When you hear that a friend scored a job at a newspaper, you assume they are meeting deadlines while punctuating the last few lines of a breaking story. For this job, however, it wasn’t even necessary to be able to read your product.

I fed pages of advertisements into a loud cachunking machine that jammed every ten minutes, stopping the entire assembly line and gluing every eye on you because you let the right corner of a glossy page slip into a machine a millisecond sooner than the right side. The first night I was feeding alluring pages of slips and panty liners on sale into the machine, I started a conversation with Brandon.

“People call me the Perv.”

“Why is that?” I asked pensively.

“Whatever it is you are into, man, I can get it for you….Powder Puff Girls, Superwoman, Batgirl. You name it, I can get it….” He winked and nudged me, and the nudge was of such a quality that the very contact made me feel like I should take a shower or at least find some hand sanitizer to smear all over my side where we’d made contact. Trying to shake off the Perv’s offer, I noticed his attire (which, allowing for very slight variations, summed up his entire wardrobe): an Hawaiian shirt, brown steel-toed utility boots that were probably a Taiwanese version of Brahma’ s, mid-knee white socks, and the same pair of washed out jean shorts the likes of which I hadn’t seen since stone washing was the rage. Neither warehouses or human purpose could achieve a color like that of the Perv’s shorts. Most astounding of all was his haircut, which most closely resembled a Siamese Fighting fish: a ponytail swinging back and forth like a fin draped over long, flowing, greasy hair.

Though the Perv always wore thick glasses and had a slight squint, he was still able to be very expressive. Of course, in some sense, he was a scripted creature of his culture: only the King of Beers was good enough for the Perv’s discerning palate, though God knows he would never say no to sitting on a cube of Stones during a game of Need for Speed or Grand Theft Auto. And the Perv only knew how to drive fast, whether that was inside a video game and in his mind on the roads of Marion, Indiana, riding around in his favorite car. “No foreign shit for me, man,” he would say. “Trans Am is where it’s fucking at.” He was equally discerning in his food choices, beef jerky and Hardees restraunts, which kept his shirt buttons stretching almost taut over his jeans shorts night after night.

The Perv was tolerable and predictable and occasionally good for a laugh, which came in handy in an otherwise mundane job. “You showed up in a tie for your interview?” He asked my first night on the job. “Shit, I came in wearing this exact thing…jean shorts and a tuxedo t-shirt, and I got the job!”

Things changed the night that we started partnering with the local jail to bring in women for work detail. The Perv immediately called dibs on a forty-five year old blonde woman, with a “solid build” and two children in junior high. She has been thrown into the slammer as a repeat DUI repeat offender. Why the Perv felt that a woman twice his age with nothing good going on was worth being pursued by such a high roller as himself was unknown. His tactics were even more interesting. The first night she came in, he launched himself high-jump style onto a pallet of ads hoping for a little attention. He became more aggressive with me and the two other college guys who were summer help, punching people in the arms and inventing other feats of strength to make up for the fact that he walked 5 blocks to work every night at midnight and back at 4:30am.

All this became even more astonishing a few nights later when the blond (Loretta), the Perv, the foreman (Steve) and I were outside on a smoke break later that week. A large, very fat man went by on a Goldwing, catching Loretta’s attention.

“If I were riding on that motorcycle, I would be smilin’ real big, so big I would get a bunch of bugs in my teeth. It’d be like fly tape!”

“Damn lady,” Steve said. “I’m trying to smoke a cigarette over here.”

Conversations like this, however, didn’t deter the Perv one iota. It was undeniable that the Perv saw a rare flower where the rest of us saw only a weed. And, after a while, I realized that he had gotten something right. The Perv liked his job, he was enamored with the women he worked with, and he was, in many ways, a king of his domain. He enjoyed his beef jerky and hoped for Budweiser, while not being at all disappointed with a dirty thirty. He appreciated a beauty he could pursue, tastes he could afford, and dreams he could hope for. What the Perv offered was cartoon pornography, but what others got was a demonstration in appreciating the simple life.

Now, I need to be upfront with you. We picked The Dog House exclusively for the comedic value. I’d passed the building one too many times and made one too many jokes about “Candy,” the fictional bartender with whom I’d been having a little summer fling. However, this particular night at least, the previous fiction couldn’t bear up under the shocking absurdity of the fact.

