economics lesson
leon got drunk in the corner of the bar
where he sat after serving pints all day
to republicans and racists
he was often with a broken arm
or a black eye
from getting beaten on or thrown off the bus
he said to me, tonight is our tete-e-tete
and then he had me put gershwin on the jukebox
to drown out the mets game
leon took out a piece of paper and started drawing
some complex economic design upon it
layers upon layers of circles
with numbers and figures scrawled in drunken chicken scratch
i didn’t know what to make of it
except that i’d never understand economics
beyond my frayed wallet
i just wanted to drink beer and listen to gershwin
forget the job that i’d come from
and had to go back to the next day
i wanted the mets to win
but they were down again
and some of the guys in the joint
were starting to get restless about it
the seat next to leon was the only one
available in that joint
because they’d all been through this economics lesson before
some of them men had threatened to kill leon
if he ever brought up economics again
so he stayed mute on the subject with them
and just served them their beer
as they yelled about hispanics and blacks
but i was still new to the joint and still docile
and wasn’t of their rowdy ilk
so they threw me to the wolf with his scratch pad and pen
his laptop and pint of bud
and they laughed at me as i sat there
the lone soul in barroom economics 101
with professor leon
getting more and more soused by the minute
scrawling like he was mozart on an alcoholic kick
the gershwin reaching a crescendo of horns and piano
lines and line of economic nonsense
that held no matter for me
being splattered upon the paper in mad pollock dabbles of
ink
me thinking that because of leon
i’d been nursing the same beer for over an hour
telling myself that if he kept it up
that i was going home to drink
this bar be damned for once and for all
which made the best economic sense for me
that strange and fiscal night.
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