Whisky & Whiskers

When I was younger, I knew everything. Now I'm old enough to know I know nothing.

Life isn't easy, that's for sure. It doesn't make sense, you can do something right one day, and the next that same thing is crap. Most of us don't know what we're doing, we're just fleshy, deadly, dying machines and no one thought to bring a manual. No one knows how we work, why we work. I suppose God does, if you're into that sort of thing. Some are, and they get a form of peace from that. I wouldn't know, God doesn't exactly come around these parts, you know?

Mainly it's just whisky and Whiskers. He's a stray that comes by, we've bonded over our shared desire not to be alone, and that's enough. He eats my tuna and purrs on my stomach. We've found it to be a fair trade.

I wanted to be great in my youth. I wanted a lot of things. But nothing came of it. I'm just an old man sitting on a cracked leather couch, drinking whisky on the rocks out of the same glass I’ve had since before she left me, with a cat and his bent tail using me as a human mattress.

All in all, it could be worse I suppose. I could not have my one-room apartment, or heat that keeps me warm, or perhaps even more importantly the freezer that keeps my ice crisp for nightly drinks.

I pet Whiskers smoothly, going along with the direction of his fur. He has a patch of black fur over one eye, another on his front left paw, and the biggest splotch is on his tail, the rest of him is orange. Dirty, but still orange. I don't take him to be cleaned, I don't think he'd particularly like that.

I don't know where he goes when he's not with me. I imagine his get-togethers with the other local tom cats are more lively than being with an old man sitting alone, getting angry at the computer when the stupid internet doesn't work the way it should. Or asking the delivery guy to “speak up!” can't they talk louder than a freakin' whisper? Yet still Whiskers comes back every night, having had some adventure he'll never tell me about during the day.

Penny would say I've grown up to be a grump of a man…then again, she might have said nothing at all. I take another swig of my drink. She left me. My Penny. Walked right out the door yesterday, or was it twenty years ago? Either way, it's all the same. The apartment, with its warm memories, is gone, replaced by this, where I live now. This is just a room, with a smaller room attached for my bed, and an even smaller one for me to piss in. Not exactly a home.

She was beautiful, my Penny. I pick up a framed photo of us, back when we were happy, when life was good and easy— a gruff laugh is expelled from somewhere deep inside my chest. Life was never easy, but when the years are gone, it can certainly feel like it was. Maybe it wasn't easy, but it was better. Life with Penny was better than life without.

My eyes wander aimlessly around my barren place, everything mostly remaining as I found it. The wood cabinets, the ugly pine color I don't like, but… why fix it? Why bother? I keep my glass of whisky near me always, it's like the security blanket I had as a child, if I had one. It wasn't a priority of my folks to get me one back in the day.

Priorities, I suppose, are different for everyone. What's my priority? I turn to watch Whisker cleaning himself beside me on my sofa. Licking his paw and then rubbing it over his ear. Does that make him cleaner? I doubt it, he's always dirty. Always out and about, meowing with the others of his kind. I sigh and run a hand over my weathered face. The cat has more of a social life than me.

There was a time I knew what I was doing, and more times when I surely didn't.

I stay seated next to my companion and click on the TV. At least the remote works, even if sometimes it takes a few whacks to get the batteries to find their happy place. I really should get some more double As, but I always forget.

Penny was wearing a yellow dress when she left. She was beautiful. I thought I knew what I was doing when I let her go. I thought I would win in the end, that I would make something of myself and she would come back. But instead, she married another man and had a child. A child I didn't, couldn't, wouldn't give her. I don't know which of those words are true, but the reality is we never did have a child…. And it was because of me.

Sometimes I find her Facebook page or Instagram and just look. I don't say anything, just look. At the life I could have had. She smiles a lot more than she did before, my Penny. She smiles with him.

At a beach, wearing those huge sunglasses that are in fashion these days; on a couch curled up in a blanket, a cup of tea in her hands; a slide show of her trying on several summery dresses, posing in the mirror with a questioning smile as if asking, 'this one?' On and on the photos keep going, her life continues.

I look down and run a thumb around the edge of my whisky glass, the light from the TV reaching only so far into the dim room. I told her I was gonna make it, I told her I would. She believed me at first, I'll tell you that friend, she believed me. She thought I would make it.

I bring the glass to my lips the ice clinking against one another, the bitter taste I've become num to rolling along my tongue for seconds before I swallow. My eyes land on the dusty guitar sitting in the corner. When was the last time I played? When was the last time I strummed my fingers against the cords and felt the vibration through my body of making music.

I don't look away, the dust on the instrument almost daring me to disturb it. I want to, I want to play, to create, but I can't… or maybe I just don't. Which is it? I don't or I can't? Are they different? Does it matter?

If I could, if I did, get out of this chair, this sofa, this soft cushy thing cradling my ass, and walk the five steps to my out-of-tune guitar, and strummed my thumb across the cords, what does it matter? What would that do? I'm sixty, no forty, no… how old am I? It doesn't really matter either. I'm just an old man who's given up and lost everything.

