Free Bernard Boyce Bennington & The American Dream by Peter Crowther Page A

working day…like a small way station situated at Civilization’s End, a final resting place before plunging off into who knows what, the huge sea of uncertainty that stretches, sweeping across time zones, to infinity in any direction.
    The clientele of The Working Day stand or sit on that island, on the welcoming boards and stools beneath the pleasantly calming lighting, listening to the music wafting from Jack’s CD player beneath the counter, catching sound-glimpses of the sea of humanity that roils outside the doorway upstairs, kind of like listening to the sound of the real sea caught in a shell washed up on a lonely beach, thinking every so often of its mystery, the never-ending swells and the currents, sometimes playful, sometimes harmful, wondering whether their course at the end of this night or the next night or some night soon should be straight on out, beyond the lights and on into the shadows. But they rarely choose that course.
    Mostly they go back, these folks, back into that which they know, at least secure in the knowledge that they can return another night and face the same decision, with a glass of beer in their hand or a malt or a highball, and maybe a cigarette in the other, or a stogie, with maybe Chet Baker singing a soft refrain from the speakers, thinking that maybe—just maybe—maybe tonight they’ll head off to something new, something different. Because the opportunity is there and that’s all that’s really needed: the thought that the situation can be changed and so it’s not so bad.
    A few of those almost-intrepid adventurers are here now, not exactly considering their options—at least, not consciously—but they’re here and they wouldn’t know how to answer a question that asked why. They’re just here. And though they don’t know it, they’re dreaming.
    These are the chosen few, these patrons momentarily lost on the long road of life. These are the few who have the potential to question. Some—though not many in this establishment—question too deeply when they get around to biting the bullet, and find they’ve submerged themselves and lost the way…find that the asking, so much asking, has left no room for answers. They only know, these terminally lost souls, that they took a drink, or maybe a couple of drinks, over maybe a couple of nights, maybe more, to get here…so maybe taking a few more drinks might help them to get back. And if it doesn’t work tonight then maybe it’ll work tomorrow night. Or the night after that one. Then the trick is getting through the long parched wildernesses that exist between those nights.
    And that’s when the dreaming becomes a nightmare.
    But the people in The Working Day know the ropes, know how to read the liquor…how to make it work for them and not against them. These people are the healthy ones; they still have questions, sure, but they keep a tight rein on them, keep them from building up so much strength that the questions turn on them and consume them until all there is is the liquor. And still more liquor. Liquor that they don’t use to work up the strength to ask any more…now they use it to drown out the noise of their asking.
    For as we all know, no sound ever truly dies—particularly the sound of an unanswered question; it just keeps on getting softer, drifting up with the smoke around the top of a room or amidst the branches of the trees in the park or nestled with the pigeons on the narrow ledges a couple of stories up above the city, looking down on the streets and whispering its insistent refrain to you time and again…because that’s all it knows how to do.
    And then, all there is is the streets…and most everyone knows that, for most folks other than the hardened store-doorway-dwellers and the troglodytes that live in the labyrinthine tunnels that criss-cross beneath the city, there are precious few answers to anything out there.
    For the people gathered tonight in the Working Day, some answers have been