He walked into the store singing,
"He's an old hippy and he don't know what to do..."
Coke-bottle glasses on his face and a
Guitar case slung over his shoulder with
An American flag sticking out of it.
Plastic grocery bag with assorted items.
Band aids, cheap bottle of wine, Hershey bar...
There's an ear bud for an iPod in his ear.
He holds ******* to it and says,
"Radio silence."
Then he says,
"I saw him at the store.
I'm going to be the first to see him."
He grabs a forty of Icehouse
and brings it to the counter.
Into his own ear he says,
"I'm off duty. I can drink a beer if I want to.
Uh-huh. Okay. Radio silence."
He pulls out a tattered paperback book.
He tells the cashier that as he reads the pages
he rips them out and throws them into the fire.
He tells her his story.
His wife left him after twenty-two years
of marriage, nine years ago.
She ran off with a thirty-one year old man
when she was thirty-nine.
She met this man on the computer he'd bought her for Christmas
and six months later she was gone.
He said, "The bible says there's two things that won't last:
a fire with no where to go and a woman without a child."
After twenty-two years they never had children
and when she met Paul from New York, they had a baby.
He hasn't slept with another woman since
and he hopes, one day, she'll come back.
He said, "If she needed five dollars and I only had four,
I'd beg you for another dollar and that's love."
"Radio silence."
He was quiet for a moment.
He told the clerk they were looking for a man
named Jerome Black and to watch out for him.
And then he was gone.