We talked for a while, both of us leaning up against a pinball machine. There was a game of pool going on in the back. A little black Lesbian with a bull cut to her was playing pool with an old Italian, a sort of working type. Maybe he worked with vegetables or he was something else. The Lesbian was a seaman. They were locked in their game.

One of the drunks at the table spilled his drink all over the table and all over himself.

‘Get a bar rag,’ another drunk said.

The spiller got up unevenly and went over to the bar and asked the bartender for a rag. The bartender leaned over the bar and said something to him that we couldn’t hear. The drunk came and sat down. He did not have a bar rag.

‘Where’s the rag?’ the other drunk said.

‘He said I owe him forty-five dollars and sixty cents. Mytab…’

‘Well, I don’t owe him forty-five dollars and sixty cents. I’ll go over and get a bar rag. This table is a mess,’ and gets up to prove that he doesn’t owe the bartender forty-five dollars and sixty cents.

The table was returned to normal. They started talking about something that I know about.

Finally my friend said, ‘What a God-damn boring night. I think I’ll watch that dike play pool.’

‘I think I’ll stay here and listen to these drunks for a while,’ I said.

He walked over and watched the black Lesbian play pool with the old Italian. I stood there leaning up against the pinball machine, listening to the drunks talk about lost cities.

The View from the Dog Tower

‘… three German shepherd puppies wandered
away from their home up near the County line.’

North County Journal

Serving Northern Santa Cruz County

I have been thinking about this little item that I read in the North County Journal for a couple of months now. It contains the boundaries of a small tragedy. I know we are surrounded by so much blossoming horror in the world (Vietnam, starvation, rioting, living in hopeless fear, etc) that three puppies wandering off isn’t very much, but I worry about it and see this simple event as the possible telescope for a larger agony.

‘… three German shepherd puppies wandered away from their home up near the County line.’ It sounds like something from a Bob Dylan song.

Perhaps they vanished playing, barking and chasing each other, into the woods where lost they are to this very day, cringing around like scraps of dogs, looking for any small thing to eat, intellectually unable to comprehend what has happened to them because their brains are welded to their stomachs.

Their voices are used now only to cry out in fear and hunger, and all their playing days are over, those days of careless pleasure that led them into the terrible woods.