“Dwarves.”
“Excuse me?”
“Dwarves. Fucking Dwarves. They’re always there. Watching.”
It was only when I turned my head and looked at the person talking that I figured out they weren’t talking to me, just mumbling with an old boozer mumble into an old fashioned half filled with a dark amber liquid. Scotch or bourbon was my guess.
I hadn’t been in this particular bar for a few years and never at this hour. Back in the day, it was mostly noted for the giant neon martini glass and blinking sign reading “Open 6 AM” over the door. The kind of place that flared for a bit with the recent post-grads who would’ve been way too chickenshit to walk into a real dive.
I was driving by on the way to my crappy job so that I could pay the rent on my crappy apartment so that I didn’t drop out of my crappy life. That was before the first cup of coffee, ask me later and the picture would’ve brightened considerably.
As it was, as I drove past the bar, just like I did every morning, this thought crawled across my brain, “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Stopped at a red light, I looked at myself in the rearview, sharing the mirror with the bar’s sign. Nothing, that’s what could happen. It would be a single day. The safest rebellion ever.
By the time I’d thought twice about it, I was sitting in a parked car and leaving some lame-ass excuse to my boss’s voicemail, hoping that they would be too busy with Monday meetings and other BS to call me back.
And then I was in the bar.
At 7 in the morning.
It was surprisingly full. Who knew there were so many old drunks out this time of day? You never saw them walking around, they were just…here.
The bartender, a tall, thin man, slid in front of me and waited without speaking. With his neat hair and by-the-books getup of white shirt, black trousers, and apron, he reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t tell you who.
What do you order this time of day? Mimosas and Bloodys were out of the picture. This wasn’t the sort of place for that kind of drink. It would be like ordering a Fuzzy Navel at the Zam Zam back when Bruno owned it.
Might as well go for it, “Jack Daniels, please.”
Curt nod and he was off and back with my Jack before I knew it. Served it neat without asking.
Went burning straight down my throat and into my otherwise empty stomach.
There. Now we’re all caught up.
The drunk next to me continues mumbling, this time too quiet to make out anything. I prick up my ears a bit and that’s when the other voices seep in on the edges, all mumbling about the same.
I turn and look, really look. It was like looking into an infinity mirror of drunks. All the way down the bar are little old men and women, all leaning over old fashioned glasses half filled with fluids of various darkness.
I dropped my jaw and stared, but the drunks just kept on doing their thing, each in their own world. After a while, they would sit back on their stools and take a hit from a shot glass each of them had at their elbow. At no point did I see anyone drink from the larger glass. Stranger still, from time to time the bartender would glide through and collect the larger glasses, the darker the contents the more likely the guy would pick them up. He would then take the glass to a large glass bulb that fed into a series of other bulbs and reservoirs, all connected with patina’d copper tubing. The bar, a glorious dark oak dinosaur, was built around this labyrinth with a brass step ladder set into the wood next to the tank. The bartender climbed these steps and poured the glass’s contents into the tank through a hatch at the top.
Further down, at around chest height, were a series of brass spigots set into the side of the bar. Above the spigots were little handwritten signs, too far away for me to read. The bartender would climb down and half fill a fresh glass from one of the spigots, this time with clear liquid. He would then place the clear liquid in front of them and pour them another shot for the smaller glass.
“Read any William Burroughs?”
This time, the question was directed at me. It was the bartender. He was a couple of drunks down to my right, not even looking my way, but I knew it was directed at me.
“Sorry?”
“I was asking if you’ve ever read any William S. Burroughs, you know…”
I quickly recovered, lest he think I wasn’t cool, “Sure. A little, anyway. Why?”
Standing in front of me at this point, He motioned down the bar with a nod, “Makes it easier to explain.” He paused, studying my face, looked down at my empty glass, looked up at me.
“Jack, please.”
He had the bottle ready. Much easier going down this time.
“Anyway, Burroughs had this theory that the real reason people get drunk is the contrast. The contrast between life and death. That as living beings, we are taking a little bit of death inside ourselves…”
“Death?”
“Through the fermentation process.”
“The fermentation process. Right.” Having no idea what he was talking about, my brain was frantically going through what little chemistry I still retained from high school. “I don’t remember this from Naked Lunch.”
“That’s because it’s from The Western Lands. Anyway, the owner of this bar, Mr. Flint, he ran with the Beats. Knew all of those guys. One night, he’s up on a speed binge with Burroughs, Ginsberg, and these other guys and they’re having an all time great philosophical bull session, really one for the ages.”
He paused to see if I was following. He needn’t have bothered. Once he mentioned the beats I wasn’t even blinking.
“So these guys are running Burrough’s theory around the room, seeing where it could go and they start talking about other contrasts. If you could get life and death, what about rich and poor, happy and miserable, old and young. Well, one of the other guys is this son of a famous winemaker from Italy, a couple others are chemists, I think one of them went on to win the Noble prize for it, a Tibetan mystic, and they are having a ball, thinking it’s all just BS. Except for Flint, who’s sitting there taking notes like it was going to be on the final. The next day, he starts working on this system. Trial and error, it took him another twenty years until he finished the device behind me.”
