I stood in the shadows between the pool cues and a table
occupied by a lone drunk. The drunk was staring, dumbfounded at me as he had
been for the better part of half an hour, but I wasn’t bothered. Everybody
stared, and the drunks stared more than the rest, since they had lost every
vestige of self-respect that would have caused a pang of guilt to assault them
for staring at a freak like me. I’ve gotten used to the stares. It’s the
overwhelming number of drunks that bothers me.
In this Godforsaken country, if you couldn’t handle the
stress of working at the plant, you turned to drink. It happened to everyone
after awhile. When there’s only one game in town, they make the rules, and
those rules were ruthless. Twenty-four hour shifts every day of the week. Ten
hours between them to sleep, or, more commonly, drink until you finally fell
into some sort of unconsciousness. No breaks, no meals, no excuses. You drank
to keep the sting of a worthless life from getting to you. Finally, when the
drink stopped working, you would just walk outside, into the cold, and die.
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