The walk up Washington Street, to Lumpkin, and left again on to Clayton was a short three block stroll. Ian, John, Nick and Travis pair off and talk among themselves, passing and waving to acquaintances on the sidewalk, on their way to meet the girls. “I haven’t seen Daphne in a while,” Nick says as they all walk through a bank parking lot to cut over to Clayton.

“I saw her last weekend. She was out with that Vic guy,” Travis replies.

“There’s something about him I don’t like.”

“Yeah. Tell me about it.”

“What is it?” Nick asks seriously.

“I don’t know. He’s a little flashy, don’t ya’ think.”

“I guess.”

“Like, whenever Dizzy’s around, he acts real friendly. But then, a couple of weeks ago I ran into him at a barbecue a friend of mine was having, and he just blew me off. Didn’t talk to me for two minutes.” Travis takes a drag off his cigarette and thinks about it.

“You know, Daphne hasn’t been real receptive to my presence lately,” Nick says.

“Well, you guys weren’t even talkin’ there for a while,” Travis offers.

“Yeah but we worked all that out back in January.”

Coming to a short wall along the parking lot’s edge, Travis jumps up on it and starts balancing his way alongside Nick. “Maybe if you lost a little weight, she would like you.”

“Shut up, Fatty.”

“You’re so fat, you’re blood type is Ragu.”

Nick starts laughing, and Ian and John stop to turn around. “What?” asks John curiously.

“He said, ‘You’re so fat you’re blood type is Ragu’,” Nick explains.

John and Ian both laugh before moving on up the street.

“Mmm…” Nick says, pulling the corners of his lips down like an angry samurai. “Me must get money from a-tee-em. Much money for good drink.”

“Hai,” Travis replies with a bow and jumps down off the wall.

The group make their way through the crowd in front of the Georgia Theater, looking at all the people waiting on show tickets as they go. Nick leans over conspiratorially to Travis as they made their way. “Over at the ticket booth. She’s buying one.”

“What?” Travis asks and looks. There was a particularly unattractive girl at the booth window.

“Yours,” Nick said casually out of the side of his mouth.

“Sonuvabitch,” Travis curses under his breath. “I’ll get you for that.”

As they pass out of the crowd into the intersection of Lumpkin and Clayton, Travis and Nick raise their voices again. “Oh my God! She was awful.” Nick hits Travis in the shoulder. “Did you see the hair bagel on that one.”

Travis doesn’t reply. Retaliation would have to wait. When someone called “yours” everyone was alert, paying attention to the game. You couldn’t get someone then—unless you were good. You had to wait until no one was paying attention again.

The basic premise of the game was simple, and had evolved out of a game that Nick and Travis had originally developed their freshman year. The original game had been invented for the purpose of commenting on the attractiveness of a woman while in close proximity. The player would spot a target, turn to the other and inquire, “What time is it?” The second player would ask, “Where?” and the first player would proceed to name a city that was North, South, East or West of the players’ location. Once the “target” was spotted by the second player a time between one and ten o’ clock was giving as a rating.

By the time they’d gotten adept at the game, Travis and Nick had also invented twenty or so sayings to follow the time as coded comments, like “I think you’re shoelaces are untied,” which was meant to be interpreted as “She’s too young/illegal for you.” One summer afternoon at an amusement park, Nick and Travis had been debating over a certain young woman’s attractiveness when Travis said, “She’s your girlfriend.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asks Nick, thinking he had forgotten one of their secret phrases.

“She’s ugly and you can have her,” Travis replied.

It stuck. “Yours” developed some obscure rules of its own over the years. A player could never lie to get another player to look at the target—could never claim that the target was pretty/handsome if they weren’t. And the peculiar rule-of-three came into being, meaning that if you were given the same boyfriend/girlfriend three times in a row in three different locales, they were yours for life.

It was all terribly shallow and childish. Nick and Travis knew it. But really, they prided themselves on being shallow. There was more time for fun if they didn’t have to worry about trivial matters like manners or politeness.

When they got to the corner opposite of the Georgia Theater, Nick says, “I’ll meet you guys up there. I gotta’ get moony.”

