The Sky Is Clear and The Road Is Dry
“There were months when I saw Jim and the guys in that bar more than I saw girls I was living with, more than I saw my parents when I was a child.”
In today’s essay, John Saward walks us through an odd, disorienting kind of death: How do you mourn someone who’s not quite a friend but occupies a very large space in the highlight reel of your life?
“There were months when I saw Jim and the guys in that bar more than I saw girls I was living with, more than I saw my parents when I was a child. We’d close up at 2 in the morning and they would be there again at 1 in the afternoon the next day, asking if I turned the fryer on yet. Sometimes they brought their half-eaten takeout with them from home, container still cold from the fridge.”
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Also — real quick: JULY CHECK-INS are next Tuesday.
July! I know, right?
The perfect length is 250-300 words. Feel free to share your triumphs, setbacks, or whatever is bringing you down or gassing you up. We’re here for all of it.
Here’s a GREAT example of what we’re looking for.
“My life these days feels like the opening montage to a movie in which they beat the shit out of the main character just to drive the point home that she is down on her luck. Got demoted at work, family member got seriously ill, kid ran away from home. And all the little things that could go wrong are going wrong. Yesterday I went to the hospital with a big bag of stuff and tripped getting out of my car, and everything went flying across the parking deck and now I have a skinned knee. Like, really universe? Was that necessary? But I am still sober.”
EMAIL ME HERE: tsbcheckins@thesmallbow.com
SUBJECT: JULY CHECK-IN
It will be published NEXT TUESDAY.
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Okay, that’s it — here’s John. — AJD
How to Mourn the Friend on the Other Side of the Bar
by John Saward
When I was bartending there was this massive guy named Jim who came in all the time; massive like a left tackle, or like a safe you’d keep gold bricks in, that kind of mighty presence in a room. For a long time he drove an 18-wheeler all over America, and sometimes he’d speak a few lines in this pretend-urgent voice that he’d crackle and distort like it was coming over a CB radio. He had beautiful snow-white hair that he combed back on his head.
He carried this game around in his pocket in a Ziploc bag called Pass The Pigs. The game was just two rubber pigs the size of Monopoly pieces that you would toss like dice, and the way their bodies landed gave you a certain amount of points. Sometimes he would be at the bar in the early afternoon, when the place was silent like some drafty old church and the daylight was smashing through the windows in thick, filthy beams with all this constellated dust hanging in them, no activity besides muted baseball highlights. And he would look down the bar at someone who he had seen probably a thousand other times in his life, guys who had disappeared without ceremony and had been gone for weeks, but then their new routine out there had been punctured by some unforeseen event, some work that had dried up, the girl they were staying with in another town had kicked them out, and now they were back, sitting in this wounded hunch, waiting for the crisis of their lives to be interrupted and mended. And Jim would say to them, “You wanna play Pigs?” and for a moment the room felt like a nursery, he had made his way across the bar now, Jim with his pigs and one of his cooing infant orphans, and they would do that through a beer or two, playing Pigs and waiting for the day to turn, for a commotion to arrive in this room that made their drinking feel less like a nasty rash and more like an event where they were going to come out on top for once.
I heard last week that Jim had passed away in the middle of May. It had been about three years since the last time I talked to him. Months back one of the guys from the bar had seen him waiting at a crosswalk and sent me a picture, the way you would if you saw a rare Ferrari or a bear in your yard; he was slimmed down, looking good. He had been sick for some time, it turned out. There was an In Memory page that his family posted online, and in the guestbook someone had written, “Rest in Peace Big Jim. The sky is clear and the road is dry.” I liked thinking of heaven that way. Not some breezy fantasy where you’re shooting pool with Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Mantle, but a Real Good Time you had, something like your MVP season, hauling ass on an open interstate with a truck full of washing machines and canned tuna.
There were months when I saw Jim and the guys in that bar more than I saw girls I was living with, more than I saw my parents when I was a child. We’d close up at 2 in the morning and they would be there again at 1 in the afternoon the next day, asking if I’d turned the fryer on yet. Sometimes they brought their half-eaten takeout with them from home, container still cold from the fridge.
The bar was a real shit hole, but in a way like it hadn’t accepted it yet; it wasn’t a place where the squalor is one of its charms, with the curated jukebox and the affected 28-year-olds and the irony. It was once a proud and crowded sports bar, but neglect had brought it here, broke it down and stranded it somewhere in 2005, and there was an owner who was once a rowdy drunk before sobriety had turned him cold and quiet, and who seemed to wish he was still living back before he had to make some hard decisions. There was a Bernie Williams jersey hanging behind the bar next to an autographed picture of Trish Stratus. There were mice that got trapped in the walls and died and stunk so bad it would seep out of the plug-holes in the electrical outlets. A satellite dish that would freeze in these pixelated 8-bit scenes every time it drizzled. A retired-model central air unit that chugged so hard to keep up with the thermostat it would freeze itself to a kind of death and you’d have to chip the ice off it to bring it back to life.
