Your Birthday is Never Your Deathday

Just a nice night out with some old friends from High School

Many thanks Jon T of Ferns of Columbo for input and deft touches here n’ there.
Special incidental music also designed by Jon.

---

"OK, so that's two Sunrise Birthday specials, extra dirty, and I'll be coming over to get your order as soon as you're ready."

Mannie stepped away from the table and cursed himself for not saying anything.
Now the moment was past. Not quite: if he turned around now and said ‘Hey I know you guys from high school don't I?’ then they could all have a laugh together about old times.

So the moment was passing, not actually past. He could still turn around and take those three paces back toward the table and say ‘Hi Barry happy birthday, Hi Chrissie remember me? I only just realized it was you’, and then they could all have a laugh together and bask in the nostalgia of good old times at Gaumont High. Go Go-Goers!

So it wasn't too late yet. He could still take -

Now it was too late. Too many steps had been taken, too many moments had slipped past. Now headed to the bar area to place the drinks order, now stepping past Lucretia the night manager.

"Quiet night, Mannie. Good thing those two stepped in. Birthday, is it? Don't forget to order up the Sparkler Surprise. People expect their Sparkler Surprise."
"Yeah, Lucretia, actually you know I know them from-"
"Nice, but don't keep them waitin’ on their order, Mannie. Go get the drinks, they're lookin’ at you over here squawklin' at me." She smiled over at them, which though in theory was warmly welcoming, in practice was always a little ghastly.

Lucretia always said squawklin'. Mannie wasn't sure if it was an affectation, like an attempted piece of down-home humor reflected in a quirky word choice, or just a mispronunciation of some other word. Squawkin', like a bird? Sparklin', like a diamond?  Maybe squawkin' like a bird. But was he squawklin' like a bird at Lucretia? It didn't feel like he was.

As Mannie placed the order and hung out wordlessly at the bar while Luís prepared the drinks, his mind ran back those thirty-some years to when he'd last been together with his friends Barry and Chrissie.

---

Chrissie hadn't been Barry's wife back then, of course, she'd been Mannie's just-recently-broke-up-but-we're-still-friends-ex-girlfriend. It was by no means clear if she'd started going with Barry at that time, before they went away to college. Quite possibly, but still Mannie didn't imagine then that she'd get married to him just a couple of years later. Only found out much later, in fact. Long after they’d graduated from their Masters’ programs and Mannie’d completed his on-again-off-again Community College course in graphic arts.

Their last meetup had been in the town square just across the road from the Hijackers Bar n' Grill where Mannie was working today. It hadn't been Hijackers then, though, but a grim working-men's hangout called Molloy's where none of them would have gotten served. Not that they'd’ve been very welcome there, fresh-faced college kids in a bar full of truckers and storekeepers and farmers and tweakers. Or maybe they’d’ve been welcome, but for the wrong reasons.

No, they used to prefer hanging out on a parkbench in the little town park where they’d played as little kids on the swings. There they sat that night, swigging neat and fiery on a bottle of tequila that Mannie’d bought in the liquorstore using his fake ID in the name of John Whiskers Prescott.

The swings blew empty in the various winds as they passed round the brown paper bag with the tequila and winced in turn at the sting of the sharp flush of the liquor in their young and tender throats.

"So you're off to Charlottesville tomorrow?" asked Mannie. He swigged extra hard at the thought of losing them both in one day. The bitterness of the drink was acceptable when set against it.

"Yeah, all packed up," said Barry, taking the bottle as it came to him. Chrissie, sitting between them, dressed in her plaid winter lumberjack jacket and fur cap with earflaps, had passed it along unchugged this time. She seemed strangely self-contained and distant, gazing out beyond the riderless swings to where the winds touched the trees so they shook like soon-to-be-parted lovers in histrionic denial of their hour of departure. They were like from some TV movie that your Mom likes to watch.

"Goin' together?" Mannie took the bottle again but nestled it rather than taking a hit. He looked out toward the agitated treeline to see whether he could see what Chrissie saw. He saw just the trees blowing in the wind.