Ian and John wave and keep walking up the street, discussing John’s upcoming show. Ian had decided to photograph it. Travis follows Nick into the ATM booth for no reason at all.

“Did you call Victoria back?” Travis asks. He’d left a message on Nick’s door earlier, before leaving for the Engine Room.

“Yeah,” Nick replies, punching buttons on the ATM. “I told her I was gonna’ hang out with you guys.”

Travis smiles. “Oh, what’d she say?”

Turning around for a moment, while the machine processes his transaction, Nick imitates

Vicky in a huff. “Fine. I didn’t want to go out tonight anyway.”

“Sure she didn’t,” Travis replies.

Nick gets his money, his receipt and card out of the machine. “Have you seen Cordova in a while?”

“Jason?” Travis asks. “Yeah. I run into him on North Campus now and then.”

The pair head out of the ATM booth. “Vicky keeps talkin’ about him.”

“To you?”

“Yeah. She’s just trying to get sympathy.”

“You know, the more I talk to him, the less I sympathize with her.”

“Really?”

“He’s a pretty genuine guy, and she made him out to be such an asshole. I think maybe she was making up some of the things she said happened between them.”

“Maybe.”

“Did you ever hang out with them when they were dating?”

“No.”

“Damn. If he even talked to another girl, she’d get all upset. Even if he wasn’t flirting with them or anything. I don’t know how he put up with it.”

“Well, he is a playa.”

“Nuh-uh, girl.”

“I’m say-in.”

“Mm-mm.”

“He’s a flirt. But I certainly can’t hold that against him.”

“Nope.”

“That’s why I always liked Meryl,” Travis continues as he opens the door to Mean Mike’s for Nick. They both enter and nod to the bouncer. Being regulars, they never got carded anymore. Raising his voice over the crowd and the music, Travis continues, “She always took it as an indirect compliment if a girl flirted with me.”

Looking around for John and Ian, Dizzy and Kristin, Nick replies, “Yeah. Karen was the same way.”

“Meryl always knew who I was going home with,” Travis says.

Making their way through the crowd to the back stairs, Nick stops to shake hands with a curly-haired fellow. “What’s goin’ on?” he asks.

“Not much,” the fellow replies. “Thursday night, you know?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Nick agrees moving on through the crowd.

When they got a few feet away, Travis inquires, “Somebody you know?”

“Apparently,” Nick says, chuckling a bit.

Travis laughs to himself. In a town of thirty thousand kids, people were bound to forget names and faces. It just happened in the peculiar currents and divergences of friendships and acquaintances.

The pair make their way upstairs, and spot Dizzy sitting at the top near the railing in a light blue dress. She is talking to a guy but stops when she sees Nick and Travis. She gets up to hug them both. Leaning in to Travis, she says in a low tone with a laugh, “Save me.” Travis smiles and looks at her, keeping one arm around her waist protectively. “Well, where are Ian and John and Kristin?”

“Over there,” she says, pointing to a booth a few tables away.

“Well, come and sit with us then, baby,” Travis replies loudly.

“Okay. Let me get my drink.”

Leaning over, she takes her whiskey sour from a stool next to where she had been sitting.

“Allen,” she says to the young man she’d been with, “I’m gonna’ go talk to my friends for a bit. I’ll see you later, though.”

Allen smiles seductively and points his finger at her, cocked like a gun with a wink. Daphne and Travis walk over to the booth where the others are, both trying to keep from laughing, and Travis pulls up two chairs for them. Nick and John are discussing some facet of sex in the perverted uncle’s voice. Ian is talking at a fast pace about traveling, while Kristin just stares at him, mesmerized. They are both madly in love with each other, but neither in a position to do anything about it. Both of them benefit/suffer from qualities that made them faithful to their lovers.

“Did you see that?” Dizzy asks Travis as they sit down.

“That was pretty fuckin’ cheesy,” Travis replies.

“I can’t believe that,” Dizzy says, covering her mouth as she laughs out loud.

When they sit down, Travis asks Nick, “I’m going to the bar—do you want anything?”

