The DreamCoach

By Stoo Magoo

Thinking of changing your name, moving away and starting all over? Then meet Maynard Skidmore, floundering radiohead and would-be writer who is at the fifty yard line of a poorly scripted life that might easily claim "The Deadbolt Chronicles" as a working title.

After much soul searching, Skidmore relocates to Arizona where he quickly crosses paths with Gypsy Kahn — carnival master, video game developer and all around oddball — who provides a psychological stress reducer for Skidmore in the form of a newly developed computer game that helps him cope with his past so he can focus on a more promising future.    

But Kahn is on a covert assignment from his 'boss' and draws Skidmore into an unsuspecting setup that forces him to choose between two different worlds. He agonizes over his choice —  even though he knows one is temporary and the other forever.

Will Skidmore see a glass half full? Or a glass half empty?
Or an ice cold tumbler of the usual blues?
And just who is this Gypsy Kahn, anyway?

~"Personally, I've always been partial to fiction that doesn't immediately provide answers readers may have about characters and situations," says Magoo, "but rather allows enough time for a reader to wonder about them, think about them, to reflect on the options and the variables. In that sense, reading becomes truly interactive.

"The DreamCoach (one word) is just such a work. The method and manner of 'time travel' is presented as the kind that resists the fantastic, the frivolous and the quasi-historical in favor of putting an introspective face on the human condition in matters of emotion, social psychology, and spirituality. All set on a contemporary, surreal stage with humor enough for readers to laugh out loud at least once, and enough of a serious literary bent for them to roll a passage over the tongue a couple of times for the full savory nuance of the entire pot of Stoo."

• Language: English
• Publisher: quadraquoin
• Release date: Jul 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201904241

Book preview

Picture 3

Just across the Arizona line, Skidmore could feel his eyes starting to get road heavy. Schmoelling’s haunting score Majorca is Still Alive managed to keep his thoughts in front of him through the night. But the long, uncomfortable jeep ride out to the desert on 66 had turned his thinking into a string of disconnected fragments. Like the stretch of small Burma Shave signs passing him on the shoulder, each trying to associate with the other, each trying to attach itself to the previous sign to form one complete thought representing one clear statement. Rather than scurrying off into the desert in a lizardly smear of disjointed allusions begging wherefore and whatnow but producing no definitive solutions — neither to the wherefore about his past, nor to the whatnow of any future in Arizona. The crucial question being how best to proceed? How to shore up the disastrous events of his life? How to make everything right, now that the problem of his career had been resolved and he had made his move?

The aggregate failures of his past made him think there was only one alternative to total victory. And that was complete and utter defeat. A sort of zero-sum game he had been playing in his head with an all-or-nothing outcome.

What can you do, he had been asking himself mercilessly for the last few years, when repeated apologies for repeated failures imply to others nothing but hypocrisy? Especially to someone like Lee back in Illinois, who occupied a first class booking in his heart but who could not possibly fathom the frustration of the challenge he had unwittingly created for himself. At times, he wished he could be like her. Hers was the faith of an unassuming child for whom God might have happily rearranged the universe.

And what to do, he wondered, when you plead unceasingly for some kind of an epiphany that never materializes? How many more rooms without furniture can your soul inhabit? And for how long? Once a cherished venue for thought and reflection, solitude had become a protracted and tortured lifestyle of singularity and isolation, harboring some hideous illness where all mental energy turned in on itself. Thought and behavior were now mere co-conspirators of some corrupt, self-perpetuating scheme whose sole objective was to prolong his illness in order to preserve their dubious roles in it. Where once his heart was a clearinghouse between what his soul wanted to think and what his skin wanted to feel, it was now in a state of utter confusion, where he was unable to differentiate between reason and instinct, his behavior manifesting itself accordingly.

Having all these questions pinballing off one another was enough in itself to heap anxiety upon anxiety, never mind his immediate situation. All of it would chase its tail around in his head for the next few days, locking arms with a lack of sleep and a profound and morbid depression, which, in tandem, would reduce him to a wired-up deadhead.

It was not something he looked forward to.

