[1]

Sitting alone at a communal table in a noisy beer bar. Good place, locals only. And me. Three others amble up with full korsos and take the far end of the table. I’m a magnet apparently for middle-aged men, close-cropped and balding. That’s my goddamn flock it turns out.

A willow grows in the courtyard. Hungarians call it a fűzfa. Fa means tree. This beer went down fast, and I contemplate another, but maybe I should keep moving, change it up, see where I land.

I decided I’ll go around the corner to Mr Bobby’s.

Over here in Pest, I feel like a spectator. Any place is fine, but wandering around my neighborhood in Buda, angling for a beer, I’m more picky. Feels like there’s more at stake. There isn’t. And yet sometimes I just wander past a pub with some strange nagging feeling that that’s just not the right place to grab a beer. Makes no sense. Strange phenomenon.

I reminded myself recently that I just need to be myself. Fuck it. The funny thing is, I never try to be someone other than who I am. But I do hide the parts of myself I think people don’t need to see. That could be the ex-pat who’s only semi-literate in Hungarian. Or that could be the guy with a funny slant to his gait (don’t walk like that). Or that could be the guy who gets sweaty after a long walk in the summertime heat and then sits down in the shade of a cafe awning. I just don’t want people to see all of that guy.

But then I see a guy with sweat streaks all over his cotton shirt and he’s laughing and talking with his pretty companion like it was all intentional. Such freedom.

Reminds me of 6th grade when I moved to the city-ish. Suddenly, I was different. The way I dressed, the way I walked, probably how I talked. They could smell the country on me. I got beat up a few times, but of course, a sixth-grade licking isn’t so bad. But it might as well be broken teeth and a ruptured spleen for how bad it hurt. That was the first time I realized that maybe I should try to hide myself. But how the fuck do you do that? Never really fell in with a crowd where I could hide—the Goth kids, the stoners, the jocks—wasn’t a crowd that suited me. So I just plain hid, well enough to blend. And now, forty-five years later in a bar in Budapest I’m still reminding myself that I don’t have to do that anymore.

[2]

At Mr Bobby’s now.

Everyone is sitting outside except for me and that’s ok. Brazilian reggae if you can call it that—Manu Chao-ish, happy—tapers into a Hungarian cover of Three Little Birds. Dig it.

Don’t take all that up there in part one for belly aching or some kind of torch song for my inner brat. He’s not the mopey sort. He just kept to himself, that’s all. Even now the melancholy that lingers on the fringe of solitude isn’t such a bad thing. In fact, it suits him just fine. He would rather be melancholy than out there grasping for meaningless connections with passing strangers. Right? Maybe.

An old man comes in, walks with a limp until he sits down on a barstool opposite my table. No hair to speak of except for the beard, gray mostly and he has a kindly air. One elbow on the bar he leans forward like he might get up at any moment, but after a minute I realize that’s just the tilt of his perch. We strike up a conversation and it’s familiar and easy, like I’ve known him since the spring of 1976.

Then he studies a mural on the side wall, a woman, perfect comic book beauty. Black and white with a bit of splatter and drip. She has good hair that could be fire if only the mural was colored.

Anyway, he looks at her, and then kinda far away like he was trying to remember where he’d seen her before, far away like he was staring through the wall. And he says, “You always wound up with the beauties, body and soul. And boy, would they drive you crazy. But hey, ain’t that just what they do.”

He huffs a laugh like he was remembering a kernel of unheeded advice that sheds light on a folly of his own.

“But you drove them lonely. Eventually. Even the good ones. It’s like there was a part of you that they just could not reach.”

Now he looked through the wall and a frown shadowed his face, and I thought he was searching for words, and I let him because I had nothing to say, and everything to hear.

It was like twenty years had passed since we spoke. “You have to let that light shine, no matter what.” He tapped a brass lighter on the bar and watched the sound it made. “You need it as much as they do.”

Then a smile spread across his face and he huffed again.

“Fuck it,” he said. “You don’t need me to tell you.”

But I must have. We swapped a smile and I excused myself to the water closet after asking the bartender its whereabouts. When I emerged, the old man was gone and so I hit the road too, one more before I head home. But where? 

[3]

I took a tram across the river, then walked up Karinthy Frigyes út toward home. Outside the college dormitories, dozens of students gather at long tables under the trees. It’s a makeshift garden bar, and it’s good. I keep walking, even though I wouldn’t mind parking it at one of those tables and listening to their stories.

I pass a Chinese place and a six-year-old boy goofs around with his sisters at the sidewalk tables. The proprietor’s kids. I don’t speak the language, but their exchange is clear. He had just bested some challenge or riddle, but she admonishes him for breaking the rules. He protests, but in vain, because the judge is, after all, nine years old.

Up the long, slow hill are a few pubs that will be open. I’ll head there. The pubs on the side streets pull their tables inside at 10 o’clock, but Karinthy Frigyes is a noisy boulevard, cut down the middle with a tram line, so the sidewalk cafes stay open late.

I duck into the cellar pub, then emerge with one more beer and an Unicum to cap the night. This place never has empty tables at this hour, but my timing is perfect. Pulling in just as a couple pulls out. I sit down, sip the Unicum and realize I’m starting to feel it. All of it. The beers, parts one and two.

From the next table, I hear the juicy smacking of lips, youngsters, unabashed, sounds like they’re both chewing the same piece of dried mango. Then the rumble of plastic chair legs dragging the sidewalk as he draws her closer. I’ve never been one for sidewalk kissing, but when it happens and carries you away from your standards—your mandates of I do and I don’t—boy, what a rush.

Good lord, look at my handwriting. Crumbling, dissolving in front of my eyes.

I glance at the kissers, and now she speaks, yes, she just wants to talk for a minute. He flashes me a look that says he’d rather be kissing.

Me too, Pal. Honestly though, as I got off the tram a little while ago, I was thinking about how I’d really just be okay with a good snuggle under the blanket on the couch. That would be just perfect. I’m feeling it now, the beers and such. Probably sharing too much.

The fear shocks me that I might stagger a bit on the walk home. This was a heavy pour of Unicum. I’m not proud of it. It feels like I lost my trousers and have to make my way home in this unavoidable condition. It’s only two blocks, and it happens to be a couple of blocks frequented by people who haven’t walked a straight line since 2009.

They’re making out again. Just enough chatting, just enough listening.

It’s a good thing, that sweeping moment.

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