Archive
04/08/10
A Night on the Town
Where I am, I haven't a clue as to ambiguity's cluelessness, This isolated, snow-spitting Thursday night In Magnificent Mile Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.,
As I sit, drinking V8, in the venerable Drake Hotel's Coq d'Or bar, Listening to the strident, near-miss stylings of a lounge act, An aggregation of non-music-making proselytizing apostles,
Its one-armed double-bassist, deaf, seven-fingered piano player, And blind, dumb Stevie Wonder–lookalike vocalist in white tuxedo Doing their very damnedest to bring the somnambulists to life,
Those phantoms of the long-past-dawning-dusk dead Rising, like vampires and ghouls, after the stroke of nine or eleven, To suck the blood out of, then gorge on, the moon —
Dwarfs, midgets, misfits, creeps, drooling inbred grotesques, And Tod Browning freaks of all off-sizes, misshapes, and species Let out of their cages, dungeons, cork-lined isolation wards,
For a night on the town by Lake Michigan, in Cook County, Earth, Before driving, busing, training, flying, hitchhiking, drifting home To nowhere, whenever, wherever, forever after, never.
Suddenly, the singer pokes me with his thirty-foot ivory cane, Invites me to join his ragtag band of cacophonous incompetents Paid to awaken the mutants, the whole dramatis monstrousae.
I follow the cane, from silver tip to gold handle, step onto the stage, Grab his microphone, and start singing my very favorite dirge: "De Camptown ladies sing dis song, doo-dah, doo-dah!" Then segue into "One dark night while we were all in bed, Mrs. O'Leary lit the lantern in her shed, And when the cow kicked it over, she winked her eye and said,
"'There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight. Fire! Fire! Fire!'" At which point the entire convention of inhuman detritus Floods the dance floor, as if to put out, drown out, my song,
Groaning, moaning, wailing, in tongues, brandishing snakes, Goose-stepping, in charismatic unison, toward the two doors, Draining up, one floor, to the Drake's sumptuous lobby.
I shove the mic back into the black man's hand, take his cane, And follow its click-click-tap, tap-tap-click, onto East Walton Street, Into a waiting hearse filled with the revelers from the Coq d'Or bar.
04/08/10
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