Tammy Know
Oct. 23rd, 2015 01:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonVampire Country, L5P. The Admiral's Grave, where the regulars drink hard and love harder, a slice of old Terminus eternal carved from the frozen shore leaves of a hundred phantom sailors lost from their watery graves. Here old wounds are covered in tattoos, here cold dispositions thaw over the heat of old stories, here laughter is served strictly in grunts of bitter wisdom or with blind inebriated cackles. For twenty-one years I've drunk anonymous amongst her punks, skins, skaters, bikers, poets, artists, stage-sharks, nomads, bar flies, college students, tourists, and the occasional random human catastrophe.
But of all the souls I've encountered at the Admiral's Grave, none haunt me more than the one named Tammy Know. Tammy offered the world, along with those willing to claim a place within it, neither grudge nor gratitude. Whatever fucks she had to give were solely of the literal kind and blessed are those who have been awarded that honor.
"Right there," she spoke her first words to me with a nod to the stool at the bar I was hunkered at, "is where the whirlwind has been known to touch down."
"I'm sorry," I said turning to her from the novel splayed beneath my attention.
"Whirlwind," she repeated, Crumb by curve and looking very much like what Nancy Drew might look like if she had been re-imagined by Russ Myers, "sweeps you right up when you're not expecting it and drops you off the last place you expect to find yourself."
"That right?" I asked not in that detached cool way a private eye might ask but rather in the manner of a wallflower who's caught the eye of the loudest drunk at the party.
"You can ask the last guy who was sitting where you're sitting," She smiles and sips her drink, dark eyes framed in Flannery O'Connor spectacles drilled on mine, "that is if he was in any shape to walk over here and tell you."
"What happened?"
"He landed hard," she finished her drink and without a word or a look to the bartender had another set down beside her.
"Ouch," I finished my drink, held up my empty glass to the bartender, who promptly ignored me focusing instead on Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's Monster shambling across the screen mounted in the corner of the ceiling. Since she's still staring at me I figure I'll play along, "So where was that exactly?"
"Beneath me," she gives a bob of her chin to my empty drink and without a word of acknowledgement the bartender reloads my Jack and Diet.
I laughed and that's when she had me. You can drop jaws, stun rooms, solve philosophical riddles, quote the Romantics, karaoke the Ramones, have a black belt in ass-whooping and a gold medal in Tantric acrobatics... but if you can't make me laugh there is a place in me that will never be yours. Not that I'm saying I deserve any of the above, it's just how I'm wired, s'all. Things never did work out between Tammy Know and I though. In truth I was between ghosts, psyche crippled, and illusion locked on the specters of what should be. She deserved better and soon found it in the arms of a younger adventurer.
Just as it should be.
Some nights however, usually in the fall or winter, we find ourselves docked together at the Admiral's Grave together, with all of Vampire Country disembarking or arriving into her many crowds. There we talk and share a drink surrounded by a world too busy to notice we're there. She smiles, her voice all antebellum aristocrat and she tells me of those electric whirlwind nights that could sweep you off your feet and land you far from home in the skin of a man reborn.
I always finish mine first, make my farewells, a kiss to the cheek, a hug against a warmth mine only to visit briefly and then gone. Back into the silence and the speculation of a life that could have been.
But of all the souls I've encountered at the Admiral's Grave, none haunt me more than the one named Tammy Know. Tammy offered the world, along with those willing to claim a place within it, neither grudge nor gratitude. Whatever fucks she had to give were solely of the literal kind and blessed are those who have been awarded that honor.
"Right there," she spoke her first words to me with a nod to the stool at the bar I was hunkered at, "is where the whirlwind has been known to touch down."
"I'm sorry," I said turning to her from the novel splayed beneath my attention.
"Whirlwind," she repeated, Crumb by curve and looking very much like what Nancy Drew might look like if she had been re-imagined by Russ Myers, "sweeps you right up when you're not expecting it and drops you off the last place you expect to find yourself."
"That right?" I asked not in that detached cool way a private eye might ask but rather in the manner of a wallflower who's caught the eye of the loudest drunk at the party.
"You can ask the last guy who was sitting where you're sitting," She smiles and sips her drink, dark eyes framed in Flannery O'Connor spectacles drilled on mine, "that is if he was in any shape to walk over here and tell you."
"What happened?"
"He landed hard," she finished her drink and without a word or a look to the bartender had another set down beside her.
"Ouch," I finished my drink, held up my empty glass to the bartender, who promptly ignored me focusing instead on Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's Monster shambling across the screen mounted in the corner of the ceiling. Since she's still staring at me I figure I'll play along, "So where was that exactly?"
"Beneath me," she gives a bob of her chin to my empty drink and without a word of acknowledgement the bartender reloads my Jack and Diet.
I laughed and that's when she had me. You can drop jaws, stun rooms, solve philosophical riddles, quote the Romantics, karaoke the Ramones, have a black belt in ass-whooping and a gold medal in Tantric acrobatics... but if you can't make me laugh there is a place in me that will never be yours. Not that I'm saying I deserve any of the above, it's just how I'm wired, s'all. Things never did work out between Tammy Know and I though. In truth I was between ghosts, psyche crippled, and illusion locked on the specters of what should be. She deserved better and soon found it in the arms of a younger adventurer.
Just as it should be.
Some nights however, usually in the fall or winter, we find ourselves docked together at the Admiral's Grave together, with all of Vampire Country disembarking or arriving into her many crowds. There we talk and share a drink surrounded by a world too busy to notice we're there. She smiles, her voice all antebellum aristocrat and she tells me of those electric whirlwind nights that could sweep you off your feet and land you far from home in the skin of a man reborn.
I always finish mine first, make my farewells, a kiss to the cheek, a hug against a warmth mine only to visit briefly and then gone. Back into the silence and the speculation of a life that could have been.