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Post by Tommy DeSilvio Jacobs on May 25, 2009 14:05:53 GMT -5
It had been much too long of a week, Tommy thought. And while he wasn't a drinking man... he rarely even had wine... he just felt like he would be justified in having a drink tonight.
The Leaky Cauldron was the closest place he knew of where he could get a firewhiskey, which he liked when he was in these moods, so he walked along the streets on London to the small, hard to find pub.
When he stepped inside, his eyes did a quick scan, just to get a feel for the clientel inside, and he stepped up the bar. There was a young man working it, and he waited patiently until he was noticed. When he finally had the bartender's attention, he asked for a firewhiskey.
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Post by Dante Santino on May 25, 2009 16:24:16 GMT -5
The Leaky Cauldron attracted all types of wizards and witches. Some were dodgy characters who hide in the shadows and rarely spoke, while others were well-dressed and well-spoken. Most were somewhere in the middle. But there weren't many that dressed the way the newest arrival was dressed. Having worked in New York City, Dante had seen many people who looked much like this man did. The stockbrokers, bankers and businessmen of New York would never fit in at the Leaky Cauldron, and that was how this man was dressed. Not that it didn't look good on him. Dante could see some witches eying him up with a good deal of interest.
He nodded at the man's request for a firewhiskey--another surprise--and went to pour him his drink. Setting it in front of him, he said in the slight American accent he had developed after 8 years in the States, "Here you go, mate."
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Post by Tommy DeSilvio Jacobs on May 25, 2009 19:33:04 GMT -5
Unlike Dante, however, nothing about this encounter surprised him. It was a small little pub in magical London, and was exactly what he expected it to be.
Until the kid behind the bar spoke to him, and his eyes shot up. "Are all bartenders in London American?" He asked, sort of offhandedly. He didn't entirely expect an answer, but the last dingy bar he'd been dragged to, Stu's, had a pretty, flirtatious girl that also spoke with an American accent, and it was sort of a strange coincidence. His own accent was very Brittish, and definitely proper British.
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Post by Dante Santino on May 25, 2009 21:36:30 GMT -5
Dante let out a slight chuckle. It was an odd question, actually, and he wondered to himself if this gentleman had seen many others with American accents. Strangely, his thoughts flew to Shana. But... she wasn't here. Of course she wasn't. She was probably dead. In any case, it was unlikely he'd ever see her again.
At that thought, Dante poured himself a shot of firewhiskey and took a quick sip. He liked the soothing burn. It helped him to forget.
"Oh, I'm not American. I'm originally from Britain, but I spent a few years in the States. I used to sound just like you."
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Post by Tommy DeSilvio Jacobs on May 25, 2009 21:45:39 GMT -5
"Oh. Well, that makes sense. I don't suppose you've been to Stu's? They have an American bartender. Now I'm not so sure though. Maybe she's like you and only sounds American."
He was talkative tonight, and unsure why. The firewhiskey hadn't even hit his system yet, so he took a shot, not even wincing as it went down.
"May I ask why you spent so much time in America?"
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Post by Dante Santino on May 25, 2009 21:55:04 GMT -5
Dante hesitated. Usually it was the bartender who asked those sorts of questions and helped the customers talk out their problems. It wasn't usually the reverse. Still, he needed to talk, and he had no real friends here anymore... and he couldn't talk about these things to Gabriella.
Taking another sip from his shotglass, he said, "The question isn't why I stayed, it's why I went in the first place. I stayed because I liked it. I made friends there, I put down roots.... I was happy. But the reason I went.... well, let's just say I wasn't happy here. I was running away, and I never intended to come back."
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Post by Tommy DeSilvio Jacobs on May 25, 2009 22:05:55 GMT -5
Tommy raised his eyebrows. "Well then, that begs the question... why did you come back?" You weren't supposed to return to the place you ran away from. Especially if you'd been gone for a few years already. He never ran away from anywhere (that he remembered) but he felt like he knew this instinctively.
"Was it a girl you came back to? It's always about a girl, isn't it?" He had no idea how close he was to the truth, and he would have felt bad had he known.
