Dimes to Nickels

He was late. By the time he got there all that was left of it was the tinny static of cymbals in the distance, like a transistor radio intermittently sparking sound.

She was a visual artist. When she described it, her face softened, her eyes quivered a little. She talked with real excitement about the sun glistening off the horns, the synchronised marching, the uniforms, the swelling crowd. She was from there so she knew all the high schools, their colors, their mascots. Her description was of a long, ecstatic event, operatic in its splendor and diversity.

She herself was not long out of high school. She was telling not through a gauzy nostalgic veil, but with the thumping thrill of a fully committed participant. She invited him, urged him to come, told him he'd never seen the like.

None of that interested him. He thought of the naked limbs of the cheerleaders, the majorettes. Those long booted legs disappearing up short short pleated skirts playing their peek-a-boo burlesque in full Main Street daylight. The quick spinning reveal and the just as quick return to the squeeky clean girl next door. He told her he'd be there.

But he was late. And the parade hadn't waited for him.

That was just his luck... a long parade nothing but a short parade.

He turned back the way he had come, kicking a gray spray of gravel into the street. Turning his head as he passed the alley, he spotted a splash of hot color about halfway down. It was a clown in a full-body, baggy red suit, pissing mightily against the back brick wall of an Italian restaurant.

---

When he was fourteen, his cousin taught him how to grip a roll of dimes, hiding it in his tight fist. The coins cushioned his fingers, gave punishing force to a blow, the extra weight a nasty surprise. They would head downtown about once a month after that, looking for drunks to roll. Usually the first Friday of the month. Pay day. Government check day. It was cheap entertainment; kept them both in cigarette money.

They left a man with his pockets turned out, face down, blood draining out his ear, french kissing the concrete outside the Stallion Lounge, his arm at a queer angle. He gave it up after that. At least he quit the regularity of it. Felt too much like a job. His cousin wouldn't talk to him anymore.

But he kept a roll of dimes in his jacket pocket. As he got older, his hands got a bit bigger. In a bar fight the roll of dimes burst, exploding out of a clubbing roundhouse, silver showering like Mardi Gras. The guy he hit went down anyway, but he started using nickels after that. They fit his hand better. 

His first vacation he got a roll of nickels tattooed on his right forearm, butting up against his royal flush. It was there still, bruise blue. People thought the tat was about gambling. People were wrong.

---

The clown was finishing up, spatter raining on his size twenty-two shoes. He swayed. Not much, just enough to keep slow time to the tune he was humming, his unoccupied hand steadying on the slimy lid of the restaurant dumpster, his back to the alley entrance. His mountainous electric orange afro wig had slipped, the edges of it smeared with greasepaint. His red suit was dirty, not new dirty, long dirty, covered with a leprous mottling of golf ball sized, grey-white pom-poms. None of them were round, as they once had been; all drooped with the force of humid gravity towards the earth, the levity of their youth abandoned.

The man came to a full stop, legs apart, sizing up the clown, scanning the street, the alley.

His hand slipped into his jacket pocket, seeking and finding the familiar, papery cylindrical weight. He lifted his head, sighted down his nose and strode quickly towards Flippo.

1/26/2022