FEATURED WRITER

Vicki Whicker

Gray Wolf

 
was there on a small chair at a small table in the back of a hipster coffee bar, when hipster coffee bars weren’t hip, you know, in the late 80’s when being a cocaine yuppie with a black BMW and a wicked tequila hangover was the thing. I was with Dre, my best friend, such a gentle soul,

such a good friend, that was when I had time for friend’s that was back in the day when we all had jobs, 9-to way beyond 5, whatever, no much was too much- 7 days a week, we were moving so fast, together, sometimes all week even months if we were on business trips, Dre and I,

we weren’t hippies in this hipster of a hippie coffee bar, the tie-dye, the beads, you know the drill, incense, a man with blue eyes as old as the ocean, His name was Gray Wolf and he was puka shells and a tie dye Nehru shirt, scrappy leather sandals, scrappy leather feet, yellowed toe nails, hanging over the rope soles like claws,

now I’ve gone to far, Dre and I had come in for the tea, it would have been chai tea, too sweet and too hot, too many calories, we would only sip it, no food, we didn’t even drink coffee back then, coffee was for blue collar folk and tippy grandmas,

and we were young and sleek as only the young can be, we had no clue we only knew that we were shopping we were designers that is what we knew how to do, we could shop a city as big in LA in one day, if we had to, once I shopped London so fast that the girl I was with was crying, the blisters on her feet had her lost,

we would have been in that hippy coffee shop looking at the chatchis, things to buy, colors, textures, patterns, anything bright and eye catching that gave us the feeling, that this, this was new, that was what we were after this was what we needed find to be brilliant, so why was I sitting there with a dude who did in fact look like a gray wolf,

why was I hanging on every word this card shuffler said, he laid down the Tarot a soft worn dirty deck, a deck that had seen many times that deck had told many lives and lived inside many heads and there I was, back from Europe, back from Asia, tired, hungry, starving,

it was the 80’s we were starving, and manless, I remember I was manless, and would he read a man into my life, conjure the big love into being? He flipped the cards down with a satisfying click and I wish I could tell you what they were, likely there was a Chariot,

we used to laugh when we got the chariot, mayhem with the chariot, upside down swords and crossed lovers and burning castles with the chariot, I am sure that I got them all, all of the disaster cards, especially knowing know what I didn’t know then, the what that was coming for my life next,

but that day, in that little shop with the pink crystals, dude with his long gray hair told me something so clear, like a howl from the other side, he said,

You are living a dream but making it a nightmare, he said,

You are living a dream but making it a night mare, he said,

You are living a dream but making it a nightmare.

Repeat it, he said, say it with me. And I did . And I did. And I did. And I didn’t understand, was I too hungry? I couldn’t digest that string of words. I chewed them then, I chew them now. It’s taken years and years and years of repeating to understand what a gray wolf saw in a thin girl’s cards.

 

 

Vicki Whicker’s writing credits include Entropy Magazine, Pigeon Review, The Nonconformist, La Presa, 12 Los Angeles Poets, Big City Mantra, and Literary Mama. Her poetry and photography appear in the poetry anthology Seeing Things (Woodland Arts Editions, 2020). Her poetry collection, Caught Before Flight (Woodland Arts Editions) published in 2020. Bucolia, her most recent solo photography show, debuted at The Word and Image Gallery, Bright Hill Press, 2020. She’s in the upcoming group show, Once Upon A Time, presented by Griffin Museum of Photography, November 2021. Originally from Los Angeles, she lives in the Cooperstown area, upstate NY.