Grief Counseling

There was a certain art to,
around Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1968,
hitting a highway sign with a beer bottle,
not your typical brown bottle, but
a clear glass quart, Big Cat Malt Liquor,
maybe Colt .45, one of several purchased by
a kind, black gentleman on Malvern Avenue
and emptied between four or five white friends
in a '55 or '56 Chevy, '58 VW Karmann Ghia, to
the sound of Cream, Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin,
and the Rolling Stones

(children were off the streets; families at home where they belonged,
finishing dinner and getting ready for The Ed Sullivan Show or Laugh-In),

and it wasn't tossed from the passenger side
either, anyone could do that, lean out and lob it up there,
no, but from the driver's side, over the roof
with your left hand as you drove with the right,
70,
80,
90
miles per hour,
time and space, hand-eye coordination,
so that,
the bottle whopped the sign, and rang like, well,
Pasquier, 

(Guillaume, Guillaume, thou art the biggest, and Pasquier the least, and yet Pasquier
beats thee hollow.  Those who can hear, I'll engage, hear more of him than of thee.)

just as it passed the passenger window.
If you hit it, and I often did,
man,
you were the cat's ass, as Dad would say,
and no need to expand on the laughter,
the dash and thigh slapping applause.  Of
course, there were rumors of broken bottles
re-entering passenger windows
and slashing the throats of those passengers,
but I never saw it happen. Anyway,

later,
1, 2 AM, bottles emptied and thrown, Track
Drive Inn cruised, Central Avenue and the fountain cruised,
infrequent but necessary fist fights, it was out 70 West
and the slow drive over Sunshine Road
to take Patrick home and stopping on that road
under star filled nights--so many stars back then--and
the sheriff's deputy pulling up.

"What y'all boys doin'?"

"Just had to take a piss, sir."

"Well, I know what that's like. Y'all been drinkin'?"

"Yes, sir."

"Yeah, well...Y'all boys better get on home, now."

"Yes, sir.  That's where we were headin', sir."

And we did, and
no one shot any one in high school,
and grief counselors did not exist.


(Son and Father Renga, 1999)