"LIVE MUSIC/FOOD"

It was a long, hot, dusty day of dusty deeds. We drove the long highway in silence. She had her hand on my knee, but it lay there flat as some flat fish that would never be not flat, no matter how hard it tried. Flounder flat, if you must know.

I glanced over at her and smiled, if you can call pressing your bottom teeth against your top lip a smile. She did it back. She always did it back. Her two middle bottom teeth cower behind each other like little kids being introduced to scary grown-ups. In a pretty kind of way.

"Hungry," she said.

"Me, too. And thirsty."

The inspiration for this masterpiece.

But there was nothing but desert and cacti, spread out over the never-ending (and, furthermore, infinite) beige landscape like a scattered army of running-backs celebrating touchdowns with green, prickly, upraised arms. Multi-cacti. She was counting them, moving her pretty lips silently: "Four-hundred-one; four-hundred-two..."

Sinatra was buzzing low on the radio -- so low that he was only dropping hints about what Johnny Mercer was trying to lay down, like some musical mouse whispering secrets through a tin can phone to an almost-deaf guy on the other end (who wasn't really listening, anyway, because he hates Sinatra).

The wheels rolled. The flat fish on my leg crumpled into a fist.

"Hungry," she said. "I need food."