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Post by Dante Santino on May 25, 2009 22:41:44 GMT -5
He still didn't know the answer to that question. He missed his family, and yet, he hadn't bothered to contact them directly. He'd run into his sister and father, and hadn't even seen his mother yet. He wasn't even sure she knew he was home.
"I was running away again, I guess. From a memory." He finished off his drink, then said in a sad tone, "You're right. It is about a girl. Only she's not here. I don't know where she is, or if she's even alive. I loved her... but she vanished. And I couldn't deal with the memories, so I came home."
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Post by Tommy DeSilvio Jacobs on May 29, 2009 8:45:22 GMT -5
Tommy smiled, but it was close lipped and sympathetic. "Memories aren't like people. They don't stay where you leave them," he said. Except for his, it seemed, as there was a chunk of his life missing, but what could have happened when he was 8 or younger that actually mattered anyway? Running away from your memories never quite worked.
"But I'm sorry she's gone," he added, lifting his glass in a silent toast to the kid and drinking some of it down.
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Post by Dante Santino on May 30, 2009 1:07:17 GMT -5
Dante nodded quietly. The man was right, of course. Dante knew that all too well. In New York, the memories of his family had followed him around like a shadow. And now that he was home, Shana's memory now hovered over him, weighing him down.
"No, you can't run from memories. But sometimes you just need the comforts of home, to remind you of what's important. And eventually you realize that you don't really remember why you ran in the first place."
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Post by Tommy DeSilvio Jacobs on Jul 20, 2009 2:14:57 GMT -5
Tommy shrugged. "Home's never really been a place to me," he replied. In fact, he had a habit of leaving places. It probably started when he ran away when he was little, but he couldn't remember that event.
"Home's wherever your heart takes you. Sometimes, your heart follows a girl. Sometimes it's family, a career... but you're just coming back to a place, and it doesn't mean much."
He gave a grin after that, which transformed his face, and asked Dante for a refill of his drink.
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Post by Dante Santino on Aug 20, 2009 17:38:30 GMT -5
Dante shrugged. He supposed the guy had a point. Like they said, home was where the heart was. And maybe that was the problem. His heart and his home was with Shana, and she was... gone. Maybe she was dead. Or maybe he'd given his heart to the wrong girl, a girl who couldn't love him back the same way. But he couldn't bring himself to believe that. Both of those possibilities were unbearable to him, and that left him lost and directionless. He didn't know what to think or what to believe. All he knew was that Shana had his heart and he was just an empty shell. Maybe he'd come home, hoping to fill that empty shell. Or maybe he'd come home because he felt he had nothing left to lose.
Whatever it was, he was here now, and he had to find a way to make it work for him.
"You're pretty good," Dante said with a wry smile. "Ever think of being a bartender?"
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Post by Tommy DeSilvio Jacobs on Oct 29, 2009 13:21:31 GMT -5
Tommy didn't even smile at that question, but just said a simple, "No. Not the job for me."
When he was younger, he was much more fun loving and relaxed, always smiling. Then again, he'd been a child who didn't have even a quarter of the experience he had now. Not that he could remember any of that any way.
"So is that why you do this?" He asked, eyebrows raising. "To make people feel better about their problems? Let me tell you something, honestly here: those problems are never going to go away. Whatever you're running from, it won't ever stop chasing you."
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Post by Dante Santino on Dec 20, 2009 21:02:59 GMT -5
Dante sighed softly. "Yeah, I know," he said. "I'm just delaying it for a while. Sooner or later, my dad will find me, and I'll deal with it from there. But I don't work as a bartender as a way to hide from my own problems. I'm really a writer... I pour my pain out on the page. I think I'd explode if I didn't have that outlet. But because of that, I can see other people's problems more clearly."
Although he didn't say it, the truth was that sometimes he tended to wallow in his pain, to squeeze out every drop of it for his writing. It was easier to do that than to try and actually solve his problems. He probably could have made up with his father years ago, if he had wanted to. But Shana's disappearance... that was something else entirely. If he even had the slightest clue where to begin looking for her, he would be travelling the world to find her.
"Pour you another?" he asked, pointing to the man's drink.
