When I go drinking, I drink for pleasure. I am not one of the morose, at least not while I am drinking, at least not while I am drinking at the Three Stallion Inn, at least not until the morning after. Now these days the Inn has been franchised and shoots have sprouted in so many cities, but in my mind there is nothing like the ORIGINAL on 23rd Street, the one frequented by taxi drivers who had not been home in decades, whose birth-cities had changed names and forgotten them. These drivers would come in for the goat-curry-SPECIAL, a quite-expensive dish they had to pay for through an installment plan.
When you ordered the SPECIAL, the proprietor shouted out your name for all to hear – for a moment you were an important man – and the proprietor rang a gong so the butcher standing ready in the alley knew to pluck a bleating pre-carcass out of the pen, and the animal was slaughtered on the spot. Halal or Jhatka, you could have it either way. Then over the next month or year – depending on the elasticity of your appetite – that goat-meat would be reserved for your consumption. You were forbidden to share it with friends, enemies, strangers. This was a rule appreciated by a good portion of the clientele, because it enforced an equality of generosity, discouraging show-offers and givers-away.
Now sometimes if the goat-meat had been around for long enough it would spoil, and the eaters would come down with pesky infections, and sometimes an eater would die. But that did not matter because there are so many people in the world, and every one of us is replaceable. A hint of death-excitement hung about the Three Stallion Inn, this rotting meat-stink that hit you when you walked in, but then the smell was overpowered by the waves of tobacco smoke – cigarette and cigar and cheroot and chillum – and then after your nose had been blinded to those as well, you would come upon the man clutching his stomach in the corner, face screwed into a knot, and you would have to ask him, “Why do you do this to yourself? Do you have a deathwish? Are you, perchance, a romantic?” And sometimes it would be too late for the man to answer.
By paying an extra fee at the outset, you could choose to have your special spirit-animal – your exclusive ghost-goat! – preserved for posterity as a wine bag. I had selected this deluxe option when I was younger, and then I had made it through the SPECIAL-order without succumbing to salmonella, shigella, coli, proteus, staphylococcus, welchii, cereus, botulinum, or streptococcus. I had paid off the loan-sharks who operated the installment plan and after that I had become a freeman. I could come to the Inn and go as I pleased, and I could order any of the other dishes on the menu. All that said: I was mostly there to drink, and even though my goat-bag had a metallic taste that infiltrated whatever spirit I filled its innards with – I did not mind.
Instead, it was the super-real that left a queasy in my stomach. Look, I may have been a regular drinker, and not a morose one at that, but I was not so far gone that I did not know which way was up and where the cellar door lay. The Three Stallion Inn was finger-jointed into the regular world – yes – but it was also set apart from it, in an orthogonal. Like drinking taken too far into the morning and the afternoon, when you walked out of the dark bar into the sunlit afternoon, and you were faced with your others coming out into the street dressed in their office-selves.
My ale-friend, the string-theorizing chauffeur, he said the place existed in two more dimensions than the ones you and I could perceive – this was why your particular goat-bag could be made instantly available in any of its many franchises. I decided the first dimension was hope, and the second was pain. But he said no, he was speaking about mathematical constructs that should not be conflated with our experience of sweat and tiredness and blood.
[More from: The Three Stallion Inn]
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