Lynch tips back the last of his whiskey, ice cubes clinking like spurs against glass. The cowboy hat sits at that perfect Lynch angle – not quite right, just wrong enough to suggest the universe might be slightly askew. His face catches the bar light in planes and shadows that remind me of Death Valley at dusk.

“Okay, pardner,” he drawls, each word precise as a brushstroke, “you got what you came for and I got what I came for. Now it’s time to ride ’em cowboy.”

He stands with that particular Lynch deliberateness, like every movement is being captured at 24 frames per second. The hat casts a shadow that seems to stretch all the way back to 1960s Montana. There’s something in his posture that suggests both Hollywood director and genuine cowhand – that peculiar American alchemy that turns myths into men and back again.

Crosby watches this transformation with quiet appreciation, recognizing another master of American reinvention at work. The bar seems to reshape itself around Lynch’s new persona, the shadows deepening into something that could be either Western noir or a surrealist dream.

Gia’s presence lingers in the air like smoke, but Lynch’s cowboy gesture has somehow tied everything together – the burning hills outside, the whiskey wisdom, the strange encounters. It’s as if he’s directing reality itself, turning raw experience into cinema with nothing but a hat tilt and a drawled line.

Time to ride indeed – out into that American night where Hollywood burns and dreams transform and every moment might be either reality or celluloid magic. Or both.

Crosby adjusts that iconic hat, the one that had seen the Sunset Strip transform from dream to nightmare and back again. His eyes hold that particular wisdom that comes from surviving your own legend. “Gia gave you something real, man. But you can’t understand it. We have to go back out into the American Night and find some metaphors.”

There’s an echo of “Eight Miles High” in the way he says it, that same searching quality that turned pop music into astral exploration. His fingers drum an unconscious rhythm on the bar that sounds like horses’ hooves on desert hardpan.

Lynch nods, understanding the grammar of this moment. “The metaphors are out there,” he says, “burning with the hills. Sometimes you have to set reality on fire to see what’s really inside it.”

The bar seems to pulse around us now, like a heart pumping pure mythology into the veins of the night. Gia’s kiss still burns on my lips like a symbol trying to become a story. The whiskey glasses on the bar catch the light like fallen stars, each one containing a possible interpretation of what just happened.

“The thing about metaphors,” Crosby continues, standing now, his hat casting shadows that could be musical notation, “is that they’re truer than what they’re describing. Like how a twelve-string guitar is truer than a six-string. Doubles the reality, man. Doubles the vision.”

Time to ride out into that American darkness where every traffic light is a symbol, every burning hillside an allegory, every kiss from a doomed beauty queen a chapter in the endless story we’re all writing together. Time to find the metaphors that will make sense of what Gia passed to us, here in the eternal moment of Jim’s Whiskey Bar.