Boozehound

I've been here ten years and I still don't fully understand bars. There's one called Boozehounds fairly close to where I live. The sign incorporates an excited cartoon dog, tongue hanging thirstily from its mouth with its eyes forming the double O of the name - which lacks dignity from where I'm stood. The term boozehound doesn't seem like much of a compliment. In fact it's probably debatable as to whether it even counts as affectionate, and so it has struck me that the bar in question might just as well be renamed Alcoholics or Losers, and somewhere there's a gentleman's club - as they're euphemistically known - called Sex Offenders.

Anyway, today it seems I have met a genuine boozehound. He's sat on a mobility scooter in front of me in the fifteen items or less queue at HEB. He has three cans of beer on the belt and the basket of the mobility scooter is loaded with shopping bags. He has greasy black hair and is thinning on the top of his head.

I heft a catering pack of twenty-four tins of cat food onto the belt.

'You got some kitties, huh?' he says, turning to grin at me.

'Yes.' I look at the people presently being served. They've just paid for many more than fifteen items and now they've found some coupons they would like to use. Great.

'We got kitties at our place. They won't let us feed them. How many kitties you got?'

'About fourteen, I think. Why don't they let you feed them?'

He doesn't seem to hear the question, but honestly, I was only making conversation.

'I like beer,' he tells me happily, indicating his three cans.

I don't recognise the brand, something called the Bull in a black tin. I see Schlitz in ornate writing somewhere beneath the picture of a bull.

'I forgot to buy my beer so I came back.' He indicates the basket full of already bagged groceries. 'That's the most important thing,' he smiles. His accent reminds me of Cheech and Chong records, probably because I didn't grow up here.

'I like Dos Equis,' I offer, not really knowing what else to say.

'This is much stronger,' he says, grinning, eyes sparkling with anticipation. 'It's 8.5%, but your beer is only 1%.'

I suspect he's wrong, and subsequent investigation will reveal that it's actually 4.2%, but I don't feel massively invested in the subject.

'My beer, it really… you know…'

'It gets the job done,' I say, finishing his sentence for him, which he seems to appreciate.

'It gets you drunk,' he laughs in confirmation. 'I'm an alcoholic!'

I smile and nod to show that I've taken this on board. 'Okay.'

'You ain't from here. Where you from?'

'England.'

'Yeah, I thought so. I was born and raised here.'

'San Antonio?'

'I'm from Crystal City.'

'Oh yeah - I know it. I've been there.'

'How you like it here?'

'I like it fine.'

Coupons are finally accounted for and the conveyor belt moves at long last. The boozehound pays for his three tins of malt liquor, then turns back to bid me farewell. 'I liked talking to you, man.'

'Yes,' I say. 'You take care.'

'He lifts up the bag with the cans. 'I'm gonna have me one of these while I wait for the bus.'

He grins and drives the mobility scooter away toward the exit. This has probably been one of the more refreshingly honest conversations I've had this year.

The Free Bike

I'm heading back from McAllister Park and I pass the parking lot. I notice Carmen sat at one of the benches. Her bike is on its stand nearby. I usually pass her on the trail at some point each day.

'I had a flat!' she wails.

I see the back tire has a puncture and almost immediately I notice something large stuck in the tread, something woody about the size of a piece of corn. It's obviously the remains of some twig to which a huge, sharp thorn is attached. 'Do you want me to fix it?'

'It's fine. I already called Stephen. He's on his way.'

'Are you sure? It wouldn't take long, and at least it's obvious where the puncture is.'

'It's fine,' she says. 'I'll take it along to Bike World.'

'Well, okay.'

We sit and talk about cats and wait for Stephen in his truck.

'Did you see that bike in the creek just by the boardwalk?' I ask.

'I know. Stephen spoke to the guy.'

'Really? It looks like a perfectly good bike apart from the wheel.'

Stephen pulls up in his truck. He hefts Carmen's bike into the back and we shake hands.

'I saw you yesterday,' I say. 'I wasn't ignoring you. It took me a moment to register that it was you. I waved but you were already gone.'

'I didn't think you recognised me,' he chuckles.

'Did you see that bike in the creek?'

