There are some that can be met, strange and twisted ones you know by an aura, a scent, a feel about them, that if you had one single word—like “junkie” or “nympho” or “hooker” or “Bircher”—a key word that labeled their secret bit, you would understand all the inexplicable, off center things about them. Like the girl you meet, and start to date, who can’t see you on Thursday nights, but makes weak excuses as to where she goes on Thursday nights. If you had the word “diabetic” you would understand that every Thursday her doctor’s appointment keeps her out of circulation, and that’s why she doesn’t drink, and spends long minutes in bathrooms, shooting insulin. But she’s ashamed—don’t ask why, people do kookie things—so she just has that one soft foggy spot in her reality, and you wonder what the hell the story is.
Or your friend who picks fights with Italians, and aside from not telling you what his real name is, couldn’t be a better drinking buddy. If you had the word “deportee” you’d understand that he was picked up for anarchist reasons in Italy, and deported, and is in the country illegally.
It’s like that. The one word people. One word, and you’ve got the handle on them, the motivater of this existence.
“Adolescent,” “Puritan,” “passing,” “wino”—they all do it. Granted, it’s a dubious sort of categorization…still, it works. And like the old wives poultice of spiderwebs that was laughed at, as a remedy for bruises, cuts and the removal of a mouse under the eye, when a recent medical breakthrough found a cure for these containing many chemical elements found in spiderwebs, it must be concluded that in the final analysis, what works…works.
Bringing me to Nicole Shahin.
Pronounced Shane.
And she’s the fastest gun in the East.
Have to be. Shot me down and I didn’t even see her draw.