Road Notes, Port Washington, WI

Sent to the upper inner thigh of Wisconsin, close enough to gargle on the listerine-green waters of L. Michigan, for a business trip that, yes, is my job, and is business that makes me feel giddy as the cryptic caffeinated icons that macarena around the Matrix.

However, guilty joy aside, I made the best of it by booking a gig to read my new book "Pissing on the Hollowdrag" in a seedy little shack called "Howard's Johnson" that boasted the latest in cigarette-burnt leather barstools as well as the well-matched sounds of the new Brad Paisley disc whiskey-and-ballsing from the jukebox.

When I arrived, Howard J. Jr., the owner's 40-ish son who reminded me a ton of Peter Falk with two glass eyes, greeted me with a hearty handshake, a free beer (Old Style, a score of cheaply-cloned brothers of whom he would pop for me free all night long), and the precious saluation, "Hey we've never had a poet in here before but for all those fukkin' young-ass cowboys thinkin' they can be the next Johnny Cash scribbling 1:30-2am away in the corner and lookin' all broody over they're notebooks! Maybe you can 'read'n a kick to their ass!" He gave me a second free Old Style before I'd taken a sip of the first.

Showtime, and the crowd would be a crowd that would be unfair to expect to live up to the moniker of A Crowd as the total turnout amounted to 17 proud patrons, well, 17 if you included me and Howard. I'm pretty sure one of them was Brad Paisley, though.

I read to them from Hollowdrag for about 20 minutes when a black man with the shade and shadow of peppered beef jerky asked me what I was smoking. I said they were Djarum cloves, branded and commonly known as "Blacks." He earned my eternal respect and friendship by uttering the quotable, "You give me one of them 'niggarettes' and I'll stick around for the rest of your fucking poetry." I gave him two, demanded to know his name (Michael), and lit the first for him by tearing out page 13 from the book and setting it on fire with my own 'niggarette.'

It was an hour more before I finished, and it was only because I'd run out of "Pissing on the Hollowdrag," then bio, then anecdotes, then harder stories, like that of my unfortunate luck to have toasted the very 767s that hit the WTC as they took off on 9/11/01 from Logan Airport in Boston and flew over my home. Only Howard, Michael, and Michael's ladyfriend Bonnie (it's 'ladyfriend' if she's over 50, but goes back to 'girlfriend' if she's over 60 - by 60, she's re-earned it) were left, and I had put down the microphone a while back. I told them all about my now ex-wife waking me up with a bottle of Brut champagne for my birthday, going out on our deck that overlooked Boston Harbor to toast (as via sick irony I so gruesomely dubbed it) 'the most beautiful day to live,' and stood out there cheersing the planes as they accelerated, landing gear rising and never to come down, into history.

Bonnie, the doll, shook her head silently for a moment, then lifted and finished the last 7/8 of her vodka-7 before saying - with her heart and voice full of the earnest inquisitiveness of a woman wrestling something she just can not grasp, "So, you writing about pussy so much because you ain't gettin' it; or because y' is?"

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