The guys who stuck around were the true believers. Sometimes it felt like all of us in there were crusty whalers sailing together on the high seas, living a life that was pulverizing us but that for a time was the only thing we knew how to do.
Jim used to want to organize a big trip for us to go down to Pennsylvania for Groundhog’s Day. He was always saying we’d be surprised by the town of Punxsutawney. A guy with Punxsutawney takes! The sky is clear, the road is dry, and I hope down deep in my heart that it leads you back there, buddy. Sometimes, in those waning, sloppy moments of a night, talking directly to someone who had that kind of medicated looking drunkenness in their eyes, he would lift his voice over whatever was on the jukebox and ask something like, Do you consider Jethro Tull a true prog-rock band? Or, Who is the greatest left handed pitcher of all time? He would start every question out with, “Now let me ask you . . .” and sometimes we’d frame a question like that to each other even when he wasn’t here. He fixated on things, but we all did, some obsession, some haunting grudge or grievance, something about us we just couldn’t cure no matter what we did. It was just that he was our friend, that there was this abundance of energy and light waiting to come booming out at any moment from the great kingdom of a stomach he carried around with him.
One time he came to the bar before we even opened. I don't remember what it was about, just that he was coming apart a little, and he got like that sometimes, the engine would just rev and rev and rev and he couldn’t really do anything about it. He was there waiting on the sidewalk when I came in to unlock the doors in the afternoon, and when I let us in he stood on the tiled entrance that led to the disgusting carpet while I carried around the bucket of remotes to turn each TV on. He had a look of Last Night on him, eyes all stirred up and hair that was laying too-flat, and he said way up loud to me across the room “People better stop fucking messing with me,” and he stomped so hard on the tile I could hear this sandy grinding, like the grout was coming loose or something, and he said “I’m telling you right now, I’m just telling you right now.” He was holding a wrinkly plastic grocery bag with some belongings in it. And when he came in a few days later he said he didn’t mean anything by it, that it didn’t have anything to do with me and that he’d just been having a hard time.
When the bar went out of business the guys like Jim scattered around town, but a lot of them never quite got settled somewhere else. They were too ornery, too extreme, too strange, had too much love and loneliness trying to break free and there was something too dull and civilized about the other bars to make sense of it all. That was the last time I ever bartended, I think because you would have said a lot of those same things about me back then too. Him and I kept in touch for a while, we met at a Peruvian bar one time on a rainy weekday and he ordered a flank steak, just like that at 11:30 in the morning and ate it with a glass of beer, and he laughed this raggedy old laugh right there in a dead-empty bar playing these Peruvian songs that sounded like a cowboy movie right before a shootout. He showed me 40 pages of a novel he’d started writing about a big-rig truck driver who’d picked up a hitchhiker. There was a scene in it where the driver is parked overnight at a rest stop, dozing off in the truck as he looks at the reflection of his portable TV in the windshield. I still think about it. We made some plans to do it again but we never did, I wanted to see all those guys again but I never did, I couldn’t get myself there.
There was a stretch when the bar was still open where he kept insisting that I watch the Kurt Russell movie “Big Trouble in Little China.” One day he brought the DVD from his apartment and gave it to me while I was working. The DVD must have sat in a closet at the bar for months; I never even brought it home. He would ask me if I’d watched it yet and I’d tell him I’d been so busy, even though what I was really doing was nothing, just wasting big fat fistfuls of time on my days off and after my shifts, “writing” is what I was telling people but not doing much of that either, I was lifting weights or worrying about girls or trying to look cool, building all my tiny dramas up to such a ridiculous height and volume, dreaming of a way out of town. I’d stay late after we locked up at the end of the night and get drunk on Labatt Blue a half-cup at a time, listening to the Temptations or the Queen Live Aid set. Watching the Weather Channel.
Sometimes a couple people would hang around late with me while I closed the register, in this bar that was now an after hours bar, in this extra hour I had stretched out of a night for all of us. Eventually I began to think of myself not like a burnout in a purgatory of his own making but like some kind of shaman providing a valuable service. I was one of the bar’s victims but also its guardian, this foul place that nonetheless belonged to us and no one else, and you can confuse this with real achievement for so long that your life starts to get carried on down the river.
But finally Jim asked for the DVD back, and I said I would watch it that night but I never did, I lied and said I had and came up with some vague praise when he picked it up. But he was right about “Big Trouble in Little China,” and when I finally watched it a couple days ago I wished I could say that to him for real, with the launch of pure enthusiasm that comes from sharing something like a secret with a person you spent so much of your life with. I wished I could say to him, Now Jim, let me ask you, what are your top-5 ’80s movies? I wished I could say, Sorry it took me so long, it didn’t have anything to do with you, I’d just been having a hard time.
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John Saward is a writer living in Chicago. He is on bluesky @rbuas.bsky.social
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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:
What We Need Is Here
by Wendell Berry
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Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
—via All Poetry
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