Part Nine

While staying halfway sober he recorded a few albums that drifted into the abyss of obscurity, two different country disco records, a soundtrack for the film, The Resurrection and a Buddhist Christian album that were all considered pretty awful.

He played country fairs and country weddings, water parks and theme parks and trailer-park barbeques, college softball National Anthems and southern small-school fraternity Tuesday night socials, back to low-key dive-bars and house parties for twenty-five dollars a night and all he could drink Ole Chattanooga beer from a keg, low-country bluegrass festivals in a Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama Tri-County area.

Many of the dark shaded bars he performed in he was recognized by the old timers and regulars across the south and southwest and they offered him free drinks and he mostly said No thank you, but sometimes he’d say to himself, ‘Well one little drinky-dew never killed nobody,’ and they’d share brown liquor and drink more and more of those drinks until the dark bar lit gold and silver and became a blurred and electric disco ball barroom like an LSD trip in Heaven, taking shots out of the belly buttons of women wearing cut-off blue jeans and tight shirts, dancing in her arms and believing the dance to be a dance with angels, and speaking like they had been in love forever and only woke up that night to understand this, over outside cigarettes, and stealing bottles from behind the bar and laughing beside windows where the moon was the only light, snorting cocaine off her fingers in a booth, being tased by the bouncer for dancing on the table and falling into her arms and carrying each other outside the doors, snorting coke off each other in the car in the parking lot, whispering into her ear the poetic verse he would never remember with her biting his neck and panting and moaning and them breathing the breath of animals, waking up in the morning fallen off her bed frame rubbing his eyes with the damnation of eternal headache and her kids yanking at her ankles hollering for pancakes.