I was out of the Army and spending a great deal of my time bar hopping for thrills. There really wasn’t anything else to do, and I no longer had any responsibilities, requirements or even a schedule. I had a job, but it was really unimportant and somewhat irrelevant to the grand scheme of things, so I started looking for bars to hang out for brunt of my free time in the evenings.
For me, this meant spending a lot of my time walking home drunk. Well, “drunk” is a mild way to put how I was most of those evenings. Let’s just say that I don’t remember a lot of what happened in between a few of those drinks and waking up the next morning. But showing up at a local bar the next evening told me that I must have had a great time the night before, because everyone in the bar was glad to see me again, talking about what fun we must have had the night before.
I’m a writer, so I chalk it up to one of those learning experiences you’re supposed to gather while working on the next all American novel. Only, 13 novels later, none of them really seem to have been all that American, or anything that would be considered “all American”. Years of experience has taught me that they’re just novels, and if people read them, then they were good novels, and sometimes you take what you can get.
But it was one of those evenings that I remember vividly because I remember talking to a woman I had been trying to get close to for some time at my neighborhood bar. You know the place. It was that bar where everyone came in, but no one knew who anyone was, although you came there so often that you kind of recognized everyone, even if you couldn’t place a name with a face. You’d nod at people, and they might nod back, but that was as close as it came to making a connection.
I knew the owner of the bar. He and I had been in the military together, studying Korean at the language school. This bar was actually located down the street from that post, and one day after he got out of the Army, he bought the bar where we used to go when we were still in the service. Army guys do that sort of crap. I never did, but I sure knew enough of them that did.
Anyway, my buddy was never at the bar but his wife was, and she always poured me a free drink or two because I had met her when she was just a waitress at this bar, before she married my friend. So we were old buddies, even though we really didn’t know each other that well. But she was the one trying to help me make some time with this one girl I was talking about, the one I said I’d been trying to connect with for weeks. Turns out she was a cop, and she was kind of strange, which always seemed to attract me to a woman. But I’m getting ahead of myself because, to be honest, this story isn’t about her. It’s about some guy that showed up one evening and started talking to me.
It was getting close to closing time, and this young guy was talking to me, and he was interested in the fact that the owner’s wife said I was a writer. He said he was an artist and that artists needed to stick together, or some kind of weird crap like that. I was drunk, so it made sense, so he and I were talking about art and all that. The facts kind of escape me, because to be honest, I doubt anything we were talking about was all that important in the first place.
So two a.m. came around, and the bar was closing, so for some reason this guy and I decided we still had so much to talk about, and we took our conversation to the street. We both lived in the area, and he said he wanted to show me his art work, so we walked towards his place.
And I should probably insert that in a lot of stories right after this moment it can go all sorts of directions, including some pretty shocking revelation that this is some kind of gay hook-up story, or whatever, but it’s not one of those. I don’t knoe if the guy was gay or not. I’m not, but it probably wouldn’t have stopped me from walking to the guy’s place anyway, just to see what it was the person wanted to show me. So I went, and it turned out he wanted to show me the sort of art that he does.
Turns out that his art consisted of large columns with pillows on top of them. No, I don’t know the significance of them either. Nor could I figure out what made it art, but his apartment was filled with these things. Must have been about forty or fifty columns with various pillows on top of them. They looked pretty dorky, to be honest. All I remember was how proud he was of his creation, and he wanted to show it to me.
I stood and stared, not really sure what to say, or even what to think. There were pillows on top of columns. and they were everywhere. To this day, I don’t know what they were supposed to convey, or even why it was an obsession. All I remember thinking was, I really needed to get out of that apartment. So I did. And I went home.
Never saw the guy again either. Or his form of art. But I never forg0t what he showed me, and I wonder if that’s the goal of the artist anway, to put forth a haunting image that endures forever, even if it is only seen by one person. If so, he was very successful and in a way that my own art has never achieved itself.