New Year’s 2013 is on the clock and so my friend Darren is all like you can’t go home and be by yourself on New Year’s, you can’t ring in the new year by yourself, and so I walk into Pat’s Cocktails and I see Brett and his beautiful girlfriend who has a twin so I greet Brett and his beautiful girlfriend and her twin and I always look back and forth between the twins because they are identical, I have a brief fantasy of watching them play ping pong wearing only bikini thongs, and then I also see Jerry who is bummed out that the coach for the Buffalo Bills got fired today. I see Vivian who also has a twin and I hug them both and I say hello. I ponder for a second the significance of greeting two pair of female twins in a row. I see Reese outside all bundled up because he still can’t come inside from being 86’d. Russell walks in after me and I am always glad to see Russell and I am thinking I am so glad that Darren talked me into coming into Pat’s Cocktails, I am so happy I am here saying hello to all these wonderful people and ringing in the new year. I sit next to Sergio at the bar, Sergio still doesn’t have a Facebook but I always ask him do you have a Facebook yet? We are talking about football and all the coaches who got fired today and we are cracking jokes about the tragedy that befell the football world on black Monday, New Year’s Day 2013. I am only drinking diet Pepsi. A ton of motorcycle cops are cruising up and down Riverside Drive. I tell Leslie the barmaid I am not drinking tonight no way no how and she’s like ok.

When this girl I met earlier sidles up to me and orders her drink but then turns and starts dancing next to me. She is doing this really close to me like she expects me to dance with her, I guess while sitting on my bar stool, because she is so close to me that I am actually blocked in by her dancing and I can’t even stand up.

Sergio had told me earlier that some girls celebrating at the bar were porn actresses and I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not and then he said something kinda funny, he said but that one, pointing at the slut version of Taylor Swift, only does double xx instead of triple xxx. Me: “I don’t know what that means.” And I really did not know what he meant.

So then what I surmise is the boyfriend of the dancing girl came over all agro but I thought he was fake agro and joking around because when I met him earlier he seemed cool. He is all puffed up like a bar peacock all puffed up which only made me think he was kidding all the more and he is like hey dude, are you trying to dance with my girl? Me: “I am only dancing with her with my eyes.” I thought that was very clever and I smiled like see? I’m in on the joke. But he was mad and he said you’re a real smart ass lard ass. He actually rhymed the insult. And I was like what? Oh you’re serious but I was impressed by the rhyme. And then he grabbed her by the arm while she was still dancing and jerked her away and she gave a war hoot like an owl, like a native warrior, but she was smiling and laughing. She raised her other arm above her head and hooted. And then Leslie the barmaid slammed the dancing girl’s drink down at the bar like a denouement, like an exclamation point, and I laughed and I laughed bitter and when I turned to see if Sergio was laughing with me, Sergio had actually been talking to a different porno girl sitting on the other side of him and missed the whole thing.

About 17 minutes later, the New Year lit up! People drank free champagne but not me. People blew noisemakers with streamers attached at the end. The streamers fluttered out when people blew into the noisemakers. Sergio was being funny, he stuck a noisemaker into his right nostril and blew, I heard a kazoo duck quack sound, and the streamer flew.

And at that moment I got lost in the haze of a memory. I saw myself sitting in the lobby of a police station near Pachacamac south of Lima, Peru. I had gotten picked up naked sleeping on the beach near some mangrove trees where the trees met the water. A tanned beauty and I were naked and sleeping post-coitus under the shade of coconut palm trees. And the policeman who woke us had told us to watch out for all the poisonous snakes. The snakes come out to warm themselves at dawn. But what I remember is all the air conditioners and rotating fans in the lobby of the police station had streamers attached and the streamers were fluttering and flapping, they were flickering and flittering, and I had the hardest time convincing the police that my passport was locked inside a car parked off the Highway of the Americas near the beach. The Peruvians were mad that I was an American and that I had slept with and defiled one of their Incan princesses and that was horrible, so horrible, my being an American and all. And this was also shortly after New Year’s Day of that year but south of the equator the season is warm, their summer is warm, but the ocean water is cold, always cold.

And then I lost the memory and could not tell if the memory had been a dream. I could not tell if the dream had been my dream. I remember the ruins of Pachacamac, the lost temples, and the girl telling me the name of the holy place meant The Seat of God the Earth-Shaker. I remember her laughing as she held my hands, as she led me to the beach. For some strange reason, I was wearing a loin-cloth. Below my lips, I was wearing a heavy purple and gold lip plug, which looked like an elongated and painted soul patch. She was laughing and her long black hair was flowing. Snakes in the sand were undulating away from us, crawling to some shattering beat. And she was dancing, she was topless. And I was watching her, in my mind I was dancing with her, I was dancing with her but only with my eyes. And then she pursed her lips, blew me a kiss, I heard a loud owl’s hoot, and I was back at the bar in 2013 and the bar was shaking, I‘d say the dance floor was quaking, my seat was swirling, and I was rubbing my chin. I got scared a little bit because I had not even had a drink. The dancing girl was now hooting like a howler monkey. I noticed her hair was long and black.

Back at Pat’s Cocktails, the new year of our Lord 2013 was in full tilt. People were dancing but not me. I saw a drunk porno girl spill beer down the front of her blouse and she thought this was funny because she laughed. I stood up and said hello to all my friends again and wished them a happy new year and then I went outside with Darren and I spoke with Reese and I told jokes and listened to their jokes. We were also laughing and having a good time when suddenly I got really tired and very sad. I couldn’t remember all the things I had said and all the things I had done. I couldn’t remember my life anymore. The last year was gone. I felt an urge to blow into a noisemaker, I wanted to make something quaver, ripple, oscillate, but I had left my noisemaker next to Sergio’s noisemaker on the bar and they were of the same ecru color and he had stuck his up his nose. Motorcycle cops kept making u-turns in the middle of the light on the corner and making all the cars trying to cross just wait a few extra seconds more. All the cars at the light had to wait for the cops to make slow u-turns in the middle of the intersection, in the middle of the road. So I got tired of watching this and went home.