The Town of Whitstable

“Does it occur to you that you’re freaking out about this way before the fact?” asked The Traveler.

 “Better to freak out about this now rather than later,” I said.

“That makes so little sense they wouldn’t be able to analyze it with a microscope.”

We were walking down the High Street of Whitstable the next day. It was starting to get ungodly cold, and, of course, the English rain made everything all the more unbearable. Yet, I was starting to get used to it and, though I learned to bury myself in my coat whenever I walked outside in the morning, I had accepted that this was going to be the state of things for the season. The Traveler, of course, didn’t complain about it at all and, walking down the street with me as if it were seventy and sunny outside.

Whitstable’s High Street is just about all there is to the town. In length, it’s about the same size as Canterbury’s, without all of the chain department stores. The town is situated right on the beach and, naturally, there are plenty of fish and chips shops, fisheries, and butcher’s shops. The landmarks—in my mind—of the High Street are The Playhouse Theatre (where we’d be performing Fiddler come April), a church with trees that look like they belong a few hundred miles south, a large pub called the Captain’s House, and, of course, the beach.

We walked up in front of The Playhouse. It used to be a church (when I found this out, I grinned a little bit, the atheist in me cheering on the slowly lessening ground of religion to the forces of Acting and Alcohol), had the sort of paint job on the front that made it seem like it grew out of the beach and simply found itself on the High Street one day. I stood there, staring at it and nodding. I thought, “Come on, you son of a bitch, I will defeat you.”

The Traveler, staring at me with the look of a psychiatrist watching a longtime patient, bore it patiently for the first fifteen minutes, then said, “Okay, we’re going now.” He wore a jacket, his usual cap, jeans, and held an umbrella. Rain pattered on the top of it.

I did not bring an umbrella. Instead, I trusted my pea coat and hat to keep me free of rain. This was a stupid idea.

“No,” I said, staring at the windows at the top of the theatre. “I’m not done studying my enemy. I need to know every—”

He grasped my shoulder and pushed me along towards the beach. “You need to know how to sing, is what you need to do. Staring at a building’s not getting you anywhere. Besides, you’re not going to be performing on the walls of the entrance, you’re going to be on a stage.”

“You’re right,” I said, moving past a grocery store. “I need to break in and study the stage.”

“Nope,” said The Traveler. “We’re going to the beach, then getting some fish and chips, then heading back to Canterbury.”

We moved down a side street, following a signpost that had beachfront written on it. “But my mission for today was to study my enemy,” I said.

“There is a lot wrong with you, and none of it, I think, can be treated by what psychiatrists and –chologists currently know about the human mind. Look, beach, whee.”

We stood on a wooden footpath leading to a pier. The ocean out there was not the sort of ocean that made me want to go for a swim. The water looked grey, choppy, and unwelcoming. White crests formed on top of the small waves that lapped up on the shore, and the grey, heavily-clouded sky made the scene look even more like something out of an old Gothic painting.

The beach was pebbly. It stretched for just about as long as you’d expect a beach to stretch, and a few people walked their dogs up and down the waterfront. About a quarter of a mile west of where we stood, what looked to me like a fleet of fishing boats were tied up to docks. A few of them had Whitstable Oyster Company stenciled on the sides, underneath the ship names, but it looked like the majority of them were owned by residents of the town.

I looked over at The Traveler and saw he had a large, content grin on his face. Even with rain pelting down on us and gusts of cold, cutting wind hitting us from the ocean, he was happy. “The hell you smiling about?” I asked as a few drops of speeding rain maneuvered underneath my hat, over my glasses, and hit me square in the eyes.

“Just listening to the waves on the shore.”

Yeah, the waves were making audible noise, but so were the seagulls a little ways away fighting over a folded-up package of chips. “Man,” I said, eyes still closed, “how you get this Zen in the face of disgusting weather, I don’t know.”

We walked down the seaside, passing some stacked crates, trash, a few people walking black Labs, and then a group of three chavs being harangued by a man in a white toga with dark skin, a big head of curly black hair, and a large beard. I listened in while The Traveler just looked around him.

“No,” said the man, just a hint of some strange accent seeped through, “that’s not what I said. What I bloody said, you idiots, is that the bird was dead. How could I put the bird around my neck if it were fucking alive?”

“Oi,” said one of the chavs—in a black track suit, his ginger hair gelled up in the crested bird fashion, “watch it mate. You about to feel some pain.”

“Aren’t you!” shouted the man, now jumping in frustration. “God damn! Speak the language.”

One of the chavs went to punch the man, who dodged, popped his arm up, grabbed the chav’s forearm, twisted it until there was a loud, reverberating crack, and then dropped it. “There.”

The chav dropped to the rocky beach screaming in pain and the other two bolted off towards town.

By the time that happened, we were long past, and I was walking backwards in order to watch. “Holy shit,” I said, “did you see that?”

“Don’t get involved in other people’s business, Narrator. Doesn’t end well.”

“But the dude just snapped the other dude’s arm!”

The Traveler shrugged.

“But the action! Bone-snapping action!”

I looked back and saw the man in the toga shake his head, fold his arms in front of him, and walk eastward. “What are you doing this week?” he asked.

“Not seeing a dude waste another dude,” I said, then sighed. “I dunno, The Writer wanted me to ‘attend a reading,’ as he put it.”

“When’s that?”

“Tomorrow night. Apparently it’s a world-famous poet.”

“World famous?”

“In the world of the literati, that means over a thousand people in two countries know who the person is. He insisted that it would be good for me, hearing a legitimate writer talk about the Art of Writing.”

The Traveler nodded. You’re going to punch him by the end of the night.”

“Nah, I don’t think so.”

“I’m starting up a betting pool. Twenty to one says you will.”

“Twenty to one? I’m that angry?”

“You can tell.”

We walked into a fish shop and stood looking at the chalkboard on which dozens of options concerning fish were present. I expected there to be “Good Fish” and, if they were honest, “Bad Fish.” But here, there were fish I’d never heard of. Granted, the only fish I ate was tuna and salmon, but still. “I met a guy in Edinburgh during the festival up there a few years ago who reminded me a lot of The Writer. See, h—”

“A few years ago?” I asked. “How old are you, man?”

“Old enough.”

A woman in a black polo walked up to the counter and said, “Hiya.”

The Traveler ordered something called haddock—which I was pretty sure was actually a town between Canterbury and London, but who was I to correct them? I walked up and ordered cod—a safe bet—and waited with The Traveler at a table. “Anyway,” he continued, “the guy was a hipster, right? Exactly, that face you’re making is the same he inspired on anyone who saw thick black glasses and see-through white t-shirts on men as repellent. Anyway, he spent the entire festival talking about how the bands on the stages should have done this, or done this, or that, and, eventually, a couple Turkish guys who—I guess—had pretty good English went up to him and beat the shit out of him. Literally. There was poop coming out of this man’s trousers.”