'I spoke to the guy. He had two kids with him. I noticed there was a slight buckle in his rear wheel so I tried to tell him about adjusting the spokes but he didn't seem interested. Then when I came to the boardwalk I saw it. I guess he'd had enough and just tossed it away in anger.'

'I think I'm going to have it if it's still there.'

Fifteen or so minutes later, I come to the boardwalk and the free bike is indeed still there. It's a little smaller than mine and it's a mountain bike. The front wheel is bent into the kind of drunken pretzel by which theoretical physicists attempt to describe the shape of the universe, or time, or reality. Otherwise it looks fine.

I'm puzzled because it's clearly the front wheel that's fucked. The rear seems okay. I hoist it up onto the boardwalk and try to work out how I'm going to get it home, given that I'm on a bike. The free bike is light, but probably not light enough to carry. Maybe I can remove the crippled front wheel and somehow hitch the frame to the back of my bike and tow it along. I have the spanners I need because I carry them everywhere. I can't get the front wheel free of the forks because of the brake blocks, so I have to take off the brake blocks too. I can never remember which way you unscrew a nut, and the fucker won't give. Then it gives in spectacular fashion, and I somehow cut open the tip of my thumb with the other end of the spanner. Big fat droplets of bright red blood drip onto the boardwalk, onto the warped front tire, everywhere.

After five minutes of holding things against other things then frowning, I realise that all my ideas for taking the free bike home have thus far been putrid. I guess if I can at least get it to the other end of the boardwalk - which is admittedly the better part of a mile - I can hide the bike in the undergrowth and we can pick it up later when Bess and I go out for something to eat. The bike is fairly small and if I also remove the rear wheel it should fit in the car.

First I try wheeling both bikes, one in each hand. It's too awkward, so I pick up the freebie by the cross bar whilst wheeling my own bike along. It's awkward and I have to stop for a rest every twenty or thirty feet, my thumb still dripping a trail of blood as I go. I recall accidentally slicing a groove of three or four millimeters depth in one side near the nail with a box cutter about two months ago. The hit with the spanner has simply reopened an old wound.

People pass by because my progress is slow and laborious, someone every few minutes.

'Hey, you need a hand?' asks one guy.

'I'm fine,' I tell him, 'but thanks.'

'Someone just threw that away. We saw it earlier.' His wife makes noises to confirm as much.

'I figured all it needs is a new wheel, so why not?'

'Yeah, it seems like a good bike. How far are you going?'

'Well, I'm just going to hide it in the woods up ahead, then me and the wife can swing by and pick it up later.'

'You sure you don't want us to drop you somewhere? We're parked up at Ladybird Johnson.'

'Thanks but I'm fine,' I say. 'It's good exercise.'

Of late I've been spending about half an hour each day cutting branches from trees in the garden, mainly for exercise. I'm not going to bother today because hefting the free bike along has been more physically demanding than I'd anticipated.

'You're from Australia, right?' the wife says.

I laugh. 'No, England, but that's what everyone thinks. I lived in London for twenty years and I guess the accents sound similar.'

'Wow,' she says. 'That's the one place I really want to go. I went all over when I served - Germany, China, but I never made it to England. How do you like it here?'

'It's great.'

'Don't you miss England?'

'Not really. I definitely don't miss the weather - no sunlight for six months of the year, the rain…'

'I'm from Ohio so I hear you.'

'I thought Ohio was pretty sunny.'

'It's up by Lake Erie.'

'I'm thinking of somewhere else, maybe Iowa.'

We reach the end of the boardwalk and they head for the parking lot. I spend another ten minutes further dismantling the free bike, removing both the rear wheel and the seat. I can take the seat with me, but I bind the two wheels and the frame together into a more compact assembly with a length of bungee rope. Then I wander off into the wood next to the parking lot and leave it behind a drift of twigs, leaves, and crap.

Four hours later, we swing by in the car. The bike fits in the back just fine and we drive on to Charlie Brown's given that it's out this way. It's Thursday so it's trivia night. We experienced the first three questions of a previous trivia night and they seemed so simple as to border on ridiculous. One of them asked that we identify the punctuation mark comprising an apostrophe set above a full stop - a semicolon. We heard someone at an adjacent table confidently declare that he knew the answer to this one, and that it was called a polka dot. This evening we've decide fuck it - we're going to enter the trivia quiz, because we'll clean up if the other questions are that simple. We'll be like Superman when he first came to Earth.

