“The bar was a place where you could drink yourself down to the wormy grave, always with the comforting thought that somewhere, somehow, some other poor bastard was worse off than you.”
Factotum, Charles Bukowski
It was truly a sliding doors moment in the Arklow pub milieu as local institution, Dolly Malone, finally hung up her bar apron after suffering years of psychological and emotional torment at the DT quivering hands of her belligerent customer captors. During her blissfully short bar career, the young dipsomaniac wrangler witnessed (in between dodging projectile glassware) such seminal events on the in-house, grainy, black-and-white flickering tube as the Kennedy Assassination, the Moon landing, the birth of Christ and the release of the Epstein files, in no particular order.
“Well, it’s a night of mixed emotions for me, but not really though,” declared a jubilant Malone. “The turd that broke the camels back for me was having to break up a jobbie the size of Dwayne Johnson in the biohazard toilet. As the pungent alcohol fumes singed my nostril hair, I knew then that if I stayed employed here much longer, I would go permanently nose blind!
My employment was the only thing keeping the average age of the punters lower than The Rolling Stones as the consistent faint smell of death, decay and general despair of misspent lives threatened to pull me one foot into the grave with them the more I spent each passing day spent in their fatalistic presence. I will dearly miss the emotional roller-coaster of being called everything from darling to slag all in the space of a night, though. Having accumulated years of collective drunken confessionals from regulars, I now possess more repressed communal secrets than the parish priest of old, and I fear I may now need my own exorcism, or “therapy for therapists, of sorts to expunge such unbearable pain, misery, wounds and scars of others.”
Dolly will miss her regulars though; the misogynists, the cucks, the unfiltered, the dirty old and young men/women/cis/they/them/their/he/him/his/she/her/hers etc., the men who a barmaid was the only woman they spoke to the entire week besides the Virgin Mary and their living or dead mothers, those who needed professional help but found a talking cure from behind the bar instead, the farts, the sharts, the piss, the drool, the barstool philosophers, the indecipherable, the incomprehensible, the lads chewing their foreheads, the paralysed, the paralytic, the melancholic until the first few drinks kick in, the diplomats, the unpolitically correct, the conspiracy theorists without the theory, the unhygienic, the overly hygienic, the polymaths holding court, the space oddities, the barred and the last chance salooners, the chewed up and spat out, the married, the unmarried, the unmarriable and the divorced, the lost, the found and everything in between.
Here’s to you, Dolly!