“What’d you do?”

“I laughed. I mean, come on, the guy referred to one band as—hold on.” He pulled a little black Moleskine notebook out from his jacket pocket and flipped back towards the beginning. “He referred to them as, ‘Trying desperately to utilize Dylan’s early work, but, like an old woman with arthritis, Jumping Fish can’t quite grasp the important aspects of the work. The humanity of Dylan.’” He shut the book and put it back in his jacket. “You’re telling me you wouldn’t watch someone have at the guy for a while.”

“Doesn’t that contradict your ideals of compassion for other people?”

The Traveler shrugged. “They stopped after the hipster soiled himself—really, about four seconds after the first punch. After that, I helped him up and he was quiet for the rest of the festival. Everyone won.”

We got our food and walked towards the bus stop.  On the way back to campus, we discussed the multitudinous things that could be discussed in the reading, and happened upon the conclusion that the most likely of them all would be a thinly-veiled allegory of sex.

In Which The Stakes Are Shown

After the film ended, and people groaned from sitting in the same spot for three hours and listening to klezmer-inspired music (a feat of strength for goyim everywhere), Laura took to the front of the room and told us just exactly what we signed up for.

See, and I didn’t know this, the last production the society had put on was in one of the dining halls of one of the colleges on campus. They performed it on a stage about twenty feet by twenty feet and had to combat a thunder storm and raging rain. Moreso, they hadn’t run through the show until the night before. In a dramatic, violent shift towards professionalism, this time, everything would change.

First of all, we’d be performing in a theater in the nearby town of Whitstable. It was a 189-seat auditorium. She showed us pictures, and I had to think to myself, “Holy crap, this looks respectable.” The interior was... Edwardian. I think is the term. Basically, the place looked nice. The sort of establishment you’d go to and expect the actors to know what they were doing and treat drama seriously.

Next came the rehearsal schedule. Now, allow me to preface this by saying that, sometimes, I am remarkably bad about putting myself in other peoples’ shoes. Sometimes I forget that not everyone has the life of a grad student. So, when I saw that we’d have two or three rehearsals a week, I thought, “That’s it?” and then went on a minor interior monologue about how these people were plebians, and how they couldn’t possibly expect to put on a show worthy of—then I remembered that a) I was the only postgrad in the room and that b) some of these people were in legitimate degrees.

I calmed down a bit and sat back. Laura continued going through the particulars, when we’d get librettos (a new term in my vocabulary: the book that contains the lines and vocal sheet music), when we’d have dance rehearsals, yadda yadda.

Then Lizzie the music director stood up and said she’d get a show-worthy voice out of all of us. I almost took this as a challenge to disappoint both her and myself, but then realized such a thing was beyond stupidity and, wisely, decided that I wouldn’t do that after all.

I turned to Dixie and said, “Man, it’s like I’m going to actually have to try.”

Dixie furrowed his brow. “You weren’t going to before?”

“I—er, well, I was.”

“Then why did you say that?”

“Cause it was a—”

“Who’s Tevye?” someone up front asked. I was a bit surprised that they hadn’t asked it earlier, to be honest.

I raised my hand and squeaked, “I am.”

The people in the room turned to face me, clothes shuffling audibly against against seats.

I was on display and, unconsciously, I sank down a little bit more in my seat as someone said, “Huh.”

Shortly after that, we all filed out—most people to go drinking. Dixie and a couple other people went back to his to play beer pong. He invited me, but I thought back to the last time we played beer pong and declined. (The events of that night may or may not have included me shouting, “Yes, I killed Christ, and I’d do it again if I had the chance!” It was, to be fair, a very drunken night and there were just one too many Jewish jokes being thrown around.) Instead, James the Greek and I meandered down to Rutherford bar for a couple pints to close out the place.

Along the way, I got the first of what I consider to be my singing lessons. Much as I thought, I found it really hard to pitch by myself. But I found what did work: mimicking. And while that wasn’t the correct way to go about learning something, it worked. Kind of. Some of the time.

Anyway, I don’t remember a lot of what we talked about in the bar, but I do remember deciding that I’d go to Whitstable the next day and check out this theater. Know my enemy, so to speak.

The Film Viewing, or Several Brief Moments of Panic

It was dark by the time I got up to campus, and I checked my watch, saw that it was only half past four, and knew that England was going to provide a fun, fun winter. This being late November, I figured that, come December, it would be dark at four in the afternoon, and I would be sitting in my room, staring out at this unending twilight, and wonering why I hadn’t stayed closer to the equator. At any rate, I went back to the flat to prepare some food.

After a brief, conversation about Magic the Gathering with Zaf while beef sizzled in a frying pan and spaghetti boiled in my pot, I ate and headed out to the lecture theater that had been reserved for the viewing.

Now, I’m one of those people who’s really bad about leaping in and meeting people. When I’m introduced to someone, there’s no problem. But, if I’m at a party, and there’s someone right next to me, I can’t make the first move. For the most part, it’s because I start running through every joke I’ve ever heard, rejecting them, then thinking about the best way to say “Hi” without sounding like a sex offender, madman, avid church goer, or any number of other things. By this time, the person has retreated somewhere else in the room and I’m safe to wander around, red Solo cup firmly in hand, until I get bored and leave.

Outside the lecture theater, a group of people stood around in a clutter, talking. I’d recognized them from the showcase, but I couldn’t go up and say, “Hi, I saw you in the showcase. That is, I was watching the showcase. Not in a creepy way, because that would be weird. But I bought a ticket. To the showcase. That’s what I did, because I don’t really like musical theater, but I figured it would be an interesting thing to see, and, wow, how about that, here I am. I mean, you know, I’m not attacking you when I say I don’t like musical theater, it’s just a personal thing. I enjoyed the showcase, but not because of you. I mean, you were good, don’t get me wrong. I saw it because my friend Gary, Dixie—what do you know him as? Gary? Gary was in the showcase, and he invited me along, and so, yeah, I figured that I’d go, and then, hey, wouldn’t you know it, bam, I’m in a production. Weird how the world works, huh?”

Of course, by the time I got to the end of that in my head, I was sitting down in the mini-auditorium and really wishing I had brought a drink. I looked around. There were about ten other people in the room, and, holy shit, I’d forgotten just how loud drama folk could be when they wanted. They had the vocal strength of five yodellers each and filled the room with conversation.

