This Saturday a friend invited me to come join her and a few other people at the Royal Night Club. Despite some occasional outburst of entirely not danceable music, I felt it was a great night. I meat a few people, got to dance for a few hours, and just overall had a lot of fun. I am not a clubbing type, but I really don’t care what people say, I enjoyed it. The night however will stay in my memory, it’s not for the blog. I want to say a few words about alcohol and money.
Alone, all alone.
This guys walked onto the bus , on the way back to Burnaby. By his looks he was in his fifties, but that could be just his tired, wrinkled face. He was wearing dark pants, a light blazer, and had a few gold chains around the neck. In a way he looked just like a typical Cuban you would see in a movie. He was drunk to the point where he was barely talking, obviously disgusting the driver with his alcohol smell. He was holding his jacket by one arm, dragging the rest of it behind. When he sat down, he right away hit his head on the nearby hand-rail. The guy was a mess.
Let’s call him Frank, for simplicity. Somewhere about ten minutes after Frank got on the bus, he started shuffling in his pocket. I could tell, I was sitting right in front of him. Frank was chaotic, pulling papers out of his pants and jacket, dropping them on the floor, picking them up again. It turned out he was looking for money. After a prolonged and heated struggle with his wallet, Frank found twenty Canadian dollars and one American. That’s not much, but it could get one a few lunches. For a moment there, Frank was staring at this money with a dull, transparent look. Then, all of a sudden, he crumbled it in a tiny ball. He pressed and squeezed it with such force, the money was disappearing in front of me. For a moment I thought he was going to hide it, maybe hide it from his wife, or a street punk who could try and rob this poor drunk soul, but it was none of those. He took the paper, squeezed it again a few more times, and then after a minute or two of mind boggling doubt, he tossed the money out of the window.
Why would anybody do that? Why would anyone just discard of twenty dollars that could put food on one’s table? My guess, because it was only going to bring Frank more misery. As he was crumbling that piece of paper I could feel some hatred, some disappointment in his movements. When one could buy $20 worth of food for that money, Frank could probably get that much alcohol, alcohol that already brought him to the state of uncontrollable chaos. Throwing out the source of temptation was the only way for this man to throw out his problem.
Although this was one man on the bus, in the middle of the night, I realized that we do such things all the time. Most often, we are not willing to conquer the desire, we merely look for shortcuts, for solutions that could help us get by, and the long run does not concern us anymore.
