Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails by John Hartness (best color ebook reader .txt) 📗

tangential enough to be part of the gathering. The priest was finishing up his last tired homage to Sammy’s now-immortal goodness when I spotted Janet, floating even farther from the asteroid belt of cousins than me, Pluto to my Umbriel. I drifted over to her as the assemblage broke up, forgoing my chance to throw a fistful of dirt on my best friend’s eternal box.

“Hey,” I said as I walked up to her, not sure how to begin a conversation at a funeral with my ex-girlfriend who left me to marry my now-lead-shrouded cousin and then left him to be an Upper East Side stiletto heel-wearing lesbian fashionista.

“Hey.” She wore sunglasses that gave a vague impression of ski slopes, but her mouth was pinched and her posture tired.

“You okay?” I asked, surprised to find myself actually caring about the answer.

“No,” she said. When she looked at me again, she took off her glasses and I could see tears in her eyes. I thought she’d had her tear ducts removed at puberty, so inured was she to the heartaches she left in her wake like the Typhoid Mary of Craigslist’s Missed Connections.

I did something totally out of character then, something so unlike me that it seemed for a minute like I’d stepped out of my skin and was just an observer as someone who more closely resembled a normal human being set his sport bottle full of firewater down on a nearby headstone and took Janet in his arms and held her while she fell apart under a flowing dogwood tree with workmen lowering my cousin’s coffin into the ground behind us. We stood there for a few long moments, just holding each other and crying like we’d lost something precious, which we had, and let the rest of the world flow around us back to their town cars and limos.

After we’d cried ourselves dry, we pulled back and assessed the damage to her makeup and my detached reputation, and broke up laughing and crying again at the ridiculousness of it all.

“Of all the people…” she started.

“Yeah, I never thought…” I continued.

“That it would be you that set me off,” she finished.

“I have that effect on women,” I responded with a sideways smirk.

“I remember,” she said, not smiling, but not angry either. “You gonna offer a lady a drink?” she asked, reaching for my bottle.

“This shit? Not on your life. Besides, I’m quitting,” I said, holding the bottle out of her reach.

“Yeah, as of when?” She laughed as she reached for the bottle.

“As of now,” I said. With that, I turned and chucked the sports bottle in a perfect spiral to land with a hollow thud on Sammy’s casket just before the workmen started dumping backhoes full of dirt onto it. I looked down at Janet, who was nestled in the crook of my right arm like she’d never left, then looked back at the hole in the ground and the confused groundskeepers, and turned to walk up the hill to my ride.

“Cheers, Sammy. Cheers.”

12

Beer Goggles

When the PBR is warm

and the band is packing up their tattered guitars

into a beat up ‘78 Chevy van

and drinking their pay out in the parking lot

will you still think I’m the sexiest thing

to ever put on a pair of Tony Llamas?

Will you still think my jeans look good

while I’m trying to wriggle out of them

in the Motel 6 across the interstate from the bar

where they didn’t really leave the light on for us

but that’s okay because they don’t ask for your name

and don’t even look at my license I tell them mine’s John Smith

and ask for a late checkout.

Will you remember my name

just long enough to scream it out

after we break the cheap plywood headboard

and get security called to the room three times

between 4:15 and sunrise?

Will you still love me when the ugly lights come on,

or should I buy you another shot of Cuervo

before last call?

13

Dance in the Graveyard

I came off the ropes, hopped over my opponent as he dropped to the canvas, bounced off the ropes on the other side of the ring and…stopped cold. Where the hell was he? I swear I told him to shoot me off into the ropes, drop down, back body drop. I felt a clubbing blow to the back of my neck, and I dropped to one knee.

“Motherfucker!” I whispered, quickly falling all the way down and selling the impact as a lot heavier than it was. It was heavier than it needed to be in the first place. Looks like the kid is going into business for himself, I thought as I rolled around on the mat clutching the back of my skull. A hand reached down and grabbed a fistful of hair, but instead of waiting for me to grab his wrist and control the movement, my opponent, some kid barely able to drink in bars who still had more zits on his face than hairs on his balls, actually tried to yank me up by my hair.

Surprise, dipshit, my hair isn’t strong enough to hold me, what little there is of it. So, he couldn’t pull me up, and since he hadn’t waited for me to get a good grip on his wrist, I dropped back down to one knee, leaving him with a fistful of my hair in his fist and a stupid look on his face.

Fuck every bit of this, I thought as I stood up. Fuck the fact that it was too early for a comeback. Fuck the fact that he was supposed to go over tonight, then I could get back the next weekend. Fuck the fact that he was the promoter’s brother’s wife’s cousin. I didn’t have enough hairs to be leaving them all over some shithole community center in Chester, SC, thanks to a stupid kid who’s never trained and only been in the ring half a dozen times. This was about the third time I’d worked with this promoter, and the talent got