CHEAP BEER AND PEANUT SHELLS

(Original image by Eric Ward)

One night, I meet a girl hanging off Tower Bridge trying to kill herself, so I help her up, and she takes me to a roadhouse with cheap beer and peanut shells on the floor. I say, what have I done to deserve this? And she says, everything, nothing. And we drink as if our lives depend on it, like fish above water, until our bellies bloat and I knock my glass to the ground, shattering it in a million jagged tears. Later, I’m lying on her big dragon carpet listening to Jackson Browne bemoan his wasted youth, and I’m thinking I might play the piano, but my fingers are too small, so I pick up the guitar and play the only chords I know: Death, Depression, and Desperation.

The moon bleeds purple between her legs. The neutron stars kill my erection. And I think sleep is better than sex at this point, so I stuff myself in her trunk and wake up on the floor beside my bed wondering where my wallet has gone. My wife looks down on me like a crow upon the telephone wire. What have I done to deserve this, I ask her. Everything. Nothing.

Yes. Yes. I eat my eggs on the edge of a knife. I rip my face off and put on a new one so the boss won’t fire me. I dance naked for rent. I run through the front door and steal your keys. I cry for wine, for rain. I cry for Jesus, for Krishna, for Gen—a—die, someone who knows better, who knows something about the women and the wires meant to string a man up. Death comes like a French tickler, like a cat’s sneeze, and all truth and meaning lack viscosity.

I meet another woman on the side of the road. I offer her a ride, and she pulls her pistol and blows off my rearview mirror, the bitch. You took that away from me. My car too. So I’m walking, walking, walking, and there are people passing by with faces like stale cinnabons. I want to eat them, but I am too tired. Beneath the bridge, fishes float belly up, and I remember the last great fuck that flew through my window. Not another woman, but a shadow cast through the blinds that caressed my imagination, that brought fear to my privileged life.

Rip, rip, tear the tattered sheets tucked around my mind. I have enough hate to float me to the center of the sun and enough love to drop me back to hell where she’ll find me again and take me away to another bar, another roadhouse where all questions lead to fucking and all answers lead to suicide. I light the candle, lick her neck, swallow her whole. She cannot handle this fire raging forth with enough dickish energy to make the gods wince.

Rip, rip, tear. Torn is this heart of mine. A predictable act by predictable gods creaming for melodrama. Well, here I am. Eating peanut shells off the floor, sucking the salt, scoffing at all mention of fairness and love. It’s all the same dream, the same pain: that blue flame melting the soul beneath the skin, striking sparks with the flint of our dead dreams, hoping for something more and finding it in the most devastating way imaginable.