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Upcoming Shows
Roadside Graves
w/Bart Budwig
FRIDAY, Aug. 6, 9PM
@ Mikey's Gyros -
Stereopathic on Hypem
Jun
30
And so Jason out in the wet, what’s he there for? He goes this way and that, backforth crossing the street. He’s checking the store signs, but the rain gets into his face when draws back the man his hood. Craggy Jason face looking out, thick nose jutting from the hood, jammed like a carrot there in the middle of the stew.
He’s beckoned by the inner voice, the happy wifely command echoed. The week is long and the work is hard, she says and he knows. He sets out in a car, but while driving he hears a tune he once sat to in a car with a girl that gave him a feeling like three handfuls of tar running the vein course to his heart. And he loses his way, even in a city he knows well. But the thing is, the stores they close. Their gates ain’t pearly and close and open according to commandments. So now he’s out in the wet, doing the back and forth in a neighborhood he doesn’t know so well looking for the sweet succor of the liquor.
But then, you know he finds it. He stamps inside the door and sees the proprietor a man with a diminished head and resplendent ears, sitting in a puppet posture on a stool. “Quickly now,” the troll says, and Jason sets to it. But the prices!
“How,” Jason asks, “can this bottle of Hendricks’ be forty dollars?”
“It can be forty dollars in the sense that I set the price at forty dollars,” says the man who sits atop a stool and whose teeth curve into the black mouth with a worm colored tongue.
“And people pay forty dollars?” Jason feels that they do, but its worth asking the question, since he’s come this far.
“Some do,” says the blackened smile.
“And if they don’t, do they walk out of the store with the bottle?” Jason mimes carrying the bottle like a baby football.
The stool bird just sits and smiles.
“I’ll give you twenty dollars for this bottle,” says Jason. He does the crooked eyebrow with a leaned forward head, a winning and conspiratorial look that he does so well, so well.
“I’ll take your twenty five dollars,” the seated man with the stick legs says, and he does. He takes the money.
Oh, the triumph of a man like Jason. He’s home now, and when he got there the kids were in their beds and the wife was seated on the couch and Jason’s face was no longer wet, but his hood was, and he and she set to the gin. Not hard drinkers, but folks who enjoy a bit of numbed central nervous system of a night. They drank a bit and the wife praised the quality of the gin and the sense of her husband. Jason does not mention certain things about the trip out, but he tells her of his heroism, of that story. And that lady loves him and loves him well.
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