In the mornings, they hose the whole thing down, and the chemical smell of soap—the whirring growl of power hoses—this briefly supplants the pounding sounds of pop music, muffled across wet wood and brick. Some club jammer you remember from 2013; the same way you remember an old friend running into you at Rouses, but you can’t recall their name.
Your clothes will smell like blood and sweat. Your flesh is like a sponge, this couch cushion containing a decade’s time capsule of cigar smoke, though you’ve only worked Bourbon for a few years now. Red Bull and vodka. Here, you age double-time. You’ll smell like drinks you didn’t even order. You’ll smell like every man that doesn’t wash behind his ears, and each of those men has their own unique scent.
The sun is coming out to walk you down the drip-drops off the canopy of overhanging neon, and this too rises just for you: to get you safely to your bus. And you see every human being that you pass, but you don’t make eye contact with any one of them. There’s a secret to walking here. You cut up the side street when there’s gunshots.
Find an awning until the chaos passes. You’ve quit thinking about the stripper that got cut up last year. Her limbs washed up along the beaches on the coast of Mississippi. They identified her only by her tattoos. You have no tattoos. How will they identify you?
Genevieve Murdick is a comedian out of Mobile, Alabama. Her work appears in 433 and her novella, Nice Evening Problems (Chacha Murdick) is available on Amazon. Genevieve is also the managing editor for DIRTBAG. Follow her on Instagram @realcitycomedy.
Image: AL.com
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Heavy Feather Review 