Have You Seen Lucky?

The breeze comes off the river here, in gusts, antiquated with the scent of another world. Heirloom winds sent down the big river, lashing the earthen levee, ready to stake a claim. This particular night, I cussed them. They made things difficult, as I went from lamppost to telephone pole, affixing posters for our lost dog. The wind coming behind me, and tearing them back down. Taunting me. At the first real drops of rain, I stopped and surveyed my handiwork. The words were too small, typed across the yellow paper Steph brought home one time.  Such a great deal, she said, because the paper was dreadful to look at. Bright canary yellow. And now it was perfect. The flyer was crammed and oafish. But you’d never miss it on that paper. It had a grainy photo of Lucky. I couldn’t resist the title. It made me laugh out loud. Steph wanted to know what was so funny. I told her it was like that bad tattoo sailors get to conquer the misery of their sea lives. A little joke, I maneuvered. Yeah, she said, good, a joke.  Everyone laughs and no one looks for him. Dummy.

I understand it better, in the aftermath. I see that the flyer was bad. The typewriter ran out of ribbon ink, so I added our phone number in dark crayon across the bottom. My handwriting runs together, and that lent a certain insecurity to the flyer.  You make something like that to find a pet, to retrieve the wayward myths you corral in the back yard, and water and feed, each day and night. Not to entertain yourself while the river turns to whitecaps, and the rain spikes your skin so hard it leaves welts. The more I looked at that question typed in large bold face at the top, the less funny it became. Maybe she was right. No one would believe it.

‘Have you seen Lucky?’

Spring storms threaten most riverside communities with flooding, and have done so for generations. The threat is what men pass down to their children; a knowledge of smell, that the hint of curved air means disaster. Pack the mules, the Studebaker, the Jetta. The heart will come back. It always does. This is what they say, the people who come from inundation, and pass it down. Get what things out you can’t replace. The photographs, the family bible. The journals you wrote in high school, when they were still called diaries. Leave the booze, the food, the clothes you don’t need. Head for the hills.  Rains come with each seasonal blast. But it is the spring ones which fall hardest, and we wait, and worry, and wait some more, for their arrival. Some people make a tally, and bet on days the water might crest the banks and where it will run first, submerging parts of the town in that murky brown goo, lifting cars and garbage cans into the wake. They make their guesses, these wagers, like it’s no joke. There’s money on the line. This is not a rich community. On Saturdays we drink in bars that stand beside churches we will infiltrate the following morning. Not we, though, I mean them. We come cut from another swath entirely.

Back in the twenties, the Corps of Engineers diverted the river. They’ve done it to mightier ones, since. They learned from this river. They told the town they’d make it spill over elsewhere. And it did, demolishing a few hundred houses, already evacuated. Already tongue licked by the silvery threads of eminent domain. Black people had lived in those houses. Even in the twenties, the encumbering reconstruction cared little for them. Beneath the stars and sky, the chain gang called, we shall tremble and fear, each couplet of their song punctuated by pick axes, and dynamite the Corps of Engineers carved into the banks from whence they came. The boom of those explosions dampened, literally, by inch upon inch of rain. Eventually, the Corps admitted they were never certain the river would crest its banks. They just weren’t positive it would not have. In the ensuing years, no storm caused that river to rise above. But each spring, the town underwent a militaristic transformation. We packed bags of sand. We helped our neighbors. We shared long necks afterward. Panic armed itself, and always leaked through cable television channels to Home Depot stores. It built up into fistfights in the aisles of Wagner’s grocer. Some set off on three-day drinking binges. Others plunged into flood party planning sessions, locating the streamers, the keg beer, ready to mix an array of Mint Juleps, and sour mash drinks, quick with a roll of duct tape. During these parties, you sat out the electric failure with a highball and the warm body of a loved one, or failing that, a liked one.

What you don’t do is lose your dog. The chain of command sees to that. In our frenetic diligence, we taped the windows against the increased winds. Laid sand bags around the perimeter of our house. In that lapse of time, trimming life to safety codes, parsed by intent, Lucky made his getaway.

So on this night, while our neighbors frolicked with each other, I went out looking for him. The tendrils of the storm were traveling south. No doubt about it. The river was abrupt with implication. I tried to retrace unknown paw prints and ply them with my wet flyers.  My hands shook as I aimed one last staple into a live oak’s trunk.

Where are you, Lucky?

The river ran down along the side of town. The Corps of Engineers put a 10 foot levee there, and now I walked from it, through the developing storm, to 2nd Street. Steph and I had been at it pretty hard. To focus on something else, I counted my steps as I went. I couldn’t keep it up. An overflowed drain, a misstep over a submerged sandbag, and I’d have to start again. There were holes in the sky, white spots of cloud. Circled by black storm heads. Black sky. Black water. If you looked past the warehouses, in between them, the river troubled itself with havoc. The ships that went up and down were docked elsewhere. Everything had stopped. Waiting for the rise to come on down and kick up its heels.

Lucky had, more than likely, snuck through a particular hole in the back fence, a hole he happily gnawed at each day. A hole Steph warned me about too many times. No, I told her repeatedly, Lucky is too big to get through it.

That hole is growing. What do you think he’ll do once he does fits through? Look at it, and run into the house?

He doesn’t want to leave us. Escape isn’t what he’s after. He’s a dog, dogs dig.  That’s what I think.

Measure it off, she said pressing the tape into my hand.

No reason.

Ok, then shove it, lazy bean.

I ain’t lazy…

That’s plenty of fence to work on. He’s out there all day. Chewing, licking his balls. Chewing some more. Laying in the sun. He’s just diverting his attention. He’s doesn’t have that kind of drive.

This is the same Lucky who wouldn’t come out of the river for an hour and a half, the same Lucky…

And anyway, I interrupted her, where is there to go? Who’s to see? What to do?

At night, Lucky curled between us in bed. Barked at sounds we could not humanly know. Woke us in the morning so as not to stain the Persian rug Steph’s father gave us when we moved in together. We went out to the flood plain when the moon hung up with the stars so rich and bright, I could see each and every one of the faint tawny spots in his otherwise white coat. He ran through the brambles before the river, until he was breathless, his pink tongue lolling out the side of his mouth. Look at what I’ve done, he was telling me, look. Look.

Sure enough, when the rains made mush of the ground beneath the fence hole, he clawed his way through.

Steph noticed first. Where’s the dog, came the incriminating tone. Telling me, you know where, gone.

He was small, and that lack of size left him wary of the cars that sometimes hurtled down the small streets of town. As a pup, I’d let him off the leash by the levee long enough to notice how he galloped. There was joy in the way he ran. But the rain, and flood parties rid the streets of anyone, and any car. He could have made it to the levee, and burrowed in, as the first trickling waters slid down the bank.

The cars that remained parked on the street caught in the coming water, and rose up, like strewn toys in a child’s tub, piling together in jumbles, where land became water. Like clockwork, five seconds, ten, thirty, and boom, another one thumped into a store window, the sound of the breaking glass and the wreckage muffled by the downpour, before it had a chance to really crescendo. Water swallowed everything. I passed the old Paris Brothers warehouse. Rental apartments now. A crash came as a far off transformer blew, and the electricity failed. A woman threw open her window in answer. She hollered at the storm. You ain’t nothing but a rainstorm, her face stoic but cheerful, waving a clenched fist only half in jest. But the rain was unimpressed and it plowed past her, soaking her, and her apartment until she pulled the window shut. The river had crested. It channeled through the streets. I realized this search was futile. My heart deflated. What I was here looking for was a carcass and not Lucky. If a car had hit him, the water might have taken him with it, back out to the river, or to some unknown place I’d never find. My mood crumbled. Death will do that. I didn’t have time to mourn. The water took precedence, and kept coming, so much so, I had to scramble suddenly as a wall of it broke down the street, and kept on going, kept on rising, one foot, two feet. My knees. I ran for it. You intuit higher ground in those split seconds where water embarrasses you, before it entrenches you, and submerges you. It feels like eternity, waiting for your brain to quickly make up its mind, and when it does, finally remember a bike ride where you lagged, at the incline, you have little time to do anything but move, and move fast.