 

I order chicken fried chicken and have a Dos Equis in one of those enormous German beer mugs. Bess has a chicken salad and unsweet tea. The woman running the trivia quiz comes around with boards and marker pens. We have to come up with a name for our team so I choose Tex Pistols because we were talking about the Sex Pistols in the car on the way over. Specifically, Paul Cook's Professionals named their most recent live outing the Pretty Vaccinated tour in reference to the Pistol's Pretty Vacant tour, which I thought was funny enough to tell someone.

The food is great.

The questions are asked by our hostess over the PA, flashed up as text on the screen behind the small stage, and we each get the length of one song to consider our answers. We write answers on the boards we've been given, which are the kind that can be wiped clean, and our hostess tours the room taking note of who wrote what before returning to the stage to deliver the answer as each song comes to an end. Songs include the Doobie Brothers' China Grove and Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama, both of which sound pretty good to me these days. I seem to be naturalising.

The trivia quiz comprises twenty questions and goes on for more than an hour. The questions turn out to be fucking hard and surprisingly reliant on a working knowledge of Latin with which neither Bess nor myself are blessed. We get a few wrong and a few right, but about half of those we got right were guesswork.

'Maybe we're more stupid than we realise,' Bess proposes ominously. We're both shocked by the results. I consider those views I now hold which I believed were traditionally held by mainly stupid people up until fairly recently.

Perhaps I'm more naturalised than I realise.

Somehow we come in third, thus winning a twenty dollar voucher towards our next visit to Charlie Brown's - which is nice, not least because I've now had two enormous German beer mugs of Dos Equis which is a lot more than I usually drink, and I'm particularly refreshed - more refreshed than I've been in a while.

Next day I take a closer look at the free bike in an attempt to assess the damage. It turns out that there is indeed a buckle in the rear wheel as Stephen reported. Presumably the rider took note of what Stephen had told him, then met with the accident which folded the front wheel into its present shape; then hurled the bike away into the creek in a fit of anger. I guess I could replace a single wheel, but wheels aren't cheap, and it seems both are fucked. I root around online and find a helpful YouTube video about fixing lesser buckles in wheels by adjusting the spokes.

I'm going to need something called a spoke key.

I go into the bike shop on Saturday and immediately find what I'm looking for. I have the front wheel with me, the one shaped like a monster munch, mainly so I can check that whatever spoke key I buy will fit the spokes of the free bike. I explain this to the assistant.

He looks at me with uncertainty, and at the massively wonky wheel I have in my hand. 'I don't think you'll be able to fix that by adjusting the spokes.'

Another customer, a young man with a beard who happens to be browsing, snorts loudly. Whatever his intention, it feels somewhat as though he's laughing at the rube. I look him directly in the eye and growl, 'Well, I'm glad you found it fucking funny,' then turn back to the assistant. 'I know. The rear wheel isn't as bad, and that's the one I'm going to try to straighten up.'

I pay up and leave.

There are a thousand stories in the big city, and this was two of them, or possibly two and a half.

Ollie

I wrote about Ollie back in November, and now he's gone. Bess and I first saw him as a tiny black kitten shooting across a street near our house. We stopped the car, picked him up, and knocked on a few doors. One of them confirmed that he was part of the litter of a feral cat living in the alley at the rear of her house. We brought him home because it didn't seem like one more would make much difference.

He was small, very friendly, good with the other cats, and had a personality I've come to associate with black cats. He seemed unusually intelligent. He'd chase toys thrown for him then fetch them back for us to throw again - like a dog. He was also our first cat to work out how to open our kitchen door by somehow hooking a paw underneath then pulling or pushing depending on whether he was inside or outside at the time. The door is kept shut by a powerful spring so it was impressive, not least because he was such a small cat. He spent most evenings curled up on my lap, and his best friend was Polly, a calico female of about the same age and size. Otto, a more recently arrived kitten would often join him on my lap and suckle on whichever part of Ollie was nearest. Otto clearly missed his mother, but Ollie never seemed to mind.

