In all of the years he had valiantly served in the Spanish army, Colonel Rodrigo Valentino Vasquez-Marquis had never once fallen asleep too drunk from a night of unabashed revelry in the company of the painted ladies from la casa de putas de mala fama and awoken in a total state of disarray with his boots still on, his purse looted, and the taste of stale licorice and absinthe curdled in his dry mouth. He had never known what is was like to regain consciousness with a young harlot’s warm face shrouded by the veil of her tangled locks, breathing heavily into his chest, under Queen Maab’s spell content. And this was his greatest regret, which he shared with the rest of us, commiserating over the strong liquor poured into hollowed-out pineapple husks, adorned with tiny umbrellas, on an otherwise insignificant and banal Thursday at just before three in the afternoon.
While he vehemently swore that he had once starred dead into the fierce eyes of Generalissimo Franco, in a distant land, as a young soldier, without a trace a fear, he nearly wept as he confessed that he had never awoken in the arms of a beautiful, young prostitute.
“I would have loved to have tasted a sweet drop of nectar from las orquídeas hermosas entre piernas mugrientas, a sly hummingbird, but I was afraid of being accused of moral turpitude by my subordinates, and so I am filled with tremendous regret for this now, in what should be the golden years of life.”
He had since become an American through marriage and been widowed, he explained, before moving to Santa Cruz and parts coastal of Northern California. He had led an amazing life and we were dumb and spellbound as he spoke, as much by his accent as his account. He had shook hands with Hemingway and Steinbeck, acquired the rights to a cannery through a loveless second marriage, been convinced by his sister-in-law to run off with her to Wyoming and invest in a cattle ranch where he had failed to flourish and was eventually cuckolded by a well-endowed rodeo clown. He had ripped off a dowager, stolen a truck in Worland and set fire to it at the Grand Canyon, then drifted to Tombstone because it sounded like the best place for a man like him to die.
“I want the wind to blow the dust off of my dried and picked carcass and the sun to beat down until it bleaches my tired bones and they crack and scatter, a los cuatro rincones de la Tierra,” were his final words before turning his face back towards the constant feed of ESPN X.
Silence fell over the bar as we stared at him, his sudden garrulity replaced with a tense laconic stare, waiting for him to animatronically spring back to life like some handmade, antique jack in the box, or a mechanical fortuneteller from a disbanded carnival that had been left behind, but he was still as the grave. He perched his dour head over the solace of his Patrón Anejo. He looked like an old vagrant in the cheap facsimile of a Spanish army uniform, one that had been acquired at a thrift store or Army surplus, one with dirt and sand ground into it until it could not be truly cleansed. And since not a drunk among us was in a position to challenge the verisimilitude of his claims, and we had been so riveted by his incredible tale, we had no other recourse than to move on to the next confession, while another round was ordered.
“I wish I wasn’t a mysophiliac,” Larry offered, his face registering with me for the first time as the words sank in. I had seen him on television being arrested near the UofA dorms for stealing undergraduate’s unmentionables. The local papers had made a big show of it, as had the school paper, which was sadly of a higher caliber than any other writing in the State. It had been the AZ Daily Wildcat that had given him his particularly poignant nickname, and effectively ran him out of town.
“No one ever says ‘When I grow up I want to be known as the Daylight Panty Prowler’, do they?”
A round of sympathetic groans rumbled belligerently across the room in response as newly poured spirits were greedily quaffed. There are some poisons that may be said to soothe and nurture a broken soul and such were the potions we desperately incorporated into our beings that day. It was a motley assembly that had come to gather, ragtag and scruffy, degenerates and rejects, filling the innards of the Tombstone Tiki Lounge like a wad of unevenly dispersed cancerous lumps. We had arranged ourselves in a slumping line across the silent, chilled bar in varying states of disgrace and infamy.
We were the wretched and rancid and disgusting that society didn’t have a use for.
Since the town was far too small to have a Sex Anonymous chapter the judge ordered Larry into anger management, much to his confusion and chagrin.
“I still don’t see what being aroused by soiled garments has to do with anger.”
Another round was ordered as we nervously eyed one another, waiting for the next disclosure to come tumbling out of repentant lips, like a rusty pipe bursting and gushing out raw sewage.
