BooksBarbecue
Back At Dawn
Chapters (39)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
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  39. Copyright

I grabbed the cinder box and removed two cigars and handed him one along with the cutter. He snapped the end off his cigar, and I did the same to mine. We lit up. Then he stood from the chair and walked to the bookcase, removed a book, flipped through it, landed on a page, and handed it to me.

“Read that,” he said.

It was a poem by Charles Bukowski. I read it and handed the book back.

“I have no reason to doubt Bukowski,” he said, “but I’ll be sixty-two soon and I’ve yet to realize that loneliness isn’t the worst thing in this world. And if I decide someday that he’s right, you can bet your ass it’ll be too late, and there’s nothing worse than too late.”

I nodded, remembering an ex-girlfriend who, just after she broke up with me but before walking out the door, assured me that I was going to die alone. Those were her words. But I was young then and the world had yet to beat me to my knees and I shrugged away her unsolicited aside, never once suspecting that she might be right, that one day I’d wake up as a fifty-year-old man, lonely, poor, and drifting into depression, suddenly aware that the world had passed me by and doomed to remember the days when I had felt another way, not happy, exactly, but still years away from the bitterness and gloom that, by then, would be coursing through me.

I took a long drink. “I can’t necessarily say that I consider loneliness the worst thing in the world. Hell, I even think I’m happier sometimes when I’m alone.”

“You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a haunted motherfucker always in contention with himself. Ask yourself what you’re so afraid of.”

“I know what I’m afraid of.”

“Yeah? And what’s that?”

I waved away the question with the back of my hand.

“Try me,” he said.

“Ah hell, I don’t know. Being cheated on. Being crushed and having my heart ripped out of my chest and stomped on the ground. Being with somebody for long enough so that she regrets being with me. Being pitied, or thought of as weak. Being viewed as a failure, or viewing myself as one. Most of all, being left or abandoned.”

“And what’s the product of all those fears?”