He's gone," said another voice. "Yeah, he took off," said yet another. Then I looked down at the bar to where Mike had been sitting, and just as I suspected, there were his house keys. I knew what I had to do, but before I could act I took a brief moment of silence for myself, and topped it off with a resounding "Fuck!"

I called Spencer Caffery, his roommate. He wasn't home, so I left a message. Then I called upstairs in an attempt to reach Ron McHale. He wasn't there either, but his son, Eric, picked up the phone. "Hey, Eric, It's Brian." 

"What's up, B.?" I tried my best to describe Mike's condition and explain the situation. It was loud and getting busier in the bar and I was slightly frantic. Eric, however, had been down this road before and knew what I was asking for. 

"If he doesn't show up here or back there in ten minutes, I'll take the dog and go look for him." I thanked him and hung up. I felt relieved that someone else was on the job and I could go back to running a bar. I did this successfully for about an hour until Eric showed up with two girls and no Mike. Inexplicably I had grown quite fond of Mike, so naturally my mind wandered into the realm of worry. Eventually I was able to put him out of my head and get back into my nightly routine. As the bar got busier I thought about him less and less, but every so often something or other reminded me that Mike Flannagan was still missing. I thought of all the possibilities: could he have gotten arrested? Is he in the drunk tank? Did he get mugged or beat-up? Left for dead? But the most likely scenario was that he was passed out somewhere -- only I had no idea where.

-----

Around eleven-thirty, when the bar was as packed as it had been all night, Markus, one of the guys who lives upstairs from the bar, walked in. It seems his lights had gone out and he had to get into the basement of the bar where the circuit breakers were. I knew him well enough and let him go down there to find them, since I myself had no idea where the circuit breakers were. A moment later he appeared at the end of the bar waving me over. I walked over to him. "What's up, Mark?" I asked.

"What happened to Mikey?" he asked me.

"I was wondering that, myself. He left here a couple of hours ago."

"No, he didn't."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Come look," he said and he led me to the door leading to the basement stairs. I opened up the door and there was Mike, curled up in an unnatural position at the bottom of the stairs. He lay amidst a pile of cleaning supplies that he had obviously pulled down trying to stop his fall. I could see some blood on his head and absolutely no movement. My heart stopped. I think Markus was saying something, but I was temporarily deaf. "My G-d," I thought. "Mike's dead." I ran downstairs and started gently shaking him.

"Fuck off," was what I think I heard him mumble. I was extremely relieved that not only was he still alive, he was healthy enough to be rude. I asked Markus to watch him for a minute and I ran upstairs. Eric was still in the bar, so I asked him to take Mike home.

"I'll carry him on my back," he said.

"Never mind," I said. "I'll call him a car." I called the car service and went back downstairs. Markus had managed to get Mike on his feet. Together we were able to get him upstairs, where Eric was waiting. 

"I'm gonna kick your ass, tomorrow," Eric told him. Eric was 23 and in fairly good shape. Mike was not looking too good.

"Boy, Eric. You're a real sportsman," I said. Before long, the car arrived and I spilled Mike into the back seat. I gave the driver seven dollars, Mike's keys, and explicit instructions to see him safely inside. Then they drove off.

For the next couple of hours I did my job mechanically. My head was still spinning and my heart was elsewhere. I was going through the motions. I don't think anyone else could tell the difference but I knew. It was a couple of hours before I actually allowed myself to think about the incident, let alone what I was going to tell my boss. 

It was around that time that Ron McHale, John Fahey, another regular, and Spencer Caffery stumbled in -- no doubt coming from the bar around the corner. I told Ron, because he was also a bartender there, and John, because he is Mike's friend, and Spencer, just because he was there, about the fall. I'm not quite sure how, but this sparked a screaming argument between Spencer and Ron. John, who was sitting in between them asked me to call a car for him. John left and Spencer intentionally spilled his beer on the floor (I never quite understood why), while continuing to scream at Ron -- who was retaliating in kind. I had had enough excitement for one night.

"Gentlemen," I said after turning down the music, "if you can't keep this conversation civilized, please take it elsewhere. I've had a hell of a night." Then I turned the music back up and scowled at Spencer as I mopped up his spill. Ron got up and went into the back room and tried to get in a game of pool, and I once again went back to the business of running a bar. 

It was approaching the end of the night. Soon after Ron left, everything calmed down. Everything but Spencer. He was screaming at Ron's chair -- Ron's empty chair. 

"You fuck. Fuck-o. Fuck-off," and so on. Not being the first nor the last drunk to converse with someone who wasn't there, I let him slide for a while (If I ignore him, maybe he'll go away) until it became so loud and profane that I had to say something. 

"Hey, Spence. I don't care if you talk to people who aren't here, but you most definitely are not allowed to yell at them."

"I'm sorry, Brian. You're absolutely right." And that was that. For the next ten minutes he directed his attention to Ron's empty chair and proceeded to whisper profanity at it. "I'm still here. Where the fuck are you? Fuck-o. Fuck-off," etc.. It was amusing for a while, but it got tired. I got tired. The whole damn night was tired. It was then that I looked up and noticed the time: 2:20 a.m. I decided that it was definitely late enough for me to start drinking without getting shitfaced behind the bar, so I promptly poured myself a scotch.

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