Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Liberty

Someone once said, "I do not fear death, I fear life without liberty." and that's how I've been feeling lately. I went downtown to the demoralized empty storefronts of Corpus and played my hymns on Sunday. And the only people were the gray faced drunks waiting for a handout to buy a tapped beer from the early morning bar called "Cheers". Or maybe they'd buy a 24 oz can at the only remaining market nextdoor. There's a bachelor apartment where queers and depressed men fiddle with their window AC units while they wait for their kids to call (their kids never call because their ex wife, the bitch, has turned them against him). And I played and for a while I thought someone was watching me and enjoying it but it turned out to be a curtain that looked like a person's shoulders. No one gave me money but everyone wanted to buy my Vespa Ciao.



So I sighed and decided to go to the shoreline and play guitar on a bench. I made $5 in twenty minutes and was so happy because I was going to eat a burrito at the Stripes gas station and maybe could afford a chicken leg. Then a marina cop came up I ended my guitar solo with a flourish and a harmonic strum at the 12th fret.

"You like it? I can play Pink Floyd."
"First thing is you can't have that motor vehicle on the sidewalk."
"It's a bike."
"No motor vehicles!"
"Ok. To make you happy."
"To make the law happy."
"That too."
"Next thing, you need a permit to accept donations in public."
"A permit?"
"Yes."
"I got to go to the City Hall?"
"Yes."
"I'm starving and I need to go to the City Hall to get them involved in my hymns?"
"That's right. But take that motor bike off the sidewalk.
The moped was parked behind the bench I was sitting on so it was in no one's way. Never mind that twenty feet away there was a fleet of pedal bicycle taxis for rent all blocking the sidewalk.
"Ok."
I gathered my dollars and change. A few people had really stopped to listen to me sing Elvis. I pulled out all the stops with a driving Jazzy shuffle. Then I got booted off the block. Now I'm hungry and can't stay at the shelter. Life without liberty.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

fucking rolling on the floor laughing, cops suck ass nuts.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.