Friendly Past

When you’ve lived through a lot of presidents and then some, you might start to lose things. Your keys, where you parked your car, where your socks went, your marbles, even your mind.  But sometimes the opposite happens, and you can’t forget some things or people no matter how much you really want to. So it went with Ol’ Johnny. He was sitting in the middle row of the pews of a little tiny chapel inside an old hospital. The quiet smell of desperation and death speckled with motes of hope was familiar to him the most.  He had also downed a bottle of whiskey not five minutes before, so sitting was not really so much a choice but a necessity. He looked to his right where next to him sat Malibu, his old buddy from his fighting days. Malibu waved. This routine had become ever more common. Flashes from the past kept coming into the present. “How’s, the kids Johnny?” asked Malibu, his faint southern drawl still ringing in Johnny’s working ear.  “I have no freaking idea, last I heard from them was a decade ago, I have grandkids somewhere in France.” Some might think that an old man having a conversation with himself was a striking sense of dementia; Johnny just considered that he was drunk. Ever month or so he ended up in a church somewhere talking to one of his old squad. It wasn’t so bad, even though the first time it scared the beejezus out of Johnny so bad that he was reasonably sure his heart had stopped beating.  In the end though, he enjoyed their talks, even though they were just ghosts in the cobwebs of his mind. So they talked, even as others in the chapel shifted slightly away from crazy old man. They talked about women, they talked about friends, politics, old times, beer, wine and everything else that Johnny could think of or the ghost of his friend spoke up about. It was nice. But eventually everything has to end. The alcohol was processed and appeared in the bladder, and Johnny had to leave. On his way back to the his Gas Station he sighed silently to himself as his age and slowness caused a much younger man who smelled like a cigarette factory lightly humming some tune to sidestep him to keep moving faster. Faster Johnny was not, not for a long long time.