What an interesting place the ‘Hero of Waterloo’ is. Full of history and all that endearing nostalgic stuff. Between the fancy ties, the beaten up dropkicks and the urban hippies this sure is a pub full of all the flavourful people one could want or despise. One could stare and gaze at the tall walls for a long while and still not fathom the muscle that built them. A place that’s gone through more than one could imagine. Though when one steps inside the story seems a little different.
Your eyes are drawn to the ceiling which is varnished and worn. The floorboards creak as you walk through. The tables and chairs are made of wood from the finest Oak. The young barman looks jumpy and the crowd seems over enthused. But as you walk in through the doorway your eyes aren’t drawn to the rich olden times but to the big old man on his Hutching’s piano.
The old guy looks a tad bedraggled and past his prime. His hair seems to have a life of its own and his pants are frayed and are falling faster than his drooping eyes. In one hand he holds a lit coffin nail and the other a brown paper bag. In his jacket pocket the culprit of his coffin nail; a box of buffalo deluxe cigarettes. His hands seem to remember the notes whilst his head attempts to play a key or two itself. After the song is done, someone claps quietly. The old guy sticks his head up quickly, ruffles his hair and looks around twice. He takes a puff from his buffalo and a swig from his brown paper bag, dries his lips on his sleeve and continues playing. It all seemed rather rehearsed.
Looking around, it wasn’t hard to see why this guy was playing inside this little old shanty.
As the gruff octogenarian opens his mouth, one hopes to hear those words of old, those experiential words of wisdom. Yes one could hope to hear those million dollar words; hear them firsthand before they had been sold to the world! But the old fella just kept dribbling on about his dead friends and his dog. This wasn’t going to be anything ground breaking.
But for one brief fleeting moment, the sightless man gazed over to me. He gives me one smile and a brief chuckle before quickly turning to his piano and slamming his fist on the keys. The sound seemed to pierce through the wooden cavern of beer and forgotten history. The crowd remained silent. With a shrill laugh and what sounded like a toast to his fallen comrades he continued smashing away.
The gruff old man continued drinking his dreams away, bashing the keys softly. I watched as he tapped his feet out of time. He seemed to have lost the knack for what he was doing. Nobody seemed to care though. And I’d like to say neither did I. But this old man was a character, he was something else. Something from the streets. Something worn and aged. He was an amusing old chuck.
He just kept playing that night; as if he were waiting for some privileged and fated purpose to be realized. He didn’t seem like he was going anywhere.
I returned through the doors of the ‘Hero of Waterloo’ a couple of nights later, eager to be amused by the utterances of the stage drunkard. Hopefully tonight, it all might be different. I was surprised, the crowd had cleared out. The barman was nowhere to be seen.
I looked up at the rich oak tables. My eyes followed the intricate cuts in the wood, the faded browns, the hollow reds. I thought of the previous life that inhabited the surfaces. As I blinked my eyes stopped at the sight of an empty ash tray. It was the big old fella. Sitting on the table with his back turned and his head staring at the ceiling. He seemed perfectly still and transfixed. Lost in a time that I could not imagine he had ever seen before. Perhaps to where he would rather be?
I turned my head to the piano. Sitting still beneath it, wrapped in a brown paper bag was a broken bottle of gin. The smell of cold liquor mustered in the air. The stagnant scent of age lingered. The old man was silent.
I left the man to his memories.
Flip
