Mind Games

Chapter Nineteen: Drunk Minds

The place to go when you didn't want to be found, was a place where everyone was looking to get lost. Howlers fit that description perfectly. A small hole-in-the-wall bar in Seattle's downtown that attracted mostly lowlifes. For anyone looking to forget who they were, this bar was the place to be. Here, you weren't expected to be anybody.

The lighting inside was dark, the drinks were mostly cheap, the bar goers strained to keep to themselves. The music was largely AC/DC and Zeppelin, the stench was spilt whiskey and cigar smoke, broken dreams and car grease.

It was the last place a person like Lucca would find herself. The last place someone would know to look for her.

The bar owner was a shady man with greying hair and a splotchy beard. He eyed Lucca the moment she stepped through the doors.

"I don't serve minors," he announced, focused his attention on cleaning the shot glass in his hands.

"And your money doesn't go up your nose, either," she deduced arrogantly, having caught the tell-tale signs of cocaine powder in the fine hairs of his beard, in the crease of his nose.

The man eyed her sharply.

Lucca ignored the look she was sure was intended to be intimidating and pulled out the money from her pocket. She dropped a couple of bills onto the bar, amongst the broken shells of peanuts and pretzel crumbs.

"Your finest scotch, keep it coming, and don't bother asking questions," she ordered him.

The man looked at the money, eyed the rest of the bills she tucked into her pocket and then back to the money. Calculating how much he could use of it to feed his habit, she thought. Thinking of her contribution to his addiction. A craving for satisfaction, for his next hit, took away his morality.

Everybody wanted money, and they wanted more.

The bills were gone within the next instant, slipped into his pocket rather than the nearby register and he placed the glass he'd been cleaning in front of her, turned behind him and picked up a bottle of cheap labelled Johnnie Walker. He poured out two fingers worth, set the bottle down just out of arms-length.

Holding temptation at bay.

The smell of the scotch was strong. A heat to it that burned at her nose. The spice, the headiness of the alcohol, clouding her mind.

The feeling of being drunk without taking a drink.

She noted the cool temperature of the glass against her fingers. The cooler temperature of the amber liquid and the intense burn as it slid down her throat.

The cough that followed was penance for the sin. The tears that joined the same, and she hated them, but welcomed them. Gritted her teeth, tried to calm her breathing against the sudden tightness suffocating her chest.

She reached for the bottle with blurred vision, poured herself another two fingers and repeated the action again, and again. And again.

People drank to drown their demons. To forget their wrong doings. To find the all magical solution to their everyday problems, hoped that the answers to their questions laid at the bottom of the bottle.

During sobriety, they wonder how idiotic they could have been to try something so inelegant, so poisonous for some sense of euphoria or numbness.

Lucca wasn't so naïve to believe that drinking would solve her problems. The answers to relieve the torment on her soul could not be found at the bottom of a bottle. Nor would they be found along the journey to sobriety amongst the groans of 'Oh God'.