Dirty Laundry

A bar like this collects the lowest life of the city like we were a dip in the pavement. They flow down here, seeking the lowest point - seeking also large cheap drinks, buxom girls, seeking talent for their next job, seeking a friendly ear for the last job.

Shrinks we don't got. And the bartenders have a strict 'no sympathizing' policy after that idiot went home last year and jumped off the eighteenth floor. What we got basically is each other - a thug for a thug, a rat for a rat - and me. I get so much dirty laundry I sometimes feel like I could open a drycleaner's. Wash and fold service, fifty cents.

But it's the guys who don't talk that carry the most laundry, and whose laundry is the most soiled. The other day a guy left a self-help book here, six hundred pages of positive thinking and how to quit being a loser and fish the bullets out of the gun. (Or, in some cases, to tie the balcony door shut.) I flipped through it to find a name, maybe hang onto it in case this sad sack came back.

He hadn't written his name in it. But he'd filled out the worksheets in the book, and I took it in back to read by the pilot light of the big industrial range. It should have felt like dirty laundry - I should have felt like that nosey-parker private eye who hangs out here. It should have felt like I had both my hands down the poor bastard's Y-fronts. It wasn't like that.

I read about how his wife had quit sleeping with him. On the couch, it said he slept. One worksheet was about how he hadn't got the scholarship he wanted and now the bill collectors were banging on his door. A marginal note indicated that he'd started looking up noose knots. "How to tie a noose?" he had written, and underlined it twice. The self-help book hadn't been helpful enough, it seemed; the bookmark had been slipped between pages 118 and 119. Was that enough time to fix a man with problems like that? Christ. He was like the lost tribes of Israel. Tribulations this man had.

It was dirty laundry and the thing about laundry is how filthily intimate it is. I got a new respect now for the housewives who rinse out pukestains and skidmarks from our patrons' cheap shirts every week. What they unload on themselves is no worse than what they unload on their listeners. The guys you got to pity are the ones with no one to do their laundry.

I still have the book. Is it yours? Do you want it back? What will you do about your wife? Do you want to borrow some money? I'll lend it to you. I'll lend it to you.

Traditional Welcome

I bid you a suspicious welcome to my seedy corner of the web.

The traditional welcome at the Strip is to overcharge you for your first and last drinks, insist you add pricey extras to your mediocre meal, convince you to give the girls ludicrous tips, and add a couple of bucks on your bill as a 'band fee' even when there's no band.

But since it's your first time here, I shall be lenient.

Here at the Strip, there's burlesque, there's music, there's ghastly drinks in funny-shaped bottles; and, more importantly, there's a salon at the back. (No, idiot. The literary kind, not the kind where some poof fingers your hair twice and announces that you simply must have Raspberry Chocolate Streaks or he will betray the sacred scissors of his mentor, the Great Lu Shi.)

The crowd here don't like mediocre books, pal. Bad movies - those can be discussed like rational people. Bad music ditto, if such a thing exists. But if it's going in print, it better deserve it. Or else it'll end up in the alley out back in a puddle of rancid slime, courtesy of our hyperliterary bouncer.

Got the gist? Now, in we go...