I sat back, propped my feet on the seat in front of me, and started making popping noises with my mouth.

Eventually, a tall guy walked in. I recognized him as one of the other guys who had gone for Tevye and nodded to him. He sat down a few seats down the row, and we had a very brief conversation boiling down to “Hi.” Laura—the director, remember her?—walked in with a few other people I’d seen before—like her friend, Lucie—and then did something that made me wonder just what the hell parallel universe I’d stumbled upon: Out of her big black bag, as she was saying something about how Campus Watch were bastards (I think), she pulled a Granny Smith apple and placed it on the table.

“Snacks,” was the first thing that popped into my mind. Then, as I saw what was on the face of the apple, my mouth dropped open. Into the front of the apple was carved eight Greek letters.

My mind flashed back to the train from London, with the husband and wife, and, from there, to the warehouse where I was drugged and fitted with a ball gag. Giraffes, part of me thought, may or may not have been involved in some way.

I whimpered. The man to my left—Adam, it transpired—asked if I was okay. I turned and said, “I’ve been drugged, confused, and made privy to the secret arms deals of the elderly—all because of that fucking apple.” I pointed to the table.

Adam looked over and said, “What apple?”

I looked back. There was no apple.

“Fuck,” I said. I looked around me. No one was wearing a bowler hat. No one was looking at me. From what I could tell, no one was about to leap up and jab my arm with a hypodermic needle filled with some sort of tranquilizer. Regardless, as the computer in the front of the room started sounding like it was going to overheat because of the DVD, my heart started pounding and I was on the verge of leaping from person to person and shouting, “Hail hail hail hail hail, Eris Eris Eris Eris Eris!” to see what sort of reaction I’d get.

I was saved from doing such a thing by Dixie’s sudden arrival. “Thank God!” I shouted. A couple people looked up.

Dixie walked up to the row I was in and sat down next to me. He pulled out a bottle of the same cheap wine present at Thanksgiving dinner, and the movie started.

If you’ve never seen the film version of Fiddler on the Roof, go see it, and you’ll be struck by how dated some of the visual effects are. For instance, back then in the 70s, it was not yet known that sudden zooms, random cuts, and sudden, uncomfortable close-ups (the sort that are so detailed that you can see individual pores on someone’s face) should only be used in Sergio Leone films. However, Fiddler breaks that rule—notably during the “Tradition” sequence. What you’ve got here is Tevye on his cart delivering his spiel about, you guessed it, traditions in Judaism.

Now, you know in the song, how you’ve got the spoken monologue bits, and then a bit of a YUH-DUH NUH NUH, DUH vamping sort of thing before the chorus chimes in with “Traditio-o-o-o-o-n!” in order to deafen the audience? Well, during the instrumental section, the film cuts to random bits of Judaica sprinkled around the village of Anatevka. The result, if you know nothing about Judaism, is confusion. If you know about Judaism, it’s overkill. And, if you’re in the middle ground, as I’m guessing most of these people in the society were, then the only reaction you can come up with is to shout, “Jew!” at the things on the screen.

And that’s what they did.

And that’s what made me flash back to when I first moved to Tennessee and it came out that I was Jewish. The people out there didn’t know how to react. They had a bona fide Heeb in their presence. One guy turned to me and said, “Do Jews have electricity?”

This was before I knew about sarcasm, so I said, “Yes, of course.”

He turned to me and said, “Oh. Cause I saw Fiddler on the Roof, and they didn’t have electricity.”

After that, I figured that anything was fair game, so I made it a habit of telling people who asked about Judaism that we worshipped snakes and sacrificed Christian virgins on the Sabbath. Thinking about it, it’s a wonder I had friends in Tennessee.

So, as a group of people towards the front shouted “Jew!” at Lazar Wolf on screen during the fathers’ bit, I sunk in my chair and took a swig of the wine. But, aside from flashbacks to middle and high school, I started thinking about how I could play this character. Everyone likes Topol as Tevye, but I always thought he emphasized the drama. I didn’t want to do that, drama meant emotion, and emotions are terrifying. So, then, my other option was Zero Mostel. Of course, I’d never seen anything with Mostel in it, other than a few clips of him on The Muppet Show, so this meant, of course, that I’d have to go about the nasty business of coming up with my own interpretation of the character and—then, suddenly, I was hit the the realization that I was freaking myself out and overthinking things. I thought back to my guitar lessons:

When I started high school, my mom bought me a black Squire Stratocaster with—I think—a maple neck and peal inlays. The thing still works. At any rate, she bought it on the caveat that I’d take lessons for at least a year and a half—a request I gladly acquiesed to.

My guitar teacher was a music student at MTSU who managed to get into the school without taking either the SAT or the ACT. Mitch was a tall, lanky guy with long blonde hair, glasses, and a habit of playing the “Jeopardy” theme song whenever I was trying to figure out the best way to play a scale. His method of teaching guitar was letting me choose what song to learn and then, being quite a good teacher, taking a technical lesson from even the most mundane things. (For example: “Blitzkreig Bop” turned into a lesson on the theory of power chords.) Another great thing about Mitch was that he was easy to sidetrack. Whenever it comes to lessons about anything, I pay attention for about fifteen minutes, at least grasp the mechanics and theory of what we’re talking about, and then talk about something irrelevant. But, all that aside, the most important thing about Mitch was that he taught me two valuable life lessons:

1) Set your expectations as low as possible—that way you’ll never be disappointed. I tell people this, and, more often than not, their reaction is something along the lines of, “Dear God, that is depressing. I shall go kill myself now.” And, while I can understand how people can see that philosophy as depressing, that’s not exactly what’s going on. Essentially, it’s almost Zen. By building up expectations, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment, because nothing can really live up to the fantasies we come up with in our imaginations. So, the trick becomes to see when you’re doing that, take a realistic approach to the situation, and, generally speaking, you’ll be happier with the result. You may not be as ecstatic as you would be thinking that the date you’re going on this weekend with the gorgeous redhead with the green eyes will lead to wild, tantric sex, but the reality of the situation will be much more of a let-down when she gets annoyed that you’re staring at her breasts the entire time.

2) Just let it roll, man. In other words, sometimes the best ideas and performances come from living in the moment and little to no preparation beforehand. Throw in a little chaos, and you’ll find that, just maybe, the end result will be a whole lot more fun.

So, sitting in the dark room with Topol and... the other guy singing “To Life,” I figured, what the hell, I’ll let it roll.

The Epilogue to The Drunkard's Second Tale

The Student burst into laughter as The Drunkard signed off with his signature sit-back-and-swig. “Holy shit,” he said. “I remember watching that and thinking of that plot to dose Nixon with acid.”

