Just Another Sucker Read Free Page A

the bottle. Whisky was the one magic escape for me. With five or six whiskies inside me, nothing seemed to matter. I didn’t give a damn if I had a job or not, I could return home and watch Nina slave at her art work without feeling like a pimp.
    With a load on, I even found it was easy to lie to her.
    ‘I was talking to a guy this morning, and it looks as if we can make a deal,’ I told her. ‘He wants me to write a series of articles around his hotel, but first he has to talk to his partner. If it jells, it’ll pay over three hundred a week.’
    There was no guy, no partner and no hotel, but the lie kept me important, and it was essential to my ego that Nina should still think I was important. Even when I was forced to borrow ten dollars from her, I still tried to save face by telling her before long, I would be in the money.
    But continual lies grow stale, and after a while, I began to realise that when I told Nina a lie, she knew I was lying. She pretended to believe me, and that’s where she went wrong. She should have called my bluff, and maybe I would have snapped out of this pipe dream of mine, but she didn’t, so I went on drinking, went on lying and went on getting nowhere.
    Then one afternoon while I was sitting in a bar facing the beach, this thing I want to tell you about started.
    The time was a little before six o’clock. I was pretty sloshed. I had knocked back eight whiskies and was looking forward to the ninth.
    The bar was small and quiet and not well patronised. I liked it. I could sit in a corner undisturbed and look out of the open window and watch the people enjoying themselves on the beach. I had been a regular customer now for five days. The barman, a big, fat, bald-headed guy, knew me. He seemed to understand my need for whisky. As soon as I finished one drink, he brought me another.
    There weren’t many drinkers in the bar. From time to time a man or a woman would come in, shoot a drink down their throats, hang around for a few minutes, then leave. They were like me – without an anchor, lonely and trying to kill time.
    In a corner, near my table and out of sight of the bar was a telephone booth. There was a pretty regular traffic to the booth. People came in, made a call, then went out: men, women, boys and girls. The booth was the busiest place in the bar.
    While I sat drinking, I watched the booth: it gave me something to do. I wondered a little drunkenly who these people were who shut themselves in behind the glass panelled door: who they were talking to.
    I watched their expressions. Some of them smiled as they talked: some got worked up: some of them looked as if they were telling unconvincing lies the way I had been telling unconvincing lies. It was like watching a stage play.
    The barman brought me my ninth whisky and put it on the table. This time he stood by me, not moving, and I knew it was time to settle the check. I gave him my last five-dollar bill. He grinned sympathetically as he handed me the change. The grin told me he knew a drunk when he saw one. I felt like getting up and driving my fist into his fat, stupid face, but I took the change and as I started to look for a small coin to tip him, his grin widened and he went back to the bar.
    It was at this moment, when I realised he knew the kind of lush he was selling liquor to, that I felt pretty ashamed of myself. I felt so goddamed ashamed, I could have walked right out of the bar and under a fast moving car, but that kind of an end took guts, and I had left my guts in Cell 114. I wasn’t walking in front of any fast moving car. I was just going to sit here and drink myself silly. It was better and easier that way.
    Then a woman came into the bar. She walked to the telephone booth and shut herself in.
    She was wearing a close-fitting canary coloured sweater and white slacks. She had on bottle green sun goggles, and she carried a yellow and white plastic handbag.
    She immediately attracted my attention because she had