Go Ahead And Decide
An hour before closing this fella comes into the bar wearing handcuffs and an intense plaid shirt unbuttoned down to his navel. I notice he's got a $20 bill clenched in one of his fists, and he orders a glass of red wine and sits down at the end of the bar. A moment later an older woman --very hard looking, from the looks of things already snockered-- stumbles in and plops down next to Mr. Handcuffs-and-Red-Wine. It seems like maybe they're acquaintances, like maybe they're picking up where they left off someplace else earlier in the night. There's nobody else in the bar except for my brother Tony, and he's asleep in a booth.
The woman calls me over and proceeds to order like sixteen different beers we don't carry, eleven of them I've never even fucking heard of. The handcuffs guy is sipping his red wine, holding both hands up to his face, and struggling to juggle the glass of wine and the cigarette he has pinched between a couple of his fingers. After the woman finally stumbles across a beer we actually carry, the two of them sit there in complete silence for a couple of long minutes, after which he starts muttering: A disaster, complete fucking disaster. Is this really what my life is going to be like? He kept up with this business for a time, and the gal kept rolling her eyes and telling him to shut the fuck up, just shut the fuck up. Finally she says, Look, I wasn't alone in my house for five minutes after my husband's funeral and I had that goddamned wedding ring screwed off my finger and buried in a drawer. You stay on the boat until it sinks and either you drown, or you find some piece of garbage to hang onto for awhile longer. Go ahead and decide whether you're my piece of garbage or I'm yours.
Hazel
Her parents had named her Hazel, precisely because the name suggested a hillbilly woman clawing at a banjo. They'd be more than happy to admit it if you asked them; it didn't matter to her in the least that there was a particular Hazel they'd had in mind, that they (her parents) had been in effect paying homage --none of that mattered; it was a loathsome name. As much as she hated the name, however, Hazel didn't have it in her to truly hold it against her parents. They'd been made soft-headed by their own youth, and Hazel was determined to avoid such a fate at all cost. It was one thing, she supposed, to actually be a hillbilly, but it was certainly quite another to sit in an apartment on the upper west side of New York, idealizing hillbillies and listening to and singing along all day with yodeling and fiddles and banjos and all manner of noise alternately plaintive and clodhopping with breakneck zeal. Both of her parents sang, neither of them well, and their exuberant attempts at 'harmonizing' only served to call greater attention to their serious weaknesses as singers. They insisted on calling their living room 'the parlor' --even 'front room' Hazel could have lived with--and would host frequent highly politicized musical gatherings, complete with the sort of terrible mishaps that inevitably occur when well-meaning white people attempt to make folk music out of such urban issues as police brutality. There were days when Hazel was half-tempted to become a cop or a stock broker just to spite her parents.
The Physical Pioneer
Somebody, see, once upon a time had to figure out what the hell a nose was all about, how it worked, its function, production, etc. For years nobody knew a damn thing about noses. They, and the strange things they did, transmitted, and produced, were one of the great mysteries, and these, of course, were the days of boundless great mysteries. We were all still puzzled, fascinated, and, frankly, often enough surprised by elimination, and many among us hadn't yet learned to walk gracefully upright or pick things up with our fingers.
I was ahead of my time in many ways, I may as well go ahead and admit it. I was something of a pioneer. I was the first of our people to clap my hands, the first to run; I feel confident in saying that I invented jumping jacks. I used to give poorly-attended seminars in manual dexterity and cause-and-effect, not to mention the earliest versions of your callisthenics. I'm also willing to admit that I was never a tool maker or an artist. No, I was strictly a physical pioneer. I was, in fact, the guy who organized the first crude Olympics, which consisted of little but jumping, rock throwing, and gargling. Forgive me if this sounds like bragging, but I won three gold medals.
6:53:29 PM 
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