Pool, Closed Door, Jim Beam

The torpor of life often stretches us like a rubber band
but sometimes the balloon pops and
The band snaps
They picked Tony and I up on a Thursday night
From the Buffalo
Which means nothing to anyone
Except if you work in The Kingdom
That means you have to go to Manama
Which serves up drinks
And sexual release
Working women from Thailand
They had a sense of humor
And snorted and hoofed
And did goofy things
Like playing pregnant on the dance floor
With red balloons under blouses
We paid the bill and followed them like lap dogs
To their car
For some decadent debauchery
And Gina drove
But slam!
Went the chain of events
Gina smashed a Kuwaiti's car in a parking lot
A wrinkle of metal
And Tony de-ionized the whole situation
As he would a class scuffle
With a gentlemanly billfold offering of 70 dinars
To pacify the Kuwaitis
And pacified they were
Rightly
But Gina is all gloom now
Doesn't thank Tony
And with mental vice-grip obsesses on the affair
Worried and replaying the event in her head
As though she could change it
But off to their apartment we go
It's spacious, clean, immaculate
With a pool table shoved in for good measure.
Plush sofas and a big screen
Gina tries to distract herself by frying up pork sausages for us
Blankly entranced by the sizzle
While Tony rubs her girlfriend Myra's feet at the dining room table
The sausages warm us and provide
Witty innuendo for the next act
But something is not right with the whole universe
At Gina and Myra's apartment
It folds in on itself somewhere between the dining room table
And the kitchen
There are cryptic texts and phone calls
That must be attended to
And Gina's raincloud of worry about the fender bender
Gives grim company to the unknown annoyances
The party is already over with Myra's toes and feet
Which are now firmly planted on the ground
As she deals with other concerns
And giggles and titters turn to furrowed brows
And Tony and I melt into the backdrop landscape
Of their living room
Ignored
Irrelevant as a grey divan
So we play pool
Like the political strategists
Visiting the writer's mansion
In a Clockwork Orange
Wendy Carlo's sped-up version
Of Beethoven's Ninth
As we hypnotically
But half-assedly attempting a game of pool
We are like forgotten boys
On whom the gravity of the complications are lost
The Witch hazel of complications
Tony's suggestion of sharing costs
Are met with blank stares
Like those of a lemur staring out dumbly in the twilight
Gina reacts by sleeping
Curls into the couch and rests her head on the
Ass-shaped pillow she had been sitting on
Then wakes up 30 minutes later
Eyes layered with daze and blur
Somnambulant muddle-headedness
And floats toward the pool table like a zombie
Grudgingly takes a shot or two
Misses disinterestedly
And retreats back into the sofa
Working women in Manama play pool
They master it
And they channel every frustration into it
And they become very very good
The pool table are their baoding balls
Of meditative tension release
Gina retreats back to the resting couch
Evening decrescendos fast
The girls ignore us and
Tony's 35 dinar proposal for the accident
Finally they're done
Wearily they creep to the bedroom
Shut the door on us
Shutting us out with a faint click
Because there's really nothing more they can do
But pass out silently
And give us the run of the place until we get bored
Letting us stew
In our Irrelevance
Tony and I scan the expanse of the kitchen table
Lives nakedly laid out
Five packs of cigarettes
A full bottle of Jim Beam
And half of another one
And prescription med
After prescription med
After prescription med
Barbituates
Colorific
capsules
Lives not legs
Spread open for us
Desperate lives
All stapled to pharmaceutical bags
The hidden torments
Of
Thai
Birds.
Like kids
Gleefully
We grab what we could
Plundering them
For the 70 bd
We snagged the Jim beam
And squirreled all the smokes we could stuff in our pockets
Scampered down the steps
And blearily sauntered to a smoky hotel café
With a Mayan motif
The whole evening to early morning
All a strange surreal
Smokey tableau
And we're just two cats in it
Tonight we'll drain the Beam and
Try to sleep through the room spins
And we'll wake up and prowl around the sick city again
And the girls will wake up
And cutely sulk and curse us for burgling the table
They will try to fix the body damage to their car
Then will be out again on dance floors
Pregnant with the balloons under their shirts
And while the sun scars the other side of the earth
The moon will rise up luminous and full again
Crayola orange
And wicked
And the cycle of life
Whirls on
Whichever way
The wind blows