And this is the thing that came back to me like a smell on the wind when I saw Guitar Jimmy walk into the American Flyers that night. That’s how his friends referred to him. I know this because I broke routine, grabbed myself a billiards brush, and went to the tables to clean them off. I was wearing a plain cotton dress and no makeup whatsoever. My hair was tied off to one side. I thought I looked fine, but not fine enough to garner the instant attention of the first two soldiers. Though they couldn’t have been more than a year older than me, they went right into a pathetic display of patronizing bravado, a chorus of sweetheart this and darlin’ that, as if they were anything more than privates in an army of penny-per-pound lunkheads. Then the one who just referred to me as darlin’ introduced himself.

“I’m Toby, and this rascal over here calls himself Rex, and this one”–he was pointing his thumb over his shoulder at Popeye Dark Eyes–“he doesn’t call himself anything ‘cause he’s so darn shy and retirin’ but we call him Guitar Jimmy. Shoot, if y’all had a stage he could lay a mile of tunes for you right now.”

Needless to say I was intrigued. And stayed that way through August and into September. Toby, Rex, and Jim came in every Friday night to shoot three-man eight ball. Toby came up to the counter and bantered with me more than I would have liked. But never Guitar Jim. Sometimes his eyes would catch mine while he stood at the table with his cue stick, waiting for his turn, and I would smile but he never did. He didn’t not smile either. He seemed to receive it without any internal need to send anything back, not mean, just solitary, it seemed.

One afternoon, while shopping with Mama down on Texarkana I saw him drive by in a black Buick with “U.S. Army” stenciled on the door. That night I wrote my first poem about him, “A Buick So Black,” and after I finished it I almost tore it up and threw it away, because the last thing I wanted was to make an unapproachable Ramos Herrera out of Guitar Jimmy. That night, as I lay in bed and listened to Gram sighing herself to sleep in the next room, I vowed to take this man to the moving pictures before I flew to France. That very week I had taken the bus down to Longhorn Travelers and directed a Mrs. Biddle to prepare an itinerary for my trip to Europe, something about which I had yet to tell the widows. I thought early autumn would be a nice time to do it, then adios mi madres, au revoir mes amis, life on the Seine. I vowed to write no more about Guitar Jimmy, and then I threw in that I would kiss him too, a real kiss, the kind I had yet to do. That sort of event could only better prepare me for my coming adventures in the European Theater of Poetic Operations.