 

The name was short for Oliver, suggested by my stepson, possibly because he likes black olives - the stepson, not the cat. My wife had suggested Goliad, because we'd driven through Goliad, Texas on the day we found him - which was our tenth wedding anniversary; and in reference to Bean, our previous small black cat. This will all make sense to anyone with a reasonably thorough knowledge of Texan history and what happened at Goliad, but I preferred Oliver because it reminded me of Oliver Hardy.

He was fine last night, and this morning we found him breathing unusually heavy, as though suffering from asthma. I suggested we make an appointment at the vet in case it got worse, whatever it was. This I proposed as an alternative to our ending up taking him to the emergency veterinary clinic. They'll see you at short notice, but they charge an arm and a leg, usually about five-hundred dollars for there's nothing we can do and he's going to die - which at fifty dollars a word would be an amazing page rate.

As I was about to leave, my wife told me that the vet had said they were able to see Ollie right away so she left before me. Half an hour later, she called me as I was out on my bike. The news was bad. His lungs had collapsed and there wasn't anything they could do which seemed like it would have a happy ending. They were going to put him to sleep.

I felt numb.

He'd been fine the night before. It was a lot to take in.

I rode to McAllister Park as usual. I'm presently feeding a feral cat called Fluffy at McAllister Park. We've tried to catch her but she outwits us every time. She's a beautiful long-haired silver grey cat and provisionally friendly, suggesting she was probably dumped by some shitbag who didn't deserve her. I can pet her fine as I empty a tin of Nine Lives into her bowl and she meows at me, but she heads for the hills as soon as you try to pick her up, or even at the sight of a cat carrier. We're going to set up a humane trap as we already know someone who wants to take her in, but in the meantime I'm feeding her daily because she seems to trust me - apparently regardless of my picking her up, even attempting to net her with a bath towel at one point.

Anyway, today was sunny and I fed and petted Fluffy as usual, then retreated to a nearby bench to drink iced tea, smoke a fag, and leave her in peace. Today, once she'd finished eating, she made a beeline for me, walking towards me - fifty yards away - meowing with her tail in the air, only swerving off course once she was within a couple of feet. It seemed like a good sign. I think I prefer to cats to people right now, and I don't really care how that sounds.

As usual, as I do ever day, I poured out some juice - as the colloquialism has it - for all the critters we've loved and lost, although the juice was iced tea in this case. I pour out the juice and go through the roll call of names under my breath, like a prayer, and I don't really care how that sounds either because I miss every last one of them.

Charlie, Maisie, Tony, Gus, Fluff, Squeak, Holly, Jack, Enoch, Bean, Pip, SOF, Selma, Emerald, Tony, Jessie, Mr. Kirby, Gary, Gus II, Gus III, Charlotte, Simon, Barney, and today I add Ollie. About half of the names are those of cats who simply went missing - as cats have been known to do from time to time - but the others are buried in our back garden.

Once home, I look for a patch which doesn't already have a cat or a rabbit buried under the earth, and I dig a hole approximately the size of the cardboard box which came back from the vet. I pile up the heavy clay soil in a wheelbarrow, then spend ten minutes gathering a pile of largish stones from elsewhere around the garden. I've done this too many times, so it feels.

Bess comes out, and we take Ollie from the box. I'd already forgotten how soft his fur was - still is, in fact. I hold him and cry my eyes out. It's all been so sudden. He was fine last night. The vet suspected it was FIP or Feline Infectious Peritonitis, a coronavirus variant which tends to infect cats at a very young age and can be fatal, meaning Ollie had probably been living on borrowed time since before we got him.

I place him in the hole, scatter some cat treats for the afterlife, and empty the wheelbarrow. I cover the site with stones, treading them into the ground to discourage anything attempting to dig him up.

Polly has been hanging around the whole time, occasionally sniffing the cardboard box. I wonder if she knows her friend has gone the way of all flesh. He wasn't even a year old.

This is the eighth pet burial in our back garden, and it isn't getting any easier.

 

 

Wedding

Despite living in San Antonio, Texas, I encounter other English people with some frequency. They tend to divide into two types - those with which I have only the geography in common and whom I probably would have crossed the road to avoid back in the old country, and people I like. Sadly there seem to be more in the first category than in the second, which I suppose is simply the law of averages. Chris, who once shared office space with my wife, belongs in the second category and is getting married. I've been looking forward to the wedding because it means I'll get to meet Chris's family, who are not only from England but are from a bit of England to which I delivered mail back when I was a postman; and Chris's dad is apparently a Millwall supporter, which I find oddly exciting.

