The Bitter End

CW: sexual content

I arrive at The Bitter End.

It’s desperate, and it’s dreary, here. But tonight it fits. Tonight, it’s inevitable.

It’s dark paint and cracked brick and temporary plywood solutions. Its square monotony is broken only by moth trap sconces and neon letters flaming from aluminum plaques along a desert horizon edge— the B is uncertain, the B stammers.

Beneath it I shift through turns of wet gravel on unsteady heels. I grip brass, release the handle’s corroded ridge— the door seals itself shut behind me.

Rubber strips suction like hardened drips of wax in the seams to keep out the rain, the city, the night sky; to keep the ceilings low.

Inside, the walls are cluttered and the floor is a laminate masquerading as solid wood— the floor lies to me, badly. It’s warped, scuffed and dented, and makes a sound like velcro with each of my steps.

I stumble.

I stumble as my toes catch on nothing: on the buzzing sway of my legs, and the raised imperfections rendered all but invisible beneath a light which is drab, and claggy, and horribly sepia toned.

The air is stale. It smells like long neglected beer taps and the stains left by old Marlboro smoke on splintered vinyl; like spilled bourbon, creeping out from behind finished pine doors and sunk down deep into the folds of my memory. I feel the prickle of things waking, there; the acid burns on pink sponge; the starving mouths freshly agitated by stock ringtone chaos; the voices that wriggle free from silk to dictate how my pulse should go, how far my limbs must splay.

With breathy need the voices say, further. Further, and further, and further, and then, that’s it! Yes. Right there. That’s good. Good. Good girl. Now keep still for me.

I mindlessly obey their commands and I eat their praise. It’s rancid. I choke, just a little. I store some of it away in my cheeks for harsher days, for famine. But I have no patience, so I spit it out again and use it to slice open automatic smiles into each wrist. Then I push at them, the voices, little by little, until they subside.

Twangy chords from speakers with discernibly faulty wiring filter back into my ears, and my mind steadies. I scan the room, which is small and sparsely occupied. I should be able to spot him easily, I don’t, so he isn’t here yet.

My knees jiggle impatiently. My fingers twitch with junkie need at my side.

I select a stool a few feet from the door. I sit. It tips.

The bartop before me is chipped and ratty, laden with stickers that advertise grunge bands and the taped-down business cards of 1-800-DUI attornies. Bowls of peanuts sit at odd intervals. Ambient floats of deep-fried crumbs lay scattered between. And across a black mat valley, a Blue Marlin hangs, stuffed and pitiful, above the tiered shelves of booze.

I remove my jacket, the color of which I have long suspected to be the product of hand-harvested and ground down bodies. Helpless and flailing bodies. Kermes, cochineal with female organs, dried beneath tropical suns until hardened, pulverized, boiled, salted and steeped to leach the precious garnet pigments hiding beneath their skins. I’ve so far been callous to the insect screams that keep me warm and dry, but tonight, the thought of it makes me suddenly too sad.

So I lie.

I convince myself that something synthetic was used instead, something that will eventually seep into my own skin, lead to crusty lesions and ulcers that burrow deep into subcutaneous tissue and never heal— which I find preferable.

I tuck my poisoned jacket— my jacket, poisoned apple red— beneath the bartop, and then I rest my forearms along the counter’s edge.

It’s sticky.

A perennial and inexplicable kind of sticky. Sticky like the hands of small children. Sticky like sap beneath my fingernails as I dig them into scaly bark plates, my feet kept planted deep as the roots.

Let go.

The voices are patient, enjoying the sadistic foreplay that makes my tender meats much sweeter. They tease their tongues, reaping the fear in sopping laps from behind my ears. Between my toes and softer crevices. They peel away my sticky fingers. They drag me back to open skies— but I leave my arms there, anyway. I press the diminutive heap of my breasts against their crook, grudgingly attempting to create the illusion of a supple swell that might spill over the trim of my camisole and glow bottle green beneath the lit Heineken sign. This works, sort of.

Let go.

I grip the sticky grain and look for the bartender, the plier of drafts and tranquilizers, of mute buttons. I spot her, a few feet away. She wears ripped jeans and a stained t-shirt cut at the sleeves. Her body is lean. Her hair is sleek, and pulled into an easy plait that drapes all the way down her back. It's black, but only at the roots. The rest is dyed a pretty shade of violet that blooms into cobalt blue— Violet Ray, gasoline rainbow violet— violet that matches the stain on her lips, which twitch at their corners, then pin down, pressed by the gaggle of unremarkable men with whom they are arguing.

The men wear expensive suits and brandish empty glasses, and entitlement, and too many C-suite dollars. The men apparently want to run their luxury cars into trees, ditches, their heads into windshields. They want to drown in their own vomit on fake wood floors, but the bartender shakes her head at them. She smirks; accepts their empty glasses, but does not proffer their replacement.