We walked in, and immediately to our right there were a group of 60-somethings on a bonafide dance floor grooving to the B-52s, a disco ball and a strobe light drawing attention to their entirely too pristine movements. It appeared that they were trying to recreate a weird baroque version of Soul Train. No one in the place could have been under 40, and not a beer on tap cost more than $3. Clearly, this was a “love shack” if there ever was one.

We escaped to a dark corner with our $3 Bud Lights, and I laid my head on the table, listening to four or five middle-aged women all hitting on one semi-interested, fat Hispanic guy whose mustache would have made even Tom Selleck envious. I was also envious.

Three cycles of Sportscenter later, the mystique was gone, and our elbows were on the bar, waiting to cash out our tabs. The spirit of desperation which obviously haunted the Dog House had gotten to me. It was boring in here, and it was 1:30am. Let me tell you, if your aim is to improve your mood, this is not a good strategy.

Alan and I asked to pay our tabs, and the bartender, who up until that point had been absorbed in something under the bar, poked his head up. Something about him made me think of Yoda without the large ears and without a trace of cuteness. His face looked like it had been stepped on, forcing all of his features to be pushed out, exaggerating everything from his big eyes to his nose, which didn’t seem to coalesce with his other features in any comfortable way. He wore an ancient, garish Hawaiian shirt, faded khaki shorts, and three or four days worth of gray, patchy stubble. Evidently the “homeless in Bermuda” look was back in style, and I’d missed the boat.

“You’re not done drinking? You can’t be done!” he said, talking to the whole bar almost as if he were acting out a stand up routine.

“Well, yeah, I think I’m done for the night,” Alan said with a wry smile.

“But I’m not done drinking on your tab!” said the bartender.

Alan stared at him blankly, obviously just wanting to get out of the bar, while the bartender responded by laughing as if he’d just had his mind wiped by a government UFO. He wore a name tag reading “Hello, my name is bOb!!!!”

“Alright boys,” said Bob suddenly, emphasizing the extreme divide between our ages and all the other clientele, “I got something special for you! Now, this is on the house, mind you!” I felt suddenly stuck, as if Bob had crawled under the bar and shackled me to something very solid, though I’m quite sure the rest of the bar could empathize. Lightening quick, Bob turned around and started grabbing bottles. I couldn’t see what he was putting in the drinks. Then he took the two double shotglasses down under the bar and poured something into them. Standing up, Bob slammed our drinks down on the bar and pointed at the clock.

Standing up, Bob slammed our drinks down on the bar and pointed at the clock.

“What time is it?” He said pointing to a Dos Equis digital clock, fully equipped with only two big red Xs.

“Um, 1:38,” Alan said.

“At 1:45,” Bob said gravely, under his breathe, “in seven minutes…” (he paused for dramatic effect) “you will be shit-faced.” Bob frowned as if he was telling us something of immense, life and death significance. “You will be gooonnnnee. You won’t remember a fucking thing.”

“Am I supposed to drink this?” Alan said, but without a hint of the incredulity I would have expected.

“Just down it, son!” Bob said. “All at once. Just throw your head back, that’s how you do it!”

And then Alan had downed his. I was stunned. What on earth was he thinking?…And then I drank mine, and I was even more stunned, too stunned to even analyze what tinfoil hat Bob could have put in the drinks. “You’re gonna be plastered, plastered, plastered,” said Bermuda Bob, screaming over the music as we escaped past the boogying old folks out the front door. “That’s going to get you there boys! Seven minutes!”

And then we were in the car with Dean, the designated driver.

“What took you guys so long?” Dean said. Neither of us answered. After a long minute, Alan broke the silence by leaning his headrest back and groaning, “I think I’m there.”

Anyway, within fifteen minutes of our arrival, we were all astonished to be joined by Sammy Davis Jr.  He was doowapping and soaking in the sweet music as the piano played, waving his hand as if playing an air piano himself through a prominent soft cast. He got the cast because of an injury allegedly sustained while getting thrown out of every bar in town. He was holding a PBR can in a paper bag that he could have just as easily gotten from the closest gas station as from the bar. His claim of 24 years of age seemed a bit absurd after noting his missing teeth and wrinkled smile.

