This is my home town. This is where I'm from.

It's a bluesy sound, the music of the Late Rounders, the guys likely all from one of the small towns in the area although they'll all say they're from Cape, have voices like you'd hear on the radio. They cover the Ray Wylie Hubbard song Snake Farm although the way the lead singer whines you'd think he'd been there before.

"I asked Ramona how come she works there.
She says it's got its charms.
Nothing to do in the winter.
Now and then some kid gets bit at the snake farm."

And I'm sure he has... Just in a different city with a different name, maybe right across the bridge which stretches over the great Mississippi River leading drunk college kids and deteriorating rednecks like mosquitoes to the neon lights of the Pink Pony in shit-hole Southern Illinois.

The Pink Pony. You wouldn't think it's turn up noses similar to a name like Snake Farm, but across the 50 states I've been to plenty of Pink Pony's and they're far from toy stores relying on little girl's love of My Little Pony. No sir-e. They're places that rely on some little girls growing up without much of innocence to fall back on. They've all smelled of smoke and molding liquor. The majority of the clientele is male and also smell of molding liquor. And 100% of the performers are female and aren't afraid, or maybe there is fear and that's part of the rush, to show a lotta skin.
(I want to intrude here... I'm sure not all strippers come from broken homes and struggle. I think it could be a very empowering thing to do in some cases. In others, possibly the majority, not so much.)

It's 10 o'clock in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, a burgeoning (Ben Affleck and David Fincher were recently in town filming Gone Girl) small college town in the Southeast of the state. It's one of the more liberal areas in Missouri although no one that lives there and most that witness the townspeople's idiotic, ineffectually smartass, Facebook posts would agree. But there's a tired youth connected to other, “better” places through the internet, so the town's population, even the young adults that basically vomit exactly what their parents think about politics and economics and society and racism, hears other sides to the story and that's the first step towards acceptance.

So it's 10 o'clock and the music is loud and the atmosphere is just what I like. I'm sure it's because I grew up here, but us Southeast Missourians know how to party. We're educated, we know what class is, we just choose not to partake.

A 20-something blonde is being spun around by a gray-haired man. She's laughing, and while his smile is unassuming, I'm sure he's still got one toe in the gutter. This isn't abnormal, for the young adults to hang out with the old hippies, to stroll around town together, to share a Budweiser and a bowl together, to sleep together.

And no one stares unless their smiling along with, feeling their toes start to tap until it bounces them right out of the chair and onto the dance floor in front of the pool table. That beer-splattered green cloth sleeps under the various knick-knacks that have been collected and attached to the walls and ceilings--a license plates, sports memorabilia, anything and everything. Isn't it cliché? A dirty dive bar full of junk, but I'd put a bet on everyone else copying us.

The couple keeps dancing, the gentleman pulling her away from the girls walking in like they own the place, in rhinestone-assed jeans and pointed-toe high heels. And while I'm proud of where I came from, I can't help but roll my eyes at these small town “big deals.” And since I've been removed I can actually smile at these patrons, but maybe it's a bit patronizing, but it's not the fake smile and gossipy pleasantries everyone else here uses.

Seven dollars for a vodka/cranberry in a pint glass, light on the cranberry. Four dollars for a pack of Marlboro Lights that you can smoke anywhere.

Warning, there's a tangent afoot: At the beginning of 2011, a vote was brought to the citizens of Cape Girardeau, what was called a “controversial” bill to ban smoking in bars and restaurants in the town. On April 5 Missouri voters struck down the bill by a 52% margin—a slimmer margin than I honestly would have expected, but at that time I was a serving bar flies extra strawberry butter and BBQ plates, watching over my tables from the end of the bar where I smoked like a chimney on the clock at a restaurant owned by one of the opposition leaders of the bill, grumbling about the strangling of our freedoms and the loss of revenue the downtown area would feel if those regulars had to walk outside. Shit they might have even realized it was a god damned beautiful night and go for a walk by the river, which is literally three feet away, behind the river wall, painted with notable people who “were born in the state or achieved fame while living there,” like Yogi Berra, Calamity Jane, George Washington Carver, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Pulitzer and Rush fucking Limbaugh.

But if you do venture outside for some fresh air, it'll be tainted with a puff of skunk-y smoke. And harder drugs, you shouldn't have a problem finding anything you need.

Just ask the people sitting at the bar already clearly fucked up. Like that middle-aged man that was a dish washer at that staple Bar-B-Que restaurant I worked at and played at for a couple years. He's laughing hysterically, spinning on his bar stool. “You look good,” he repeats and then laughs again, spinning away from me. He isn't saying it because he hasn't seen me in forever. No, instead the drugs are blocking his recollection and demanding over and over, “Find pussy.”

But you gotta ask early. Drugs get smoked, snorted and injected quick...

A friend of mine bought coke for my arrival. I'm not sure why, maybe for old time's sake. 

The night before this night at the bar, he microwaved the gram on probably an everyday, ordinary plate in his mother's kitchen because it was wet, tested it, decided it wasn't very good coke, so snorted it all by himself at 3 a.m. watching an Umphrey's McGee concert.  

“Why would you snort it all?”

“It wasn't good so it wouldn't even be worth it for you to do.”

I laugh; he gets upset and tells me not to judge. I'm not.

It's just ridiculous. It could easily be a scene in a movie adapted from a Hunter S. Thompson novel. And everyone would laugh at that man's unbridled “don't give a fuck.” 

I think it's harder for him to think it's comical, since he's far too smart to be struggling with drug addiction. Maybe I laugh because I am an asshole; I'm removed from the pestilence so what the hell do I care; it is like watching a movie.

Maybe I am judging...