By Rick Harsch
That’s Arjun playing pool at Tom’s Bar and Grill in Galesville, Wisconsin, where Kneifl, Arjun and I stopped for lunch on the way down from the anticyclonic depression that swept through the brains of the northerners we escaped from, finding ourselves finally free and at ease after passing the last of the fracking sand mounds as the sun came out. But we were hungry and Kneifl against my initial objection insisted on leaving the main route so we could hit Galesville, where this early 20th century tavern sat two buildings off a square free of music and postwar architectural ideas. After we slant-parked I got out and saw a skinny guy that elsewhere would have been a heroin addict, but in a midwestern town is the alcoholic town mascot. “Call me Wirebender,” he said as we boarded the porch. “And tell that redhead in there that the Wirebender sent you. She’ll get pissed.”
So we had lunch: mushroom swiss burgers and what has not hit Europe yet, hashbrowns, which was what I really wanted. And keep in mind we were in the northern rurals, mostly out of public sight, so I had no real idea what a couple geezers like me and Kneifl, unkempters from way back, dragging around a black kid like Arjun, might run in to–after all it was in just such a place stopping for lunch my pal little Tommy Franc’s girlfriend was handraped while they held him by the neck with his toes on the ground, which it to say it never hurts to wonder one way or another, especially when Wirebender came in and the redhead was pleasant with him, but a bit brusque to us. And Wirebender asked Arjun his name, not looking at me or Kniefl, just Arjun, who gave him the name which Wirebender got the spelling for, and came back in about two minutes with the copper label pictured below.
Before running into us, Wirebender had bent names for people from 36 states and six countries, so Slovenia made seven and we gave him names of girls from Czech and Italia and now he’s up to 36 and nine.
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