Inkster

Back in middle 1980s, the Gypsy and I were in Detroit visiting her mother. The two yentas went over the bridge into Windsor to shop so I had the day to myself. I went on a long run through the suburb where the Gypsy grew up. Every house, if it wasn’t entirely made of brick, had a brick front. It was Dearborn—The Gypsy told me the locals pronounced it Dear-BURN. When I returned, I showered, put on some clean clothes, and drove the rental car over to the Henry Ford Museum.

This visit to Detroit was my first, so I headed down Michigan Avenue to see old Tiger Stadium. The Tigers were out of town, so I drove around the neighborhood a bit and found a tavern. Therein, I ordered a local brew—“Fire Brewed” Stroh’s­— highly recommended by my girlfriend’s mother. The place had pictures of former Tiger greats hanging on every wall.

A guy with a Tiger’s cap on and I struck up a baseball conversation all the while buying one another “Fire Brewed” Stroh’s. When I mentioned to him that I was from Los Angeles, he asked me what it was like living out there.

“Smog’s real bad and so is the traffic. You ain’t missing much,” I told him.

“I like topless bars.” he said, “I hear L.A. has one on every corner almost.”

I met my girlfriend, the Gypsy, while she was dancing in a topless bar. After the Gypsy and I moved in together, she quit dancing. She took to telling fortunes with tarot cards and began taking real estate classes. Dancing, she was making sometimes over five hundred a week. After she quit, we were lucky if she made a c-note a week reading her cards for customers out of our apartment. It was okay though, because I was working a lot of overtime in the warehouse back then, so we were doing just fine.

“Yeah,” I told him, “there’s a lot of topless bars around Los Angeles. If you ever come out, call me, and I’ll give you the beer and boobs tour.”

I scribbled my name and number down on a napkin and handed it to him. He put it in his wallet.

“Tell you what,” he said, “I gotta go, but if are looking for a topless bar, then drive out to Inkster. When you leave here, make a right out on Michigan Ave and go a few miles and you’ll see Bogart’s on the right. It’s a wild place.”

After my new friend left, I had another Stroh’s, and with nothing better to do, I drove west on Michigan Avenue out to Inkster. Sure enough, there was Bogart’s. Inside, it was classic topless bar ambiance. Multicolored fluorescent and neon lighting softly illumed the strategic darkness. Rock music wailed from several over-sized speakers. Big-haired beer-maids, all with barely controlled cleavage and near-bare butt-cheeks, scurried about with almost foamless pitchers of beer. On the spacious stage, four dancers, legs akimbo and bare breasts a-bouncing, gyrated and shimmied like painted, dollar-driven, rock ‘n roll she-demons. Yeah, that guy back at the cocktail bar knew his topless bars.

Bogart’s had it going on.

It was the definitive den of din and sin.

By the time I got back to Dear-BURN it was late. The Gypsy and her mother were sitting at the dining room table, tarot cards spread out between them. In their over-ringed fingers, each of the gypsies held mini-fish bowl sized wine glasses. Their faux gold bracelets fallen to mid-wrist, their glossy red and over-long fingernails curled around the bulbous goblet’s stems like stylized crimson snakes. On the table alongside the crux of colorful cards was an assemblage of gaudy vases and junk jewelry—meretricious booty no doubt from Canadian second-hand stores.

“Are you drunk?” the Gypsy asked, after just the briefest of glances at me.

“Maybe a little.”

“A little, my hairy Hungarian ass!” she quipped, and she and her mother let out simultaneous little laughs.

“What did you do all day, Honey?” the Gypsy’s mother asked me.

The Gypsy took a long sip of Sauvignon from her goblet and again gave me that accusatory glance with those merlot-dark eyes of hers. Then she went back to scrutinizing the long-practiced assemblage of demon-ridden cards before her on the table.

I looked back at the Gypsy’s mother and said, “I spent the day at the Henry Ford Museum. Interesting place. Then I drove downtown and looked at Tiger Stadium. Found a bar and had a few beers—‘Fire Brewed’ Strohs like you suggested. Good stuff. Then I drove out to Inkster.”

