Hank Died Here

I had been married before. Twice. Had a bachelor party both times. No one was ever hurt. Nothing too terribly exciting ever happened. Someone passed out or ran naked down a hotel hallway, which they still talk about, ad nauseam. Someone brought a donkey who ate the pickle and cheese platter. Someone called a dancer who haggled over prices and ended up giving someone a hand job for fourteen bucks. Someone broke a lamp or a TV. So another bachelor party wouldn’t hurt anything. Hell, all my friends and I are in our forties.

Missed the wedding. Lost my tuxedo and the wedding ring. Pretty sure I have a broken rib or two and woke up in back of a black Cadillac in a gas station in West Virginia. For some reason I was dressed up like Woody from Toy Story. Don’t know why. A pre-space-age cowboy who was about to get shelved for a laser-beam shooting space explorer with a buzz-cut, who didn’t even know it. Only I knew it. I knew the marriage wouldn’t work. 

I had a hell of a hangover. Went in to the gas station with a limp and bought a snickers bar and a Gatorade. Wasn’t wearing any shoes. Didn’t have shoes. But there was no sign on the door and to hell with it if there was anyway. The cold tile felt good under my bare feet and I thought about how you could never appreciate a cold tile floor when you always wear shoes. The Woody outfit was tight. My underwear was riding up my ass. Or maybe that was the string. My phone was dead in the tomb of a tight pocket.

“Howdy partner,” the slimy attendant snickered. “Is it Howl-o-ween in Jew-lie?” Even in West Virginia the gas stations are owned by Middle Eastern men, but they talk like they are from West Virginia. I briefly wondered what their fascination was with gas stations, but my headache dulled my curiosity and I thought no more of it. I was sure it was part of a greater plan. I was sure OPEC had something to do with it. I would know when everyone else knows.

I don’t know whose Cadillac it was. Maybe it was a 57 or 58. I don’t know much about cars. It was black with fins. I don’t know where it belonged, but I sat in the huge backseat with the windows down and my naked foot dangling out in the hot air watching people come and go from that gas station. I was bobbing my foot up and down to a song in my head that I couldn’t name. 

As I was about to fall asleep, I was awakened by a loud knocking coming from the trunk. I found the keys in the ignition and got out and popped it. There was a little person stashed in there who was doing the knocking with a tire iron. He was like and angry little bull once sprung until he sucked air back in his lungs and got circulation in his feet. He danced around wildly for a minute. He too was dressed like a cowboy, but in black. Grabbed the keys from me. Griped that it was his company car and the Lincoln was a rental. Wasn’t a Cadillac at all. Shows how much I know. But he was grateful I freed him and he thanked me, presuming I had nothing to do with his capture. So it was like he was a genie and I had just rubbed the magic lamp.

Without directly making a wish, I told him I was three hours late for my wedding in Ohio. He seemed to sympathize, maybe thinking of his wife and said he’d drive me for a hundred bucks. Better late than never, I said. I wondered if his wife was a little person, too. Or if she was full-size. I don’t know why they don’t like being called midgets. I wanted to ask him, but I didn’t. I don’t know how being called little people or a little person is any better. There are many mysteries in the world that I will never be able to solve, but that doesn’t mean I will ever stop trying. She was overweight, I was sure, and the thought of them making love made me laugh, though it shouldn’t. The thought of almost anyone making love makes me laugh and I sit in restaurants and look at people and imagine it all the time. My head is a seedy porno theater. It is a sort of involuntary reactive amusement. I chuckled. My miniature chauffeur riding this imaginary wildebeest like a life preserver on tides of passion.

He turned on the air conditioning and put the windows up. The air gushing out of the vents smelled like talcum powder and old suede. He flipped on the radio and I noticed a bald-spot on the back of his head that appeared to be in the shape of Ohio. An omen, perhaps. The song that played on the radio was some old country song with a lot of twang. I wanted to ask him how he got into the trunk, but I didn’t. It was likely a sore subject and maybe I had something to do with it, after all.

“You like Hank?” he asked looking back at me in the rearview. “Hank died here, you know. At this gas station.”

“Hank who?” I asked. 

“GET OUT!” he screamed.

