In The Days...

In the days before our hero Comrade Kevin became a virtual recluse, he had many exciting experiences in the music scene.

One such adventure concerned a red headed, fashionably tattooed female troubadour who sang songs of loss and frustration. She bummed him a cigarette when he asked for it. It was no small gesture on her part because money for much of anything was a struggle. Couches were to be pilfered for change to feed her addiction. Couches were to be slept on as well, since mattresses and box springs were merely distant memories.

He pictured the dirty house where she must have lived. He pictured the cluttered living room and the visitors and the inevitable drama that swirls around such places. His life had been more or less analogous to hers at some point in time. He had left it behind because he valued his privacy and enjoyed the ability to leave his few valuable possessions unlocked and unhidden.

Flirtation was a defense mechanism. As she sat across from him and stroked his cheek with a bony, white finger, she revealed the hair on top matched the hair below. This was said with a particularly seductive smile, but the aim was merely to tease. He looked her square in the face and upped the flirtation a notch whereupon she drew the line in the sand.

Good try, she said, with a smirk. But our hero feigned that his real interest had not been on her body but rather her alluded to former success upon the stage. She was caught off balance and her smirk turned quickly to a look of pain. It said I don't know how to help you.

Her successes had been years in the past. They had long ago drifted into a state of romanticized mythology. The irony among many ironies was that what passed for success was merely a long succession of close calls which left her with some degree of name recognition within the scene. Musicians know each other by variously decreasing degrees of separation.

Unused to someone who played romance with the dodges and dives of a boxer, she came clean with her true thoughts. I have cancer, she said. No way to pay for it and no desire to fix it, either. Instead it served as her ace in the hole when called into compromising situations. She lit a cigarette and stared off into space, her leer now transformed into a worried frown.