For maximum effect, play John Prine’s “In Spite of Ourselves,” repeatedly on a dive-bar jukebox in a room that’s empty save for two young women pluming with cigarette smoke. The women are sipping Busch lite from a can, singing along with Prine and Iris Dement, “In spite of ourselves, we’ll end up sitting on a rainbow.” Make sure the sound of the Gulf of Mexico can be heard in the background, always churning just outside. The bar’s interior should be made entirely of wood, lacquered in old varnish, and yellowed with nicotine. Also, it should be a sunny day but the room should be dark.
*
I drop the needle. Sunset glows outside our 1920s wooden garage apartment and the breeze releases endless yellow pollen from the oak trees. The glass in the windows shakes from the volume of my speakers playing Will To Power’s 12-inch disco remix of “Say It’s Gonna Rain.” Rain is forecast but the skies are bone-dry. My ex-boyfriend, who lives in front of the apartment I share with my husband, clips his toenails audibly and for far too long. It sounds complicated. It isn’t really, except for the toenail clipping, which drives me especially insane for some reason.
*
Play Led Zeppelin’s “D’yer Mak’er,” and imagine her lips soft and whiskey-wet against yours, her labret piercing cold on your face as you stumble through the swinging doors and onto the shell-paved alley by the beach on Pass-A-Grille. She’s your bartender, you fall in love over a barstool and cans of cold beer and too many Camel Crushes and never enough John Prine. Her hair is long and brown and swishes like a mane when she moves her big beautiful bones through the wrap-around bar pit.
*
All I want is a big storm on the beach, my bartender, our songs and a better buzz. I’ve got my husband, my records, a case of non-alcoholic beer and a big bag of really good weed I’m prescribed by my doctor for PTSD. I can’t go to the beach, the beach is closed. The beach is closed because of the pandemic. And my bartender is gone, leaving me with nothing but a sake set. I hear the ex-boyfriend clip another toenail. When we were together, the ex-boyfriend said he thought that my attraction to women was a form of cheating. My husband said he liked it. The rain keeps teasing but never comes.
*
Play The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm,” with a Florida summer thunderstorm shaking the wooden rafters and bar windows like hammers in a metal trash can and the sweet smell of rain in the air. The doors should be propped open now, the storm’s gusts tearing through the bar like a ghost. Tell the person next to you that Jim Morrison attended St. Petersburg Junior College when he was living with his grandparents off Druid Road in Clearwater, Fla. Tell that same person you think that song, at least in part, is inspired by a Florida thunderstorm.
*
The bartender, my kinda, sorta, lady-fox-disaster, love of my life. She was and wasn’t my girlfriend. We fell into each other’s mouths, into each other’s bodies. We slept together, read on the beach, and once fucked so loudly in a friend’s shower that we got kicked out. But somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we get into a quiet kind of argument. The decision to get a drink at the beloved local strip club, Mermaids, wasn’t sexy as I’d hoped. I walk away from her and our full beers when she gets a call from another woman. I call my husband from the beach, tell him to pick me up. That she and I are through.
*
Play Brooks & Dunn’s “Neon Moon” and sing every word into the sad, sweet, humid St. Pete Beach night. That’s your song, even though you weren’t really a couple, even though you were. The heat lightning from the storm is now miles to the East but flickers like fireflies in the clouds. Belt out the words, “When you lose your one and only, there’s always room here for the lonely,” into a long-gone sunset. Smoke each and every blunt rolled with Swisher sweets and old outlaw weed from the former Marine who loves Tim Dorsey and who prefers cocaine. Think about texting the bartender with the long hair and the big beautiful bones, but don’t. Not yet. Play Brooks & Dunn’s “Neon Moon” at least three more times.
—
Arielle Stevenson is a writer and journalist based in Largo, Fla. In 2018, she was accepted to the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop in non-fiction for her memoir in progress. Pidgeonholes is her first literary publication.
Photography by: Roberto Nickson
