Dave Harris is a regular at the Wayside Tavern. Short & cheerful, a tyre fitter by trade, he works hard & drinks hard.
A deep thinker he isn't. He's also rather a worry at times. Drunk or sober, he rarely comes accross as fully coherent.
He's also physically one very tough cookie, as tyre fitters tend to be.
There are circular bar tables, the right height to sit at on a stool.
This particular night he climbs atop one of these tables, and stands there. This is scary stuff, the table wobbles, he is drunk to the point that he has a "sway-up" anyway. It will be quite a fall.
And fall he does.
Tap dancing when he should have shuffled (or something), the table flies out from under him, scrabbling with his feet to stay on it, he manages only to point himself headfirst at the tiled floor.
When he hits, his head is likely to split open like a ripe watermelon.
Halfway to the floor a hip snags the seat of a barstool. This levels him, and he lands *splat* horizontally on the tiled floor (instead of head first).
He stands up, shakes his head, remarks that that "sure dazed" him a bit, weaves his way to the bar & has a few more rums. Observing him most carefully there seems to be nothing wrong. Well, nothing more than usual.
He goes home at closing time. Full of trepidation I barely sleep. He'll almost certainly have a brain haemorrage. In the morning he'll be dead in bed.
This is the sort of unhappy & unpredictable event that results in a life changing lawsuit.
However the next afternoon he is in again after work, as usual. He gets drunk & seems no sillier than usual.
After a few weeks have passed, and nothing adverse seems to have happened to him, I put the incident out of my mind.
Years later he's still going strong. Still not making any sense, still working hard in a tough job.
4 comments:
Your writing is very intriguing and draws you in. Love it! Thanks for your lovely comment on my blog re job interviews. Like you say, it's a nightmare out there with HR Depts having to justify their billable hours. Common sense is all out the window.
He'll probably outlive a lot of us!
Tuff.
God protects drunks and fools.
I worked for a bloke who was a drunk, and so was his brother. One Saturday night, they tied it on at the local pub as usual, and the next morning, my boss woke up with a "sore leg". It had bits of gravel embedded in it, and it was broken.
His brother had accidentally run him over in the pub car park (gravel) as they were leaving. His brother didn't notice running him over, and the runnee had forgotten about being run over the night before.
He was told about it when he turned up at the pub on Sunday night, leg in cast.
Some drunks are impossible to kill.
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