“Juvenile,” said The Writer. “Absolutely juvenile.”

“Well fucking done,” said The Stalker. “Hackem got what he deserved—wanting to station police officers in mosques throughout the state. Absolutely disgusting”

“Hackem?” asked The Traveler. “I don’t know him.”

“Really?” asked The Drunkard. “Where were you through the entirety of last year?”

“Southeast Asia,” said The Traveler, “doing charity work.”

The rest of us hung our heads, being shown to be the self-centered Westerners we clearly were.

“Now, what I don’t get,” said The Writer, “is why you felt the need to work in this Cloyd character.”

“What?” The Drunkard said.

“Come on. This kid with his ‘gul dernit’s and his overly-rural shtick? Really? You expected us to buy that? No one talks like that. People in cartoons don’t talk like that any more. I mean, we’ve already established that I’m as anti-populist as the rest of us, but I’d never stoop so low as to—”

The Drunkard groaned. “When was the last time you weren’t in a city?”

“—think that—what?” asked The Writer.

The Drunkard leaned forward. “When was the last time you weren’t in a city?”

“Well, I could hardly call Knoxville a city,” said The Writer. He leaned back and folded his arms—body language that reminded me of a turtle retreating into his shell. “It’s such an anti-cosmopolitan place that—”

“How many people live there?” asked The Drunkard.

“’Bout three hundred thousand,” said The Student. “Oh, and it recently had a Broadway production of some musical with puppets.”

“Broadway,” said The Drunkard, “puppets, population in the six-figures, sounds like a city to me. Know how many people lived in Eldritch? Just over a thousand. Two thousand, counting students. So, answer the question. When was the last time you weren’t in a city? When was the last time you lived—held residence—in a place that could be described as Bumfuck, Tennessee?”

“Well,” said The Writer. “Not... that is to say, I haven’t. But, I think I—”

“Let me tell you,” responded The Drunkard, “about a guy named Jim-Bob. And that was his actual name, and I swear on my mother’s life that I’m not making this up, and everything I’m going to tell you about J.B. was true.

“Jim-Bob was a Marine. Now, right there, that places him at the top of the totem pole in rural Tennessee. Anyway, out in Iraq, J.B. and his platoon were incredibly bored—this was during one of the lulls after the first troop surge. So, they picked up a few bazookas and started target practice—using camels instead of bull’s eyes.”

The Student and I started laughing. The Traveler furrowed his brow and, probably, started thinking about the injustices of the world that such people who would fire upon innocent camels with heavy weapons would escape without retribution. I admired him, I really did, but sometimes he didn’t see the humor in situations. The Writer shook his head. “What’s your point?” he asked.

“Hold on there, hopalong,” said The Drunkard. “Before Iraq, J.B. got married to a girl from down the street and had a couple of kids. J.B. was nothing if not a decent father, so he decided that, damn it, his kids deserved a swimming pool. Went out back, started digging a pool. J.B., like many people in the area, didn’t trust chemicals, so he never bothered to put any treatment stuff in the water. In a couple of weeks, his makeshift pool was covered by a spongy mildew and mold the likes of which you would not expect to see on the surface of the most grungy lake in the country.

“So, in answer, J.B. figures that the best way to handle such growth is to buy trout to eat all of the ickiness. You might call this the organic approach, Writer, but then you, perhaps, wouldn’t want to give credit to such a plebeian approach to the problem, so you’d double back and say that the man was an imbecile—or something to that effect.”

I looked over and saw The Writer open his mouth in order to answer, then stop himself.

“Anyway,” said The Drunkard, “as fish are living beings, they need to defecate after eating all that delicious growth. And where does all the poop go? Into the pond. So, J.B. goes out to Wal-Mart, buys a couple of fishing poles, and gives them to his kids. And so, the family ate fish.”

The Student and I laughed again. The Traveler grinned and raised his glass. “To J.B.,” he said.

The Stalker raised his glass and clinked with The Traveler.

“My point in all of this,” said The Drunkard, “is that there are, quite clearly, individuals who prop up these stereotypes. Cloyd, that magnificent bastard, was one of those people by virtue of being one of the most innocent and hickish people I’ll ever come across if I live to be a hundred and twenty.”

“That does not excuse the use of such boorish dialogue,” said The Writer.

“Oh?” asked The Drunkard. “Everyone has to sound the same? Hey everyone, let’s chop sentences up and have them stop and end places where they should be joined by fucking commas. What’s that? You want to use slang? Here’s a list of Establishment-Approved™,” at this, The Drunkard actually said ‘tm,’ “folksy terms. Use only them, or you’ll be seen as a hack.”

“Sat in on a writing class recently, Drunkard?” asked The Traveler.

The Drunkard nodded solemnly. “I felt a part of my soul die. The pretension was suffocating in that room. If I heard one more story wherein the hero gains some fucking realization about life via eating a pretzel in a park or some shit, I would have brought a fucking Glock to the next class.”

The Writer shook his head. “None of you understand Art. Understand anything that matters. You just don’t care. Don’t observe.”

“You see!” shouted The Drunkard, shooting up out of his chair. “It’s disgusting when you try to sound like that.”

I checked my watch. I had a cast viewing of the film version Fiddler on the Roof that night, and had arranged with Dixie to bring a couple bottles of Jack Daniel’s. It was, after all, an incredibly long movie. “Well,” I said, standing up, “as much as I would love to sit here and debate writing with you guys, I’ve gotta run.”

“Oh?” asked The Traveler. “And do what?”

“Wait,” said The Student. “Let me guess. You’ve gotta go update your blog. Perhaps, tonight, we’ll learn more about that bespectacled vixen from your Ranting in Literature class.”

“‘Bespectacled vixen?’” asked The Drunkard.

“His words,” said The Student. “You know, I might have to use that when Rebecca and I have a row. She might like that.”

The Drunkard turned to me. “‘Bespectacled vixen?’”

“I don’t have to make excuses to you!” I shouted.

“Yeesh,” said The Traveler. “Don’t get defensive.”

“I’m not getting defensive!” I shouted.

“Oi!” shouted the bartender. “You! Out!”

I left the pub to the sound of my friends laughing as The Student read out a list of horribly out-of-context quotes from my blog. I hated him, true, but, at the same time, I was one more hit a day closer to a wide audience. And no publicity is bad publicity.

