"Small-town dating"

I don't remember what she said, what the context was or what it was in reference to, but I know one of the first things I said to her the first time we got coffee was, "Well, the great thing about living in a small town is that even when you don't know what you're doing, someone else does."

"Where'd you hear that?"

"It's on a plaque above the Palace cash register."

"Is it like that here?" She'd just moved to town from the city.

"Pretty much."

"Well, we'll see, I guess."

Excerpt from "The Wall"

... We'd sit there for hours, our asses on the ledge, our legs dangling above the sidewalk below. We had two games we liked to play. One was acorns. We'd collect acorns and throw them into the busy three-lane, one-way street. First one that gets run over, the thrower gets a point. Play to 10. The other game was "What's up?" Any girl that walks by, you ask, "What's up?" If she keeps walking, no points. If she says what's up back, one point. If she stops to talk, two points. No one ever got to 10 points. One incredibly cold night, Champagne and I rode our bikes around the city scavenging Dumpsters for treasure. In the Trader Joe's Dumpster we scored bouquets of half-dead flowers and stuffed our bags with two bouquets each. We rode to The Wall and tried to give them to college girls as they walked by. It was a tough sale. Not only was it cold, it was between fall and spring semester, the university was dead, everyone was gone. We sat and sipped whiskey from my flask to stay warm, but I was wearing Converse, my feet were frozen. Champagne said, "What's up?" to two girls that walked past. They stopped to talk. We gave them a bouquet each. We talked with them for awhile until I dumbly mentioned something about a girl Champagne had recently hooked-up with. Then they left, saying they had to go back to their dorm, it was too cold to stand around. To this day, Champagne contends that he would have got that girl's number had I not blown if for him. "They would have invited us back to their dorm!" I still feel a little bad about it. Well, I told him, at least we still have one bouquet each ...

"The Great Thing About ..."

"The Great Thing About Living in a Small Town," a 'zine, issues No. 1 and 2, "Then and Now," forthcoming ... seriously. Excerpts coming soon ...