Skidmore’s breaths now became slightly shorter, causing a hand to instinctively move from the steering wheel to his breastbone, massaging the lumpy seam where a heart surgeon had crazy-glued his rib cage back together a few years ago. It brought to mind a fault line with a deep, empty chasm.

If he could just clear the books and lay down the letter A, he was thinking to himself. If he could just put one foot down in front of the other in a disciplined sequence so he could relegate all the lunacy of his life to his rearview mirror once and for all. So he could take another crack at doing things the right way with a clear head and a clean heart, where life could be a gratifying challenge once again instead of the disastrous experiment it had become. It gave him some sense of hope just to be wanting it.

The whole mess was behind him now, so he muscled himself hard to think of some practical avenues toward his future. He would go back to school and get a degree in something reputable. Auctioneering maybe. Or mortuary science. Pick some upwardly mobile friends with garages full of 4-wheeled weekend toys. Marry a woman with a clue who could give him a couple of dopey looking ninja kids to help him feel normal and upwardly mobile himself. He would buy a new car and get a job with a contract. That was very important. A contract would make him legitimate. It would verify his existence. Without a contract in life, you’re nothing.

Exhausted, he heaved a big sigh, not at all puzzled by the absurdity of his own thinking.

The Burma Shave signs soon ended and he quickly found himself approaching a small cluster of tiny white lights up ahead.

Suddenly, without warning, a heaving squall rose up out of nowhere.

It had begun as a thick spatter of stealthy raindrops but morphed rapidly into sheets of icy, wind-shot shrapnel thumping on his windshield. Out of the enshrouding tempest quickly emerged the rosy blush of a thick pervasive mist similar to a subtly chromatic nimbus that had temporarily stepped out in front of its own subject. It was omnipresent and intact and glowed like a mysterious constellation of crystalline scintilla in a state of perpetual motion. Breathing out of itself into itself, suspended for but an instant at the peak of its most radiant brilliance as if to capture the moment of full revelation.

At which time Skidmore zigged when he should have zagged, sending his old canvass topped Army jeep off the highway, nearly crashing headlong into a culvert at the entrance to a spread of raw ranch land.

A bit shaken with a bloody knot on his forehead, he felt his mind retrieving a thread of words that had been lost in an ocean of radio static a few miles back. It told of a similar predicament. Of a type of shrimp that is hatched inside a living sponge and spends its whole life in there because it can’t get out. Which prompted immediate guilt over what his own radio career might have looked like had his chronic overindulgences and indiscretions in life not been so eager to displace his ambition for it.

The pre-dawn sky had cleared enough to reveal to him through glazed eyes a canopy of sharp bright pinholes high overhead. In his groggy state they seemed one dimensional at first until he shifted his vision and looked at the night sky as though it were one of those disorienting 3D art posters found in used paperback stores. Where you have to gaze at it deeply in totality in a nearly hypnotic fixation. Or else step into it and out of it with your eyes, behind and in front of the natural field of view, until the image emerged.

The tarp of stars soon took on a third dimension, then quickly almost a fourth, becoming a ledger of all that existed. Of everything that had ever been or ever would be, from the beginning of time to the end of the night. It was the cycle of life of all that lived in perpetuity. At that moment, he had a front row seat in the theatre of forever and that made him feel at once both highly privileged and extremely lonely, lost in the infinity of the cosmos, yet assigned by design to this quiet and curious little rock among all its flamboyant neighbors.

Torn between holding on and letting go, his mind finally surrendered to a darkly cumulus semi-consciousness where all thoughts became the stabbings of short-lived electric sleep-starts, not easily identifiable, darting like gar from the back of his head forward into a network of washes and creeks and streams, finally gathering in unison off the port authority of his frontal lobe.

In a detached and cloudy mind-state after what seemed like mere seconds of unconsciousness, Skidmore’s eyes again opened slightly for a moment to greet the lethargy of twilight. He lifted his head up, not knowing where he was. Or who he was. Twilight romanced both daylight and darkness but wouldn’t tell him which it preferred. Whether the sun was coming up or going down. Whether a new day was breaking or an old one dying. He didn’t know because usually night was forever the host of escape while morning’s job was to kickstart new life and he had so often confused the two.

