Flashback: Jessie's drunk ...

I dug around under the bar and found a bottle of anisette that the guys used for shots to celebrate little victories.  I drank right from the bottle and shivered as the strong liquorice liqueur warmed a path down my throat to spread across my belly.  Taking the bottle I walked to the old Wurlitzer that Dad installed for the club’s reopening party and punched in numbers from the 1960s section and listened to the music Dad said was the narrative of his young life; Led Zeppelin’s ‘Good Time, Bad Times’, Clapton’s ‘Crossroad Blues’, Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth’, all the while sipping the anisette and weaving to the music.

Then I played all the songs I knew reminded Dad of Carrie; ‘Hey Carrie Anne’ by the Hollies, ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ by Procol Harem, and the one that made me cry that night; ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ by the Foundations, about a young man who was so desperately in love with a girl he knew would break his heart, but loved her anyway with every ounce of his being.

I knew them all by heart, growing up watching my Dad get that faraway look of longing and heartache whenever someone played one of them.  I was always in awe of a love that could endure for so long; kept alive and fresh even separated by such an impossible distance; the love he held for that long dead girl.  And knowing he was capable of that made me know that when he told me he loved me, he meant it and it was real.

I drowned myself in his music and Mike’s anisette until I was sitting on the floor, leaning against the Wurlitzer, with raw tears flowing down my cheeks.  I wanted my Dad right then, right there.  I wanted to feel his arms around me, holding me like he held me so many nights as I cried.  And him, never offering advice, never trying to fix it, never reminding me how I ended up in that state in the first place.  All he ever did was listen and hold me and love me, and that was more than anyone can ask.

I’d set out to quiet my busy mind and had drank myself into a state of crippling nostalgia.  I was a hot, drunken mess, and my busy thoughts had given way to a flood of emotion that was gutting me.  I toughened up on myself and called an end to my pity party.  My Dad was still alive and would hold me again, and I was determined to keep him alive by hunting down the motherless bastards responsible for his wounds and pain and kill every single one of them.

The Dark Riders and the Russian mob learned of my Dad’s cunning and savagery the hard way - ‘just wait until these mutts got a load of his daughter’, I silently swore to myself.

It took me three tries to get my legs under me and hold myself up by clutching the Wurlitzer.  I studied the song titles as they blurred and came into random focus until I found the song I was looking for to pull myself out of the funk I was in;

‘Mambo Number Five’ by Lou Bega, the song that Dad and I danced to at my ninth birthday party, immortalized by the enlarged photo that lived inside the entrance in our home since that day, and will forever remain the happiest moment of my childhood.

I danced like I did when I was nine until I lost my balance and almost dropped the anisette bottle as I fell against the Wurlitzer.  Then I felt dizzy and sick, so I staggered behind the bar and threw up into the sink.  I rinsed it down and doing so tipped over the anisette bottle and spilled it all over Mike’s prep area.  I tried to clean it up but I’d cashed in all the exhaustion that I’d saved up since Tuesday morning and the more I tried to clean up the worse I made it.  So I finally scrawled ‘I’m sorry Mike’ on his order pad and hauled myself upstairs and flopped face down on the couch and passed out.

"Gangster's Girl"