CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The bar was in full swing, raucous, the music loud, the smoke-filled air alive with bawdy comments tossed randomly at the topless girls dancing on the elevated runways, writhing on the pole, their garters packed with five and ten dollar bills, giving the guys what they wanted, a fantasy of lust and fulfillment. The men knew it wasn’t real, that it was only a mirage of sexuality. Yet a hope fueled by expensive and watered-down booze lingered in their fevered brains, a bare possibility of fulfillment that would be dashed as soon as the lights came up and the bartenders stopped serving and the dancers left with their tattooed boyfriends. The men would file out of the bar and drive to their homes, crawl into their lonely beds, and pass the night in alcoholic oblivion.
The young man glanced at his watch, turning his wrist to catch the minimal light from an overhead fixture. It was late and his friends had left an hour ago. He wasn’t sure why he’d stayed, ennui perhaps, a seeming inability to get off his chair and leave. He hadn’t drunk much, but had enjoyed the solitude, the anonymity of the bar on the edge of town late at night where no one knew his name. And truth be told, he enjoyed the slope of a well-rounded breast and the flexing of butt cheeks confined only by the single strap of a thong.
His thoughts drifted. He was only two years out of a public high school and much of his worldview was shaped by that experience. He’d known the jocks, the geeks, the dweebs, the preppies, the poor kids, and the rich. He fell into a couple of those categories, rich and preppie. There had never been a question but that he’d go to college and join his father in the family business. But what about the dancers? What had they been in high school? He couldn’t place them in any of the categories. What made them become topless dancers? What drove them to undulate mostly naked on a stage and endure the catcalls of drunken men? Why were these pretty girls attaching themselves to men, boys really, who looked like societal dregs? It was all a mystery to the preppie from the suburbs.
He was not a snob. Far from it. He understood that there were people in his world who had not had his advantages, could not look forward to a future of prosperity and community acceptance. He appreciated the fact that he had been lucky to be born into his particular family, the son of a war hero who had become a man of substance and prominence in the city of his birth.
He was twenty years old and had, what, seventy more years to live? What he would do with those years would measure him as a man. Did it really matter that he didn’t want the future that had been so meticulously crafted for him? His bridge year, the year between high school and college, half of it spent in Cambodia helping build a school in a place that had no sewage or running water or electricity, had given him a broader view of the world, one not circumscribed by the confines of a mediumsized southern city and its power structure, its flow of people and events little noticed outside its inhabitants’ cloistered world.
He was going to have to have the talk with his father, explain his decision to follow a path other than the one ordained for him. It would disappoint the man, but the boy knew he would accept it, even encourage his son to find his own way to happiness and fulfillment.
He signaled for the waitress, paid his bill, and walked toward the entrance. He’d stop on his way home for a late-night burger and fries, maybe a milk shake. He hadn’t eaten since lunch and even the little booze he’d consumed was taking a toll on his stomach. A little grease would be helpful.
As he walked toward the door, he was thinking about the next seventy years. He came from a long-lived family, so it was probable that he would live to see ninety. Maybe beyond that. He had a lot of life before him and he’d made up his mind. He’d talk to his father and then set out in the direction he wanted for himself. One that would take him happily through all the coming decades.
When the young man stepped out into the July night, he had less than two minutes to live.