The man limps in, already walking tilted. He comes here to flap his blackened gums all night long at anyone who’ll listen. With his suspenders bowing out like parenthesis and his big nose glowing red, he wobbles up to the bar and orders something light. He starts slow and then speeds up, like a boulder tumbling downhill, straight till last call.
“I’m trying to watch my figure,” he says, patting his bald tire of a gut. He means it too, but for hard men with late-night vices, it’s all things in moderation, especially moderation. People like him stack up regrets, like old Playboys or shut off notices.
He splashes down a foamy mug of Michelob Light. Ever since the whole "transvestite" thing, or whatever, the regulars here would rather be found murdered than caught dead drinking Bud.
The man takes a big, tall chug and peers around the bar, looking for tonight’s audience. Sizing up guys, looking for good company who’ll sit there and listen while he spews his bullshit, thicker than the cow shit he tracked in on his red wing boots. He targets newcomers or people from out of state. Folks he’ll never, ever have to meet again, sober.
Dirty Willy only ever talks about two things: How much he loves his wife and aliens from outer space. The wider his suspenders bend and the higher his tab gets, it’s more that second thing, though. The space invaders. I’ve seen this routine every week for a decade or more, but it’s a bartender’s job to be an ear that hears, not a mouth that talks, so I listen as if it’s my first time. I “ooh” and “aww” with the rest of them. I keep the booze flowing like lubrication for his dry, dusty lips.
Willy hurls his voice at a group of young dudes in clothes that fit good, “You fellers look new. Come a long ways?”
They don’t answer. Standing there, stiff and overdressed, they’re locked into their own conversation. They speak in a language Willy recognizes but can’t understand.
We get a lot of Canucks here at night, pit-stopping on their way to or from their homeland. Visiting “the states,” as they say. They wear expensive clothes that look cheap. Designer flannel and unscuffed workboots. Factory worker beards that cost a fortune in oil and waxes to shape. Just poorboy perfect. They always smell like oak-moss and sandalwood. And pot.
“Ah, Canadians,” Willy guesses, “My favorite type of alien.” He moves fast, closing in on them, smiling and talking loud,
This gets their attention and the five of them go quiet and turn to face the old nut case.
“And let me tell you,” Willy smirks real big, polishing off his second mug of the night, “I know a thing or two about aliens.” His words line up with broad, friendly motions, with all the scripted spontaneity of a stage magician. He’s banking on their politeness.
Before I fill him up again, he gives me that nod he gives. He tells me, without saying a word, that it’s time for heavier beers.
Dirty Willy’s own flannel hangs by the door, stinking like roadkill and motor oil, frayed and faded. He wears a plain white t-shirt of thin cotton, stained with tobacco and coffee drips. A blurry, blown out bald eagle tattoo is inked cheap, on his forearm. It’s carrying the Confederate “stars and bars” in its talons. The seams near his armpits are burst through with scraggly gray tufts of hair.
Seeing that, the Canucks are sold hook and line. They check their weird, futuristic phones, clicking buttons. The white lights of photography flash in Willy’s haggard face. Here we have a genuine example of American hickdom, roaming free in his natural habitat: a dive bar at midnight. While not rare, this particularly pungent specimen comes adorned with an oversized belt buckle and rotten teeth and tin-foil theories and all.
They act real friendly and I act right back. Canadians pay for their booze, reliably.
“Now my wife,” he starts. “Boy-oh-boy, what a woman. She makes a damn good pot roast.”
He forces out a long sigh, and empties the rest of his mug while they wait. Their extra big Canadian eyes stare without blinking, black as crystal balls.
“But,” he continues, “One thing she does not abide is me yapping about spaceships full of little green men. Not at her table, lord no!” He gargles up a slug-sized loogie and drools it into his own drink. “And you can understand why. What with the boy around. Don’t want him up all night having terrors. ‘So what,’ I say, ‘if it’s true, then what’s the harm in him knowing.’ Still, she don’t want the boy corrupted.”
The group laughs the way you do when you see an orangutan jerking off at the zoo, until Dirty Willy gets a stern look that morphs his goofy face into something scary. His features sharpen and frost in the blue light of the Coors sign. He scans each of their eyes with his, looking them, one by one, right smack in their mapley souls. He stares for one beat of silence before moving on to the next. He does this to all five men, landing hard and stopping slow on each, before making his play. They look green in the light of the neon Heineken logo.
“But you guys,” he speaks low, bending one eyebrow up, “You guys don’t mind a little bit of corruption, do yuh?”
He says it quiet enough that they’re forced to listen close and strain their ears to hear him, but loud enough that they can’t lie later and say they didn’t. He sucks down the whole rest of his beer, listening for five "No"s. To Dirty Willy, that means “Yes."
