[Poem] The Dark Bar Boy Of Decatur, Illinois
"Lessons From Old Men Playing Shuffleboard" - Another Poem By JB Minton
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There was a time before this networked nightmare, and time will be here after it collapses. The dust on the shuffleboard table doesn't stay long. Every throw changes the board. And we play through the changes with all the grace we can muster in the dust. I spent a lot of time in bars as a child. My Mother still wanted her youth. It was once a well known fact that dark and dirty bars were places that slowed time to a crawl, and the men discredited, smoked cigarettes, drank whiskeys, plugged quarters into the jukebox, while they shot at each other on the shuffleboard table. Those old men were immortal for a little while, every day. "Come on over here, Juicy," they'd say. Juicy was my baby nickname that everyone seemed to know. I was slobbery and known to piss on a lap if held too long. Diapers back then weren't absorbant like now. "Come on over here and let me show you how to shoot the weights." The old men smelled like cigars and pickles drawn by hairy hands from the giant jars, wet fingers jostling for pickles past the eggs and pigs knuckles floating in the brine. "Get Juicy a stool." My only goal was to be tall enough to see over the edge of the board without help. I had nothing close to the skills these men wrecked each other with every game. Trick shots where one would light a cigarette and stick it with gum to a weight pushed to the middle of the two line. From the other end, a sharp old man sent his weight down the table, screaming with the anger that the old must bear against the young. The weight jumps off the board and lands smack flat on the cigarette, extinguishing the cherry. It was one of the most athletic feats of skill ever performed for the Dark Bar Boy of Decatur, Illinois.