When I was working at that bougie place on the row, they offered health insurance but I got fired before I could get it. Maybe it was too many Saturday nights in the summer calling in sick while I was selling ounces of mushrooms and burning my feet on the beach down the Jersey shore. I think it was because besides the manager I was the only one in that place lucky enough to fuck this singer who worked there. He got his feelings hurt and took it out on me. It was hard luck in Philly then. Bitter cold, February. We shared a cab. When she got out I followed her in. Her hair glowed red in the cab’s brake lights. We could see our breath when we laughed.

It wasn’t until summer that he got his revenge. He fired me. On the payphone at 83rd&3rd, in Stone Harbor. I leaned right, taking the weight off my foot. It was bandaged and burned. The sun was setting on the strip. It lit up the water-glass of Wild Turkey tilting in my hand like a jewel. The beach was deserted no families no one. I hung up and dug for your number in a pocketful of cigarettes and sand. Your boyfriend answered so I hung up, limped across the street and back to my sad throne. I drank in dusk with gulls crying in the salty air. I had no apprehension of anything. My dead car, my sudden unemployment, the black September cleaving in. Nothing. I sunk low in my chair and drank. It was the end of the summer and I blew it again. I felt old and foolish like only the young can.

Curator at Going For the Throat, columnist for Into The Void and progenitor of stand-up tragedy,™ Jim Trainer's Keep Bleeding In The Anno Finem: 10 Years At Going For The Throat will be released this year through Yellow Lark Press. To sign up for Jim Trainer’s Poem Of The Week, visit jimtrainer.net.