Purple Prose and Tortelli's Night Out

My journey began with the rising heat of a July night, during those dreamy hours I dedicate to restful repose. It was during those hours my sleep had been interrupted by fiery dreams of what I was. Your life! Your life! What is your life?!! My emotions were subsumed by a hazy delirium.Get up! The voice ordered. Go to the One Lucky! Bring fire to your life!

To the One Lucky I went. A loser bar. A bucket-of-blood saloon of deadly one-eyed muckers and prison tattooed rapscallions. Why the voice came to my head and sent me there, I did not know. But like an inscrutable master it demanded of me, of all people, to challenge my usual convictions of civility. On that mad July night, I was to steady my spine and curl my fists. I was to ready myself for bloody combat!!!

So I entered the One Lucky a tender foot warrior. I stood amidst tuffs and fiery drunkards. Amidst blood red killers. Amidst men whose steely-eyes could slice the necks of craven souls. Maybe my neck! Maybe my soul!

A broad shoulder man in a belligerent pose stood before me. I walked into his stare and cocked my arm but before I could hit him, the force of his granite fist knocked me to the ground.

Like a pack of wild elephants they, the bar denizens, stomped on me, their menacing laughs piercing my blood filled ears. I was dragged into the street where my unconsciousness melded with my maddening dream, so close to this maddening crowd. So far from Hardy and Yeats.

The sound of the ambulance siren and the attendants of the night jostled me into a sensible-lucidity, sensible enough to see her: the beauty in white. She lay over me, this Florence Nightengale in stethoscope sounds. My penis rose. I unbuttoned her blouse and felt the firm-soft roundness of her chest. I caressed them under the wail of the siren, past the red lights on broken streets. I f@!cked her hard, my supine savior.

I could hear the quiet, satisfied words of Bukowski: "You done good, Tortelli. A fight and a screw on a Friday Night."

I knew what my life should have been all these years. I knew then that Bukowski had been that voice in the night.