RachelWhere: rejoice in poverty? he sure did.



let's see I met him in a bar in Virginia Highlands. I was there with my sister for the dancing. he

was sitting in a booth with this boy who I knew from around the Five Points named Rafe Dubious.

Rafe was an artist and had his work hanging in this one place off Ponce they were formal works with figures and they were quite quite good but he'd that summer gone abstract



I didn't care for that I was a vetrinary technician with long dark red hair. I was the type to make allusions to all the fucked up things I'd done in my past but I was a clean girl now or trying to be. my rooms had a gothic thing going with black wrought iron skull candles and witch pictures but they were clean quarters indeed. there was a spiral staircase. my bedspread was floral and bright. I live there with my sister. she was a blonde girl short and compact while I was tall and thin and had hips like a mantis. she wasn't my sister at all but that's what I told Cromby to give you an idea how I valued him. that night in the Highlands I had gone there for the dancing. Rafe D. and Cromby were holed up in a booth over pitcher of beer and arguing. About their band. Rafe wanted a saxophone in there. Cromby wanted to be Chris Cornell. It was Rafe who brought us in to sit down. Both of them were a couple of glib characters. Rafe was oilslick sexy and Cromby was sloppy and surly in a sweet way. Guess who I was attracted to. Rafe said Cromby's kind of a light drunk and Cromby said No I'm not in a way that told you he so was. Well, maybe not that bad. I don't know what happened to my not sister but it was late real late finally and we were all shit drunk and carefree in the way that you really can get to be in summer in Atlanta and we dumped ourselves into Cromby's white Nova and Cromby drove us back to the studio. The studio of Rafe in this semirenowned band practice space a big white washed brick old warehouse space where you weren't supposed to live just play music but it was shady and Rafe lived there anyway for painting studio purposes first and also the band stuff. Cromby had a key and had been sleeping on the couch occasionally with the understanding that is was to be Stealth. and what I noticed about Cromby driving and here is where I gained a certain respect for him was that even though he was completely loaded he was indeed a very very careful and inscrutably cautious drunk driver. so there was something. well the boys took me back to the studio and plugged in their guitars and proceeded to play me a song they had written together, worked up out of an old song of each of theirs. it was no better or worse than a million songs of its kind written by a million dudes of their precise ilk. i appeared flattered in the way girls such as I can but we were still drinking beer and smoking Camels. it was the kind of good time you can have at 3:30 in the morning. then we were all drunk and lying on the couch cushions Rafe had put on the floor. both of them started then to give me a backrub. Rafe put his hand in my shirt. I stopped things there. We all slept drunk on the floor. at least that is what Cromby thought happened



hey what do you know there is more to this anecdote. I will be back but I better let MercyGraft chiaroscuro you in on some ancillaries