We wound around Akard Street so much that I have no idea where we were. We’d just left a tiny unmarked warehouse space showcasing experimental music made with Commodore 264s, line-item-printers, and old Atari sets. The Underground so fresh, so underground, that I’d found myself looking the trends up and down the same way my mother had done me in those same clothes years ago.

But we ended up in my kind of place. Only, like I said before, I can’t tell you where my kind of place is. A belly button to the city, where people that go missing end up. Atlantis. Roanoake. Elizabeth Smart. My baby’s daddy.

The parking lot was just dirt for a shack made from scrap wood and its front porch sloped with an overhang like an old west saloon. We pushed the front door open, and bright warm smoke put it’s arms around us and walked us down a short hallway that ended in a big puddle of old friends that had long ago dropped out of the scene. We laughed and bumped each one heart to heart, and the hollow wood floor thumped.

This is where I learned how to play low stakes dice games on borrowed quarters and a green felt pool table. Mark Cotton coached me on a three dice game the boys called C-low. 4,5,6 wins; Craps is out. Tripples beats the point. The point falls out from the standing die between a matching pair. Everybody in the whole place was in; even the bartender.

What I saw was that some men roll like ass-holes. Some men roll like children. Some men roll with no respect whatsoever and some men roll dice like they’ve been waiting all week for Friday night come. Nobody chats over a game of dice outside of shit talkin’ and prayin’ so you pretty much decide who you like and who you don’t by the way they toss. I don’t like the assholes, the children, or disrespectful folk. Straight-shooters only. One or two quick clicks in the fist is perfectly acceptable, but then let them go clean.

It doesn’t matter whether I won or lost that night. Mainly because like I said, it was borrowed money. The game died out when people got to drunk to toss. The first die was lost to the right corner pocket, and not even the sober white-aproned bus boy could stretch his arm far enough into the belly of the table to retrieve it. Someone made a desperate attempt to make a game out of two cubes, and a few hung in there, but just rounds later the second one got swallowed up too.