-To be read aloud in your best Tom Waits voice.-
We were camped in a pup tent five miles west of Tuscon and you know what it’s like for a guy with two dwarves to feed, they’re each like a teenager with a tapeworm, they never stop eating. Hot as balls all day and any minute the sun was gonna crash out and leave us to the coyotes and desert night winds and all I had was three Pall Malls and a tin of pinto beans for comfort. But thank god the dwarves had tuckered out early and weren’t gonna wait up to hear me sing the full Brunhilde from Gotterdammerung.
Their loss.
I’d just finished my last cigarette, saving the beans for breakfast, and was about to tuck into the full nine minutes of ‘Fliegit Heim, ihr Raben’ When I hear hooves on the dirt and a horse’s snort. I turn ‘round prepared to take my interrupted aria out of the rider’s philistine hide when he holds up a bottle.
Now, he’s a filthy flea bitten jack and smells like boiled armadillo and cabbage, dressed in a hand me down potato sack with a hat he stole from a dead Comanche mental patient, but he says to me, he says, “Drink it pardner. It weren’t on my lips.” That’s all the guarantee I need. What man among you could turn down free hooch, in the desert, when it’s cold?
It tasted like horse piss and back alley Louisiana rum used to bathe cats then ladeled out and sent walking in the desert. But upon finishing the bottle, damned if I didn’t sing Brunhilde’s immolation so sweetly…I’ll put it to you this way, before that night coyotes in those parts only ever barked like rat terriers. I taught those bastards the meaning of sadness. Now they Howl.
And this here’s what I drank
WhizzBang Brand Snake Oil:
A Profound Sadness that Still Haunts the Sonoran Desert.
