I had poked around the Block a few times. Later on I found out that was where Blaze Starr did her thing. So, one night, I drank a string of rum and cokes and a blonde girl with a Bawlmer accent sat on my lap and did her thing.
I told her a bunch of lies. And it all came back to bite me. She asked if I wanted to drive her home. I’d lied to her about the car. Said it was a Jeep. It wasn’t. It was a station wagon I’d borrowed from my mother. She slipped into the back to change and I went outside into the cold air.
In the morning I’d ride down to Penn station and make my way westward. In the morning everything would be gone. Everything would be something else. But as the cold of early January in Baltimore bit into me, drunk and agitated with myself, I had no answer. Just the beak of lust and nothing to do with it.
I rode back across the first streets I’d ever steered a vehicle over and all of the angry regret slipped off of me. There was where what’s her name used to live, by the huge anchors, and that was our old babysitter’s house. That’s where Cliff lived in the basement of his parents house and turned up 98 Rock until the commercials clouded his brain. I was glad to leave it. I didn’t know about nostalgia. By the time I got home, I’d almost forgotten the stripper.
by Hank Cherry