His mind suggested someone he couldn’t see was sitting in a nearby patch of grass working a few fingers across the strings of an acoustic guitar. Tenderly. With a gentle hand. As though mending a child’s quilt. The night air stirred only occasionally, like a flurry of voices rising up out of a quiet conversation far off. Soft laughter made it cool breeze. Thick words, a heavy gas. Clinging to his own grogginess, he felt himself resisting all thought that might bring him fully around. He was consumed by a raw notion that all his substance at the moment was merely the absence of anything else.

Sensing still another squall brewing around the jeep, he slipped again into a final murky sleep-start. Chasing carriages on their way to what might have been.

Or might yet be.

Picture 4

1

––––––––

Within moments, the whiny, expectorating sounds of an 18-wheeler brought Skidmore around for good. He heard it shifting through his head, dissipating into several hydraulic sneezes. He could hear voices outside that indicated planning and arranging more than they did idle good-old-boy chatter. He vacillated between a strong sense that he had been dreaming something real and a vague notion that he had been somewhere else not so real. Sometime during the night, he surmised, though he had no memory of it. An innate feel for time told him he hadn’t actually slept more than a few moments. If sleep was what it really was.

He soon was aware of a rapping noise on the windshield, raw knuckles against thin glass, the door then springing abruptly open and cold air getting behind Skidmore’s droopy lids to reveal a squat little man in a dark, ankle length overcoat and a bus driver’s cap.

A little taller and he could’ve been Ralph Kramden from The Honeymooners.

You okay, friend? he asked. You come flyin’ off the road like a ski jumper. 

I’m good, Skidmore slurred dizzily. I think.

You got quite a lump on your forehead, the man reported. That’s my rig right there. He pointed with his chin. Come on, we’ll get ya patched up. And they made their way up the bank of the wash toward a 1956 split-deck bus that looked very similar to a Greyhound Scenicruiser.

Beads of water had collected all over the bus, making the whole thing shimmer like diamonds in the freshly emerging morning light. On a side panel Skidmore could make out some colorful artwork depicting a beachfront with bright orange and purple flames crashing onto the sand in place of surf. The title, ‘Gypsy’s Kahnival Rides’, was painted underneath it in a gradient three dimensional deep purple and scarlet font tagged with the line, ‘Thrills, Chills and Spills. Have Fun, Will Travel’. It danced under Skidmore’s eyelids. It told him there was a carnival in town.

As the little man steered him toward the bus doors, a blustery wind began to gush impetuously through Skidmore’s frame, reminding him of the discomfort of it on his skin and how he had grown to be leery of its ambiguity in the past few years — gently carrying the fragrance of lilacs through the air in spring but in the winter making a caricature of him with chapped lips and hair that looked like he had slept in the woods. Leery still of how it is borne out of the unseen, evolves out of itself, is totally invisible, and can start out as a gentle caress then turn into something mighty and powerful, almost intimidating, demanding respect.

Name’s Gypsy Kahn, the man puffed, slightly out of breath. Gyp, they call me.

Skidmore, he returned hazily. Skids for short. Concerned that his brain sprain was preventing his full moniker — Maynard Biff Skidmore — from surfacing.

Jus’ passin’ through, I take it?

Not anymore, Skids said. You own this little clambake?

And the arthritic mule that came with it, Kahn huffed.

Your steering wheel’s on the wrong side. This a Limey rig?

Australian — Pioneer brand. They merged with Greyhound back in the 80s. I found this one in a junk yard up on the Saskatchewan border. He reached down and grabbed one of Skids’ arms. Come up, step up, he said.

Kahn had rigged the bus doors with a special kind of box where you could swipe a plastic card key to get in. Once they were both inside, he reached under the dash and the doors drew shut and made a locking sound. The two men passed a water closet on the right and a storage closet on the left, then plodded up a pair of big oversized steps through a dividing curtain and into the living area.

