WE ALL MEET AGAIN

By Walter Agnew Moore II, Roving Correspondent

Austin, Texas, May 16, 2001.

Now you may think it's a silly thing for a grown man to go tracking down a pod of plastered Sorority Girls in some shot-bar on Austin's much-hyped Sixth Street, and you're probably right. But the piping-voiced message was on my answering machine, and here I am.

The crack-dealers on Red River are cool and polite. "yo, playboy...". "hey, tall white guy..." Low soft voices, very reassuring, drifting off so you can drift into the conversation. I ask them how's-it-going and I walk on by.

What was that message? "We're going to Cheer's about 10:45 for shots, and then somewhere from there", said (BeeSting) on the machine. Cheer's-- a grubby generic dive like a country-club gone worse, where you check your soul at the door. Long narrow space with a little balcony running the whole length of the bar making it more oppressive, like a submarine full of drunk rich kids. This is where (BabyBush) chose to get arrested for underage drinking. Poor Secret Service agent. The last time I was in Cheer's I was sitting at the bar with an dirty homeless girl who was falling off the stool from drinking too much cough medicine, but that is a different story.

The place is still as classy as ever. (BabyBush) is not there, nor is (Cough Syrup), nor are (Bee Sting) and her friends.

The only place I hate as much as Cheer's is the Colorado Room up the hill, so I go there. (Xerxes) will set me up.

(Xerxes) thinks he owes me. Why, I don't know. But his misplaced sense of obligation translates into free martini's for Walter. Martinis with five olives in them. The Colorado Room is nasty, the kind of place that makes you hope there is a God, because otherwise the universe is just one big Colorado Room full of skanks looking to breed. Of course, there's the constant techno beating in your skull. You like techno? Then do us both a favor and move to France.

Of course they're not here. I knew they wouldn't be. They always go shut down Trudy's. Trudy's I don't hate, I merely dislike. It's like being in Dallas, loud and superficial and full of lawyer-looking types who probably are from Dallas. I go there from time to time to meet up with friends who inexplicably like the place.

But not tonight. Sorry Trudy's, sorry (BeeSting) and all liquored-up greek girls, sorry (BabyBush), I've got better things to do.

(DeWiebl)'s still up. Of course she's up. She sent me an e-mail yesterday at almost 5am, and it's only 2am right now. Yeah she'll go watch me eat somewhere.

She grabs a sweatshirt-- the Tracker gets cool at night with pieces of the top removed, and (DeWiebl) is the farthest from a dummy I know. We start down the street. She forgot her notebook and tape-recorder, so we whip back around aminute later. As she goes to unlock the apartment again I yell up from the car, hopefully loud enough for all neighbors to hear: "Hey, I'm NOT gay! I'm just nervous-- I didn't expect you to want to do it so soon! Gimme another chance!"

She comes back down with the stuff and a "Kill Walter" look on her face. I do love life.

(DeWiebl) really likes the tape of songs that I gave her. For some reason that disappoints me. Then she begins to blast each and every set of lyrics: "'Rattlesnake in my heart'? What is it with this tattoo-imagery in the first line of an otherwise beautiful song, Walter?" "'I don't ask for much'-- catchy tune, what the hell is going on?" "Do you realise you're sitting there on this one singing a chorus that consists entirely of 'I need a girl'? Can't you just hum that part or something?" "Where DID Britta go?

You build up this narrative, then it sputters out! You haven't told us anything!" "Can't you sing the '600 francs' chorus less?" "Why don't you sing the 'Cigarettes' chorus more?" "That line is trite, and it doesn't rhyme with 'eyes'." "Oh God, I hate that 'Wish I Didn't Know' song, why'd you ever sing it?"

I'm happy. Everything is going to be OK.

The Hill Country along South Mopac is remarkably barren of all-night food joints. We head East on Ben White, I swear I remember an IHOP somewhere. (DeWiebl) doubts, and taunts my faith in the mythical IHOP.

There it is! Next to I-35. I whip the Tracker around and...

I miss the entrance.

No problem, we curve into the Day's Inn instead, surely the parking lots connect. Obligatory joke about girl's honor ruined, spotted driving to Motel with Walter Moore at 2:30 am. Told to shut up.

OK, the Day's Inn parking lot has an exit that is only about 50 feet from the IHOP entrance. Only problem is, the street they both connect to is a high-speed, one-way frontage road, and IHOP is the wrong way from us.

Oh what the hell-- those headlights are a half-mile away. I say "How much do you love me!?", gun it, and we fly into IHOP followed by (DeWiebl)'s shrieks, and that's when I see the two cop cars parked there.