Floods wreak a vanishing act of aggression, they bash, and ruin, smash and grab, and leave mere traces of what stood before their vengeful swell.  As they ebb, walls and floors and ceilings erupt into crawling matrixes of spirulina. A dark stew of gas and chemicals, and a seething rot waits behind, and it will kill you if you leave it be. The detritus of a deluge keeps moving onward, until onward, too is quelled by the river.  The bales of destruction quieting one day, as they find purchase beside a lone pylon, or catch in a bygone pocket at the river’s bottom.

Highland Avenue sat empty, the rising inflorescence yet to damage the row of houses there, but damage was coming. The park beside the levee had already been submerged, and was besieged by floating timber and appliances, dryers and washing machines that once lived on back porches. They bobbed like untethered buoys. The water pushed and pushed and pushed and rose some more. I had been in the park just minutes ago, I walked from there along Front street. When I looked back to where I’d come from, the fronts of the houses were lower, windows pushed open by the moving water, and the debris it carried. The river was the town. The town was the river, and the helicopters which had flown overhead before the rain started had vanished, not caring to film the storm. They would return to capture the saturated destruction as it baked in the sun, callously commenting on the dichotomy of good weather in the face of calamity. A faux starlet with dyed blonde streaks in windbreaker, surveying the outcome, mining the technical and emotional aspects of the aftermath.

I walked the streets alone, mostly ignorant of any danger I was in, cutting down less flooded streets, skipping onto porches, and front steps when I had to, until I got back to the part of town we lived in, and our place.

Steph met me out front.

Nicely done. Everything you touch turns to shit.

What are you talking about? There’s no water here, not on the street or in the house. We’re fine.

And the dog? Is he fine?

She stood blocking the door. I touched her arm. C’mon, I said offering an adolescent kiss. I wanted out of the rain.

C’mon what? Where are you going? You can’t give up. That’s no answer. That solves nothing. And you have a lot to solve.

What do you mean?

You’re not coming inside without that dog.

I was at a loss. The town was washing out. And I didn’t understand her furor. I loved that dog. He waited for me to get into bed before he jumped up between us.

I stood there silently stepping back from the door as it swung shut.  I loved that dog better than she did. I loved that dog. I did. I loved.

Steph buried emotion, and only acknowledged it when it came back to the surface, until it reduced into a cold glare, absent of closure, waiting to bubble back up. Lather, rinse, repeat. Empathy perturbed her. Elation distracted her. Concern, she felt that. The all time favorite Stephanie Chaloff emotion. She reeled, caustically, when the rude hicks who drank at the bar she worked in managed to get under her skin. And on those times, while she vented I stroked Lucky’s face, held his paws in my hands, so he would not shake.

We are not all hyper aware of how everything feels, she told me.

Feeling is a mystery.

It is to you, I’d said.

And cheap shots are your weapons, right?

Not everyone is trapped by this inability to talk about how they feel. Some people cherish that.

How can I explain it if I can’t prove it exists?

Emotion is weakness, her dad told me the day before we left Illinois, journeying toward a fresh start as new people. Emotion lets the other guy know you lost control.

I waited there until the rain let up, imagining her on the other side of the door, unsure how this dreary existence had become hers, while a brooding repulsion passed through her. Her back pushed against the door as she contemplated the smoke from her Marlboro. She could dangle a cigarette from her rouged lips, with such perfect style you forgot the failing brown in her hair, and the lines on her face, and its oily imperfections. Wearing a sultry look that made you want her, no matter how tough she talked to you last.

When I made it past our street, I faced the river. It had taken over. You could hear it, dominating the places normally dry into doused submission. The lapping sounds disoriented me, slipping from a basement, every natural thing I knew was soggy. If I had found Lucky’s carcass floating by, beginning to bloat, I wondered would the door open? She would want to see the body, and know the truth, but after that, who knows? And if I offered him to her, like that what then? It would only give her anger more currency. The same if I didn’t find him, the endless hole in our hearts shaped like the fence, a lasting shrine to our shortcomings. Our perfectly inadequate love.

The closer to the center of town I got, the higher the water. There were few dry places left. The Public Works building was mostly waterless, having been built, wisely, on a lump of land scrunched up by the earth’s crust a million years before. That, and the old Doctor’s clinic parking garage, impossibly sterile, it’s concrete hulk pregnant with the assumption our town would always be, somehow, sick.  I went for the parking structure, assured by the rugged cement structure. I climbed the stairs to the uncovered top level to better see. The storm was flaking apart, and when I strained, I could make out Tennessee across the way, the green farms brown, and underwater, too.  There were slivers, the tops of the levee, like sandbars in the shallows, catching barges, here, and then gone, and the river lapped at them.

I looked for the Carruthersville flood plain, where Lucky had run, and played. It, too, folded under waves, and at first, I didn’t recognize it. The view proved much too depressing, so I climbed back down the stairs. Every direction I looked had offered a new terrible view, more impact of despair, less ground to walk on.

He’s dead, I thought to myself, back in the flood, fighting through the polluted water. A large branch floated by, and I grabbed it. Sunlight rippled through the granite sky, and people were beginning to venture out, to assess the damage. An eerie shwup, shwup, shwup sounded out of an exposed storm drain, the water retreating in overworked pipes. I poked the stick into it, then sent my hands in after, hoping I wouldn’t catch Lucky’s hind legs, or blocky head. Nothing but a car battery cracked, bleeding out its corrosive acid. The passing waters frothed with sewage, danger and trouble. When I called Lucky, the storm gobbled up the sound, before the chance of an echo.

I started back for the house, empty-handed, once again.

The light switched on, but that was not care. It was automation. Technological advancement. The television cackled on the other side. And Steph with it, her hair pinned up, perhaps a cocktail resting on her knee. I hoped for some sign, any sign, of the dog, and listened for a minute. Nothing. I sat down on the stoop, to wait her out.

Steph had been excited to move. Chicago had somehow offended her sense of being. Her father was the only one of her family she still communicated with, and when she told him we were moving, his disapproval was hardly veiled. He had pressed into her a radius of no more than 500 miles away; the direction was her choice. Pass that boundary, though, and she was an orphan. He lived in a world empty of approximates, ruled by all or nothing.

So, we went exactly 455 miles south.

We packed our things into cardboard boxes a nearby liquor store let us have. The inside of the Hertz truck lined with boxes marked Busch, St. Ides and VSOP. All of them overstuffed with the cheap kitchen utensils, paperback books, thrift store linens we bought out of necessity and not from pleasure. Our rusty bed frame, a couch, a dresser, and the rest of the space strewn with by black plastic garbage bags stuffed with the clothes, and keep sakes, and bugs from the rundown apartment we shared in Pilsen. The small savings account we kept tricked us into leaving, evaporating to nowhere. No jobs awaited us, only a leased apartment in a town we knew nothing about.

It seemed like forever before we escaped the metropolitan sprawl, traffic goading us on, daring us to suffer through it, to defy our city-bred nature. Her hands gripped the wheel so tight her knuckles were not white; they were gray. As she pushed us through the smoggy veil over the stop and go flow, anger blossomed in her, as it rose, it colored her blanched skin. I smiled at how those reddened cheeks made her beautiful, she looked so goddamned pretty, her waxen complexion rumbling to life, as the bright sun leveled down on us. Seven hours, one driver switch later we arrived. No fan fare. This was a town of strangers. And that’s what we sought, a place where we could be new people, if not different ones, then fresher, more assured versions. We went there not for them, but for us. The people sitting in their lawn chairs waved and we waved back. Not because we cared, but because we didn’t.

