They were all kind of young. Loosely young. Late twenties, mid-thirties. Maybe. Paid for tans. Dark eye sockets that mirrored still wet shores from receded tides. Flanagan’s Pub was a bar teeming with walking skeletons, wrapped in beige masking tape, covered by designer t-shirts that still had the price tags on them. They had thrift-shop bought extensions and overpriced greasy products caked into thinning and already retreating hair lines. They were strung out, everyone sitting at the bar.
Guy and girl.
These people, who had grown up in the same neighborhoods as their parents, were taught that leaving to live somewhere else was not their culture. Flanagan’s was a place where you had to ask a person for their lineage before you hooked-up, as to avoid the awkward later revelation that you might be cousins. The Pub was a house of people completing barely put together sentences, throwing whiskey back and down their gullets, trying to remember how they all knew each other a little too well. It was a place where generations had gone, still go, to forget that, at one point in their lives, it seemed as though so much more was important.
I began going there after I broke out of rehab the first time. It was a few towns east than where I’d grown up. It wasn't an awful place. It had it’s run down parts, a trailer park, but crazy quick availability to the opioid of your choosing.
In Flanagan’s, deals were made with unabashed brazenness. There were tiers to the clientele. They were mainly locals. People who lived in the area. You had the four old guys who had been going to Flanagan’s since it opened. Sat in the same stools, ordered the same beer till the day they gave up those stools.
Then there were the middle-aged divorcée women whose husbands had left them fifteen years in. They were there partially for dick, but more so for validation that they still had what it took to be attractive.
There was the majority. The young men and women, some related, that claimed: it’s the bar where my parents met. They were on drugs you took orally. Or anally, depending.
Then there were the derelicts. Myself in included.
Because everyone was fucked in one capacity or another, we were able to meet reliable dealers out in the open with impunity. We couldn't cook there, but it was a warm place to conduct business when it was zero degrees outside. Air conditioned in the summers.
But there was this one guy,
A legend at Flanagan’s,
Knockout Ned.
He was a ginger, naturally. A gym head, had a blowout. Was still fit for a single guy in his late thirties.
He fancied himself a pugilist, but that, he certainly was not. Not by any means did he train in any of the martial arts. He just ran his mouth on a habitual basis. Someone would say something at one end of the narrow bar. He’d walk up to the person, pontificate about what his gripe was, got in the person’s face, and then, as sure as the lunar cycle, he would get knocked-out.
This one time I watched him pick a fight with a group of kids with fake ID’s. They were in the middle of an animated conversation when Knockout got in their faces.
They were good kids. After Knockout Ned hit the floor, the guys propped him up against the wall so he wouldn't swallow his own blood.
There was this local who frequented the Pub. She was a bit heavyset and had a bunch of tattoos. I had a theory that Ned gave her a hard time because he was secretly into her. Everyone else said that Ned resented the fact that they had the same barber, wore identical jeans and boots, listened to the same music, enjoyed vaping, and drove the identical sort of pick-up truck.
She had been minding her own business the entire night, but something in Knockout Ned pushed him over the edge. He didn't yell at her, when Ned finally charged. As Ned pounced, she did this pirouette type move that landed Knockout Ned in a rear naked chokehold. Shut Ned’s lights off for the night.
He was the instigator in every single fight he got in to. Knockout, barely landed any of his punches, the same way Cooter Clemons never stuck his landings.
I had been waiting for, Julio, to bring me my dope, which had me in a fit of fidgets. I wasn't really paying attention to what was unfolding. There was a commotion at the bar. It was raucous and then there was a hush. When I walked over, people were murmuring about what just took place.
There was a man on the floor. I assumed it was Knockout, but Ned was standing above the man, eyes as wide as he could open them, huge surprised smile, Knockout Ned had finally knocked some one out.
Everyone in Flanagan’s erupted with uproarious cheering for Knockout Ned and is first ever victory.
The guy on the floor’s girl helped him up, disoriented and wobbling, the girlfriend stumbled with him out. There was such jubilation for Knockout Ned that the bartender declared that Drinks are on the house, the crowd sent into another frenzy.
For two hours, Knockout Ned reveled in his new notoriety. It was an underdog story for him that finally happened in real life. I even joined the celebration, mainly because of the free booze. Needed something to stave the shakes.
Around two-thirty in the morning Julio had finally showed up. Upon Julio and I’s exchange of commerce for goods, there was this extremely loud pop, my eardrum felt like it exploded.
I was sprayed with something warm that tasted like a penny. I had moved to the bar after Knockout Ned knocked out that dude. As the evening progressed, Ned migrated till he ended up next to me, a barstool between us.
The the guy on the floor had come back to Flanagan’s, with his .38, fired it into Knockout Ned, striking him in the neck. Julio grabbed me by the clothes, forced me behind the bar for safety. The dude pumped five more rounds into Knockout Ned, who would remain alive for two more days. His assailant was arrested. Sentenced to life.
Flanagan’s Pub never recovered after that. About six months later, where once hung electric neon signs advertising beers, now were bordered up windows, with graffiti I could not understand. The worst part of all of was I began meeting Julio on corners that were ill equipped to handle incremental weather.