The moment they all agree, he switches back to smiling and jolly, offering to buy them a round. I give him that nod I give, telling him, without one word said, that he’d better actually pay for those drinks. He nods back, and I fill up six tall mugs while he begins the same way he always does.
“It was on a lonely, cloudless night. A telescope kind of night, with clear skies straight across, from the mountains to the forest, nothing but stars shining. I was trudgin’ home, weary…eh…roughly ‘bout two tallboys north of here, on this same road.”
The group watches Dirty Willy’s wild hand gestures, quiet as a blizzard.
“It was a night with no traffic. No coyotes to scare off or owls hooting from the trees. Erie too. Felt dead, except for me and my,” his gut rumbles, and he lets out the first of many long, grizzly burps, "My bottle of Jack. The air was still and thick, almost like you had to wade through it."
One of the Canadians sips his beer as slow as hot coffee and asks, “Was there an increase in atmospheric pressure?”
Dirty Willy sinks his drink, and I fill ‘er up again.
“Listen here,” he points a greasy finger at the smug one and lets fly with burp number two, “Now I know this is gonna sound bat-shit crazy, this story I’m tellin’. But hand to god, ain’t one word’s a lie. I was heading home to my beautiful wife, whom I dearly love. That ain’t no lie neither. She gets all pissy when I tell this story. Doesn’t believe it one bit, either.” He’s leaning heavy on the counter, slurring his words. “But I still love her anyways. You got to love ‘er, right boys? You gotta love your wife, don’t cha?”
His head swivels around, loose on its hinges. He makes sure they all agree. A few nod. The short one speaks his strange words into his watch like he’s got a screw loose. When I fill up Willy’s empty mug, he taps two fingers on the counter in a gesture that I recognize. It means we are moving on to hard liquor.
“Hmmmm…” Willy holds his free hand up to his face, pinching his thumb in front of his lips, before he snaps his fingers. “OH! Now I ’member. I’m walkin’ down the roadsie, not a sound heard, when there I see it. Rye there, floatin’ up in the sky, pollinatin’ the whole night with its bright lights. The mothership! Hoverin’ up a-buh me! Rye there plain as the piss in my britches.”
Dirty Willy points up above the tall foreheads of his Canadian gaggle like he’s calling a home run. As though he sees the UFO right here and now, floating through the bar. For a silent, still moment, it’s just him and that empty space. His cheekbones glistening wet, he whispers too loud saying, “What the fuck you want from me, man. You know I got a wife and a newborn comin’.”
The last local yokel slams the door hard on his way out, and the noise breaks Willy out of his trance. He picks up his freshly poured glass of Johnny Walker and shoots it half down in one toss. Pointing over at the empty mugs, he says, “How ‘boww suttem stiffer. Unless Canada’s just a bunch of sour pussies?”
One Canuck, the tall one, chimes in and waves me away, saying, “I’ve had a sufficient quantity of alcohol. I will reconvene with you, my fellow normal Canadians, in the RV.” He walks briskly, robotically into the night, alone and confident, as if to prove it to himself that Willy’s tall tales are nothing but the sad, drunken ramblings of a confused old hillbilly. The rest of the boys all settle in, wide-eyed and stone-faced. Drinking on their own dime from here on out, I pour generously.
Willy scratches the side of his head, truly lost in his own wet brain.
One of the four guys left, the one with the holes in his ears big enough to stuff a hot dog through, he says back, “You were informing us about the interstellar space craft materializing in the sky. You noted that you vocalized obscenities, pleading that you are a married man whose wife is in active reproduction.”
Dirty Willy pounds the counter with his empty glass, hard, and his words tumble right back into the story. I’m already pouring more, “lubrication” while he continues, frictionless.
“Rye, so there I was, stanin’ there on the rowside. I motherfuckin’ blink, an BOOM, I’m layin’ flat on my belly, sprawled out and the wood door slams shut, hard.” He points at that same Canuck with the ear holes and says, “You know wha I mean by slammin’, dontcha?” He winks a few times and says, “Yeah, boy, I bet you fuckin’ do.”
That fella, still washed in green neon, looks at me and says, “Ho, bartender! I request a popular, cheap beer for my exit, please.”
I hand the guy a cold, tall Bud Light.
Seeing this, Dirty Willy squeezes out a thin fart and a long chuckle, pointing at the scandalous aluminum can.
He’s midway through another burp when the Canuck with the ears grabs the idiot by the front of his white cotton shirt and pulls him tight on up to his tippy toes, “Sir, do we have a problem?”
Willy, that close up, he squints into the man’s mouth and says, “You got some sharp teeth, mister.”
Then a moment of silence, the two men practically nose to nose, making eye contact the way you only do when it’s time for killing or fucking.
“One moment please,” the smug one rubs his designer beard, “Am I correct to recall that you claimed the alien space ship is outfitted with doors made out of tree-wood?”