“Yeah. Get me a Jack and Coke, will ya’?”

“You want anything?” Travis asks Daphne.

She holds her half-full drink up in response. Seeing that everyone else is adequately full, Travis sets out. There are two bars, one upstairs and one downstairs. Spotting a space at the bar downstairs from the top of the landing, though, Travis heads down. Besides, Phil Allen worked the downstairs bar and made a better gin and tonic than anyone else—or anywhere in town for that matter. Reaching the bar, Travis pulls out a twenty and fits into the space at the bar like a puzzle piece, snug between a pair of talkative girls and a young couple. Putting his bill out where Phil will see it, he waits while listening in on the surrounding conversation.

“Oh my God,” the girl to Travis’s left says. “I can’t believe that.”

“Seriously, though,” the girl’s friend responds, “isn’t that so disgusting?”

“Oh. My. God. I can’t believe that she is such a slut.”

Rolling his eyes, Travis shifts to his other leg, leaning imperceptibly towards the couple.

“It’s not a bad deal,” the boyfriend says.

“I think you should go with the other one, though,” his girlfriend replies.

“Really?”

“Definitely. You’ll probably get a lot further in the long run.”

Travis isn’t paying attention when Phil walks up to him. The long run of what? “Hey!” Phil calls across the bar. “What’d’ya’ want?”

“Sorry, man,” Travis hollers, turning to look at Phil. “How ’bout a gin and tonic and a Jack and Coke?”

Phil heads off to get them, hollering over his shoulder, “Six dollars!” Travis already knows this of course. One of the other benefits of being a regular was getting a discount for drinking too much. What a shame, Travis thinks, not sure if he’s sarcastic or not. For some reason he is always paranoid he might fall out of good standing with the bar. Believing himself to have a forgettable face, it is always a relief to hear the discount price. Phil comes back in no time at all with the drinks. Travis gives him the twenty and waits for his change. When Phil returns, he asks, “Been good?”

“Yeah,” replies Travis, slipping two dollars into a green vase on the bar. Phil thanks him with a discrete nod as Travis finishes, “Summer’s my favorite time of year.”

“Good to hear it,” Phil says, before moving on down the bar.

Travis slips his change into his pocket, bumps the girl on his left, excuses himself, and gets his drinks. Heading back to the stairs, Travis turns to look at the two girls he’d stood next to. They were both attractive though overdressed for a place like Mean Mike’s. He could never stand it when anyone talked like the two had—sincerely. Daphne and Kristin did it all the time as a joke, and it was hilarious, but they could also be literate and well-spoken—it was a joke. Travis wondered how anyone could say anything real, talking like that: in a high-pitched falsetto, a million miles a minute, every sentence sounding like a question. He tries to imagine one of them talking about their dead father. “And, oh my God. He was, like, all dead and stuff. I was so totally distraught?” Probably, he thought, they don’t talk like that when they’re trying to be serious. How could you?

On his way up the stairs, Travis passes Allen—Daphne’s new friend—and smiles at him. The guy looks off like he doesn’t see Travis. Travis laughs it off, but it’s rude nonetheless, so he hurries back to his friends. Coming back to the table again, Travis sets Nick’s drink down and sits down in his chair.

“What’s the damage?” Nick asks.

“Ah,” Travis replies, dismissing the request. “You just go next time.”

Turning to Daphne, Travis asks, “So, who was that guy?”

Daphne just shrugs. “One of Rick’s friends.”

Travis and Daphne both imitate the guy and point fingerguns at each other, laughing.

“You sound happy,” Travis comments.

Dizzy makes her I’m-frustrated face and declares, “I am!” before hitting him on the shoulder.

“Ow!” she yells.

“Mom!” Travis yells at Kristin. “Dizzy’s hitting me again!”

Kristin turns slightly in her seat and points alternately to Daphne and Travis. “Stop it now you two—or no more booze.”

Daphne and Travis both look down, pouting for a moment, trying to behave, before Travis points at Daphne again, winking. “Hey there, baby.” he says with mocking seduction. Dizzy just rolls her eyes and finishes her drink, slamming it down on the table, much to everyone’s surprise. “I want more!” she yells, and in her best redneck accent, hollers, “Woo-hoo!”

