text: I was only fooling myself. To think she would stay with me when my wallet got thin and front page headlines turned to passing mentions on some obscure fan site. Sheila was long gone but I understand. I’m surprised she lasted as long as she did. The news feed on my mobile used to light up as the band got famous but now we were old news, a fan site somehow knew where I was: *Rock legend Dennis Crip spotted today by the Mavis Motel, not *quite* the teen idol he once was...* And this was from the reporter who always said nice things about me. I met Shelia backstage after a show in Dallas two years ago. “What’s a nice girl like you doing at a place like this?” I said as I lowered my sunglasses to flash my blue eyes. She laughed. “Which lying asshole told you I was nice?” She said while she flipped her hair back for dramatic effect. “I’m Dennis,” I said and held out my hand. “Sheila,” she said. What followed was eighteen months of hell intermixed with an *almost* hit record, an *almost* hit tour and an *almost* normal relationship with Sheila. But soon the private jet and luxury hotels went away when the hit didn’t happen. We went from flying in a Gulfstream to riding in a Dodge van. And soon the Ritz Carlton morphed into the Mavis Motel. It was worse being an *almost* rock star than being nobody; if you never got a taste of it, you don’t know what you’re missing. The room smells like a thousand dead elephants and she didn’t leave a farewell note or message. But her shit was gone and the battered door was left swinging wide open. The Mavis Motel slogan should have been, *We don’t give a shit as long as you pay.* It was a place where the cops wouldn’t respond to calls anymore, a place with more broken glass than carpet, a place cops called the *murder motel* since the mix of drugs and booze ended most Saturday nights with crime scene tape and them counting the shell casings. And the only saving grace was that most of the shooters were too high to aim, so bullets might fly but only add to the holy decor. *Fuck.* I fumbled for my cigarettes but she took ‘em, as if a hit of nicotine would lessen the sting from where she busted my nose the night before. Two bottles of Jack Daniels blurred into some sort of coke fueled fight about whether Clapton or Hendrix was better. So now the TV was half-buried in the drywall where a mirror used to be. And Sheila was halfway to Mexico by now with my cigarettes, wallet and lighter in her cherry red claws. I outta drive the van, the one thing I ever paid cash for, off a high desert overpass. There would be no more mornings of waking up hungover and bleeding with my cigarettes five hundred miles away in the purse of the woman who broke my nose the night before. Hendrix was better, there I said it.