The other Canucks, all at once, break into sterile laughter, the short one catching this all on video on his fancy space age phone. The guy holding up Dirty Willy; this video will be playing on a screen at his wedding. They’ll all drink and laugh to this moment for years. And Willy, the dumbass, is lucky that the good humor of it shines through, because that guy drops him like a hot turd and storms on out to the RV they’ve got parked right outside. And then there were three.
By the time Dirty Willy gets this point in his alien story, it’s just us and the Canadians. He swaggers and sways in the rough seas of a liver in peril.
“My wife is a good wahman, boys. But in that hodel spassse ‘aucer full of all those green alien men, my beautiful wife, my beautiful peggant wife,” the tears start to flow, while he rubs his beer gut as if he, himself, was nine months with child. He lets out a pop and wheeze of a drunken fart before mustering the words through his sobbing, “In that room with all thoss ‘trangers, I coulden even remember her preddy face.”
Dirty Willy goes on about seeing patterns and colors, about how the aliens probed his stupid asshole. He says “they had these big”, he sobs and extends his arm span to measure about the length of a 40 ouncer. “These big fuckin things.” By now it was down to just him and the last Canuck left, a little short guy with one of those floppy hats on.
“Between you and me,” he moves in close enough to mix their sweat, “Them aliens, they knew jus what they were doin’. They knew jus how to stuff me full up with their space alien parts. All night long…mmmm…they had me laid out, beggin’ for mercy.”
The last audience member, abandoned by his countrymen, just stands here watching, sober as the day he took his driver’s test, while this sun-bleached old trailer trash throws his arms around like a man on fire. The Canuck has his phone out, recording every tear and burp and fart. Documenting the way the little green men from outer space had all taken turns turning him inside out. How they manipulated the laws of physics and bent the flow of time, until his butthole hung open like a baby yawning. Dark and wide as a black hole. Sure as the pole of the US flag was planted into the surface of the moon, so too did they plant their flags into Dirty Willy’s moon.
He tells how the whole spaceship, with its particle board furniture and its nicotine stained walls, smelled like a thick fog of cologne and shit, how these aliens have a glowing, purple shimmer in their eyes that make strong men weak at the knees.
Dirty Willy whimpers, “I love muh wife, the way a good Christian man should, but whah she doesen know won erter.” Telling how he sucked on those aliens’ space peckers stronger than the vacuum of the void, after they got done probing him, while the bunny-eared TV on the space ship played infomercials about vegetable juicing machines. That’s how he got the name “Dirty Willy."
He makes a fist with one hand and slides it back and forth through the crescent fingers of his other hand, bragging about how those strong dark aliens zooped him right out of this world. Took him over the edge of event horizons that his wife, bless her heart, could never dream of taking him.
“Cease,” the last Canuck throws up his hands. “I have reached the maximum limit of my capacity to process your fabrications.”
He places a stack of bills on the table, neat and unwrinkled, before heading out to the RV with the others. It’s getting to be that time anyway, and looking at the money, my mortgage is likely well paid. Dirty Willy, hardly able to stand, I give him that look, and even as drunk as a skunk and twice as smelly, he knows exactly what it means. He takes one final pull of whiskey before stumbling his lonesome way out.
But, when he’s about halfway between me and the door, it opens up all on its own. Then, in steps one of the Canucks, the fightin’ word one with the ear holes and the silly goose taste in drinks.
“Sorry fella,” I call out. “Closing time.”
“I have returned, merely, to apologize for my past transgression,” he steps in, eyes wide and round, like big black buttons.
A Canadian, apologizing. I never thought I’d see the day.
“Oh my,” he says. "The person does not appear safe to venture to his dwelling alone.” He calls to me again. “What is the approximate distance he must traverse?”
I tell him it’s far. Really far walking and even further than that if you’re tripping over whiskey legs.
“Are there alternative lodgings nearby?” The Canuck asks. “Just for the night, until the earth rotates further on its axis?”
I tell him about the old UFOtel, two tallboys up the road. I say he can’t miss it, on account of the big flashy spaceship-looking sign. I warn him to watch out for lot lizards.
The Canuck wraps one arm around Dirty Willy and follows me leading them out the door. They walk into the silent dark, in tandem like conjoined twins, with not a cloud in the sky from the mountains to the trees. I watch the twosome wander farther down the road. Getting smaller and smaller. Almost out of sight, the man with the ear holes glances back, and I could swear I see a faint, violet flash in his eyes before he and Dirty Willy disappear into the night.
Then, it’s just me all alone in the parking lot, totally empty with not one single RV parked and I can’t help but wonder if Dirty Willy won’t get abducted all over again, out there, beneath the twinkling starlight.
-- Brandon Yount is a writer, born and thrown to the wolves in Northeastern Pennsylvania. His work has been previously published by Horror Sleaze Trash. Follow him on Substack and on Instagram.