As he walked away, playing an invisible tambourine and looking for someone else who would swap war stories, two guys walked up both with gauges in their ears. The first guy’s were large enough that a penny could fit through them while his buddy’s were more the size of an ink pen. They were both obviously excited about the piano music that had been coming from the corner of the bar. As they were sharing about just how excited they were, large gauges began reflecting on old regrets and, suddenly, looked at us almost as if choking back tears.

“I wish I would have played an instrument growing up. I would have played the guitar or the harp,” he said. And then, after a brief pause, “Chicks fucking dig the harp, man.”

With that he felt compelled to hug me and walk away, small gauges following. They then stopped at the juke box to select the worst possible music they could find on the machine, none of which featured a harp.

As our ears were being punished by their selections, we heard a loud noise over the music, over the chatter, over the shuffling and washing of glasses. At the jukebox, standing inches from small gauges, was a large man who was the precise intersection of muscular and fat ass, wearing a plain blue sleeveless shirt and plain sweatpants with the drawstring tied snuggly at the waist as if he’d come straight from the gym. He had big hair with a mullet following him around like a mangy dog and a cassette player on his hip accompanied by what I assumed were the original headphones. He was screaming so loud that we worried both for Small Gauges’ safety and that his very eardrums might simply explode right there in a blaze of red glory.

“I can’t believe she is telling me to fucking be quiet in a bar. Does she not know where the hell we are? We are in a fucking bar!”

The last phrase was aimed back in the general direction of the bar like scatter shot, sure to find the offending bartender, leaving her with no doubt he was angry at the very suggestion that he could be talking too loud. His face was a brilliant red, his eyes wide with anger as he continued to recite the travesty :  “Who tells you to be quiet in a bar, You can’t be too loud in a bar….IT’S A FUCKING BAR.”

Perhaps he had enjoyed one too many beverages that evening, perhaps the cassette that I can only imagine was pumping “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy into his brain was dialed up on MAX, or perhaps he just didn’t have a great “not on the assembly line” voice.  But if any of these were true (or even if all of them were) it would still not completely explain just how loud this individual was speaking.

I didn’t know you could be too loud in a bar before that night. But now I know. It means a maniac screaming above music, above people, drowning out his own and everyone else’s consciousness, justified in his head because he is fighting the power, fighting the powers that be.

And, then again, there are those people who are just old, even if you are that 70 something. I have no idea how old Dor is, but she would certainly fit in this category, because, as moralists say, actions speak louder than words.

Before I’d ever even seen Dor, I’d heard from co-workers that she’s had 14 accidents in company trucks—according to lore, one for every year Dor had been at the company. Supposedly she’d come back from Chicago one fine summer day with a tree branch transfixing the bed of her straight truck. Evidently, somehow or other, it was somebody else’s fault. And she was very confused about just how they’d managed to do it.

Sure, Dor was personable enough. She could talk to any sentient and probably most non-sentient beings, which is probably why the District Supervisor found it so hard to fire her. Still, the insurance premium hikes must have strained his sensitive conscience.

The first run-in I had with Dor was when she asked me to drive her to Arby’s during lunch break since her car was in the shop. She “yammered” (as she called it) the whole way there and back about her son Shawn, a good boy, who was in his eighth year of undergrad majoring in Physical Fitness.

I found out Dor had taught math at Western Michigan for many years (which begged the question how her mileage logs were always wrong) and that her husband was a musician who, because of health problems, was now limited to playing organ in church. After cataloguing her husband’s, her son’s, her own and her next door neighbor’s health problems (which took the rest of lunch), Dor turned to religious matters.

She asked me if I believed in God, and I said “Yes, I do.”

Would she, I wondered, assign me to the deepest circle of hell (though, if Dante was right about hell’s “circles,” I was sure mine would also involve Dor’s doppelganger sitting down to “chat” for all eternity) or would she attempt to engage me in a discussion about the latest episode of Touched By an Angel?

“Well, I’m an Evangelical Christian,” Dor said, “and I have been all my life.” I braced for impact.

