The Gas Station Diaries: Let’s Get it On

The Full Story

There stood but one as the glass doors clicked shut for the final time that night. Just gone were the pool table junkies who in their earnestness had licked the dewy felt clean, trying in vain as the bouncers had yelled, “time to go” to savor the last of their eight ball high . The residue of cigarette smoke clung to the ornamental tin ceiling tiles like some sort of carcinogenic epidermis and the tumblers clinked in the washing machine like the replacement elbows of a motorcycle daredevil.

“Cocksuckers, all of them cocksuckers,” I said, as I threw back the last of my beer.

Yes, I was the one; the lone bastard son of night that stood in the empty bar teetering on the edge of inebriation. Evidently, the rules didn’t apply to me or at least I didn’t apply to the rules, for I had brazenly stayed on as the others had been ushered out the door and cast into the sobering night.

“They’re still there,” I said as I watched the silhouette of Shrub Head and three of his posse pace back and forth in front of the large plate glass window.

“You’d better go out the back door,” Terrance the bartender said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ll wreck the lot of them. They’ll be sorry they ever—”

But alas my poetic rebuttal was cut short as gun shots pierced the star embroidered sky.

“I think I’d better go out the back,” I yelled as I took off past the pool tables.

“Good luck,” Terrance called after me.

I would need it.

As I took off between the rows of pool tables there was a gunshot and the large plate glass window in the front that said FAST EDDIE’S exploded.

I hoped the back door was open….

* * *


Nights like these--when the floor has fallen out like the soda soaked bottom of a wax coated paper cup--are the ones which should be laid in pot holes and stomped flat so that the midnight traffic can ride smoothly over them, their sordid memory forever gone. But alas when one’s reality is bent, viewed through the prism of drunkenness and melancholy, well then there is no turning back and no words or primitive tribal rituals will make happiness rain down. There is only YOU just as it has always been and THEY will never understand and though you try to help them along, offer them hints, they still, sadly never catch on but still you try. It is after all your destiny.

“So, what have you been up to?” I asked.

“I went back and finished up my bachelors degree in forestry,” she said.

Even in the smudgy darkness of the pool hall her long blond hair glistened like the gold of a trend mongers nipple ring. Had it been socially acceptable I would have thrust myself upon her like a Mississippi leg hound and ridden her luscious calf muscle into oblivion but alas such actions are considered objectionable if not completely unacceptable and so I concentrated on her teeth as a distraction. Don’t get me wrong, her teeth were perfect little pillars of finally polished quartz but wedged between the two in front was a sizeable chunk of what looked like spinach.

“Right, like Smokey the Bear,” I said.

“Well, kind of. We don’t really fight forest fires,” she said, and took a sip from her vodka drink.

“What the Hell do you do way up there in the woods? Where do you buy beer? Who would you party with? It doesn’t seem like life to me but a flatter, far removed version. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a part time loner but I need people. I feed off their actions. I’m a people junky when I’m not alone,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Hey, isn’t that your friend the Weasel over there?”

I shifted on the cushioned bench and gazed out across the crowded pool hall to the direction which she was pointing. Sure enough the Weasel was poking his finger in the chest of a rather large individual with an afro as big as bean bag chair.

“This doesn’t look good,” I said.

I knew my duties, as a part time knight errant of modern day status, revolved around protecting those that could not fend for themselves or at least not adequately fend for themselves against considerable foes. This was such a situation and I would be abandoning my duties if I continued to court said beauty and ignored my comrade’s plight but what choice did I have? The reproductive impulse stapled to the genes of all male species, like some gaudy plastic flower arrangement, would not let me look away. I cursed myself for being all too human.

“You bastard,” I said.

“What?” she said.

“Uh, nothing I was talking to myself…I should do something,” I said.

She took hold of my biceps muscle and squeezed. I sank back into my seat.

“Perhaps this will turn out all right,” I said.

She nuzzled up to my cheek like she was a phone sex operator and my ear was the receiver. She licked my earlobe.

“Ooh, you are a little minx,” I said.

“You asshole,” the Weasel yelled.

I prayed that somehow what was happening wasn’t; no, not the kissing part, the Weasel part, the part where my friend was getting tossed around like a pair of lace underpants during a spin cycle.