The Last Part of The Drunkard's Second Tale

My cell phone buzzed and rattled on the nightstand in the hotel room. I yelled an obscenitiy and picked it up. The display read five past noon. I sat up and chucked a shoe at Cloyd in the other bed. He responded, “Stop your kickin, Goat. I ain’t gettin up.” Last night had been his first drunken experience, and this afternoon would be his first hangover. I shook my head. There were two reasons I needed him to get up:

The first was because he had to have been at least twenty, and, by now, he should’ve been drunk and hung over more times than he could count on his fingers. The only for him to get any more experience was to man up and get drunk again—and he wasn’t going to do that by sitting in bed all day.

The second, less deplorable, reason was that I really could’ve used his help. This Tea Party psycho was no good news, and I knew a con artist when I saw one. He was trading on a misplaced sense of governmental distrust and, in doing so, trying to secure a seat of power. The man had to be stopped, and I was truly concerned about my prospects of going in on this alone.

I knew the sorts of people who were in this ultra-conservative, ill-informed grassroots movement, and Cloyd, with his borderline impenetrable accent and bouts of extreme idiocy, would fit in perfectly. My original plan—where I would walk into the conference room and try desperately to blend in with a bunch of hicks—was thrown out the window. Cloyd was the new operative and, if I could get this kid moving, I’d more than happily buy him a first-class train ticket to Nashville.

“Cloyd, come on,” I said.

He opened his eyes and groaned. “Mr. Yudavitch, I don’t much feel like gettin up. My head hurts somethin nasty, and, on top a that, I done puked about three times over the night and I keep feelin like I’m gonna do it again.”

“If you do, we can pull over to the side of the road.” I stood up and paced across the room. “Cloyd, you don’t understand how important this is. This state is my home. Unless I get into grad school, I’m going to be living here. I will not stand idly by and let some schmuck who wants to have prayers in public school take office in this state. It’s the duty of every American with a functioning mind—and yes, that includes you, my friend—to try and stop this prick.”

I walked back over to my bed and sat down on the corner. “Come on, Cloyd. We can be part of history. Don’t you get that? All it’ll take is just a little friendliness on your part and just a modicum of stealth.”

“I don’t know that word,” he said.

“Stealth?”

“No, that’s when yer bein sneaky. Apple called me that when I tried to sneak up to Cow and stick an apple in her ear, but tripped over the plow and shouted ‘Tarnation!’ and scared her off. He was being irony. The m word. I didn’t understand that.”

“Modicum? It means ‘a little bit.’ Kind of. Look, all you need to be is just a little stealthy and then bam, we’re done, we watch the proceedings from the comfort of a bar across the street, and you’re off to Nashville to find your Dad. What do you say?”

Cloyd groaned again, but kept his eyes open. This was progress. “Can you make this feelin stop? I don’t want my belly to feel like it’s a-gonna go flip again.”

“I can’t make it stop, but I can make it feel a little better.”

There is a place that has all the trappings of the stereotypical South. Old people in rocking chairs. The vague atmosphere that, unless you’re white and Christian, you’re unwelcome. Food that immediately brings on a heart attack. And, of course, country music blaring out of every nearby speaker—not the good country, music where drugs and death and murder are the subjects, but the bad country. The sort of music where Jesus is  a recurring figure and the United States is an unstoppable vessel of God (generally spelled Gawd). This place is Cracker Barrel, and, as much as I hated it, it was the only place I could think of where the food could heal a hangover.

We walked in the front of the restaurant—cash registers on one side, and a carefully marketed, researched, and stocked gift and sweet store on the other—weaved through the hordes of elderly people and trailer trash, and got a table in the middle of the restaurant. Cloyd looked around him with a very confused face. No doubt, part of this was because he was getting whiffs of sick off of his shirt (neither of us changed into fresh clothes before we left the hotel), but, probably, another reason was because he, like myself, realized there was something dreadfully wrong about this place.

At any rate, he didn’t say much except groan occasionally. The waitress—using an obviously fake Southern accent—came over, I ordered for us and got a pot of coffee. “Here,” I said, “have some of this.” I poured some coffee into a cup and pushed it towards Cloyd. “This place may be one of the largest offenders in terms of institutionalized racism, but they have damn good coffee. Probably about as far from fair trade as you can get, but, hey, there you go.”

He took a sip and said, “I don’t know if I like this.”

“That’s a typical reaction. Like anything worth having, you sort of have to force yourself to drink it.”

I told him my plan for exposing the candidate and, though he looked fairly confused, I think he understood what I wanted him to do.

Our orders appeared at the table and we dug in. Cloyd said that he hadn’t eaten anything like this before—apparently the last homemade breakfast he had involved a copious amount of bagels and scrambled eggs, which really got me hankering for a place in Nashville specializing in kosher deli food.

At any rate, we paid back in the restarant side and left, headinb back towards the hotel and our date with destiny.

Just as I suspected, Cloyd got in without attracting any attention. I hung out in the bar next to the conference room and watched the TV. It was turned to CNN. The sound was muted, but the flawed closed captioning kept pace with what was going on on-screen. (Occasionally, jewels like “President Obama splayed that Iran’s knocker program has to be squelched by verdict of U.N.” would flash across the screen.)

One of the network’s talking heads stood in a room filled with TVs showing correspondents standing in front of blue screen-produced backdrops of Murfreesboro’s Broadway Avenue. Turned out that having the first standing candidate running under the Tea Party was big news.

I nursed my beer (five dollars for a bottle of Fat Tire). I shifted it across the top of the bar between my fingers, like an air hockey puck. The bartender looked over at me, then looked at the pool of water that was forming from the dripping condensation, and flicked a coaster my way. I put it under the beer and continued.

“H’eve just been alertold that candydate Bob Hackem is about to speak,” said the closed captioning—a good five seconds after the image of the talking head shifted to Hackem walking up a small set of stairs to a podium in front of a deep, red backdrop.

“God I hope this guy loses,” I said.

“Fuck you,” said a hick next to me. “Get outta the country.”

“You,” said the bartender, pointing to the hick, “get out.”

The hick, thankfully, knew better than to start up with a bartender. He drained his beer and shuffled out of the bar.

“God,” said the bartender. “I hate this state.”

Hackem, on screen, started talking. The closed captioning read: “Howdy neighbors. I’d like t‰o thank Jesus—the Gib Buy Upstairs—for bringing me hear today. Y’know, if there’s one thing I hate more than traffic on I-24, it’s g‰vernment graft.”

There was a pause. Presumably, the crowd was cheering their inbred heads off.

“I don’t kn‰w about you all,” continued the captions, “but when I herd that our Senate up there in Nashville told us God-fearing Christians that our kids couldn’t pray in school, well, I was plum about to [expletive deleted] m‰yself. My kid wants to prey, then lettem plry. [Expletive deleted] the Ahabs in the school, Jesus is the Answer!”

