Lovecraft, H P - Old Bugs

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Old Bugs

An Extemporaneous Sob Story by Marcus Lollius, Proconsul of Gaul

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written 1919

Sheehan's Pool Room, which adorns one of the lesser alleys in the heart of Chicago's

stockyard district, is not a nice place. Its air, freighted with a thousand odours such as

Coleridge may have found at Cologne, too seldom knows the purifying rays of the sun;

but fights for space with the acrid fumes of unnumbered cheap cigars and cigarettes

which dangle from the coarse lips of unnumbered human animals that haunt the place day

and night. But the popularity of Sheehan's remains unimpaired; and for this there is a

reason -- a reason obvious to anyone who will take the trouble to analyse the mixed

stenches prevailing there. Over and above the fumes and sickening closeness rises an

aroma once familiar throughout the land, but now happily banished to the back streets of

life by the edict of a benevolent government -- the aroma of strong, wicked whiskey -- a

precious kind of forbidden fruit indeed in this year of grace 1950.

Sheehan's is the acknowledged centre to Chicago's subterranean traffic in liquor and

narcotics, and as such has a certain dignity which extends even to the unkempt attaches of

the place; but there was until lately one who lay outside the pale of that dignity -- one

who shared the squalor and filth, but not the importance, of Sheehan's. He was called

"Old Bugs", and was the most disreputable object in a disreputable environment. What he

had once been, many tried to guess; for his language and mode of utterance when

intoxicated to a certain degree were such as to excite wonderment; but what he was,

presented less difficulty -- for "Old Bugs", in superlative degree, epitomised the pathetic

species known as the "bum" or the "down-and-outer". Whence he had come, no one

could tell. One night he had burst wildly into Sheehan's, foaming at the mouth and

screaming for whiskey and hasheesh; and having been supplied in exchange for a

promise to perform odd jobs, had hung about ever since, mopping floors, cleaning

cuspidors and glasses, and attending to an hundred similar menial duties in exchange for

the drink and drugs which were necessary to keep him alive and sane.

He talked but little, and usually in the common jargon of the underworld; but

occasionally, when inflamed by an unusually generous dose of crude whiskey, would

burst forth into strings of incomprehensible polysyllables and snatches of sonorous prose

and verse which led certain habitués to conjecture that he had seen better days. One

steady patron -- a bank defaulter under cover -- came to converse with him quite

regularly, and from the tone of his discourse ventured the opinion that he had been a

writer or professor in his day. But the only tangible clue to Old Bugs' past was a faded

photograph which he constantly carried about with him -- the photograph of a young

woman of noble and beautiful features. This he would sometimes draw from his tattered

pocket, carefully unwrap from its covering of tissue paper, and gaze upon for hours with

an expression of ineffable sadness and tenderness. It was not the portrait of one whom an

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Lovecraft, H P - Old Bugs

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