Playing my Ace in the Hole

When faced with the doppelganger demons of a deadline and writer’s block, a columnist can always resort to the ol’ Ace in the Hole.

He (my preferred pronoun) can reach into the junk drawer of his noggin, pull out something that he started but didn’t finish, comb its hair, douse it with aftershave and submit it as “commentary.”

It’s a tried-and-true trick that requires a bit of the ol’ soft shoe, a fast pair of hands, and ultimately, deception. But the editors don’t care as long as it slides over the transom under the deadline and within word limits, and the audience eats it up like bacon-flavored ice cream.

Sometimes I feel like I’m cheating when I do it. Other times, I have sugarplum visions of Pulitzers and a WTF moment.

It’s times like this, when my Muse has dumped me again to run off to Belize with her Jamaican cabana boy, that I realize that I am all alone with the King’s English and damn little to say. So it’s up to me alone to make our language dance like she’s in heat, or pull out his switchblade and gut you with words. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So I’ll offer up a recent memory about the time I learned that I am no longer street legal.

It all started the other day when I ran out of Copenhagen. I drove to the C-store desperately jonesing, while Good Dog Henry rode shotgun and scanned the street for doggies, squirrels or anything he could bark at. My driver’s side turn blinker was out, so we had to resort to a series of right turns to get where we were going. That itself is probably probable cause for a bust that would hold up in court.

But Good Dog Henry and I are blessed with primo road karma, and we made it to the Copenhagen dispensary without being touched by the long arm of the law. So far, so good.

It was training day behind the counter, so when I asked for a roll of the Most Efficient Nicotine Delivery System On The Planet, the newbie cashier asked for my ID. Tobacco sales to minors are verboten in our quaint little village (a policy with which I disagree, but I am about as far from adolescence as a man can get and still be alive), so I tossed down my driver’s license like a good law-abiding citizen.

She examined my license through thick glasses, then scanned the back of it. “This license expired three years ago,” she informed me, “I can’t sell you any Copenhagen.”

Like I said, I have great cop karma and hadn’t had occasion to pull out my license for quite some time. I examined it myself, and the li’l gal was right. I looked her square in the eye with my grizzled beard and wrinkled Boomer visage, and said, “Does this look like a Gen-Z face to you? Hell, I have boots older’n you.”

But she wouldn’t budge. The law is the law.

It must have been the nicotine withdrawals talking when I patted my pockets and told the trainee clerk, “I have a note from my mom. She says it’s OK for me to chew this stuff.” She just shook her purple-haired head.

Good Dog Henry greeted me with his tongue lolling out and his flews drooling when I got back to the truck. He wanted a pinch of chaw between his lip and gum as badly as I did. “No dice, pard,” I told him. “We need to wait for the next shift.”

We corkscrewed our way back home, making right turn after right turn, to stare blankly at the walls for a few hours until there was a cashier on duty who would sell contraband to an undocumented cowboy and his dog.

So there you have it.

I wanted to write something with political heft — the box score of the culture war, or a clever dispatch from the battlefield of ideas. But I suffered a severe case of writer’s block, and was forced to resort to that ol’ Ace in the Hole. And quite often, what that consists of is nothing more than giving the world enough time to sort itself out around me.