She coasts up to us at 1:30 a.m., hair and smile topsy turvy, blinking blue sunglasses atop her head.
"What's happenin' dudes?"
"Not much," we reply. "You?"
"I'm fucking starving," she says. Then quickly adds: "I have five dollars, though."
"Hey, can I wear your hat?" she asks one of us. "I don't have lice or anything."
She takes the hat and hands over her sunglasses.
Her name tonight is Sera Tonin. Or maybe it's Augustine. She is 93. Well, 23, actually.
Her mom was a fairy, she says. So I guess that makes her one, too. A lost little Nashville fairy with her light blinking out as she flits from the drug house she's staying at to this dive bar where she may or may not be allowed in.
She's got some crazy dance moves, this bony girl — more fragile each time you see her, like a bird stripped of its feathers.
She'll tell you stories of being gang raped like a recount of a trip to the grocery store.
"I had a baby last year. I didn't eat or go to the doctor or anything the whole time." I don't know how she was OK. And it was really quick, too. Only like a half an hour."
"What happened then?"
"My sister stole her."
She wants to go to school for sociology and get her teeth fixed so the cavity-induced headaches will stop.
"I'm so tired of this caveman shit," she says.
"I can't wait to be the best philosopher there is. If I can make it to school, I can meet some like minds."
"If you get a bunch of people doing opiates that's kind of like a think tank," she adds, then laughs. "Everyone forgets everything."
The bar won't let her in tonight.
"Let's go in together," she suggests. "You can say I'm your best friend."
But it's already past last call. We head for our cars and she coasts into the night.
Good old springwater. ha
er.. whomever wrote THAT has got to be a meathead hell’s angel hater. i had 10 prenatal visits, and i talked mad shite about VANDERBILT (probably the author’s drug of choice, it is similar to a love of NRA) I am Sera Augustine Tonin, an orphan/ survivor of child abduction and sex-trade in THRASHVEGAS… wherever that is!!! (ha, imean Nashvegas, TN)
And, the tar fazed losers that may or maynot run that bar can suckit for not paying me for my much loved mural.. and kicking me out for NOT fucking their much loved morphine dealer, or just not being a prostitute enuf i gezzzz…
my lawsuit is pending btw, PTSD is real… psychizophrenia not a valid insult numf’n scum’f narc mofo
It’s never too late to write that book. There is no time or judgement in dreams. I’m hooked on these two sisters in such a short starburst of writing. I like the speed of development in the dialogue and the freshness in the language. It lays out a lot of delicious insights and questions at the same time, like a secret trail of breadcrumbs, which leave me thinking long after the reading, and so the characters infiltrate me, like all the best books. I’m imagining a Kerouac / Burroughs world of danger and beauty that is semi-dream-like, as transcendent as it is brutal and real. Please write it!!