Bah Humbug! (ManxMan)

Episode 2 - A hot beverage before going to bed sounds nice.

The trust—that false faith George had been willing to hold onto became the very venom that tainted his innocence for a lifetime.

He was just a man, a boy even, when his life got flipped upside down, turned inside out. And no matter how strong he was, he knew that he could only be broken once. And when he became broken there was no putting him back together. George knew that at a young age. No matter the effort, it doesn’t matter. He understood that he would forever be shattered. Forever broken. Damaged beyond repair.

He had accepted that his childhood was never an innocent affair, but a choreographed lie. He had accustomed himself to the truth that not a smidgeon, not even an iota of innocence was left to dwell in his young soul, for he had seen how terrible life could be. And that was the truth.

Therefore, it couldn’t be helped who George became now. He was the kind of man who’s quite untrusting of people he meets, cherry picking on the work his employees did on a daily basis, placed every little thing under the speculation of a microscope for he knows that man—known for their vile nature—couldn’t be trusted. He grew up with a liar for a father so he knows. George knows. He knows, and he’d be damned if he ever let his guard down.

He tipped his bottle of Devil’s Harpoon into his mouth, toasting a patron who just ordered a bottle of the Pregnant Santa—another one of George’s products, which was a well-spiced and seasoned mix.

“Nothin’ like a good ale to get rid of them ails, ain’t that right Bona?” asked the patron, his voice dry and chafed, which could either be due to long hours of work or too many bottles to drink. George didn’t care for neither of these reasons, for as long his bottles were sold. That. That’s all that really mattered.

It was definitely a white Christmas with snow booting up to one’s ankles right outside the tavern where George found himself settling in, away from the menacing rip of the cold climate that had managed to turn a quiet little town into a chilling inferno.

The pub looked like a time capsule from the sixties. Or even earlier. With its old jukebox stashed in one corner by the pool table where men—who were too young to even be drinking—were showing off to their girlfriends bouts of machismo evidenced by their mixing of beer, vodka, Red Bull and absinthe. They would down the mixed drink with incessant chugging, coupled by the revolting singing of curses. Girls swooned at this, which made George snort at the inexplicable recklessness of today’s youth.

Over to the other side of the bar was the drinking hole where shelves behind the bartending waitress were stacked with both colorful and colorless liquor, the colorless looking pure and yet had the most percentage of alcohol. The waitress—the one George fondled just the other day—was busy serving the downpour of patrons, popping open bottles of Bona’s products and serving beer by the pitcher from the dripping tap of the barrel that doesn’t seem to go dry, what with barrel after barrel getting consumed by the almost demonic consumption of alcohol their quaint little town was famous for. If there was a fight for the book of world records as to which town drank the most, theirs would surely top the list beyond the shadow of a doubt.

George swished the ale in the bottle he held in his hand. The consistency of the product inside the bottle was as clear to him as it was dark. Clear in the sense that he knew every molecule that made up his own product, and yet it was dark in the sense that it was incredibly addicting. And as he consumed what remained of the bottle to the last drop, he knew, he knew that the only reason he’d gotten into the business of making beer was due to his struggle to forget. To forget the past and everything it stood for. What it represented.

What’s funny about drinking was that most people did it to forget. And yet George finds himself remembering every hurtful detail of a life he wanted to let go of. The memories clung to him the more alcohol he consumed. There really was no cure for repressed memories. The only sure way of forgetting hurtful things was through lobotomy, and that sure as hell wasn’t something George was ever going to consider. He might be emotionally unstable with his troubled past, but he wasn’t a complete basket case. He was insanely sane, thank you very much.