Alliances and Medicine

"Have you ever seen a band that didn't play an encore?", Coyote says barely even asking. I had just met Coyote two hours earlier outside this cafe on the corner when he approached me to bum a cigarette. He said his birth name was Ben but people called him Coyote, like the pelt he wore on the back of his jacket. Along with that he sported a thick mustache, large glasses, a cowboy hat and boots. All of this looking extremely weathered as if he wore this personality every day. He, his friend Huck, and I sat at a table in the corner where he would hit the keys of his typewriter, not violently but like he meant it, taking breaks to talk of farming across the country and taoism. "I sort of feel like I'm ripping off Bukowski when I write, except for the fact that I'm not drunk.", I say off hand after reading aloud a poem I'd written the day before. "Not yet, right?", Coyote says pulling out a little brown vial with a crude hand made label and a dropper. "What's that?", I say honestly intrigued. "Grain alcohol that is taken and infused with the original elements it came from and then distilled again. For every drop, it's gone through the process four times." I am honestly interested now, which is rare for me. "So what do I do with this?", I ask looking quizzically at the dropper. Coyote sees my uncertainty and hesitation and takes the dropper, dispensing it's brown liquid directly into his mouth. After seeing no ill effects, I do the same and instantly feel a warmth coming over me from no more than five drops of the bitter liquid.
"-what I'm saying is my family is german and before world war two it took a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread. Would've been nice to know someone with grain. Would've been nice to know how to make bread.", I hear Coyote say as I become aware once again. "Oh. Yeah man."