He was twenty-five,
a messed-up kid in man-sized Doc Martens thudding the splintered sidewalks of East Carson Street,
back when July nights in Pittsburgh still smelled faintly like steel mills and catfish piss and not yuppie money,
his Polo shirt half-unbuttoned,
two steady streams of sweat dribbling down his neck and meeting at a confluence that ran down his chest.
The first stop,
like always,
Jack’s,
his favorite dive where the doorman never looked too hard at the fake I.D.’s of pretty Carlow girls with big tits.
Bellied up to the bar,
he downed a shot of Jack and a Yuengling,
then another,
then another,
then another til he mustered the courage he failed to forge in his cubicle all week.
Sufficiently lubricated,
he darted off and chased it with a key bump in the bathroom,
mirror showing a clever grin and the chipped front tooth he got last Saturday.
As it spread wider he felt his heart gnawing rabidly at the lock of its cage.
“Time to jump in”,
he told the reflection.
The reflection laughed back,
on the South Side on a Saturday night,
it was the only time it did.
He closed his tab,
slammed the wobbly door shut,
and prepared for the fall.
At the next bar,
the girls on the dance floor moved like they wanted to be anyone but themselves, too.
He bought a jagerbomb for the first who held his glance a moment and smiled back,
his hands found her waist,
his mouth found the back of her neck,
then came the sucking kisses that leave hickies she’d have to cover all week.
She had dark-reddish hair and a septum ring and an annoying voice that cut through the thumping bass of a Mac Miller song,
she said her name was Erin but that her friends called her “Emo”.
He said his name and she called him,“Trouble”.
Then she said he looked kinda like her dad.
He liked that.
He noticed the old ladder of scars climbing her forearm.
He liked that, too.
He called her baby,
sweetheart,
fuck, he’d say whatever if she’d let him put his hands down her pants.
They danced sloppy,
grinding to songs without words,
he felt invincible,
dick hardening against her hip,
mind already halfway to the alley or her apartment,
or the backseat of his piece of shit Civic parked in a dark lot a few blocks away.
A little later,
at the rooftop at Carson City,
the coke made him jabber too much,
he told her about the job he hated,
the old man who mined coal by day and drank too much and beat his mom by night,
the crippled one-horse town he ran from,
how the city felt like it was swallowing him whole but that he hoped at least he tasted good going down.
She smirked,
called him a poet,
asked him if he’d ever read Bukowski.
He had no idea who that was,
but said he did,
then said he’d fuck her like him if she’d let him try.
She said she was on the pill so he didn’t bother with a condom.
It was raw,
desperate,
his feral growls between awkward thrusts in the back seat,
her sweat and Fireball-flavored spit combining with the faint taste of his blood after she bit his lip too hard.
He gave her a fake number,
marched back towards Carson street for rounds four until he-ran-out-of-time-or-money,
the bottle of Adderall he swiped from her purse rattling in his pocket.
Outside the next bar, somebody passed him a grape white-owl blunt.
Inside the one after that, another stranger handed him a shot of Cuervo,
the night blurred into neon and sirens and a fistfight he almost joined just to feel like he was part of something more than a tangled barge of flood debris.
In the blur before last call at Casey’s he found another girl,
this one bleach blonde and on molly,
or named Molly,
he didn’t much care to ask her twice.
She pulled him into a bathroom,
hiked her skirt up,
yanked his jeans down,
he took her from behind while she moaned into the filthy mirror,
her breath fogging the image of his face,
showing him as a haze without definition.
After he came and called her by the wrong name she slapped him and waddled off cursing.
He looked into the mirror and shattered it then wandered off into the masses on the street howling like a jackal,
throat dry,
his last tab un-closed,
his cut fist wrapped in his shirt.
At three a.m.
he found a yellow bridge
and leaned on the railing smoking cigarettes.
He thought of Monday thru Friday, recounted the battle he knew he was losing.
Hell, he wasn’t even putting up a fight.
But tonight,
he fought,
and goddamn it if he didn’t love this one night war.
He loved the way the city lights smeared and sparkled in the muddy water,
loved the girl who left the lipstick on his collar that matched the crimson seeping through,
loved knowing he’d wake up tomorrow with a head feeling like a busted taillight,
and that same dumb, chipped-tooth grin spreading cross his face.
A smile that would remind him that,
for a few loud hours,
he wasn’t some small-town kid drowning all alone.
For one night,
he was the river itself
—a confluence—
murky, fast,
carrying everything downstream, unstoppable,
with a middle finger to the sky,
and a shot and a kiss for whoever jumped in to swim with him.
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