The Last Picture Show...

"He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong..." - Anon

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

San Angelo, Texas - The crowd inside a beer joint called Blaine's here always pumped me up in a sort of rural way. You know the feeling; it's always one whoop & holler after another, even when the television set set on the wall behind the bar is offering something stupid like Judge Judy or somesuch bullshit. I'd sit at the far end of the bar, a long way from the front door, and wait on her. I'll call her Daisy, mainly because she still lives in this dusty, sleepy West Texas town and her name is, well, well-known. I waited on her as the afternoon dragged on.

Daisy worked for some bureaucratic outfit. I'd met her while working on a newspaper article. We'd arrived at the idea of meeting for a beer after one long session to do with the workings of the business that employed her. Tallish and rather atractive in the True West style, Daisy ambled in looking fine and proud, smiling and waving a hoot of a hell-o. I can be a cowboy if the movie's worth it, was my feeling. She drew the stupid out of me, for sure. Silly was more like it, but I analyze too much after the fact.

We would see each other often over the two-month span I spent in town, lunching and Happy Houring across Tom Green County, in her fancy car and in my SUV. Her old man travelled, or so she told me. When things shook-out, she knocked on my apartment door and asked to come in. I was okay with that, as I would've been with any woman arriving late at night in short shorts and a halter top. San Angelo goes through the usual summer scorch faced and endured by most of West Texas, so maybe the skimpy fashion wasn't all that out place. She said something about her old man getting a new vehicle and did I want to go for a ride in it? The goofy, dark backroads of San Angelo always sparked something in me. We left at midnight and she headed for a place called Twin Buttes, a sort of rendezvous hillside for lovers and other unfaithful rurals. Headlights moved in and out while we parked near a ledge of some ravine, looking out into the star-lit sky, talking silliness and angling fondlings that eventually brought the desire to drive back and go at it in the sack and not on a patch of dry grass and hardened dirt.

At the scene of the wanton sex, Daisy dropped her shorts and halter top quickly. It was all she wore. I smiled from my futon as she pulled my boots and jeans full-off. Shortly, she was showing me how the rural mouth cleared the land of Indians all those years ago. Then she angled over into the spooning position and I drove the herd home.

She called me in Dallas one day a few weeks after I left town. Something about meeting downtown for a sandwich or something. I said I'd do my best, but didn't. That afternoon, I waltzed over to my daughter's Fall picnic at her elementary school and enjoyed the Hell out of that, playing the clown in the dunking booth and all.

This is so true: things that may seem all-important in one setting don't quite work in another. Guys have a hard time putting that into words when talking with an unsympathetic lover, or when confessing to the wife...

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