Last night I
was talking with a friend about one of the most important benefits of getting
drunk: having interesting conversations with fellow drunkards, usually
strangers, in various rundown bars. We were talking about some of the weird
things these raving lunatics have said to us over the years.
He then
reminded me of a conversation I had with an old, stooped-over man a couple of
years ago. I don’t remember where I was, probably some place down in
Willowbrook, and he sat next to me at the bar and shook his white mane of hair
hard enough to spray me with a blizzard of dandruff. When he’d seen that some
of his flesh flakes had wound up in my whiskey, he apologized and bought me a
new drink. He then started talking to me about assassinations.
“Fer
instance,” he said, waving his finger around at no one in particular, “did you
know that Elvis was the man behind the Kennedy assassination?”
I stifled a
laugh because he’d said it so sincerely I was afraid he’d break a bottle over
my head if he thought I wasn’t taking him seriously. “Elvis Presley? The
singer?”
“You betcha
britches,” the old man said.
“So Elvis
was the man on the grassy knoll?”
“What?” He
looked at me for a moment, his muddled gray eyes looking in two different
directions. After a moment of silence, he realized what I was saying. “No! Not
Jack Kennedy! Everyone knows that Bigfoot put JFK down! I’m talkin’ about Bobby
Kennedy!”
This time I
did laugh. “Bigfoot? Are you sure?”
“I’ve seen
pictures of the grassy knoll, my friend. There are footprints there. No one has
feet that big. No one.” He finished his drink and ordered another one.
“But Bobby
Kennedy? They definitely know who plugged him.”
“Naw, the
Ay-rab was just the fall guy. Elvis pulled the trigger on that one!”
“Why?”
“Revenge,”
the old man said.
“For what?”
“The King
wanted Marilyn Monroe to himself, but Kennedy got to her and squirted a
bunch’ve swimmers into her first. He couldn’t abide putting his pecker where
Kennedy’s had been.”
“I thought
we were talking about Bobby, not JFK,” I said.
“We are.
Elvis couldn’t get his hands on JFK, so he shot the guy’s brother instead. The
next best thing.”
I slapped my
forehead. “Of course. But that doesn’t answer one question.”
“It answers
all my questions.”
“Why did
Elvis wait so long to cap RFK? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to do it
earlier?”
He licked
his chapped, peeling lips and said, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”
I nodded
thoughtfully, and we drank in silence for a moment. Then I asked, “So, why did
Bigfoot do it?”
“He was
hired to do it,” the old man said.
“By the
Mafia? The Cubans? Who hired him?”
He grunted.
“Them fellas’re small time. No, it was aliens.” And then he stood and silently
slipped away into the crowd. I never did find out if he was fucking with me,
but I know this for sure: if I wasn’t a drinker, I would never have been
involved with this interesting conversation.
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