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I spent half of my life on a train somewhere. Somewhere i never reached. Friday's sullied by. I left parts of my beard all over the country. I saw multi-colored flags wave in the distance. Arcs repeated themselves. Divers repeated the arcs. I spent 79 hours in an Iron Lung, then charged the bill to my company account. Bankrupt company anyways. A drunken soldier with only $6 & a shore-leave wristwatch to tide him over till Saturday stopped me at Mickey's. "For the good of the country, brother. Don't believe what they say on TV... for the good of the country." Who are you to tell me which side of the fence to lay my bet down? A nickel's worth of justice goes a long way in this economy. So does tourism. But you'd never mistake the two. "What are you writing," huffed the waitress, cigarette dangling from her dry-cracked lower lip, another in reserve behind her right ear, ready to burn. "None of your goddamn business you wretched whore," i thought, saying nothing. The stank-hash smell of the diner consumed my brain, forcing evil thoughts on me like a Nazi bunker. Idaho is full of places like these, if you can find them. I once met a man in Woonsocket, R.I., who called himself "The Maitre d'". It was a funny thing, i thought. I never thought of Donald Arthur Mattingly as "The Baseball Player". Maybe "a" baseball player... but whatever. His real name was Johnson, or some such other nonsense. He was struck by lightning while golfing one fall. Headline in the paper the next day read, "Local Waiter Struck by Lightning." Johnson was insulted at the demeaning title given to him by the paper. "I haven't worked 14 years in this business for nothing," he railed, coming out of the courthouse after pressing charges against the Woonsocket Gazette. Put the paper out of business. Not much of a town, anyhow... Nap Lajoie aside. The ducks were flirting with disaster. The fish were getting loud, fat & top-heavy. Gail in accounting was nervous. Piotr - the violinist, not the composer - was out of town "on business" yet again. A car door slammed outside the dentist's office, & to none of the townspeople's surprise, out popped The Mayor. "Fifteen years I've lived in this town. I'm Mayor one goddamn week & this is how I'm treated." Barney from the saw mill took offense, but said nothing. Linda fumbled for words, agreeing with Barney. Pat was the only citizen with the balls to say anything, but he was cut down by cancer in the prime of his life. Cancer, Mayor... goddamn Cancer. Aberdeen, S.D. - A man is sent off to jail for 30 days after passing himself off as Spiro Agnew & trying to write bad checks in two separate drug stores & a local video mart. "Screw Agnew anyway," the man said after sentencing, "I voted for McGovern." He sat around listening to old Trojan records. Just out of principle. He didn't even really like Reggae music, but what the hell? Baby Doc had been banished... the Rum mill was back in the hands of the poor & water again flowed. The only gabacho left on the whole island. The only one who had the balls to stay. Toots Hibbert blared about Pressure... what did he or Jimmy Cliff know about Pressure, anyway? The Army. The one place every unemployable American can go for a hot meal & a dental plan. "Sounds good to me," said Two-Ton Tony to Richard, the queer down the street, & his brother. He had a drinking problem. Started showing up at work drunk. Soon enough he was sitting on the toilet in the back of his mobile home with a snub-nosed revolver testing his gag reflex. Tony was kind of a loser, too. |