Well, it’s been an uphill battle being Jonny Cigar. As my twice-widowed grandma was fond of saying: All stallions could be mounted sooner or later. I took that advice to heart. This was 1976. It wasn’t until 1979 that I saw the sun again. In those days you had to can your own food and I had a supply of corned beef and hash that lasted me through. I memorized all of Hemingway’s books and re-read them to myself out loud from memory. I charged myself premium prices to see me perform and before I knew it I had more gigs than Shirley Temple. As a side note I found out that one pound of butter takes six weeks to evaporate completely if you leave it out in the open. It seemed I had discovered a magic trick, but had to speed up the action, ya know? I tried to make all kinds of things disappear: shoes, furniture, baby elephants, whiskey – I got real good at making the whiskey disappear. Though, later, I wished I could reverse the act and make it reappear cuz dang, it put a hole in my allowance so big you could fit a heard of immigrants right through without changing the spellings of their last names… Then there was Vegas. You didn’t know the Vegas I knew. Mostly cuz it wasn’t in Nevada. No, no, sir, Vegas was in Montana. Vegas was a small town where I was king of the land, an urban cowboy. I wore boots twenty-four hours a day and chewed dandelions in my mouth so my teeth would turn to a golden yellow. I could smile in the thick of night and you’d swear the sun had just risen. I invented, what historians refer to as “the prairie” and turned America from swampland to the land of mobile homes and twenty-four hour gas stations. My America. Where boys and girls grow up to pursue their dreams of livin’ life on minimum wage and deep frying the turkey every Thanksgiving while giving thanks for all the credit cards our institutions hath bestowed upon their hearty hearts. In my day, there was no credit and if you wanted a drink you had to work for it. ……….. so pour up bartender, cuz I’ve paid my dues. Well, I may not have a thing at all, but I got lots of plans for tomorrow… just you wait…