“And I haven’t exactly heard this in church, but you know, I was just thinking this morning as I had my breakfast that as we all get to know God as history advances and as so many people around the world become Christians, that maybe God’s also getting to know us better as a species!”

She dipped a fry in her horse radish.

“And maybe—this is what I was thinking this morning—maybe God is even getting to know Himself better over time! Have you ever thought about that young man?”

“That’s very interesting,” I said, wondering how to tell her that she was expounding (as far as I could make out) the metaphysics of the German philosopher Hegel. “I haven’t given that much thought.”

“Well, I think I might just write a book about it,” she said. “You’d read a book like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” I lied. “But maybe you should do a bit of research first. You’d improve the book quite a bit, I think.”

“Of course, of course,” she said. “But we should get back to work.”

“Yes, we should,” I said too exuberantly.

“There’s a church board meeting tomorrow night,” she said as we walked back into the warehouse, “I’ll have to bring up the idea with them.”

For those who have never heard of Monster’s of Folk, I pity you.  Bright Eyes, M. Ward, My Morning Jacket, all on one stage ripping the air apart with their virtuosity.  The highlight of the show was certainly “Dear God,” a rhythmic ballad about man’s search for his creator.

During the song, my friend interrupted my contemplative head-bobbing and directed my attention to the balcony at the right of the stage.  “Look at the chick in the purple dress,” he said.  And I did.  She was fat (not obese, just fat enough to be generally repellent) and probably in her middle twenties.  She was turned away from us, making out with some dude, probably imagining he was Conor Oberst.

“What about her?” I asked.

“Just wait for it,” he said.

Then it came.  She turned around and I could see that her remarkably large bust was about to take leave of her dress.  The cups had ridden down obscenely low, so low that I couldn’t believe I wasn’t already seeing nipple (really, three-quarters of those babies were on the loose).  She was jumping up and down to the music; it would happen any moment.  I tried to ignore her, to focus on the band, but it was like averting your eyes from a train wreck.

When at last I looked back, her right boob was out on a mission.  Pressed between her and her man, it looked like a deflated tetherball getting knocked around by a couple of goons.  I told my friend to look again.  He did and then got his wife to look as well.  Soon several people standing around us were staring at this woman’s drunken exploit.  I half expected M. Ward to drop his guitar and make the night complete by saying into his mic, “Is that a nipple?”

No such luck.

The man was clearly on the rougher side of fifty, with sallow skin and a head of gray hair like the coat of a Scottish terrier.  His hands rested on the calculus textbook in his lap, his downy arms framing a prodigious gut.  He was completely unconscious.  His head was tilted back and his mouth was slightly ajar, sparkling with saliva at the corners.  He wore a light gray shirt that looked like it had been left to fester for a few weeks on the floor of a West Virginian outhouse.  Fresh sweat stains ran down the front and around the pits.  The front side contained a veritable bestiary.  Reptiles and amphibians posed in various action scenes, all having to do with exercise:  frogs and geckos bench-pressing, squatting, doing the iron-cross on Olympic rings; a salamander doing ballet stretches in a mirror; etc.  They were all of the sort of ostentatious coloring that makes you wonder how they could manage to survive in the wild.  It was quite a shirt.  Also, with every breath our Sleeping Beauty took, the shirt rode up a little higher on his gut, eventually revealing a gaping navel birthing a forest of black hairs.

Waves of repulsion seemed to pour off the guy.  Every few minutes a new bunch of girls would round the corner, expecting an open couch, then stop dead, grimace, and leave.  A barista came by every now and then and would look at the guy, look at me, look at the guy again, and then smile and shake his head.

Now, I have a rather strange habit of observing people and, consequently, have developed a strong intuition concerning the whys behind most behavior.  However, this character poses some true mysteries.

Why, exactly, does an unshaven, over-the-hill troglodyte with a face like a Shar Pei need to study calculus?  Why did he choose a venue where he sticks out more than a democrat in West Texas Hill Country?  Why is he wearing the sort of protective eyewear you use in shop-class?  Why/How is he sleeping in such a boisterous environment?  Most importantly, where the hell did he find that shirt?

Why?  There are no whys here.  Someone like Camus would see this guy as one more proof of the overarching absurdity of existence.

