As Ivy enters the room, Bo is leaning against the bar. He exhales a plume of life and says, “Ivy, come here.”
She saunters and swivels. A smile, a laugh.
“Why, of course, Bo,” she says.
He takes another meditative drag. “Ivy,” his voice is staccato. He punctuates his sentences with cadenced pauses.
“Ivy, I know an old man like myself does not stand a chance with a young woman like you.” He tilts his head back and takes a drag of his smoke.
He continues, “But, Ivy, if I should die, and come back as a horse, would you train me?”
Ivy leans forward, throws her arms around his neck and kisses him on the cheek.
“I’d be honored, Bo,” she says.
The flirtation continues. A week later, Ivy is at the front bar slinging drinks to an audience of wannabe suitors. Bo glides through the door and it’s as though the bar is suddenly connected to a tobacco stained band of light, a fading ray, here for a moment to teach us about defiance and dignity and grand gestures.
Bo lights a cigarette and waits for Ivy to look his way. When she does he says, “You know, Ivy, if I was just 40 years younger…”
She cuts him off, “You’d be 40, Bo.”
This time he gives her a kiss.
About the Author
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John Rexer, the founder and editor of La Cuadra Magazine, expatriated himself from Los Estados about 12 years ago because he couldn't stand seeing his city, New York, lobotomized by the metastasizing sameness of WalMart America and didn't have a pillow large enough to Chief Bromden the place out of it's misery. After knocking around Mexico for a while he landed in Antigua, Guatemala - broke but certain about the decision to stay out of the States. Without much of a backup plan he opened Café No Sé (with a rusty credit card) on a residential street, in this sleepy, third-world, colonial town with the intention of creating the best bar in the known universe. For those of you who've been through Antigua, you know he succeeded. Primary mission accomplished, a few years later John started "creatively transporting" mezcal from Oaxaca into Guatemala with the intention of creating a multi-national company that would deliver the finest agave spirits to the citizenry of the world. That company, Ilegal Mezcal, is currently selling its booze around the globe.
La Cuadra Magazine, an idea hatched a decade ago in a booze fueled bitch session with current Editor-in-Chief, Mike Tallon, is actually just the first step in larger plan to develop a publishing company that will create a genius literary movement in this new century in much the same way that Ferlinghetti's City Lights project launched the Beat Movement of the 1950s.
Writ short, his aspirations are as big as his liver. Or, as Mike has noted on a number of occasions, John Rexer puts the "messy" back in "Messianic."
Rexer, I remember all of your stories about Bo. What a nice surprise, on this dull and rainy Saturday morning in London…to read about him. Tell him that if he comes back as a weimaraner in his next life, I would be happy to train him. Love you, Trisha