Empty Pockets by Dale Herd Page A

time.”
    â€œYou’re all heart, Arnie,” I said.
    â€œIsn’t everyone?” Arnie said.

Paradise
    A s we walk by, a young girl steps out and hands us a pamphlet.
    â€œWould you like to attend a meeting,” she says, “a Buddhist meeting? It will show you the way to peace on the earth and self-enlightenment?”
    â€œNo, thank you,” Lea said, “I already know the way.”
    â€œAh, c’mon,” the girl says, “you’re putting me on . . .”

Cut Flowers
    â€œS ex works exactly the same way. Listen to this. I was going out with this gal, right, gorgeous, gorgeous gal, a client of mine. Well, I never laid a finger on her, never. Knew better than that. That’s what everyone else would do. ’Cause she was fabulous. Totally. So we keep going out, getting to know each other better. I’m staying completely under control. It wasn’t conscious on my part. Not completely. It was just what I was doing. So this one time she’s over to pick me up. I’m in the bedroom fixing my tie. I turn around and there she is, sitting on the bed. I looked at her and said, What are you doing? We have a theater date in twenty minutes. Don’t you want me? she says. Sure, babe, I said, absolutely, and we will, I mean, we both know that. Now c’mon, get off there, we’ve gotta get going.
    â€œOkay. We go out a few more times. Same thing. I don’t do a thing. So one night she’s here. I’m sitting here, she’s over there. So all of a sudden she just jumps across the couch and, well, so that was that.
    â€œNow, okay; how does it end? Well, she ends it. She used to come over for the weekend. It was just great. She’d stay all weekend. We’d never go anywhere. We never went out for a minute. It was our refuge from the world. We didn’t do much, make love, sometimes just cook, watch TV , maybe do some barbecue, make love some more. She never wore anything. All she’d wear would be one of my shirts. It was really fine. Just perfect. And she’d say I just loved you all weekend. Just was the key to the whole situation. I just loved you this weekend. Just was the way we wanted it. It was really good. Well, then she did it. She changed it. She said, I love you. I said, What are you saying? She said, I do, I love you. I just looked at her. She said, What’s my future with you? I said, Babes, you just had your future with me.
    â€œSo that was it. I didn’t see her again. Then about a year latershe calls. She wants a couple of hundred dollars, she says. Something has gone wrong, see, and she knows she’s not gonna make it. Sure, I tell her, c’mon over and pick it up. She comes over. I give her the money, but, like don’t tell me what it’s for, I tell her, just take it, you tell me what it’s for and I might not approve. Okay, she says, and I could use another fifty for running money. Take a hundred, I tell her. No, fifty more was all she wanted.
    â€œAnd that was it. I gave it to her and that was it, see. Because if you borrow money then I’m involved in your personal life, right? That’s the way it is. I’m not a bank. I don’t want your personal life. Only a bank can give you money and not be involved in your personal life. She knew that.”

Bragging
    T he coat was folded lengthwise, and when he got in and laid it on my board I saw a rifle barrel emerge. He had a leather pack on the ground he had to squat to lift, and when he put it in back next to the coat I could smell blood. The pack was loaded with deer meat, 110 pounds of deer meat. He was Chet, he said, Chet the Jet of The Family Dog. He and his old lady had been with The Dog up in the Santa Lucias but she got pregnant, they’d moved down to Pacific Grove because of that. They were into macrobiotics but just brown rice wasn’t giving her the strength, she wanted meat, so he’d gone back up there and shot a