And how I cringed at my bungled strokes, my jittery potshots that popped jauntily out of the table and onto the floor regularly, nicotine-sticks notwithstanding. As I puffed and fumed and spewed private thunder, she watched po-faced, shiny-eyed, while metallic spheres butted and jostled like maniac planets on a flat velvet universe. Her gaze speared through mine even as my ball-riding competitor shot white against color into blackness in grinning contempt. She stood out duskily amid the colorful, unrestrained laughter of the few who'd stayed to watch an amateur being pounded into the ground, gurgling with that vicarious rapture derived from witnessing first-hand the survival of the fittest, extinction of the impotent.
She watched, chewed gum, sipped Bloody Mary, sage, inscrutable. Just her way, perhaps, boring through with the drill of unseeing scorn. Maybe her thoughts were far away, on a Caribbean vacation and a Casanova, or her mother's recent mauling of a maid whose lack of numerical skills exposed her talent for siphoning money off the household account. I wanted to stride up to her, shove my tongue into her mouth and wiggle out the gum. But what I did, in a haze of ignominy and self-pity, was continue to hone my aptitude for losing; what did I have to lose after all, when I'd already lost everything subsumed under the heading Pride. The game was over before I could putt one of the solids, the monochromes and I returned to my pitcher of beer.
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Evolved writings of a lifetime. As they say in Africa, "Through others, I am somebody." Quotes: "If you're going to read this, don't bother. CHOKE" "Why am I soft in the middle, the rest of my life is so hard." "I like to remember things my own way ... How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened." "Be warned in time and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood."
