Astoria.

I had a bleeding heart stomach ache. The whiskey I just gulped flowed through my vein and dealt me a solid knock in the face. The two attempting-to-be-younger 30 odd year olds laughed at me while I talked aimlessly about the possible transit strike.

“I'm stuck in Astoria every day” I mumbled, with what might be considered 'dangerous' breath. I must have smelled like a furnace after a fire... “Why can't everyone else suffer like I do?”

They chuckled inanely. The fat one with warts wasn't interested, but she was polite. The thin, cute one with an Irish accent pushed me. “What street are you stuck on?” she smiled, like a devil looking for a signature on a binding document.

“29th” I thought about lying, but what was the point?

“I live on 30th” If this was a porn film, I would be filling her various orifices. But this was real life and it seemed like a bad idea.

I sipped my whiskey. The guy turning 70 next week grabbed my arm. “They're striking no matter what”. He was so sure and so old, how could I not believe him? His grip was firmer. He needed something to hold on to. He was in a room with people so much younger then he. I wondered why, but later my question was answered. “I have no one left”, I was quizzing him, because I thought maybe he wanted to fuck me because he touched my arm so much. “No wife?”...”No wife” he said “kids, nephews, anything?” I mistook his loneliness for some sort of perverse homosexual desire. He just wanted to talk. But Christ, Dude, stop touching my arm. “No, everyone's dead. Yesterday...Well, Wednesday, I guess that was yesterday, I put a reef on my sister's grave. I saw my headstone. I'm next.”

I told him about my 96 year old grandmother. “She's bonkers.” It didn't do much for him. I don't talk to 70 odd year olds as a general rule. I don't hate them, I just don't usually find myself at a bar at 1am talking to them. “You're so young” again with the arm. He HELD HARD. He was grabbing on to me, I thought, because he had nothing left to hold on to. “Your parents must be worried about you”. I could have taken that miserably, like there was something wrong with me, but instead I took it at face value. “Well, they do call too much”.

I had to walk out. I'm turning 25 next week. What happened to 16-24? I thought. I'll be 70 soon enough. What was I doing here?

I bought Paul a whiskey. He was talking too fast with some Canadian about health care. I didn't give a shit, but I could see Paul did. If I ran back to the bar to buy a drink I knew I was buying some piece-of-mind time. I kept looking back and I stared at the 70 year old man's face. He was so fucking lonely. There was no one else. Not in this moment. He couldn't look beyond this shitty Astoria bar. This was what was left of his life. He'd be dead soon enough. Why not hang out with some mid-20's kids? If he wasn't around dead people, he wasn't dying.

Still, he didn't figure on some 25 year old Jew who has lived his entire life afraid of death. I looked in his eyes and I saw myself in 45 years. Alone, wrinkled and at some shitty Astoria bar assuring some kid that the transit strike was going to happen. If I wasn't steadfast about it, he thought, I might be wrong about a lot of things. I gotta tell him I know it's going to happen, or somehow my life is meaningless. If I can't talk with authority at 70, then life's a shit worth shit.

I told Paul we needed to leave. I gulped my whiskey, nodded to the 30-something nymphets and ran out into the cooling rain. Life's too short to be worrying about life, I thought. I don't smoke, but I lit one up and walked a few blocks home. Carpe Diem, I thought. Carpe fucking diem. You couldn't catch me fucking dead in 45 years lamenting to a stranger. That's not me. I'm not that fucking guy.

So I inhaled deeply and stood in the rain for a second. “I hope he's right about that transit strike” I thought. “Everyone'll be trapped in Astoria like me” I thought.