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Alan Catlin |
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This early in the morning commute he was more into a new kind of walking than trying to live up to the motto of his worn through hell & high water t-shirt that sd.: 'Beer Helping White Guys Dance Since 1842' -his flailing- for-balance- in-the-aisle-arms not part of some new dance routine taught at an Arthur Murray Studio but something you might expect dangling at the end of a rope One for the Road She's playing Little Town Flirt with the boys at the bar. By three in the morning she's a heat seeking missile waiting to explode. "My old man's gone back to Buffalo for good. He said I could go too. How could I? This is home to me." Her man of the moment is a high school flame out in worn leather, jacket unraveling at the seams, salt and pepper hair grease slick, born to raise hell tattooed on his arms, pounding down long neck Buds. Outside the bar she's falling off his motorcycle in the parking lot. "They're gonna find them in a ditch somewhere." I said but I was wrong. They only found her, half-naked, head pounded in by a rock but they didn't find him. The Black Hole Martini No one sees them in sunlight, these worm people, white skin so pale you'd think they might have been carved from stone, polished alabaster, if statues were sentient, wore black sunglasses inside cellar bars, subdued lighting supper clubs they never actually ate at, nursing their drinks at the bar, cocktails with an unearthly hue, ultra-chilled Vodka with a tincture like blood for savory flavoring, aromatic blends the color of skin once the fur has been removed from something that once lived, out there, in the wild, that strange forbidding place where the sun has been known to shine. |