Steve Braunias goes out for a Friday drink.
It'd been a while since I'd gone out for a drink and everything was going swimmingly in the sense that I was all at sea, in over my head, drowning. There was a bunch of us. A mild bunch, nice people, old friends, complete strangers, in a pub on a Friday night. Wine, beer, cheerful spirits. All good. Except there was a tension in the air and I developed a very fine, beautifully attuned instinct for it, based on talking to someone who thought I was the worst human being to have ever slithered across the surface of the Earth.
I missed my fireplace. The winter evenings of 2019 have been a long and reasonably content shut-in; I work from home, and at about 4 or 5 I slip into something more comfortable, close the curtains, pick up my book – I'm slowly relishing Paul Theroux's epic travel book about a year in China, Riding The Iron Rooster - and draw up an armchair by the fire. I'm quite parsimonious about the firewood. I only ordered a square metre back in summertime and figured I could eke it out with sacks of coal, and foraging for pinecones in the nearby woods. It's worked out okay so far and there should be enough wood left for another month.
Yes, party all the time, and so it was that one of the great bores of my generation put down his book, slipped into a smart pair of chinos and a winter coat, and headed for town. Friday afternoons have a special kind of excitement in all cities and there are traces of it, too, in one-horse towns. The horse walks into a bar. Everyone and their dog and/or horse were already in the bars when I got downtown at about 4. The light was falling, laughter burst out of doors, drunkenness had not yet taken hold and the city belonged to the office workers set free. I felt quite nervous.
She said over and over, like a chant, "Stop being so disingenuous." I kept replying over and over, "But I'm not." It was catch-22: each denial sounded more disingenuous than the last. Things had started well. I was a bit startled to be out in company and to have a drink in my hand instead of Paul Theroux's vivid comedy, but I soon found my tongue, and the conversation was pleasant, lively, normal. Now and then when I went to the bar I ran into other people who I knew, and stopped to chat with them. One guy muttered that he had to talk to someone else before they left and I thought he stalked off a little bit abruptly. This hurt my feelings and I brooded that it was significant of some deeper antipathy or downright loathing, but I put it out of my mind and gamely rejoined the conversation at my table.