Another Broken Wizard Read Online Free PDF

liked him enough to fire and then rehire him more than a few times. Joe introduced me to Erik, who let me in without paying the cover. I ordered a beer and Joe told me how had been fired the last time around.
    “I was bartending, and I over-served myself. Like, I was out past the last boundary fence of anything even resembling sanity. So this guy orders a beer.”
    “And that’s all he did—order a beer,” Erik interjected.
    “Exactly, by all accounts a perfectly reasonable guy. And I remember thinking I didn’t like his face. So I said I didn’t hear him, and he leaned in to order, and I punched him in the face. But by the time I hit him, I realized that it was the totally wrong thing to do. And Erik is like, right there,” Joe said, punctuating the story with his laugh.
    “So Joe just looks over at me and says ‘I know. I know .’ And he takes off his apron and leaves. It was the easiest time I ever had firing anyone,” Erik said, cracking up along with us.
    People forgave Joe. For all the dumb, destructive things he did, he was never malicious for very long. And he had a way of inviting even the people he’d wronged to laugh along. They mostly did. After all, he he’d given them a good story. And that was worth something.
    The Lucky Dog was peppered with faces I had known and half forgotten in the last decade—people from little league, from keg parties, from high school, from McDonalds’ parking lots, friends I’d willingly or accidentally lost touch with, an ex-girlfriend I’d say hello to, and one that I wouldn’t.
    “Jim fucking Monaghan, how the hell are you?” said Terry something, emerging from the crowd and offering me his hand.
    Terry looked pale in his black leather jacket and weathered Red Sox cap. We’d played little league and gone to high school together. I hadn’t seen him in at least a decade. We did the recap. Now he taught high school in Shrewsbury and had a daughter who lives with her mother. I gave mine, leaving out that I was unemployed, that my folks had split, and that Dad was days from surgery. It’s funny how you can live ten, fifteen years, but can’t be bothered to discuss it, can’t get excited about the story. It amounts to a line or two, careful to sound content, careful not to boast. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Terry—he’d never been anything but nice to me. But there was no place where our lives intersected, except in time and space. We drank a shot together and I excused myself to go to the men’s room.
    The night’s first band started tuning up. Erik told me it was a hardcore band, which meant an angry wall of sound fronted by a fat guy with a shaved head and possibly a goatee. He would scream, gesture angrily and rock violently back and forth. It seemed like every third guy in Worcester was in a band like that. Erik, Joe and I drank and joked around until the band started screaming, thrashing and so on. After a few songs, the music got on my nerves, and Joe knew the unattached women at the bar too well to want to stay. We left and I followed Joe’s white Buick Skylark across town to Ralph’s.
     
     
    7.
     
     
    Along with the birth-control pill, liquid-fuel rocket, monkey wrench, smiley face and barbed wire, Worcester is the birthplace the diner. And an old green diner fronted Ralph’s bar and diner. I followed Joe around an old mill building remade into a furniture showroom, past Ralph’s spastic green neon sign, and down a crumbled concrete stretch that wasn’t exactly a parking lot and wasn’t exactly a street.
    The stretch was Friday-night crowded, so we parked in the shadows beside Ralph’s. In the darkness I could see I-290 atop a palisade of shadow in the distance. The city light reflecting off the clouds made the sky pink. No one had ever spoken or wrote or sang of a pink night sky. It had once made me believe I was dealing with a totally new experience.
    Inside Ralph’s, Joe knew too many people to list. It was a series of exuberant,