Her name is Liz and she’s 34 and
she works in a bar in Passaic
called the Coo Coo’s Nest, which is probably the most appropriate name ever
given to anything.
It is a go
go bar and I go there because the place has tables where I can drink and write
without anyone bothering me, too much.
Liz, the
hostess, delivers drinks to the tables and she sees me writing and bends over
me with more than just a literary interest.
It’s a
strange place for a woman like her and her sweet smile. She doesn’t fit here.
She doesn’t look older than 18 either. This makes her seem even more innocent.
I ask how she stands the place. She smiles and tells me she’d tell me later,
and later, she hands me here number, saying we should have coffee together.
Yet, she’s
here, surviving this world and its hard faces, surviving me and the strange man
beside me, and the man beyond that.
Why?
She
mentions vaguely that her husband left her and her seven year old child.
I want to
ask why a man would leave a woman like her?
But I
don’t.
Those words
won’t come out of me, and shouldn’t.
You just
don’t make those connections in this world. You sit; you listen; you take what
you can get.
And she
likes me. You can’t ask questions like that when someone leans over you with
that bit of sexuality in her eyes.
A week ago,
I told her this was a rotten place to pick people up in, too much raw energy,
too mush lust.
She only
smiled with that compact smile of her sand touched my hand, and all I kept
thinking of was of weeds and flowers, a whole lot of weeds and this one tender
flower growing in the least likely place of all.
So now I
have her number and a piece of her heart, not a lot, but something, and it
strikes me strange how a human can make contact with another human even in a
hell-bent place like the Coo Coo’s Nest.
So maybe
I’ll called her, maybe3 I’ll reach out this time and make contact with the
single lovely flower and maybe I’ll find out why such souls spend their lives
alone. Why their husbands leave, how they survive in bars like this.
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