The first thing Skids noticed was a small bar against the far wall. It was a varnish-glazed Polynesian number made of bamboo with green tiki bark cloth running down its midsection in an abstract design. It was crowned with a Formica top the color of canned asparagus and stood proudly on four short wooden legs. Perched in front of it were a pair of armless bar stools whose orange naugahyde seats brazenly invited you to park it and ratchet down. Running along the wall on the driver’s side was a red marshmallow sofa with a baby blue pole lamp next to it. Up above were some cupboard doors and a brass plated sunburst clock.

Kahn yelled toward the back. Caprice? But there was no answer.

Against the wall opposite the sofa stood a small black lacquered table. It had a chalkware lamp on top with a seafoam green cloth shade bearing blue and red speckles and black veining. A square black Bakelite ashtray sitting underneath caught Skids’ eye. Printed in gold brush script around the edges, it said, ‘The PierPointe Hotel and Lounge. Long Beach, California’. Next to it was a book of S&H Green Stamps.

Kahn gave it another shot. Cap, he hollered to the back then said to Skids under his breath. Cap’s quite a sizzler but a bit of a T.V. junkie. One of Kahn’s eyeballs was severely askew up and to the left, giving the impression while he talked that part of him was patiently awaiting a meteorite that would inevitably come crashing through the bus at any moment and render him and everything around him extinct.

On the other side of the living area was a pair of miniature easy chairs, an old Philco console TV with a radio and a phonograph that were pulled part way out. And on top, to his sheer delight, a toy replica of a Helms Bakery delivery truck — the ones that would cruise door to door down L.A. streets during the 50s when he was growing up, blowing their air horns as they passed. Helms had the best brownies Skids had ever tasted.

Mauve print curtains covered all the windows of the bus, leaving little wall space to hang anything except over the doorway leading to the back, where a pilfered yellow street sign warned ‘ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK’, implying some sort of context and relevance wrapped in sarcasm.

Appearing underneath the sign at the moment, was a sleepy looking girl around 18 or 19 wearing plastic hoop earrings and bracelets and a short blonde pixie hairdo, modestly cut. A white pop-bead necklace and a satin, jade colored kimono belted loosely at the front revealed a silky, peach colored slip and an almost subliminal whisper of cleavage exposing a small tattoo of a unicorn, center stage. A pair of black and white Keds hightops took some of the pop out of her getup but Skids tried his best to ignore it. What he couldn’t ignore was the obvious age difference between the girl and Kahn.

Caprice, this is Skids, Kahn said. He just crashed his car out front.

Hey there. Skids smiled at her, staring at the overall presence of the girl in spite of himself. Caprice acknowledged him by blowing a Double Bubble ball.

You gotta be shuckin’ me, scooch, she intoned. Your handle is ‘Skids’ and you just stacked your wheels in the ditch? She worked her teeth and snapped her gum a couple times. That’s out there, Clyde.

Kahn went over to a small refrigerator adjacent the bar. He pulled out a six pack of frothies — Brew 102s — and pinched a trio of chilled pilsner glasses between his thumb and fingers. He set them all on the bar and popped the caps.

None for me, thanks, Skids said, watching the golden liquid churn around into one of the cold wide-mouth pilsners, gradually forming a light transparent head that would soon disappear into thin air once it reached the rim of the glass, as domestic beers usually did. Nonetheless, he wanted to dive headlong over the furniture and gulp down three or four of them in a row like a frat boy. How’d you come by these, anyway? he asked, curious because he hadn’t seen a 102 since junior college in L.A. They were practically a prerequisite for matriculation.

Caprice collects things, Kahn said. We been savin’ these for a special occasion.

Caprice eyed Skids lazily up and down. Looks like you’re it, she managed.

He noticed there were decals on the stemmed pilsners of bobby soxers whose bobby sox and everything else magically disappeared as the glasses beaded up with water. Skids’ mind immediately started leafing through the Johnson Smith catalogue from his youth. Glow worms and joy buzzers and midget spy cameras. Whoopee cushions and miniature baking soda submarines and Chinese handcuffs. It gave a kid something to do on a Saturday morning.

The girl dumped her 102 into a glass.

This cube has that kicky third eye thing you keep telling me about, Big Daddy, Caprice said to Kahn, referring to the lump on Skids’ forehead.

