example #5 in Examples of flashs past

She sizzled like fat on bacon put to the fire, she danced like a tilt-a-whirl. I put a bill on the rail and swear to god she picked it up with her butt crack. The band was lousy and the liquor overpriced and the food was watered down, but I’d been there four nights in a row to catch her act. She comes up to me after her first set on that fourth night, something a bit perverse about a stripper in a gown, and she leans into me, those soft cushions, those dirty pillows, pressing into my arm and she whispers in my ear “I need an eight letter word ‘satisfied thirst’.” I lick my lips and press them to her ear, touching the metal of an ear cuff “Slaked” She pulls back and sizes me up. “That’s six letters.” And walks away. “Quenched” I shouted at her back but the band had plugged back in and something almost close to an E minor chord rattled the cheap PA.

I spent my evening for the next week there before a waitress loosened up with a Jackson.

“She’s at the Mort Matisse?”

“What the hell is that?”

“One of them artsy fartsy strip clubs uptown. Means dead painter, one of those guys with all them dots I think, or maybe I’m thinking of Money or Manny. Uptown off MLK.”

The bouncer wore a beret and a Redwings jersey and he asked me for a password. I almost blurted out something about the best minds of my generation and running down the negro streets at dawn, but that cat wasn’t dead enough for this joint so I says “Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels, and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells, Streets …”

“G’won in,” he says sleepy as a winking joint, almost nodding.

It’s between sets when I get in and I order a Dewar’s neat and it comes in a rock glass that looks like some kid had made it in pottery class for mother’s day; glass, it was glass, but had no symmetry. The house lights went down and the spot goes up on this gauzy opaque curtain. I can tell it’s her by the curves of the silhouette, I can read those curves sure as a cop tech can read a fingerprint, distinctive and special to her. And the whole act is behind the curtain like shadows on the wall of a cave.

Not the kind of act one takes with a single Dewar’s, and I’m up at the bar trying to hail the bartender who’s doing so much nothing it’s made him deaf, when I feel those familiar dirty pillows press against my back and that hot breath in my ear “An apple could be a rock.” “Quenched,” I said,

“Eight letter word for satisfied thirst.” The bartender is at my elbow

“Dewar’s neat” I turn around and she’s gone again.

I tell the bartender “If an apple can be a rock than a rock could be an apple. I don’t know how this world works, but I’m pretty sure the key is balance.”

The bartender nods and says “Ever notice how the French pronounce Henri? Like it’s a cross between Ornery and Ennui.”