volume one IN THE D U D L E Y C L A R K - Ohio Vine Tours

These two men—from such polarized socio-economic
worlds—have been brought together today by happenstance and
addiction.
A happenstance occasioned by a world built upon chaos and
disorder, and an addiction to C 8 H 10 N 4 O 2 .
Otherwise known as caffeine.
“Two Nicos and a tall breve—no whip!”
Suzie sings of love unrequited.
Roy thinks he knows how she feels.
Not that he’s ever been in love. But he digs what the fallout
of such a loss might be. Without having been there, he shares
Suzie’s heart-wrung words. He disappears inside her voice,
into the catalytic cataclysm that is her music, drifts out of his
body and into the undulating, adulating crowd, slips out of the
Starbucks for a bottomless moment, an unreckonable eternity—
long enough for the man with the professionally sculpted hair
and flying ace aspirations to break ahead of him in line.
A young blonde in a green apron, hair pulled back and
twisted tight, smiles at him with a dazzling array of Frigidairewhite
teeth and two intensely blue, jitterbugging eyes.
“WhatcanIgetforyoutoday?”
The sculpted young man is smitten by jealousy; he longs to
join her in her amplified realm.
His eyes frantically scan the menu.
“I’ll-I’ll have a doppio cappuccino double-double wet with an
addshot.”
Did he forget to say something?
Yes, he did. But the Magic Word is not forthcoming.
Roy looks on with loathing at the Yuppie Scum who has
broken in front of him and not used the Magic Word. It is at
times like these he wishes he were a black-belt Karate guy. Then
he would tap the Yuppie Scum on his factory-distressed leather
shoulder and, when he turned with his sour did you actually touch
me? look, Roy would take him out with a single blow and he
would drop like a sock puppet and the milling, caffeinated scrum
would stop milling and price-checking and nosing wares and
would stare instead in shock at how this fallen Yuppie Scum had
ROY ROGERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY