Another trip to the Lamplighter

Almost as soon as I arrive in Memphis, Leila and I go to the Lamplighter, a favorite tavern from years past. The lamplighter is small and cozy, accommodating maybe twenty people at most. Nothing in there seems to have changed in decades. It’s a time capsule. Miss Shirley, the bartended who seems to have been there forever too, doesn’t look happy. She’s got cancer. She’s bald now. The whole time, she just stares off into space thinking god knows what. She knows it’s finished. No more tomorrows or next years, just that stinking pile of shit -the wasted past. One can only assume it’s tormenting her. All our lives, Miss Shirley’s included, are centered in some conceptual sense of tomorrow. But for those who know they are dying, tomorrow is revealed for what it is: a cheap fuckaround. Tomorrow-ness steals from us an entire lifetime of now-ness. Miss Shirley must be on the cusp of some sort of epiphany, but it’s too late to make anything of it. She must be thinking to her self, “That’s it? That was my life? What the fuck?” Of course Miss Shirley would not think or say the word fuck. There’s no cussing in the Lamplighter, and she’ll throw your ass out for using language like that. She goes on staring at nothing somewhere back toward the toilets.
I’m sitting at the Bar beside Leila and a couple of her friends. I can’t hear what they’re talking about, so I quit bothering to listen. I look at the weird shit behind the bar. There’s a little pyramid of cans of Vienna Sausages. Jesus, what the fuck is that doing there? My grandmother used to eat those God damned things. She liked canned meat smeared on saltines too. Vienna Sausages are a shitty low-grade meat paste that’s pressed into the shape of little sausages and sold in tin cans. They’re barely fit for legal human consumption. Lips and assholes, man. I get the feeling they aren’t for sale, just decoration. Lips and assholes.
You can order hot food here, but I heard someone got sick from it, so I don’t. I used to eat here all the time when I was in college. The menu is posted behind the counter and appears to have been drawn with a set of magic markers. It’s rife with misspellings and incomprehensible artistic flourishes. Hamburgers cost three dollars. Chili costs four-fifty. Leila gets the idea to make some cool T-shirts for the lamplighter. I suggest that the design on the shirt be nothing but a photograph of this fucking menu. It’s hilarious.
I look around the room. The dying alcoholics that used to frequent this place are absent, replaced by smart-looking young people. Dive-bar tourists. The fucks. As though I can talk! I’m probably one of the guilty assholes that popularized this place with the art school set. The Lamplighter has become a museum, a museum of kitsch. It was never like that before. Memphis used to be completely unconscious of it’s own weird stylishness. I guess thing’s have changed. I’ve been gone a long time.
It’s dark in the Lamplighter. I’m listening to the jukebox when despair comes over me, bad fucking despair. I can’t understand where it’s coming from. I feel fatigue as though I’m dying. The conversation keeps moving, but I have fallen out of it. I get this terrible fear that what I’m feeling is true. As always in these moments, I have a hard time convincing myself it’s temporary. I cant help but feel like it’s always going to be this way, that life is over.
I start to wonder if I’m sensing Miss Shirley’s doomed thought waves. It’s so crushing I actually go and hide in the men’s room -but the fucking door has no latch on it! What if I were peeing for god’s sake? I get up and go outside, just to break the spell. It’s nice and cold. I breathe deeply, but it does no good. I am doomed, and although this makes no sense it’s nonetheless an absolute reality. It’s the kind of thing that make praying to god seem reasonable.
I go back in and order more booze, doing my best to conceal what I’m going through.
Leila’s on the phone, so her friends make one more well-meaning yet totally ill-fated attempt to socialize with me. They haven’t got the slightest idea that the person they are dealing with is not even alive, not even human. I’ve been stolen away by the eruption of some sort of mood disorder -a psychic convulsion of hopelessness, tiredness. I’m tired like the grave.
One of them says, “You’re from Colorado, huh? Cool.”
I say, “Yeah, it’s pretty cool.”
“I like those towns like… Durango.”
“Yeah, those towns are cool.”
“So uh…”
“Yeah.”
And that’s basically the end of that. I go back outside and a fucking crack addict approaches me making pitiful weird sounds. A white person can’t understand a word these crazy Negroes say when they get on the crack. In response to this unknown query I say something like, “Get the fuck out of here leper! I’m armed! I have no sense of morals and I will get away with what I do!” The leper drags himself on sullenly. Shit, maybe he was just asking what time it is. I go on back inside.
The night ends early.
Later, alone with my friend, I know the worst has passed. I’m normal again and grateful for it. The fit of despair at the Lamplighter was bad enough that it actually frightened me. This place used to make me happy. I was another person then though. It was a different lifetime. Between then and now there is no continuity whatsoever except for the bones in my body and a handful of spoiling memories I don’t even understand or believe anymore.

10/30/09