Tales from the Foggy Duck:
Excelsior!
by James A. Bridge III
(Any similarity to people living or dead is completely accidental and unintentional. –Editor)
Streaming trails of red tail lights lit the rain-splashed black roadway, the volume of traffic blocking the oncoming brights along State Street. Soon I was shaking my hat and brushing water off my shoulders in the doorway of the Foggy Duck Bar and Grille, taking in the smell of beer, burgers and, well, urine.
Albany is the kind of city that noir movies were made for. Remember the Phenix City Story? The river rats…of both species…the cunning, filthy rats.
I had had a disturbing day dream after a boiling hot summer day. Would-be Governors pleading in sack-cloth and ashes before their electorates that they are IN FACT truly moderates. Leaders of the people! Well, in that dream, the Governor of the Empire State had been birthed from a moderate’s cocoon into a space alien! I awoke disturbed and out of sorts.
Worse still, the announcement of the Democratic Socialists of America. They had just released their platform of political ideas. (https://www.dsausa.org/) Abolish this, abolish that, open borders, defund the military and the police. Christ! I remembered! There was a monster outbreak, Hochul wasn’t alone! Sherill in New Jersey...Spanberger in Virginia.
What a nightmare! That had settled it.
I needed a drink.
Holding my temples, I dressed for bad weather, grabbed my book, and ventured forth into a storm-riven July evening.
To The Foggy Duck.
And here I was.
She was wearing a kind of wrap over her dark hair, like she wasn’t planning on staying very long. She was nursing a Singapore Sling, crowding it with her elbows on the bar and her forehead bowing down between sips. It was that bar, the one that everyone goes to when they don’t want to be known. Sounds a bit oxymoronic, I admit. But the “Foggy Duck” was that place, the cure for “Capitol Punishment”, or the hot lights of scrutiny at the seat of power. There is buried in it an entendre, if you care to delve.
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