I called for Lucky, and got to my knees. He bulled his way through the driver’s side door, knocking me over as he ran underneath the porch. Steph crawled in after him. We’re finally home, she said, wiping the dark soil from her face, holding Lucky by his neck, like a captor. After we had him settled inside, Steph assaulted the leaning multitude of boxes and garbage bags, and I crept down to the pool, alone. The starry lights ricocheted off the ripples my body made in the water.

While we made no real inroads, or true friendships, I fell for the quiet pace of life, and worked odd construction jobs. Steph found the bar gig, and switched between hibernating from the customers at work, to bouts of late nights drinking with them. I walked the dog. I watched the river hidden in darkness. I waited around for something to happen to change it all.

Steph flipped channels on the remote. I went to the kitchen. In the fridge was a lonesome jar of mayonnaise, a package of sliced ham, and two six packs of cheap beer. A loaf of bread sat on top of them. We’d bought the bread and ham after the evacuation order.

Want to get a room somewhere, I asked her, after the deputy left to tell the neighbors.

Where would we go? Chicago?

Somewhere out of harm’s way. High, and dry.

Then we’ll never be part of this town. We leave, we might as well keep going. They’ll never respect us.

Are you kidding? Respect doesn’t matter when you’re face down floating in the water.

Always the smart guy, aren’t you?

They won’t respect you if you evacuate, eh. Who told you that?

The guys. At work. They lived here their whole lives. They know.

Oh. The same ones you bitch about every night. But, you’re listening to them this week.

That’s right. Maybe they’ll be better to me if I show ‘em I got what it takes. Don’t be such a pussy.

There’s no way to understand that. It’s not Shakespeare, or logic. Her real emotions had long been guarded by a malice meant to keep everyone at bay, her victories always pyrrhic, her low expectations always sadly met.

I grabbed a beer.

That’s not gonna to help you find him, she said proudly, like I flailed in the trap she set.

You never know what you’ll find in the bottom of a can of beer, do you?

You’re so smart. Think about what I say to you.

You want to know what I think? You really wanna know? I think I don’t know why we came here. But I like it, now. And I’m not pissed about living here every second of every day like you are. No matter how much you want me to be someone else, if I was, you’d still be unhappy.

I didn’t let the fucking dog escape. You did. I told you about the hole in the fence. You’ve got tools, you shold have fixed it. This is your mess.

No. The hole in the fence, the lost dog, that’s life. This is your present to me. This is exactly how you told me your dad talked to your mother.

That’s not fair.

I drank the beer in two long swallows, and crumpled the can as menacingly as I could, but held onto it, instead of bouncing it off her forehead, like I wanted.  She drew up on the couch and watched me, waiting for something she could jump on, if I dropped the can, if I threw the can, if I melted into the floorboards. But I just held up the can, like a trophy.

Ok, she said, will you just go?

I put on my slicker, and left. I walked around the perimeter of the place. The street lights switched off at dusk, replaced by foggy darkness. I wasn’t going to find him in that. But I walked the sidewalk, letting the alcohol charm its way into my body, the light tinge of warmth building in my legs, then rising past my waist, a flood of temporary mood adjustment all for me.

Stephanie was unable to circumvent her anger with liquor, or a day’s rest. She did not have the proper equipment with which to healthily absorb the wrongs she perceived. She boiled for days. In sharp phone calls to her dad, and in loud pronouncements to her boss, she could not, or would not siphon the venom from her tongue.

We lived with a withering attraction, in a sloth of mistrust. Our photographs melted into discordance, unless of course, the dog was there. Lucky offered our discontent an olive branch, and though we were just as fiercely upset, we restricted the arguments, and muffled our displeasure. The three of us pretending away the night as we chewed the insides of our mouths.

At some point, she turned on him. Her once careful words became strained, unrepentant. And she spoke of a dull sense of betrayal, when we ducked into the Salvation Army, or St. Jude’s tiny one room store, for supplies she deemed beneath her. But it was the dog she blamed, like Lucky had bankrupted the curve of her supposed gentility, leaving her with the adverse geometry of a common classless wench.

I know what you want, you want to sit out on the porch and gaze into the heavens. Sit back and take it all in. That’s what you do. You sit, and you watch.

That’s a wild approximation if I ever heard one.

Vintage store, thrift store, antique roadside peach cobbler.

You wanted out of the city. I was headed for California. You picked Car-U-thersville.

It’s a weak U.

We’re here on your account.

But you let us stay here. You fell for it. The Goddamned river. The Ferry Landing.

You’re making more money here. And Lucky likes it.

I think that dog is more important to you than me.

She was asleep, when I got to bed. I watched her, and wondered if all the glory hidden in the nape of her hung open jaw, in the velvet skin of her eyelids, would eventually return. I awoke the next morning to the sound of a light rain dinging on the roof. I slipped into my still wet clothes, and was exiting the front door before she noticed. She forced a smile and gestured towards the pan heating on the stove. She was cooking, the thing she did to save an apology. I shook my head, and went out.

An old carburetor floated by in the water blocked by our sandbags. We had done one thing right, together. This thing. One thing.

I went around the back, and stood over the empty pool, filling with tree limbs, and mud, and rainwater. There’s a center of each storm, a profane angel of nature. It throbs and pulses, squirms bloody and recalcitrant like any old heart-sheep, human, fish, dog, they all act the same, plunked out of the cavity that holds them. I heard something behind me, in the shrubs, near the fence. It was Lucky. He poked his head out, soggy, vanquished, but not dead, or choked by silted chemicals. He came at me sideways, afraid, but hopeful. I rubbed his face, picked a few large briars from his coat.

We burst through the door together, Lucky striding atop my electric buzz.

Look who I found, I roared triumphantly.  We stopped short. The place was empty. She had left a note. Off to work, it said. Don’t wait up, unless you find the dog.

I carried Lucky upstairs, and put him in the tub. He cowered at the advent of more water, relaxing only as I gently worked the warm soapy lather into his coat.

You’re my dog, I told him. Mine mine, mine.

His tail wagged, saying, of course, I always have been. He lapped at my stubble. I dried him with a towel. Carefully, he went from room, to room, peering back at me, a question in his eyes. When he knew for sure she wasn’t home, having inspected all places, he tilted back his head and barked. A cloudbank disappeared inside the both of us.

It was just midnight when she poured the truck into the parking space. She lurched toward us, openly telegraphing the coming fight. Then, she spied the packed bags and the dog. She tossed me the keys and shook her head.

Ha, she managed, locking the door behind her. I put Lucky in the cab, wrapped in one of those serape blankets.

Ha. The adulation of surrender.

Rock Candy

We scramble out of holes, from underneath sewer covers, resembling the cockroaches we emulated for so long. Blink, and you’ll miss us. We gather in church basements, and bingo rooms, VFW halls; I’ve even been to a few in those forgotten abbeys above bar rooms, no kidding. The signs?  The perfume of burnt coffee, jittery hands which hold throwaway cups of that burnt black goo, yards of bad hair, automatic fluorescent lights outside, clicking on whenever one of those shadows reaches out to bum a smoke or cadge a light, cast in the guilt ridden gloom of their past. Memories have failed. We are a forgetful lot, unable to quietly go wherever we go.  We never stop jangling. We fight laws of physics just to sit still.  We are a group of people dressed in rejection. It’s on our sleeves. It dribbles out of the cheapo Styrofoam cups we grip, tightly, anxiously. We are foul mouthed, and nicotine stained. We have, and are, bad livers.

This night, the fluorescence hasn’t turned us into purple coated mysteries evaporating into the dark. Not yet. It’s my turn to talk. I stand up. Run a shaky hand over my shirt, brushing off imaginary crumbs. Someone, Russell I think his name is, speaks up.

Introduce yourself, son. Russell might be five years older than me, but I sing his tune.

I’m Louis, Louie, I say to the room, glassy discharge lathering in their wide, unblinking eyes.

I quickly attach the qualification of what brought me here, for the rest to see. We all do it, before launching into the tale of our downward mobility. I’m new to this.