My wife and I drive downtown, to one of the big hotels. We leave the car in a parking garage opposite the hotel, and share an elevator with a young guy wearing a Stetson. Bess gives me a look but I'm thinking, wouldn't it be funny if he were here for the wedding?

He follows us into the hotel, and then out to the courtyard because yes, he's here for the wedding, having spent at least some time in the same office space as both Chris and my wife. Alex, Tristram and others from the same company are also present, which is nice because I vaguely know them by some definition. Alex was the first ever person to have bought an oil painting from me.

Chairs are arranged around the courtyard and a sort of mobile bar is being set up. A photographer wanders around taking light readings and guests drift in. We try to guess which side of the proposed family they represent. An older man in a suit arrives and I think, that's a south-east London haircut if ever I've seen one. His hair is silver, short on top and spiky like Joe Brown. It has to be Chris's dad.

Soon the chairs are all occupied, and we're watching Chris and Tessa get hitched. The vows include a line about honouring who you are rather than who I think you should be, or words to that effect, which Bess and I both consider a nice touch.

Chris and Tessa are pronounced man and wife, the bar opens, and I have a beer.

'You should go and talk to Chris's dad,' Bess says.

'Not yet,' I say. I have two more beers. It's been a while since I socialised and particularly with people I don't really know, and it's taken me a while to remember that I was never that sociable.

Eventually the time seems right, so I wander over.

'You must be Chris's dad,' I say.

'Stepdad,' he corrects me, but he seems pleasantly surprised to hear an English accent. His own is clearly south-east London.

'I think I used to deliver your mail,' I tell him. 'I was a postman in Catford back in the nineties.'

'My wife's from Catford!' he says, and I notice that he has introduced himself as Chris's stepdad.

'John and Jane,' he announces, 'although I don't expect you'll remember.' He now turns to his wife. 'He's from Catford!'

'I worked there,' I say. 'I used to live in Lewisham though. Chris told me you lived in—I'm trying to remember the road. Was it Springbank Road? Meadowbank? Summink like that?'

I'm thinking of Hither Green Lane, to which Ryecroft Road was conjoined. Ryecroft Road was the first place I lived in London, so Hither Green Lane stayed in my memory and was apparently where Chris grew up - except I can't remember the name right now.

'Crantock Road,' she tells me.

I manage to keep myself from saying holy shit in front of strangers, although I think it. I haven't thought of Crantock Road in probably two decades.

Inchmery, Sandhurst, Arngask, Crantock…

The sorting comes back to me from all those mornings stood at the frame slotting letters into alcoves, although the order is probably somewhat jumbled through disuse. 'Ernie Gough was probably your postman, I should think.'

Ernie was fucking great, so I remember him fairly well.

'Ernie,' Jane says, although I can't tell whether it's because she knows who I'm talking about or not, and I'm finding this a little disorientating.

'I hear you're a Millwall man,' I say.

'No. No,' says John. 'I used to go and see Charlton though.'

I recall Chris telling me about his dad singing hits from the Millwall terraces following a number of cold, refreshing drinks; and I realise that I didn't even realise his mother had remarried, and that I don't actually know anything about this man aside from what I'm learning right here and now. I wish Chris had told me some of this, then recall that most of it has, in any case, been information passed on through my wife; so it would probably be churlish to resent the inaccuracy of details he hadn't actually told me in the first place.

We talk for fifteen or twenty minutes, although it becomes confusing in part. I'm also aware that I possibly sound drunk due to my silently wrestling with narrative conflict, but regardless, it's great to have met these people, and to talk about the Bromley Road, and London, and how there was once a Robinson's Jam factory opposite the bus garage. It's strange that we're talking about this in San Antonio, Texas.

Inevitably they ask how I met Bess, and we talk about international travel and Covid restrictions.

Then we depart for different tables in the restaurant.

Speeches are delivered.

Food is eaten.

I regard the table to which they've exiled all the teenagers, allowing them to play with their phones and compare tattoos without interruption, and I marvel that I'm no longer among them; and that I barely even recognise their general kind. I'm not sure how that happened. Truthfully I don't know how any of it has happened.