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Last week I was in Nicholson's to get some tires and
while they were mounting them—they said
it’d be about a half hour until they could get to
them—I went into a bar across the street. I
thought I’d have a beer, so I sat down at the bar
and ordered one.
I wasn’t wearing a watch and I wanted to keep track of when a half hour was up, so I said to the guy sitting two stools away, “Hey Ace, what time is it?” Now, I call everybody Ace; I’ve been doing that for years. I figure it’s a good thing to be called Ace. It means you’re tops, or you’re a winner, you know? But this guy, he turns to me and slams his beer down. He’s just glaring at me, red in the face and making fists. I didn’t know what got into him. He said, “Don’t ever call me Ace!” and he said it real slow. I said to him, “Hey, I ain’t trying to make no friction between humans.” And since he spilled most of his beer when he slammed it down, I ordered him another one. He cooled back down and told me about how he used to be called Ace for real—that was the name everybody called him. He got the name because of his card playing, and that was a long time ago. I guess he was good at it or they wouldn’t have called him Ace. But then his wife left him and things got kind of bad for him and he never played cards anymore. I don’t know if she left him because of the card playing—see, I’m forgetting parts of what he told me. Apparently he switched from cards to drinking. He said he never loved anybody else and when she left him he lost everything and he’s never gotten her out of his mind. He lost his job and his house and he’s been living with his mother. I don’t know how long ago it was that she left him—maybe thirty years ago. This guy was younger than me, maybe sixty or so—he could’ve been younger and just looked older on account of the drinking. So we had a real nice talk and then he said to me, “You know, you’re alright. I’ve enjoyed talking with you and I’m going to have my mother take a picture of us.” And then this lady who’d been sitting over on the dining room side of the place came over. She must’ve been about ninety and she had an old style Polaroid camera—you know, the kind where you have to coat that solution on the pictures after they come out. And she took a picture of us—two of ‘em—and then she went back to her table, didn’t say a word. He set the two pictures on the bar and let ‘em dry and then he gave one to me and kept one for himself. Said he was glad to talk to me and then he left. When I went back over for my tires, they’d been ready for over an hour.
THE END
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David Greenberger's Duplex Planet website
offers excerpts from the brilliant Duplex Planet
magazine (as well as subscription forms), CDs from the
Duplex Planet Hour radio show (featuring music
by NRBQ's Terry Adams), the amazing series of CDs
titled Lyrics by Ernest Noyes Brookings that
feature a wide variety of notable musical acts
performing original music utilizing the words of Duplex
Planet regular Ernie Brookings as lyrics, plus other
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A Brief Editorial: The Duplex Planet is
about people and the fundamentals of compassion. And
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here: The
Duplex Planet The artistic stylings of David Greenberger have also frequently graced the album covers and promo material of NRBQ, that band of musical iconoclasts who have been consistently brilliant, both on record and in literally thousands of live shows, for 30+ years. This is not about shilling products (“Hey, I ain’t trying to make no friction between humans”), it's about ART, and as far as the Canopic Jar is concerned, anything produced by Greenberger or NRBQ and especially any collaborative efforts of any kind involving these guys should be procured immediately.
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