And I turned back to my whiskey. I knew she was deranged. She had all the accoutrements of the mentally deranged: loose hair, wild shoes, paisley pants. Plus one of her buddies with very large hooters had been crotch-grabbing her. I mean you could tell that later they were going to get down. I didn’t feel like I ought to have to pull out two of my hard-earned dollars and buy her some smokes.

It started raining outside and it only deepened my mood of misery and despair. I’d been down in Mexico a few weeks earlier hunting artifacts and native art and I’d been held up by mountain bandits and they’d lifted fifteen hundred American dollars off me and cut a small American flag into my stomach with a sharply pointed knife. They had laughed at me while I’d lain there bleeding, and a small boy had come up to me after they left with a wet piece of wool and bathed my wound. He had black eyes and black hair and was wearing blue shorts without underwear. His name was Pancho. He put me on a small donkey and led me to his home, and his mother had fixed me tortillas and coffee and had spread her fat thighs over me after the child had gone to sleep and whispered into my ear that she loved me and wanted to come to America. I’d gotten on a pack mule the next morning and ridden it all the way to Acapulco and bought a plane ticket home with the last of my American Express traveler’s checks.

I suddenly wanted to be back in that woman’s hut with the sun falling behind the mountains, drinking mescal, eyeing her heavy breasts inside her threadbare shirt, waiting for Pancho to go to sleep. I could have stayed there and married them and loved them and not been in the shape I was in. She had admitted that her brother was one of the men who had robbed me, and that if nothing happened to prevent it, Pancho would grow into a life of crime.

All of that was weighing on me pretty heavy while I sat and listened to the artificial laughter coming out of the booth behind me.

I turned around and looked again. They were smoking cigarettes and playing with each other’s fingers. I knew he was suggesting things and I could see that she was ready to listen. The little road-lizard she had been running with walked back into the bar and took one look at what was happening in the booth and turned and walked back out. He knew it wasn’t his day.

This chick next to me said: “You want me to read some of my poetry to you?”

I said: “Nah, I don’t guess so.”

So she said: “So, you’re, like, Leon Barlow. Like, that’s some big deal?”