I tried at first, I tried when she was with me, with Penny standing beside me I thought I could take on the world. I could handle talent agents, and PR reps, I could do the business side of things as long as I could play my music. Could write and hear the chorus of muses singing in my soul. I could do anything. That's what I told myself.

Whisker meows, wanting attention, he rubs along my calf and then hops onto the rug, before trotting with his tail straight in the air to the plate I leave out for him. I guess maybe attention isn't what he's looking for, food is.

I lean forward and force myself to move, making sure I don't let go of the glass in my hand. I place it gently on the kitchen counter before fishing out another can of tuna. I don't know how he's not a chunky boy by now, lord knows I am. I rub a hand along my protruding gut. Diet and exercise they say. Pay attention to that, do that better. As if it's just that easy. Then again, Whisker seems to get plenty of exercise. I take another sip of my dinner, relishing the burn as it goes down. I don't have time for that, I'm busy.

I place the plate of tuna down for my friend and then leave him in peace. Whiskers won't eat if I'm watching, he's a very private feline that way. I can hear the sounds of him lapping up his dinner as I toss the empty can away and return to my spot on the couch. The TV not having missed a beat while I was gone, still going on about some comedic problem that will be solved shortly.

Life isn't a TV show, it's not solved that fast or that from A-to-Z. It’s not sensical, this thing of life. Shows, stories, they tell this easy tale, this rhythm of life going in a straight line, or if not straight then zig-zagged. But it’s not either of those, it's a gone dang blasted mess of a line, hardly a line at all. It's a freaken' ball of string like the one Whisker plays with. Life is a mess.

People ask me, “What happened? Why did you stop playing? Why did you let it all slip away?” I want to give them answers, or at least I used to, now I'm just annoyed by the question so much I don't let them ask it. Stay holed away, where the only request of me will be for more tuna.

I want to tell them there was a reason, that I did something B that led to something C that led to me stopping. I want to tell them if only I had H I could make K again. But that's not life. That's not how it works, it's not so simple. Sometimes, it's the way that person took a song, or if I'd had a rager and made a public scene at one point. I didn't. Believe it or not, I was one of those musicians who didn't drink much. I lift my glass as if in salute to my past self, before taking a sip. Now it's a different story.

I stopped caring about propriety a long time ago, of filling my whisky glass with just two fingers worth of liquor. Now I pour it like it's water, not caring who sees, cause no one will. No one but Whiskers that is. He tried it once and if the spot of puke that ended up on my carpet two seconds later wasn't a negative star review of the taste, I don't know what is. A sober cat and a drunk man. I huff, my closest sound to humor. Sounds like some sort of twisted comedy.

Anyway, I didn't do anything. The public didn't do anything. It was… it was the muses. I take another swig of the liquid potion of numbness and lean my head back against the couch, closing my eyes so I don't have to stare at the overly offensive popcorn ceiling. When people keep pushing, that's what I tell them, the muses left me, and then Penny did. Without my muses I guess Penny saw me for what I was, and whoever that was, wasn't enough for her.

I wanted to make her stay, I wanted it so bad. In that moment I wanted to grab her arms and throw her into our bedroom and force her to stay… but I always swore I would never touch a woman like that. I wouldn't hurt her like my mother was hurt. So instead I just fell to my knees and begged. I begged her to stay. I'll never forget that day. In a way, I'll never stop living it either. It could have just happened this morning for all I know.

“Please, please stay.”

“I can't,” she said with no pity or anger. “You're drowning me.” Blunt and emotionless. Her expression betrayed no feelings, and her straight back betrayed no leniency on her decision. “I'm leaving.”

And then she was gone. And my muses never came back. And my guitar just kept sitting there, gathering dust.

I drain the very end of my cup and debate filling it again. Weighing that against needing to have another cup tomorrow night. To wallow in my misery again on repeat. I stare at the dusty guitar, the strap attached as it sits ready to be played, though out-of-tune it may be.

The end of this night, a satisfactory way for this night to end would be for me to walk over and play. To just strum it one more time, to feel that music lighten my soul. But as I said, life isn't a straight line. I've strummed that thing many times, many nights, even after Penny left. I've begged for those muses to come back to visit me just once more. I've played tunes as basic as the oldest Christmas song, as rocking as Kiss, and classic as Simon and Garfunkel. I've spent hours strumming it till my fingers bled.

So no, that's not how this night is going to end. This night is going to end with Whiskers jumping back up on the couch and curling up on my pudgy tummy to use me as his human heater. And I'm going to fall asleep like that; whisky glass in my hand, and Whisker purring on my stomach. And that's it. Cause life isn't clean, it isn't easy, and knowing that I know nothing, doesn't make a goddamn difference when at the end of the night, there's nothing to know.