All I know is that come closing time the barista squatted next to the guy, cupped his hands around his mouth, and yelled, “We’re closing!”  Sleeping Beauty opened his grossly gibbous eyes and blinked at us.  Then he stood, tried to adjust his ridiculous shirt (which refused to obey), and marched his awkward corpulence out the door, off to find some new couch to besmirch.

No, you’re not dyslexic (at least probably not); a man really entered a busy coffeehouse full of college students and twenty-somethings WEARING A CAPE AND A LIGH-BULB-HAT. My conversation ended abruptly and, compelled by some ungodly curiosity, I asked, “Alright, so what’s this all about?”

“I,” he began, clearly pleased to have been noticed, “am a thought. I am an image, an idea, which you will never remove from your mind. I am Walter Barker.” He sat down heavily on the recliner next to the couch, leaned forward and began to explain to us in earnest just who and what he was. He claimed to be an information technologies consultant for companies and universities, a commercial pilot, and a man sincerely dedicated to changing the way people think. “If you give me five minutes of your time, I will transform you into a verifiable genius.”

I did not inquire further or in any way suggest that my curiosity had been piqued. However, he took my silence as acquiescence and produced a calculator from an inside pocket of his coat, handed it to me and asked me to cube any two-digit number and tell him the answer. I did so and he immediately provided me with the identity of the two-digit number. He did this time and again, without fail. I’ll admit it: I was impressed. “In only five minutes,” he said, “I can teach you to do this and in so doing provide you with a framework for achieving eidetic memory [photographic memory].”

I consented. He began to frantically point to different locations around the room, assigning them numbers and outlandish imaginary objects (i.e., a tree that is falling on you, a castle who’s gate flaps open and hits you, a linebacker about to crush you, etc.), each object having some relation to a two- or three-digit number. He explained that he was creating images of “accidents” in order to excite the secretion of acetylcholine in my brain (as if his mere presence was not “accident” enough). His claim was that if you associate information with a combination of cognitive links, locations, pictures, words, and emotions (thus triggering acetylcholine production) you cannot forget that information. Whatever. It was all gibberish, yet somehow at the end of it I could spit out cube roots just as well as he could.

By this point the girl I was sitting with had lost interest in Walter Barker and had stuffed her iphone earbuds into her ears, blocking him out with Fallout Boy or some other neo-punk atrocity.

Walter Barker, delighted at my cube-rooting ability, leaned forward—light bulb pulsing, cape rustling—shook my hand and congratulated me on having become a genius, like him. I repressed a shudder.

He then went on to make some of the most outlandish statements I have ever heard. They were so bizarre that my memory (sadly, far from eidetic) of it all has sort of run together. I don’t remember the sequence or even the context of these statements, but I’ll list them as best as I can:

1. “Currently, I am working here in town developing my SEAIROAW. It is the vehicle of the future. It is a car the flies and floats. You can take off from your driveway.”
2. “I fly all over the country getting paid $100 an hour to provide corporate employees with photographic memory and the ability to read at a rate of 400 words per minute.”
3. “The greatest problem of your generation is a failure to launch. Your parents have been coddling you all your lives and now you’re all unemployed and don’t know what to do with yourselves.”
4. “I am a good friend of the governor of Texas and have numerous contacts with the leaders of industry in Texas.”
5. Last but not least: “I have powerful ties to the Pentagon. You know, the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

Walter then asked me what I studied. I told him and briefly explained my current situation—that I am living with friends, writing fiction, and searching for steady employment. Then he said, “See, you’re failing to launch. If you let me, I can equip you with the tools to add $600,000 to your resume.” He then explained that for every dollar you invest in your brain, you should expect $400 in return. I asked him where he was getting his figures from and he seemed appalled that I should doubt a man who could do cube roots in his head. He provided no answer but went on to try to sell me on his fifteen-hour seminar on memory enhancement, entrepreneurship, and speed-reading, which costs a measly $1,500.

I told him I was broke.

He says, “Hey, that’s not a problem. I won’t charge you anything. Just come and let me equip you. You won’t owe me a cent so long as you commit to traveling the country with me for six months, helping me to open minds.”

