from katsuya terada’s rakugaking, page 0940

Every morning was the same for Harry. He rolled out of bed at six, ignore his creeping hangover, and rinse his mouth. A brief glance in the mirror, expertly avoiding his permanently baggy and bloodshot eyes and the sag that had infected his cheeks, to confirm that his face was clean, or at least clean-ish. A hand run through what remained of his hair was the final step before he set about his morning.

Breakfast, when he felt like it: three scrambled eggs, a frozen dinner roll, and a glass of orange juice. Sometimes the OJ was pulp-free, sometimes it wasn’t, and sometimes it was diluted with one part vodka for every two parts juice. If he woke up late and needed to be out of the house quickly, he’d skip a step or two and let the eggs cook themselves into an omelette while he prepped in the bathroom, slip the slightly-burned finished product between two slices of white bread, and eat while he walked.

Every day of the week, Sundays excepted, Harry walked into the city. He lived in the city, technically. In fact, where he lived used to be what people called uptown. It was annexed early in the city’s first burst of expansion one hundred years ago and became the commercial center of town for a few decades after. Then the depression hit, businesses disappeared overnight, and what was left was less than blight. The one school left behind was devastatingly underfunded and closed a few years later. Harry stuck it out. He liked his place. Not like anywhere else was any better. “Unincorporated” didn’t mean anything to him anyway.

He walked into the city because that’s where the work was. Harry’d been to college, but all he could find now was cheap physical labor. Lift this, move that, hit him. It was a long walk, usually an hour and a half if no boats were due to cross under the bridge, and it gave him a chance to organize his thoughts and try to figure out what he got up to the previous night. He’d often catch sight of his own bloody and swollen knuckles in the mornings and wonder who he hit and if he had it coming.

When happy hour arrived, it was quitting time at the plantation du jour. Harry liked to tell people he had a favorite bar to visit, if he got the feeling he could cajole them into drinking with him, but the truth was that he had a lot of favorite bars. Sullivan’s down on 6th, with the barback who smiled at him like she cared. Mike’s Bar, over by the bridge, had two dollar beers, five dollar whiskey, and let you smoke in the back. Route 69 was a strip club on occasion, the drinks were cheap, and he knew all six bartenders by name. They knew him by reputation.

—

Harry put himself through college building houses. Every weekend, he and several other students would pile into a charter van, bus out to the suburbs, and work until the sun went down. After his sophomore year, the business expanded to building and renovating homes and skyscrapers in the city. A shorter commute, but harder work.

He majored in education. He wasn’t sure why. His mother was a teacher when she was younger, before she gave birth to Harry and his brothers. Maybe it was in his genes. Probably not, though — he was a middling student, never a standout.

He just about missed his degree by inches, thanks to a complete lack of interest in every single math class he ever took, but he got it done. He rigged it so that he had a summer of nothing before he took on his first official teaching gig that fall, instead of going directly into working. He had a little savings and he wanted to have some fun.

Harry met Brenda, his future wife, the same weekend he graduated from school and went on his first bender. The three were related, of course. The graduation led to the bender, and the bender led directly to him making an impression on Brenda. She thought he was hi-larious and couldn’t get enough of his antics. He thought she was cuter than a button and loved to make her laugh.

—

Six years later and they’d passed all the major relationship milestones. Moved in together? That was month four. He met her parents in month two and got drunk with her father two weeks later. Six months in and they shared the bathroom for the first time. Fourteen months in and they announced their engagement. Four months after that and three months before their marriage, Brenda gave birth to Michelle Gloria. After that came two more kids, one every other year.

Harry entered Alcoholics Anonymous six years into their relationship, too. He worked hard, but he’d started to play harder. Some time after midnight on one whiskey-fueled night, he got blackout drunk and put a grown man through the window of a toy store. An ATM across the street caught the entire encounter, and though Harry was clearly provoked, the judge still ordered him to seek counseling, attend meetings, or face prison time.

Harry accomplished both, much to Brenda’s delight, but neither lasted longer than six months. He never drank at home, of course, or to the extent he had before. He knew better than that, especially after several long lectures from Brenda. But he drank.

—

Twenty years later, he had an ex-wife, two daughters that hated him, and one son that struggled to understand him. The son was blessed with his mother’s kind heart, the daughters with her common sense. Harry-and-Brenda became Just Harry to the vast majority of their shared social circle when he lost his job after a third DUI. She moved out, deep into the city, and Harry moved in the opposite direction.

Harry was a quieter now, most of the time at least. He’d sit and sip, or swill, and watch the game with a lazy smile on his face. The sport didn’t matter. It could be anything from basketball to golf. What mattered was the ritual of the game. You sit. You watch. You cheer at appropriate points and use the commentary as an excuse to go off on a rant of your own. You slap the table when the athlete on-screen screws up and you pump both fists for a win. You talk to people and you enjoy what you’re doing, and you repeat the process the next day.

But every once and a while, Harry would snap into consciousness and he’d look at what he was doing with crystal clarity. Sometimes he’d be hunched over some goon in an alley, one fist full of the man’s shirt and the other full of broken teeth, a man in a suit standing behind him and gently egging him on. Sometimes he’d sit straight up in bed with a woman whose name he forgot and didn’t particularly care to learn.

“Crushing paralysis” was the only way to describe the feeling that raced through his body at this point. The time between the intake of breath that heralded his sudden horror and the exhale that represented a grudging acceptance felt like forever. Harry wasn’t particularly quick on the uptake, but he was far from stupid. These were the only moments when he let himself recognize the truth of his life, and he was thankful they were so fleeting.

Harry had a system, he had figured out how to survive without rocking the boat, and he didn’t plan to break it.