Open Sky
Target practice, chickenshit bingo, beignets
Not quite 6am, in Stephen Elliott’s dining room in New Orleans, listening to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Robert Ford, by Nic Cave and Warren Ellis. I may have mentioned this before, but this was the soundtrack I listened to in my car nearly the entire time I investigated and wrote (the early draft) of my book The the Bridge. The plaintiveness matched for me exactly - forgive the metaphor but this is what it felt like - to be swimming through dark water, trying to understand why a mother would throw her two young children from a bridge. The music, though, is all open sky.
I have seen a lot of open sky, driving New York to Knoxville to Nashville to Tulsa to Austin, where I spent four days; where I learned gun etiquette from Karl Rehn and shot a pistol at a target (246 out of 250, hello), and where the locals were bold in telling my husband Din and me just what they were doing.
“This is the propaganda tour,” said Anna Z., who took us to taco trucks and swimming pools and peacock parks and a honky tonk for chickenshit bingo and where we danced to “I’m an Okie from Muskogee” and felt exactly perfect.
In Austin we also met Dave Burge, who for a long time I have been sure is the funniest/smartest guy on Twitter, and then, within two minutes of meeting him, was hooked on his kindness and the talk-talk, and who, when I asked what the guy in the sparkle-shirt was wearing on his feet, ballet slippers or maybe some custom shoes, said, “Nancy, they’re socks.”
I could have stayed in Austin a long time but instead drove away. Everyone close to me is on the road, traveling thousands of miles, shooting digital images at one another, texting poems in the middle of the night, poems you read with one eyeball open in a bed you’ve never slept in, and even if you did not know who sent it, you’d know, by the allusion to the curve of her neck as she bent her head back for a kiss.
Off to St. Petersburg now, 679 miles. Until soon, big love and the beignet I am about to eat at Cafe du Monde xx
the real question is-where the hell did you find ammo?
"...and felt exactly perfect." I felt it when I read it.