When the Poet Buys the Beer

In Weeds the other night it felt like being inside a Robert Stone novel or a Robert Bingham novel set in the sixties or the early seventies but not the eighties or the nineties - forget the present or the future - it felt like that other time. That crazy time. That time lousy with good drugs and mostly bad poetry and bars that felt like Saigon or Bangkok or some other place where the end felt like a beginning and where the beginning never came.

In Weeds the other night it felt like that. There were four of us and a band that was very loud and mostly bad and a poet who stood in front of the band in his thread-bare red sweater and very thick glasses and eastern European accent who smoked up a storm and read what needs to be described as the most god-awful verse ever shared in a public space.

But, and this is important. The poet felt bad. Maybe this poet always feels bad, but that night he felt especially bad and in an attempt to make things right with the two remaining patrons (read: us) he bought us a beer. Together, in the finally quiet room we drank it.