“What, exactly, does it do?”
“It distills things.” He let the sentence stretch out a bit. He was enjoying this. “Things like emotions and memories.”
“Say what?”
“Just like I said. Flint has these connections around the city, through the homeless outreach programs mostly, he calls them his farm team…has them arranged by their personal demons.”
“Demons? Real demons?”
“Real enough, but I’m talking about the kind that roam in the old bone cave.” He tapped the side of his head once he saw that he’d lost me again, “Mental problems, whatever makes them…them.”
I wasn’t sure if I believed him or not, but it was all about playing along, “What’s the deal with this group?”
“Pretty rare, actually. Delusional, borderline dangerous. Paranoid.”
“And what comes out of this?”
“Just what you think. Pretty select clientèle for this sort of draught, though. I’ve heard that back in the day there are a couple of groups in LA that get together and drink this stuff. People in the entertainment industry, lawyers and executives I think. They say it helps them keep their edge, but that’s shifted to groups up here, C-level folks that work at start ups. Things change with the times, I guess.”
I couldn’t keep the skepticism from my face. He reacted with a ghost of a smile.
“Want a taste? As they say, the first one’s free.”
I looked down the bar again, trying in vain to imagine what the stuff must be like, assuming of course that this wasn’t simply a bartender bored off his ass trying to pass the time with the only customer capable of forming complex sentences.
There was that thought again, “What’s the worst that could happen.”, except that this time, the downside wasn’t so easily dismissed.
What the fuck. In for a penny…
“Hit me.”
He turned smoothly, strode down the bar, and returned with a small crystal vial filled with a dark liquid and placed it in front of me. I looked down at it and back at him.
“This came from them?”
“In a sense, there are a lot more steps involved than just that. What you have there is over 18 months old.”
There was a scent coming off the liquor, musty with a tinge of blood and tears.
“Best to down it all at once.” he advised.
Sounded like good advice. I raised the glass to my lips, the smell increasing and noticed the look in the bartender’s eyes had changed, narrowing from bland to something predatory.
Couldn’t say if it was that look or something from the scent of the draught, but it brought me up short.
What was with that look? Strike that. Why was he telling me all this at all? Thinking about it, this seemed like the very thing you would want to keep quiet. It didn’t make sense.
What if I told other people? Twitter was arguably invented for this reason. All I’d have to do is pull out my phone but if he was at all worried about me doing that, it sure didn’t show which makes you wonder why that would be.
I set the glass back down on the bar.
A moment, him looking at me, taking my measure, me trying not to turn tail and run, trying harder to suppress the wild desire to pick the glass up again and down the fucker. And the longer that moment stretched, the more persuasive that desire became. My right hand was actually shaking.
“Huh. Usually the people who stagger in here by accident are either gone by now or take the offer. Policy is we serve whatever’s being distilled and we never take requests.”
I was at a place of overwhelm that made anything beyond a nod impossible.
“How about I serve you something you’ll like?”
By the time I was aware I had nodded, he had picked up the glass and poured it back down the hatch, rinsed it on a sink next to the hatch and glided down the bar, climbing another ladder at the end of the bar to the top tap. After filling the glass, he climbed back down and then he was back in front of me. He set the glass down. This time it was filled with a much lighter liquid. I stared at it as if there was an LED display on it counting down to 0.
“I can understand why you would nervous but I assure you that this is one of our more popular varieties. It’s policy for anyone still here after refusing the first.”
“What’s in it?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you.”
“Policy?”
“Of course.”
Staring at it, major portions of my brain were telling me that the thing to do was turn on my heel and get the Hell out of there. I’d taken an odd turn here somewhere and if turning around and retracing my steps was the way to get out, that’s what I would do.
But there were these other parts of me, the parts that got me in here in the first place, that said otherwise. I’d spent most of the my life staying out of situations like this. All the way through high school and college, I’d kept everything safe and cool, but since moving to San Francisco two years ago and getting to know people who not only lived lives more on the edge, but didn’t seem to be any of the worse for it, well, let’s just say I’ve been rethinking this part of my life. Turning 30 a couple of months ago didn’t help.
If not now, I rationalized, when? When I was married? Or when I had kids? My dad went that way a little, although it was generally more embarrassing than really dangerous. It wasn’t like he had an affair or did anything really stupid. Still, the idea of your father having an identity crisis at the age of 45 was little bracing. As a kid, you kind of hope that all of that gets resolved by then.
The glass was half way to my face before I was conscious of picking it up. The scent hit me at that point—a Bach contada of summer grass, popsicles, bactine and gardenias, and that was only the beginning. It was incredible. I closed my eyes to savor the shifting aromas and heard distant laughter.
When I’d opened them again, all I could see was the contents of the glass. There were subtle blooms of color going on in there, bright primaries dancing with subtle shadings, the light itself seemed different, like I was standing outside in the morning sun.
The bartender was watching all this go on, eyes smiling through his specs. It was the awareness of this that got me to pull my eyes from whatever was in the glass, “What is this? It smells…” Every time I tried for a word to describe it, the word seemed inadequate.