“Inkster! Did you go to Bogart’s?” the Gypsy’s mother asked.

“Yeah,” I answered, taken aback by her insightful question. I shouldn’t have been, since I’ve learned that these Czigany women are very intuitive, even straight-out psychic at times.

“What’s Bogart’s?” the Gypsy asked her mom, not looking up from the prophetic cards.

“A topless joint. Your stepfather used to go there until I gave him a reading once and told him I saw Bogart’s going up in flames, and him and his horny buddies all being burned to death alongside some half-naked, coked-up girls with fake tits. You know that he took my readings serious after the cards told me that his mother was going to get in a car crash on that cold, snowy, windy night just this side of Duluth. Remember, I told him to call her and tell her not to drive up there that night, but he just laughed at me. Well, you know what happened. Poor woman—had to be a closed casket.”

“I’m going up to bed,” I said, and leaned over and gave the Gypsy a kiss on the top of her black-haired head. She ignored it.

“Did you really see Bogart’s going up in flames?” I asked her mother, as I walked unsteadily towards the stairs.

“Well—” the older Gypsy began, but was interrupted by her daughter.

“Sit your boob-loving, fire-brewed ass down biker-boy,” the Gypsy said, sweeping the brightly colored cards into a well-practiced pile with a jangling of her bracelet-laden, hairy arms, “I need to give you a reading before you pass out.”

Tired and drunk as I was that long ago night, I shoulda just went on up to bed instead of letting the Gypsy read the cards for me. Halfway through the reading, I got up from the table. I knew the cards were stacked ill against me.

“Where do you think you’re going,” the Gypsy asked, looking up at me with her Persephone eyes, “I’m not done yet?”

“Well I damn sure ain’t driving to Duluth.” I said, “I’m going to bed.”

That comment drew a little laugh from Simona.

“That’s too bad,” the Gypsy said, drawing the crux of cards back before her on the table. “I’ll never understand all you fucked-up topless bar guys—I mean, do you idiots think that whoever sees the most tits in their lifetime wins a prize or a trophy or goes to some higher heaven or something?”

I just ignored her pithy comment, but the vino-fueled Gypsy wasn’t done with me yet.

“Mom,” the Gypsy said, “lift up your blouse so beer-brained biker boy here can mark down another set of tits he’s seen.”

The Gypsy’s mother schussed her and I went on up to bed. I did sneak a look back though, just in case Simona thought her daughter was serious.

Not long after that trip to Detroit the Gypsy dumped me. She had started to make some serious money. Tarot Cards and real estate—who’d ever think that those two things would work together for lucre? She had wanted me to go in with her and buy a house, but I, in my numb-nuts, tits-counting, “drifter” fashion, told her I couldn’t be tied down to a mortgage and that I still had lots more motorcycle traveling to do. (For the past five years I had spent two months each year seeing the country on my motorcycle.)

“I know you’re going to hate me,” the Gypsy told me at the door the night she threw me out, “but the cards told me that I have to do this. I love you, but you know I can’t ever go against The Tarot no matter what. They told me that I need a man with ambition and drive, not a man-boy with drifter pipedreams who disappears for a months at a time and when he’s here he is either at the topless bar or if he’s home he’s content to sit around watching baseball, drinking beer and polishing his dumbass motorcycle.”

She was wrong. I never came to hate her. I missed her, and for years use to think about her a lot, especially those times when I’d be watching baseball, drinking beer and polishing my motorcycle. Only going to a topless bar would take my mind off her for a while.

“Drifter” please! Drifters don’t work the same job for thirty-some years, minus a few months here and there. Okay, so I had this romantic Kerouac or Herman Hesse-like image of myself. It was unreal as any Heaven or Hell, I know. But many, if not all of us, have to tell ourselves lies in order to go on. After all, it’s been said that we save our very best bullshit for ourselves.

The cards were right, again.

BIO: Dan Delehant has had stories appear in Dear Booze Magazine, Twisted Endings Magazine, Liquid Imagination Magazine, and elsewhere. Dan and his wife Dora live in Temescal Canyon, Southern California.