It's like an onion dude....

Mom, Dad, I need to tell you something.

In order to watch the Red Sox game the other day I went to Applebee's. I know it sounds bad, but they say they are an Italian joint, and seeing as how we're not Italian we're supposed to respect that, right? Well, I've been listening to Italian language tapes this whole time I've been down here, and the entirely Mexican staff they had seemed to be doing a good job of at least speaking something close to Italian. I just, maybe, got caught up in the romance of the place.

But so I'm sitting at this bar and a guy walks in. No joke coming. Frank. He seems shoulders and boulders, just this rolling face and body seems necessary that he's my seatmate. He has a buddy that disappears before he walks in the door, all talk says "let me tell me about myself."

I'm the only other one on the bar and he seems to be talking to me. The red sox are 23/27ths from losing for the last time this season and I hear about his diet. He lost 24 kilos in the past three months. "Do you know how much that is?" Yeah, 2.025 pounds to the kilo you son of a bitch and do you know the acceleration of kin falling from a roof? His diet? Hiking some mountain he can't pronounce in Afghanistan, ravaging teenagers in South America or getting locked up for his improprieties with some "hot young thangs" in Southeast Asia depending on when you slice into a branch of his words. He is crossing betweeen stories seamlessly, crossing time, crossing beams, blowing up the stay-puff man. Despite myself, I start talking.

"Sorry, not trying to be rude, but do you mind taking your phone outside?"

"I'm not on the phone, I'm just talking to my friend here."

"Oh, sorry. You were just yelling and I assumed..."

He turns away but talks twice as loud. The Red Sox are still losing and I hate him.

Bartender comes on shift. Frank assumes she's worldy, that's how she would have hiked the same mountains he can't pronounce. Frank thinks she couldn't possibly be married, her being so young and fresh and the way she throws her eyes at him. Frank thinks that she would be great in one of his all night adventures with four or five young girls, all in descending age propped up agai....

I laugh out loud, shooting my beer onto the poor, confused bartender who is wishing Applebee's had audio to complement the four video cameras on her as this guy's lips aren't moving enough. Forked tongues speak softly. I apologize loudly.

This is his cue to talk directly at me while I finish my beer and actually wish for the 150+ games of baseball I have watched this season to mean nothing. I want this over, I want to go home now, wherever that is.

"Do you know what your problem is?"

I've heard this before and it makes me cringe. It makes me expect a kidney punch. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what my problems are, and they are many, but I generally need to avoid the odd diner/bar stranger espousing what he (always he) thinks they might be.

"Yes" I say, both to him and the bartender, "I don't have my check quite yet."

My brief time in Romania offered me a chance to meet a woman who spoke not a word of English except for this: "The first night you spend in a bed offers you the dreams of your future." Honest to god. I spent three nights at her house, her son translating the rest of the time, and this was the only English language shit she pulled out.

So this is my translation of that, at least for me:The drunk asshole at the bar has something to say, even if you do your best to keep it as far from you as possible.

"The problem with you is you don't know where the hell you are."

Rightly said him, I pay my bill and leave, entering the traffic stream of the freeway almost immediately. There is a plasic stackable chair turned upright on the side of the road that I swear for a second is a cartoon creation dead fawn. There is a styrofoam cup that defies physics and bounces twice off the hood of my car, the first farce the second tragedy. I pass a cop without breaking the speed limit, watching in the rear view as an entire hillside of headlights backs up behind a grandma driving, power having son a bitch. The outlined swerves and wavers of tires stand out on the Hercules stretch, a reminder of something horrible that happened yesterday that held me up for a few minutes. There is the stink of those tanks, there is the smell of new, fresh, human-corrrupted bay area around the corner. My car cuts that and every other corner with precision.

Where am I going? What's for dinner?

This is a poem I wrote a couple years ago, offered simply as evidence that I am good at finding a fight, no matter the time zone.

_________________________________________
drinking beer i hear
his voice come over the loudspeaker
that is his mouth
"legs up in the air spread so wide"

see the old couple
from just before route two merger
cringe, bob, stumble for conversation.

drunk trucks, big men weave
prejudice themselves palms spread
down on the bar

turn young women
fleet as barn swallows
sober to avoid

texas state "that's where i'm from
call me texas two house four boat
mackinaw indian fuck."
tex is big i write

he points at my unwatching eyes
filtered din of glass bottom mugs
sitting standing and the trod
of tenders "fuck him" fork scrapes

"one i worry about"
untethered locals and the chop
of this place slapping their hulls
hammer braking Kenworth

texas is upon me
simple. "wanna hit me?"
all i say is
this is michigan
oregon to new hampshire
to hit a drunk
behind the wheel i think i did.