"Seemed like the logical thing, man," said Barry. "Going to the same college, same day. I have my Nissan, and Chrissie's folk need to visit her sick aunt over in Arlington. Makes sense, right?"
"Yeah, makes absolute sense" said Mannie, agreeing much too hard against his screaming inner No.
"Makes sense," murmured Chrissie, distracted, looking out at the whirling empty swings and the leaf-bearing winds beyond.

---

At Hijackers now, this evening, Mannie picked up the drinks, scenting that long-ago parkbench tequila, and mounted them on his tray. As he approached their table, he wondered if it was really true that they didn't recognize him, or whether they were bluffing at unaquaintanceship of their former best friend.

Mannie'd changed some in thirty years, sure, hair thinned to the point where a buzzcut might be advisable, his body chunked out with years and nights parked on the couch picking on chips in a bowl. But unrecognizable? Perhaps it was all just a charade, to preserve appearances. But appearances of what?

He set the giant fishbowls of Sunrise down and parked his tray on a neighboring table.

"You guys ready to order now?"
Chrissie was looking into her cellphone, organizing the snaps she'd just taken of her birthday boy. So it was Barry who ordered, looking over his reading glasses at the unknown server before him.
"Sure, we'll have the guac and chips for starters, then seafood platter for two. Is the seafood fresh?"
"It is fresh," replied Mannie. It wasn't.
"Local?"
"Sure, all caught locally down at Safe Harbor over by Deltaville." It wasn't. Frozen, shipped in from overseas in a container, trucked in from the wholesale warehouse. But these were the answers he was instructed to give. The backstories to the frozen food were uncontroversial in themselves and seemed always to go unchallenged.

Barry looked up from his fishbowl, let the cocktail straw fall. Glasses off now, scrutiny.
"Say, aren't you...?"
"What?" Mannie braced for the question, the recognition, the shame. Chrissie was still mercifully engrossed in her phone.
"Aren't you guys kinda quiet tonight?"
"Well, it is a weeknight," Mannie found himself turning to pick up his tray, and pushing it up toward his face. "Always kinda quiet on a Tuesday. I'll just go get your order now."

Lucretia hissed at him as he passed on the other side heading for the kitchen.
"You forgot the Sparkler Surprise! Make sure you get it right this instant. I told you, folks expect their Surprise."
"Look, Lucretia, I'm not feeling so good. Maybe need to come home."
"Come home? Don't you mean go home?"
"Come, go, whatever. Point is, Lucretia, I'm feeling ill."
"We're rushed off our feet here, and you're squawklin' at me about ill? Man up, Mannie. Comin' and goin'? Tough it out, mi hombre. And go get the Surprise before the sparklers get all soggy and too hard to light."

---

The years since Barry and Chrissie went away to college and careers and marriage were years that Mannie had spent hiding from them and from himself. In those days it was easier to lose touch with people. There wasn't the awkwardness of today, the sending of unread texts and the guilty ghosting, the jaggedy edges of lost contact. It was simpler then: just don't meet up. Forget that home number, don’t call, and draw apart into your apartness.

Where do you see yourself ten years from now? There was always a difference between how this question was answered, depending on whether it was given in a job interview, or staring into the void of the bedroom ceiling at 3am. In an interview it was always: "Continuing to further my professional and personal growth, and developing valuable skills" or some other such precious horseshit.

How Mannie answered this self-put question into the bedroom ceiling would differ some over the years, however:

Where do you see yourself ten years from now?

At 20 - back together with my girl.
At 25 - working hard to establish a place for myself in the world.
At 30 - working hard to make a living and maybe put a little by.
At 35 - working hard to stay off the streets.
At 40 - dead.
At 45 - dead please.

---

Others in his age cohort had started tweakin', late 90s. Rocks hit quick out in the loading bay, discreet. Or huffin': bag or two of paint-thinner out in the car before the shift. When faced with such transgressions, urged to indulge, Mannie made excuses and walked away. It was what Mom and George H.W. Bush would’ve wanted for him.