And I’m a drug addict and alcoholic.

Christian Donovan is to blame, or, I suppose I could thank him. Just remember that name, I say.

The room swells into a sea of agitated half whispers.

Russell stands up. He points his finger at me, across the circle of fold up chairs.

No names, man. You should know that by now.

I stare back at him. I know some things. I know I’m nervous.

No names, he repeats.

I nod my head. He sits back down. No names.

Christian Donovan, I say. Remember that name. I hold up my hand before the seagulls start up again.

Listen, I say, listen.

As they lurch in for the kill, I send them this look, a look I borrowed from the man whose name I’m telling, and that look breaks over them, forcing them back into the tidal waters of apathy, of cowardice, and of patience, where they steadfastly await the revelations of my pain.

They fidget, shuffle feet underneath the seats. Gnaw into their Styrofoam cups. But they listen.

Christian Donovan was beating this little elf of a fellow. Elvis wannabe. How tall was the king? 5’11? 6 feet? Not this guy. 5’5” if he was lucky. And believe me, right then, he wasn’t.

Look, I say to them, to really reel them in, I’m not doing this how you want it. I get mixed up, how it was, what happened, how it is now. That’s all combustible. It’s all one story.

I tell them I’m sorry. And like that, I win them. Victory for the watery brains. I dip my eyes, so they don’t know I’ve planned it.

Someone gets up. The woman who invited me. 30’s. Horses. Married. Vodka.

I want to hear what you have to say.

She offers a challenging glare to the rest of them. Then back to me. An outstretched hand.

You do it how you need to do it.

She sits back down. I start again.

Yeah, ok, so, um, the guy getting beat on, he’s dipped in Clairol #7. Black. A real vision of the ‘68 comeback Elvis if you ever saw one. But there’s a something different in his performance. The king? He luxuriated in performing, it got him off. This guy, he was lying, his body language swelled on a river of deceipt. Christian hit him once, to get him on the ground. Then he hunkered down on top, grabbed the guy’s the collar, head butted him, and knocked him out cold.

I sat there watching, in the guy’s dingy plaid wing chair, flipping through one of those motocross magazines. You can’t read ‘em, They’re nothing but pictures, every now and then, a caption underneath. My cousin John leaned on the stairwell behind me.

Get me some God damned pliers.

What d’ya need pliers for, John asked.

John was a burly black haired kid. Really, more my brother. His mother dropped him off like a bag of groceries, when we were in junior high. His dad was my mom’s brother Uncle Lenny.  Caught a life sentence a few years before that. Got popped doing some guy a favor, driving up 95, with a dead body in the trunk. Life, no chance of parole.

When his ma dropped him off, John was still trying to find a way back into her good graces. But why? She left him. No turning back after that. She went off in search of mainlines and truckstop bathrooms. Plain and simple, she didn’t want him. Never wanted him. She had an envelope with his birth certificate, his dentist’s name and one hundred dollars.

That’s all I got, she said, and I’m gonna call here later, so don’t try and spend it. Then the gears started ticking.

You know what, I’m gonna take that and send it to your folks, later.

She left us with five dollars. Stuck the rest in her pocket. Gone.

We walked down to the Wendy’s and John ate five  dollars worth of those square hamburgers. He hadn’t eaten for a week. I know that because he told me, I ain’t had nothing to eat for like a week.

I stand there, my shoulders rolling forward, like they do when I get anxious, when I gotta talk about the things I don’t want to confront. I’m not stuck. I got cocky, and then I panicked. I stop and look over at my champion. She winks at me. I stare at the rest of them. They’re mine, each one of them, bastards, creeping toward the edge of their seats, waiting for more. Russell, he’s waiting, too. He nods his head. Ok.

So, Christian got off the guy. Stood up and walked to the screen door. He kept his back to the both of us. Then he turned and looked at me. Somehow I’m to blame.

What?

Remember that Yamaha  two stroke?

Yeah, I remembered. Christian ran the county dump, and John and I had recently started working there for him. He moved stolen, rebuilt motorcycles on the side.

The one you sold two weeks ago?

That’s it, out there, by the cars. This twerp, this piece of shit.

He stopped talking, and spit on the guy.

This little maggot bought it. But he never paid me for it. When I brought him the bike, he didn’t have no dough. I said, keep it, in a week you give me another hundred top of the one fifty you already owe me. You know, for my trouble. Fuckin’ A. Only he didn’t give me two-fifty. He didn’t give me one-fifty, either. Shithead said he was connected to some tough guys. He’d take his chances with me. Fuck tried to shut the door in my face.

He paused, and he turned back to the guy and kicked him in the ribs with one of those Redwing steel toed jobs. Steel-toed boots come in handy on a job like this.

When John came back with the pliers, he laid them in Christian’s out stretched palm, without a word, without looking at Christian. Like they’d done it all before.

Louis, go through his pockets.

I put the magazine down. Got up, grabbed the guy’s wallet, started to hand it to Christian.

Is there any money in there?

A twenty and three ones.

I showed them to him.

Hardly enough for that bike out there. The fucker’s been riding it.  Mud all up and down the goddamned thing. No, Louis, you keep the money. Fuckin’ A.

I shot John a proud look. By then, John’s attention stayed with Christian, while he plunked out Elvis’ teeth- one by one. Finally, Christian pointed to the pile and the red pool coming from the guy’s mouth. To signal he was done.

Ain’t but four or five left in there.

He wagged his finger at me.

Louis, bag up them teeth for me, clean up the blood.

I started to complain, but thought about what had just happened. He and John went out and loaded the bike onto the truck.

We lived, a few miles from the dump, down route 40, on Haven St. A cold swath of stripped out unincorporated county that turned to crumbling city blocks. Truckers parked their rigs overnight next to warehouses. Abandoned churches transformed into barrooms. The row houses sagged on poor foundations. People dumped garbage in the empty lots that cropped up after neighboring buildings collapsed into blight.

The Coffin Cheaters hung out at a bar down the street. They took their garbage out to Christian Donovan’s dump and junk. For a nominal fee, Christian turned a blind eye while the bikers dug holes underneath of car shells, and towers of junked appliances. The bikers liked him. He asked no questions, and he knew a hell of a lot about motorcycles.  After they dug their holes, the bikers and Christian might spend a few hours combing over the yard searching for a rare Flathead, or a fender that could be chromed back to life, and they forged an unspoken pact.

The Coffin Cheater Presidente outright asked Christian Donovan why didn’t he just put on a leather and they’d sew on the rockers right then and there. He’d done enough by then to warrant membership in the gang.

Make it official, the Presidente said.

Fucking A, and all, but why rock the boat, Christian Donovan said.

But understand a thing or two about the Coffin Cheaters, and you’ll understand Christian’s decision. The Cheaters were too ragged an outfit to become part of larger, international gangs like the Outlaws, or the Angels, or hell, even the Bandidos. The Cheaters were lowlife thugs. At their best. Biker speed, PCP, and junkie whores. They gathered their take with fists that pummeled you and then clicked open knives that cut you into ribbons.

Haven Street existed somewhere beneath what other Americans called neighborhoods. A lost kernel of compulsion. Where blue-collar indignance accompanied well-atrophied minds. The Iran hostage scandal played out on the news each night, but to those of us on Haven St., it was hard to care. We were as bombed out, as hibernated from the onslaught of Reaganomics as any Third World country. Rats ran through our streets, through our raw sewage, with such regularity it was as if they, too, knew a better world than us. John  got a job as an apprentice in a garage, but the place went under a few weeks later. Drugs overran the neighborhood. Girls we used to pine after trawled for johns, their once pretty skin cragged with dirt and scabs.

I made it out, for a brief respite. I went to college, that is to say. Not the Ivy covered walls you read about, and I did no living in the dorms. And maybe that’s why I did not last. But in school, where John failed miserably, unable to focus for any length of time, I scorched Bunsen burners black producing mystical concoctions the teachers who cheered me would be hard pressed to recreate. Adminsitrators took notice, and pushed to get me past the SAT’s and into UMB. It looked good for them, for the school to add a college next to one more name, it meant funding, and it meant my father spoke to me in a new voice. That spring the house warmed over with good will, and relief.

John saw the positive aspect, saw opportunity, never annoyed that the natural sequence had overlooked him. He was not jealous, like I half wished him to be.

This college thing works for me, too, man he explained, while we sipped celebratory beers, a few hours after graduation.

How d’ya figure?

Girls, for one thing, cute ones.

I’m the one going to college.

And I’m the one that’s gonna mack all them cute college girls.

He couldn’t help but link his future to mine.

That soft hair, and skin like a baby. Sweaters and perfume.

I started to laugh, but his look cut me to the quick.

I’m gonna get me a piece of pussy ain’t no one ever touched, or paid for, or nothing.

Trouble was, I didn’t assimilate well within the social stratus of UMB. I got into a scuffle when some over privileged kid cut in line at the library, and then I got into it with the same guy, at the cafeteria. He came at me with some tough talk. Before I could stop myself, my fists launched into his face, like pistons working hard to level our disparate heritage. He curled into a ball as the other students tried not to watch. Before the next semester began, the UMB Provost office sent me a letter telling me I was not welcome, anymore.

That I got into College was all the gold my father needed. The Provost’s letter meant little to him, and he listened to my side of the story with a care I had not previously felt from him.

You’re not a liar, I know that much.

No, I said, bracing myself.

I can’t explain this thing, he had the letter pinched between his thumb and forefinger, like it stunk up the room.

You did the hard work, you got the grades. But listen, son, this next part is going to be hardest on you.

What’s that?

He looked at me. His eyes were wet.

The hard part is knowing you had a chance to get out, but you got stuck on this godforsaken street just the same.

He handed me a beer.

Drink it fast. Your gonna need it once that shit hits you.

I did what he said.

John started spending time at the Cheaters’ hangout. He helped the bartender change the keg beer, and stocked booze, in exchange for a tab. Sometimes he rode along with one of the handy men that frequented the place, and that’s how John ended up at the dump.

Christian aspent his days talking to everyone who made it out to his dump. To ease his time. Only, Christian filed that information away. Maybe it came in handy later, maybe not. Either way, Christian never forgot a face. Or the timbre of your voice. He had a mind for that kind of thing.

Not more than a week later, John sat at the Haven street bar, drinking, when a gaggle of Coffin Cheaters strolled in, Christian Donovan in tow. He spied John, and worked his way over to him.

John, right? How you doing?

John, not being the charmer Donovan was, struggled with small talk.

Unemployed.

Fuckin’ A.

Soon as I got a damn job, the place closed. They wouldn’t gimme no unemployment cuz I didn’t, um, I didn’t…

You didn’t work their long enough to pay into the insurance fund.

Yeah, John said, that’s exactly right.

Christian had his entry.

A regular catch 22.

A what?

Nothing, Listen, John, you need work, call me over the next few days, and he handed John his white Baltimore County card with Christian Donovan in small blue embossed letters across it. A phone number underneath.

Once John understood my college career had ended, out came the card.

How well do you know this guy, I asked him.

Not hardly at all. But he runs the county dump and junk. He can’t be that bad.

He’s bad enough to run with the Cheaters.

So what if he rides with them sometimes. He’s hiring. And I don’t see you got nothing for the next fifty-two weeks.

Alright, alright, I said, giving a couple dollars to the barkeep. The last couple of dollars I had.

Something in John’s eyes made me stop worrying. Powerful weapons they were.

You think too much, he told me, and thrust his long neck beer into mine.

All that thinking, and I’m here doing the fixing.

Call him up already.

Something in me wanted the words back as soon as I said them. But I didn’t stop John from making the call.

We’d been working at the dump a couple of weeks, just after Christian pulled the teeth out of the ’68 comeback guy’s head, when John mentioned I had gone to UMB on a science scholarship. The next day, Christian Donovan strutted over to me, like I was a prize.

Goddamned scientist, eh?

I looked up from the pile of rusted tail pipes he wanted separated.

What’s that?

Cousin John told me you were a college man.

He leaned on the pile of rusted pipes. My heart pumped like when a girl says in that breathy voice yes, and falls into you, that way. The one way. Pumped fast.

Leave them pipes be. Got something else you need to take a look at.

And I heard the lilt of trouble heralded. But I did not listen.

He took me down the hill behind the junkyard, to a slightly listing creosote-covered shack. Pushed the door open. It creaked dramatically. I was waiting for zombies to attack.

A table stood before us, an old dining room thing, longer than it was wide. A kind of chemistry set atop it, beakers connected by medical tubing, Bunsen burners, and behind them a long row of mason jars. The room smelled, well, strong. I didn’t know the smell, but I’d never lose it; sweet, like fruit, and underneath of that, metallic, and bitter, and corrosive. It smelled like trouble.

That’s ether, Christian told me.

It sank into my skin, into my face, my nose. Christian tossed a rag my way.

You’ll get used to it, doc.

He was wrong. My face roasted in it. I knew Ether as an anesthetic, a drug doctors used to knock you out, before the cutting. I looked around the room. What they wanted, what this was, wasn’t Christian’s concern, and that concerned the hell out of me.

Behind the mason jars sat a suitcase half full of bundled twenties. A kid like me, I’d never even had the guts to dream about that kind of money before.

What do you want me to do?

I was full of suspicion. Christian heard the grinding in my head.

The previous cook, how should I say this, he got a little greedy. Started stepping on the product. The boys didn’t like that.

Christian tossed me a college level advanced chemistry book.

There’s a few extra pages in there to help you out. Chemicals come tomorrow.

You trust me?

I don’t need to trust you. Fuckin’ A. I trust John. I know where you live.

That’s not what I mean. I’ve never done this sort of thing.

No time like the present.

He pointed at the book.

Better read up.

The shack was no more than 600 sq. feet. A bank of deep sinks, the table, and two crudely made wooden shelves. Painted across one wall were the words DO NOT SMOKE IN HERE, DUMBASS! the ‘B’ turned backwards.

I lied to Christian Donovan. In high school, they let me have run of the chem lab, and I made some powerful LSD. John and I took it the rest of the year. That was the reason John left school. He liked the LSD too much to contain himself in class. One day, as the high came on, he got up,  overturned his desk, and walked out. His teacher backed up against the blackboard, glad to be rid of the menace. She never spoke up, and no one called from school. A valley of unspoken acknowledgement, of shrugged shoulders. Neglect is a sharp blade.

John’s first hallucination started out all wrong, he told me afterward. Gone was the comfort of his adopted family. He was thrust back into the world he inhabited with his mom, after uncle Lenny went to prison.

That ended quick, like a jab of pain, a reminder that’s all, he told me.

The bad feelings left. I saw my pop in prison, playing guitar. I knew it was a hallucination, but it felt so real. He sat there playing country songs, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard. That was good, see. I realized he had something. And from there, it was like the dark part of my mind just up and took off. I lay down in the grass behind the H&S bakery, the clouds were somersaulting, doing back flips, on my command. And I loved it. I was in control of something.

He found euphoria.

When I got to the dump the next day, Christian pointed me toward the shack. Five large boxes full of the chemicals sat on the table, with the chemistry textbook, a respirator mask, some plastic yellow gloves, and pair of safety goggles. It felt good to be working that part of my brain again. It also felt strange. Charged with fear. I was crossing a boundary. I was becoming an outlaw.

The last cook left behind notes. Outlines of a few long but relatively simple processes, some explanations of chemical compounds, possible ingredient substitutes, but most of all, page after page after page was devoted to the subject of how to avoid poisoning yourself, how to keep the lab from turning into an exploding ball of death. One page stood out from the others. In a hard to read scribble it listed a few other processes to make the stuff, faster recipes. Stay awake, the last line said, don’t fall asleep. Do some coke.

