Famous Actress Disappears: Johnny Favors Changes His Tune

(I performed this on Wednesday night, January 3, 2018, at the Tasso Hostel open mic in Florence.–Cary T.)

Johnny Favors was a junkie sax player in the Tenderloin playing punky jazzy avant-garde new wave bebop when he got so strung out he couldn’t hit the high notes opening for Blondie and backstage Debbie Harry wouldn’t give him one of her last three Marlboros so he called her an airheaded cheerleader for the capitalist rear guard of New Wave sellouts and she called him a preppie asshole and he kind of made a gesture like he was going to punch her even though he wasn’t and that was when the Filipino bantamweight bouncer broke his jaw.

Johnny Favors didn’t get any more gigs in San Francisco after that and one rainy night on Ellis in the Tenderloin walking home from trio practice he got shot.

The bullet came at him from behind garbage cans in an alley off of Turk Street and he wasn’t doing anything but walking home with his sax case after trio practice, he wasn’t out to cop, he wasn’t even high, he was sort of even trying to quit and this bullet comes out of nowhere right behind his skull and it takes like the cleanest little nick of hair and scalp right off the back of his head and then he hears, from the dark pile of vague alleyway shapes and ironwork and brick wet with cat piss and beer urine and condoms and syringes lying about and a half-torn copy of the SF Weekly turned to the section of demo tape reviews and an empty box of cornflakes lying next to a discarded old broom and one foot protruding from the garbage can in the vicinity of which the shot had been fired, HE HEARS, in the mizzling rain of 2:30 a.m. on a Friday night in January, his hair wet and slick and the piece of his skull the bullet took off so tiny, just a tiny little sliver that fell down his shirt, and a few bits of hair on his neck, and him all startled and starting to run and he slips on the mucky garbage slick as he tries to run and goes down on the sidewalk but catches himself with his left palm and as he regains his footing, agile son of a gun that he is, HE HEARS from the alley way this kinda plaintive, whiny old wino voice saying, “Sorry mister! Sorry! I didn’t hit you, did I?”

So then he’s going to run but he’s kind of stunned and he’s already fallen down once so he’s like,

“What?”

“I said I’m sorry mister I don’t know what happened with this stupid gun of mine I didn’t mean anything.”

Then Johnny feels the back of his head and there’s this tiny little sliver missing and that’s when he figures anything could happen and maybe he doesn’t have as many lives as he thought.

The next morning was a rainy San Francisco morning in the Tenderloin when he woke up and had no dope and after searching under the cushions and in the coffee can and in the pockets of his two jackets and under the rug and behind his copy of De Quincy’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater and behind the TV and under the microwave, it hit him that he was a fucking moron, an addict, a junkie, nothing more, a fucking lowlife junkie who would never amount to anything and would probably die behind a garbage can like that idiot bum who nearly took his head off last night and then in that moment he knew, he just knew he was done, done for good, if he could swing it, and he walked out of his room in the Luxworth Hotel on Eddy and Hyde without even locking the door and trudged up to Bush to Leavenworth and up Leavenworth to the Nob Hill home and office of his brother-in-law the clean-and-sober surgeon and rang the bell and when his brother-in-law the surgeon answered the door he told him he wanted to get clean.

“Finally,” said his brother-in-law, and booked him into a 28-day program in Napa.