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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... Down in the Dirt magazine (v101) (the December 2011 Issue) You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5" issue as an ISSN# paperback book:						This writing also appears in this 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback “Perfectly Imperfect” Order this 6" x 9" ISBN# book:

Order this writing in the book Bleeding Heart Cadaver (a Down in the Dirt collection book)		get the 320 page September-December 2011 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Order this writing in the book 1,000 Words (the 2011 prose collection book)		get the short poem 226 page collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Bohemian Groove

Jack Bristow

    The man—Jordan Emerald, thirty-five, with long black hair and clean-shaven—sat next to the canvass, gently administering the finishing touches with his fingers of the water colors. Green, purple and pink. It was of a smiling president of the United States of America. The incumbent, Barack Obama. His face was inside the rainbow but it was not. Underneath it, there was a group of shepherds dressed in shepherd’s garb. White. They were Obama and former president George W. Bush’s cabinet—Biden, Clinton, Rumsfeld; then, Cheney, Hillary and Napolitano.
    On top of the rainbow, and the shepherds was the words “One Party.” What it had meant exactly, Jordan was not sure. But he had known there was a market in these type of “radical” paintings.
    The man’s life was great—there were no complaints from his side. Economically, he had never been better. The federal grant money was making it possible for him to function as a full-time artist. He had all the time in the world to work on paintings like this, and so what if he could only sell them for twenty dollars apiece? Sure, a quarter of that money had probably been invested into the goddamn water colors and canvass. But so what? He was making money—albeit such a short amount—doing what he loved to do, no: had to do.
    Later in the week, he would haul this beauty—with about twenty more he had done early in the week— to the local swapmeet. Darren, the man upstairs, was a beautiful man to loan Jordan his big green van on the weekend, and Jordan had loved driving the big gas guzzling monster into the vacant lot he had paid seventeen dollars the night before to use. He had loved the way it looked. Straight out of the 1960s— white-topped and ridiculously outdated. In the back there was a mattress, yellow and lumpy with age.
    You could still smell the cannabis, as well as the sweet- dirty smell of sex of the summer of love wafting off of it.
    Ah, how the 1960’s must have been—and how angry Jordan was to not have lived through them. Free love. That is something in this society we are sorely lacking, Jordan had thought. Not that he ever went hungry for long periods of time. Outside the apartment complex there was always a group of junkies, more than willing to accommodate you with such endeavors. Laila was his favorite. She didn’t have your normal abuser’s face. Her cheeks were rosey and filled with life. Her hair blonde. But whenever she was “panicking”—itching for her fix—she was willing to go to bed with Jordan.
    Jordan had seen something different in the girl—a rare, innocent type of intelligence. And had told her so. Tactfully.
    “Those people outside, especially Frank, are losers Laila. No-goods. You know my buddy Darren that lives upstairs? He’s been living here for twenty years, and you know how many people like Frank he has seen come and go? Hundreds. Thousands, maybe.”
    Laila, lying in the bed beside him, had looked sad. And then tears had started to stream down her cheek. Jordan had felt terrible lecturing her—especially after the excellent service given him—but thought she had deserved the truth. Maybe there was still hope for her. After all, when she looked at you, she didn’t have that soul-sucked, vacant look most of the junkies had in their eyes.
    “I’m telling you this because I like you. I think you’re extremely intelligent—too intelligent for the crowd you are hanging out with. Why don’t you live with me, get off that shit, and stay away from these losers?”
    The girl, Laila, would always break down. Crying hysterically, she would tell Jordan how right he was. “Tomorrow, I’m leaving them. And going to the Methadone clinic. I swear to God. To Jesus Christ Almighty—I’m doing it tomorrow.”
    Tomorrow, unfortunately for Jordan and more so for Laila, had never come.
    At the swapmeet now. Jordan had taken enormous delight in all the modern-day yuppies taking him in— this bohemian weirdo with a green van selling his art. A cute girl of about nineteen had walked up to the van with a two-by-one. It was another political painting—the kind that he knew would sell. It was a crude rendition of Uncle Sam. He was in the middle of an opium field, and his balls were being squeezed savagely, mercilessly by a large, gloved hand that had said over it Halliburton.
    “I love this,” the girl beamed. She had auburn hair and an innocent way of speaking. “How much?” She teased her own curly hair as she asked him.
    “Normally, twenty. But you—you I like. I like your face. Free.”
    “Free,” she beamed. “You’re sure?” She looked at the painting in wonderment. Jordan had felt sorry for her—he could just see her showing the painting to her radical liberal friends at Berkeley, or wherever the hell else it was that she studied. But she definitely studied somewhere, and she was definitely a bright apple. It was a shame she would have to wait another three years, at least, to overcome this silly little phase in her life. Then and there Jordan had felt a tremendous love for this woman, and he didn’t want to see her get away. Not before he could consummate it on Darren’s bed which, up until now, he had not the good fortunate of using.
    “You like that,” he smiled at her innocently enough. “And you’d really like the dozens more I have in the van.” There was a pause, so he could think up a good story. “I just don’t keep them out because they were recently painted, and the sun can possibly distort the colors, making them splotchy and whatnot.”
    “Sure,” the girl smiled. “I’d love to see them!”
    And then she followed Jordan into the back of the van—and, it wasn’t three minutes later that their tongues were wrestling one another, and that her warm, roomy chest was beating against his fiercely, radically.
    Seconds after climax, the girl in his arms, the two of them sweaty, alive and beaming, Jordan couldn’t help thinking, beyond gratefully, It doesn’t get much better than this.

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