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Post by Tommy DeSilvio Jacobs on Apr 19, 2010 17:09:24 GMT -5
Tommy eyed the kid in front of him. Why was it that so many young kids were becoming bartenders? He was used to having the hardened old men serve him drinks... but maybe that was just the choice of establishment he freuqented. Still, it seemed like a rather disturbing trend to him.
"No, I'm fine, thank you." He wouldn't ever have more than one drink in public.
"Are you a published writer?" What he really wanted to ask was if writing actually helped him with his problems. He didn't think it would, but who was he to judge? "How old are you, twenty three, somewhere in there? What problems have you managed to accumulate?"
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Post by Dante Santino on May 25, 2010 23:48:26 GMT -5
"I had one of my poems published while I was staying in New York," he said.
Of course it had just been the one. In general, he did not show his work to anyone. Shana had been the exception. She had kept asking him about his work until he finally broke down and showed her a few. One poem had touched her so deeply that she had begged him to send it for publication somewhere. What she hadn't known at the time was that it had been about her. He had refused to send it anywhere, of course, but every time she saw him, she tried to talk him into it. The night they slept together--the night she disappeared--he had finally confessed that the poem was about her. After she disappeared, he sent it to a magazine in the hopes that, where ever she was, she would see it and know he was thinking about her.
But it hadn't worked. She either hadn't seen it, or didn't care, although he refused to believe the latter. And something in him still couldn't quite bring himself to believe that she could be dead. She had to be alive somewhere.
"I'm 25, actually," he continued, feeling a bit defensive. Yes, he was young, but that didn't mean that he couldn't have problems. "Not only did I get kicked out by my father, but the woman I love disappeared right after I finally told her how I felt about her."
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Post by Tommy DeSilvio Jacobs on Oct 19, 2010 15:35:08 GMT -5
Tommy eyed the boy up and down. 25, 23... it was the same thing. And as he listened to the problems that Dante explained rather briefly, he almost chuckled. "You'll survive."
Maybe it was a cold thing to say, but Tommy didn't feel like he should sugar coat things. The kid was 24, so a girlfriend left him. So what? There would be dozens of other girls in his life. And he seemed to be doing all right without his father.
"But good for you on that poem, hey? You should get more out there." He took a look around the place, just checking out who was there. If he saw any of Clarice in the boy, he didn't recognize it. It has been years, after all, since he saw her anyway.
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Post by Dante Santino on May 14, 2011 22:10:41 GMT -5
The one trait that Dante shared with both of his parents was an almost unmovable stubbornness. It was why he'd left... he and his father were like two rams crashing together, pushing with equal force and not moving at all. In the end, one of them had to either give in, or go away. Dante was never going to be his father's good little mafia boy. He was never going to accept the business, and Marcello was never going to accept Dante's refusal.
Clarice, of course, was equally stubborn, and it was very lucky that, most of the time, Marcello and Clarice agreed. Anytime they did argue, however, it was ugly.
At the moment, the thing Dante was most stubborn about was showing his work to others. Although he considered himself a writer, he was always uneasy about showing it to anyone. The rejection was too hard to take, and besides, he never really thought his work was good enough.
But he didn't need to go into any of that with this stranger. So he just nodded. "Yeah, maybe," he answered vaguely. "Wonder how my father would react? I've never even told him that I write poetry. He'd probably think I'm a sissy or something. But I bet my Mum would be proud."
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Post by Tommy DeSilvio Jacobs on Jun 20, 2013 0:40:29 GMT -5
"Mothers always are," he replied. Or so he'd been told. From 8 years old and forward, he hadn't had any trace of a mother figure in his life.
"Why are you here?" he asked, the question sudden and without any kind of prelude. "I get the running away from the memories and all that kind of nonsense. But why here? For instance, I'm here because for once, in a rare a while, I felt like a drink and this was the closet establishment to the inn where I am staying. You, on the other hand, come here every night, or close to it, and you'd be lying if you told me it wasn't depressing."
It had to be depressing. One glance around at 90% of the clientele, and he was depressed. He'd only been here ten minutes. He couldn't imagine coming back night after night to this. What a lonely existence... not that he had room to judge.
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