Say again? Skids said to Caprice. As his hearing had gotten progressively worse over nearly three decades in radio, he discovered that he had gradually switched from ‘Excuse me’ to ‘I’m sorry’ and now to ‘Say again’. It was more to the point.

So get the man a bandage, lover, the carny boss nodded, then got quiet for a bit. I got summa the crew pullin’ your car out, he said to Skids. They’ll leave it outside the gate so ya don’t get trapped inside the yard.

Sweet, Skids said, relieved that he would avoid the otherwise inevitable red and blue strobes. I owe you one.

Kahn didn’t let that go by. Well, since ya mention it, I could use an extra ticket-taker, if you’re lookin’ for walkin’ ‘round money. Then, as a formality, Long as you’re not passin’ thru at the moment, I mean.

Skids was getting the feeling the little man rather enjoyed putting him on the spot.

You look like a well seasoned carny boss, how long have you been at this?

Forever, came the reply. Actually, it all started when they came out with a computer-aided design system back in the 60s. CADS they called it. From there, the whole carnival thing took root. He smiled merrily.

Kahn all of a sudden turned into a little kid getting ready to shoot off some fireworks he had smuggled in from Tijuana. He launched into a verbal history of his endeavors, beginning with a yarn about how he had been contracted by an amusement park in L.A. back in the mid-50s to design a ride for the younger kids. It was supposed to be a memorial to a couple of Navy guys who had been killed on the beach out there. This perked Skids’ ears.

You don’t mean Nu Pike? he marveled.

Ya know it? Kahn asked, moving arrows and punching keys on a Mac on the bar.

The Pike. Out in Long Beach, Skids told him. I grew up in L.A. My father took me there when I was a kid. Had a great big white roller coaster out over the ocean. A classic.

That’s the one. Navy guys and zooters brawlin’ alla time, too, Kahn added.

He went on to explain how the park commissioned him some years later to design the ride. But CADS was new and slow and clunky and the park was falling into general disrepair. Rumors began to circulate that the city was going to replace part of the park’s oceanfront with a parking lot for the soon-to-be-retired Queen Mary. So the whole project was scrapped and he removed his work-in-progress to a property he owned in Florida. Until recently, when he came into a little scratch and resurrected it, beginning with the creation of his own computer aided design and drafting software. A holographic number no less, which he had named SPLATT.

That’s the right name for a carnival app, all right, Skids interjected.

Systemic Prototype Layout And Three-D Tracking, Kahn translated. The best of all worlds.

Skids couldn’t believe he was actually having a conversation with someone who had Brew 102s in his fridge and the Pike in his past. By the time they tore Nu Pike down it was a dilapidated cesspool crawling with nighthawks and benzedrine dealers and even though everyone loved the place, nobody much talked about it after that. It was like admitting you had strangled your dog and buried it in the back yard.

As Kahn told it, he had put the finishing touches on his new ride, then gave it a name — Vanity’s Vortex — and decided to take what he’d learned from SPLATT to move into the unique arena of creating computer games for adults. Brain games, strategy, trivia and such.

I managed to throw together this one complete game — ‘Portals’ I call it — mostly for trial purposes. To see if it’d gooey-up with the system. There’s no copyright or anything. The Vortex ride is on the way up from Florida and, well, the Portals game ain’t exackly marketable yet so I fiddle with it when I can. I don’t have all the periphials yet to make it real virtual. He chuckled at his own mutually exclusive words then slugged on his 102.

So what is the objective of this little game of yours, Skids asked, mildly disinterested. To win, I suppose you’ll say.

Actually, winnin’ has nothin’ to do with it. Ain’t no winners. Or losers, either. The objective? Kahn pondered, shrugging. Well, ya pick a character or a situation in history, or a scene in a movie, or just about anything ya want really and ya just tinker with it a little. The game gives ya some options to choose from to see how ya can make the whole thing turn out different. You know, the way ya wannit to.

Tinker how?

Well, the whole application is a kinda hybrid between Watson’s artificial intelligence and all those algorithms the networks create to project election winners. Only with video, audio. The works.

