The Sum of All Happy Hours

[no-prisoner.livejournal.com]

Eddie comes in from the Staff Quarters with damp hair and his Ginslinger t-shirt, his gun and gunbelt already tucked into a neat roll that he sets under the bar. He sits on a stool for a while picking his Specials and writes them up on the chalkboard.

"Howdy, all you beautiful folken. Specials tonight are Love Potion #9, the After 18, and that old fav, the Manhattan. Come and get it!"

Comments

[mr-brautigan.livejournal.com]

For his part, Ted is remembering what it was like to walk the streets and stand in buildings, watching as skyscrapers were constructed ever higher and higher, defying gravity -- and sometimes aesthetic sensibilities -- in the name of progress. Ted saw New York change. Saw old make way for new. And he liked what he saw, though he never got the chance to see it in glory, except in magazines and newspapers and the occasional movie in Algul Siento.

It's no substitute for the real thing, and Ted Brautigan knows it.

Is there such a thing as grief for what you never saw? Perhaps. But there is such a thing as sympathy, and regret, and the desire to ease suffering.

And the knowledge that there is a job to be done.

"Eddie."

[no-prisoner.livejournal.com]

Eddie lifts his head; his eyes are red and swollen and angry. "What, Ted? Can't a man get kneebound in peace around here?" So very bitter.

[mr-brautigan.livejournal.com]

There's no point in quiet sympathy. Not for something like this. And so Ted speaks simply. "If you want to get kneebound in peace, go to your wife. Not out here."

[no-prisoner.livejournal.com]

Eddie freezes.

Susannah was from 1964; he's not sure but were the Towers even started then? But by '76 they had to be open, and they'd've been under construction for at least a decade before they did.

Oh Christ how'm I gonna tell Jake?

"You say true, Ted." If he stay out here, breaking on the bar, someone might try to symapthize, and then he might hurt them. He really might. And if it were Bernard or Ace, cheerful mad bombers...

He shudders. There is an ocean of rage looking for a place to vent right now. He needs to get out of the bar.

[mr-brautigan.livejournal.com]

"Go on." A pause. "I've got reading to do."

He looks at Eddie's Mets cap, now askew. He feels sick.

[no-prisoner.livejournal.com]

Eddie straightens it.

He's not taking it off for a while.

Like, a year.

"Night, Ted." He takes his gun out from behind the bar and walks out into the Staff Wing, his shoulders bowed.