Day 176: Howling

In bed. Home from a ten hour Saturday shift of three deep at the bar, monstrous crowds jostling, reaching for you, yelling at you, clawing, pawing, cackling, howling. Pour and serve and note and till drawer and change and thank. Pour and serve and note and till drawer and change and thank. Pop a bottle. Empty mint leaves from the sink. Pour and serve. Scan fifty people and work out who is next. Have forty nine people screech at you that they've been waiting longer. Correct staff mistakes. Float the tills. Wash glasses. Pour and serve and change and thank. Cut fruit. Run upstairs to connect a new barrel. Run downstairs and grab glasses on the way. Have men in identical shirts and bald heads yell orders at you while you head back to finish pouring your pint. Want to scream at them all to fucking die. Pour and serve and change and thank. Pour and serve and change and thank. Pour and serve and change and thank. Pour and serve and change and thank. Serve two groups at once. Pour three pints at once. Clear glasses from the front bar while filling the Pepsi. Pour an extra cider because you hear your colleague needing one. Wipe the bar top while the cider fills. Cash off your order with one hand. It's never enough. More and more and more and more. Screaming cacophony. Everyone taking from you. Stemming the tide. Standing in the breach. Slack jawed blurry eyed sallow skinned complacent slabs of meat spitting orders at you. Uhh excuse me. This San Miguel is flat as a fart. I'm not drinking this. Swallowing down the anger, breathing slowly out. No worries, let me sort that for you. Uhh I saw that you just poured it into a new glass. I wanted a fresh drink. Swallow down the anger. It just needed refreshing. It had been served in the wrong glass is all (by an exhausted inexperienced staff member, because every lager glass in the building was being used). It should be fine now, but I'll be happy to do a fresh one if it is flat. Well, we'll see. Huffs and head into the crowd. There goes one of the richest most lucky, what, 10% of people on the planet, middle class and white and English, drinking freely on a Saturday night, and just so very thrilled to be alive. Ten, fifty, a thousand more like him. Who's next? Pour and serve and change and thank.

Limp home and collapse in the dark and body gone but mind still keyed into that bar zone, can't turn it off. Falling asleep and wake with a jolt, realising you haven't finished the Tuborg, you need to reach for a gin globe. Then realising you're in bed. Drifting off, then jolt awake, you need to pass the change back. No, you're in bed. Drift, and jolt. Over and over. Mental torture, while muscles yowl in fatigued pain.

And back tomorrow for Sunday morning shift, brain mushed like roadkill. But at least now, for a few brief moments, there is only silence, and the empty whiteness of the page.