Last Call for Alcohol

By Joe Flynn

This is a fictional story of a man dying of liver disease and the return to his past childhood, teen years, on to becoming a tavern owner, and of course, the fear of his unknown future into his demise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643509907

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Last Call for Alcohol

Joe Flynn

Copyright © 2018 Joe Flynn

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2018

ISBN 978-1-64350-989-1 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64424-060-1 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-64350-990-7 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

PART 1

My name is Patrick Ryan. I never thought this would happen to me.

Where’s the nurse? Please, I need a shot of morphine.

She’s late.

I need a shot. I need that shot!

I look like I am pregnant with my stomach sticking straight out, as hard as a rock. My skin and eyes are yellow, death-yellow, and I am in severe pain from head to toe from my cancer-infested liver and bones. How I wish it were over. I need peace. I have been exposed to liquor all my life; now I am finally paying the price for too much booze.

I keep going in and out of consciousness. It won’t be long now. My hazed mind takes me back to the late forties and early fifties when I was seven years old.

We lived in my grandparent’s bungalow on the south side of Chicago. We had the best of everything: Persian rugs, cherry wood furniture, and a small-screened, black-and-white TV. We were one of very few families in the neighborhood to have one. I remember there were only three stations. There was a very limited choice of shows to watch back then. We could watch baseball, the news, or Howdy Doody, a freckle-faced boy puppet. The host was Buffalo Bob Smith, who was dressed in cowboy garb.

In the evening we listened to the radio in our bedroom, which was in the attic. We usually listened to a program called The Lone Ranger, which was a western live action; Amos and Andy, a comedy show; or The Adventures of Little Orphan Annie.

We had a refrigerator instead of the old-fashioned icebox and a telephone that took nickels to make a call. It had a two-party line. I had a brother, Tim, who was four years older than I. He and I would pick up the phone and listen quietly to what the other party was talking about. Sooner or later we would start to giggle, and then someone would yell, Who is listening on this line? We would hurry and slam down the receiver.

Our house had a long driveway on the side, with a brick, two-car garage in the back that no one ever used. It was just full of old stuff. Near the alley was a concrete incinerator that always smelled of smoke. My father burned garbage in it once a week before the garbage men came to shovel out the ashes.

On the main floor, we had a large living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and three bedrooms. The front bedroom was for my grandmother, the one in the middle of the house was for my parents, and the one in the back was for my mother’s sister, Maureen, who was engaged to be married. There was a steep stairway in the kitchen that led to the attic bedroom where my brother and I slept with our dog, Beauty. She had a fear of any little noise, like the mice running around the attic late at night, and she would jump in one of our beds and pull the covers over her head with her mouth. The attic had cardboard walls and ceiling and ran the whole length of the house with a window at each end. Sometimes we peed from the back window instead of running downstairs to the only bathroom in the house. It seemed it was always occupied anyhow. Mom would come upstairs and open the windows because she always thought it smelled like urine up there.

Do you have a bottle or a can of pee hidden up here somewhere? she would ask.

No, Ma, we would answer.

We prayed for rain; then it always smelled clean up there. It would wash the smell of pee off the roof that was under our window. In the spring, with the windows open, you could smell the mayflower bushes from the front and back of the house, and the fragrance would come into the attic. I loved that smell.

Every adult in the house drank and smoked. They often smoked in bed. Ashtrays were everywhere. We never thought about it then, but in later years, I realized that attic was a firetrap.

In the front of the basement was another bedroom for my grandmother’s son, Uncle Mike. He was a bartender at my grandmother’s bar on Seventy-Ninth Street that was called O’Brien’s Tap. He was a tough and fun jokester that everybody liked. He kept odd hours because of his bartending and his lifestyle. There was an exit door in the basement that he used instead of going through the main house so he wouldn’t wake anyone up. His room was locked all the time; we were not allowed in there. We called it the mystery room because we often saw strange women leaving in the morning with their hair all messed up.

One day, my brother and I were walking home from school when Uncle Mike stopped his car and said, Get in, and I will drive you guys home.