He then asked me to be his protégé. Just let that sink in. A man wearing a cape asked me to be his protégé.

This was the opportunity of a lifetime, he said. I too could be making $100 an hour selling crazy. He was going to hook me up, take me around the country in his flying car, even share his Pentagon connections with me. I could be living the dream.

Then I realized that virtually everyone in my immediate vicinity was staring at me, observing the insanity. I quickly stood up and thanked him for the offer and told him that I would “seriously consider it,” but that at that moment I really had to piss, which was the absolute truth. Walter Barker’s five-minute genius session had taken an hour and a half.

He extended his hand, I shook it, and he reiterated that he was more than willing to allow me to “ride his coattails” for a while, to “take advantage of his pre-established credibility” until I had built my own. He jotted some more info down on a business card and gave it to me. Then he was off and out the door, cape fluttering into the night.

When I returned from the restroom, people still stared at me. The cute girl had her earbuds out now and was on the verge of laughing. All I could think to do was to look squarely at several people and then say, “Wow. That really just happened.”

Is there a lesson in all of this? Possibly. The encounter did serve as a bookend to my Sunday, the other being the church service I attended in the morning where the pastor preached on “Can-Do Attitude” (right, only in Texas); so, conceivably, the universe is telling me to get on my horse and ride. However, I believe there is a more fundamental gem to be found here: unless they can fly without the aid of a magical car, DO NOT TALK TO MEN IN CAPES.

[For anyone interesting in learning more about Walter Barker, search YouTube for “wbprotime.”]

Last Wednesday Alan and I went to Le Treff’s for $0.75 well-drink night—without question the classiest night of the week in Waco, and the surest way to go blind before age thirty. We arrived early (8:45; things usually don’t get busy until 10:15ish), got drinks upstairs and found seats as far away as possible from the rowdy group planted at a table near the bar. There were about eight of them, half men and half women, all rotting away in the onset of their autumn years, already barking drunk and shouting obscenities like sailors at port. We sat a good fifty feet from them and so, as a collective, they were more or less a grumble. However, one woman was particularly loud at moments and (amidst the profusion of “Shit!” “Fuck!” “Cunts!” “Hell-Fuck’n-Yeah!” and everyone’s favorite, “Ah-goddam-shit-motha-fuck!”) managed to produce some real jewels.

The first involved her standing up quickly, sagging flesh spilling vulgarly out of the bottom of her “Don’t Mess With Texas” sweatshirt, and demanding that the comparably hideous woman across the table compare dick sizes with her. “Come on, slut, how big is it? Mine’s just a tiny little thing.” The episode devolved (yes, devolved) into her making declarations about how “damned big” her tits were and how they are now “all withered up like old fruit.” Made the lime in my gin-and-tonic look quite appetizing.

Alan eventually went for another drink and, while standing at the bar, overheard the conclusion of a conversation between the woman with the big tits and little dick and some woman in her early twenties at a neighboring table: “Yeah, honey,” she says, sweeping a hand over her used-up body, “this is what you’ve got to look forward to in thirty years.” If that didn’t put the fear of God into the young woman, I’m sure nothing will.

Shortly thereafter, the group stood up and trundled out of Le Treff’s; off to do whatever it is that drunken, uneducated boomers do at 10:00 on a Wednesday night.

ENTER THE GRACKLE.

After grabbing another drink, Alan and I sat down at the table where the boomers had sat and watched as all sorts of people began to filter in. After a few minutes we noticed a guy who had caught our attention the past week. He was well into his fifties and had then been wearing fashionable nut-hugger jeans he’d probably just bought for $90 at the Buckle and a gaudy, long-sleeved black dress shirt with a massive silver cross emblazoned on the back. This time he had on similar jeans and a t-shirt so tight it seemed to be cutting off circulation. It was bright, blood red and had one of those faint, henna-esque airbrush designs so en vogue currently with dumb, beefy philistines. The back of the shirt sported a black bird with outstretched wings, some bastardization of the creature on the Albanian flag.