There was another pause in the captioning. Five seconds ago, Hackem gave the audience a manic grin/nod combo ripped from the playbooks of televangelists. The bartender snorted and shook his head.

I started worrying about whether or not Cloyd managed to drop the stuff into Hackem’s water. He wasn’t acting like a man who was drugged—he was acting like a man who had no conscience.

“S‰ yeah,” the captioning said again. On-screen, I thought I saw Hackem sweat a little bit. He loosened his tie. “What else I gotta talk to you about. Ah. The other week, I brought kids my to Sunday School d‰wn at church.”

Whoever was doing the captioning before must have been fored, because at least the delay was lessened to roughly a half a second—there were still some errors, but hey, typing quickly’s a hard thing.

“The lesson was about Jesus and some fucking friend of whis. Don’t matter who. After, I got the best coke-fueled blow job ever. Y’all got an escort service in Murfreesboro? Get em coke. They’ll do whatever you ask em t‰.”

I smiled.

The bartender’s jaw dropped.

One of Hackem’s aides rushed up to the stage and Hackem reached back and punched the kid in the face. The aide dropped to the floor like a sack of rice. “Fuckin faggot,” Hackem said. He turned back to the audience. “Y’know, he woudn’t take shots wih me the other night. God forbid I brought a whore on the bus—that one was liable to throw a Goddamn hissy fit. Whaddya’ll say? You’d run a train on a wh‰re with me, wouldn’t y’all? My constyants.”

Why another aide—or a group of them, for that matter—didn’t run up on stage was beyond me. Maybe they, like my friend the bartender, were in complete and utter shock. I, on the other hand, laughed.

Cloyd walked into the bar and said, “There you is, Mr. Yudavitch! Gosh, that guy sure can talk a lot, can’t he? Mighty dirty mouth on him, too. You know, if Mrs. Silver was to hear him, she’d pop right up and say, ‘Gul dernit, you watch yer language when there is kids around.’ Cause there is kids in there, Mr. Yudavitch. Buncha em had shirts what have that picture on em and—gosh, why you laughin so hard?”

I patted the stool next to me and said, “Just watch, Cloyd.”

On the stage, Hackem’s own jaw dropped and he, slowly, as if it weighed a hundred pounds, raised his hand up, pointing at someone in the audience. “Ma’am, you have the biggest Goddamn horn growin outta your head. Holy—holy shit, you see that?” he leaned forward and squinted. “You ain’t a person. You can’t be a person. No—DEAR GOD!” (Of course, in the land of closed captioning, everything is in caps lock—but, judging from his face and the way he pushed away from the podium, Hackem had to have been screaming his head off.) “WHAT IS THAT THING?”

And then, sadly, any more comedy that could have been dredged from the situation was stopped as two aides rushed Hackem and tackled him to the ground.

The camera feed returned to the talking head, who, sagely, opined that “this may be the death sentence for Hackem—no political candidate has ever recovered from a complete and total meltdown during a press conference—especially one in which the candidate referred to perverse sexual acts on prostitutes.” Truly, the voice of the media was an indispensable one. I clapped Cloyd on his back and said, “Good job, my friend. You may have saved this state from more ridicule than it deserves. I’d buy you a beer, but you’re driving.”

“I’m driving?” Cloyd asked.

“You bet ya. Going to the train station. First-class ticket to Nashville to find your Dad, right?”

“Gosh!” Cloyd said. “I plum forgot about that, what with havin so much fun with you.” Cloyd’s face fell. “Aw. Does this mean we won’t seee each other no more, Mr. Yudavitch?”

I shrugged. “Who knows what the future holds. Barkeep! Two celebratory shots of whiskey. One for me, one for you.”

The bartender, still looking at the TV set, nodded like a zombie and poured the shots. I drained mine, toasting in my head to American democracy, where politics were treated with all the reverence of a sporting event and an election was decided a month before the fact.

The Fourth Part to The Drunkard's Second Tale-b

Cloyd was up as fast as a drunk man can be. He fell out of the booth, staggered, and walked over to the soroity girl. They weren’t that far away, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying because two thick-necked cretins wearing McCain-Palin t-shirts walked in front of my view and started having the loudest conversation about Dave Matthews I’d ever heard.

The two moved a little bit—one of them had encroached upon the Straight Man Bubble of Protection and, by universal frat boy law, they had to rectify this by putting a distance of five feet between them. This, of course, meant that their discussion became louder and they started talking about tits. I like tits as much as the next guy, but I don’t view them as a discussion topic necessary to prove masculinity.

So, as these two beef-necked sub-mentals started arguing about whether Scarlett Johansson or Penelope Cruz had a better rack (my opinion: Johansson, hands-down), I hocked up a loogey and let loose on the one on the left. It flung through the air like a javelin hurled by an Olympian, with a certain amount of grace and form that only comes from years of practice of spitting on football players. It landed on the man-child’s neck and his left arm, spring-loaded, swatted it off his neck. “What the fuck?” he asked, wiping it off on his khaki shorts.

His friend laughed and said, “Dude, you just got spit on. Fuckin baller!”

I took this brief moment to look for Cloyd. He was in the middle of the dining area waltzing—with perfect form and rhythm to some unheard chamber orchestra—with the sorority girl, who looked like she was having the time of her life. (Considering her alternative was to be grinded on by some roofie-wielding Neanderthal, it was probably the best time she’d have all night) I grinned, glad for the kid, and then I jerked upwards by just such a Neanderthal.

“What the fuck, bro?” he asked.

I kept my grin. If I was going to be beaten, I might as well take it with a smile. “Don’t you think referring to the person who just spit on you as ‘bro’ is a bit, ah, strange?”

He answered with a solid punch to my stomach. His friend shouted, “Fight! Fight!”

The cry was answered by the rest of the frat boys in the place, who stampeded over and formed a circle around my booth and my assailant.

“I don’t like smart kids who think they’re smart when they ain’t smart, broseph.”

“Do you really want me to point out the logical fallacy in that, or are you goi—”

He punched me in the stomach again. My reaction in this situation was fairly predictable: I vomited. Had this been during the Presidential election, vomiting over the words “McCain” and “Palin” would have been hilarious political satire.

My assailant, now really having a bad day and realizing that, even if he did save face and beat the crap out of me (and judging by the look of pure rage in his eyes, he fully intended on doing so), he wasn’t getting laid—not even the least self-confident woman with no self-respect would sleep with a guy who got puked on. And so, my new friend simply took off his shirt and then started to land blow after blow on my face.