The others in his peer group, the ones who like him'd tanked their SATs? Well, they got married, or else started cohabiting - in second-floor apartments, or in little second-line bungalows, or in trailers in bleak second-growth trailerparks out on the secondary roads. But not him. No other, significant or otherwise, for Mannie Lasky.

He'd never saw the way to get there, to make that first connection with some girl he met through work, or in some tired bar on a tired Friday night. Because there was always that thought -

this is the curse you've laid on me
and then -

this is the curse you've laid on me
and then -

this is the curse you've laid on me 

and it blocked his tongue and sat on his mind when the time came to make just that little connection, say those simple words.

Who was the “you” of that curse? Mannie was no longer sure. He used to know, but he forgot, some time in the nothing years between when the curse was laid and now.

---

While he waited in the kitchen access zone for the guac and chips to be laid out, the Sparkler Birthday Surprise to be placed in its expected place in the center of the tray, his eyes were drawn to the storage closet in the back of the kitchen. Where Luís and Janet the cook liked to go and tweak, and maybe make out and do other stuff. There was also cleaning supplies there, and rat poison, mops and brushes, and cleaning supplies.

"Where you going?" called out Janet the cook. "The guac and chips are ready for ya, Mannie boy."
"Gotta go to the bathroom," said Mannie. "Back in just a sec."

---

The sparklers sparkled with birthday glee. It was a very special moment. Surprising, just as everyone had expected. Janet from the kitchen and Luís from the bar and Lucretia, all of them gathered round Mannie as he brought the tray and the Birthday Sparkler Surprise to the table. They all sang, as did he, with gusto and great joy.

As he set the tray on the table, he was handed the cellphone by Chrissie, who had her eyes on the sparklers and whose eyes sparkled too, but not in any way for him. She scurried round the table and snuggled up next to the beaming Barry, and Mannie knew then unbidden what he had to do.

Snap snap. Perfectly framed. A wonderful moment. The couple also much chunked out by couch evenings, but sleeker somehow, and more burnished by companionship. Flush with vigor they were alongside photographer Mannie, whose misery was made manifest in sallow skin and those seared lines of unregarded rage. But there’s no selfie of him at that moment.

"A very happy birthday, and many many happy returns to you on behalf of Hijackers Bar n' Grill," burbled Lucretia happily. It was a hideous thing to behold, Lucretia's empathy, a minor atrocity committed on the very concept of sincerity. Her enthusiastic singsong was made of dread and screams unheard.

But they bought it willingly enough, birthday boy Barry and beaming wife Chrissie, just as they'd bought Mannie's tale of the frozen seafood without demur. All of it tracked with the experience they knew they were buying here. Nothing was untoward.

Lucretia and the others had performed their surprise task, and now returned to their apportioned workstations.

"Happy birthday," mumbled Mannie as he passed the cellphone back to Chrissie. He looked over to Barry. "Happy birthday to you, I mean."

"And happy birthday to you too, Mannie," said Chrissie. "I hadn't forgotten that you and Barry share the same birthday."

To Mannie everything was now silent. The ambient noise continued, of course, but to him and to the equally stunned Barry, a bubble of real muffled befuddlement fell over the table. A gobbet of guac fell off Barry's chip. His mouth came wide open to reveal a shocked green slurry inside.

Mannie looked at Barry then at Chrissie, his head gyrating across the table like a spectator at a paralyzingly slow tennis match. Not his mouth but his eyes came wide open. The pupils widened to their utmost. In panic or in ecstasy, he had been seen.

"Uh, thanks Chris, Chrissie," he said. "Didn't recognize you before. Uh... How're you doing?"

If social unease were a bowl of dip, Barry and Mannie would have needed several servings more of chips to get them through it all. But Chrissie was strangely self-contained, distant somehow.