The smile had spread from his eyes to his lipless mouth, “Remarkable, isn’t it? I understand it’s Mr. Flint’s favorite.”
“What is it?”
“Sorry. I can assure you that it is popular for a reason.”
“Come on. You know I’m going to drink it anyway.”
“Everyone served that draught does in the end. Mr. Flint believes it ruins the experience.”
“But you said it was popular, so people do order it, right?”
“Of course, but not the first time.”
“Come on. Consider me a control group.”
He sighed, “Very well. It’s Childhood.”
The what now? I regarded the glass again, starting to doubt that it was just a trick of the light. Pulled my eyes off the liquid by casting them down the bar like a desperate dice roll with all or nothing riding on the throw. Down the row of drunks.
Wait a minute. If this is childhood, then how did they…
He saw it coming a mile off, “We maintain a rather robust sourcing effort. In this case, Mr. Flint, who is also very supportive of early childhood education, owns a lovely preschool in the Western Addition.”
“Why would…childhood, right. You can’t be saying what I think you’re saying.”
“And what is that?”
The little amused smile was suddenly starting to piss me off, which was good because it was taking my mind off the scent of the glass still in my hand, “I’m trying to picture a line of little kids doing what these guys are doing,” I gestured down the bar with the glass, overly aware that I hadn’t spilled a drop. “But from there I can’t decide if the next thing I see is a group of freaked out parents storming this bar or the police carting your Mr. Flint off to jail.”
“Oh, I can assure you that the process is different from that and completely above reproach. And the city’s leaders are well aware of Mr. Flint’s elixirs. Some of them, in fact, are regulars.”
“Customers?”
“And suppliers in a couple of cases.”
Huh? I tried to picture the Mayor or the Board of Supervisors lined up at the bar, making speeches into glasses of clear liquid. It wasn’t hard to do. I needed to say something else or I was going to empty the glass, and I still wasn’t sure if that was what I wanted to do, “Then how is it made?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know for sure, I just pour them.”
I held the line. If I learned anything from my Dad, it was how to spot a guy who liked to tell a story. Plus, he’d already told me what it was.
“Alright. Keep in mind this is just what I’ve heard. This school is known for rather…esoteric craft projects. From what I understand, the distillation involves pillows crafted with a very specific Tibetan pattern that the children themselves stitch. Every nap time their dreams flow through the threads in the pattern into a special medium in the center, a stable gel version of the base liquor you see in the old fashioneds.”
“You have got to be shitting me.”
“Proofs in your hand. I’ll leave you to it.”
With nothing to distract me, I regarded the elixir in the glass, the way the light played in it, the smell of it. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
I took the glass to my lips, just a sip to start, or so I thought until the first drop hit my tongue and then the shot was drained.
It started out sweet and light, like sugared rosewater, moved up to brighter flavors and then got weird from there. It tasted like it smelled and I just can’t describe it any better than that. But I’ll never forget the taste.
My arm somehow managed to steer the now empty glass back down to the bar. My eyes danced with the highlights shining off the crystal.
It wasn’t like being drunk. Or stoned, for that matter. This was like nothing I’d ever experienced before and trust me, if I had I would have remembered.
The only way I can put it is I felt different. I was still me in that I knew my name and there were no gaps in my memory. I could recite my address, phone number, birthday, all of that. But the baggage of it all, the weight and import, were somehow lifted from mix. Memories were just things that happened. I felt light as a feather. No wonder this was anyone’s favorite elixir.
All this passed without any of my bar mates taking the slightest interest. Well, the bartender did say this was a pretty serious group.
For his part, the bartender watched from down the bar, same little smile on his face, although it didn’t bother me nearly as much as it did before. It hit me that he reminded me of the bartender in The Shining, that amiable enabler of Jack’s descent. I was able to consider this without all the meaning and portents behind it. He was just a guy who looked like a guy in a movie.
I looked around the bar again, faded posters on the walls, torn upholstery in the vacant booths, old people at the bar. The bar itself was still cool, but that only took a minute and I was starting to get bored. Well, not bored, more like really, really restless.
I wanted to go outside. I was having trouble standing still for long.
The bartender seemed to understand this, didn’t even charge me for the two Jack Daniels I’d downed. The elixir, of course, was free.
I spilled out of the bar into the most beautiful morning I’d ever seen. I’d tried ecstasy a time or two and it wasn’t like that, either. I didn’t really like X, too artificial for me to really enjoy. At the time I compared it to riding a runaway train in a car filled with pillows; comfortable but not comforting, if that makes any sense. Anyway, this was different, it was just…great.
I walked past my car and continued towards the still rising sun, if for no other reason than the fact that the warmth felt great on my skin. I figured that I’d already gotten the day off work, might as well make the best of it.
Dolores Park was a couple blocks to the right. I started towards it.
Afterword
It’s been a month since I wrote the above. It took everything I had to keep from dropping into the bar the next day and asking for more. About the only thing that worked was the absolute certainly that if I went back in, parts of me would never leave. I try to remember how it felt after that draught of childhood, but it gets harder every day. Probably for the best.