You have to understand, for the first part of my “adult” life, I was a beer man.
This was back when I was working for the Japanese, back when I was starting my own company, back when the “craft beer” thing was a new, beautiful, and completely honest religion. I’d watch these guys, these beautiful, mustache-wearing bastards at a pub, take down a pint of some dark, foamy shit, and they wouldn’t pull back ’til the glass was half-empty. The foam on their beard. A quiet “ah” as they let out a satisfied, gassy belch. It was the goddamn Marlboro Man, but with hops. And I wanted in.
And Christ, I was good at it. Old Ben Franklin, he was right. “Beer is proof that God wants us to be happy.” I was a happy drunk. Not the angry, fist-throwing kind. No. I was the giggling, “I love you, man” kind. I didn’t like bars, those quiet, desperate, and completely soul-crushing meat markets. I loved breweries. The food, the vibe, the honest, beautiful noise of people who were just drinking, not hunting.
But the truth? The beautiful, ugly, and completely honest truth? It was all a goddamn lie.
I was “happy” because I was clueless. My wife, that quiet, respectable, and completely ruthless operator, she already had her exit plan. She was already gone, her bags packed in her head. And I was the last poor bastard to know. I was “happy” crashing my truck into the side of my own goddamn house, blaming the “black ice” when the real culprit was the six-pack of beautiful, ugly, and completely honest delusions I’d had for dinner. I was “happy” celebrating my own early retirement at 35, sitting in my “man room,” surrounded by kegs, a king in a quiet, empty, and completely fraudulent castle, with no one to even throw me a goddamn party.
The beer, it was just… a costume.
And then, the divorce. The nuclear bomb. The “great reclamation,” as I call it. The quiet, respectable “happy” drunk, he died in the blast. Because you can’t put out a goddamn nuclear fire with a pilsner. No. A war like that, a real, ugly, beautiful, soul-crushing war… it requires something with teeth.
It requires whiskey.
And that’s when I met him.
Mr. Pendleton. A beautiful, Canadian brew in a manly bottle. It went down smooth, like Crown Royal, but better. It wasn’t just a drink; it was a goddamn partner. It was the kind of whiskey you want to dab behind your ears. It tasted like the old shipyard days, like the bottle of Jim Beam I’d drink every night after getting conned into that first, sexless, joyless marriage. It was the taste of beautiful, honest, and completely unapologetic rage.
And Pendleton, he became my only friend.
He was the quiet, loyal, and completely non-judgmental eyewitness to the whole goddamn beautiful, ugly, and completely glorious clusterfuck of my new life. He was there for the shenanigans. He was the one who remembered (when I didn’t) who was in my bed, who was leaving my house, who I was giving money to.
He was my crutch. My anesthetic. The beautiful, brown, and completely necessary poison that kept the real poison—the lawyers, the loss, the failure, the quiet, screaming loneliness—from killing me. My daughter wasn’t seeing me. My old life was a smoking crater. I was depressed. And Pendleton, he was the only one who understood. He was the only one who didn’t ask stupid goddamn questions. He just… numbed it.
But he was a dark friend. He demanded payment.
I wasn’t the “happy” drunk anymore. I was the Pendleton drunk. Angry. Pissy. Stupid. Self-destructive. He was the excuse for a long, beautiful, and completely predictable line of bad decisions. He was there when the women were fighting over me, when they were breaking into my goddamn house. He was there when I was sponsoring the “Last Band Standing” at Amalia’s, a beautiful, drunken king, and people were just… handing me glasses of Pendleton. I had so many I didn’t even have to pay for my own goddamn poison.
He was there when I got the DUI.
And he was there when my ex-wife, that beautiful, cold, and completely calculating bitch, showed up to drop off the kids and saw the citation. And she smiled. A “glowing, smuggish,” and completely triumphant smile. The beautiful, ugly, and completely honest face of a woman who had just watched her enemy step on a landmine. And in that moment, I knew… Pendleton was a hell of a lot more loyal than she ever was.
He was there, in my system, when I grabbed some poor bastard in the passageway of my own bar and cracked his goddamn skull. I don’t know if the guy ever made it. It’s not on my conscience. It’s on Pendleton’s.
I finally stopped drinking that beautiful, ugly, and completely honest poison when I left Bend. I left the war, so I left the goddamn armor behind. In Sedona, the anger just… faded. I don’t drink like that anymore. The fire is gone.
But now, sometimes, I look back at that bottle. That old, dark, and completely necessary friend. I picture the two of us, two old buddies, sitting on a porch, watching the beautiful, ugly, and completely silent silhouettes of the Southwest, a cigar in one hand, a glass of Pendleton on the rocks in the other. And we’re just looking back at the beautiful, ugly, and completely chaotic war we survived together.
Thank you, old friend. You were a real sonofabitch. But you got me through the goddamn night.
