Dave Malone Twig and Leaf, Louisville Tom Waits sidled up to the bar at the beat-up diner. He was younger and less interesting and didn’t say much. I was glad of it, for I was secured in a booth in the back with you. The waitress had great hips and took our order as if we’d bunked regularly in her section beneath neon life. The young cook knocked grease off the griddle before emerging to baby, baby his girlfriend behind us. You talked too much and laughed too much and pushed your hair behind your ears too much, and you and I drank too much of that hard coffee, until we stopped in this piazza of silence. And that’s when I felt Tom on us, his face all wrinkled up in the bright lights by the grill and time slowed down. His cigarette ash wouldn’t fall and dangled mid-air like a gray kite. A pen along the register slunk toward his fingers as if a song could write itself.

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