November 15, 2002
Genie's Too Bar & Grill
I'm here on the advice of Dammit, the fine female cashier
of the
Rollover Pass Bait Store. Emblazoned on a camper parked out front of
bar just off the beach are the words, "Retired Chicken Hauler and
yes I
am here just to piss you off.''
And the sign where the Rollover Bay inlet meets the gulf
reads,
Corrients Peligrosas
Que No Nadar
Que Sean Interados
I interpret this to be a warning about swimming, something
not too far
from the warning/invitation that Dammit threw me as I walked out of the
Bait Store with my tres candybarros and my bag of 100% white corn
tortilla chips. After a beer-by-liquor-by-hamburger-action breakdown
of the three local gin joints, she adds, "And if you're looking for
trouble, bleep-bleep-bleep's is the place. Just be sure and wear lotsa
raincoats, cuz.. you'll see. You'll know `em the moment they walk in
the door."
Sketching out at the beach house, tired of my own company
and starting
to see the writing on the wall, that, in this case being that neither
Mary nor Stefan would be coming up to visit tonight, Friday night, and
that old Stinky ain't the greatest company unless you stay up all night
with him, I opted to go out on the "town."
Stinkey, incidentally, I have renamed "Packie"
after the New England
vernacular for package.., aka, liquor store, owing to his penchant for
collecting & stashing beer cans. We'll see if the name sticks.
The pretense I handed my subconscious was that I needed
chocolate, or
something sweet anyway, which was true. I do crave sweets in my old
age.
"If you wanna be laid back and poor, this is the
place." Not the
first, but one of the better sentiments to be thrown my way this weird
Friday night in one of a grand total of two bars here in Rollover Pass.
Bang! No sooner do I play Grandpa McKinney, talkin' chit
about how
old i am than Ray, almost 50, chastises me for calling myself old.
"Eat Creatine," he says, "a dietary supplement.. look at
me! I was
skinny as a rail six months ago." Creatine monohydrate by EAS, Inc,
Golden CO. Isn't that where Coors comes from? Maybe there's a
connection.
I got my mojo working, sings some woman on some cyber-generated
DJ
disco-bar tune-music-making whatjamawhoosit.
BTW, this is live, foks. No chit. And it's one of the
harder gigs
i've ever taken on. We got Debbie the bartender, Gary the gay mushroom
dealer, Ray the guy pouring me V.O. and tellin' me how he lost his
memory ten years ago to a motorcycle accident and then, just six months
ago, lost to a car wreck the woman and daughter who got him through it
all.
This is live. It is difficult. I want to stow this thing,
but I
can't. I'm a writer. Lemme spell it out for you:
You walk into someone's living room and introduce yourself
around as
best you can because YOU are the only new face in the room. And
because the woman down at the bait shop told you you'd better, and
better yet, if you see Miss Genie, a little old gray-haired lady
sitting alone in a booth drinking a Pearl Light, "Buy her another
Pearl
Light and your golden." Pearl Light? Never heard of it. But golden..
now you see? I knew there was a Coors conspiracy going on here.
Anyway, you get pretty well acclimated and you meet the
few folks
hanging around, the early birds, the one's who's showed up (sic) early,
just before sunset, or in the case of this stormy day, before darkup.
You drink four or five Lone Star beers whilst trying to ingratiate
yourself with the locals, and next thing you know it's well beyond
darkup and you're hammered. Note: I was/am truly eager for some
conversation, no shit. Hell, how long can a guy talk to a ferret?
But somewhere in all that your journalistic impulses,
your "tell the
story" jones gets to jonesing bad, and you just gotta whip out that
collapsible keyboard and Palm Pilot. But you know the risk. You know
you're breaching bar etiquette in a big way. So what do you say when
people ask, "What you got there? What you doing?"
Email.
Email, huh?
Yup.
Whatcha do, boy?
Uh, I'm a bum (actually I think I said I was once a reporter.. at once
more mysterious and respectable).
I tell him I work as an eBay broker, that this is how
I keep tabs on
what's going on.
Now, Dearest Reader, please understand. I really have no desire to
hide who I am from these folk. But it's weird, doing what I do. I feel
self-conscious and I think it often makes other people feel weird, too.
Just like sticking a camera in someone's face. I'm much more subtle,
but to no avail. In a small town, in a small bar, you're on camera,
baby. Everybody's watching, like it or no.
And the last thing I wanna do is make people feel weird.
I just wanna
relate the scene, capture the moment in all its precious, human beauty.
Whatever, right? Write.
Six Lone Stars, four whiskeys and one Our Writer Tis Of
Thee is so many
sheets to the wind it would take Dreamworks, Inc. a hundred animators
working double-time to create that many sheets blowing
cyber-frenetically in the gulf winds....
Whatever. Debbie the `tenders been good to me. Ray's been
pouring
V.O. in my cup and offering me work with him as an electrician ever
since the
------------------------
And that was it. I left the bar. I drove the three-quarters of a mile
home, utterly skunked.
And I find it odd as I read back through this. Because
I have more
memories of the experience than are here.. as though they were written,
and should thus be a part of this written record. But nope. They're
not here. All in my mind, I guess.
They say to students studying a foreign tongue that when
you begin to
dream in that language, then you have arrived, that you are well on
your way to fluency.
Maybe that's what's happening to me.
-RSM the Nobody Duke of Nowhere
[Postscript 1: You know you're out of your gourd when
tongue-kissing a
Milky Way Dark at 10:27 p.m. on a Friday night has extreme sexual
overtones.
[Postscript 2: I'm quite sure that my next great love
will be a singer
because.. who is that? Mazzy Star? Hope Sandoval, I mean? Yes,
because I am pud-deeeee in the lyrical hands of breathy hot, female
crooners. Whao!]