She didn't seem very put out by all these decades of displaced awkwardness coming together into one silent shuffling moment. She stood up again and came over to where Mannie was, stood next to him carefully positioned, and took a selfie with her phone. Mannie tried to smile.

She showed him the photo: her sleek tanned skin next to his sallow sunken paleness, her calm assured smile next to the grinning rictus of a desperate cadaver. The sheen of saliva leaked from the corners of his mouth, Mannie's eyes like caged animals seeking escape at any price.

"Let's take another!" said Chrissie. "With Barry in it! The two birthday boys an' me!" She said it like it was a barrel of fun, a riproaring diversion.

Mannie complied, shuffling at her direction to a spot next to her with Barry on her other side, like the arrangement on that windswept parkbench all those years ago.
She snapped an ill-framed selfie, arm protruding so Mannie's grim semi-grin was half-obscured. But the panicked eyes remained fully in shot. On the other side of the selfie-frame, Barry had recovered enough to perform a wan smirk. Not authentic perhaps, but adequate to the task at hand.

And out beyond the happy trio, beyond the dining room of Hijackers Bar n’ Grill, the camera registered a few stray pixels through the window. It was the old swingset in the city park across the road. The rusty frame was still intact but all the swings were gone, except for that one hamging down on one chain.

Mannie mumbled greattoseeyougain, picked up his tray, and left the table without looking back. He headed directly towards the kitchen this time, as if passing directly through where Lucretia stood surveying the jubilant scene.

Out on the street, another small group looked to be about to enter, squinting through the front windows into the bare interior of Hijackers. They seemed unconvinced as yet, but at this hour it was either here or the MacDonalds DriveThru out by the mall.

Lucretia beamed warmly at Mannie as he came near. This expression was a base insult to the very notion of human connection.

"So glad you're being friendly to our birthday guests, Mannie." She laid her hand on his shoulder. He could smell the washroom pot pourri on her fingers. "Birthdays are a very special time for our customers. You're makin' the effort to care. It's like you're comin’ out of your shell at last."
"I'm still feeling ill, Lucretia. And you know, it's also my birthday, so if you..."
"Well, happy birthday, Mannie! I'm pretty sure we can whip you up a slice o' cake come end of shift.” Now her with both hands on his shoulders.
”How ol... never mind. Happy birthday to ya."

The glare of her empathy was set full on him. The simmering threat of a hug was imminent, so Mannie pulled away from her grasp. Her scent was offputting. Carbolic and lime jelly. Eyedrops and something unclean.

"Uh, thanks Lucretia." But detached from his boss, Mannie had less direction than before. Instead of striding, he drifted uncertain.

In his mind he urged the folks in the street window outside squidging their faces to the pane, trying to detect any kind of spirit of enjoyment inside, to just take the goddamn plunge, and come on in. Then he could pretend they were busy, then he could limit the time spent at Barry and Chrissie's table. Make like the other table was urgently calling for him, anything.

But the folks at the window saw Lucretia turn a welcoming grin on them and they gave up. The prospect of takeout at MacDonalds, or no food at all and slugs of hard burning liquor at a dive bar, seemed so much more appealing now. They drifted away from her and out of the windowframe, and ambled off down the street. Beyond their vacancy was a broken swing hanging in the park and the empty town around it.

Lucretia meanwhile slipped a new ambient music CD into the player. But something was wrong with the disc. Slightly melted or worn or something. Easy sax jazz wafted through the room, but the sound was off. A tiny wobble flat and a pinch sharp, occasionally skipping from one bar to another. Not glaringly defective, just... wrong.

---

---

In the kitchen, Janet had finished the seafood platters and was just slicing lemons to garnish the plates. She heard a faint cracking sound and leaned to look over the service counter.
"Aw look! You went an' broke a bottle. We can't have broken glass in the kitchen. You gonna haveta clean it up, later."

The storage closet: cleaning supplies, mops and brushes, rat poison, cleaning supplies.

"No, I'll clean it up right now." Mannie headed through the counter hatch into kitchen, toward the closet at the rear.
"Mannie, wait." He turned round.

