Roses

Fergus slumped onto a stool next to me. He looked worse than I did, but I didn’t comment. It wasn’t so much out of politeness but rather out of a sense of resignation. Any remark I made wouldn’t have changed anything, we were past the age where self-improvement seemed a noble pursuit.

“I tell ya, I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, and didn’t feel like playing the game. I looked up from my beer, raised my eyebrows and nodded knowingly. That would piss him off just enough, I reckoned. I was right.

“You don’t even know what I’m talking about.”

For a brief moment, I felt like I was in a circus, with animals doing my bidding. Dance monkey.

“These fucking women, man,” he continued without encouragement or solicitation. “I thought by now I’d understand them, but if it’s not one thing, it’s another. I can’t fucking win.”

Fergus had a surprising number of girlfriends since I had known him. Surprising was a loaded term. Surprising implied a benchmark that had been missed or exceeded. Surprising came with baggage. Ten letters with tiny suitcases attached. Surprising owed you an explanation.

The number of Fergus’ girlfriends was surprising to me because Fergus was one of the most unremarkable people I had ever met. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the guy and had spent a great deal of time in this exact spot with him alongside me. What we discussed was beyond me. The beer took care of that, I guess. Chalk one up for beer.

He was older than me, often unshaven and known to wear the same shirt two or three days in a row. He had a large, bulbous nose and a scrunched-up type of face, like someone who just caught a whiff of something unsavoury but is yet to fully process it. Offense tempered by curiosity. Maybe it was the curiosity that got the girls. Maybe it was his jokes. I couldn’t say because I had never really met any of his girls, yet thanks to the hours spent on that stool I felt I knew each intimately. Which was to say I had heard how they fucked and what their flaws were. After all, when things were going well, there was no cause for Fergus to even mention them.

There was something worth noting in that. But even if I noted it, who would I share it with? That’s the great shame of life: we’re too self-involved to learn from each other’s fuck-ups.

“You listening? Because I’m only telling this once.”

“Yeah yeah,” I responded with a slow nod. “I’m listening.”

“Hold on, I’m parched. I need a beer for this one.” Fergus waved Woody over. I had never been given the full background on Woody. What I did know was that he looked far too well put together for this place. I had decided that he was one of those guys who had potential, but never had the guts to strike out on his own. Big fish, little pond type of guy. I had to hand it to him though, he ran a tight ship. You could set your watch to the opening and closing times of The Duke. He operated that place like he owned it. Being around reliable guys calmed me, made me believe that someone knew what was going on amongst the chaos.

Woody was a tall guy, with brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and a neatly clipped moustache adorning his upper lip. He wore a pressed flannel shirt tucked into blue jeans like some sort of uniform.

“Two more pints, Woody my friend. On the house.”

Woody looked at Fergus with the expression of someone who knew which battles to pick, and knew this wasn’t one of them. “You still haven’t grasped the concept of ‘on the house’, have you Ferg?”

“Grasped it just fine, Woods, yet for some reason you continue to charge me.”

These pointless interactions were part of the fabric that held us together. Without the bullshit, we were just a bunch of old guys sitting quietly in a bar, watching our final days burn out one by one. Well, we were still that, but at least there was something to do while it happened. All I knew was that the repartee mattered.

Fergus threw a few notes on the bar, undoubtedly coming from his girlfriend’s purse or a welfare check, but he was buying so I didn’t consider their provenance any of my concern. Convenient.

Fergus was already off and racing, and I had missed the preamble. “So I may have mentioned this before, but Cindy would have to be one of the best lays I’ve had in my entire life.” I watched as Fergus flipped through a mental scrapbook at hyperspeed. His brow furrowed, before he concluded: “Top five, easy.” I figured he was comparing Cindy to some girl in his youth and had been unable to rank Cindy above her in good conscience. It wasn’t fair really. Whomever Fergus was thinking of had had the benefit of youth then and the advantage of decades of Fergus’ romanticising. I opted not to play devil’s advocate and tuned back into Fergus’ frequency.

“But she’s doing herself a huge disservice, because, well Mack, she kinda smells.” Fergus leaned back on his stool, pausing to survey the reaction to his statement. It was just me listening, so his gaze was fixed on me.

“She...smells? Do you mean literally smells, or are we grade-schoolers again?”

“Nah man, she stinks, and I don’t say that lightly.”

There are some moments in life – the quality of the life not a relevant factor – where one has cause to pause and reflect. Sixty long years on this planet, and I had sweet fuck all to show for it except a truck, a house the bank owned and a few hundred bucks worth of beer money. I spent my time in conversations like these, discussing the grim details of the human condition with so little in the way of solutions that I bordered on complete passivity. The worst part? I actually welcomed these discussions. They were like a buoy in an empty sea of nothingness. As the years ticked by, I had begun to believe that the world was in fact flat, and my battered vessel was being mercilessly pushed towards the edge, towards complete oblivion.

Thoughts like these suggested I was becoming dangerously sober. I took a long sip of beer, knowing Fergus would interpret it as me thinking deeply about his conundrum. I was doing anything but. After all, what do you tell a guy who is banging a woman who has a less than desirable scent? Go find someone better? At our age, that probably wasn’t the most realistic advice.

“You hate to see it, Ferg. You really do.” It was weak, but there wasn’t anyone left to impress with a witty response.

Fergus nodded solemnly, a look of complete agreement on his weathered features.

“So what are you going to do?” I continued after Fergus hadn’t moved for a couple of minutes.