Turning around again, Kristin says, “Will you get me a vodka cranberry?” and holds out a five dollar bill. Daphne gets up and struts over to the upstairs bar like she owns the place. To some extent, she does—she started everyone in the group, and lot of other folks, going when the joint was still new, and is friends with everyone that works there. Travis watches her walk and marvels at her desert-like beauty: cream-colored skin, strawberry hair, eyes like blueberries. He turns his attention from her to the rest of the upstairs: the dart boards and pinball machines tucked away in corners. He watches for a second and then turns to Nick, leaning in a little without looking at him. “Don’t look now, but those two chicks playin’ darts over there are givin’ us the old eyeball.”

“Really?” Nick asks seriously. He waits a couple of seconds before subtly leaning back in his seat in the booth. Waiting a few moments, he glances in the direction of the dart boards. Waiting for just the right moment of recognition, Travis blurts out, “Yours!” laughing and takes a drink.

“Damn it!” Nick says, leaning back onto the table.

John pokes Nick in the shoulder and says with a sly smile and redneck accent, “Why don’t you mosey on over there and ask her what her sign is?”

“Shut up,” Nick replies. “I don’t have to put up with this crap.”

“What’re you gonna’ do, Fatty? Hang out with all your other friends?”

“You’re right,” Nick laments, collapsing onto the table, “I haven’t got any friends!” He

pretends to sob and Kristin pats him pitifully on the head.

Daphne comes back to the table and set her’s and Kristin’s drinks down before seating herself. “So, where you guys been?” she asks Travis and Nick.

“Right here,” Travis replies, pointing at his drink. “You know how the beginning of summer is.”

“Yeah,” Daphne agrees. “I went home for a while. Mimi asked about you.”

“For real? I can’t believe she even remembers me.”

Dizzy puckers her lips and squeezes Travis’s cheeks together, “She wuvs you.”

“That’s sweet,” Travis says, thinking that it really was. Mimi was Dizzy’s grandmother.

“I think I’m gonna’ get a job,” Dizzy adds.

Travis and Nick both look around in unison, as though they were confused. “A what?” Travis asks.

“A job,” Dizzy explains.

“No, seriously,” Nick adds. “I’ve been having trouble with my hearing. I thought you said you were ‘getting a job’.” He and Travis laugh obnoxiously.

Dizzy rolls her eyes.

“Seriously,” Travis says, “Why would you do that? You don’t have to.”

Daphne shrugs. “It’d be nice to have something to do—and the extra money.”

Leaning forward, Nick adds, “Don’t mind him—he’ a bum.”

“Hey, I work,” Travis replies defensively.

Nick just rolls his eyes and sits back again.

“Don’t even,” Travis retorts, “Like you could legitimately call what you do work.”

Smiling mischievously, Nick shushes Travis to keep the secret.

“Yeah, what do you do at that gallery?” Daphne asks, genuinely curious.

“Well,” Nick replies, “When we do stuff, we usually build cabinets and pedestals for sculpture, hang pieces and light them, inventory the gallery’s collection. I mean, we work pretty hard when a show is coming in or out—it’s just that in the interim, there’s not much to do.”

“Are you ever gonna’ show anything?”

Nick shakes his head. “You have to be pretty well established—more than me. I was thinking about doing a show at Joe’s or Blue Sky though.” —two of the local coffeehouses.

“You should do that,” Daphne urges.

“Yeah. We’ll see. Getting shit framed is pretty expensive.”

Ian leans in from the other side of the booth and says, “Hey, I meant to tell you: I found a guy in Atlanta that’ll do it for pretty cheap. He’s an artist and does it in his spare time for the extra cash.”

“See,” Nick replies, “That’s what I’d really like do, learn to do it myself.”

“Is it that hard?” Daphne asks.

“It’s hard to do it well. But workin’ at the gallery’s taught me a lot.”