"What the fuck?" Janet was holding up a small shard of glass stained with marinara sauce. "This was in the food. In the platter. How the fuck'd it get in there, Mannie?"
"Fell in I guess, like bounced up from the floor when I dropped the bottle."
"And there's no whisky in that whisky bottle… What you doin' carryin' around an empty bottle in the kitchen anyway?"
"Recycling."

Mannie pushed through the closet door and hoped this conversation was at an end. It smelt of burnt crystal, bleach and dried discharge in there.

When he came out of the closet, Janet was rummaging both hands through the plates but Mannie knew she wouldn't find anything. Waste of time, a waste of words. He brought the dustpan out around the counter into the access area and started sweeping up the pieces of the broken whisky bottle. Janet was watching him silent and judgemental, but as long as she said nothing Mannie was content.

Lucretia pushed open the door. Off-kilter smooth jazz sounds flowed in, discordant and sour.

"We need those seafoods for table six. Right now, please."
"Just clearing up. Little accident here."
"Leave that and just take in the order. I know you’re not well, Mannie, I sympathize, but honey, we all gotta cope, just however we can."

Janet's burning stare of silent accusation and condemnation was far far easier to sustain than Lucretia's sympathetic look of fellowship and understanding. Mannie picked up the loaded tray and swung past her into the dining area, head down and burning-faced.

"So Mannie! We were just sayin'! Me an’ Chrissie. You're lookin' real well, man."
"Thanks, Barry, your appearance is very healthy too. I mean, much healthier than a -
a man your age."
"So whatchadoin' these days?"
"This."
"Oh, sure, but nothin' else right now? You were always a great one for the comic books. Drawin' and uh, letterin'? That's right ain't it? Letterin'.'"
"Yeah, that's right, lettering."
"Great that you're still keepin' that up."

"We're back in town to visit, first time in years," said Chrissie, cheery. "My aunt down in the Florida Villages died, and I guess I inherited her place. Favorite niece, all that."
"That's great Chri, Chrissie. I mean, sorry for your loss."
"Oh it's OK, Mannie, she was a giant pain in the you-know-what."
"So are you all movin' back here Chri, Chrissie?"

"Thinkin' about it," said Barry. "Hey buddy, I never wished you happy birthday." He stretched out his right hand.
"Neither did I," said Mannie. "I mean I did, but that was just for the job. Not me personally." And he shook Barry's hand. The touch was soft and warm against his eczema-scarred, clammy fingers. He wanted to squeeze hard and give him a knowing manful grip, but his clasp loosened in the slow crawl of the moment. The handshake withered and dropped away.

"What's this stuff?" said Barry. "You got some kinda powder on my hand, there, man." His look at Mannie flashed frenzied and momentary between warm friendship and ferocious contempt. The features shifted and rearranged on some microscopic scale, phasing through delight, fury and disgust and back again in milliseconds. It was fascinating to Mannie, this never-seen thing that Barry’s face was doing now.

Easy-listening smooth jazz buzzed up now coarse and sour, skipping notes and resolving into a bebop dirge of disquiet. Outside the broken swing swung softly on its chain just out of time to the slow rhythm.

"Oh, the powder. That's just flour," said Mannie. "We were baking a cake." He reached for a napkin and started dusting down Barry's hand. "Sorry 'bout that, bud."
"What kinda cake?" giggled Chrissie. She was well into that huge fishbowl of Tequila Sunrise, and was really starting to have some fun.
"Birthday cake," said Mannie. "We'll all be getting a slice o’ this birthday cake come midnight."

"Midnight?” she snickered. “But it won't be your birthday then, Mannie! After midnight it’ll gonna be just another day for you boys." Chrissie hiccuped suddenly, spilling her drink. Mannie saw a tiny drop of blood on her shirtsleeve.
"Oh I never serve birthday cake on my birthday," he said, lighthearted and giddy now. "It just wouldn't be decent, don’t you know."

And all three of them laughed and laughed again, just like old times.