“What I’m gonna do isn’t the problem. What I have done seems to be the concern.”

I nodded to Woody and held up two fingers. It seemed like this ramble was about to become a bit more interesting.

Woody dutifully wiped the counter, put down fresh coasters and placed the beers in front of us. A man who took pride in his work. A dying breed. I believed you could be an artist in any profession. Sure, it was just a beer, but everything was just something. But even something that was nothing could be special if done right. I would say that, because I had long clung to that exact sentiment about myself.

Shit. I’d lost Fergus again.

“So I waited until she fell asleep and then I went looking for deodorant. And guess what? I couldn’t find any, anywhere in her place. Not spray, not roll on, not stick. As far as I can tell, she’d never even heard of the stuff.”

I started to chuckle.

“Oh laugh it up, but this is serious. She coulda been the one, I’m telling you. But I can’t live with someone who smells like a locker room. It’s unchristian.”

Fergus had the habit of returning to his religious upbringing when feeling indignant.

“So she doesn’t own deodorant. So what?” I was still laughing as I picked up my beer. “Be a big boy and have an adult conversation.”

Fergus looked truly exasperated, his own glass trapped somewhere between the bar and his mouth.

“‘Have an adult conversation,’ he says. And tell me, how exactly does that go? ‘Hey Darlin’ you know I think you're fine and all, and I’ve really enjoyed the time we’ve spent between the sheets, but are you aware that you reek to high heaven?’”

“Well, perhaps not those words exactly,” I managed, struggling to contain my laughter like a schoolboy in a quiet classroom. It was bubbling up from somewhere in my gut, but it was nice to feel a sensation like that which wasn’t gas.

“Fuck you, stop laughing,” cried Fergus.

Wasn’t going to happen.

I composed myself for long enough to say, “So what did you do? You must have done something if you’re sitting here telling me all this.”

Fergus paused for a moment, apparently trying to decide whether I was the person he wanted to disclose the details to. Evidently, he apparently decided that he had come too far, was too comfortable, had too many beers. All the reasons in the world to not do something provided him with the exact reason to continue.

“Well,” Fergus finally continued, “I didn’t find any deodorant. But I was in the kitchen, and there were some limes in the fruit bowl.”

My eyes widened with the overwhelming anticipation that comes with knowing someone else is about to do something horrendous. I was glad I had gotten another round in advance – this was too good to interrupt.

“I don’t know what came over me, but I, well I cut them up into quarters and I...well I put them on a little plate...”

I could feel the chortle moving from my gut up past my diaphragm, my eyes began to water. This was too much.

“...and I carried that plate back into the bedroom. I was holding my breath, you know, so my breathing wouldn’t wake her. Then I lifted each of her arms and rubbed the limes right up there in the pits.”

I caught “pits” at the exact moment I was trying to swallow the last mouthful of my pint. None of that golden liquid destined for my stomach made its final destination. Woody didn’t look entirely pleased, but then again you never really could tell with that guy.

What was a chuckle before had morphed into a desperate struggle for air as I descended into the throes of a laughing fit.

“You...fucking...did...what?” I had lost all control by now. Something deep inside me recognised that it was these types of unexpected reactions that stopped me from swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills on the bad nights. It wasn’t much, but I truly believed it was enough.

“Fuck you, motherfucker,” Fergus said. “She stank and I loved her, I had to do something. A man can’t love a woman who smells. Women are gorgeous creatures, they’re meant to smell like roses and...fresh linen and...fuck, you know what they’re meant to smell like, you fuck!”

Until that point in my life, I had assumed the phrase ‘Fell off his chair’ was a figure of speech. But it happened, and it was less than graceful when it did. Fergus, in spite of himself, was chuckling at the entire sorry situation. His good humour was short-lived, however, when in the reflection of the mirror that lined the back of the bar, he saw Cindy’s car pull up to the kerb. For an old guy, he moved quick. There was little doubt in my mind that Fergus had made it to the bathroom before she had even killed the engine of the battered sedan. Everyone in that bar knew how easily the bathroom window could be removed, yet Woody had been polite enough to never fix it. In his wisdom, he knew that anyone who knew to skip out on their tab using that mode of egress was regular enough to return sooner rather than later. It was then he would recover his debt, with interest.

Barflies are the most predictable bastards on the face of the earth.

No sooner had I finished admiring Fergus’ agility than a woman who I could only presume was Cindy marched into the bar already yelling at Woody.

“Where is he? Where is that molesting son of a bitch?”

With a style of conflict resolution that would never be taught at any college, Woody paused before replying “That description matches half the fine gentlemen in this place. What about we take a breath and see if we can’t work out just which one you’re referring to.” Woody then grabbed a glass from beneath the bar, turned back to Cindy and said “What are you having?” He took the smallest of glances at me before adding, “On the house, of course.”

Cindy never did find Fergus that afternoon. I would like to say that she had her one drink and was on her way. I would especially like to say that I hadn’t asked her for a ride as she was leaving. But most of all I would like to say that her ride wasn’t sitting out the front of my place come 10 a.m. the next day. I would like to say all that because it would probably been true had I been a better man. But there comes a time in one’s life where every single thing you do could be for the last time.

I had to give it to Fergus: there wasn’t a word of hyperbole in what he had said. Cindy, while not much to look at, was one of the last great lays in this world. As I came, I collapsed on top her. Amongst the scent of booze and sweat and sheets that should have been washed months ago, my nose did detect one more.

It was citrus fresh.