“I have to go,” I said, putting my tumbler down.

“Don’t the bouncers will take care of it,” she said grabbing me around the waist.

“You would leave the fate of the world in the hands of bouncers?” I asked.

“What?”

“Nothing, wait here for me. This shouldn’t take but a minute.”

I glanced back at the divine beauty I was leaving behind for the untold horrors of barroom brawling. She sat under a cloud of blue cigarette, gasping at the cleaner air underneath so that her lips looked like those of a great goldfish. How I wanted to encircle her in my arms, for her to tell me I mattered, that all I had done and all I believed was worthwhile, that my quest, though I knew not where it would take me mattered and that she would be there eternally. At my 50th birthday she would pop out of my cake wearing nothing but a bikini fashioned from three ace of heart playing cards and a shoe string.

“Unhand my friend you cocksucker,” I said, stepping in between the weasel and his large shrubbery haired foe.

“Who in the fuck do you think you are?” Shrub Head said, his forehead wrinkling up in consternation like a Shrinky Dink in a hot oven.

“It’s not who in the fuck I am. It’s who in the fuck I think I might be,” I said.

“What?” Shrub Head said.

“This mother fucker stole my fucking quarters,” the Weasel said.

He never knew when to leave well enough alone, this of course was his nature. I had Shrub Head off balance and might have wrangled us some type of peace accord but now all was lost. Shrub Head lunged for the Weasel and with me standing in between I was knocked backwards into a pool table.

“You filthy cocksucker,” I yelled, pulling at Shrub Head’s Nick’s jersey.

“You ripped my fucking jersey,” he cried, and I knew then that there was no turning back, that this guy’s anger had now been displaced to my somewhat smaller yeah powerfully built shoulders. My strength being attributed to my stout German/Irish/English/Italian parents, copious amounts of weightlifting and chucking hay bales in my formative years for summer beer money.

“Calm down you behemoth,” I said, trying to sound rational. “I’ll give you your filthy quarters.”

But calmer heads did, of course, not prevail. I saw Shrub Head’s obsidian eyes take on the mad glaze of a institutionalized syphilitic and his meaty hands shot through the air like toaster ovens with wings. From my parents I am also blessed with great reflexes and can in fact catch a salt shaker that someone accidentally knocks off the dinner table before it hits the floor; a most valuable tool in pugilistic endeavors.

“Aha,” I cried.

I grabbed Shrub Head’s fists in mid flight and thrust them up in the air and then charged him hitting him soundly in his chest. I drove my legs like the great pistons that pound in the bowels of world’s largest cargo bearing ships and the big man was thrust back as if his tan work boots had lard smeared across their knobby treads.

“Ugghhh,” the large man cried.

Those around us scattered as I picked Shrub Head up off his feet and slammed him against the wall. I had lifted him high enough and slammed him hard enough that he know stood on top of one of the benches that lined the wall.

“Take that you cocksucker,” I said.

Yes, indeed I was gloating and rightfully so. Shrub Head was much bigger than I and I could see by the faces round me that all were duly impressed. I contemplated a little celebration jig but alas my triumph was shorter than short lived. For behind me were several of Shrub Head’s gang, numbering four or five. They grabbed hold of me, securing my flailing limbs and though I grabbed at sweat suit jackets and long baggy football jerseys I was rendered harmless and thus a sitting duck.

“You wanna fuck with me mutha fucker?” Shrub head cried.

Not waiting for an answer he began to wail on me in terrible form; fists flying at me in a windmill fashion. Defenseless I knew my only option was to duck my head, which was an old fist fighter’s trick. The skull as one knows is much harder than one’s fists and soon Shrub Head would find this out.

“Mutha fucker,” he yelled again and again, futilely pounding the top of my head.

Soon he was breathing in great guffs-- like a sumo wrestler skipping rope--and his punches hit the top of my head less frequently and with less force.

“Having fun?” I said looking up.

He sped his assault up momentarily with a burst of adrenalin but soon his blows weakened to the point where they felt like tiny sparrows flying into my head.

“I always say to use your head,” I said, and then spun madly, pulling free from those that held my arms and jumped up on the bench beside Shrub Head.