Finishing his drink, Travis gets up to go to the bathroom and get another. He makes his way through the tables and chairs and people, rubbing up against backs and other errant body parts, excusing himself as best he can as he goes. No one minds a gentle push if someone else has to get by, and as he walks through the crowd, Travis takes note of the fact that everyone at the bar seems to be in good spirits. Getting to the one unisex bathroom, Travis raps loudly on the door and hesitantly turns the knob when he doesn’t hear anything, which is hard to do with all the other noise from the room. There is no one inside, and he steps into the darkness and closes the door behind him, shutting out the light and noise.

Turning on the light, Travis steps up to the toilet and reads the graffiti on the walls. Most of it is trite or cryptic. People had scribbled names and dates or declared their undying love. In a spot by the window, someone had written: “Reality is for people who can’t handle drugs.” Travis smiles and reads the phrase directly next to it: “Linoleum is for people who can’t handle carpet.” It is clever enough to get a good laugh out of him as he finishes, and zips up his jeans. Stepping up to the mirror and sink, Travis leans in close and stares into his own dark, brown eyes. Lightly, he taps his nose with his finger. He was tipsy, and he smiles to himself, enjoying the feeling. No matter how many times he’d been warned that alcohol held no answers, he found himself disagreeing. There might be no concrete answers in the bottle, but there was an escape. There was no denying it. That was the real danger—the truly addictive property of alcohol—the temptation to abandon everything. But he could never abandon his guitar.

Travis opens the door to step out, and has to make way for a hurried young women who looks like she is going to be sick (speaking of abandonment). As the door slams behind him, Travis makes his way to the edge of the bar. Just as Travis gets there, Chip steps up to him, wiping his hands off on a towel and says, “Gin and tonic?”

He smiles and replies, “Actually, let me get one of those and six shots of tequila. And let me get somethin’ to carry it all on if you could.”

“Comin’ up,” Chip says. He lines the shot glasses up on a small tray in front of Travis and pours them all, throws a handful of limes down, sets a salt shaker on the tray, and goes to mix the gin and tonic. “Eighteen even,” he says when he’s done.

Travis fishes through his pocket, a mass of small bills and quarters at this point, makes out twenty-four dollars and hands it over. “Thanks. Keep the change.” No, he doesn’t have to say that, but it’s cool. He picks up the tray carefully and starts making his way through the crowd. With the tray, it was difficult, but relying on his old skills as a waiter, Travis manages to get back without spilling anything. The crowd is congenial and makes way. Setting the tray down on the table, he just says, “All right, let’s go. Pass ’em around.”

“What is it?” Kristin asks skeptically.

“To-kill-ya’.”

“Oh God, I hate tequila,” Kristin replies.

Taking his, Ian coaxes her, “C’mon.”

“Everybody’s doin’ it,” Travis insists, sounding like a bad actor in a public service announcement on peer pressure.

“I’ll take yours,” Nick offers, reaching for his own.

“No,” Kristin answers warily. “I’ll do it. I just won’t like it.”

Travis hands John his, who thanks him with a nod, and then he passes one to Daphne who just makes a face but takes it. “You’re gonna’ do it?” Travis asks, surprised and curious. Dizzy just sighs and nods.

“Okay,” Travis says, “put ’em out.” Everyone licks their hands and passes the salt shaker around. “You know the drill. Lick, drink, suck.” Holding his shot glass out over the table, he says, “Here’s to bein’ wreckless.”

“Woo-hoo,” Dizzy hollers as everyone drinks and reaches out for the limes with various faces. Travis laughs as he sees the range from complete satisfaction to utter illness. Everyone either drinks to wash the taste down or smokes to savor it.

“Hey,” Ian says, “Why don’t we all head back to the Teke house after this—see what’s goin’ on.”

Everyone nods in agreement.

Checking her watch, Kristin says, “I can’t believe it’s only midnight.”

Nick replies, taking a long drag off his cigarette, “We got all the time in the world.”

Read the whole thread: Carousel Cowboy

Characters and Places: Athens, Daphne Dearborn, Ian Fleming, John Riffing, Kristen Shelley, Mean Mike's, Nick Vaughn, Travis Fleeting