Most heavy drinkers have developed their own set of coping
strategies—hiding the keys, chewing aspirin before bed, facing
the morning with a packet of Emergen-C dissolved in Gatorade (try it!).
Chief among these strategies is learning to ignore the fact that behind
the bar is a witness to every drunken moment: the bartender who sees
everything you’d rather forget. The second-person narrator of Patrick
deWitt’s Ablutions is just such a witness, but even his harshest
judgements about his regulars don’t protect him from the one weakness
they all share.
Much of Ablutions consists of snapshots of the bar where our
nameless narrator works as a barback. The cast of regulars at this
Hollywood bar are a “curious balance of classes particular to the parts
of Hollywood devoid of klieg lights and make-believe,” an assortment of
crackheads, cokeheads, and aspiring actors who insinuate themselves
into the fabric of the bar. As the book begins, the narrator affects a
sort of removed, anthropological approach to his work: “Discuss Sam,
the bar’s principal cocaine dealer,” he invites us. “Discuss the
effects of the full moon on the weekend crowds.”
This façade of clinical distance, though, soon begins to
crack. Employees at this bar are allowed to match their customers drink
for drink, and by the book’s halfway point any delusions our narrator
may have had about being fundamentally different than his addled
clientele have become increasingly difficult to maintain: His wife
leaves him, his health deteriorates, and even a well-intentioned effort
to quit driving drunk comes to nothing. “It makes you sad that you
can’t keep a promise to yourself but you are of two minds on the
matter,” he observes of his own inability to stop drinking. “The minds
are cleanly separated and functioning independently of each other. They
are content with this arrangement and have no plans to alter it.”
Ablutions has the visceral effect of pulling you into a world
of degradation and tawdriness that you’d rather not acknowledge and
certainly don’t want to inhabit. And what’s more, deWitt’s unsparing
writing is so clear and unfussy—and so punctuated with tiny,
heartbreaking moments of grace—it becomes impossible to put the
book down and abandon your narrator to face that world alone.