The human body can take a lot of punishment, but even if you train yourself to accept pain and not fight it, being punched in the face hurts. Around the second hit, when I staggered back into the table behind me, I heard a scream that landed somewhere in between a pig in heat and a seagull. Chet—as I’ll call my assailant—turned around and I saw Cloyd leap through the air as if his legs were springs. “What the—” Chet said, before Cloyd landed on him, sending Chet crashing into his friend.

Cloyd started raining blow after blow on Chet. Where the frat boy clearly had been in a few fights in his time and knew what he was doing, Cloyd simply let loose. No part of the body was hit twice in a row. His torso twisted, his arms flailed around, and, in between screams of rage, I occasionally caught Cloyd saying something like, “I don’t like when people hit my friends and just be meanies! Meanies are mean!”

A couple bouncers—Behemoth and his friend, Behemoth II—shoved their way through the crowd. Behemoth jerked Cloyd off of Chet and held him at arm’s length like a trash bag filled with cat litter. Cloyd, still screaming, punched the air. Behemoth II picked Chet up and pushed him to the other side of the bar. Behemoth turned to me and said, “You and your friend get the fuck out, now.”

My mouth was already swelling, and the blood running from my nose meant that I couldn’t properly form words without swallowing some of it down, but, nonetheless, I tried to say, “I can’t get my friend out of here when you’re carrying him around like a puppy.”

Behemoth, it appeared, did not have a sense of humor. He shoved me out of the bar, into the parking lot, and then threw—actually threw—Cloyd at me. I didn’t have the energy to shout him down for being a fascist, and just lay there on the asphalt with Cloyd panting next to me.

The Fourth Part to The Drunkard's Second Tale-a

Now, I’d mentioned before that I had been to Murfreesboro. When I first joined the paper at CRU, the then-editor had the gall to stick me on sports. I knew nothing about any sport aside from baseball, and the Cumberland Rift University baseball team was the worst—absolute worst—in the NCAA. Any coverage of their games could have been summed up by a cartoon stick figure hanging himself. So, naturally, they stuck me on football. The first game I covered was versus MTSU (Middle Tennessee State University) in a bowl match in their home town.

I learned two things on that trip: the first was that a journalist has power over editors—all you had to do was act a little nuts while on assignment and they had a coniption fit and did whatever they could to make you behave. The second thing was that MTSU girls were easy. They were the polar opposite of CRU girls, who were so damn uptight about life—results of being brought up by Fundie parents who thought CRU was a Christian institution—that you brushed them in the hallway and they ran screaming.

That, by my reckoning, was exactly what Cloyd needed. So I reigned him in—his eyes darting from object to object in the midrange, two-bed room—and told him we were going to an adult playground.

“Gosh! You mean a bar?”

I blinked. “You’ve been to a bar?”

Cloyd guffawed. “Course I have! Dale took me to one. Dave Silver, he took me to another one where we got into a fight with some folks who called him a Jewface, and then we got arrested. I didn’t much like gettin arrested. They put these big iron thingies on your wrists and, gosh almighty, do they smart like no one’s business. Say, you ain’t never been arrested, has you? If you hain’t, then, boy, I got one up on you, and I ain’t ever even—”

I reached back and slapped Cloyd. “Shut up.”

Cloyd’s eyes got wide for a second, terrified wide, and I thought he was going to start crying. Thank God, though, he didn’t. “Why’d you do that? I thought we was friends.”

“We is.” I shook my head. “We are friends. You just... man, there’s this thing called a filter. It tells you when to stop talking. You’ll develop it, just... shut up for a second.” I reached into my bag and pulled out a black shirt (stained, but it was barely visible, and if I remembered correctly, this bar didn’t have strong lighting) and gave it to Cloyd. “Put that on.”

“But I got on a shirt.”

“Yeah, a blue-and-red plaid shirt that’s going to give any sane person an aneurism. Put the black shirt on and we’ll go get you some tail.”

“But I’m a person,” he said. “I don’t have a tail. Oh! You mean to eat! Gosh, I ain’t ever had tail before. I had hoof after Mr. Gamble killed Horse and gave me the hooves to eat. I didn’t much like that, though. I felt bad eating Horse and—”

I reached back my hand and he shut up.

He took off his shirt and, well, fuck. The guy was built like a Goddamn bodybuilder. If his story about pulling a plow every day of his life weren’t true, then he sure as hell did a lot of manual labor. If we could get him to calm down enough to talk to a girl, all he had to do was flex a little and she’d be putty.

 “Gosh,” Cloyd said. “I don’t think I like this shirt.” He started picking at the fabric. “It’s mighty tight.”

“Yep,” I said, grabbing the keys and making my way out of the door. “That’s the point.”

“Oh!” Cloyd said. “Is this like one of the shirts that Dave called a douchebag shirt? I don’t wanna be a douchebag, Mr. Yudavitch. The douchebags got into a fight with us at the bar.”

“Clothes don’t make you a douchebag. You, in fact, couldn’t be a douchebag if you tried.” We stepped into the elevator. “You’re a simpleton.”

Cloyd snorted. “You sound just like Apple.” His face fell. “I miss Apple sometimes. Too bad I threw him into the woods. Shouldn’t-a done that. That were stupid.”

We walked through the lobby, I nodded to Derek, and we headed out into the night, across the hotel parking lot, through a massive mall parking lot, and towards the bar. Cloyd jabbered the entire way about topics ranging from how to survive head-butting contests with goats, how to wash in a creek, to how to rip ticks out of your skin with only your teeth. I zoned out and steeled myself for the onslaught of frat boys.

Sure enough, we walked into The Ostrich and the first thing I was hit with was the low, thudding bass of whatever hip-hop was top in the charts that week. The second thing I was hit with was the overpowering stench of Axe body spray. The third thing I was hit with was the sight of loads of women wearing pastel-colored t-shirts with Greek lettering on them. “Ah,” I thought, “the sorority girls.”

“Gosh,” Cloyd said. “It stinks in here. Worse than the barn after Goat got sick that one time.”

“An apt description,” I said. “Your powers of observation are overwhelming.” I got the bottle of whiskey from my jacket and felt a tap on my shoulder.

I turned to see a Behemoth in a black t-shirt. The man must have been seven feet tall, had a shaved head, and probably could have killed an ox by staring at it. One thing I’d forgotten about this place was that they had the audacity to have bouncers. (A common occurence in establishments like The Ostrich.) Behemoth cleared his throat and spoke in a voice somewhat like James Earl Jones. “No outside beverages.” He held out his hand.

“No worries,” I responded. “It’s empty.” I gave him the empty bottle, tipped my cap, and we walked into the bar proper.