I went to open the back door and he said, No! You two get in the front seat. There is a dead guy in the back!

What the hell is he talking about? We looked into the back seat and, sure enough, it looked like a dead guy. Tim knelt up on the seat and said, Yeah, it’s a dead guy, as he poked at the body with the corner of his book.

Then I looked over. Wow, I’ve never seen a dead man before. Where did you get him?

Uncle Mike laughed and said, He was lying in front of the tavern by the street. I am taking him to the morgue.

I asked, What is a morgue?

That’s where you go when you die. They cut you up and see what killed you.

I wasn’t feeling too good and wanted to get the heck out of that car fast. A week or two later, Tim and I stopped at the tavern on our way home after school. We often went there after school because sometimes whoever was tending bar that day would let us sweep the floor, take out the garbage, or clean glasses. In return, we would get a bottle of orange or grape pop and maybe a bag of chips. But what we wanted most was the occasional change we found under the barstools. We would ask the customers to move off their barstools so we could sweep. The customers would laugh and drop an extra nickel or dime for us. Oh, look! they would exclaim. There’s more money over there!

That day when I went over by the booths to sweep, I got a terrible shock. Slumped over in a corner was the same dead guy we saw in Uncle Mike’s car.

Hey, Tim, look at this! Here’s that dead guy again!

The customers in the bar laughed and finally told us it was no dead guy, just someone drunk and passed out. We didn’t know what to make of that at the time.

The summers were long and hot back then. Most places had no air-conditioning yet, but Grandma had just had it installed in her tavern. She was so proud of having air-conditioning that she put a big sign in the front window that said Cool inside to draw customers.

There were always a lot of people in the tavern and constant parties in the banquet room: weddings, birthdays, retirements, graduations, and baptisms. The men always stood by the service bar drinking shots and beers. There was a lot of drinking among the men. The women sat at the tables eating and drinking, mostly coffee. The kids ran nonstop for hours, in and out of the doors, all over the place.

I had my First Communion party there; the room was packed with relatives, family friends, and customers from the tavern. There was a special kind of etiquette among kids when they opened their cards, and I knew it well. I would rip open each envelope when it was handed to me and exclaim, Wow! like it was the best gift of them all. That way, everybody was happy that his or her gift was special. Each contained a card, five or six dollars, or sometimes the granddaddy ten-dollar bill. Sometimes the money was in silver dollars in a nice, heavy envelope. All kids liked silver dollars.

One envelope, that had three brand-new dollar bills, came from my rich aunt and uncle—the ones we rarely saw. They owned a new car dealership. Mom said they needed to save all their money for their payroll, but we overheard my grandma say that they were simply cheap; they went to parties and drank all top-shelf liquor and then asked for any leftover food to take home.

The heartbreaker came after all the envelopes were opened. My mom said to hand over the pile of money. She explained the money was to go in my savings account. Savings account! What savings account? I didn’t even know I had one. Oh well, the money felt good for a little while. Then I ran off again to play with the other kids, doing things we weren’t supposed to do: tasting beer, mixing adult’s unfinished drinks like we were mad scientists, and drinking some of those concoctions. Sometimes some of the kids got sort of high on the liquor and began to act goofy, but the adults never noticed.

Although my communion day was great, the day before wasn’t a good day. It was the day of my first confession. My whole class went to mass and then had confession. The nun in charge put me in line by the confessional that had that tough old Irish priest, Father Murphy, inside. The class had just said a prayer for his mother who passed away a couple days before. I was nervous and didn’t know what to say to the priest. I couldn’t tell him some of the things I did; he might know who I was. We had all heard he could see us through that thin black curtain. So I began with a whisper, so no one around the box could hear my sins.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession.

Speak up, little girl. I can’t hear you.

I am a boy, Father.

I couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice. I must have set him off because after that, he spoke much louder.

All right then, little boy. Speak up!

I began my confession with: I forgot to say some of my prayers, disobeyed my mother, and was late for school one