Coco Lovelock by Rich Boucher

Maybe about a hundred people know about this place, but you only ever find not even a dozen troubled souls on any given night here. Directions are pretty easy - if you get off the Brantley exit from I-39, go left towards where there's no light at all and you'll come to a dead end. If you go straight through the dead end, even though you think you might not ever make it back, that's where you'll find this place. So go straight through. I love watching people get into hassles here, sipping a cold one and measuring strangers out of the corners of my eyes. Jay, who gave me my first real job, bought me my first real legal beer here, and I'll never be able to forgive him for that and nor will I ever be able to thank him enough. This is the kind of place that people with sterile, squeaky-clean Comet kitchens have no idea about and could never imagine. Decades of beer stains on the floor, snot streaks and blood smears in the bathroom sink, every chair and bench wrought in unidentifiable black wood with hundreds of roughly-knifed initials on anything you'd call a table here. When I find my place at the bar, I nightly re-discover that I’m made of expired muscle and atrophied honesty. Somebody once told me that this place was built over what used to be a Native burial ground, which is hilarious, considering how much of the walking dead laugh and get into pointless tough guy fistfights here. Over at the pool area, the sharks move slowly around the suckers who move slowly around the island of green felt. I am free to hate who I hate out loud here; the only thing it costs me to be here is time I don't have, but I'm in so much debt as it is that the effort to care isn't worth it. Clouds of smoke, red Marlboro, drift for months at a time over corrupted atmospheres of cheap, purple perfume in this room, this place, this world. I’m not your tour guide, but let me say that on partly cloudy days, you can tell that even the sky is ashamed of this place - another reason why I love it so much. Make yourself comfortable, take a bribe or give one. As for me, my best guess is that last night was a Friday; this is where you would have found me, my pockets full of copperthroat restlessness and enough cash to be here for about four or five hours. Only thing I know for sure is I tried to make some time with that exquisite blonde bartender again, the one who only barely looks old enough to be here herself, but I left after failed attempt Number 23; resignation is a registered trademark of futility. Your first name is really Coco, I asked her. When I use a question mark, it really stinks up the room. She snapped her gum and looked at me like the people at the Apple store look at homeless people. Yup, it’s Coco, like I told you already about five times. I promised her there was a big tip in it for her if she would tell me her last name. Lovelock, she said, it’s Lovelock. I left her the rest of every paycheck I’ll ever earn and headed for the door, a cashmere noose around my neck and the click-clack of the pool game behind me suddenly loud enough to make me duck.

Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in The Nervous Breakdown, Eighteen Seventy, Menacing Hedge, Drunk Monkeys and Cultural Weekly, among others. Rich recently served as Associate Editor for the online literary magazine BOMBFIRE. He is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me, a collection of poems published by Jules’ Poetry Playhouse Publications. Peep richboucher.bandcamp.com for more. He loves his life with his love Leann in the perpetually intriguing Southwest.