At the punk rock dive bar with the heavily graffitied men’s
room where the wild-haired woman who reeked of patchouli whirled around from
her studious hunch over the jukebox to face me eye-to-eye and lament it didn’t
have The Dead Kennedy’s “Too Drunk To Fuck,” they told me I couldn’t order a
pitcher of PBR if I were drinking alone.
At the comedy club, the harried, frazzled waitress who
didn’t check in for 20 minutes or more told me I couldn’t order two IPAs at the
same time if I were drinking alone.
At the white table-clothed restaurant I wandered into empty-bellied
on a business junket in a distant city, they told me I couldn’t order a full
bottle of wine if I were dining alone.
They told me I couldn’t pair the halibut with a whole bottle
of white, or the ribeye with a whole bottle of red. I could order by the glass
though.
They were sorry. They were so sorry.
Disappointment stings, but you learn tricks. I learned them
anyway.
You go to the theater and buy a balcony ticket. That way you
can hit the mezzanine bar, abscond to your seat through the first entrance past
the stairwell, drop the stadium plastic cup down to mark your seat, pop out the
other side, and hit up the balcony bar.
Viola! You’ve got enough liquid sustenance to fortify you
through intermission.
No one is metering how much you’re drinking. No one is
judging.
The meter—the tracking—is what you want to avoid.
You invest in a flask. You pre-game. You funnel cheap vodka
into a water bottle to make the nature trail hike more bearable.
There’s the world—its grotesque warts, structural flaws,
intractable crises and all. Then there’s you. Some insulation is required.
Craft beer
aficionado Joseph S. Pete is an award-winning journalist, author of two books,
an Iraq War veteran, an Indiana University graduate, a book reviewer, and a
frequent guest on Lakeshore Public Radio. He is a Pushcart Prize and Best of
the Net nominee who was named the poet laureate of Chicago BaconFest, a feat
that Geoffrey Chaucer chump never accomplished. His literary work and
photography have appeared in more than 150 journals, including Dogzplot, Stoneboat, The High
Window, Synesthesia Literary Journal, Steep Street Journal, Beautiful Losers,
New Pop Lit, The Grief Diaries, Gravel, The Offbeat, Oddball Magazine, The
Perch Magazine, Rising Phoenix Review, Chicago Literati, Bull Men's Fiction,
shufPoetry, The Roaring Muse, Prairie Winds, Blue Collar Review, Lumpen, The
Rat's Ass Review, The Tipton Poetry Journal, Euphemism, Jenny Magazine, Vending
Machine Press and elsewhere. Like
Bartleby, he would prefer not to.
