Jerry, Meet Jerry

I should write first about what a great day I had today. It was the perfect backside for yesterday. I’ll get to that, I promise. I’ll try, at least. But for now we will fast forward to the end of the day. To Tiki. To my out-of-body experience.

You may have come to assume, reading my tales, that I’m a Rock ‘n’ Roll All Night, Party Every Day kind of guy. Sorry to have led you astray, but that’s generally not the case. At Tiki, for instance, I am usually gone before the band starts to play. Find me a bar where good bands play in the late afternoon and I promise I’ll be there every day. I assure you this has nothing to do with my age.

So tonight I found myself still there as the music started. I was sitting next to Connecticut Bill, who would not SHUT THE HELL UP! He was the one who convinced me I should stay to hear this guy play, but once the guy started playing, all I could hear was Billy. In the presence of good music I do one of two things: I dance or I write. Usually when I write while listening to music it’s all in my head, but tonight I grabbed a pile of bar napkins and a pen, both because I knew my memory was fragile and to keep Bill at bay. It took some hard-core ignorin’ to buy myself some space.

Meanwhile, the singer was starting to attract a few new partons to the bar. Some of them were even female. I worked away, studiously ignoring Billy as much as I could. There was one woman in particular, over my right shoulder (Connecticut Bill was to my left), in a floral dress short enough I could appreciate the toned legs crossed and aimed directly at the singer. I scratched away at my napkin. One corner of my mind, of course, drew a scenario that had her crossing over to me to see what I, obviously an artist of great virtue, was breathing to life there in her very presence.

It was as I contemplated that fantasy that I saw myself. There are no mirrors at Tiki, and none was necessary. There I was, shaggy, saggy, and baggy, scratching on a napkin arcane symbols that I myself will not be able to decipher later, tearing the parchment when I get too excited. My hair is a wreck because I run my hand through it repeatedly as I wrestle with the tougher parts. I’ve got a pretty good dairy queen thing going by now.

And here’s the kicker: if that woman had come over to see what I was writing, on the off chance that somehow she had felt the force of my intellect across the room, I would have been paralyzed. “What are you doing?” she would ask. “Uh, just doing some writing,” I would answer. “Oooh, I love writers! Can I read it?” Gaah! Shit! Shit! Shit! “Uh, no. It’s not ready yet.” It would have been something like that, except less graceful on my part. Luckily the entire scenario is impossible.

4 thoughts on “Jerry, Meet Jerry

  1. It’s funny how precient that was. I crashed at Amy’s last night, and I put the napkins on the coffee table. Later I told her about my evening.

    “Are those them?” Amy asked.

    “Uh, yeah,” said I, scooping them up.

    “Let me read them.”

    “Well, they’re not really anything to read, just notes, really.”

    “Oh, com on. Please?”

    “I’ll let you read them when they’re done.”

    “Let me read them. Think of it as rent.”

    Well, she had me there and she knew it. Amy always gets her way, at least with me. It actually worked out pretty well. The napkin with references to Brownian motion and Quantum Electrodynamids didn’t impress her much, but the scribbles I had put down on another one were good enough to make her want to share some things she had written in the past. We ended up crashing at 4 am. Hey, it’s fine for me, I don’t have to get up and go to work.

  2. I’m pretty sure I ran into another Jerry the other day. I put it down as coincidence, but now that you bring it up…how many of you are there? Did you really go to all of those places in the photos…or did y’all go to all those places?

    Did the italics work? All these washes will come clean!

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