Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town

I've always loved this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebcJ2WycQ4o  Actually it's titled Easy From Now On and and the phrase Quarter Moon In A Ten Cent Town only appears once in the song, but it's something that always stuck with me, the clean beauty of the quarter moon contrasted with the tawdriness of the ten cent town.  Not ten cent in the sense that it is a small town, but ten cent in the sense that it has a rigid hierarchy as to who is who and who stands where and nobody thinks outside that, or if they do, says anything about it, because people would look at them funny and  chatter about them in the drugstore over sodas.

I've heard this song hundreds of times.  I have an armada of maybe 300 CDs and I rotate through them, and everytime the CD (also titled Quarter Moon In A Ten Cent Town) that contains the song comes to the head of the line I smile.  I have a picture in my mind, as I do for most all my favorite songs, maybe not quite what the song says but what I think it says.

The girl has this apartment over the store in the one or two blocks of downtown that the town has. She is doing okay as far as the town goes, she has a boyfriend who is kind of a lout, but this is the best that she is going to get in this town.  But then she wakes one morning at 3AM and sitting up in her bed she glances out the window and there is the quarter moon (in the ten cent town), and she realizes she can do better than this, all she needs to do is get out of town and she can be riding high in a fandagled sky.

This is a little story I wrote about it, and since I have nothing to respond to this morning, here it is.

His name ain't even Billy Bob like he likes to call himself.  It's William Kilpatrick, of the Beacon County Kilpatricks, the guys that own the feedstore and the dimestore.  And I never even fucked him.  That's what all the high school girls who wait behind the counter have to do, or should I say get to do, because they all want to because then they get to ride down main street in his Camero.  Getting his wild oats out, that's what Mr and Mrs Kilpatrick say leaning forward on the couch all pukey smiles, and when he's done with that stuff why he'll come straight back to you Honey and then you two can raise some children.

Why did I ever think that was a good idea?  Did I ever think that was a good idea?  I don't think so, it was just this and then that and the next thing you know I was on the arm of the golden boy, the most eligible bachelor in all of Beacon County, so gee maybe I better make the best of it.

And that's what I had been thinking, though actually not thinking, just this and that like I said before, but sure enough headed sometime in the future when Billy Bob would get tired of those charming shenanigans and become William Kilpatrick and move me into that nice house on Illinois Street and fuck me so I could have his kids.

And maybe that would have all happened if I didn't happen to wake up that night in the apartment above the dimestore and notice that sharp little glow out the window, and getting up out of bed there it was, a quarter moon. That’s what the moon is when it’s just about to wink out or just beginning to come back, but I remembered counting the coins out of the register last night and a quarter is like a coin too. 

And Deanna she was moping around because Billy Bob had found someone else to ride beside him and I was telling her it was probably the best thing that ever happened to her, but she was all fidgety and bumped the cash drawer right out of my hands and all the coins scattered over the black linoleum and the dimes, because they were the smallest and the shiniest, they shined like so many stars, and Deanna picked one up and squinted, “Shit,” she said, “this ain’t even a ten cent town.”

So there I was staring out the window at that quarter moon in a ten cent town and it all came together and I remembered seeing early in the morning sometimes that Greyhound come stop right down the street, and luckily I didn’t have much to pack and hell, I even had time to make myself a cup of coffee.