Dead drunk on wormwood

Dead drunk on wormwood

fiction
edward w pritchard

There was something pathetic about Josie Sitzwell but no one would say; it being impolite to restate the obvious like that. He would collapse into that green John Deere folding chair he carried each day into work in the kitchen of the hotel where we worked and Josie would say every hour or two, after standing on his feet in the steam of the automatic dishwasher, " I am drunk on wormwood". Meaning he needed a break as he fell back into the canvas folding chair. When he was ready to get back to work cleaning pots, pans and dishes in the back of the hotel kitchen he would always say" best machine John Deere ever made", speaking about his chair. Josie was pushing eighty years old but since he sent all his social security money to Memphis Tennessee to care for his handicapped daughter in the Jolly Rogers retirement center he still had to work full time. The hotel was an old dilapidated Holiday Inn there in Akron across from the Summit Mall.

I was the night auditor at the Hotel where I would be hanging around the kitchen as often as I could at night to be around one of the girls who worked in the bar adjacent to the kitchen. That girl there kept me on a string so I had to work at talking to her. Josie got a kick out of me chasing after her and enjoyed kidding me about it. Once when he was being serious he told me I should get a legitimate girlfriend from the College I went to but I would have none of that.

One of the maids at the hotel got beat up back in the second story hallway near room 235 the suite used by the Jeanette Morganstern Dressmakers service who had a day room during the week and sold designer apparel from 12 to 5PM Monday to Thursday. The porters were off that Wednesday night after the day maid was banged up and beat about the head up there near room 235 and Josie and I ended up scrubbing the blood from the walls where her head had struck at least four or five times. Later she admitted that the assistant back up custodian had hit her because she was seeing two men at once. The maid and the custodian were both black and in those days nothing came of such matters with the police.

Josie was upset that the girl would get no justice and I remember he talked to her a few times about going to the police but she couldn't risk loosing her job over such a thing so the matter dropped.

About a year later, after I had moved on from the hotel business after graduating college and getting married, I was talking to Josie over at the Egg castle restaurant one night where he was working as the night dishwasher and busing tables. I mentioned to Josie, making conversation, that I heard the guy who had beat the maid up had been shot a few months after the beating incident and had slowly bled to death in the Hotel parking lot.

Josie was wearing a grease stained white torn apron and was balancing a mop and a half tray of dirty dishes as we talked about the maid who had been beat up by the assistant janitor. Just like that, cluing  me in on what he had done, Josie said " I guess that man was dead drunk on wormwood" that night when he lay out there in the cold between the cars bleeding to death.

Wormwood was a word from the Bible, it has something to do with Revelations but also Josie had told me once wormwood is another name used in the old testament for absinthe, a bitter herbal drink. Josie wanted me to know he had shot the man in the parking lot for beating up the maid. That's how Josie would tell a story, it could be a little confusing but he got his point across.

After that incident old Josie didn't seem so pathetic, to me at least.