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Once, after a night of Scotch and port wine
when the moon was a White-Russian mistress
and the stars aligned in regiments
of sparkling gin shots,
she insisted he drive them to a motel─
she insisted he drive them to a motel─
them meaning she and her feral,
one-eyed girlfriend
closing up the tavern.
"We'll party if you pay for the room,"
said the girlfriend.
They climbed into his pickup
and proceeded in the wrong direction
down a one-way thoroughfare.
"Easy there, Sport," the ladies protested.
They climbed into his pickup
and proceeded in the wrong direction
down a one-way thoroughfare.
"Easy there, Sport," the ladies protested.
"You trying to get us killed?"
He cut across a stranger's lawn
and through the neighbor's
meticulously-groomed azalea bushes.
"We'll pull over here for one more."
And one became three, four,
then a round for the bar.
It ended abruptly when patrons
It ended abruptly when patrons
inquired if their one-eyed companion
was a pirate?.
"Are you a rectal lobotomy?!"
her friend replied.
"I think I'm in love with you," he said,
"I think I'm in love with you," he said,
then declared a plague
upon their antagonist's houses
as the trio hustled into the sapphire night.
He cursed the tyranny of traffic laws
while racing past bicycle cops,
crowded boardwalks,
and escalating appeals for safe passage,
and escalating appeals for safe passage,
finally screeching to a halt on the freeway
to inquire
WHY IN THE HELL
they were nagging him
about his driving?!
"Let us out!" the ladies screamed.
"Let us out!" the ladies screamed.
He pulled onto the shoulder
and summoned an incoherent plea
for solidarity.
But it was too late for speech-making.
He saw it in their frantic eyes
as they spilled barefoot onto the concrete,
straightening their skirts
and bouncing into their high heels.
Within minutes, they vanished
and he stumbled into the wild grass
above the freeway offramp.
The radio shouted Green Day's
"Boulevard of Broken Dreams"
as the car sputtered its dying gasps.
Morning found him
beneath a buzzing Motel 6 sign,
ants biting his ankles,
a vague sense
of getting away with it.
Somewhere
in Corpus Christi, Texas,
two women
were telling the day shift
a cautionary tale.
**First published in Barbar Literary Magazine
