Succo Pazzo
By: Jack Jenkins
You know it’s a good bar when you can smell the fishmongers and the motorway is so close it puts out cigarettes and ruffles the old boy’s hair. You have enough money for two beers. You drink the first one quickly then bring the second to a table in the corner and sit with your back to the wall. People try to make friends but, in Albania, only the young speak English and you are the only young person in the bar, so they grow bored of you and turn their attention back to the football and then it is late and glasses are being collected and people stumble away until it is just you, sat in the corner, picking a scab on your ankle while the bartended hums showtunes and mops the floor. You have barely touched your second beer. They can’t kick you out if you still have a drink. Perhaps the bartender will let you stay here tonight in a little camp bed on the floor. Perhaps he will finish his mopping and pour himself a beer and look you straight in the eye and say, why don’t you tell me a story.
And you would tell him about Ciro, how you met him on the night boat to Bari and how the two of you spent two months tramping around Puglia. You and Ciro grew up on other sides of the planet and yet you look identical, with the same thick black hair and prominent brow and weak, pointy chin. Everyone you meet, at bars and hostels and park benches, everyone mistakes you for brothers, and for some reason this feels good, although one night you meet a Dutch lady who says you have different eyes, who points with the blunt end of a bottle and says, you have the eyes of a child who has lost his mother in the supermarket and you, pointing now at Ciro, you have the eyes of a dog chained to a post at the end of the street.
You suppose it was inevitable, the speed with which you fell for Ciro, ambling through the haze of your months together. You think that, at some point, you did sleep together, although you can’t be sure and then, one morning, you wake up to find your back has been ravaged by bed bugs and Ciro has vanished. Probably for a walk, you think, as you get up to make coffee but, when you go through your bag looking for cigarettes, you see your passport is gone and you know, in an instant, that he isn’t coming back.
And you still have some beer left. You have rushed the story and you aren’t ready to leave, so you grope around for something else and you start telling the bartender about the afternoon you and Ciro spent in that town square, how the sunset cast long shadows across the paving stones and the fountain had been washed into shapelessness by a hundred years of acid rain. You and Ciro sit side by side, barely speaking and almost touching as you pass a 2-litre carton of wine between you. By sunset your head feels soft and pliable and Ciro’s teeth are stained a feeble, milky shade of red.
An old man shuffles through the square. He has a long jacket covered with pockets and lank blonde hair. He stops, surrounded by a blast zone of pigeons, then turns and walks towards you.
Non ho monete, says Ciro, pulling out the lining of his trouser pockets to demonstrate and sending a rain of tobacco and lint down onto the ground below him. The old man shakes his head.
No, I do not need your coins. I have come to tell you about this wine, he says in slow, careful English.
Scusa amico, è quasi finito, says Ciro, giving the carton a little shake to demonstrate.
No. The old man shakes his head. I need to tell you, to warn you about this wine. It is very dangerous to drink this wine. They make it in a town close to here. I have been there. In this town they use a powder, a … you watch him search for the word … a conservante. Very bad for the brain. The old man puts a finger to the side of his head and turns his hand, as if using a corkscrew. In Italy only the barbones drink this. Everyone knows about this wine.
The old man stands in front of you, waiting for a reply. You move your head to the left and line him up with the fountain in your vision so that the water squirts from behind his greasy blonde hair. Ciro rolls two cigarettes, lights them both, and passes one to the old man.
Grazie.
Preggo.
You watch him shuffle across the square, pigeons flocking from his path and then resettling behind him. The light has almost vanished now and the town bells ring behind you. Someone is practicing the trumpet in a nearby house. Ciro grins, takes a long drink, and then hands the carton back to you.
Juca loco? you ask, unsure of the Italian. Ciro laughs and shakes his head.
No, that is how we would say it in Spanish. Italians would say ‘succo pazo’.
You take a long drink of crazy juice then hand it back.
Succo pazo.
You both lapse into silence. Ciro watches the ember of the cigarette between his fingers. It is a university town and you have vague plans to try to sneak into a student party later but, for a moment, everything seems very still and perfect. Events are about to rush past you – cold and lonely on a park bench, staring down at an empty packet of painkillers, unable to remember if you have just swallowed them all, or crouched beneath a rock, watching two dogs fighting atop a mountain. Your knuckles rap on a fire door bathed in red light and a man with no teeth holds up two fingers as you climb inside a tree which has been scooped hollow with lightning. Ciro buys another carton of wine. You drink it in an abandoned dockyard filled with giant gulls and rusted machinery.
Excuse me … sir. We need to close.
The bartender has finished mopping and now he is stood beside a security guard, a big balding man with a very neat beard, muscular in that way which is somehow specific to Albanians. You lay your final note on the table and stand up to leave. Outside the air is cool and your feet take over and lead you down to the ocean.
Jack Jenkins is a writer and editor from Bristol, UK. He works for the children's publisher Curious Universe and runs the indie publisher Goatshed Press. In his spare time Jack writes strange, confessional works of fiction.Website