My Eyes are Going to Bleed (Insomnia at the Dixie Tavern)

--Insomnia is a cliché.

I didn’t sleep last night so this night I should sleep, and early, but I can’t and so finally I rise up and put on jeans and t-shirt and a jacket and go zombie like to the Dixie Tavern where half the people are in costumes and there hangs on the men’s room door a paper skeleton.

It is easy to get drunk this tired.

The swinger couple is there.

J is there, an older man who introduces me to women and buys drinks for everybody. He hates me really, but we act like best friends.

I got to the bar and order two shots of vodka. This is our custom. We drink them and he is indebted to me. I never accept the beers and shots he passes around.

He introduces me to every pretty girl, and he knows them all. He’d slit my throat if he could have one but since he can’t he’ll keep me close and that keeps some of the girls nearby too.

M shows up. We dated for one night about five months ago. I still have the socks of hers that I wore home. I never got in touch after that. To be fair, her ex boyfriend called about six times that night and she lied to him each time and I begin to feel he wasn’t really an ex.

Anyway, I’ve seen her a few times since then. She’s angry at me. She gets prettier and thinner every time I see her. Tonight she is with two lovely girls. They’re in fatigue skirts and fatigue hats and fishnet stockings. She throws her foot out and swings her thigh all over and I think: she’s the sexiest girl in here.

Indeed.

And her friends. Together they make this trio of sexiness that could destroy a male dominated world.

They tell me they are GI Hoes. We drink together.

They dance together. The ghouls and the ghosts salivate.

Only the skull remains on the bathroom door. The skeleton itself has been ripped away. When I go inside I see that somebody has dropped it inside the stall and only its hand and forearm come out.

This haunts me.

Jimmy has a woman sitting beside him. She’s got a Russian face and heavy breasts and good thighs. She smiles at me. I see everything she wants me to see in the half second she keeps her eyes on mine.

M comes off the dance floor. She offers me a cheers. We touch drinks. She’s still mad but not so much. I try to explain. I was lost at that point, still nursing a broken heart. And anyway, the boy kept calling. I didn’t know what to make of it all.

I tell her, You never called me, either.

Even though I know she did

She says, I don’t call boys.

I say, It was confusing, and I’m sorry.

I’ll give you my number again, she says. She is solemn about it, as if this is a sacred chance I aught not fuck up but she imagines I will.

I take it and put it on the bar.

Jimmy gets up to piss above the skeleton.

I sit in his chair. The woman asks me how old I am. I tell her to guess and she underguesses. Then I underguess her age. She was flattering me and I was flattering her but I am sincerely surprised at how old she really is.

Her eyes are light brown.

She puts her hand on my thigh. I wonder if it feels like me, if she can feel my workouts, or anything particular about me at all, or if it is just jean and heft beneath it.

I think, If I were to do that to a woman, just drop my hand down that high up on her thigh, I’d be in trouble.

Then I think, No, she’d want that.

Indeed, she would.

She says, What happened to your twenty year old?

I point. M is dancing. God she is sexy but now that she’s given me her number and I know she is available again, she is less so. In fact, I can see that she is drunk and her moves are not really that graceful.

Even though they are the same moves. Even though when she was unavailable she was the most graceful woman I could imagine.

She’s drunk, I say to the woman. I have no idea about her grace. I’ve never even seen her stand. But I’ve calculated her already. I’ve measured her stomach, I’ve noted her collarbones, I’ve taken into account her calves. She’s in good shape.

The woman nods.

I prefer experience, she says.

Yes. I adore Jimmy, I say.

He’s a good man. I always have a drink with him.

Jimmy comes back.

I’m tried.

I’m tired of this all and I was tired of it before I got here but I don’t want to go home but there is nothing else I want and the skeleton head grins on the door to the bathroom and we call that a skull.

I think, One day everything will be different. I think of the skeleton in my own body, that collection of bones beneath the muscles that our mine. No woman, not through touch or smell or anything else, would be able to tell that skeleton of me from that of another.

I shake hands. I fold the napkin with the number in my pocket. The woman with Jimmy looks at me quizzically. We’ve done the whole dance, smoothly and with ease. It’s just a matter of the undressing now.

But I go out the door.

I get in my truck.

The moon makes me sad because it is so beautiful, but then I realize it is just a Shell sign rising up in the fog.

And I get home.