StretchyHead

Madison’s feet black cat fire-worked on the barstool’s metal rung.  She kept sliding around and catching the ass of her tights on a rip in the vinyl stool-top but it didn’t bother her tonight.

Jules grinned and said, “To my champion!” and drank another drink of beer.

Madison broke her cocktail straw’s spine and now knotted it.  She blushed but the red light of the place from the candles in hurricane jars hid her color.  “I know.  I can’t believe I won,” she said.  She wasn’t used to the attention.

Jules scooped her head into Madison’s concentration and used a finger to hook her chin.  She looked through her best friend’s thick mod glasses, into her eyes, and smiled her cute chipped-tooth smile.  “Madison, I always told you you were good.”  Jules pulled out of the hearth of the bar’s redness and yanked at her pager.  “Shit, Maddie I have to go.”

“But you promised you’d wait with me in case Rakes came!”

“I know, baby, but you’re a queen tonight.  Just be cool, be yourself.  And talk to him this time.  None of this too-shy-for-guys crap.”

With a whip wake of clove-smoke Jules left, a wet five dollar bill melting into the bar top.  Jules’ departure left a tender hole in Madison’s confidence.  Madison read her future in the ice cubes of her glass.

The DJ’s peroxide afro bounced to his b-side beats.  Conversations barb-wired the air.  Madison composed herself.  If you’re a winner then act like one, she thought.

The door flapped open and Rakes was there.  His left pant leg was cut short just below a knobby knee and hemmed with a six-pack’s plastic ringer.  He wore all black and looked like a burnt match.  Madison built a suspension bridge with her stare.  Rakes saw her and walked the span to take the vacated stool, his skinny black jeans rubbing Madison’s one-night tights.

Rakes said, “hey.”

Madison heard his capillaries hum.

Rakes said, “you’re the pinball contest winner.”

Madison felt her organs glow.  Her heart was a candle in a hurricane ribcage.  Rakes had lit her.  She sighed and her breath made the air between them shimmer.

Madison said, “hey.  Yeah.”  She pictured the pinball machine backdrop she’d designed.  A forest on fire.  A shark-finned Cadillac stampeding forward.  It was good.  And now here she was, talking to Rakes.  She’d won all right.

The Attic

3336 24th Street (b/t Bartlett & Osage), San Francisco

(415) 643-3376