All Over the Place: I Just Want to See How the Drunks on Ash Street Are Doing

By Michael H. Brownstein

When my county became a red zone in the wake of the pandemic, I already knew the answer. Of course, this is my personal opinion. I live in the entertainment zone of my town. This means bars and restaurants with bars. It does not mean theater or dance or creativity. It simply means places for people to drink and get drunk. One of the managers of one of the businesses came down with Covid-19. He was driven to the hospital by another employee – neither wore a mask. He stayed home a couple of days and then he began going outside. He even entered the bar where he works. Even now he does not look that healthy.
    The Board of Health announced it was no longer going to track individuals. All of that would be done on a voluntary basis. I asked one of the city people in the know and was told that this was how it was going to be. Keeping businesses open even with infected people working there.
    And get this – the health department reported to one of my friends who called in and asked that waitstaff in restaurants with the virus were highly unlikely to pass it on to customers. That’s why my area remained open. Shortly after that there were a few large parties, crowds of diners where the Covid-19 man worked, and then the numbers in my county began to rise.
    We wear masks to throw out the garbage, to walk the dogs, whenever we go outside. You must remember our governor – who won re-election – never wore a mask and actually met close-up and personal at a great number of crowded events in my state. That said, here’s a short work that has been published more than once on the Internet and in a couple of journals, but I think it might find interest in the readers of Moristotle & Co.

I Just Want to See How the Drunks 

on Ash Street Are Doing

What are you having? The bartender asks when I walk in.
    I do not want anything, I answer. I just want to see how the drunks on Ash Street are doing.
    Some of the drunks I know. I know them by car or I know them by disposition. Others I know by face and apartment. I don’t know names. I’m not a good old kind of boy, the kind with a friendly smile and cruel demeanor behind shadows of darkening eyes. I’m not a small talking kind of guy. Once we get past the weather report, I have little to nothing more to say. How’s the rehabbing coming? How’s the job? What’re you drinking? These questions are not me.
    I do not mean anything by saying I just want to see how the drunks on Ash Street are doing. I do not say it out of anger or concern. I just say it the same way a poet writes a line into his journal that came from nowhere and he does not know how to explain what it means or what it is about or even what motivated it to come from his head to his hand, from his pen to his paper. I say it, and once the words enter the room, they float from booth to booth, bar stool to bar stool. Somehow they make their way to the back of the bar where the television begins to blink, go to static, and then the pictures and words crumble into puzzle pieces, angles in a broken mirror, and freezes.
    What the hell, the bartender mutters.
    Everyone looks at me.
    Then the television corrects itself.
    I let myself out the door and onto the street where the snow is just beginning to fall and the air forms clouds ahead of me as I walk to the next bar – the one exactly next door – where I do not want anything. I just want to see how the drunks on Ash Street are doing.

Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.