I saw him as soon as I turned the corner. I had noticed him around town numerous times, begging for change, cleaning windshields for a dime, scrounging for scraps. He was ragged, in ragged clothes, with what looked like little to offer anyone. He glanced up at my approaching silhouette.

From his spot on the sidewalk, he leaned forward, and, with little effort and expectation, asked, “Can you spare some change, brother?”

His voice cracked and creaked like an old house, one aching for occupants. His eyes glowed through the shadows of the night as inklings of light bounced and sparkled off of the pool of water that settled in his eyes. The old man remained motionless.

I stopped right outside of the door the man was stooped next to. I watched him, with his permanent five o’clock and his weather stained cheeks. He made no effort to persuade me, nor was there any dissuasion with antics of plead and pity. For this gentleman, life had already done its worst, and the old man seemed to hold little concern, regardless.

“Do you wanna drink?”

The old man’s eyes hardened a bit, anticipating the mundane lecture of the privately and publicly ignorant. He turned from me, looking back into the desolate world before him.

“It wouldn’t hurt.”

I opened the door and held it for the man.

“Come on, then.”

The old man looked back to me. I could see a mixture of emotions pass across his tightly skinned face. His jaw pulsed with the beat of clenched teeth, then softened with a thought of plausible kindness from an unusual stranger. Slowly, he rose to his feet, awkwardly dusting off the front and back of his long brown coat. With reserve and an awkward sideward glance, he passed into the door I held for him.

Inside, I let the door slide shut behind me, grateful as the last little breath of the cold night faded into the warm air of the bar I was now standing in. The old man said nothing but stood to the side, awaiting my command. Without a word, I moved to the bar, taking a stool midway down. After a beat, I glanced back to see the old man still standing by the door. I turned back to the bar as the bartender approached.

“Two shots of Jack, and a round of beers.”

The bartender nodded, glancing to the old man in the door. Slowly, the old man made his way to the stool next to me. He took it cautiously and sat, pulling the hole-filled gloves off of his hands.

I could see him clearly now. His stringy gray hair scattered out from under a heavy black skull cap like lightning bolts from the sky. His heavy eyes and protruding cheeks bones gave him a skeletal look, creating a creepy sense of childish fear in me. His clothes heavily hung from him like his societal status. His eyes darted a glance at me, then back to the bar.

The drinks came. The bartender set them in front of us, again eyeing the old man sitting next to me.

“Just start a tab for us, please.”

The bartender nodded, still confused by my company and I.

I raised one of the shots of Jack and held it between the old man and I.

“Cheers?”

The old man sat in silence for a moment, keeping his eyes parallel to the bar.

“Why are you doing this?”

I looked back to the bar, really not interested in the man’s questions.

“Why’d you come in?”

I tossed the shot back, grimacing as the bourbon burned the back of my throat. I sucked air in through clenched teeth and swallowed deeply. I set the glass on the bar, motioning to the bartender for another.

The old man slowly raised his hand to the glass in front of him and embraced it with his fingers. He looked at it for a moment. Slowly, the old man raised his glass, resting the edge of it against the pale pink of his lower lip. He closed his eyes, cracked open his mouth, and tipped the glass up. The brown bourbon poured into his mouth, and the old man swallowed. He took a deep breath and set the glass back on the bar.

The old man opened his eyes.

“Give him another too,” and, as the bartender wrapped up mine, he swiftly poured another shot into the old man’s glass.

I grabbed my glass and stared ahead. I was aware of the old man – the smells of his dilapidating body and its collected garbage, the sandbags under his eyes that held back the flood inside. Yet, as the night grew colder and stronger, I became more aware of the weight in my own heart. I could feel the approaching apocalypse in my soul, and, already, the night seemed like it would never end. Finally, with effort, I lifted the bourbon in front of me, breaking my gaze into space. I looked to the man, lifting my glass between us, once again.

The old man gradually lifted his, clinging it against my own. With a nod to the evening, I threw back the shot. The old man followed, and we both set our glasses down on the bar. With another grimace, I took a long sip of my beer.

“Thank you.”

Simply, I shrugged my shoulders, longingly swallowing the drink in my mouth.

The beer felt good. It had been countless hours of wanting since I had had one, and, despite the nagging voice of my addiction-fearing conscience, I was enjoying this one. I took the bottle from my lips and licked them gracefully, swallowing once more. I set the bottle on the bar, looking again at that strange gaping hole of darkness in the distance.

“This is my first drink in two months.”

My voice was like that of a traitor, my soul struggling to find a way to counter the body’s sudden regression into the raging battle that it had fought so hard to win.

“You never stop… you just can’t.”

The old man’s voice rang with measures of painful truth and experience. He continued to stare forward, but it was obvious that what played across his vision was not the present, but the past – the past and all of its pressing memories.

Both of us stared ahead, silence firmly sitting in between us. We didn’t care, though. We both had other things on our mind. Things that bit and chewed all the way down to the core of our being.

The clock struck the hour.

“Thank you for your kindness.”

“Thank you for your company.”

I took another long drink of my beer. The cold glass caressed my lips as the bottle poured friendship and grace down into the bowels of loneliness and guilt. I let out a soft sigh of sensation as I set the bottle back down.

