Peace

Blank stares and the occasional amorphous amorous compliment over the blare of trumpets, in a basement bar past midnight, feeling like a bomb shelter in the blitz, the outside world a cigarette strewn landing under a star-obscuring awning- her hand brushed mine, we sat side by side as I crawled inside my fifth pint of bitter (feeling british) and resolute in my wet charm. I told her not to believe anything I said, and launched into an abbreviated life-story, one that included an entirely fabricated account of working in a tincan fish factory on the coast of British Columbia. I invented a hero, by the name of Fernando, a best friend, of sorts, who always showed up as my own personal deus ex machina (luckily Fernando had hit big enough on the craps to bail me out, and we bailed out of Atlantic City over to Phili, where we knew this girl we both had been itching to see. Fernando was the charming one, and so I ended up on a couch, and at five in the morning, chose to call Dale, and see if he could make it down in a pinch and deliver me back to New England. He showed up a few hours later, and shortly thereafter we were waiting in the wind-shorn streets of Scranton, waiting for the bars to open.)

I could elaborate, but the condensed version is this, her eyes were constantly in mine, and mine were pulled away from hers only to stare into my beer for the next fiction to leap into my head, and then I'd look up with renewed frenzy and relate how I once slept on an abandoned house boat on the Neckar river, and woke up in Frankfurt, the owner not realizing his stow away, and how I had to swim to shore when he refused (after much shouting and cursing) to stop the boat and let me off.

This story I had told in better days with less at stake, under the feint disapproval of my love at the time, but more often to amusement, and in those better days I'd tell how I got a nasty infestation from sleeping in a sail closet. But this was the hygienic version. Best not to leave any damning hints out in the open, and open sores to scare off the prey.

Cigarettes, and the awning looked like a haunted house, with all that smoke trapped up there. A guy named Bruce asked if I was in a band, and when I said "no" told me I should be in one. Bruce looked like a skull with a ponytail pulling away from a hair recession, and the goatee was the only vital part of him. He told me he did graphic design, and I believed him; he was gravely graphic, graphically grave.

Back inside to the alcohol soot-stained fog of a bar at 1 am, the lights rising and falling like a funeral wail, and no numbers in sight, no fat calves bursting from miniskirt to comfort me, no hiked up, punched up breasts swallowing my imagination like some dinosaur in a tar pit. I was alone, supremely and serenely alone, naked, drunk, and my disappointment felt like a vestment, and my last drink the last thing there will ever be to save me, subside my rage and bring down silence and peace.

I walked home in a faint whisper of rain. I crawled into bed, received a phone call, smoked, and fell asleep.