Excerpt from Bachelor's Graveyard...

Bachelor's Graveyard...now in rehearsal...stage reading with NoHo Arts...May, 2010:

Chip

(Addressing the audience.) Nine years and nine months after this night in Bachelor’s Graveyard we

did all get together one last time. Our ten year high school anniversary. We met on a Saturday

afternoon at a new place in town called Winston’s Pub. Our lives were all radically different by then

of course. I was in from New York pretending to be a big shot writer. Actually, I was waiting tables

at a little restaurant in Chelsea. I’d saved for three months to make the trip. I bought everyone

drinks all afternoon like I had a lot of money and told fantastical lies about my writing career. Big

Jimmy didn’t stay long ‘cause Cherry girl was sick with the cancer even then. Wayne was back from

 prison but looked at all of us like we were strangers. He didn’t seem embarrassed or anything about

what had happened. Just sort of dead. He had two beers and left without saying goodbye. Dave the

Vulcan had just moved back a few months earlier and was working at the nuclear plant. He’d

gained a lot of weight and lost most of his hair and looked ten years older than the rest of us. All

he talked about was computers. He nursed the same beer all afternoon. Eddie Cobb was still living

with his Mom. Unlike the rest of us he looked almost exactly like he did that last night at Bachelor’s

Graveyard. His car was in the shop for a month. We all got a big laugh at that one. He’d been walking

to work everyday at the Public Library where he was the janitor. He was drinking soda pop ‘cause

he had to work that night and he left right after Wayne did. And me, I sat there by myself for hours

after they’d all gone. Sat at the end of the bar by myself, living in my head. I tried to engage the

bartender in conversation. I actually asked him if he’d read any of my books trying to get him to

say something like, "Oh, you’re a writer?" But he didn’t. He just said, "I doubt it," and gave me

another Budweiser and a shot of Jeigermeister. I sat there drinking until late into the evening. It was

 just another bar. I could have been anywhere. New York, Missouri, Tokyo, Africa, anywhere. The

only difference was I had saved money for three months to travel a thousand miles and sit by myself

in a bar a thousand miles away. I must’ve put my forehead on the bar and passed out at some point ‘

cause the next thing I remember my Dad was shaking me and sayin’, "Chip, Chip, wake up. Come on,

son. It’s time to go. It’s time to go home."