A Rider on the Storm

He was there, man. I saw him with mine own eyes. In the flesh. Gaunt and ghost-like, but there. The curls of his long brown hair hissed and slithered like Medusa’s serpentine bouffant. He had lost the weight that he had gained and he looked almost skeletal in his green apron. He grinned at me, coy and spectral. Asked if I’d like an Arabian Mocha Java. I told him I’d have a Grande Latte.

It was he. The poet. The singer. Mr. Mojo Risin’. Slingin’ coffee beans for the lions in the street. Start at one. Off at five. No one here gets out alive. He moved like a panther to the pot of black liquid crack behind him. He’d been up all night sipping aged Sumatra from a flask.

Wake Up!

You can’t be late for your first day. Stumble through the golden dawn to meet this carnival elephant on the labyrinth streets. Is this the room where my sister lived? C’mon baby run with me.

I felt his pain, communicated through each twitch of his neck. Where had he been hiding? I wanted to ask. While teenage tourists wrote bad poetry and defaced his Paris grave, he had been somewhere trying to forget the world and all its people.

He knew I knew his secret and we acknowledged this shared information with furtive glances. I won’t tell anyone I said with my grin. Have a nice day he said with his.

At the counter I stirred in copious amounts of sugar. My usual ritual. I looked about the Starbucks and thought, “This IS the end. My friend.” The end of our elaborate plans. Of everything that stands. We never broke on through to the other side. Some are born to sweet delight. But we are born to the endless night. And he wanted to give us one last kiss before we slipped into unconsciousness. The world had withered. Forgotten the warnings of past generations. Packaged and resold the past generations. We are all too happy to be commodities.

I took a sip of my Good Morning America. It tasted bitter, regardless of the sugar I had filled it with. It needed something more. Something sweet to help it go down. Perhaps a shot of caramel.

“Could you give me a little shot of caramel, please?” He looked at me with that same coy grin and nodded.

“I am the Lizard King,” he said. “I can do anything.”