As if he’d been reading my mind, Christian came through the door. And dropped a tiny package on the table.

Don’t mix that up with them chemicals, man.

What is it?

Coke. To stay awake. It’s a long process.

He handed me a straw.

Coke is it, man.

A tired line. His eyes drew down on me. I stuck the straw into the envelope, and inhaled. I didn’t turn into a monster. I hadn’t become mentally occluded. In fact, everything suddenly felt a little better, everything looked a little bit finer. Confidence arrived. I turned to Christian. He patted me on the back.

Coke is it, he said and split.

I spent hours, days, in the shack. Each moment further down the line, a new layer of doubt disappeared.  Chemical compunction turned mythological apprehension into physical discovery. I synthesized, and synchronized, I metabolized. I burned. I parceled alkalide by sulfate of bromide, inch by dissociative neurotoxic inch.

Every morning a new packet of powder arrived, via Christian. In two weeks time, I had a burgeoning cocaine habit, and my first successful batch of PCP. He called the Coffin Cheaters to come on out and party.

Tell me how they like it, I told him.

You’re not gonna stay and try the shit?

No. I had to get out of there before the Cheaters showed up. I knew what the drug would do to them. The next day, Christian Donovan and a biker called Smoke came for me.

Smoke waited without expression, as I tugged on a pair of Levi’s. He was short, slender, and clean-shaven. Without the leather vest, and bandana wrapped around his dark hair, he could have been one of the kids at UMB.

Come on blood, you gotta hurry for the boss man. Don’t want to keep him waiting.

His eyes twinkled, and he whistled when Christian mimicked a cracking whip. Their laughter came easy, and was directed at me.

I rode with Christian in the bondo’d county dump pickup.

John’s been working on some Cheater bikes.

Not a good sign.

I could use him in the lab.

Better.

Let’s get things straight, Louie. They smile just as kitty kat friendly before they tear you apart. You’re so damn cocky.

I interrupted him.

Cool it with the Nightmare on Elm Street stuff. I tested the stuff on Johnny boy. Two days ago.

Christian’s jaw dropped, and then he flashed his perfectly white teeth at me, too pure to suit his character.

The meeting went as smooth as something completely predicated on fear can. Their Presidente was well spoken, and like Smoke, appeared pleasant, almost beatific. Two muscled up goons with scar tissue flapping under their dim eyes, stood near by. They wore long beards fouled with engine oil, tobacco, and blood. And they reeked. Their eyes bobbled in their skulls. Still riding high. Ready to exact vengeance if the meeting veered off course.

Mr. Presidente inched closer to me, and offered me his hand.

Don’t worry. Don’t even think. Last guy got to thinking. Screwed the whole situation right the fuck up. You’re a kid, you got a big bright future, make some dough for a year or two, teach what you learn to one of our guys. You’re out. No harm, no foul.

Yes sir, I stammered.

I didn’t trust him, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. When I took his hand, I shook it firmly, and took the money he gave to me, and counted it there, in front of all them. Buoyed, I called after him. Everyone froze but me.

Say, Mr. Presidente, I said, my nerve quavering, not my voice.

I need my cousin helping me, if you want to keep things running on time. Or ahead of time.

The ogres started toward me. Presidente shook his head. The ogres stopped.

Of course, of course, he said. Of course.

A land of repetition, a tide of retribution with smiles so gladly given, you knew they lacked honesty, and brought with them worry formed by bones that crossed underneath empty skulls.

Drugs do things in chemical bonds that are beautiful to watch, but if you leave them, they decompose, and fragment into unrecognizable pools, and in that, hell might develop. I kept my distance from the bikers,  kept John close to me, using him, whether unwittingly or not, like a shield. Reason, and logic had no place with us there.  We were dug in deeply with covalent bonds. Seventeen parts Carbon, twenty-five parts Hydrogen, one part Nitrogen, all together, flux, mix stir, batch it out to dry a day and a half later, voila-phenylcyclohexyl piperidine. PCP for short. We worked endlessly, the seductive veil of projected importance fogging our judgment, psychopathic thugs feeding our pockets with dollars. Clean flaked out crystals whiter than the snow that built up on the side of Haven street every winter. Yeah, for all intents and purposes, I was a drug dealer. Hell, I was a loser. A fucking criminal, so out of my mind. I didn’t need the drug to prove that. But I fried on it, anyway unable to resist the impulse after the first few batches. I left part of my brain back in the shack, as I went exploring the meager realm of my psyche. Our battle cry should have been, Remember Love Canal, and like that noxious place, I was a depository for waste. I percolated with chemically dependent sins.

What happened then? I became unreliable. Drank to my own health, sent powdery substances of differing variations into my nasal canal. The money, the power, the prestige. Maybe not your everyday Joe’s vision of it, but for me, here came success. And I reviled in it. The myth of my perfection unfolded before me, as Coffin Cheaters applauded their Presidente for his shrewd discovery. I became unglued. Unhinged. Undone. Was it the tenth batch? The twentieth? It was one batch, my batch, and it sent three Cheaters to the hospital. Luckily, none of them died. I came close the next day, the roar of motorcycle engines waking John and me from our diluted rest. I got to the window, in time to catch two burly bikers take a sledgehammer to the front hood of the blue Ford pickup I had just bought. The next second, John screamed. I turned in time to catch one of those mountainous goons bust him with a fist wrapped in chain link. The goon made for me. I yelled for him to stop.

If you hurt me, I might not come out of it, and whatever it is you want I won’t be able to fix.

He remained unmoved. A careless glimmer lingered in his eyes.

I’ll take that chance.

They took us out to the dump. Christian Donovan was there when we roused. He said something to John I didn’t hear. He noticed my head bob, and turned his attention to me. He asked if I was hurt very bad. He meant it. I felt his distress.

I paused. The roomful of drunken addicts, bobbled on my sea of mistakes and false moves, my audience, my fellows in decline. Only the pressboard wooden podium offered any protection from their wolfen stares. This is the disease; this need to open your wounds for your peers.  Acceptance, or expectation?  I can’t be sure. Perhaps these daring explorations into our past lives return us from stone, but in them, do we retreat too deeply, reigniting our bug eyed past selves? Every night a different room, a new speaker plumbs the murky depths. And we linger over their words like gargoyles caught in that brilliant twitch, ready to feast. My mouth, your ear, our heart.

The glassy apprehension in their faces made me queasy. A calm, listless façade, underneath of which ran the jones. The jones smells fear, the jones leaps tall buildings, carelessly leaving dead bodies in its wake. The jones shares needles with known carriers of HIV. The jones does not care.

You want my blood, You want it, you got it. Fuckin’ A.

I smacked the blue big book on the podium. That brought them back.

I tell you what happened next. Christian Donovan looked at my face, with the links of chain freshly swelling into my cheek bone. And he looked at me hard. Louis, he said, we’re in a lot of trouble. But me and John boy, here, we are mere byproducts of this trouble. You’re the one they’re mad at.

The room tilted toward me, bodies swung forward in their seats. I continued.

There was patience in what he said, or how he said what he was saying, a kindness, a real concern, I told the sea before me.

I struggled to keep up with him, my bell still ringing.  At least the goon showed me restraint. They trained him well. One punch from his chain linked hand, I went down, and out, and he packed me up like a box to be mailed off to Indiana.  Where he was then, I didn’t know, and was glad not to. His absence implied there would be a second chance, for me, for all of us. Christian Donovan confirmed my suspicions.

The  President came to see me, Christian told me.

The Cheaters expected one batch to cover the last one I messed up, and two extra ones beside it, to square the deal. And, I had to pay back the money they paid me for the bad batch.

What bad batch, I said, what happened?

I was playing a hand. Christian punched me, clean and fast, on the nose. He grabbed my jaw with the hand that hit me.

