| Thunder Sandwich #17
|
 dweeb by jeff filipski |
| Oasis Back in the days when I worked in Oasis Gifts as a stockman on The Strip, day shifts endlessly coiled us into a tired routine squeezing out a lifeblood's slow drip. One summer the T-storms fulminated & the Vegas streets were grayly oceanic with waves pooled in flash flooding, so high cars plowed through waters nearly submerging storm-struck hoods. Our store manager, Bob, bemoaned business falling off with customers seeking shelter inside the safe, dry, nearby casinos. "They ought to rename this store Noah's Flood," Bob bitched, noting those inside roof leaks while spreading his dire halitosis -- the worst bad breath imaginable, it smelled of inner organs percolating with cancers -- each time his fiftyish mouth gasped for air. "I'm due for triple bypass if we don't drown." Airs sluggishly humid held the temp at 90% until dark clouds massed hugely overhead, still spraying their relentless, evil rains. A few weeks later we learned Bob shuttled off alone, driving his used Sentra past Lake Mead into distant desert reaches ... There, fasting through long T-storm hours, deep in his Christian meditations & prayer on eschatological issues, Bob suffered an irrevocably fatal heart attack -- something he knew he'd find within rolling vistas & great mountains to backdrop his journey into solitude. Only thing was, instead of a Bible, nearby Bob was just a cassette tape in the car stereo playing endlessly the long song from the movie TITANIC. Losers, Innocents, & Dead Children I'm always in the presence of absence I tell myself, drunk on my ass in the winter of neon city airs -- make that semi-drunk, maybe a Heineken buzz after all? -- gambling thru windfall night at slots tight as claw-fisted virgins unlike my e-z lipped cocktail waitress putting me down with gorgeous smiles because persistent losing looks bad, even on the holidays. She has the child-faced charm of the deceased Jon Benet Ramsey under my eye's inebriated intake, & chuckles, YOU QUIT YOUR JOB JUST TO LOSE YOUR LIFE SAVINGS?... She's amused by this ongoing end-game. But Life is a fantasy of dead gods mocking you & me, I reply soberly. I imagine if Jon Benet lived in hell would I succor the roots of passion her murder left shorn in dreaming psyches of old men ... The laughs are all on us, I declare there are no real virgins left except underaged & prepubescent Dolly-clones. That's why men like me are askew in a world given to unfair dichotomy, why the serial rapist still flourishes in societies where VIRGIN is a bad word. You do need another drink after all, laughs my waitress, winking, don't you? |
< Back
| ISSN: 1534-4037 |
Edited by Jim Chandler & Haze McElhenny
|