“Is that the best you have,” I said, the words with generous amounts of spit pelting his face.

Shrub Head jumped down form the bench as if I were a minor annoyance; a crazy man carrying an END OF THE WORLD IS NEAR sign? Is this what he thought of me or more likely had he found that I couldn’t be beat? I chose to believe the latter if only to boost my own often sagging ego.

I looked across the room and the Weasel was hopping nimbly from pool table to pool table as the rest of Shrub Head’s gang chased him with pool sticks. Such agility I’ve never seen in a drunken man and I doubt I will ever see again. He stopped every now and again to pick up a discarded beer as if to refresh himself and when they once again closed in he hopped agley away looking like Pan out on a summer dalliance.

The rest of the pool hall had turned into an orgy of swinging fists and colliding torsos; the long green shaded light fixtures above the pool tables, jarred in the ruckus, swung to and fro throwing light jaggedly across the room like bolts of lightning. I watched as the bouncers pulled one fight apart only to have another form right in front of them.

I might have just sat down and watched the spectacle play itself out but as my fate had always dictated I was not to sit idly on the sidelines and pass the water bottle to those that were playing the game. I would be put into the game, thrust in front of the pulling guard as the 275 pound tailback bore down on me.

“Come and get it mother fucker,” I said, leaping off the bench.

Immediately upon hitting the tiled floor I saw Shrub Head rambling towards the Weasel-- once again concentrating on his original source of anger--and I couldn’t let him do what he wanted to do. There would be a dreadful outcome if he grabbed hold of the Weasel, who had Muhammad Ali’s mouth and the fists of an arthritic pastry chef.

Dodging the mayhem I bound towards Shrub Head and just as he was about to grab hold of the Weasel I shoved him.

“Hey cocksucker,” I said and he turned. “You touch him and I’ll hang you by your hair from one of those ceiling fans.”

Shrub Head looked at the Weasel and then back to me. He was contemplating his next move. I suppose what might have been going through his head was that I had the hardest head he’d ever tried to punch. I could see his fists were swollen up like two country hams and that he wouldn’t be hitting anything with them anytime soon. I stepped up into his face and looked up.

“It’s over,” I said.

“It ain’t mutha fucking over until I say it’s mutha fucking over,” he said pointing in my face.

“I don’t like fingers in my face,” I said.

He wouldn’t look me in the eyes but focused on the Weasel who was now casually leaning against a pool table and talking to the young forestry woman I’d been cozying up to.

“You out,” Terrance the bartender said.

I turned and he was pointing to Shrub Head.

“You’re making a fucking mistake,” Shrub Head said, as Terrance escorted him out the door. It was an easy out for the bastard and he took it like a fat man takes free fried carnival food.

I gazed around the bar. Things had begun to calm down, the fights had petered out into heated discussions and rounds of beer in others.

“That was something,” I said.

There was no response. I turned just in time to see the Weasel exit through the back door with my forestry sweetheart. I had just saved the cocksucker’s life and he had stolen my girl and sneaked out the back door. This of course was his nature.

Alone, I sat and finished off a pitcher of Guinness as people began to filter out of the bar. It occurred to me that I was not destined for happiness in the conventional sense of the word that my contentment would not be found through another, but through the small and large triumphs I collected as my life played itself out on the hairpin turns of existence that only I would slam the gas pedal down on as I took them at death defying speeds. Sure, I wanted to find HER but where and how? Who could keep up? Who wouldn’t keep me down? Who wanted more out of this life than the version with the white picket fence, and a laugh track? I didn’t want to wake up one day dead and then hang around for another forty or fifty years. I wanted life and I wanted it now.

“They’re still there,” I said as I watched the silhouette of Shrub Head and three of his posse pace back and forth in front of the large plate glass window.

“You’d better go out the back door,” Terrance the bartender said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ll wreck the lot of them. They’ll be sorry they ever—”

But alas my poetic rebuttal was cut short as gun shots pierced the star embroidered sky.

“I think I’d better go out the back,” I yelled as I took off past the pool tables.

“Good luck,” Terrance called after me.

I would need it.

As I took off between the rows of pool tables there was a gunshot and the large plate glass window in the front that said FAST EDDIE’S exploded.

I hoped the back door was open….