Fire and Drunk Veterans

Before I knew it I was far beyond stoned and someone was talking my ear off about Bruce Lee and Gracie. Brandon Lee was assasinated. Gracie was the best...but he lost. Bruce Lee was a god. He's buried in Seattle. His daughter was in a movie with Chow yun Fat.

I was growing weary of all this.
By god, I needed drink, not trivia!

End up in a slow bar advertising 80's metal on tuesdays at 8, and it's 9 with still no metal...but baseball!
I can't explain it,
the sensation was completely new to me.
Sipping on a pabst,
the only patron in the place,
watching baseball,
and...enjoying it?!

Not just enjoying it,
I was captivated!
Suddenly it all made sense;
T-E-A-M
this faction of men wrought with the intention of keeping you from passing first base...or even hitting the ball, if you proved to be so poorly endowed. All working on the same mind, the same goal.

'Johnson strikes two, Roberts is stealing second, but mamma lamma Hughes throws him out from home plate. Badda bing badda boom!'

So that was all very new and strange.

Down the street at Joggers,
an all-day happy hour pabst
and some fries.
Just as I breezed up this old man tells me
sit down
take a load off.

Ok.

Take a look at my art work.
He had a few oyster shells etched with
lighthouse
boat
seagull
and polished to a shine.

My old man would like the lighthouse,
I say
though I had no intention of paying him for it.

Some character walks up and starts talking real strange about the artwork, like, the way someone might try to cover up a public herion deal with a bunch of jargon that they don't really know. I was about to jet but I saw him hand off some greens and realized it was just a cordial little ganja exchange. Old dude borrowed my pipe while I went in for said french fries and pabst.

Get a call from Sui who is down to spin, so we meet up in the warehouse part of town and light up. He had a compelling method with the poi that used a lot of isolations and chain wrap thingies that I don't know the agreed upon names for; it was pretty sweet and I wished I had a video camera or something so all the Arcata crumb-bums could check it out, too.
I was a slight drunk or sloppy and burned off the better part of an eye brow.

We go back to Joggers for a drink. Old dude is there still and his name is Mike. He's a little drunk and looks like a salty old tug boat captain. He's there with his old pal Les. Les is a little old man with the cantanquerous face of an eight-year-old in a thin white chin-beard and overalls. He's mute from chewing tobacco and you can see where his throat caved in so now he breathes through a hole in his chest beneath his collar.
We wanted to play some pool.
Les conveyed to us on a pad of paper that he kept in his chest pocket that we would have to beat him if we wanted to claim the table. This was Les' table. Ok, why not.
Sui went first. He was stomped, badly.

Single handed shots,
behind-the-backs,
upside-down and eyes closed.

Les had every trick in the book and then some.

He sunk the 8 and then looked at me with tauting blue eyes and smiled.
Next?

Oh hell, why not. I don't carry too much pride in my game of billiards anyways.
I didn't sink a single fucking ball that game, and I think for a second I had Les thinking that I was bluffing.
Hah, no sir. Just not my night, you know.
After I accidentally hit two of his in, he laid it down hard and reduced the table to 7 stripes sitting there like stupid little snowballs. It must have been a Freudian slip of some sort in a final attempt to maintain just an ounce of dignity; I sunk one stripe, one eight, and one cue...all with one stroke and into different pockets.

It could have been a glorious shot,
but instead
I lost.

Sui goes up for another beating and I shoot the shit with Mike.
"Boy, if I was twenty years younger I'd be fucking every girl in this bar."
"What do you mean, these girls are schmoes. Look at all that makeup."
He looked at me like I must be gay or at least asexual, but then had a different thought.
"When I was your age I thought I'd never be old. I thought I'd die young, and if I didn't, I'd kill myself."
"Ah man, you're not so..."
"I'm old."

It was kinda sad, you know, because one day I'd say those exact same words and get kinda quiet like Ole Tugboat Mike did and then I'd have to decide.

But Good Ole Mike chose Life that night,
so I bought him a drink to remind him that it's not all bad and told him I'd take him up on a roof to squat for the night, to roust the embers of his neglected sense of Adventure.

I lost a few more games to Les, who was getting drunk quickly. His game was not affected, but his hand-writing was another story. The complications of drunken communication are compounded greatly by the written word. He wanted badly to insult me, for sport. Like, maybe, "you son of a pigs cunt!" or "you play pool like a cup of pudding!"
Yes, the impulse was truly noble, but when sounded out phonetically from the scrawls on his notepad, all Les managed to say was "meeergish-ummmmphlamup-berrrgnona-boop" and things like that. Which was cool, too.

I left, soon enough. Mike was too drunk to do any roof climbing, but he was in better spirits already and I could see that he should save the Hobo Resort Get-away card for another, more demanding day. We all shook hands and parted ways. It was oh so heart-warming to connect to the Elder Generation on the premise of beer and cheap insults and terrible karaoke.

I went back to the insurance office I'd scoped out earlier on 15th and Pearl. As with any other hobby, a new pair of eyes is born when traveling. Just as the avid skateboarder sees a gap-to-rail when the commoner sees only stairs, I had aquired a new instinct for...getting on people's roofs!
Dumpster-to-ledge transfer,
tight-wire across the powerlines to spider-man wall-cling revert,
triple rodeo flip to sunset rooftop super-vagrant sillouette pose.
Why, yes, I suppose I could sleep on top of the Space Needle!

Slept like a baby and woke up feeling good, and then hungover.
Nap in the graveyard,
read in the park.

The Old Man and the Sea.