velazquez, bacon, matilda & you

Waltzing Matilda

So I'm at this waterside saloon yesterday sitting between a Romanian exboxer (who stands about 4 feet tall), and a Turkish usedcarsalesman. Across the bar, there's a couple in their fifties. The lady keeps straddling the guy, but the guy's playing it slo-mo & cool, fidgeting with his Blueblockers and grinning around a cigar in all his omnivorous buckteeth. She touches his (makebelieve) hairstyle, nudges his crotch with her knee, and I'm beginning to think I'm watching a Levitra infomercial until the band starts to play. It's a ragtag agglomeration of yokel huckleberries. The pivotman is this seething hump of whaleshit in leathers, a pissmop of yellow pseudowig flaring out from beneath the skullandcrossbones bandanna precariously unbalancing itself upon his tete. He keeps placing his Stratocaster up against his ear, strumming the chords and winking at the drummer and I'm like oh god oh please not again... not this... again. The harmonica player I do believe I know from somewhere. He's this washedup partially exhumed pile o' phytoplankton the Tet offensive neglected & Nixon left for dead because, apparently, when the shit hit the fan, he was out smoking from a RubeGoldberg-shaped hookah on a sunken ricepaddy somewhere around Hill 55 (without even knowing it). I watch, as his boots measure the sound. and this is all I need, I think... Jesus, this is all I need... but he actually surprises me. And the rest of the band does too. And when they finish their first song, the old man next to me says, "Play it again, Sam!" "They don't do that," says the even older man sitting next to him. "You watch..." says some thirdwheel in a shirt upon which swims several seacows. He yanks a fin from his billfold, waves it, then quickly stuffs it down his own pants and all is forgotten except for the Levitra couple dryhumping on the other side (over bud lights & against the leg of one strategically placed busboy). "Get a room!" someone yells & all our Blueblockers lothario can do is blow cigarsmoke on his knuckles like he knows something no one else does, except perhaps for the band, which plays Waltzing Matilda as if they all had her once.