NON-FICTION

HAIR OF THE DOG
COLUMN 2, MID-80s

by
Caucus de Bourbon

WAKE UP LATER than most I do, often later than I like. Stems from chasing bells all night. Bells are to cabbies what a case to a dick is. It's the stuff dreams are made of; the stuff with which you pay your bills. On this particular afternoon I awoke atop a dingy, little stool in a sleazy, little dump hosting a single fern, a tired juke box, and the woozy miasma of inebriate jubilee: Happy Hour to most, cheap drinks to me.

The young thing hovering next to me at the bar called herself Melodious Flank. She called herself an actress.

"My condolences," I said.

Conversation dwindled after that so, spying a vacant seat, I landed myself across the table from Tito. Tito was from Trinidad. The bulk of his head consisted of face. In it a single eye looked me over good. Where the other had been only a cloth patch could be found.

"I know you," Tito decided at length, this putting him at ease. Apparently he recognized my mug from the author's photograph never taken for the jacket of my unpublished collection of short stories, Wives Tales and Pigs Feet.

"I'm a guerilla," he said.

A diminutive fellow suffering from chronic rubicund nose swaggered passed and into the restroom. Tito watched him closely, waited until the door was closed before answering as to what he was doing in town.

"Me and some Australians come to vacation from the war."

"What war?"

"Salvador," he said quietly.

"Oh," I replied intelligently.

"People I kill," he said. "They try to kill me, I kill them first. I make more money than them. You write. Me, I am a mercenary."

I tried to spot Melodious.

"You look my nose," demanded Tito. He thumped his nose, the bridge of which was noticeably absent, separated from his brow by a deep, ghoulish crevice. "They shoot out my eyeball. They try to assassinate me by sneaking up on the side I don't see them. But I am smarter. I cut out the bridge of my nose so I do see both sides with just one eye!"

"Umm," I said.

Tito took a swift swig from the flask he'd snuck in. Racket in the bathroom stirred the table. "Mr. Boggins!" came the bathroom racket. "Mr. Boggins!" it came.

The bathroom in this joint consists of nothing more than a tight vestibule with a shallow porcelain troft able to accommodate one individual at best. Rubicund Nose was the only one in there.

"I've got you now, Mr. Boggins!"

"You I like," said Tito. "You want to kill someone, you come to me."

Melodious Flank stood by the door. "Cab!" she yelled to a passing taxi.

"Right here!" I leapt from my chair, not one to miss a cue. "I'll take you home, Melodious."

"Aren't you a writer?" she asked.

I smiled and took the actress, Melodious Flank, home.