I saw the anger in his eyes and so I did as he ordered. I didn’t want to fight because I was never much of a fighter and I couldn’t think of anything worse than getting beat up by a little person. It would shred my dignity. He peeled away and gravel spit from the tires of that Lincoln all over me. The country music twanged as he sped away. So much for my genie. I stood there in the sun with a splitting headache. I wondered what my fiancé was doing. Left in the lurch as she was. I wondered if she was figuring how she was going to get the money back for the place settings and the flowers. For the glasses and the bubbles. Splitting up the cost of the postage and stationery for all those invitations in her head so to send me the bill. She would probably sue me in civil court. She was probably deciding what she could do with the cake and eyeing groomsmen or old boyfriends on Facebook to replace me. That is how much faith I had in her.

I exhumed my dead phone from my pocket and looked at it and wondered what kind of business was going on in there in its circuitry. In that invisible universe. I imagined how it would light up like the 4th of July when I juiced it back up. I had some weird satisfaction like a man whose death sentence had been commuted. A man who would be scot-free. For some reason the phrase footloose and fancy free came to mind and I wondered what musical it came from because that sort of gay thing always comes from a musical. My fiancé would know. She knew all the show tunes. But she was probably crying. She probably wouldn’t talk to me anymore unless I came up with an excuse as to why I missed our wedding. Why I had a bachelor party in a casino in West Virginia. I was kidnapped. I died. I could die and that would be a good excuse, but then she would figure out the time of death and realize that I had died just to make an excuse.

I walked across the hot gravel on bare feet, feeling like I was being punished. I cursed with every step. Wondered where my shoes were and if they were lonely or if they were in good hands. Poor girl, God said of my fiancé through the clouds. Oh, she does well with sympathy, I scoffed in my mind. She loves being a victim. But it isn’t wise to argue with God, so I bit my lip. I just said, yeah, poor girl and then some Hail Marys. He probably heard what I said in my mind though. I’m pretty sure God reads minds.

There was a diner nearby and so I went to eat. Near four thirty. I was thankful I had a wallet. Old people were already there having early suppers. Supping, they call it. A short bald man with a cane laughed at me and asked, “Hey, Woody, where’s Buzz?” I wish I could properly elucidate the way he said, “where’s.” His bottom lip protruded from his dumpling of a chin and looked like an earthworm taking a bubble bath. His eyes looked like two squinting assholes.

I borrowed the waitress’s charger, figuring I should send out apologies and find a ride home. And as I imagined, when it was turned back on my phone lit up like the 4th of July. It seemed that everyone in the world texted or called me, besides my fiancé. Not one single message from her. She was probably too angry to text or call, I figured. Poor girl, God said. After I ate my grilled cheese and fries, I read through enough messages to find out what happened. She didn’t show up, either. She was somewhere with someone getting the same sorts of texts and calls undoubtedly. He was probably telling her, “You did the right thing.” That sounds like something some guy who was fucking someone’s fiancé would say. There is no way in the world she was not fucking someone. That was the only way in the world that she wouldn’t have showed up after all those invitation stamps she licked. After buying that expensive dress.

“Some shit,” I groaned. I no longer felt footloose and fancy free. I felt like gum on the bottom of a shoe. Like the crud on the salt shaker. The gunk on the on urinal cake. The scum on the bottom of the lid of the tampon waste basket. I hardly noticed how pretty my waitress was. How she laughed and joked with me, maybe just to milk a better tip out of me, but nonetheless. She said she gets off in a couple hours. I said that’s nice. Her name is Rachel. I sat in that diner for hours waiting for my friend and best man, who woke up late and fled the hotel, without me, to come back and get me. He said he thought Hank Jr. took me home. 

“Who the hell is Hank Jr.?” I asked getting in the car. It smelled like fat girls and disappointment. Gym shoes and Axe body spray. Farts and peanuts. Chlorine and teen spirit. He laughed at the Woody costume. He forgot all about it. 

“The midget driver,” he explained.

“Little person.”

“Right. Him. So, Belle didn’t show, either? Wow. So it’s a good thing you didn’t go or you would have been the one standing there having to explain everything to everyone. Looking like a jackass. God, that would have sucked. But it was like it was meant to be. You both backed out. Wonder what she did. Did she tell you why?”

“I wonder,” I snapped. My badly bruised ego showing. Like Rocky’s face bruised. Or Marilyn Monroe’s pus – forget it.