The men look back at her with runny bourbon eyes, tilting and swaying against the nudges of their inebriation, bumping shoulders like balls in Newton’s Cradle. Most can barely stand straight or still, and still, they hold out their hands to her expectantly, relying on their always assumed accendency to deliver their wants without question.

But she denies them.

And the men begin to howl. And the voices begin to rise with them in a violent tandem.

LET GO!

My body lurches up against the bar. My hand waves, too frantically, and the bartender looks at me. She knits her brow. Impatiently, she nods toward the men. Then she holds up a scolding finger. Then she shakes her head. Then she turns, and I slink down into my seat again.

Two tumblers, filled with staggered levels of something clear and sparkling sit abandoned one seat down. Wedges of lime bob sad and lonely amongst their floats of melting ice. Their depression era glass weeps.

If I were truly and irreparably lost, these drinks might look appealing to me.

But they don’t.

I’m not.

Not at all.

I pull my gaze from the weeping glasses, forcing my eyes to wander the room instead. I search for distraction, but everything here is too familiar to provide me much interest. Everything here looks like every other crumbling dive bar in which I sit, and drink, and wait for the strange men to arrive. I know this bar unequivocally, though I’ve never actually been here before.

He picked it.

It’s right in between your place and mine, he told me, after learning the city neighborhood in which I live. He neglected to tell me his, but I have to assume it's nearby, if it truly is right in between. I could have walked here if I wanted to.

Stop fighting me.

I look to the bartender again, but she’s still busy with the men.

This doesn’t hurt.

She holds a bat now, tightly, in her left hand, and the men appear to be more capable of listening. A few of them have already begun to break away from the pack, tripping over zig-zag strides as they make their way back to the door. Their booze drenched eyes find me as they pass, loiter, and slick me soused with drool.

I don’t mind.

My skirt is too short and my heels are too high. I understand this. I understand that I have earned the onus of their attention, so I accept it. I lean further into my folded arms and uncross my legs in welcome. I force my face to flush, my lips to slip, open, and the men seem to enjoy my performance, applauding me with unfriendly chuckles until the night finally swallows them up.

Slut.

And because there is still no glass of my own before me, I consider following the men out. I consider offering to help drunken hands unbutton flies, and then sucking a bit of creamy, saline succor out through the swollen heads of baby pink cocks until my knees bleed against wet gravel. Or else, until the booze makes their varicosed shafts too soft to continue, I suppose. Until their bones begin to pull too much like yeasted dough. Whichever comes first.

I take a few imagined steps toward the door, but I don’t leave my seat.

Instead I burrow my eyes into the bartender’s back as she runs credit cards for the men left behind. When eventually I let them fall, they somehow get stuck on the weeping glasses again. My eyes plead with me to let them linger, so I do, a little too long, on the melting ice and the watery booze, before finally pulling them away. Then I console them with something else to do.

I reach into my satchel on the hook beneath the bartop, retrieve my phone, and let my eyes read the clock flickering on its screen— 9:15. We agreed to meet at 9:30, so I shouldn’t have to wait for him much longer. For TheWolf, I mean.

I found him earlier, as I tried to drown the voices in my second bottle of cheap Merlot. In the blue light of my favorite hook-up app, prowling patiently through my cache of direct messages, amongst all the unsolicited pictures of perked-up penises, flopping around like so many spit-shined carp in eager hands, between the lazy hey there, beautiful’s, was his simple line that glowed hot and neon red.

You look sweet enough to eat.

The message lit up some ancient part of my brain. Raised my hackles and pinned back my ears in submission. It shot off alarm bells that rang in unmelodic and sinister harmonies, but such are the songs that my body recognizes more intimately than its own heartbeat. Songs that swaddle up my thoughts in the comfort of a more controlled kind of darkness.

This is exactly the point of the strange men. So I sent a message back.

How would you like me served?

I prepared myself to wait, but his response was immediate.

Tenderized. Chained up. Tied to my bed.

My stomach coiled.

You like it rough?

Yes. I do. You?

I bit my tongue until it bled, trying to hold back the uncomfortable laughter spurred by the complexity of an honest answer. I toyed with the idea of dangling something raw a little too close to his teeth, but ultimately kept my answer vague.

I’ve never really tried.

Are you open?

I waffled, but for only a second.

Yes.

How wide?

Let’s find out. Meet me for a drink?

How about a preview?

I noticed the question mark but it felt irrelevant, so I sent the pictures without protest. Pictures that showed my body bared, strategically angled and seductively split; my fingers dancing in the dark places between my thighs, my pelvis tipped to artfully conceal the more venereal steps of their work.

Show me.

I don’t want to, but it doesn’t matter. And both hands finally close around weeping glass as I relax the arch in my back, lift tulle reams, listen for the whistle that sings low through my head.

You’re going to be a knockout, aren’t you? A real heartbreaker.

Quickly, I down both glasses, nearly moaning as the 50% ABV and fool proof burn brings the bar chatter back up to its full volume. The shame comes a quick second later, and then her voice does.