We had come to gather here, mostly by accident rather than design, inside the cool climates the bar provided, on the corner of Allen, apart from the rest of the more respectable drinking holes where the tourists congregated.
We had fallen downwind of Legends of the West and Ringo's.
We were south on the boulevard from Crystal Palace and Six Gun City.
We were long past Big Nose Kate's Saloon, each of us silently praying to be forgotten in this ghost town, in the shadow of Wyatt Earp and the indelibly magnificent legacy he left upon Tombstone.
We had come to get away from the clamor of the bustling outside world.
We had come to forget the honking and screaming and cell phones ringing mixed acrimoniously with the high pitched wailing of crying babies.
We had come to sear out the memories of what we had done, our terrible pasts, along with the unrepentant fax machines cursing and small incessant dogs yipping for attention.
Inside these walls was an unexpected sanctuary, decorated festively with grass skirts and fake palm leaves and pictures of Don Ho and seductive pin-up girls leering larger than life with dimples in their rosy, smiling cheeks.
Inside these walls was a man named Ted wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Billabong board shorts and a straw hat with a plastic macaw fastened to it and pineapple flip-flops.
Inside these walls there were no family members, no mothers or sisters or wives to disappoint or abandon.
Inside these walls was a television that played surfing clips on a continuous loop, which is how we all coalesced in the first place, after watching Benji collapse over the bamboo into a sobbing wad of emasculation, a quivering pile of man and snot-filled Kleenex.
It took a Purple Hooter Shooter to discover that he was formerly a professional surfer who had banished himself to the desert to drown his sorrow and came running into the Tiki on first sight, like a moth to a freshly lit match.
It took two layered Duck Fart shooters before he admitted that the love of his life had recently left him.
It took another Cherry Bomber before he would tell us that she was a Maori girl he met in Ibiza in Barrio de la Penya y de la Bomba while he was recovering from a Great White attack he survived at Maverick’s the previous year. He lifted his shirt to show his elliptical arc of stitching, a raw scar line of mangled skin sewn together like a baseball.
“She was so beautiful with her long, flowing fire red curls,” he wept aloud to all within earshot.
“She had eyes like two dark pools of ink,” he sputtered, while we gathered around him.
“She was a shark attack victim groupie,” he wailed. “She left me for a scuba diving ichthyologist who was bitten by a Great White off Aldinga Beach in South Australia in ’72. He punctured his lung and needed four hundred and seventy one stitches while my bite was far less severe and only required three hundred and sixty four,” he wailed.
Not a one of us had spoken up to this point, but now we came to eagerly congregate around this fallen brother, the sluice of sugar and alcohol in our blood forming a newfound sense of community and rapport.
I was the first to offer up something personal in response, to break the tension, which instantly stopped Benji from blubbering.
“I once fell in love with a mycologist who turned out to be both inconstant and a kleptomaniac,” I spontaneously coughed up, downing the dregs of a sugary sour sidecar. “Back then I believed in politics, before the ugly days of this rancid narcissism swallowed up my boyhood and darkened my dismal doorstep forever more. I may have excused her for liberating my television when she left, but I will never forgive her for stealing my heart.”
Faces lined with creases of concern quietly turned towards me, lines carved into them like hard oak. They wanted to more. They needed it. I could hear Ted rubbing a glass dry. I could make out the sultry song of a cricket behind a bamboo wall.
I confided that I was celebrating the first day of my new career as an unemployed postman, having been fired the day before when the FBI uncovered that several harassing letters being added into the mailboxes of certain business leaders in the community had originated from my squiggly handwriting. This, I suggested, had in turn lead to the discovery of the bottle of Wild Turkey I routinely nursed while making my rounds through the wilds of this wicked little tourist trap of a town. At last I proposed that my peculiar behavior stemmed back to the queer turn of events my life had taken since she left me, from pornography to pugilism to this paroxysm.
“I still miss her magic mushrooms.”
The Colonel was the next to add his note to the sad symphony of regret we were concocting.
And then Larry.
And then Ted the bartender, who had stopped being apart and had begun to do shots with us. He summarily informed us that he had failed to make headway as an actor and that his last great comfort in the world, cross-dressing, was also his greatest shame. When he alluded that he might be wearing women’s panties Larry’s face brightened.
