“Happy birthday, asshole,” I said.
Half a bottle or so later, a waitress came back to see how I was doing. I told her to bring me a bottle of the cheapest, nastiest tequila they had and a Budweiser in a bottle. I gave her five hundred dollars for her trouble. After that, I had no shortage of customer service.
The bottle of tequila was almost gone, and a forest of empty brown beer bottles covered the table. The afternoon crowd in the bar had mostly been office folks skipping out for a beer at lunchtime, a few college kids with no classes and money to burn, and of course my people, the barflies who didn’t give a fuck about the décor or the crowd as long as there was a seat for your ass and booze to whittle away the hours of your life until the end. There is a certain Zen meditation present in hard-core alcoholism.
The evening crowd was in now. It consisted of more sketchy locals from the Second District, the surrounding neighborhood, and swarms of hipsters, nursing the one PBR they could afford. There was a battle over who was setting the tone for the night on the jukebox, the music jumping from blues, to dance, to country. I did my part for the war effort by tossing in Johnny Cash’s cover of “I See a Darkness” and followed it up with K.Flay’s “Blood in the Cut.” Take that, alt-folk scum! I paid the club manager a grand to keep my section closed. I wanted to be in a fishbowl, watching life, seeing how normal assholes spent their Friday night.
I had almost finished off the Pappy Van when the tattooed bartender walked up to my table with a stride like a panther. The black lights made her white hair almost glow. “You didn’t forget about me, did you?” she said over the throbbing music and the traffic jam of voices. She had a glass in her hand. I nodded for her to sit and she did. I poured her a glass, the last of the bottle, leaving a single swallow for myself. She raised the glass, and I raised the bottle.
“Happy birthday,” she said, “and congratulations on another successful fulfillment of your ongoing obligation, Laytham.”
I paused in drinking the last of the bottle and cocked my head at the bartender, who drained her glass and sighed. I looked across the bar and saw the same bartender, same tattoos, same hair, waving bye to the other bartender on duty as she headed for the door, her purse over her shoulder.
“That,” said the bartender sitting across from me, “is what sin tastes like.” I slipped a cigarette between my lips.
“Got a light?” I asked the Devil.
“You had two images prominent in your mind,” the embodiment of all malice said as she lit my cigarette like any good bartender would. “This sweet young thing you visualized rutting with, and that dead little girl back at the school. Since it was your birthday, I chose, sorry for this, the lesser of two evils.”
“What do you want?” I asked. “You are assassinating a very expensive buzz. I did your dirty work, and got you your AWOL scumbag back.”
“You did, Laytham,” it said. “I would have manifested sooner, but I had to wait until your consciousness was altered sufficiently for us to interact. I wanted to congratulate you on heroically saving that poor boy’s life, Laytham. Bravo.”
“Fuck you,” I said, and drained the last of the bourbon. It tasted like ashes.
“Technically, fuck you,” she replied, pouring herself a glass of the last of the oily tequila, “since you were the one who bartered away three years of your life in my service in exchange for those wishes you needed so desperately at the time.” I watched the Devil drink the last of my booze. I think there was a metaphor in there somewhere. “Haven’t we had fun these past few years? Me, breaking up the wearisome monotony of your plodding march toward self-induced oblivion with my little honey-do list of tasks. You, a villain most foul, given chances over and over again to act the hero, like you did today. Tell me, hero, how does it feel to be back on the side of the angels?”
I looked across the table for anything left to drink. There was nothing. I looked up at this thing of purest self-hate, conjured out of my own mind, and said nothing. There was nothing to say. The Devil knows you, because the Devil is you. She went on, taking one of my American Spirits out of the crumpled and almost empty pack. “I wanted to congratulate you,” she said, lighting the cigarette between those full lips, “and let you know I was here to give you a little birthday present of my own. You have worked off about a year’s worth of your debt in the past two. I am forgiving almost all of the remaining time on your account tonight, my dear Laytham.”
“Almost?” I said, leaning across the table, knocking several beer bottles over as I did. I think a few smashed on the floor.
“I’m holding onto one minute,” the Devil said. “That’s
