I feel like telling a story today. It's basically a true story though some of it I have just heard second or third hand from sources that might not be reliable, but often the story that comes down is more compelling than the actual facts.
The Wigwam was the bar I went to work for after I realized that I was going to have to work for a living. A few years later I left it for the House of Chin which was just one door down from the Wigwam, but I still dropped in from time to time to see how it was doing. At some point they hired a new bartender who was not to my liking,, one of those loudmouth guys with not much to say, but that didn't keep him from saying it. His girlfriend sat across the bar watching him, but never saying a word. The only reason you would know that she was his girlfriend was that he was constantly mentioning the fact, proud I guessed that a no account guy such as himself would have a girlfriend at all. You couldn't tell if she was pretty because she was always hunched over and wore a stocking hat pulled low over her forehead so that all you could see were her gimlet eyes peering over the bar at him, watching over his every move listening to all his blather.
Eventually he was gone and so was she, nobody knew what happened to him or her and nobody much cared.
But then one day a story came down, this I heard from other sources so I am not clear on all the details. One morning she was going to catch the train up to Chicago, but she missed it. There was another train coming by in less than an hour, but she felt that she couldn't wait for it. The story was that voices told her she had to leave right away and when a freight train rumbled through she tried to hop it. But she was no practiced hobo and she slipped under it and lost both her legs. Some story huh, but that seemed to be the end of it, nobody heard anything more.
There was this guy who used to hang around the campus bars, called himself Angel. He wore a broad brimmed hat and often a cape. There was something sinister about him, but he had sort of a charisma among the riffraff, and always had a coterie of them following him around.
Late one slow night I was thinking of closing the House of Chin bar down a little early when I heard a commotion coming up the stairs. It was Angel and his coterie of riffraff and he was carrying some woman. The reason he was carrying her was because she had no legs.
She was wearing one of those floppy southern belle hats and she was made up, and I have to say she looked pretty good, but somehow I recognized her right away, she was the girl who used to sit across the bar at the Wigwam with her stocking hat pulled low over her eyes. Angel deposited her on a bar stool and the riffraff gathered around her. If Angel was their king, she was their queen.
And now she was no longer silent, she was talking up a blue streak, mostly nonsense. The riffraff put quarters in the jukebox and every time a new song began playing she would say, "I wrote that song."
Not much happened other than that. When the songs came to an end Angel lifted her off the bar stool and carried her away into the night. I never heard anything more about her or Angel.
What to make of it I don't know. I like to think that she was like a caterpillar when she sat across the bar with that hat pulled over her eyes and when she lost her legs it was like she became a butterfly. one of those butterflies that don't last very long after they come out of their chrysalis. Interesting story. Somebody ought to write a song about it.
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