Gross. He has dried spit in the corner of his mouth.
So funny. I wonder where he’s from.
Leave me alone! I don’t care about the stupid beer-coaster collection you’ve got.
Should I ask for her number? I think she likes me.
My blood went cold as the din of noise from the room and the din of noise in my head became overwhelming. It was so loud. I couldn’t hear any one thing anymore. I was hearing everything and unable to discriminate between sounds I wanted to pay attention to and sounds I didn’t want to hear, sounds that were actual, and sounds that were coming from...I didn’t know where.
“Jesus Christ! Are you deaf? I said I want a Guinness.”
I looked helplessly at the man at the bar facing me, wondering if he’d actually said that, and realized that his lips had moved, so he must have. I grabbed a bottle and took his money, ready to run from the room with my hands over my ears. Instead, I turned away from the customers and faced the brick wall that housed shelves of liquor behind me.
The voices wouldn’t stop, and somehow the brick wall drew my eyes. It was a comfort for some reason, maybe because it was still and cool in a noisy room. I imagined that brick wall in my mind, thick and tall, containing the wild cacophony of voices, and suddenly...the voices went silent. The only noise I was hearing was the club noise again. Music was pumping through the club’s system, and there was a general din of conversational noise with random roars of approval and anger over whatever sports game was currently playing on the screens.
With a sigh of relief, I turned back around, shaky and sweating. I didn’t know what was happening, but I was scared and still had another two hours of customers and one hour of behind-the-bar cleanup. And then what? What was wrong with me? I’d have made a joke about needing to be committed, but I was too afraid that it was true. I didn’t even know how to explain what was happening to me, much less whom to talk to about it. Maybe I needed to call my aunt and ask if there was any history of mental illness in the family.
“You okay?” Barry, my fellow bartender, came over to me with a look of concern. He was a guy in his forties, had kind of a Hawaiian visage with long black hair tied in a ponytail, dark, happy eyes, you know? Smile lines around his eyes and mouth. He was a guy who liked to laugh. He also liked to eat. He had a slight paunch in his midregion. “You sick or something?”
“I’m okay.” I ran a hand over my forehead. “Just a headache.”
“Need to go home? Johnny could fill in for you.”
Which was true about Johnny. He jumped in whenever one of us had a crisis. “I’ll be okay.”
“All right. Let me know if you start feeling worse. Don’t be a tough guy.”
“I promise.” Such a sweetheart of a guy.
The rest of the evening went by in a blur as I did my best to keep up with the orders coming in, though half my brain was preoccupied with trying to figure out and find an explanation for what was happening to me. By the time it was last call, Barry said he’d cover me and told me to go home and get some rest. He said he’d handle the cleanup on his own, and I wasn’t going to argue with him. I was anxious to get home and start worrying some more about what was wrong with my brain. I figured I could look up my symptoms online and see what came up. Probably schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder.
I had to park a couple of blocks away from the apartment. It was a short hike back to the security gate, and though I was feeling pretty freaked out about what I was starting to think of as my medical condition, I still kept my wits about me. It was two in the morning, time for the weirdos to be out and about. I had a moment when I wanted to chuckle, thinking I fit the description better than anyone else around. I seemed to be the only one hearing voices.