DIVE BAR DIARIES

Bill the Buddha

Happiness on a barstool

(Created by ChatGPT)

“I’m nowhere new no more.”

He spit it low and sad, like the last sentence that would ever leave his lips.

The speaker is a nonagenarian, an old man named Bill. Ninety-two years on this earth, and he still walks to my bar every day. Rain or Rapture. I’m writing this on my day off, but Bill doesn’t take days off. I’d wager all the lead in my liver he has his ass on a barstool at this very moment.

Bill offered his age the day I met him. It was the first thing he ever said to me, once he finished ordering his beer. “I’m 92, you know?”

Survive enough decades, and the year you were born becomes an accomplishment.

People want to congratulate an old-timer, they just don’t know how. You tiptoe next to death when you say: “Ninety-two? Isn’t that something!” It’s like reminding a man he’s almost done.

When I was young — younger even than I am now — I couldn’t understand the sluggish putter of old people. Their pace seemed to prove that the world is perfectly backwards. A decrepit codger with six months to live will spend six minutes inspecting nectarines in the supermarket, while a teenager with 70 years to spare runs down the aisles like she’s shopping for the apocalypse.

You age, and you understand. What’s the rush? The grass is the grass, as green as it’s ever going to be. Racing to the next patch won’t put a smile on your face. But maybe smelling that nectarine will.

Plus your knees hurt, and your bones are as brittle as breadsticks. One badly placed banana peel becomes a broken hip, followed by hospital pneumonia, followed by heaven.

If Bill goes to heaven today, he’ll miss his smoked meat on rye with three onion rings, and that side of coleslaw he asks for but never eats. These small offerings look so dejected on a great big plate, but the happiest any human has ever been in my bar is Bill when I set that sandwich down for him. Even when he forgets his teeth, he just laughs and drinks his lunch.

Dress Bill up in an orange robe and he could be the Dalai Lama. He’s already bald and round. His face is twisted happy — like a big-bellied golden buddha, who just heard what happened when a priest, a rabbi, and a duck walked into a bar.

I’ve only known Bill in the best of moods. I was thunderstruck to hear him say it. “I’m nowhere new no more.”

It was a rejoinder. The bar fly beside Bill, a middle-aged Eeyore, had just moaned for ten minutes, all woe and self-pity after Air Canada cancelled flights to his favourite resort, where the half-starved hotel staff specialize in Mai Tais and fake merriment. “Looks like I won’t be going back to Cuba anytime soon.”

“I’m nowhere new no more.”

Bill speaks the truth. His walk to my bar is his sole respite from the wallpaper in his retirement home. His wife died years ago, his children were never born. He doesn’t fly, he doesn’t drive, and I’m damn sure there’s no convertible idling outside that old-age village, with a gaggle of sexy dames eager to chauffer him downtown to bet on the horses and sip expensive whiskey.

(Created by ChatGPT)

Maybe he finds peace in his patterns, but I’ve never known joy to sprout from still waters. The great delights of my life have come from risking misery, from getting tangled up in a bit of the good trouble. Keep seeking unique, and suddenly you’re on the back of a motorcycle in the jungles of Phong Nha, holding the hips of some half-crazed Portuguese beauty as she leans into the curves of a thousand-foot cliff.

Then you have a pint at the bar. Then you smile.

Take away the new, and all you’re left with is breakfast again. Eggs and toast, eggs and toast, eggs and toast; until the toast turns to cardboard and the eggs are rubber routines. Until your soul crusts into a cocoon, knowing you won’t be needing it.

It’s a Groundhog Day life. Only the weather ever changes. So how the hell is Bill so happy? Is it perspective? Pleasant recollections? Dementia?

I’d ask him, but I know Bill. He will laugh and shrug. So I make the same old joke, and Bill spits his standard comeback, and we bask in the pleasure of repeating ourselves.

“There’s a band tonight, Bill. Will I see you on that dance floor?”

“That’s not fair. Too many ladies, only one of me.”