“Evening.”

The bartender stares at me, her eyes amused. The golden flecks that pepper their darker tones catch like fireflies in mason jars, buzzing beneath the dim bar lights as she drags the now empty glasses back toward her center, as if protecting them from any further acts of my depravity.

My stomach shrivels.

“Evening,” I stutter.

She considers me.

“Are you ok?”

I nod, because I am.

She studies me.

“Would you like your own glass?”

“What?”

“Would you like a clean glass?”

She taps a finger against the hot pink lip print along one of the rims.

I didn't notice it.

The bartender chuckles.

“Can I get you a drink?”

The question makes my brain clean and my tongue instantly looser.

“Yes,” I say. (‘Oh fuck, yes,’ I do not).

“Do you want what they were having?” She tucks her chin down toward the glasses, a wry smile spreading.

I choke on my saliva. I cough awkwardly.

“Double vodka soda?”

“Well vodka ok?”

We both know that it is.

“Lime?”

“Yea… please. Sorry.”

The bartender uses the well directly in front of me to prepare my drink. Keeping an eye on me, I suppose. Though there are no more fallen soldiers within my immediate reach now, so her efforts are wasted. I might have mocked her for it, if my cheeks weren’t still blazing.

“Drinking alone tonight?” She raises a brow, dropping a lime wedge into my fresh glass. The lime wedge is dry and has crinkled brown at the edges. I do not care.

“I’m meeting someone,” I answer, trying to regain my pride through means of forced indignation.

“Oh yea?”

“Is that surprising?”

“No. Did I sound surprised?”

“A bit.”

“Really?” Her eyes bounce off of the pink lipstick. “Huh.”

I don’t respond.

“Boyfriend?” she continues.

She’s holding my finished drink, just barely out of my reach.

“No.”

“A date though?”

I could tackle her. I could just take it.

“Just a man.”

“I see.”

I’m too worried I might lose precious drops to the lying, laminate floor.

“Sorry.”

The bartender’s brow dips. “For what?”

I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I just say it to make the pain stop.

“I don’t know. Sorry.”

Her eyes narrow, but only slightly.

"Tab?" She extends the drink.

I tell my hands not to be too eager as I accept it. They almost listen.

"Yea."

I sip the vodka, carefully. I am dainty, and I am far from parched, at least until the bartender stops watching me.

Wondering when that might be, I glance down the bar to the smattering of other patrons. By subtly averting her gaze, and pointedly directing my own to her other, shamefully neglected, responsibilities, I hint to her to move on, but she doesn’t.

Growing irritated, I ask, “do you babysit all of your customers?”

Purple lips frown.

“Do you usually drink from used glasses?”

I busy my smarting mouth with the vodka, then, and the bartender settles her ramrod posture to a slouch, leaning a hip against the well as she directs her attention toward the window by the door; still streaked and speckled with the still falling rain. The stern angles of her face seem to soften some. Her golden glint goes hazy.

Absently, she lifts her right hand, the nimble cord of an index finger. She begins to drag it across the opposite wrist, and my eyes snag.

I hadn’t noticed them before, the curling scars she wears, branded there, beneath the meditative run of her touch, but now my eyes are all but transfixed by the lines. And following some strange, competitive drive, I begin to trace a nail over the faded marks that traverse my own wrists. Scars I dug there on nights when whining saxophones and relentless crooners kept me wide-eyed. Nights when clotted red bled between sheets of purple stars. When the voices grew too loud. When they would not be ignored, I cut bloody oblations into unspoiled flesh. I formed scars I could own over wounds that wouldn’t close. My scars seem bland and pitiful compared to hers.

“See something you like?”

The bartender’s voice breaks through my thoughts. My face grows warm.

"What?”

She steps closer, pressing her belly up against the bar, and then angles her wrist so that I might better see.

She repeats. “Do you like them?”

Her keloidal favor touches me too honestly. The friendly hand she extends may as well be stroking in snaketail rattles down the back of my hair, my neck, the quivering spine beneath.

“I’m sorry,” I murmur, and the bartender’s lips pull softly to the side.

She takes hold of my wrist, and I let her. She runs a gentle thumb over the scars there, and I let her do that too.

“You don’t need to be so sorry all the time,” she says, quietly, as the gold in her eyes rises, seeming to swallow the shade as they kiss each band of my self-prescribed healing. Her review is exhaustive, and when it's done, she looks up at me again. Her expression searches, implores me for— something, but all I can do is gape, stare; unable to form words, thoughts, barely noticing the sound of squealing hinges that makes the gold begin to hiss and then dart to look past me. The bartender lets me go before she speaks.

“Is this your guy?”

My mind is battered and my skin still hums, so it takes me a breath, but I manage to turn in time to see the last bits of night disappear before the door reseals. I see the imposing shape settle past its frame.

I nod.

TheWolf has just walked in.