flash friday for 2-14-14 virtue, virtuoso, vertigo in Flash Friday

Institutions look at your flaws, they have too; the job is to instill virtue by conformity. Learn the same stuff, wear the same stuff, go through the same pain; kindergarten, the navy seals, jail, it doesn’t matter, you go in flawed you come out a first grader, a seal , an ex con.

“Bitters and ginger ale.”

The bartender didn’t smirk, didn’t joke. They know what bitters and ginger means, all the variations. When you have jailhouse tat’s on your knuckles no one smirks, ever. Mine said F U C K on the right knuckles and Y O U on the three knuckles I had left on my left hand. Lost the finger whittling when I was ten. No one ever asks.

Ok, an old lady on a bus asked once. I told her I had been a virtuoso, first viola for the Jackson Symphony, when the curtains caught fire I ran back to rescue my lover the cellist. She didn’t make it and I lost the finger. She smiled and patted my shoulder when I held the door for her at her stop.

In a retirement home somewhere it’s common for violists to have fuck in blue ink on their bow knuckles.

The bartender waved me off when I dug a couple wrinkled bills from my pocket. I don’t know why but I didn’t argue and he didn’t do that wet rag thing on the bar top in front of me. No small talk, adamantly no small talk. He stacked glasses in the dishwasher.

Tuesday day shift sucks for a stripper. She was bored with her nudity, the music, planet earth, she swung on the pole but not high enough to get vertigo. I left the crumpled bills for my drink on the rail and turned my back to her. I don’t think I could have worked up a grin for her lazy shuffle and I know she couldn’t have worked up that fake plastic gratitude-hey-I’m-naked grin.

Without windows and many lights you couldn’t tell how much dust, miles, years were between the stripper, bartender and me, but we were like points of a triangle, connected only by the shape, like the winter triangle on the horizon, billions of miles apart, but, generations of connection.

I was thinking about getting the tats covered. I was thinking of covering them to read fuck you facing in instead of out, maybe in a sans serif font. I don’t know what the bartender was thinking, and the stripper, well, yeah, I don’t know that either.