The Drinker and the Guitarist

“Thanks for keeping things normal.” Said the drinker to the guitarist. They were both long-term Flagstaff residents, and they both loved The Annex Cocktail Lounge. It served them drinks and a moment to forget about all there was. Both were born and raised here, moved away, and like salmon, made their inevitable trek back home. Why do salmon swim upstream when they are old and tired? I reckon they have no choice.

“It is very good to see you.” Replies the guitarist in his ‘my life is gently drifting into its twilight years’ voice. He never thought he'd return to this hollow town, but he stumbled into his early thirties with no money and was forced to move back in with his parents. Now in his mid-sixties, he was sad, sad as an old country song. With glaucoma in one eye and deafness encroaching in both of his ears (woe to the musician!), medical bills were dragging him to his ruin. He always hid the stress under his cool composure, which had kept him in high regard with everyone who knew him. After graduating college with an engineering degree, he struggled with various addictions and never settled in any direction. Now he was a tennis coach and played the guitar at his local bar to support his drinking habit. It all happened so fast.

Getting older was far more difficult than he would have ever imagined, and little did he suspect the decisions of his youth and inexperience would tarnish his beautiful shine. How he should have kept his geologist job. Once he was a young Jack Kerouac, friends everywhere and a desire to leave no path untraveled. Strangers would fall into his eyes, seeing a depth of the human soul in those two blue oceans, a man who had seen the beauty of true love and the despair of total suffering. While he was rich in love, life’s stormy seas tossed him about, and eventually into the rocky coast of Flagstaff.

The guitarist was no idiot, but he could never sit in one place for long. His future did not exist, for he could hardly see as far as the tip of his very nose, but this allowed the guitarist to take the weight of the future off his shoulders as he drifted. In his early years, he was envied by his old college mates as they peered at him through the bars of their cubicles in which they were shackled in golden handcuffs. The guitarist managed to scrape together enough money to ride with his old mates for a time, but he eventually bottomed out in the shallow shores of his Charles Schwab account while his friends sailed on to warmer waters.

Tonight was a night of despair for the guitarist, and not for any particular reason, though there were many. It was everything, but more so, nothing at all. Everything was the bills, his crutch that was alcohol, and his poor health. Nothing was his family, for he never settled down. If you asked him, he would tell you it was his finances, and just rotten luck. This was not the whole story, nor even a fraction of the truth, for he had given up. By having no place or family or future to look forward to, he no longer loved himself, and every relationship he held had collapsed due to his self-destructive habits. Tonight he texted the lady he had been seeing for the last year that things were over. It was for her sake, he told her. He couldn’t stand to hurt her, but in his heart he knew why. Love for her was impossible when he hated himself.

To the guitarist’s exceptionally normal response, the drinker responded, “It is good to see you too.” in direct mimicry of what the guitarist said first. This was a purely robotic motion; one he had spent decades practicing. He was the stoic businessman and never showed his emotions to the world. Back home, his wife hated him, while she and the children remained his everything. It all happened so fast, they were happy when they first met in Park City. He was in town for his annual skiing and drinking trip, and these were the finest years of his life. He had money in the bank, dashing looks, and nothing to tie him down. He and his friends skied all day and boozed all night. One night, while stumbling to the bathroom at No Name Saloon, he found a gold ring on the ground. Someone will be looking for this, he thought, so he put it on the staircase railing so it would not get kicked into oblivion. It was forgotten until the beautiful lady at the bar next to him was asking the bartender if they had a lost and found, for she lost her ring. She was a sunning gal, and, what struck him more in this moment was her clear intelligence and well-to-do upbringing. Her eyes told you everything you needed to know, a piercing brown that was both soft and calculating. She didn’t just ask the bartended but commanded him and the Drinker knew the value of what he was looking at. And a ring? He had seen a ring; it must be the one! He entered the conversation, hardly believing his luck. “A ring, you say? I just saw it, moments ago!” He dashed off so as not to spoil this perfect opportunity. It was her ring alright, and the next thing he knew, they were having coffee the next morning.

She was from Greenwich, Connecticut, and had graduated from Columbia with flying colors. She checked all the boxes for him: beautiful, well educated, and from a good family; he was not ignorant of the opportunities this trifecta would offer him. This was the first time in his life he decided to sacrifice everything, for her, or more specifically, something he would never admit to himself, his future. Through her family connections, he landed a cushy job on Wall Street, and they moved to the Lower East Side. This was the best of all worlds, his girl was close to home, and the Drinker had tapped into the golden vein of the universe, New York City. The Drinker was enchanted by Lady Liberty, the grand Siren herself. I was first the drinking, then the money, then the drugs. Drugs allowed him to party harder, then became necessary to keep his head above water. Cocaine was the Drinker’s Swiss army knife, the man of the night and the king of the office. The only thing this Colombian marching powder could not do for him was keep his relationship in line. She was fed up with his late nights and his total neglect of their relationship, so she moved back home to her family. They both knew they loved each other, and they made a compromise. Buying a house in Flagstaff, they settled down to start a family. Once again, they were in the best of all worlds. Flagstaff was close to the Drinkers' aging parents and was a quickly growing town, attracting wealth from all around the United States and had begun to catch the world’s eye. It was not quite Sedona, but it offered a unique mountain lifestyle and ski resort access. Coming from New York City, Flagstaff was the idyllic destination of those of wealth and taste. It was not difficult to sell this dream to his wife, and he bought her a house big enough to save their relationship.

He started his own private equity firm and absolutely took off, and so did Flagstaff. His job was tedious and required his complete attention, at the expense of everyone in his life outside of his office. The sacrifice he made was for his wife and children, or so he thought. His wife could afford her expensive furniture collection, and he sent his kids to the best private school, with big plans for the ivy leagues. He worked hard for his dreams, arriving at the office at 5 am every morning and leaving no earlier than 4:30 pm on the best of days. Work was hard, but home life was becoming impossible. It started with him forgetting to walk the dog (who’s idea was it to get the damn mutt in the first place?!) and not attending his daughter’s piano recitals that he CLEARLY said he was not going to be able to attend. His children followed their mother’s lead and would openly assault him at the slightest difference in options. To cope with the thorn in his side, he would show up at home later, and later, and later. This is when the Drinker became a regular at the local cocktail lounge. The Annex quickly became his safe space, somewhere he could wind down before he stepped into the hell that was his home. Tonight was going to be bad, and he knew it. This time he had promised to show up to his son’s fencing tournament, but as the hour for him to head home drew near, he realized he would be late. Petrified, he found busy work until the situation became so dire that there was not a singule excuse he could tell his wife. He had fucked up, and he was not going to face her sober. Thank God for The Annex.

In a cloud of doom, the Drinker strolled over to The Annex for a whiskey sour, but it did not stop there. Now properly trashed, he listened to the sad old folk songs that were being performed tonight and held back his drunken tears.

As the Drinker and the Guitarist both gave their cordial responses to each other, they caught each other’s eyes for the briefest of moments, but long enough for them to settle upon parallel thoughts. ‘Did I see a look of sadness in those eyes?’