We sat in his car for a while and talked. He had to get gas and the diner and the gas station were all one place. My ribs hurt like hell sitting in the bucket seat of his aging sports car. I wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. As he pumped gas, I rested my head against the window and flipped through pictures of the bachelor party on my phone. I didn’t remember any of it, other than the girls and the drugs I turned down, and the bottle of brandy I didn’t.

I deleted all the pictures because I didn’t want to remember it. Didn’t want the Facebook memory to pop up in a year, or two, or five, or to be scrolling through and happen upon bachelor party pictures for a wedding that never was. But there was one picture that I just couldn’t delete, which I didn’t remember at all. A photo of a gorilla holding some woman in a polka-dotted bikini who looked just like Bettie Paige. I don’t know who invited either of them. I’m pretty sure Fidel Castro was there, too, but I didn’t get a chance to shake hands. I didn’t get a chance to ask him if the CIA really tried to kill him hundreds of times.  

My friend said he was going to get a coffee for the road, so I pulled up a song on my phone. I typed in Hank Williams and “Lovesick Blues” popped up, so after a gay Walgreen’s ad interrupted for five seconds, I skipped it and the song played while I watched people come and go from the gas station diner. It was as though Hank was sitting right there in the car, picking his guitar, singing to me and only me. In the very place where he died. The little chauffeur had every right to be angry with me. I wonder what that gorilla was thinking carrying Bettie Paige. I wondered if that gorilla liked Hank Williams. Or if Fidel Castro liked Hank Williams. I think that gorilla ate a dozen cheeseburgers at some point, though I am pretty sure that he said he was a vegetarian.

“Gonna be hard to top this one,” my friend smiled when he got back to the car. He started cleaning the windshields like an 80 year-old man does. Streaks of disintegrated bugs and their guts were washed and squeegeed from view. He looked old to me in the diminishing light of day. I saw wrinkles on his face I had never noticed before and hairs missing from his head that I swore were there. And so, if those things were happening to him, they would also soon happen to me. It was suddenly as though he had some highly-contagious virus and I had been exposed. All this time, all this life, and I had never done a single impetuous thing. Always dated the good girl who I was told was right for me. Asked her to marry me. Got bored. Argued. Looked for someone else. Divorced. Never one hooker. Never one waitress. Never one blind date. My head and heart split like the hull of the Titanic under the stress of all that mundanity. I was a cowboy in the space age. Dusty. Shelved. Doomed. Replaced. Dying. I can’t stop making mistakes that are counter to my happiness. I’ll never get out of this world alive. Or could I? Did that little genie do me a favor by dumping me here? Was it all a part of a greater plan? Then I saw the light.

I saw Rachel, the waitress, leaving the restaurant and I popped out of the car and my friend, dripping squeegee in hand, asked where I was going. I don’t know. Just hold on, I said. I caught up to her as she got into her beat-up blue Jeep Wrangler. I froze when I approached her and didn’t know what to say. Being a waitress I suppose she met all kinds and talking to folks was second nature to her. And she probably heard every pick-up line in the world. I was a deer in the headlights.

“Cowboy,” she nodded, greeting me with a blithe grin. “If you’re coming to complain about or compliment my service, they’re little cards inside to fill out.”

“Would you like to go on a blind date? With me?”

“That ain’t so blind,” she chuckled.

“We can go to the casino and have dinner, watch the band and have some drinks. I’m going to stay at the casino tonight and rent a car tomorrow to go home. But I’m not ready to go home, yet.”

She looked me over, smiling all the while, as though she were considering my proposal prudently. “Well, that would help rectify that paltry tip. And I got a feeling you got an interesting story to tell.”

I nodded. “I have a few.”

She was much more beautiful outside of the diner without the apron and in the glow of the natural light of a purpling evening sky. She shook her head, judiciously, still smiling. “Okay. I’ll have to go to my place and shower and change first, but I could use a good night out. And a good story.”

I scuttled back and told my friend to go home and he saw Rachel over my shoulder who was looking at us from her Jeep. He shook his head and smiled and wished me well. He fortunately had my suitcase of clothes in the trunk of his car so I took it and walked back over and hopped in the Jeep. I asked her if she had any Hank Williams and she turned to me and grinned. Of course. She put in a CD and we drove off to her place and then to the casino to drink to old blues and to new blues and all that would occur between.