Maybe it's the fog of war or the haze of alcohol but I don't remember ever seeing people in there who didn't look like me when I went in there. I think we drove the previous crowd out and, in turn, were succeeded by I don't know how many succeeding student-scholars (if wet tee-shirt contests and dropping shots of whiskey into beer glasses is on the syllabus).
The folks who ran Olde Queens, and probably still do, were always very patient with us, and much more kind than they needed to be (in light of our age and the terrible fake IDs we all had) in moving us out when it was to close up. Some of us, I think, probably didn't go home, or have homes to go to, but leave we did.
Long before Joseph Heller, Closing Time was a state of mind and an attitude check. I'm grateful I don't remember more of some of those nights and the state I was in and I am grateful beyond words for somehow not succumbing as a result of behavior that went well beyond 'youthful indiscretion' without harming myself or anyone else.
The old man I've been sentenced to become never existed in the fevered fantasies of the young me and I am still amazed how I well I survived that person's excess as if that were, itself, a success. What I do recall makes me shudder and I strive to recall as little as possible for as long as possible.
I hope I live long enough to regard the age in which we now live in the same manner. I have extended and extensive angrily-escalating exchanges with people whom I don't know nor shall ever meet on topics and subjects about which we both have strongly held opinions without nearly as many facts to support them as we think we can muster.
We hurl invective at total strangers and they give as good as they get, in my case usually a bit extra because through so much practice I am a nearly perfect and egregious ass. We used to joke as kids that 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me' but that is, as we all know, an absurdity and a lie.
Words can and do hurt, wounding in a way unlike any other weapon ever can, without leaving a visible scar. And after the echo of the last of the words has died, all we have to do is go on living with ourselves and the consequences of what we have done to one another. "When the old men do the fighting and the young men all look on. And the young girls eat their mothers meat from tubes of plasticon. Beware of these, my gentle friends, and all the skins you breed. They have a tasty habit - they eat the hands that bleed."
-bill kenny
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