Taking the backroads from Allendale to Statesboro, I spotted a hand painted road sign that read
“Hoodoo Honky Tonk two miles ahead.”
Beneath it, nailed to the same post, a smaller sign, with two words:
Cold Beer.
It was just now getting dark. I was about halfway there. Hey, why not? A couple of beers might do me good, so I slowed down so not to hurtle past and have to turn back around.
There it was, just ahead, on the right, a tar paper shack with a rolling sign up front, a couple of letters missing: Ho Doo Honk Tonk.
The door was propped open with a brick and a window with a lit-up Bud Lite sign.
Dark inside, a roughhewn bar in the back. Against a wall sat a conked-out jukebox you could tell quit working a good whiles back.
One customer on a stool. A fat boy behind the bar. The customer a woman facing out. Couldn’t of weighed more than eighty pounds. Something bad wrong with her, late-stage cancer I would guess.
“Hello, stranger,” she said.
Her voice – how to describe her voice? – imagine two sheets of sandpaper soaked in ‘shine scarping against one another rasping raspier than a rasp.
She wore an Atlanta Braves cap, her stringy grey hair pulled back into a ponytail, a fashion faux pas cause you could see her jug ears sticking out like a satellite dish.
“Good evening, Ma’am,” I said.
“All we gots is beer. Pabst, Bud Lite, Miller, Miller Lite, and Schlitz Malt Liquor in a can.”
“A Bud,” I said, “that sounds alright.”
“Lonnie” she rasped, “get this gentleman a Bud.”
“I ain’t deaf.” he snarled.
“You own the place?’ I asked.
“Yep, but not for long. Doc says I got days left, a week or two at the longest.”
Damn, what do you say to that?
“Damn, sorry to hear,” I said.
“Look, Mister. I need a favor, a huge one. I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t desperate.”
“Oh shit,” I thought, “stopping here was a mistake.” I could see now she was all drugged out or drunk or both.
“I need you to make love to me, a man to make love to me one last time, to remember what it feels like. Ain’t no one come in here no more. I ain’t got to kin, no friends, just Lonnie over there who is as sick and tired of me as I am of him.”
Damn, what do you say to that?
“Um, I wish I could, could accommodate you, but I have this fiancée. (A better lie would have been that I was gay, but I’ve never been too good at thinking on my feet).
She sort of snarled a smile. “It would be a saintly act, but I understand.”
In the long silence, a couple of trucks swooshed past.
“How much do I owe you,” I asked.
“On the house, baby doll. Money don’t mean nothing to me no more. Nothing means nothing to me no more. No friends, no kin. In a year my memory will disappear, nobody will remember that once I was a pretty good looking redheaded gal. No trace of me left. Nobody will remember me.”
“Wait, a minute,” I said. “I’m a writer who sometimes gets shit published. I could write this story, and in the story make love to you, pick you up and carry you like a child to that trailer across the road. People would read the story for years maybe. You’d be remembered.”
She looked at me long and hard.
“Fuck you,” she said. “It’s time for you to run along.”
You Do Hoodoo 