Sadie and the wind

(Edit: I changed the name to Sadie. Only because after I was done, realized that Maggie was a name in a Lucero song. When I started, there were no thoughts of the band, but with a reference, it became stupid. Maggie works better than Sadie, however...)

I stare at the bar lights after the door opens and closes. It’s windy outside, gusty even. The little time the door was open let in a big ol’ gust of wind. The dust in the lights attracts me like a moth to the headlights of your car while driving down a desolate back-country road.

“What keeps me here?” I say out loud.

“Me, honey,” Sadie, the other barfly here at 11 in the morning says to me with a crooked-teeth smile. I’ve had sex with Sadie three times. We’ve both been regulars here for almost three years. So, that works out to having sex with her once a year. Not exactly the tie that binds.

“Donna” by Waylon Jennings starts up on the jukebox. I think I picked that one about 45 minutes ago. Or two whiskeys and three Miller High Lifes ago. It’s not that bad of a day, I think.

“I’m serious, Sadie,” I say. Knowing full well that she’ll get her feelings hurt by that. Almost instantaneously she pouts. I look at her red dress. It’s nice. Plus, it has dandelions all over it. Maybe tonight will be No. 4.

“Now, Randy. Why you have to say something like that,” she moans. “You and me, we got something special. It’s taken us years to get to where we are.”

“Years?” the barkeep, Johnny, exclaims. “You two haven’t changed since the first day you both walked in here.”

That day was July 19th, 2012. I had just finished moving into my new apartment off of General Pershing. She happened to live next door. I was playing Lucero’s “Tennessee” on my front porch. God, how lucky was I to have a front porch? I could sit out here, listen to music, watch the people go by and not have to talk to any of them. I put an old foot locker out there with a good lock on it. I kept a crappy old lap top computer in there to write on.

“Paradise,” I thought to myself as Ben Nichols’ belted out the heartbreak of “Here at the Starlite” probably for the 2,007th time on my turntable. I loved this album. Paid a pretty penny for it too. But you tend to do that with things that are important. That record saved my life more than once.

She walked up just as “memories too close to home, for something that’s never coming back” screamed out of my JBLs, a gift from my buddy Mike, who shared a love of great music, drinking beer and holding on to the past for way too long.

Sadie, I would find out, used to be stripper in the Quarter. Not exactly my cup of tea, but hell, I hadn’t drank from the loving cup that Mick Jagger sang so damn much about in a long, long time. So, hell, that didn’t matter to me. That was, until her boyfriend at the time -- Mitch -- died in a knife fight on Decatur.

She said she cried for a complete year over that. He was “the one,” and all. But, Mitch, it seemed, had been hiding a secret from her for the three years they dated. Mitch used to be a ballplayer. A damned good one, too. Signed a $44 million dollar contract after he graduated from Arizona State. Then he blew his knee out and was out of football in less than three years. He never spent any of his guaranteed money. Died still driving a 1987 Ford Tempo with a bank account bulging with $27 million in it. He left it all to Sadie.

Mitch’s mother, however, didn’t agree with the will. The only one that Mitch ever drew up. He did it three weeks after seeing Sadie dance at the club. Two weeks after he asked her to quit dancing up on that stage. One week before they kissed for the first time. And one hour after they got married.

The lawyers, courts and such took an awful toll on Sadie, she told me one night. So, after six months of fighting, she gave up. Signed a piece of paper that gave the mom everything but the Ford Tempo and $300,000.

ESPN did a report on it. I remembered watching it with Josh. We both said, “damn, sucks for her” at the same time. I thought she was kind of cute. Josh’s wife said she looked like trouble. We were both right.

“Who is that?” Sadie asked about my favorite band in the world.

“The greatest band to walk the earth,” I said with a smile while reaching into my old Igloo cooler for an Abita Amber. I grabbed two and held out one for her.

“I really shouldn’t,” she said.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”

That produced a smile. The first one I’d ever seen from her. It stuck. Her lips had no lipstick on them. But they were red. Too red not to have anything on them. Her eyes were hazel.

We drank a case of beer and talked about Lucero for the next two hours. By the time the beer was gone I was burning her a couple of CDs and working up the courage to ask for her phone number. She didn’t give me a chance to ask, swooping down on me like a sea bird plunging into a school of fish on a cool September day. I woke up the next morning with an STD and a new obsession.