Drinking

Nursing a Seething Grudge

The din of the jukebox, the smell of sleaze, the hustlers and the hustled, all swirling madly together like a slithering shadow silhouetted against the cheap Christmas lights that twinkled unmerrily around the trim of the bar; such is the ambiance that is The Black Hole, the place I drink to nurse my sorrows and feed my demons. It’s a hopeless dive but its home. 

All my life I’ve searched for the perfect drink, the one that would satisfy. I started bar hopping in college. My first haunt was Darwin’s Folly where I wasted my educational opportunity sucking down Blind Monkeys till I couldn’t think straight. Post-graduate, I became a regular at the Flesh Factory, inebriating my soul with the house specialty drink: Blind Lust. One sip of that poison and you burn for hours finding neither relief nor fulfillment. And the more you drink, the more you burn.

To quench the fires that come from doing shots of Blind Lust, I got sloshed at The Purple Wino. Their house drink is called a Flaming Fury, a volcanic swig that rages violently, uncontrollably. In the end, I decided I preferred my vengeance ice cold rather than in a hot, drunken frenzy. Some drink to forget but I drink to remember.

That’s how I fell into The Black Hole.

Every bar has a specialty drink, their signature house concoction that puts them on the map. Like the losing sports team you love and hate, identify with and adopt, the Black Hole became my bar. Why? Their house specialty was my perfect poison. One sip of that familiar spirit, a venom called a Seething Grudge, and I knew I was home. No one can hold a Seething Grudge like me.

It’s intoxicating. You can sip away the hours while the shot glass never seems to empty. It carries you away back to old offenses, real and imagined, to betrayal and disappointments, leaving a bitterness of regret in your gut no antacid can quell.

There are some drinks that can swallow you.

A Blind Lust can set the body aflame, but a Seething Grudge ignites the soul. More potent than an Oblivion from Dante’s Inferno, you can nurse it for countless hours and, the more you nurse it, the more potent it becomes. Sure, a Seething Grudge is an acquired taste that’s repugnantly bitter to swallow but, as they say, better the devil you know.

My loveable slosh of a college roommate had a motto: “If you’re at odds with God, make peace with your bartender.” Mine can pour three fingers of stout, instant cure-all therapy and, if it doesn’t work, I am usually too drunk to care. On this fateful day, however, my bartender called in sick. A temp was brought in to serve.

I watched the Stranger cross the room, pick up a towel and put it on his arm like a well-heeled servant, and step behind the bar. My bar. “The usual,” I said more out of boredom than habit.

“I’ve come with a new drink offering. Taste and see that it’s good,” said the Stranger.

New drink? Uh-uh. My bar. My rules.

“The infamous toxin of choice here at The Black Hole is a Seething Grudge and right now I need a double,” I said tapping my fingers on the bar, glaring at the upstart bartender. My fellow lounge lizards murmured in groggy agreement.

“Sorry,” grinned the Stranger, “but I’m here to offer you a new drink.” He glanced at the Christmas lights, and said, with a wry smile, “You might say Christmas has come early.”

He set a line of shot glasses up on the bar then pulled a carafe from nowhere and began to pour. Is this new drink on the house? The Stranger replied, “Yes, but only because I paid for it in full. Please drink freely. Others who have tried it call it a Sweet Release. Drink up. It’s free.” 

Free? Nothing’s free, I said flatly, and he shrugged, suggesting I take his offer on faith.

You can’t get a Sweet Release from The Black Hole. It’s just, just… wrong, a violation, an intrusion into my personal hell. And the old adage is dead wrong, too: misery hates company. I wanted to be left alone to drink so I threw the barkeep an angry look and demanded my Seething Grudge. He assured me again that what I really needed was a Sweet Release. Why not try it? After all, he was buying.

“You don’t look like you’ve ever been hammered in your life,” I said, dismissively sizing him up. “Have you ever had a Seething Grudge?”

 The Stranger shook his head No but said he once gotten totally hammered in a contest in another black hole when he deliberately chugged a vile concoction called a Sinners’ Lament down to its bitter dregs. “Loosing sucks,” I admitted. He nodded in agreement but replied, “Actually, I won.” 

OK, he had me confused but curious. If this was a challenge to a dirking contest, I was in. “OK, I’ll taste it to see if it’s good. Give me a Sweet Release.” He pushed the shot glass at me and I noticed odd scars on his wrists as if he’d been… hammered… with spikes. Very weird. In total seriousness, he said, “Drink this and you’ll never thirst again.” It’s that good? Fine, then. As I raised my cup to toast our unregenerate congregation of lost souls, I asked, “That time you say you got hammered, was there a prize at stake?”

The Stranger looked on with triumph in his eyes as I slowly drank away the toxins, the darkness in my soul, with every healing drop of his Sweet Release. He said softly, “A prize? Yes. The prize is you.”

Bryan Hupperts © 2008

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