Excerpt from the story Roller Girls at the Empty Glass from the book of short stories Mountain Tales & River Stories by Pete Kosky.
“The Empty Glass is a true Charleston landmark. If yuppies and hipsters flock to micro-breweries and guitar bars to drink and listen to music, The Glass is where the musicians gather to drink and listen to music. It is the equivalent of an old coastal village that still has a true fisherman’s wharf, where all of the real old salts dock their boars and congregate after a day at sea, isolating themselves from the tourists and wannabe sailors. After a gig, songwriters, guitar players, and full bands, from venues all over the city can be seen lounging at a table with pitchers of beer or stirring at the bar hunched over a tall-boy of PBR. Live entertainment of some sort is offered every night of the week.”
“In the days before the County ordinance banned smoking in bars and restaurants, The Glass was a dark, hazy, den of smoky funk. Today the air is clearer, but the message is the same. To cross its threshold is to enter into a cultural mosaic of ever-shifting patterns of light and dark, good and bad, soft and loud, genteel and wild, docile and crazy, all rolled into one big fat joint that could not be smoked in one sitting, but must be passed around the room and shared in common experience. It is a lava lamp of righteous, living, art and music that exists in the dark recesses of the artist’s soul, a psychedelic kaleidoscope of people and music that blend together to form something greater than their individual parts. It is a Jackson Pollack work painted in smoke, beer, blues, jazz, patchouli oil, lilac-vegetal, ringing amplifiers, tattoos, nose-rings, dreadlocks, electric violins, banjos, Hammond organs, leather sandals, spiraling dancing hippy chicks, red-neck shit-kickers, and steel guitars. It is a lighthouse beacon that calls out to the soul of the artist after the sun goes down, when the muses whisper and beckon like sirens to a rocky shore.”
Mountain Tales & River Stories is published by Mountain State Press and Available here:
https://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Tales-River-Stories-Peter/dp/0941092739