And then we started over again, and everyone who joined us began to tell their most embarrassing stories until the bar swelled with losers, all drunk and loud and more ashamed then the next.
Someone drank a Mojito.
Someone drank a Rum Runner.
Someone drank a Bush Whacker.
Our confessions starting dribbling out of us, like piss running down your leg when you laugh too hard at a ball game because the pitcher just took a line drive to the coconuts. They blended together until one was the same as the other, until we all collectively shared each other’s terrible guilt.
“I cheated on my taxes.”
“I cheated on my wife.”
“I feel cheated by life and I’m so fucking sick of it.”
“Mea Culpa!”
Someone ordered a Pink Panty Pulldown.
Someone ordered a Long Slow Screw.
Someone ordered a Cum Shot.
At last the clock struck five, when the tourists would come, from exploring Thunder Valley, from telling ghost tales in Old Tombstone, from filling the coffers of the city council elite with their shiny coins.
At last there was not a man among us who had not been cleansed from the holy fire of this great repentance, who did not feel transformed from what they had spoken, some great and unbearable weight lifted off of them. It felt like having a 747 engine that had pinned you by the legs dead to the ground suddenly removed, and finding out you could still walk.
And this is when it struck me, as the obvious leader of this inchoate gang, that I was most likely going to be indicted within a few days, and that it would be a long time until I enjoyed this kind of freedom again, and that I would never come back to this town so long as I lived, that the ghost of Spiro Agnew couldn’t make me if he tried.
And so I rallied them to me, standing on a table, and I told them all my brilliant plan for revenge.
Ted did a shot for me.
The Colonel was the first to join.
Larry pulled out a soiled pair of panties from his jacket pocket, placed them over his face, inhaled deeply, and then returned them before committing to the cause.
Ted passed out behind the bar, crashing to the floor with a loud crack, and the Colonel let out an unintelligible expletive at high volume before helping himself to a bottle of Cuervo.
“Viva los grande putas!”
“Ted?” Larry blustered, but I knew we had lost him, one way or another.
And as the clock struck, we stripped off every stitch of clothing we had worn in and walked out to meet the tourists, our flaccid cocks and hairy, pasty white bodies as jarring a site as one could expect to see without warning.
All along Allen street they stood rooted in place, their jaws slack, their eyes transfixed, as I marched the naked parade in front of them triumphantly.
We swooned up past Legends of the West and Ringo's.
We flaunted our drunken genitals north on the boulevard from Crystal Palace to Six Gun City.
We sallied gaily in front of Big Nose Kate's Saloon, swinging our hips and doing an inebriated jitterbug, before a small wave of police accosted us and drove us back.
We were ordered to cease and desist from the leering and poking of tongues and general mayhem we were inflicting upon the unprepared visitors to the Grand Canyon State.
We were commanded to put our restrictive and concealing clothing back on immediately.
We were informed in no uncertain terms that each and every one of us would be arrested, but we no longer cared.
The tourists didn’t say a word. They pointed silently at the absurd procession of grown men behaving badly. Some searched their free pamphlets trying to figure out which part of the show they were witnessing.
They clicked their cameras and wound them and clicked them again.
We held our heads up high and smiled for them.
Each of us was glad not to be completely forgotten.
Each of us was glad to be added into the indelibly magnificent legacy that is Tombstone.
About the author:
Of the great many tragedies in his life, failing to publish his latest novel EXIT PLAN is among the worst of the indignities that Devan Sagliani has thus far suffered, and the author remains somewhat indignant about it to be quite honest.
In the meantime he has moved on from such petty setbacks as an ocean full of rejection letters and retreated into his cave with his power animal to plot a great and terrible revenge upon the unsuspecting world, and to craft a new collection of short stories to submit in order to gain some writing credits.
At present he is hiding somewhere in Los Muertos sharpening his claws and teeth and awaiting the perfect moment to strike out. He may also be petting his cat, surfing the web, reading incessantly or testing the barometer of lowbrow, popular culture by "watching the slave box."
Beware! That's all I am saying, and keep both eyes open. That is all.
© 2009 Word Riot