The place had about twenty TVs sprinkled around the bar, most of them tuned to SportsCenter, and a couple on some tennis match in Europe. The sound system thudded with recycled bass notes set to some abitrary rap lyrics about materialism and mysoginy. All around the bar, there were guys wearing pastel-colored shirts hovering—orbiting—around bleach-blonde women tanned to the point of orangeness.

There were two accents spoken in a place like this—for both genders. There was a fake California/Valley/surfer accent with a like of “bro”s thrown in like pepper in a soup; and then the native Tennessee accent. A soft lolling sort of thing that took its time getting out of the speaker’s mouth. It was different than the one I was used to: The East Tennessee accent is a harsh, nasally version of a Southern accent.

I looked over and saw Cloyd wincing. “What’s up?” I asked.

He wined some more as the music got louder for a second. “I don’t like this music, Mr. Yudavitch,” he said. “It ain’t as nice as the Baitman I listened to before—this stuff makes my head hurt.”

I ndoded. “That’s because you have a working brain, my friend. Come, let’s adjourn to the bar and get some alcohol to dull the pain.”

I took him by the shoulder and guided him through the crowd (passing by a guy in a pale blue polo shirt, I heard “So yeah, down at the A-Chi-O house, we’re having a Madden tourney,” and almost threw Cloyd at him) to the bar at the opposite end of the room.

You can tell a good bar by the best kind of whiskey available. Here, the best kind of whiskey they had was Jack Daniel’s. Luckily, I wasn’t going for quality here, just sheer, blackout-inducing quantity. I paid the bartender—a petite girl who may or may not have been 21 herself—and waited as she struggled to pick up the half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s to pour a couple singles on the rocks. I looked back and groaned.

“What’s wrong?” Cloyd asked. “You ain’t a-gonna puke again, is you? I don’t think you want to, on account of if you do, it’ll be on me, and this is your shirt. Say, you think I should climb on back there and help the lady pour the water?”

“That ain’t—isn’t water, Cloyd. It’s whiskey. We’re drinking. The reason I’m groaning—no, stop trying to climb over, you’ll get arrested, and I don’t have the money to bail you out. The reason I’m groaning is because this,” I gestured out to the crowd, “is our generation. And our generation is doomed.”

“You sound a lot like Apple. Apple started soundin sad when he talked about people. Cept he used this other language that I ain’t heard you use yet. I don’t reckon I get why we’s doomed. They look like they’s havin fun, don’t they?”

Oh, they did. Off at the other side of the bar, underneath a TV showing a replay of a double play in the Cardinals-Cubs game, a girl slapped a guy in a Billabong t-shirt, and he shouted, “Don’t do that again, bitch!” before getting dragged off by his friends. She probably caught him putting a roofie into her drink.

“I can guarantee you, if you were to go out amongst these people and ask them who the President was, a third of them would tell you it was still Bush, a third would say McCain, and a third would say something like ‘some nigger what don’t belong in Washington.’”

“I don’t know who the President is,” Cloyd said.

“Yeah,” I said, “but you have an excuse. You’ve done so many drugs that your face looks like it’s about to collapse in on itself. No offense.”

“No matter,” Cloyd said. “And I ain’t never done no drugs. My face ain’t about to collapse in on itself, but I did get kicked in the face by a horse once. That hurt a lot, but it’s okay, I kick-killed the horse a little while later. Weren’t a-cause of revenge, though. Apple told me I couldn’t kick-kill a horse, so I did, and Horse died, and Mr. Gamble went  to town on me.”

I turned and blinked at Cloyd. He grinned.

The bartender finally put the whiskeys on the table. I glanced at her and saw she was sweating her ass off. I tipped her a couple of dollars, said, “Babe, you need to eat something,” and led Cloyd over to a booth facing “Baseball Tonight.” “The point,” I said when we sat down, “is that out of all of these people here, you and I are probably the most intelligent.”

“Shucks,” Cloyd said. “I ain’t that smart at all.”

“Exactly, that’s my point.” I held my glass up. “L’chaim,” I said. I clinked glasses with Cloyd and took a sip of my whiskey.

“What’s that mean? I ain’t ever heard that, and it don’t sound normal.”

“It means ‘to life.’ Drink some of your Jack.”

Cloyd took a sip from his glass and winced. “That don’t smell right. It smells like Mr. Gamble. I don’t think I want this if it smells like Mr. Gamble.” He put the glass back ont he table and shoved it over to me.

I picked up the glass and drank from it. “Fair enough. What’d this Gamble guy do to you? Head of the commune? Touch you places he shouldn’t?”

“What?” Cloyd asked. “No, he was just a right ornery fella what wanted to kill me afore I got to realizin that I didn’t want to be chained up to a plow all the time. Shot at me a few times with one of his shotguns, but I dodged him. I ain’t seen him in a while, and I hope I ne’er see him again. Probably won’t, on account a how he refuses to go to the cities, and here we are, in the city.”

“Hmm,” I said. I finished off the whiskey and caught the attention of a waitress—she looked older than the bartender, and looked capable of picking up something heavier than a shirt. “Ma’am,” I said, “can we have two pints of Red?”

“Sure can,” she said, and walked off.

“Two pints of red?” Cloyd asked.

I nodded. “Among other things, we’re going to find out what you like to drink. Red doesn’t taste anything like whiskey, and actually smells nice, so we’re going to give that a shot. Cloyd, you ever fucked a girl?”

“Do what?”

“Sex.”

Cloyd sat back, grinned and blinked.

I shook my head. “Vey iz mir, what sort of stuff did they do to you at that commune?”

“I told you,” Cloyd said. “I weren’t on a commune, I was on a—”

“I know, you were kept prisoner on a farm by this Gamble scoundrel.”

The waitress returned with the two pints of Red lager, set them on the table, and put down the bill.

I raised my glass, Cloyd raised his, and we clinked. He sipped from his and said, “Dang!” He took a swig. “I like this! It tastes like summer, or somethin. Somethin nice, anyway.”

I grinned and said, “Reds it is.”

By the time he finished his pint, Cloyd was drunk. Admittedly, it wasn’t really smart of me, thinking he could handle alcohol after seeing him leap up and down in amazement at potted plants in a hotel lobby. But, there you go. You let your guard down for a second, not fully understanding the person you’re with, and they go and get absolutely plastered on a 4.6% red lager. “Oh well,” I thought, watching Cloyd sway back and forth in his seat, “he’s having fun.”

“Sssay,” he said, “you—you think that nice lady over there,” he pointed to a sorority girl wearing a teal shirt and pink hotpants, “wants to dance? I dance. Apple told me how to dance, and—and so I can dance. Don’t you think I can dance.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sure you can. And, as to the lady, you won’t be sure unless you go ask, will you?”