I have to confess, Skids confessed, I’ve never played a whole video game in my life. They bore me to tears and my hand-eye coordination is kind of like looking into a couple of bathroom mirrors trying to cut my own hair. I’d probably bail on you.

You’d like this game, bud. It ain’t about hand-eye coordination, he said. Ya ain’t prowlin’ ‘round for someone to vaporize. It’s a thinkin’ man’s game. Ya get to rewrite history, shake up the world a little, move the furniture ‘round to where it fits the room better, ya might say. He looked at Skids with that one goofy eyeball shooting off into outer space. Get what I’m sayin’? It occurred to Skids that hand-eye coordination had to be an issue with Kahn as well. He couldn’t possibly have possessed any with that big marble in his head.

A chirp on Kahn’s radio interrupted his fingerwork on the Mac. It was the crew telling him about some problems they had run across out in the yard.

He turned to Skids. Wuddaya say we take a break so I can tend to bidness and you come back here t’night, say around six? We’ll do carryout then I’ll give ya the Portals For Dummies tour. You can be my maiden voyage with Portals, howzat? The Vortex out in the yard and Portals right here in the bus. A piggyback launch. It’ll be a gag.

Skids had no real intention of returning but agreed to it anyway, just so they could part amicably.

He was an interesting character, this Gypsy Kahn, a likable sort, warts and all, and Skids had to admit, Brew 102s and The Pike weren’t exactly king-sized things to have in common, but they were good icebreakers and a hoot to boot. And there was always the hope that, like himself, Kahn might be interested in electro swing, film noir and classic cars, too. It was an outside shot for a carny master, but who could say with such an eccentric as this.

Do me a favor though, wouldja? Kahn was scratching a cheek. Ya might be around for a couple days gettin’ parts for that ol’ jeep.

Yeah? ... He felt another squeeze coming on.

If ya get time, could ya jot down a description of somethin’ on a piece ‘a paper and bring it back with ya next time? Doesn’t matter what. Nothin’ real involved, just maybe a paragraph or two. I wanna show ya how I can put somethin’ together in Portals from the ground up.

You mean like a car or something? Skids asked.

Like a personal experience. A job. A girl ya once had. Whatever. Just a paragraph or two, okay? The Reader’s Digest version. He paused a moment in thought. An’ a picture of yourself, too. Somethin’ recent.

Skids said he’d see what he could do and they both got up and exited the bus.

Outside, Kahn yelled to a couple carnies, then disappeared into the night yard, thick white smoke wafting about from his cigar and enshrouding him like the backlit vapor off a Hong Kong steam press.

2

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Skids decided it was in his best interest to get some sleep and clean himself up a little. He scanned the highway up and down for a motel and saw a marquee protruding slightly from a few scattered single story buildings where the highway became Main Street, so he headed in that direction.

The neon was still on. ‘Fowler’s Casa de Cardas Lodge and Lounge’, it read.

The motel’s only apparent entrance seemed to be through the side door to the lounge, which was pinned back against the juke with a broken cinder block. It was mostly dark inside except for some sunshafts spilling onto the floor from the entryway.

Skids was the only one in the place. He sat at the far end of the bar, staring straight ahead into his past. A fan overhead was barely turning, creating a sporadic kiddie ride for the lone fly buzzing its blades. He could feel a cool breeze blow through every so often — that early spring kind of breeze that pulls on your coat and suggests maybe you should be someplace else. Someplace more tropical, where you wouldn’t be so lonely. Someplace outdoors where the smell of urine and pine oil didn’t dance the mambo up your nostrils and hang around all day. Fowler’s was that kind of day-bar where old men talked trash over flat beer and staggered home by noon, then came back quietly the next morning for medicine. That the antidote to their problem was, in fact, their very problem, was a pure paradox that never garnered much conversation among them.

The back wall of the bar was all Formica shelving with a pyramid of glass blocks embedded in the center, backlit in pink and pale purple with more Formica at its base in the form of a countertop with a cash register on top. Underneath the counter, on a couple of plywood shelves painted mint green, several generations of bottles were all lined up together for a family photo. Some were short and pudgy with long necks, some tall and proud with swimmers’ shoulders, some sleek and slim with a vampy art deco facade about them, all half-empty of their stories. In any other place they might’ve looked deliciously colorful and tantalizing to Skids, but in this place they just seemed like so much watered down illusion.

