Hell wasn’t built in a day
It was an ongoing, slow, cumulative
process undermining the bedrock
of my life behind bars like the Colorado
eating its way through the earth until
it made the Grand Canyon. Each layer,
each ridge, each furrow cut, represented
a psychic injury to the self that was slow to
heal but left real wounds and scars
after, only I could see and feel.
I’m not sure if it was solely the alcohol
that attracted the devils who tormented me
or whether they were born damaged and
the drink simply exacerbated all the worse impulses
they indulged when interacting with the world.
Whatever it was, the result was the same:
they gradually made me into someone like them,
turning a reasonably intelligent, well-read,
sensitive, caring person into a card-carrying
member of the Auxiliary Devils of Loudon.
I often wondered at what point I gave up caring,
of even thinking about escaping, or going
where the mellow people, the good ones went,
that made life in bars bearable. I knew Satan’s
minions ruined it for everyone, that was their job
after all, and they chased the normies to civilized cafes,
wine bars, bistros, while the rest of us toiled
in the pits. Instead of the young man I once
was who offered opinions, disquisitions on
the state of the modern novel, I became the cynical,
foul-mouthed, hair-trigger personality who was
eager to prove I could do psychotic reaction
to outside stimuli as well as the next, on work
release mental patient. I wasn’t pleased
with the direction my life had taken but I took
some comfort knowing: I was home, that I fit
right in with the wicked and the damned.
Alan Catlin worked for the better part of 34 years in his unchosen profession as a barman in and around the greater Albany, NY area. He has published dozens of chapbooks and full-length books focusing on his work and the people he met while laboring in the trenches of bar warfare.