“Drinking alone is worse than drinking.”

I laughed slightly at the old man’s comment. “It’s funny how the presence of one person can change drinking.”

“It’s funny how the presence of one person can change anything.” The man paused for a minute. “What’s funnier, though, is how much a person’s absence can change things.”

I reeled with the old man’s comment. He was right. Terribly right. The absence of a person could mean so much, could do so much. That pulsing passion for that one person, that one absent person.

“And you drink like they’re in the bottom of the bottle. Like you’ll find ‘em if you can just get to the bottom.”

“But you don’t, so you move on to the next, until you wake up and they’re no longer even in the spot they were actually in.”

The old man stopped. There was a moment of hesitation in his voice as he tried to cover the chokes of weeping in his throat. Gently, I glanced over at him. He had grown softer in those few minutes sitting there in the bar. The pain and misery of his life had made him his own caretaker, and, now, he was a walking coffin, made from the trees of failure and futility. His vulnerable nature bled through, saturating the wood of his cheeks and clothes with an expression of despair and desolation.

I looked back into the distance.

“She’s my absent person.”

The old man was quiet for a moment. Then, with a voice like that of a consoling mother, asked, “What happened?”

I could feel the tears welling up in my heart.

“Cancer. She had breast cancer. When we found out she had it, it was too late.”

There was a moment of silence as I breathed in the stale air stained with my words.

“She died last night.”

I paused, feeling a surge of emotions enveloping me.

“She was the reason I quit drinking, you know. We were married for three years, but she helped me through a lifetime of… of…”

Tears welled in my eyes and spilled over, running down my cheeks.

“I don’t know what I’ll do without her. I can’t…”

I stopped talking. My eyes burned with the sadness that dripped from them, and I watched as a tear slid off of my nose and into my beer. I could feel the depths of my loss stirring tumultuously inside of me, suffocating my heart with its overbearing weight. If I didn’t leave soon, I was going to break down. But, as I decided to get up and walk out of the bar and into the empty night, the old man spoke.

“My son is my absence.”

With my head hung low, I wiped my face with my hands. I gritted my teeth and shoved back my tornado of feelings.

Through chocked syntax, I muttered, “Your son?”

“Yea… he was an artist. Damn good one too.”

The old man paused. He continued to stare forward. Still fighting my ensuing storm, I tried to keep the man talking.

“What happened to -?”

“He had a show in L.A. once. He went for a week and knocked everybody off their feet. Had ‘em in the palm of his hand.” The old man shook his head, grinning slightly. “He blew it though – went out one night and wound up getting into a fight with one of his investors. Ha… like father, like son.”

The old man raised his beer to his lips and took a drink. Softly, he set the bottle down.

I was slowly gaining control of myself, and I followed the old man, taking a long sip of my own beer. I closed my eyes as a streak of cold rushed down my throat.

“He always used to challenge me to drinking contests. Sometimes, we would go out and paint the town every shade of possible red.”

The old man paused again. This time, he didn’t drink his beer, nor did he simply sit in silence. With almost mechanically movement, the old man lowered his head.

“What happened to him?”

“He killed himself.”

I stopped, struck by the old man’s response.

“I remember, the night before he did it, we had gone out. It was his 24th birthday, and he was… way too drunk. I was sitting in the bathroom with him, holding his head over the toilet. He had been half-conscious all night long, but, suddenly, he opened his eyes. And, with his head in my hands, he looked up at me and said, ‘I’m so sorry, dad.’ And he just started crying. He cried and cried… like I’ve never seen anyone cry.”

I could see a twinkling tear running down the old man’s cheek, and I turned away, looking down at my beer.

“I’ll never forget the way he clung to me that night, like he was searching for something in me to save him… but he never found it.”

The old man never moved, with his head lowered to the bar and his stiff body stationary. Yet, tears streamed from his eyes, dripping from his chin and landing on the bar.

After a few moments, the old man raised his head. He still looked ahead, motionless.

“I blame myself for his death….” He wanted to say more, but the past wouldn’t let him.

I continued to stare at my beer as the silence between the old man and I grew. I didn’t know what to say to him, nor did I know what to do. His story filled me with an unbearable sadness that seemed to seep inside of my own hurt. I took a deep breath and turned my eyes to the old man. He sat there, motionless still, staring ahead. I watched him as my mind pondered over just what exactly it was that we were supposed to do with some of the hands that Fate dealt to us. And as I sorted through the cards of my own hand, I reached for my wallet. I pulled out forty dollars and tossed it on the bar. The old man looked over, taking note of the sum of the money. I stood from my stool and looked at the bar. I didn’t have any words of wisdom or phrases of inspirations. I just wanted to go home. So, with one last glance at the old man and the half full bottle sitting on the bar, I left.

The third-eye image of the old man was already fading as I walked down the sidewalk, the wind viciously wrapping around me. I could feel the dread of the long, sleepless night creeping into me, snuggling up next to my infinite sadness, and, as the memories mounted and the dam of my despair threatened to break, I wondered if maybe I should have just stayed in the bar, after all.