Are you ok? You still with me?

I nodded.

Want another one?

No, I did not.

You know exactly what I’m talking about.

John stood up behind him, and Christian turned to face him.

No John. No.

I tried but the words were swallowed by the pain in my jaw.

No.

John clenched his teeth.

Don’t punch him again.

Fair enough, Christian said, fair enough.

He turned back to me.

Louis? We cool?

Yeah, I mumbled, don’t hit me anymore.

He went to the fridge, got out three beers.

Fuckin’ A. Quite a pickle we’re in, he said, doling out the cans of Natty Boh as if he himself had bought them for us.

Christian Donovan pulled a man’s teeth out of his head with pliers to square a debt, and still we pulled for him. He linked us with amoral bikers, yet here we sat, drinking beers with him. Who helped our faces to the marks we wore, who first ignited my illegal Bunsen burns, but came up smelling roses? Christian Donovan’s sense of self worth had propagated and reproduced with such vigor, affected his sense of the world so totally, it took ours with it. The same way that it had charmed the Cheaters, and the county officials who placed him in charge of the dump. His magnanimity may have been bluster, but that bluster granted him a kind of salvation. I had the chance to step away. John had that chance, as well. Yet, there was that extra something in Christian that pulled us closer to him, when those chances came, we ignored them. It was like he had these little packets of trust he’d invest in you, drawing everyone nearer to him and his apocryphal faith. There Christian banked. He had been banking there for so long, worry etched into his face.

He was not bad, I told the allegiance of dopers, and cuckolds, and frigid aires, the paranoiacs and the blown gaskets, and the desperate junkie mothers. The drunken bums and businessmen.

Will you know what I mean when I say that? A room full of snitches and finks and rats, losers every last one of you, we all affected our loved ones so adversely the spiral further cascaded into a Hades of our own device. Will you know that when I tell you this man, whose fist cracked my face a moment before, was not wrong to do so? Yes. Because you remember watching, as the elevator slammed down past the floor you always said you’d exit on if things got bad enough. Mine shot down past those floors while I licked cocaine frosting off of Coffin Cheater whores, while I knocked back Tuinols with pint glasses of Jack Daniels. I slipped past clarity. I rode lower than despair. Instinct, when confronted by pain, has little, if anything to do with reason. Because by then, you’ve crafted a persona that exists in sideways glances, and Mexican stand offs, all of which you somehow manage to escape. The skin of your teeth isn’t just a phrase, it’s a motto. Put it on a sash, for all the world to read.  Tattoo it on your forehead.

We got back to the apartment, the television was on. There was half a case of beer chilling in the fridge. If you forgot about the debt, the welts on our faces, things looked alright.

The news was on. A local anchor strolled through the Patterson Park.

This is a land overcome by rock cocaine, he said trailing the black chord of his microphone in the grass behind him.

They call it Crack Rock, in this land of the living dead.

His mellifluous voice called out sadly. His eyes were red, as if from anguish, his hands shook with an angry palsy. He bent down and retrieved a small glass container from the ground.

They come crammed into vials. These little yellow rocks make zombies of regular citizens, one by one, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, from the inside out.

John smacked the top of the TV set so hard the picture momentarily went haywire.

What? What’s wrong?

Crack rock, he said. Dyno-fucking-mite.

That I knew immediately what he meant fully illustrates that place we inhabited. John copped the power of this new drug instantly. A more sensible duo would have made a quick survey of the terrain, realized the dangers. We were too far gone. We overlooked our own recklessness like it was never there to begin with- oh that, that’s bravado, that’s charm, that’s strength. That’s what we thought.

But we were wrong. I was wrong. John had already slid into the PCP glaze. Any of the money the bikers had spread around to him spaced out into lint balls, and vacant stares. What I had, I owed to the Cheaters. What I had, and owed to him, that was harder to see. But when he said let’s go get some, I listened. I thought I saw his vacant glaze clear. And maybe it did, the soft glow of excitement cutting through it. But I don’t think so. Because, for a bright moment, I saw through my own glaze, and knew that the plan, whatever it proved to be, was wrong. Stop the insanity, that moment said. And I heard it. I realized this was not an offer of goodness, or love, this plan of ours, this was drugs, and money, and if I proceeded, in any way, the only thing I was doing was looking for some way to free myself from John and the rest of them. To get off Haven Street, and out of my own head. But clarity could not wrestle control of my vocal chords. I said nothing. And clarity passed.

Yeah, let’s go get some, I said.

On the TV the reporter continued through the barren park.

It’s a simple distillation of baking soda and cocaine, he said importantly to the camera, his frown perfect. Man, we were gone.

On Baltimore Street the black kids came out of the shadows like victorious Viet Cong. A short one thumped the dent on my hood.

How much you want, he asked in a high, squeak.

What are you eleven, John asked.

But the kid just motioned for the money, and I fished a ten from my jeans. The kid snatched it and tossed a couple small vials in my lap. In the distance police lights rounded the bend in the road by the old stone wall of the cemetery, stained black by soot, and malted, mentholated defeat.

At the apartment, John immediately found a beer can, and thumbed a flat surface into it. In the crease he poked a few holes in with a steak knife. He threw a rock on it, and lit it up. Inhaled.  His whole body lifted upward. I wondered how he knew to do that. Suddenly his eyes slammed back into their sockets and the vein in his neck began to pulse. He looked over at me with no kindness, and  started yelling.

Give me the rest, damn it. Give me the fucking rocks. Give me the fucking rocks. NOW!!!!!!

His fist raised, blood pressure boiling his brain. I threw the rocks at him, and got out of his reach.

He lit them all at once, sucking in their venom for almost and minute and then he fell to the floor. His eyes were helicopter blades chopping up his mind. Whoomp, whoomp, whoomp. His legs, feet, and fingers twitched out of his control. John got off the floor, and threw me my keys.

We need more.

Second verse same as the first; John smoked all but the one rock I managed to hide, while he shouted incoherently at the ceiling.  Whoomp, whoomp, whoomp. When he finally passed out, I split.

Christian Donovan hugged his pillow in such a way, I knew he wasn’t gonna be happy to see me when he woke up. I tapped him on the forehead, until his eyes blinked back at me.

I need to get some coke.

Baltimore St., by the cemetery. All you need, man, right there. And leave my ass alone, I got a good thing happening.

Powder coke, Christian. I need powder, and I need a lot of it.

He disengaged from the pillow.

Why?

I had become his responsibility.

How much is a lot?

I’ve got to play catch up , I said, starting in before he had time to latch on to any one piece of what came out.

I need to make some money for chemicals. And I gotta be able to stay awake while I’m cooking. A quarter pound, maybe more, maybe less.

Ok, listen, calm down. I’ll get the coke, but you make some extra dust for me, and you keep it like a secret. Fuckin’ A.

True to his word, there was a quarter pound of coke in the shed the next day. I smoked a sliver of rock I’d hidden from John, for flavor. But what happened to me centered in my stomach, a low aching rumble. None of the gorgeous rapture John had found. Acid reflux hit me pretty hard. But then the flower bloomed, and it was a mean flower, a flower that slammed my head in a car door, repeatedly. But I knew the flavor. Thick, metallic flakes of starchiness that popped and sizzled as they burned.

Crack comes together a lot faster, a lot easier than the Freebase that inspired it. Base torches your mind for long spans. Crack blows it for less than hour. I mixed it twenty percent coke, eighty percent baking soda. The kind of mixture that only blows you for about ten minutes.

By noon, I’d rocked it and packed it up, stashing the drugs in a suitcase behind the bench seat in the truck, in case Christian went hunting through the shack. I needed to start batching up some dust. By then, things took on a fluorescent sheen, it felt like I was a character in a video game, where you shoot all day long, and no one gets hurt. Somewhere deep inside, I knew the extracurricular damage. But the ones who were looking for Angel Dust, or Crack had been hurt long before I came on the scene. I was just cooking, I lied to myself. And like any good cook, I sought other recipes. I remembered that extra page the Cheater’s last cook had scrawled. A change in recipe. Timelier, less volatile, a change was all I needed. I could handle most of it myself, another advantage. Only needed John to help stir it, two shifts of stirring, me adding in the ether at the end.

