Godly
A hundred dollars.
The bill reads just that, but I'm in a sort of suspended sense of disbelief. Have prices risen since I was an alkie, or did I get out just in time?
I throw you a look when I pay; recognize that face with easy familiarity. You're happy, drunk Jim tonight; the one that can take off a rat's bra over her shirt, the one that knows every word to "Spanish Eyes" and can sing them in a mocking tenor to those who dare to love tonight.
This is the Jim that amuses me. Sober Jim is intense, serious, sarcastic; too much like me. If you put another beer into your body, you'll slowly dissolve in a giggling puddle, and the bartenders will find you in the morning underneath a gum-riddled table.
A hundred dollars for two rounds of drinks, and I didn't touch one.
Jeff watches us both with the sober, detached expression of a judge. He's been on the receiving end of too many ribs, and he finds it all funny enough, as long as money isn't involved. Last week you had them charge your tab to his account. He hasn't forgiven us yet.
It's quiet, tonight; the town's so damned small. We couldn't even find a decent strip joint, so we sit around a table at Famous Tony's, eating greasy pizza and swallowing pitchers of watered-down beer. There's a Four-H Club headquarters down the street. In the pauses between songs and conversation, crickets chirp through the foliage.
I want to be somewhere else with you. Wrapped up in your grip of bone and sinew, alone but with the wilds of nature.
You ramble on in the dim light of stained glass lamps, while I listen to your eloquence. The more you drink, the stranger your tongue becomes. It's an altar-religion. May I be your burning sacrifice? For it would be only fair. We have suffered for our art as nie before us.
There, and in our mortal skin, you have reached Utopia. And I am but a lamplighter at your toe.