….spent the evening and half the night listening to Tom Waits and drinking bourbon with Mark. How I want a cigarette! after ten years my addiction still kills me….the lyrics take me to places I’ve touched, sometimes been; sometimes stayed; sometimes just cruised. ‘Kentucky Avenue’ brings back such memories… killing snakes with a trowel with my 6-year-old psychopathic next-door neighbour, Jeffrey, in Columbus, Ohio; pulling the lights off lightning bugs and putting them in a jar. I hated Jeffrey for that; I had more compassion for the lightning bugs than the snakes. He ended up in prison for life; dunno what for.
‘all she’s got in her jeans are pretty blue wishes…’ Fabulous. …and my soul breathes straight back with a sigh toward the pretty blue wishes I used to have in my jeans… Mark asked me what I’ve got in my jeans tonight. Well, most of my wishes have come true, one way and another. The thing they never tell you is what comes with the wishes. Real bad-ass stuff. Memories of wish fulfilment fade, but fuck! the bad-ass stuff is with you forever. Do. Do. Be careful what you wish for.
This music makes me want to drink bourbon and smoke cigarettes all night; fuck somebody I don’t know. I’m 55! Fucking my husband is still a thrill…I”ll never completely know him; he knows how to stay a stranger with unknowable intentions. But I want the cigarettes and the bourbon, too…and the MUSIC.
Waits takes me back to the world I used to run in. A world of broken windows, endless cigarettes; diners with over-filled sandwiches on white bread…and pie. A haze of impressions lit by street lamps: ‘the sirens slice the night’. A young man with a bloody knife stuffed down his boot — I let him kiss me just to see what it was like. It was soft, and tender and warm. But the knife’s still bloody.
8th St in Kansas City MO, and the truth told me by one big mama when I asked about a club on 3rd St. ‘Sheeit, girl. I wouldn’t go down 3rd street dayed, and I BLACK’. That’s me told.
A broken jaw; a pool of blood — everybody keeps on dancing. What else are you supposed to do?
Mark’s punk stories of performing and then laying out the injured and the bleeding on the stage until the ambulance arrived…What the fuck IS anxiety anyway? I think the word ‘anxiety’ was invented in the ’90’s and we’ve never been the same since. We paid for that word with our collective balls. Fuck anxiety. Just LIVE and let life’s juice dribble down your chin. It’ll all be over soon enough. And that’s your kick at the cat, done and dusted. In my case, Dunn & Dustid.
Deep inside, the older I get, the clearer this becomes. Somewhere in me is a lesbian-blues-singer-alto-saxophonist-anarchist who’s a dead shot with an S&W .38 (Henrietta, the gun my father gave me). What do I now do with this woman? If I’d lived that life, I’d be dead now, and that would probably be OK.
We finished the night with the beat of BB King. ‘Let the Good Times Roll’, with Mark on djembe.
My love, if you go first, I’ll play it at your funeral. God, how I love you.
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