Woonsocket, Rhode Island was a whore and booze city for decades, way before I started to partake in its depravity. Arnold Street was the forefront of vile. The road reeked of vomit, bad whiskey and burnt semen…It could be smelled for miles—all the way to the borders of southern Massachusetts.
Dark days offered no sense of priorities when you had little to contribute. This city of misfits and offenders was the best place to hide for me in the early 90’s. Better to wander around places where people just didn’t know your name—plus, could care less who you were.
Opinions were formed from crack pipes…jealousy would sneer for some hooker who just earned a twenty, rules and sanity were just bumbling thoughts forgotten a lifetime ago.
I was seated at Buddy’s Tavern…a whole in the wall with peeling wallpaper and death sentenced
customers.
Waiting for the end with the rest…
I sat and championed my talent for drinking twenty or thirty beers without giving the impression I was half in the bag. Saying nothing, pretty much being left alone by the clientele.
And I wondered—among the skanks, empty glasses of fifty-cent drafts, the not-famous drunks, men who once had dreams, women who sold their bodies for hour by hour existence, declared losers and defined morally deceased—in a place where finality was a welcomed
dream.
I thought I could pay my penance here.
To whomever
was responsible for
untangling the puppet strings
that I was ensnared in
from the beginning of
the womb…
Yea, right.
Dark days offered no sense of priorities when you had little to contribute. This city of misfits and offenders was the best place to hide for me in the early 90’s. Better to wander around places where people just didn’t know your name—plus, could care less who you were.
Opinions were formed from crack pipes…jealousy would sneer for some hooker who just earned a twenty, rules and sanity were just bumbling thoughts forgotten a lifetime ago.
I was seated at Buddy’s Tavern…a whole in the wall with peeling wallpaper and death sentenced
customers.
Waiting for the end with the rest…
I sat and championed my talent for drinking twenty or thirty beers without giving the impression I was half in the bag. Saying nothing, pretty much being left alone by the clientele.
And I wondered—among the skanks, empty glasses of fifty-cent drafts, the not-famous drunks, men who once had dreams, women who sold their bodies for hour by hour existence, declared losers and defined morally deceased—in a place where finality was a welcomed
dream.
I thought I could pay my penance here.
To whomever
was responsible for
untangling the puppet strings
that I was ensnared in
from the beginning of
the womb…
Yea, right.
Dan Provost has been published throughout the small press for many years. He is the author of nine books and lives in Berlin, New Hampshire with his wife Laura
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