Dark Lord Day

by Joseph S. Pete

Good Eats YQR

The veteran scored a $200 ticket to his first Dark Lord Day, a celebrated craft brewery’s annual bottle release of a molasses-thick Russian Imperial Stout he long had been meaning to try. Thousands descended upon a suburban industrial park every year when they tapped the Dark Lord stout, which craft beer enthusiasts talked of in hushed tones as though it were a mythological creature, a wizard, a panjamdrum, the black arts incarnate.

It was just another craft beer, although a jam-packed one expertly brewed with roasted barley, dark chocolate, coffee, honey, molasses and black malt. But the drinkers acted like it was manna from heaven.

​The bearded, bespectacled masses milled around for hours, trading hard-to-find bombers of craft beer and chatting about IBUs while heavy metal bands blared in the background. They often huddled in ponchos and cut-up trash bags as the rain poured down while they waited to haul off the prized stout, which came in wax-sealed bottles adorned with images of a menacing, axe-wielding Satanic figure with antler horns and skull-clad armor. They got messed up. They got really far gone.

​They polished off pale ales, India Pale Ales and Double India Pale Ales that were so strong the odd straggler ended up passed out on a wooden pallet in the morning hours, as the graveyard of empties grew ever larger. They drank farm fields’ worth of hops.

​The veteran finished a few 22-ounce Double India Pale Ale bombers on the eve of Dark Lord Day, and they hit him hard before he knew it, to where his eyes were blurry, his tone bombastic and his mind mawkish. He was just getting started. He switched over to a six-pack of a Scotch Rye Ale he bought because he hadn’t tried it, then downed a few leftover kolsches, and sampled a coffee stout and a lobster ale he hoped was brewed with water used to boil lobsters but suspected was just marketing balderdash. He worked his way down to the low-end 36-can case Canadian lager that was popular in America only because of the exchange rate made it ridiculously cheap and that he turned to only when he no longer cared about the taste.

​He was bloated and woozy, more so than normal.

Every night, the veteran drank so he could get to sleep, but he often tried to tell himself it was for some other reason, to unwind after work or because he deserved it or whatever. On this exalted night he was celebrating his first Dark Lord Day. He was imbibing alone as he often did. He drank late every night so he wouldn’t be kept awake by memories of mortar shells landing on the children’s hospital. He had been on QRF, or Quick Reaction Force, and they were dispatched to hunt down the mortarmen who bombed the hospital, likely to blame it on the occupiers as a hearts-and-minds propaganda gambit.

A helicopter swooped overhead, feeding his platoon directions, but they never even saw the target. They ended up mucking around in a swamp, futilely pressing ahead until they were more than waist deep. Some nights, if still sober enough in the blackness of his bedroom, he could feel the reeds brush against him, his boots sink in the mud. He could feel the fetid water inch higher, its rank odor prickling his nostrils.

In the dark, if not too self-medicated, he could see the children they later carted out of the place where they were supposed to be safe. There was a procession of tiny, ashen, blood-flecked corpses he had failed to protect.

He sank deeper into the swamp, pressing ahead blindly. He never made it to Dark Lord Day, waking up at four in the afternoon and realizing the coveted stout would be long gone. Knowing there were no refunds and that he just pissed away $200, he decided he needed a drink to console himself. He cracked open another beer.

*

Joseph S. Pete is an award-winning journalist, an Iraq War veteran, an Indiana University graduate, a book reviewer, and a frequent guest on Lakeshore Public Radio. He was named the poet laureate of Chicago BaconFest 2016, a feat that Geoffrey Chaucer chump never once accomplished. His work has appeared in Rat’s Ass Review, The Grief Diaries, Chicago Literati, Dogzplot, shufPoetry, The Roaring Muse, Prairie Winds, Blue Collar Review, Lumpen, The Tipton Poetry Journal, Euphemism, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pulp Modern, Zero Dark Thirty and elsewhere. He’s boarded a tramp vessel before, and once told a guy about a thing.