Life Among The Ruins

The Goldmine Hotel, a bar that during its heyday had acted as the beer-soaked townhall every Saturday night, was now a place that seemed abandoned by time. Only a few bombed-out relics from the old days would frequent it now. One notable regular was John Dunn, a bloated old man that had the look of an old cowboy actor. John drank whiskey—and that was evident on account of the smell he exuded. Anybody enticed by the bar’s lurid neon that draped its front façade would eventually fall victim to one of John’s stories. What he had to say did not seem at all true, but rather a version of his life that seemed to comfort him in its telling. One could at least gather from his stories that he was once a wealthy man, but how he accrued his fortune was still a mystery. People supposed he was either deliberately quiet on the subject, or that the whiskey had helped him forget it. Either way, John would wail on about some character he knew once or something that happened on one of his ‘trips’, while the other patrons would look into their beer glasses as the jukebox spit out a tinny country song. Each of his stories ended the same way—with a resigned sigh, which sounded ghastly due to his removed lung, and an assertion that everything was different now, and that things like that didn’t happen anymore.