Fitty
Moths fly like echoes, in and back out Mrs. Dupree’s
second story red brick and mortar apartment window.
Her voice spills down onto the street like a halogen beam,
“Fitty, keep your godambullshit away from my shop, hear!?”
He’s a soggy whiskered ripe old drunk, a devil
waking up from a nap in a vacant car in the parking lot
behind a sign that reads: CC Dupree’s Nite-Time Diner.
This time peeling himself off a bottle green vinyl seat,
rising up like a black eyed eight count prizefighter
feeling around in the floorboard for a bottle to piss in.
When Palmyra tells this story she always starts with
“Fitty didn’t know that wreck wasn’t locked ‘cause
he lumbered around in there for about ten minutes
like a woozy moose. But then he just put the boot
to the door and came tipping out into the parking lot,
arming the air like a hobo-magician, lit from behind
by a pink neon sign.”
He reminds me of the chalk blue rusted dumpster
pushed up against a section of chain link fence
out back of Dupree’s – empty every night.
Ransacked by tramp spirits in the secret dark.
“Here come Fitty – tap dancing across busted glass
whistle-waving, talk-talking, high as a kite.
He marched on out sidelong into oncoming traffic,
un-hemmed and hawing. Flung out like phlegm –
dirty dancing in the headlights when a policeman
in the left lane, looking the other way,
at thirty five miles and fifteen dollars an hour
hit him square in the hips with the front bumper
of a cruiser with a brand new paint job.”
Palmyra sips my cold coffee and looks at her watch.
“That cop never could’ve seen him there
two fisted whipping at the air, a drunk
in a dull-smudge duct taped coat
in the middle of the road halfway
between the corners, dancing.”
“The ambulance lost a hubcap jumping the curb
and a skinny white whore
in a oversize pin stripe dinner jacket
told everybody three-four times Exactly
what happened to Fitty.
Sweet Jesus,
what a mess.”