Skids could never understand what it was that drew him to such places every now and then. Dank little slurp-and-burps weren’t exactly the type of joints he felt comfortable in, if any. He just seemed to be drawn to them. Out of curiosity. Or danger. Or depression. Or something. Fowler’s was one of those places you could go if you wanted to remove yourself from the world for a moment or two to forget about what a four alarm fire your life had turned into. Forget that it might’ve been different if you had made different choices or had plugged into better people. It was a place where you could tuck yourself away from everything that could harm you. Lost jobs, unpaid bills, poor health, mean dogs, nasty weather. People. He seemed to almost retreat into these places. To take refuge for an hour in some small dark corner of his other self where everything was painfully familiar by its pointlessness. Where he could find relief from all the depression that comes from doing the things he shouldn’t be doing and not doing the things he should. It was the kind of joint where evil could pop an eye up out of a pool of calm without warning to create havoc. Where a skinny guy in a dirty T-shirt could walk in with a pistol and grab a carton of cigarettes and forty dollars out of the cash register and walk out without anybody stopping him. And if, on his way out, he happened to notice Skids sitting alone in the shadows at the end of the bar, Skids was sure he would just quietly await the outcome, hoping that whatever the guy had in mind for him he would accomplish quickly and cleanly. Without any unintended consequences for either of them.

He put some flame to a Fandango Light, staring at his own reflection in a mirror behind another muster of liquor bottles, these all shoulder to shoulder, royal and loyal and ready to serve. His face was tired and shopworn. What the women of his past had called ‘bedroom eyes’ were slowly and subtly becoming two tarnished coins lost on a beach of finely woven crow’s feet and wax paper wrinkles. Life was slipping away, he realized. But he didn’t know what to do about it anymore.

The barback finally appeared out of nowhere, taking his time noticing Skids in the shadows, then starting the long haul down his way, made even longer by a gimpy leg. When he finally arrived, he asked Skids with a tenuous look of annoyance and a British accent what he’d like.

Skids rolled his ashes off into a tinny green tray. There a garage in town? Jeep’s got a busted headlight and a broken radiator. Which was met with a look of both sympathy and chagrin.

Connie’s Big Tow. Little ways down the road on the right going in. Something to drink?

Skids looked at the clock on the wall. It was just past nine.

This Connie, he a morning person?

Doesn’t get there til ten on weekends ... What’ll you have? the Brit pressed, thinking he didn’t hear him.

Skids went through the usual litany to himself ... club soda, club soda with a twist, cranberry and club soda, ginger ale, O’Doule’s Regular, O’Doule’s Amber, Red Bull, iced tea with lemon ... thumbing through the entire manifest until he came to a passenger that had recently resumed an interest in him.

Champagne? Skids heard himself query. Just to purge the pressure of being asked.

The barback didn’t say anything for a bit but just gazed blankly at Skids for awhile as though he were a pig in a party hat.

"What’re you celebrating at nine in the morning?" he quizzed.

Skids rolled that one around in his head for a long time, staring off, then said thoughtfully, Another day of God’s mercy on the foolish. And hit big on his Fandango.

The barback stared back without expression. No champagne, gov, second choice.

Skids tried again. How about a Deadbolt, short, lots of ice? Again, the purging thing, but this time the barback took him seriously. A Deadbolt he knew from the Saturday night crowd. He made his way back toward the liquor shelves and went to work.

While he waited, Skids took note of the wall of photos to his left. It was a virtual Fowler’s yearbook. A compendium of leather faced passers-by and tattooed hangers-on. One gigantic love-in of 60 year old Mother Road stoners, pool hustling car thieves and over-exuberant hoochie mamas with Olive Oyl hairdos, all smiling and laughing and slapping back and panning dead and caking cheese. It was a memorial wall to all those who had given their money and their time to keep the Fowler’s legacy everlasting.

