“I reflected on how different it was to talk to someone who had been there compared to the suburban abstractions, the easy blather, the sheer logorrhea of television and newspapers.”

            -from True North by Jim Harrison

LUNA

I woke up from a Sunday morning dream that my church was in a certain bar at night then during the day in a cathedral of shade under the lone cottonwood behind the bar.  Who knows what this meant, but perhaps it’s because the people in bars are sometimes flawed saints though not in the modern prefabricated religious sense. 

Speaking of bars, the movement of the past few weeks left me feeling blurry and muted.  But some clarity came last week with the help of friends at that certain bar on the old highway at the edge of town.  I don’t know what it’s called because the sign blew away in a tornado years ago.  But then again nobody cares.  It’s not the kind of place that caters to tourists from the nearby Interstate. 

It was there that Luna told me one day her dad stumbled into the sometimes strip club after a long day of fishing.  When he discovered she was a stripper he was very angry although he later renamed his beloved ’69 Chevelle “Luna”.

To lessen the stereotype it is perhaps interesting to note that Luna has an interest in history, having named her toddler son Tiberius.  She also plays the flute, and, being a “bad girl”, spent plenty of time in juvenile detention growing up.      

The night before coming back to Afghanistan I went back to no-name bar for reasons of nostalgia, being the last bar I'd see for months.  And also because Luna was supposed to be working.  But Cherokee Bill said that her baby daddy put her in the hospital along with their son Tiberius, adding, “After baby daddy gets out of jail I’m going to string him up by the pecker from the disco ball and let the girls have their revenge!”  Then Lonnie, a 300-pound Bandido biker doubling as the bouncer, furthered with, "I’ve got ten heavily wooded acres with plenty of room to hide what’s left of baby daddy after the girls finish with him.”

There is a sweet spot an hour before closing when it’s best to leave a bar like that or at least lay claim to the barstool closest to the door.  The time just before the collective weariness of a week’s hard labor in the oil fields is overcome by loneliness and booze paranoia, the perfect ingredients for an abundance of violent sinning in the parking lot. 

I left before the sinning commenced, although it would have been better to roll the dice at closing time, after it had stopped raining horizontal. 

I rode home in a full blow rain squall dodging windblown branches on the dark highway.  There was so much rain my boots filled with water and a time or two when I wondered if I’d be joining Luna in the hospital that night.   

6/25/18
Kuwait City