The Call of Wild

My life was once ruled by the night. I haunted concerts, bars, clubs, and parties from dusk to dawn from the 60s into the 90s. My retirement occurred around the turn of the century and the birth of my children completed the process, for I feared the Chris Rock's curse of being the oldest man in the club.

Last night I came home from work. My plans for the evening were dinner, a little writing, a glass or two of wine, and then retire to bed to finishing reading THE SAVAGE FURY, a non-fiction book about racism, dirty cops, and injustice in New York of the 60s and 70s. This destiny was disrupted by a phone call from the 347 area code.

A New York City cell phone.

I answered the call and a gravelly voice spoke several indecipherable words.

"Who's this?" Only my wife called at his hour and I was a little annoyed until I deciphered the thick Delta slang. "Homer, that you?"

"Course it's me. Who you think it was?" Homer was a regular from Frank's Lounge. The rest of the crew loved to rib him about his Deep South roots.

"Had no idea." Homer and I had a bar stool relationship. 660 Fulton was our universe. He drank Beck's. My quaff was Stella. Our conversation were face-to-face. This was our first interaction on a phone. "What's up?"

"I got that thing." His voice dropped to a whisper, as if his cellphone was taped by the NSA seeking out terrorists around the world.

"Thing?" I was confounded by 'thing'.

"You know, the shine."

"Shine." The syllable referred to the elixir of the South, Moonshine otherwise known as Mountain Dew or Brokehead. A good percentage of the regulars at Frank's Lounge had family in the South. Several months ago the bartender's husband brought up several jars from NC. The 'shine was favored with peaches. We drank the demon liquor with reverence and I remarked that I was in the market for some 'shine. "How much?"

"A gallon for $35."

"I'm in." A liter of Scotch cost about the same and I was stashing this 'shine for an emergency and judging from the state of the world ie Japan earthquake, the rich having all the money, revolution in the oil states, and the rising cost of everything under the sun I considered a gallon of distilled corn liquor a good investment.

"I'll be down the bar in an hour." Homer was good to his good and an hour later I had my jug. Plastic unlike the old ceramic classic jug. He shook the jug. "See them bubbles vanish quick. That means the 'shine is strong."

"And if you take a match to it and it burns blue, then it's clean." LA said from his computer. The 40m year-old worked around the corner. His second office was the window table at Frank's. It was my living room.

"Don't you be lighting no matches around 'shine in my bar." Tyrone the owner's son was in charge of the joint. 'Shine was highly flammable and the health departments of the Deep South condemned the safety of drinking 'white lightning'. Blindness and internal destruction of body organs were only a few of the risks. Mostly the state and feds were worried about the theft of their tax revenue.

"Don't worry, this ain't have nothing to do with you." Homer lifted his finger. The Mississippian had earned his respect. 75 years on this world and not a gray hair on his head. He leaned over to me and said, "Put that under the bar stool. you can only drink in a bar what the bar serves, unless the owner isn't there and then we can do what we want."

I planted the jug between my feet. I had intended to go to sleep at a decent hour. I watched basketball until midnight. Only four beers and I got into bed before midnight. At home I cracked the cap of the 'shine. the fumes cleared my head, but I resisted the siren call of its magic.

The Call of Wild was for the weekend.

I won't be an old man no more thanks to the grace of 'shine.

Yee-hah.