A Weird Night
I was wearing my Ren and Stimpy T-Shirt the day I found myself at the sandstone-brick hotel on the corner of a one way lane and busy Market Street. Not my regular watering hole, but I’d been there before on other occasions when my Saturday afternoon walk ended up going for longer than I’d anticipated. I liked the look of the pub - it was old, with only a few regulars and not much cigarette smoke that I could see through the yellow tinged window glass. Even from the outside I could smell that rare mixture of beer and – something else - freshly planed wood? Sorta. Wet woolly jumper? Yeah, maybe. I breathed in the mysterious, but welcoming, aroma.
Perfect.
I pushed open the door to the front bar and strode in. A few eyes turned toward me, only slightly curious or vaguely distracted. As I walked quietly up to the bar, I noticed, from the corner of my eye, a sly movement. It was Jason, and he was ambling drunkenly towards me. I ordered my beer, and waited for him to come to me. Jason was a good bloke when he was sober. Unfortunately, he was never sober.
He was a regular pain in the arse when he was pissed. “Fuckin’ Ren an’ fuckin’ Stimpy?” he slurred, as he leaned drunkenly on the bar next to me, gesticulating at my favourite T-Shirt. “Tha’s fuckin’ stupid!” As he spoke, his wet lips slurred over the consonants, his unsteady co-ordination causing beer to slop over the rim of his glass.
It was a challenge - alcohol induced bravado, clumsily disguised as a flippant tete’a’tete between acquaintances. The barman placed my beer on the clean bar towel and took my money. He glanced uneasily at Jason before turning to the till to make my change. I smiled at the young fool and he grinned stupidly back at me. The barman placed a few coins next to my drink in front of me, soundlessly, then turned quickly away feigning some urgent business at some other section of the pub.
“You know, Jason,” I began. My smile faded slightly as I looked up from my beer into his red-rimmed eyes. “Some people find it hard to read a man’s innermost thoughts. Most find it impossible. Therein lies the danger of underestimating the value a person may place on the most trivial of things.”
Jason frowned, struggling to make sense of what I was saying. I could tell that it was a challenge to his alcohol-flooded mind. I sipped my beer, leaned casually against the bar and continued.
“Take, for instance, Ren and Stimpy. A simple cartoon to most free-thinking people, including yourself. But to some, the meaning of life revolves around the icons you have so casually blasphemed.”
Jason’s brow was crinkling in abject stupidity. The slight change in the timbre of my voice wiped the shitty grin from his face as his tin-pot brain grasped the possibility that I might be pissed off with him. All conversation in the bar had stopped. The handful of drinkers on either side of us were trying to look disinterested while glancing casually in our direction, struggling to remain as anonymous as possible but edging away discretely, fearful of drawing my attention.
The atmosphere chilled noticeably as my raging fury, still contained beneath my taught exterior, extracted all warmth from the room. Jason opened his mouth to grunt some inept syllable or two, but he was too slow. I spoke deeply, quietly and deliberately through half-clenched teeth.
“Beware the unbridled anger which you may unwillingly bring forth with your off-handed candour!” Barely able to contain the boiling rage within me, I focused the enormous pent-up energy into the ends of my fingers, tightened the sinews and muscles in my arms and, in the blink of an eye, I went for my weapon. As if tethered to a taught spring, my hand snapped to my side, the air whistling audibly as it did so. My nimble, practised fingers unsnapped the leather pouch and extracted the spoon in the blinking of an eye. With the same awesome speed and slight displacement of air, the spoon was in Jason’s line of vision at the same time, it seemed to him, that my hand twitched. The shiny, silver surface caught a ray of light that drifted through the tops of the tall windows of the bar, giving the impression that the spoon generated its own, malevolent luminance.
It was one of those collector’s teaspoons that depicted some minor landmark around one of those small country towns that dot the highway between Sydney and Melbourne. Its finely balanced shaft and razor sharp edge now served a more malicious and deadly purpose than measuring out small quantities of sugar into old ladies’ cups of tea. Jason’s eyes widened comically as the full impact of my violent rage made its impression on his dulled wits.
“Taste the wrath of my spoon, blasphemer!!” I cried.
He didn’t know what hit him. Before he could utter a word, my spoon sliced through his jugular, cutting off his voice at the same time as it cut through his life-giving artery. I side stepped quickly to avoid the gushing red flow of blood as Jason’s heart pumped its last few throbs. His half empty beer glass clattered to the floor, miraculously remaining intact as it came to rest at the foot of the bar. The sound caught the barman’s attention, and he made as if to move toward us. Seeing Jason’s fate, however, he quickly changed his mind and looked back over his shoulder in a movement intended to reassure me that his interest was not in any way connected to the event which had just snuffed the life from an annoying customer.
I swallowed the last of my beer. I was too tense to order another, so I twirled the spoon around my fingers a few times before sliding it back into its holster and left the bar.
I couldn’t smell that old-pub-aroma any more. I breathed deeply and smelled exhaust smoke, tar and a thousand other recognisable aromas that combined to make “city-smell”. As I walked away, I wondered whether I had actually killed Jason or if it was just another one of my “turns”. I felt for the leather pouch at my side. It was one of those old tram conductor’s pouches that once held a ticket snubber. I came across it once at a trash and treasure market in Adelaide. I paid fifty cents for it because it triggered a long forgotten memory inside me. I remembered seeing such a pouch as a young boy when I travelled on the tram from the City to Glenelg with my Mother. The conductor would whip out his snubber and use it to punch a hole in the ticket. Instead of a snubber, I found a spoon (probably purchased at the same trash and treasure market, but I had forgotten exactly) that fitted perfectly in the pouch. For hours and hours I practiced whipping it in and out, just like the conductors used to do on those trams from so long ago.
The image of Jason spreadeagled on the bar room floor in a pool of his own blood was replaced with a bemused barman shaking his head in disbelief at the antics of the village idiot, who carried a spoon in a leather pouch at his side like some sort of scimitar. But it quickly passed.
Fuckin’ barman. I’ll nail him next Saturday!
