Twelth Day in America....

Sometimes, as well, folk advised us where not to go. And I came to recognize the immediate gleam that came into Andy's eye then. But while I was considering the good advice given and evolving it into the word 'No' (for Andy) I usually found he'd already driven us most of the way there.

This is how we went looking for Andy's Dobro, lost in the night of the same day that Andy had bought it in Albuquerque, New Mexico in a complicated deal involving part-exchanging his Canadian guitar.

This was after getting his hair cut by a Harley-riding, tattooed and very sociable barber, and after two hours of buying shirts at a Buffalo Exchange assisted by five dramatically dressed, teen-age to (one said of herself while we waited for Andy) 'four-deeply-failed-relationships-kind-of-age', though I said I didn't think leaving four no-hoping, angry, smelly kind of bidey-in grumpy fellas was a failure: Staying with them would have been a failure, I said. She said she loved the word; bidey-in, and hoped to use it in the future, but of a successful situation. I wished her good luck. I think she was the kind of person who needed good luck. I don't think being very open and good natured and good-looking had served her well so far.

Andy concluded the Dobro deal and drunk with happiness and after some really wild chilli (on the recommendation of the Barber) we set off North to play and sing and read poems that night at Shelly's open mike in the Mine Shaft Tavern in Madrid, a town too wonderful for anyone to even imagine. You should go there and see if I don't speak the truth.