Beasts and Violins

For the Topless Girls in the Brewery Gulch

47 For the Topless Girls in the Brewery Gulch With wet fur coats framing naked tits, you danced in the New Year on the narrow drive between St. Elmo’s Bar and the Stock Exchange Saloon. There were three of you. A small posse in like uniform. Your hair was stuck to your faces, so when you shook your heads, the strands tore off strips of foundation. In the right street light, the negatives looked like tiger stripes. It was raining. Tomorrow was a holiday. Everyone knew this desert water was poison. Of course you were drunk. The mariachi band members were done up as if they had been dug from the graveyard, with a tuba wrapped around a skeleton, and a zombie with a green, decaying fist pulling on a trombone. They had come out of the club to play on the sidewalk, elevated three feet above the trench of the road. Writhing down there, we were the living dead, clawing from underground. Your fur coats were getting soaked. It made them smell more musty, halfway to rotten. Runoff was threatening to wash away your high heels. Maybe that’s what happened to your shirts. Of course you had to be wearing tight white pants, so when they became stuck 48 to your asses, your thongs were obvious from my vantage against a brick wall. I wasn’t single then. I lived with that girl up the canyon. You all knew her. Small town. But I’d put her to bed early. Told her I was going to stay up a little longer and walked downtown. When I saw what was waiting for me there, of course I thought about cheating. But the giant whitewashed B on the hillside above us, wasn’t for Beautiful, because you weren’t. It couldn’t have been for Breasts, because soon the cops showed up, and your coats were buttoned, leaving nothing but your sternums exposed, shiny with steam above whatever animals you wore. The B could have been for Bored. For me unloading trucks and working a register, barely full-time in a grocery store at the edge of the pit mine. For me, living with someone who spent all her time in the tub. But that feeling was really Discontentment, which starts with a D and isn’t advertised. It’s kept for silence and late nights alone in crowds. And watching nude girls dance is all satisfaction and self-loathing. When the ladies were carted off, and the band put to rest, I started home. 49 It was after midnight. The celebration was over. Postal workers were out of their uniforms. They wore fringed suede jackets, and walked beyond the Gulch with painted staffs. ...