Jesus and Hector from down the street are hanging out under the trestle with the cholos, drinking beer and singing Charlie Daniels Band songs. My old landlord payed for them to come here to be bellhops in his hotel, basically slave labor, but they have other duties to perform as well. They just shrugged when he told them. They knew being bellhop slaves was too good to be true. Anyway, their other chores led them to meet the cholos and now they are drunk and teaching the cholos English by teaching them Charlie Daniels songs. When they were traveling through Oklahoma with all its wind and dust, they had taken refuge in a rusted out 1976 Chevy Nova. You could barely tell it had been turqoise. In the 8 track tape player was the Charlie Daniel’s Band, Fire on the Mountain. Hector pulled at it and, surprisingly, it slid right out. He fell asleep staring at the flowers, river and robust looking raccoons on the cover and took it as a good sign of things to come in America. He wasn’t very surprised to find out he was wrong. Now John has to make coffee for all of them while they sober up..

Gracie Finch

I was looking for batteries in the dollar store when Gracie Finch burst in with two guys who would have had mullets if they had any sense of style at all.  She’d been eating Cheetos and was chugging down a Big Gulp Mountain Dew.  I knew about the Cheetos because her hands and half her face were orange and, if that weren’t enough,  there was an orange dusting on her bare white stomach that fell out of her halter top over her skin tight spandex shorts.  Her eyes frantically searched the aisles  and  then she saw me.  I said, “Hi Gracie.  How are you?”  She adjusted her glasses which had fallen down her nose, blinked  a few times  and then  recognized me.  She rolled her eyes.  I had just wasted her time. “I don’t have time to talk now.”  and she plunged noisily  down the snack aisle, resurfacing moments later with a bag of Ruffles and a can of onion dip.  “If you are having chips, you gotta have you some fucking dip!”  she had told me once before passing out snoring in a sugar and carb coma on my couch.  That was down on Main street.  Stuff like that never happens up  here next to the trestle.