Leaving The Pirate Party.

I went to the bathroom and fished a couple of cans from the bath. When I came back  Dizzy was chatting to a woman who also had an eye patch. I gave him a beer and went outside. Little Annie was on the patio with a blond boy in a tee shirt that read Bob Marley but had a picture of Jimi Hendrix underneath. She was backcombing and twisting the boy’s hair into long fuzzy knots while he, sat on the floor in front of her, twisted together a joint. As she worked on his hair she spoke with an older woman who swayed this way and that and steadied herself on the arm of a man next to her. I stepped over the boy’s legs and stood by the wall and drank a beer. The woman was asking after Little Annie’s trip.

“Did you go to Little Beach village?”
“Oh, yeah. Amazing.”
“But what’s it like? I’ve heard it’s amazing.”
“Oh, it was, like, literally a little beach. And a bit of a little village.”
“Wow,” said the woman. “Amazing.”

The boy with the Marley-Hendrix tee shirt was out in Gun Lane. He was leaning against the wall with his head hung down, almost half his hair in shock-headed locks. The other half draping his face. I tried to slip by without him noticing, but he looked up and asked for a smoke, so I leaned against the wall and we smoked badly rolled cigarettes and shared a plundered Merlot. We tried chatting shit that boys don’t chat at parties. He had some long and dreary love story that he seemed determined to tell. And, according to the pirate law, while he held the bottle I was obliged to listen. He showed me a photograph of a blonde woman on a bicycle and I could see at once that it would never last. I took the bottle and I said she looked nice and left.

Back home i got undressed and climbed into bed and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. I was too tired or it was too late. I looked at my clothes on the carpet and saw that I had been wearing odd socks. I couldn’t decide if this was funny or sad, so I got up and made some toast and watched the kettle boil. And I thought about whether a tee shirt with mismatched stars on it was funny or sad.