“The clientele were cliched lonely, older working men with cumulative, functional-but-chronic drinking habits. And occasionally the younger nonworking locals that liked to slum in dive bars…They constantly telegraphed that they were there for a laugh only, as if getting older were contagious.”
C bought Polaroid film last week. Between the three of us that live together, we had two polaroid cameras and six photos of unusable film. After the package arrived from Amazon we had one working camera and eighteen squares of film. When photos were taken of me in the living room they turned out completely black as if I were unable to be captured with light and shadow. It was another thing that made me feel like a shell of myself.
But, then, we turned the flash on or it was daylight and instead of a square of black, there was a square of sun and street and me. What I like about Polaroids is that they make nostalgia instant. The frail object and the washed out colors like the moment is already in a dream. I have only had this kind of instant nostalgia happen when I move away from somewhere to a new place. Immediately every memory of the old place is honey-dipped.
I think about New York this way all the time. Honeyhoneyhoney. A lot of what I did in New York was drink. Drink a lot, drink a little, drink at night, drink during the day. A gin martini with cracked black pepper and a little bloom of oil in it. That was on a date at a speakeasy. I was twenty-three, I was on a date with a video artist with a beard so long it reached his chest. With him I drank Bitburger beers with pizza and cheap wine at his house and red ale in a fairy-light backyard of a bar. Coffee slush topped with a floater of whiskey. That was ordered on nights, so many nights with my best friend, talking to men at the jukebox, dancing together in the middle of the dance floor, spinning back and forth on the plastic stools. You could buy a 24oz beer there for $7.00. The thing about beer is that it is already the golden color of sweet memory. As it slips down your throat it’s already as if it is a captured good time.
It runs out, this nostalgia. It can become something else, something functional-but-chronic. I’ve seen it happen. Last year I saw, in someone else, the middle of its shift, as if I was watching the exact year the fun ended but the drinking didn’t. White wine from a bottle with a label painted to look like an ocean, tall boys from the gas station every night after work, beer after beer, the nights getting longer and longer, Ted Leo on the stereo and no end in sight.
One evening in the middle of that shift, it was dark in the house but a light still blinked on and off. Trapped lightning bug. A moment of magic. We were transfixed, pulled out of our separate nighttime thoughts. Like that thing that can happen in a bar where a song or a bizarre patron can bind everyone together: the lonely older men, the younger nonworking locals. We watched it light up for a few more minutes, its new location always a delightful surprise. We let the lightning bug back out into the woods around the house. Maybe no one was even drunk that night. Or maybe that is the Polaroid version of events in my mind.
Sometimes I like to think that I could never get like that: breaking out the last can of beer all the time, pacing if I left my ID at home and couldn’t drink for a night. I was there only for fun, right? I was still young, still in the party of my life. The problem with a photo is how much they leave out of frame, how much they are only one version of events. Frame the lightning bug in early summer in a dark cabin. Frame three days of cigarettes stubbed out in a can of PBR. Frame stumbling down the sidewalk arm-in-arm singing loudly. Frame one of us on the couch, always, asleep, the other, always, restless. None of it is everything. When you leave something, it gets honey-dipped. I thought this was always the case. It is not.
I don’t drink so much anymore. The world still gets amber-colored sometimes.
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