Title: Gloria

Author: Chris Else

In: Sport 7: Winter 1991

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, July 1991, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 7: Winter 1991

[section]

You go West far enough and you get back to the East someplace and, at the back of the East, there's another world where nothing is quite the way it's supposed to be, where people are shadows, where words flap around in the wind like tattered flags after a battle. There ain't no reason in a place like that. It's a wild country and if you don't have no laws and lay them out good and clear and nail them down with a bullet, then you've got nothing left but desert and cactus and the vultures picking over the bones of the dead.

—Oh, my boy, my boy, my poor, poor boy!

Filling a man with whiskey is turning him over like a rock. All the fears and fancies lying there quietly in the shelter of what he thought he was are suddenly out in the open. They go crawling and wriggling and scuttling away as fast as they can or else they come slashing out at you with their teeth and their tails, trying to get a strike in first. I guess there are more kinds of drunk than there are hours in a day and some folk can drink their way through most of them. There's drunk that's brave and there's drunk that's yellow. There's drunk that's miserable, drunk that's sad, drunk that's happy, strong, weak, sick, dead. There's drunk that's cold and logical, like Nick Wright, the gambler, whose wife died of fever before she was twenty two, and there's drunk that philosophical, like Judge Sam Carter, mean as buckshot when he's sober, but always ready, somewhere in the second quarter of the first bottle, to give you the fulsome benefits of what he calls a classical education. Worst of all, there's drunk that's crazy, like young Mickey Haggarty.

—I had a dress of yellow silk, remember? Such yellow, golden like the daffodils.

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