Nothing to do but pull in next to them. As we walk across the parking lot, we can see the two cops inside, a man and a woman, chewing their food and staring at us through the large glass window that faces the one-way frontage road. I especially remember the woman, large expressive eyes, looking at us like we had just parachuted in.

I am very calm and detached at this point. I know that next the waitress is going to seat us right next to the cops. How else could it be? But she doesn't and we end up out of earshot of the cops. Soon I forget about them.

(DeWiebl) sets the tape-recorder on the table. "Tell me about when you joined the Army."

I can't talk about the Army unless she knows about (Goblin Girl), and that doesn't make sense out of context of X, Y, and Z, and before I know it I've unraveled the sweater back to when I was 15, then I realize 15 without the context of 12 and 13 makes no sense.

Anyway, I talk a long time, but it all boils down to this: one minute I'm a 13-year-old kid watching "Hogan's Heroes" pretending it's all OK, then the next minute they unplug the TV while I'm watching it, and the TV and the house and my dad are all gone and that's why when I was 27 I joined the Army.

I don't know what (DeWiebl) makes of all this. She takes out her notebook and starts reading me observations she wrote about a family she saw eating together one Sunday morning at Kerbey Lane. Her description says more about herself than about them. She loves the family, the little girls, the father, the mother. It's more touching because she probably thinks she was being coldly detached. I don't know. She doesn't sound detached. Her voice goes through the pages, low, speeding up, slowing

down. The third or fourth time she looks up and asks me if I'm bored, I think she finally gets it. She leans forward, low over the notebook, her eyebrows almost worried, her glasses liding down her nose, bottom lip moving.

Every few paragraphs, on the pages, she's written:

We all meet again
We all meet again
We all meet again

(DeWiebl) says it won't leave her head. It's the chorus of a song I wrote called "Novelyne". It was the first song I played on her radio show a few weeks back. It's all from the viewpoint of one writer who lived in a tiny Texas town in the '30's, Bob Howard, speaking to his friend/sweet-heart/fellow-writer Novelyne Price.

(DeWiebl) has modified some of the lines:

We all fall apart
We all meet again
We all fall apart

Everybody in the town thought Bob was crazy. Novelyne didn't. She did get exasperated with him though. Bob created famous pulp-fiction characters for the magazines of the day. Novelyne turned to teaching, which she did long after Bob's early death in 1936.

We all meet again
We all fall apart
We all meet again.

Bob and Novelyne met a year after his death, in Houston in 1937. She was downtown waiting for a bus, as Bob came walking by wearing a suit, looked at her with that same old look, got on the bus and rode away. Novelyne was too busy falling back against the show window of a store to get on the bus herself.

But he'd always said he'd be back.

The male cop is standing by our table. He is good. He hasn't yet said a word and already I am an eight-year-old caught guilty as sin. I want to think of some way to get out of what is coming, but all I can do is watch and answer. He looks at me with no secrets between us, thin nose and lips, light short hair, various gear strapped onto his dark blue uniform edged with red.

"You went the wrong way on that access road just then, didn't you?"

"Yes sir."

"What was that all about? Did you want to cause a head-on collision?"

"I, uh, well, uh-- no sir. It was a very stupid thing that I won't do again."

He looks at me for about an hour.

"Make sure you don't. We'll leave it at that, tonight."

A few minutes after he leaves, I finally exhale. (DeWiebl) has been looking at me with an unreadable expression the whole time. I start to joke:

"Wow, if we hadn't have been whacky enough to park right next to them and then just walk right in, I'da gotten a ticket!"

"You were a dumb-ass."

"I was lucky! Lucky you were sitting there with the little wholesome Amish-girl doo-rag on your head!"

"You were a dumb-ass."

"I was a dumb-ass?"

"A dumb-ass, Walter."

On the way back to take her home, (DeWiebl) and I play the tape and harmonize the best we can. She keeps changing my words and putting in new stuff like she's calling down angels for help. We go down Congress to the bridge, up Congress towards the big hulking pink capitol building ("Taller dome than the one in Washington!", poor, driven Texans), past (BabyBush)'s old digs in the Governor's Mansion. It's 4:30 am, even soused Sorority Girls are home snoring like lumberjacks.

We all meet again (We all fall apart)
We all meet again (We all fall apart)
We all meet again (We all fall apart)

And wouldn't you know it: I go the wrong way on big wide empty Second Street. By accident.

© Walter Agnew Moore II 2001