Charlie Huston, Guest Blogger: Another Bloody Mess
FLUIDS 101
Bartending often serves as a introductory course in bodily fluids.
Call it Blood, Spit, Urine and Vomit 101: A general survey of liquids and fluids, viscous and non, generated and/or expectorated by the human body under alcoholic duress.
Most people audit it in college. Sit in a few times, get a feel for the material, and decide it's not for them. Others sign up as soon as they see it in the catalogue. The take advanced topics and specialities. A few attend seminars, endure orals, become masters. The select, willing to invest the time and effort required to compose a thesis, are eventually granted the status of doctors in the art. Whether you advance from there into the professional ranks depends greatly on your ability to translate the theoretical into the concrete.
It's one thing to talk about the puke you just saw sprayed all over the inside of the can at the local off-campus, it's another thing entirely to be the guy with the sponge and the mop.
I was the guy with the sponge and the mop. Not that I employed them very often. Not as long as the effluvia was restricted to the confines of a single bathroom in any establishment with two conveniences.
Brother, that's what out-of-order signs are for.
Anything on the open floor, anything in great enough quantity to puddle, that was another matter. A little pride of position, please. Let's get the regurgitate off the floor before someone slips and falls in it.
Not everyone was so well schooled in their calling. I've walked into bars that reeked of excrement. Human excrement. Unmistakably human excrement, floating in a thick strata all its own in the dead air of the place, while the reeling drunk bartender did a back bend over two stools to allow slobbering customers to take body shots of Don Pedro out of her belly button.
As you move up the bartending ladder, away from frat bars (that's the gutter, well below the bottom rung that is generally occupied by transient-junkie bars located withing two blocks of bus stations) and up toward fine dining establishments (same booze and behavior, more veneer), the fluids become more rarefied.
Less puke, more blood.
Odd, but true.
Not the kind spilled by violence, but quite a bit of accidental blood. Chalk it up to a higher proportion of inexperienced heavy drinkers, a greater likelihood that customers sufficiently monied to pony up for an $18 martini may be of an advanced age and more prone to the stumbles, or the chances that any drinking taking place is in the context of a special occasion or a business account (both incite an overestimation of one's capacity for top shelf booze, vintage wine, and caustic digestives.)
B fell into the advanced age category. God knows he had a hollow leg. I'd watched B and his boyfriend pass through opening rounds of Manhattans, knock off a warm-up bottle of Prosecco before moving on to Barolo, ease into desert on two glasses on limoncello, pause for a sip of port before closing on a tide of grappa (speaking of caustic materials), and sashay out without the slightest totter.
Which is why drunkenness did not rate high on the list of reasons explaining why they walked out of the place one night, and made it halfway up the block before B keeled over, dropped dead-weighted, and cracked his head on a steel trap that lead to someone's basement.
A customer standing out front, waiting for a table on a summer night, came inside and asked for towels. I brought the towels. I also brought a chair. But when I saw the amount of blood, and the sprawl of B's limbs on the sidewalk, I dismissed entirely the idea of easing him up to the chair.
"I want to get up."
"I know, B, let's just hang here for a bit."
"This is silly. Who are these people? I just fell, that's all. This is silly."
There were some people standing around. Not rubberneckers, it was a quiet neighborhood and these were neighbors. They wanted to help. There was nothing to do. Just stand around while I held towels to B's head and watched them turn slowly red. B's boyfriend was holding B's hand.
"He just fell down. He just fell. We didn't even have anything to drink. Just a bottle of wine. We were walking and he just fell down. He didn't trip. He just fell down."
"I want to get up. This is silly."
B kept trying to stand and we kept gently holding him down. This was clearly one of those don't-move-them accident scenarios.
Blood was all over my hand, running up to my wrist, dripping onto the trap, pooling.
The EMTs showed up.
They asked B some questions. His boyfriend tried to answer and they hushed him, wanting to hear B put it together, listening for signs of concussion.
In the end they loaded him on a gurney, allowing his boyfriend into the back of the ambulance, and pulled away, no sirens, no need to race, B was going to be fine.
I went back to the restaurant. Someone had stepped behind the bar while I was gone and I asked him to stay there for a few more minutes while I found a couple plastic to-go bags, walked back to the scene of the accident, sopped some blood from the trap, dropped the ruined towels in the bag, and took them down to the basement where we stored our trash barrels, and where I dumped them. Before going upstairs I stopped at a slop sink, rinsed my hands and arms, doused them in bleach, rinsed, repeated, washed with soap and hot water, dried off, and went back up to the bar.
B was never quite right after. It was months before I saw him again. I gathered he'd had a stroke. And then his boyfriend started coming in alone.
The blood that I'd smeared over the trap down the street was hosed away by a porter or a super, washed into the gutter.
I'm Charlie Huston. I wrote a book about trauma scene cleaning and family. It's called The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. I'll be here all week telling true stories about messes I've seen, helped clean up, and made.
Be well,
-c
I don't know how you decide the next book you read (I'm sure it's not just what I tell you!). For me, especially before I started getting a flood of upcoming releases in the mail each day, it was often some combination of bookstore serendipity and the slow accumulation of recommendations from other readers. Those two combined a year or so ago when I finally picked up my first Westlake: after all the admiration I'd read for him (and Stark), often from 
