One Night at "The Safari"

In a foreign bar, that’s much too dark,
he feels as if his ears might fall off.

A group of locals seem to be taunting him,
and if he had any clue what they were saying,
he might take some sort of hero action, such as
pouring a drink all over all of their shoes.

But he doesn’t, so he doesn’t. He doesn’t really care.

He spends the next several hours drinking tall glasses of
something that’s taste and metabolic reaction is
utterly unknowable to him, but he sees no reason
to stop drinking especially considering that
more just keep appearing in front of him.

The group of locals keep up their nonsense,
still seemingly at his expense,
when through a weird turn of syllables,
he misinterprets what one is saying
in their own native tongue, to be:
“He should just jump off a house”.

Having entirely too many of these liquids
filling his blood with something like
erratically blinking Christmas tree lights,
he makes it known, in no uncertain terms that
he'd like the sentence repeated.

They instantly become silent until one says,
(again in his own native tongue) something which
he misinterprets as “The attic. Now the attic”.

But in fact, it had the verbal tone more like:
“Easy old-timer, we’re just having some fun
completely unrelated to you and your
undeniably obvious troubles.”

Unfortunately, one of things he’s trying to forget
by drinking this liquid is his son’s tragic death.

Suddenly the drop that he didn’t witness is
recreated, in full color, right before his eyes, and the
whole thing sounded like the chips of someone
having a very good night going “all in” during
a high-stakes poker game, but only a hundred times louder.

Once this unwanted cinematic has completed
he returns to the foreign bar.

He is seeing beet red and awkwardly
steps “out” of his bar stool and confronts the men.

He spews a heated tirade at them (in a language
that even he doesn’t understand at this point)
only to have them sadly repeat “the attic”
over and over and over again, meaning him no harm.

He can longer take it and for the first time since the war,
he takes a swing at the nearest man with all he’s got.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), he’s a good 3 feet away from them,
and the follow-through of this unlanded punch,
spins him around violently and he loses his balance, falls
and brutally hits his head on the bar railing.

He hears the sound of the ocean.

The collective of men, stand over him sadly, afraid to move him
because of his convulsions and the rapidly increasing pool of blood
steadily threatening their shoes.

After the barkeep calls an ambulance, he rushes to him,
and shoos the group of men away to somberly continue
their conversation, which was actually about the televised
soccer match, on the ancient bar TV, directly above his head.

The ambulance takes a full 30 minutes to make it to the bar,
because, as the barkeep later finds out,
this sort of thing is happening all across the city.