What I Do Now

"You're a fool, man. You got toys runnin' down your sleeves, it's not real." Marty was drunk, and when he got drunk he talked like this. Not that he wasn't drunk for good reason. His wife had left him and we were tying a few on. We tied them up good and tight.

"I dunno if she ever, you know, bub, if she loved me?"

"I know."

"Yanno?"

"Yeah."

Marty was the one guy I'd been friends with since grade school, since I was old enough to pick my own friends. I kept a few acquaintances from those days, but he was the one that always stuck around. Marty got kicked out of that school for setting off firecrackers in the girls' bathroom, twice, in one day. When he came back for junior high I got him all caught up, and after he got kicked out of there I did the same thing in high school. It's hard when you're a kid sometimes to keep those friends that you don't have class with, that you don't see everyday. It's easy to get into habits. Marty tried to do right. But that rascal streak in him was the streak that usually won him over.

"We need more dri—we need more drinks! innkeeper!" He always used that word in bars. I don't know if he thought it was clever, or if he used it ironically, or what have you. Party of Marty always seemed to be someplace else, another time, or somewhere. The innkeeper poured two more ryes and Marty raised his glass.

"I'monna toast now, bub." I pulled my drink over to me. Marty spoke carefully, that difficult three-sheet careful. "I'm, I'm going to say... good riddance!" He laughed and drank. "To all the riddances out there, bub, and may they all be goddamn good and well played." Marty had been having an affair with a married woman from work. She wanted him to leave his wife, do all kinds of things.

Marty started slipping off his stool. "Think we better go."

"No!" He slammed his tumbler down on the bar. We were picking glass out of his hand most of the night, always finding some new shred when we thought we were all done. "Always getting kicked out," he said on the corner curb. "Help not wanted, and you've got goddamn kids, bub, and look at you, haircut, I don't..."

Marty pushed himself up and crisscrossed into the intersection. "I'm gonna get up in the middle of the night, eat snacks, hear the goddamn birds chirpin', yeah. Put the TV on. You remember when we found that old TV by the railroad tracks?"

"I do."

"Yeah. Yeah. That sure was somethin'. All those bugs, makin' that broken thing their home. As if there were another kind." We both had a good laugh at that. "This," he sighed, "this is what I do now."

When I crawled into bed Chloe woke up. "I don't want you seeing him. I don't like it."

"He's a bit unstable right now, he needs me."

"Right now?"

I'd had lunch with Marty for thirty years. And if you have lunch with someone for thirty years you stick by them no matter what happens. That may be a luxury I can afford to think, but if you got it, hell, flaunt it.

I got out of bed and went to the den. I turned on the TV and grabbed the phone. It picked up after one ring.

"Channel three, bub. Channel three."