After subsequently arguing over the best moniker for this champion, we settled upon The Grackle, in tribute to the shirt. Grackles, just for the record, are loud, filthy birds. You’ll often find them picking through the leavings of other carrion fowl on the side of the road. Which is fitting, as you’ll come to see, because that’s just what The Grackle does on the bar scene: picks at the diseased meat that none of the other drunken clam-scavengers will touch.

To get a better image of The Grackle firmly in mind, imagine seeing a hulking guy from across the room and thinking, “Surely not! No! Rodney Dangerfield, in this bar? I thought he was dead?” Then you walk closer and for an instant think you’re looking at Andre the Giant’s zombie. But no, he’s dead too, and you don’t believe in zombies. Yet that’s his face: Dangerfield’s rounded chin and bulbous tree-frog neck, Andre’s thick, Cro-Magnon brow and mongoloid forehead. Now, drop this 1980s nightmare mask onto the body of Schreck, and you should have a pretty good idea what the ladies of Le Treff’s have to contend with.

So The Grackle sauntered up to the bar with his buddy, some rough-looking trick about thirty years old, and started pounding $0.75 shots of pink tequila; you know, getting “tuned-in.” In a short time his eyes had taken on a half-open, utterly contented squint, and you could tell he was open for business.

Not long after he was flirting with two girls well under half his age. One was petite and fairly cute, the other (the one he gave most of his attention) was shaped like a spinning top. She had a narrow, angular face, low-hanging, devastated breasts, and a body which widened drastically at her waist (where pallid skin winked out from the gap between her jeans and too-short shirt) then thinned out again towards her feet. The Grackle bought the ladies drinks and managed to get an arm around each. The cute girl kissed him on the cheek and he seemed giddy. Then his left arm lowered on the other girl and, though I could not quite see, I knew he was fondling her loose buttocks, which, I could only imagine, hung like jowls inside her pants.

A while later, The Grackle and his buddy were buying round after round of Skittle shots for a group of about five girls. Now, Skittle shots, while not too expensive, were certainly not $0.75. I suppose one of the two had locked the old crosshairs on one of the ladies and was trying to get a taste of the rainbow.

Alan, needing to refresh his glass, happened to go to the bar at the same time as The Grackle. His friend was with him and was clearly the one paying for the evening. The buddy slaps his cash on the counter and The Grackle turns to Alan and says, “Hell man, he’s paying tonight. I’ve got four kids and two ex-wives to support.”Alan  got his drink but stuck around for another minute and The Grackle turned again to him and says, “Yeah, tonight I’m playing wingman for this guy,” he slapped his friend on the back. “And that’s cool, you know, don’t need to work to hard. Besides, when you’re fucking these girls in the ass, and they’re all bent over, it don’t matter what they look like.” He then turned back to his buddy and the ladies and began to explain that he was “a very important man at the telephone company.”

Later, I went to get another drink and had my own encounter with Schreck. He was in front of me, waving his hand like a jackass, trying to get the bartender’s attention. Thick hairs stood out of the back of his fat neck like fingers poking through wet sand. The bartender finally came over to him and The Grackle ordered seven shots of tequila. He turned to me and said, “Shit man, this guy’s just lining ‘em up. I’ve already had nineteen.” The bartender returned with the shots. The Grackle took one and downed it, dropped it on the table, and said to me, “Ah! I’m just living life like a motha’ fucker.”

The next half-hour went by Grackle-free. He was nowhere to be seen. Alan  and I went about people-watching as usual, although nothing of note happened. Finally, The Grackle reappeared, looking a little ill, but cheery as ever. He found the girls and his friend and resumed his role as “wingman.”

Then I got up to go to the restroom. I walked in, some guy I could not see following at my heals, and stood at the revolting trough urinal and began to break the seal. Then a voice came from the stall to my left, “Holy shit! I know you don’t want to hear this, man, but I gotta tell somebody. Some dude puked his guts out all over the wall! It’s fuckin’ nasty. Chunks everywhere. I mean, shit. You should see this.” I finished and then waited for him to step out and went in to see it. Yep. Awesome.

I thought about approaching The Grackle and applauding him.

Nothing more of consequence happened. Things clearly began to disintegrate with the group of girls and The Grackle seemed to be getting sleepy. Suffice to say the only person he “got behind” that night was his buddy, as he followed him out the door, empty-handed.