For all his sarcasm over the pictures and for all his silent internal critiquing of the line-‘em-up-and-shoot-‘em technique, Skids actually found himself quite envious of them all. The photos appeared to represent that sense of belonging that had pretty much eluded him his entire life. The kind that can only come from family and friends, no matter what they look like, who they are or where they’re headed in life.

Over the years, he had made periodic attempts at changing the company he kept. But he wasn’t much good at making new friends, so when the old friends stopped coming around, he just wound up spending most of his time alone. The circumstances of his past had all conspired as partners in crime to govern his every thought and make every decision for him for nearly half a century. Until they brought him here. To this place. To Fowler’s. With a lump on his head and an old Army jeep with a mangled fender, a busted eyeball and a bleeding radiator. In a dusty, dry, anonymous little town right off the backlot of John Ford’s Tobacco Road in the middle of Arizona’s upper desert. Where he grudgingly had to accept the reality of it. And his culpability in it. Small wonder, scanning the photos, that he just didn’t feel normal under the circumstances. Out of his element. Like he didn’t belong here either. All of which again left him with an elusive sense of being squeezed through a black hole.

He wasn’t sure he liked the feeling.

On his way back, the barback managed to step off the curb out in front of Skids’ racing thoughts. Skids looked up to see the man walking a tightrope trying not to spill the goods, which he had shaken into a stemmed martini glass, the way a Deadbolt was intended to be. For some reason, it reminded him of a cartoon he had once seen in a magazine about a Danish demolitions expert trying to insulate a bomb by stuffing it into a loaf of pumpernickel.

Skids had his head propped up on one hand, nervously spinning a cocktail napkin around with the other. The barback finally set the Deadbolt in front of him and for the longest time Skids stared at the thing. The rum was moving a little from side to side like the water in a swimming pool at the onslaught of an earthquake. From rim to stem, it was a kaleidoscope of sparkling ambers and golds, its light refracted through a veneer of condensed water drops all around, standing evenly balanced on its one leg like a flamingo in a rich man’s Koi pond. What he was staring at in front of him, he admitted to himself, was a universe which, for the moment at least, provided light years beyond a dark day-bar, a dead end radio career and a head full of foreboding monsoons.

Let me have a room, too. Something quiet. One night, Skids said.

He reached into his front pocket for some bills and laid a few on the bar, his past whispering of those moments, ever more frequent now, when his brain would slip into autopilot and everything that came into it would come straight out of his mouth and he would wind up saying all the wrong things to all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons.

Like now.

Ever wonder why people blow their brains out? he asked without emotion.

It was a simple question.

The barback snatched up Skids’ money, somewhat repelled by his little riddle and, not caring to wait for the punchline, limped off down to the other end of the bar to get some change. Skids watched him for awhile, struck by how a simple thing like an acquired limp could downgrade every youthful dream in a person’s life — career, prosperity, respect, love — to an entirely different level, without the person himself having had anything to do with it at all.

He fired up another nail, accidentally bumping into himself again in the mirror. He found it impossible to look. Normally, by this time of day he would’ve been looking and feeling more like a mad inventor on the verge of a copyright than a hapless misfit on the ledge of a building. He dropped his eyes and they came to rest on the beer bottles in the cooler, all at the ready now like a platoon of perspiring paramedics eager for triage.

When the barback came back with Skids’ change, he took a couple of glasses off the bar and dipped them into a sink and set them on a rubber mat. He stood there drying his hands with a bar towel, studying his patient, waiting dutifully for the answer to Skids’ question simply because he was a bartender and that’s what good bartenders did.

Skids fixed his gaze on the Deadbolt some more. The barback was done wiping, so he folded the towel and put it down next to the glass by the sink. He leaned impatiently on the bar with both hands, the way a gold digger’s lawyer might lean on the rail of her dying husband’s hospital bed, hoping his next words would be his last.

Skids drew on his cigarette, letting the smoke curl around the foyer of his open mouth for a moment before sucking it down his throat all at once.

He blew out a thick, white rope of it and looked straight up at the man.

Because that’s where the pain is, Skids said.

Then slid off his barstool and left by the side door.

His Deadbolt untouched.

3

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Skids leaned back on the hind legs of a wooden kitchen chair outside his room, sipping