text: I'll never understand the power of inebriation to make things funny when any rational empathetic person would find them heartbreaking. It rewires the brain unplugging the proper emotion from a stimulus and connecting it to its moral opposite. Joy for disgust. Anger for pity. Love for disdain. There is one connection that never gets touched no matter how long or how much you try. Every drunk hopes one more round will break the link from regret to sadness. That bond only gets stronger. Still they persist and drink here day after day. My humble dump of a pub hugs an ancient block wall that reaches out of the sand from what had once been sidewalk. It is not much more than a lean to built with a quilt work of charred road signs and corrugated tin. All hung on a lattice of what you might think was driftwood if it were not in a desert. When I built it five years after the blast life had just started to creep back. They said the radiation would kill me. They were right because I won't last much longer but the morons didn't realize that was the point. I just didn't think it would take so long. Penance has a pace all its own. The bar was an accident, or a sentence depending on your point of view. Leaning against that wall drinking one day a guy offers me money for a swallow. The next day he staggers by and brings a friend. We held up the wall and drank till the bottle was empty. Rinse and repeat. This went on for days, because I had a secret stash and a longing for a horrible death. In my half lit state I decided a bar needed a proper table so I scavenged one of those wooden spools they use for the power lines. There were a lot of them around from before the government gave up on restoring services and surrendered Arizona back to the desert. I set up shop and have been here ever since. There were more people like me that wandered back for the death sentence than you would have thought. Each of them looking for somebody or some thing they knew wouldn’t be here. The city blocks of rubble around Talking Stick turned into a little community for the broken, starving and cancer plagued survivors. Trading for food, drugs and other sordid needs. Wherever there are people, there is thirst for amnesia and what was left of the entrepreneur in me was compelled to fill the need in the market. You might be wondering where I got the booze. To understand that I have to take you back to when the NBA still played on the other side of the wall we drank under. Back in the day I was the penultimate business cliché. Every week was a stream of meetings, flights, and scavenger hunts for power outlets to charge the phone. Five minutes a night to talk to the kids. Weekends were for super dad. Coach third base. Paint a set for the play. Work in the yard to keep the homeowner’s association off my ass. And somewhere in there I saw the woman I was married to. She stopped being a wife a long time ago. Just another client meeting over an expensive dinner where I listened to problems, cared deeply and promised to fix them all, knowing all along I could not change a thing. It was a Friday and I couldn't wait to get home. Eva and the kids were picking me up and we were going straight to the NBA finals game. Nobody could believe the Suns were in it. It was my son's ninth birthday that weekend and he was crazy about it so I bought the tickets with my commission. My sixteen year old was all eye rolls and snapchat but once she got there I knew she would get into it. High impact quality time. Except that I blew it. The meeting went long and I missed my flight from Chicago. I got on the next one but I'd be late. It might work. I texted Eva and she would go ahead. I would meet them there since it was just a few blocks from the airport. No idea what I would do with the bags but I'd figure that out. This would work. The pilot had just given the announcement for the initial descent into Phoenix Sky Harbor. Forty-five minutes until game time. The plane banked right to come around and land from the west. Then the flash. It filled the cabin but felt like a camera flash you looked right into. A second later the plane banks harder, acceleration pushes me back into the seat and we climb. Some lady screams. When the shock wave hit I knew we were dead. It shuttered for what seemed like hours but it was only seconds. We didn’t die. Three hours later we land in Dallas. We should have died. We had been a hundred and twenty miles out and on pure reflex, the pilot finished the rotation he started and turned us in the opposite direction of the blast. Had we been perpendicular to the spherical shock wave radiating from ground zero or even at a lower altitude it would have rolled the aircraft. I heard more than three thousand died that way. But not me. I walked out of that airport with one thing in mind. Get to that arena. I never really thought about why and I never stopped. It is not like I had hope. I just had nothing else. The next few weeks were rental cars, dead phones, stolen cars, refugee camps, more bombs, water lines, riots, and walking. Endless walking. Funny thing about history is that they write down in excruciating detail how it starts. The finer points don't matter much when it ends. I kept moving from camp to camp, dodging troops scooping up people trying to get West once I got free of forced relocation. Why they cared to stop any of us I still don’t know. There wasn’t anything West of Albuquerque that didn’t glow in the dark. I had a time getting by the barricades at first but eventually the gatekeepers just drifted away. It just took a while for society to collapse to the point where they stopped caring if you wanted to kill yourself going home. It got easier to travel once I found that beautiful eighteen wheel monstrosity. An abandoned Peterbuilt at a truck stop outside Las Cruces, NV. The only thing I was ever grateful about from having an emotionally distant and mostly physically absent trucker father was that he taught me how to drive one of these when I was fourteen. That thing blew through the abandoned roadblocks like dry leaves in winter back east and I made the last four hundred miles in a third of the time it took me to go the first fifty. Dallas to Phoenix in forty-six months. The truck had one other advantage. Daddy taught me to drive but he never taught me how to unhook a trailer. By the time it got to Phoenix it was still hauling 18,990 bottles of Absolut. Turns out I get a hundred and eighty miles a gallon. Coming into the city most of the abandoned cars had been bulldozed off the highway by the military. Closer in it was much harder to move a rig that size so I ditched the truck in a rail yard, packed a few bottles of encouragement and started in on foot. More walking. Rubble strewn between charred buildings and the refuse of a dead civilization lay every where. Scattered among the ruins was the occasional scavenger with telltale growths and blisters, few teeth and even less time. I walked up what I thought was Jefferson past what had been Chase Field. Even back then a market of sorts had started to take shape at between the ruins of the sports complex and casino with a water peddler,battery smiths and other traders. I walked down Third street with the crumbling remains of a parking deck to my left and the hulk of the arena on my right. Turning on Jackson I planned to just walk around the block. You might have thought I’d have had a better plan than this after four years. I shuffled down the long block wall toward the arena’s south entry. When I noticed the monstrosity it looked almost as if it were leaning out of the wall. A trick of the light. At first I thought it was some kind of memorial. I’d had enough vodka by then to laugh out loud at the absurdity of an artist’s tribute in a dead city. Then through the haze it hit me. A long train of silhouettes. Blackened shadows etched all along the wall. A hundred or more outlines in the grey block face, forever queued in time for a game that never started. I slowed. Moving down the wall my fingers tracing the edges of Satan’s artwork until I came to one about four and a half feet high. I paused and looked back at two I had just brushed by and knew in my soul they were exactly five feet four inches. Tracy had caught up to Eva when she was fifteen. The air left my lungs and I sank to my knees, my face scraping the wall. Wanting so desperately to burn my own flesh into the rough gravel. Blood dripping on the sand at my feet. Every breath long slow and painful like it was drawn through the wall itself. Released in a dry coughing wail. I sat there wanting to die and started to drink. I drank until I couldn’t see anymore. Woke up and did it again. Drifting between screams, sobs and silence. I should have had a better plan. I don’t know how long after I looked up and there was a man standing over me. “Is that real liquor or are you just using the bottle to pretend” Somehow I found a voice, and told him what it was. “I’ll pay you for it.” And with that transaction my last life as a bartender to the damned began. Day after day I stare at the wall where my ghosts hang in judgement. But as much as I longed to see them as they were, I want so much more to see the shadow that isn't there. For another blinding light to put me on that wall where I should have been. Go ahead and laugh. Everybody does after a few. I don’t hear it any more. I just drink and I wait for the game to start here at the bar I call the Flash and Shadow.