Dietrich and back again.

Marlene Dietrich bought me a drink this evening in a bar downtown. She said I looked sad and lonely but I assured her I was just hungry. I asked her to sing something for me so she snapped her fingers and a five piece band came out of the toilet and gathered themselves behind her. She sang 'Where have all the flowers gone'.

Everyone fell silent then started to cry.

I lit a cigarette for Marlene but I smoked it myself like a character from a half-written Leonard Cohen song who was had just made love with the ghost of Memory in a bar in Vienna.

At half past eleven Marlene faded through the door of the toilet and so far she has not returned. Perhaps there is a window in the bathroom, or perhaps she accidentally flushed herself away. Maybe she evaporated like brandy on a cold night in a warm glass, leaving only a necklace of pistachio nuts on the bathroom floor as a reminder of the flowers picked by young girls who took men who became soldiers and died in the war, and whose graves are now covered in flowers that young girls want to pick....