a fourteenth story...'the old drunk'

I remember the old drunk: his eyes two flints, his head like a Toby jug.  He never left the bar as far as I could tell.  He would be there when you went for a morning coffee, still there if you came back for a bite to eat at lunch, and lurking menacingly around the pool tables in the evening.  When he was sober he was loveable.  When he was drunk he was ‘the beast’ – the regulars called him that. 

He was almost funny to look at in his small fitting blue dungarees and red baseball cap, though I imagined he had been quite an athlete once, what with his long legs and strong forearms, but after all the drinking he had gone to fat.  He hadn’t bothered to shave in a while, that was for sure, and wore a great beard that hid most of his face.  When he smiled you could see several teeth were missing, dissolved by alcohol or punched out in any number of bar room brawls.

Even I had seen the red mist descend on more than one occasion, and there were several stories, some of which became urban legend.  There was the time when he put a cigarette out in the barmaid’s eye; the time he put a couple of billiard balls in one of his socks and cracked his opponent over the head with them; as well as all the times he attacked various bystanders with broken bottles, bar stools and table legs.  People who didn’t know him said he was a loud and aggressive drunk, his ruin became their favourite topic; but not all the stories about him involved violence.

In the main he was generous.  There were the occasions when he would stand everyone in the bar a round of drinks, although nobody knew where he got the cash from, and he would often volunteer to carry out someone who had had too much.  I also saw him extinguish a fire with the soda pump.  He was a loyal customer and most of the time, greatly valued.

His demise in the end took no one by surprise.  It was a heart attack they said.  The old drunk hadn’t turned up by three o’clock one day so the owner sent someone around to his flat, they found him dead in his bed.  His eyes were closed.  Afterwards the regulars would cross themselves and say things like: ‘he may have been larger than life, but no one is bigger than death’, and ‘death outruns us all in the end’.  Then they would nod and drain their glasses.  I watched this as a young man and never understood any of it until much later on.