Mike would come in every night before everyone else did. He called our crew the Bargoyles because it was the same cast of characters. There were me, Mike, Sean, Ethan, and a couple of others I never knew the names of. We all sat at the end of the bar.
The bartenders hated us because we were the first ones in and the last ones out, and we were hogging up space for the other patrons.
Mike would get the drunkest. He drank Jack and Cokes all night, using red straws to count how many he’d drunk because he would lose count. The bartenders couldn’t stand him, especially because he would play the same damn songs on the jukebox. The jukebox was a digital one, not the retro kind where an actual record would pull up. You would use a phone app to play the songs. This gave Mike more wherewithal from his bar stool.
“Don’t you have anything else to play?” the bartender said to him.
The bartender wanted to listen to hip-hop or something more uptempo.
Mike’s songs were sad. They had to do with drug abuse, loneliness, or heartache. I didn’t mind the songs, but after a while of him playing them every night, I could understand the bartender’s point of view.
“You’re driving away customers,” he said. “My customers.”
“But we’re the Bargoyles,” Mike said.
He even bought us blue t-shirts with the word Bargoyles on them and actually wanted us to wear them. It was a joke—an unfunny joke. If we didn’t wear them, we weren’t part of the Bargoyles. And he bought drinks for only the Bargoyles.
But enough about them.
Mike illustrated comic books with his talent until one day. He was laid off by a couple of dude-bros who’d taken over his company once the founder had died. So now Mike’s drinking got worse. Not only was he at the bar before the rest of the Bargoyles, but he was at the bar when it opened. And he would stay until it closed. When it closed, the Bargoyles were the only ones who stuck around after hours.
I didn’t hold onto many memories of those nights because I would black out. Mike would order shots of whiskey for me and the rest of us. I would wake up with nasty hangovers and forget how I got home.
It was the only place I wanted to be after leaving my lousy job until one day I stopped going.
I was forced into rehab at forty-one. I never said goodbye to the Bargoyles. They heard about what happened to me through social media. Rehabilitation took a month before I was released.
I wouldn’t go back to the bar on La Brea, but I learned that Mike would move back to Connecticut. No more sappy songs. No more Bargoyles. The band would break up. I almost felt like the nucleus—the cause of their breakup.
The bar burned down while I was gone, too. They changed ownership and gave it a new name. This all happened during that month as if the world had turned upside down. Every time I hear those songs, I think of Mike and the Bargoyles and how much I miss drinking. I’ll walk by bars and poke my head in, wondering if I should have just one innocent pint of beer. But I know one would turn into two, that two would turn into four, that four would turn into eight….
I keep walking with those songs in my head.
