Bird’s Aphrodisiac Oyster Shack

In downpour-soaked sweatshirts, Jay & I sat at picnic tables in the broken-shell parking lot, chipped paint & plastic pitchers, & devoured dozens of oysters raw in their shells, a squirt of hot sauce or squeeze of lemon to cut against the sun overhead, & both of us, Jay & I, unshaven & brain-fried, lonely as fence posts, would watch the traffic on Bronough drip past. Chelsea, server on Sunday afternoons with her always-wet hair & tattoo sleeves, stood in the doorway of the kitchen with a cigarette, scrolling on her phone, or squatted against the wall with her head in her hands. She shifted temperaments like a Gulf Coast storm, swinging between the simple kindness of joining our table for a beer after her shift or walking away from us mid-sentence. In my head I can still hear the shattering of shells as cars pulled in & out of the parking lot, like one thousand broken bottles swept by a push broom across a factory floor. I love beer. I drink it every day of my life. In Fort Collins, Colorado, I toured the Funkwerks brewery & more than the sugar & yeast musk comes the sound of the dumpster pouring shards into a garbage truck, all that broken glass falling in a rapid wave of greens & browns, the noise clearing each bird from the trees overhead. I’m embarrassed, today, of what my life looked like then: bare mattress beneath the window, trashcan on the balcony filled with cigarette butts, wide mirror above the bathroom sink that I stuck post-it notes on, Do Better. Get oil change. At night I’d sit out on the balcony with the door open behind me, listening to my dad’s Neil Young records, the moon an ugly man looking down on me. It’s better now. I’ve got a ribeye dry-aging in my fridge & a fresh can of shaving cream in my bathroom. On weekends I drive up past the jail & park my car in the trees, walk down the rocks until I’m on the bank of the river. Sandwich packed, two cold cans, a bucket of chicken livers, I cast my line & sit with a paperback until tension breaks my reading & I pull a catfish to shore. I lower its body back into the stream, feel its slick skin against my own as it shudders once, then darts into the reeds.