| I'm sitting by myself still with yet another pitcher of beer I didn’t want to drink. Roadtoad keeps buying them in spite of the fact we’re both too shit-faced for a straight answer or a steady move. He’s over at the bar talking to a couple of Mexicans fresh from the river, and one of them has quarters stuck in his ears. We’re in the White Horse Pub, probably the most police-visited dive on Hemphill that week. It was a wired little place whose name fit its neighborhood of shooting galleries – tattoos covered needlemarks, the urinals stunk of crank. Fugitives and refugees, outcasts and misfits, I just sort of blended into the blurred picture. Fort Worth, Texas, 1989. I’m 32 years old, broke, soused and sitting alone, wondering if my oldest drinking buddy was going to get us thrown into jail again. The screwdrivers of the afternoon had set us up rather well, and now the evening pitchers came in a long chain. “Hey,” I hear Roadtoad addressing the Mexican who spoke fair English, “How come your friend has those quarters in his ears?” “He wants you to ask him,” the man replies with a grin. “What?” “He wears them so people will ask him why.” The Roadtoad shook his head. “Stupid sonofabitch,” He sips his beer. Roadtoad doesn’t care if the Mex with the fifty-cent hearing understands what he just said. It doesn’t matter. He nudges the guy on the barstool next to him, an ex-sailor getting up on his crutches. “That’s about a stupid sonofabitch, ain’t he?” It didn’t matter to the swabbie either, he just lifted his long-dead legs off the stool and made off for his private hell in the toilet, his powerful gorilla arms moving the sticks in fierce bounds. I’m slipping from depression into stupification, but there are too many patrol cars outside to drive away, and I must continue drinking to stay awake. Keeping a droopy eye on the Roadtoad helps chase away the numbing calm, because I know this watched pot usually will boil over at some point. He has mastered the duality of friendly/obnoxious, talking at everyone in a jovial/insulting, charming/scathing manner, just happy as hell. I envied his total lack of inhibition when he squatted down at a table of tejano couples and hung out for a while, making them laugh, drinking their beer. I feared it once he renewed his verbal dual with a wretched bar rag of a woman who had moved several stools away to escape his cruel assessment of her physical structure. The small, round table I sat at was wet, beer dripping down on my boot. I stood myself up and leaned my way over to Roadtoad’s side at the bar, hoping to diffuse the situation. He slapped his arm around my shoulder. “Hey bubba, have you ever seen such a sorry excuse for a female before?” I laughed and addressed the lady in reference. “I don’t think he really means to say that ... he’s just a little drunk.” She pointed her squint at me and growled, “Fuck you, too, dipshit!” I patted Roadtoad on the back. “You’re right, she is a sorry one.” After a couple volleys of clever crudities I moved on down to the far end of the bar and sat by the video blackjack game; lizard brain repartee was tiring overall, though they both made me laugh at certain remarks. I looked to my right and saw a very large woman sucking on a highball. Her hair was tied back in a bun or something making her head look too small in comparison to the massive portions of arms, back and chest. I then recognized her to be from the old gang. “I know you,” I said to her. No answer. “Hey, you know me, too.” Still no response. “Sure you know me. Hell, I think I even had my dick in you once or twice!” She got kind of pissed. “Who the hell do you think you are?!” “I don’t know who I am right now, but you’re Fat Tina.” She moved her mountainous frame closer and shushed me. “Don’t use that name in here.” Ah, sounded like she had some nasty scam in progress, or maybe she was just hiding out. “That’s cool,” I gave her, it not mattering to me at all. I leaned on the bar and nursed my beer. Somebody in the club said the police had found a stolen car in the parking lot. A wave of tension washed through the place, straightening a couple of backs. Two patrolmen walked through, but didn’t take long – they were looking for someone in particular. Once they left the mood loosened, and talk again became loud, especially Roadtoad’s. The bartender walked down to my end of the bar, crickety old biker freak, tells me I should get my friend out of there before he gets into it with some psycho wetback. I shot a look down the bar. It appeared the old bar rag had greased up a greaser champion, who, though smaller than the Toad, had faraway eyes and was smiling the smile of a man with a pistol in his pocket and the itch to use it. But in the other corner, Roadtoad was moving rapidly into his just-fuck-with-me mode, an awesome force of nature not unlike a geyser. One was smiling, one was clenching his teeth. That’s how it usually starts in a bar killing. I always try to steer the Toad clear of trouble if I can, a guardian attitude that goes back to a night several years ago. At that time I was inside a titty bar while he was passed out in the back seat of my Jeep. Someone we didn’t know came along and shot him twice in the head, then once in the crotch for good measure but for no known motive. Good thing they were only .22 slugs – one of them even split on his skull. (Small, clean holes, not recommended for anything but target practice.) Yet this brush with death only seemed to make him more fearless, the knowledge that the irretrievable bullet fragments could forever move at any time to a fatal position in his brain just honed him a sharper edge. Years later he would try slowing down, but for now there was no convincing him. His pride had been engaged, his eyes glowed red, and he actually made bull snorts. The bartender leaned in and re-advised that the Toad did not want to be messing with the little foreign man smiling at him. The Toad disagreed. “I’ll fuck him up!” The Toad took a couple of steps towards the flame, but I stopped him. “I’m not going to see you shot again, asshole!” He tried to go around me, but I slapped a bear hug on him, hoisted and toted him towards the back door, something not easily done when both parties are trashed, but the memory of his face covered in blood as I raced him to the hospital lent some momentum. As the distance between him and the Mex increased, so did their bilingual barbs. Tina held the door open and kissed me after I had wrestled the ruffled Toad outside. He got into the car only after I had persuaded him to “do me the favor” of leaving with me. Somehow I drove home. In the fuzzy headache of the morning I found the Toad crashed on our couch. Brother Tom had the coffee made, and eventually the three of us sat around the kitchen table sharing blessed caffeine and philosophical notions about our wasted lives. We were all steeping in stagnant relationships at the time, Tom and the Toad caught in loveless and near sexless cohabitations, and I in the death throes of a sex-charged friendship with a college girl. We all wished for those almost forgotten romantic ideals of our youth. I guess being tripped up along the way makes compromise easier to swallow. But I can’t think about even the best of those times without wincing. Each time I allowed my heart free rein it ended up in a ditch, and those hardened recovery periods left me cold to both the right and the wrong women. Looking back in confusion at the blurred succession of faces, it seems the sweet moments always turned sour. Only by dulling my senses could I get that taste out of my mouth, but my love grew sluggish. Our emotional wounds come to make our hearts heavy with proud flesh, and the poisons we soothe ourselves with demand their own price. I wondered if one should keep looking for the dream come true. Roadtoad says he gave up on all that shit. “I think I’ve lost the ability to love,” he said. I considered that briefly, then, realizing I felt the same way, dismissed it from my mind. |
| Poemission |
| Spilt Beer & Broken Dreams |