7.

It was a fun date, one of our best. It was also the last. Crazy A. had driven in from Texas in that big Suburban of hers ferrying my dog and three cats to Baton Rouge. We went out on the town for one more good time, the kind of thing that we were best at. We knew we’d be getting hammered so for once we were smart and took a cab. The taxi driver, a gentle Algerian with one arm, remembered me from the old days when I worked at the Hilton.

“So good to see you my friend,” he said, opening the door for Crazy A. “Salaam Aleichem.”

“Aleichem Salaam.”

He drove us across town in search of Tabby’s Blue Box, a mysterious joint that never seemed to be where you remembered it was. The driver rolled us through the desolate streets near downtown, crossing and recrossing railroad tracks. He stopped for directions at a convenience store where a sign was posted on the window that said ‘We accept torn money.’ The Christmas cheer was in the air and people wanted us to buy things, mostly crack rock and ditch weed. We abstained. We had each other. For one last night we were in love all over again. I was wearing a suit; Crazy A. was in one of her sexy dresses with six inch pumps. Her cigarette burned like a lighthouse, the smoke forming complex colloids in the air. We kissed and touched and she called me Mean Old Gabe. Her voice was gravely as always, even more so with all the hard living of the last year. She still had her looks and her hair was still long and brown and her belly was flat and her booty was black girl big for a white girl. She was perfect and easy in so many ways and I wondered why it just never seemed to work out with us. Maybe we were too alike, born one year and two weeks apart. All we cared about was how we felt and it took a lot of adult-strength Whatever to make us feel anything.

The cabbie got us to our destination and further impressed Crazy A. by refusing to take any payment. He shook my hand, left to left, a great indignity for a Muslim.

“You are a very happy man,” he said as he departed.

I wondered what he meant. Happy that I was with Crazy A. one more time or happy that I was with Crazy A. only one more time.

Meanwhile a woman was standing outside Tabby’s talking into a payphone. She had been listening to someone in silence. Now she spoke.

“You don’t have no explanation, mutherfucker,” she said and slammed the phone into the cradle so hard that it jumped out and dangled on its steel cable. She turned and walked inside the bar. We followed.

Tabby’s son Chris was on stage, cutting the room to pieces with his blues and his guitar. A few couples sat at the little round tables. In the back was a bar where the only thing available was cheap bourbon in a plastic cup. We swirled around each other, touching and dancing. Crazy A. had a magnificent growl and Chris Thomas asked her to get up on stage. She did, and again I loved her harder and farther than the Indian Ocean fighting Jersey Joe. She sang Little Milton’s ‘Grits Ain’t Groceries’ and I wondered indeed if Mona Lisa was a man. Crazy A. had the soul of a hundred misplanted flowers pushing through her body, and inside that body, our child was still alive. This was its last best chance to be the one, a new Christ, one that would cleanse mankind of its sins with something besides blood. But it was not to be.

We took another cab back to my brother’s pad and we went to sleep in the same room for what I hoped would not be the last time. In the morning she put on a red silk shirt and said goodbye. This was it, and she looked lovelier than I had ever seen her. I was turning her loose, turning her over to the wolves and her mother and a someday trip to see a certain kind of doctor. All of that and more as she climbed in that big truck.

“Mean Old Gabe,” she said again, and then dropped it in gear and drove out of my life.