The hard part, the part where John came in, was the reflux and the stir. A batch took 18 hours. I’d already rocked up the coke. Once I sold that, I’d have enough money to square the deal with the Coffin Cheaters, with some left over. In the back of my mind, I knew that if anything went down the Cheaters would come for John first. I told myself I was ok with it. Just like his mother depositing him with me, that day on our stoop, scratching the sores on her face, convincing herself what she was doing was right. In my mind, I’d already left him.

Bromides. Bromobenzenes. Etherates. Halobenzenes. Halobenders. I paid the wrong attention.  I spent it on details more easily manipulated- where to move to, how to get there. John, bugged out on his rock candy, was in no shape to follow directions.  And I never told him that I switched recipes. He stirred in preparation for a 16 hour batch, the way we had always done it. When I didn’t show to relieve him, he processed it, not adding in the ether, and he split. By the time I got back, I was split myself, after a night of booze and strippers the Cheaters sent my way to stopper any trouble I’d have making a clean batch for them. My bleary eyes took in the work John had done, and I made the lethal mistake. I left the PCP as it sat, batched it up and got Christian over there.

First batch is finished, ready for the taking.

He wanted the good things I wanted. To stay alive, for instance.

You try it?

You know I don’t fuck with that shit.

You should this time. You want to scrap two batches in a row? Last guy, I can show you pictures, if you want.

I don’t need to try it. It’s a new recipe. A better recipe. This is potent dust. Enough to knock every last one of ‘em on their leather covered asses.

Rock, my brain thumped, rock, rock, rock. Weeks sped into days, days crammed into hours. In minutes, I’d be free of this messed up spot, undone of this imperfect obligement.

You smoke some, Christian. You give it a blast. It’s divine.

I left him standing there. Should I have been more wary? The answer is simply, yes. Woe is that I should have left. What was I thinking? I wasn’t. There were rocks in my head.

I couldn’t sell the crack through Christian. He wanted me on his side, anyway he could get me there. Trust did not exist between us. So, I found myself brokering the deal with some tweaked out, streetwalking hussy. I was living in the future, a future that never mattered, because I couldn’t even touch it. But I drank up the thought. The funnel was open. The flue unhitched. Implications meant nothing. I was high on foolishness.

Whatever her name was I’ve forgotten it, forfeited in the back alley behind Baltimore Street, near the Gaiety’s door. Her body shivered in the night air, one of those satin jackets covering her breasts, the name of the club written across the back in too hard a script, too bright a pink. Her legs pale, untouched by sunlight in years, bare to ALL elements. And I wanted them. Even with the cluster of bruises, I wanted her. I did. And when the fat black dude with dripping Jheri curls got out of the parked maroon Pontiac, with chromed mud flaps, I thought about the bad joke I had just become a part of. I even laughed, as he waved me over. I had to, my backpack dangling in my hand. No weapon, nothing. Jheri Curl motioned for the girl to get, and she disappeared fast enough, I knew the only thing left in the alley with me was trouble.

Give me the bag.

Give me the money.

Uh-uh, kid.

His words were broad as he was. They came down with a nasal force that thudded at the end of each one.

Give me the bag, I ain’t gon tell you ‘gen.

I shook my head no. No. No. No. No. My arms clutched the bag to my chest. As if life poured out of it, and me, into the alley. The way it probably would after he shot me. But I couldn’t just give up. This was my future. My life. I had to try.

I turned to run out of the alley. Another black wall of flesh behind me.

Uh uh.

The same slur, same nasal thud.

Jheri Curl pulled a revolver, a snub nosed thing, with pearl handles. I stood there admiring the damn thing.

The bag.

I dropped it.

Just business, white boy.  No hard feelings. But, you git on, ‘fore I use this.

He scratched his crotch with the gun barrel. I backed out of the alley, past the second one. I started to run.

White boys think they know shit.

Jheri Curl laughed. Then I was gone.

I stopped at a bar near the Art School, because they sold package goods, because I was so turned around, I drove the wrong way. The bartender slid my change back with a brown bottle of Jim Beam. The doorman eyed me, like I was trouble. He was right. I was trouble. That much was swimmingly clear.

I twisted the cap from the bottle and drank it down to the bottom as I drove.

I wanted them to seethe, and writhe in their metal chairs, while I exposed the guilt of my secret. But they seemed to care, a little concern radiated my way. And I did not like it. Not one bit.

The wax, the apogee? I ruined the last batch of PCP. I was responsible, but the Coffin Cheaters blamed John. And they killed him fast, a bullet to his unfazed skull. What’s worse, I blamed him, and told everyone who would listen, it was his fault, John had gotten the both of us in over our heads. I told them that story, but, as messed up as I was, I knew that it was a lie. Unlike chemical compounds, Guilt has a an after life that doubles in size. It keeps growing as time marches onward.

The Cheaters caught up with me. There was little to discuss. Our business was concluded. Their message clear, delivered in a one way conversation, leaving precious few marks, but every bit as painful as the beating their goon delivered a few weeks before: If I talked, my parents were next. I listened. I already had John’s blood on my hands. Turns out, I had Christian’s too.

Christian tailed me the night I went to make my ill fated deal. Only he got waylaid. When chance brushed by him, as he went from titty bar back to street, fate came in the repeated stab of a switchblade. Awe struck and helpless to defend himself, his eye socket filled with blood, and his throat slashed so no plea could curdle out into the night. His assailant? Clairol # 7. Gums.

There are some in the audience who stay with me. Their eyes are kind. And that hurts.

I’m no different than the rest of you, but for one brass ring. My ring says this: I don’t care if, when I walk out of this room, I’m struck down dead. Me, I’m no better off than I was before. What you hear and see in these rooms is not solace, or absolution. Nothing but a grim reminder. What came, might come again.

Their faces collapse. Their grief is total. I light a cigarette and leave the room. There is no coniferous table, no chemistry set, no mason jars filled with cash, no blood filled eye socket. There is no thing to bring unto your chest and clutch between your skeletal fingers until the moment passes. The moment will not pass. The moment will never pass.

Dark Sandy Nothing

The night had gone, replaced by a sun with nowhere to go, and nothing to do, but burn. He had fallen asleep on a bench. When he woke, he got up and started heading left, was that eastward? How strong the sun was now, pulsing beads of sweat on his brow and under his arms. Left again. Straight ahead. He passed by a desecrated casino, the Queen of Hearts. The place had been fenced off for years. Today, though, the sunlight exposed a gap in the chain link, revealing a crude entrance. The fencing had been rolled back, beyond that, the Queen’s smoked glass doors splayed open. He heard the whir of air conditioning saunter to greet him, followed by the dampened jingles of the Queen’s slot machines.

He had no memory of the casino. He tried to place himself inside, but nothing materialized. He did not remember decor, the outfits that cocktail waitresses wore, even a partial flavor of the stench that wafted from the place on a busy night.  Nothing. He could not reinvent the glistening statues, the chintzy floral pattern of The Queen’s carpeted floors. Because of this, he found himself lulled by curiosity, intrigued enough he began to inspect himself for any glaring imperfections that might dim his chance of entry. Obvious no no’s like stains, bits of food  on his face, drool, leaves in his hair.

His fingers found and then ignored a slightly discolored spot on his lapel, spilled liquor, stray ash. No cause for alarm. He shifted his attention to his trousers. They were hardly rank enough to cause embarrassment, or worry. There had been times, though, when his pant legs did, indeed, give the bouncers and doormen, the gamblers and tourists cause for alarm. He passed muster. And the Queen’s barebones entrance hardly spelled out elegance-for Christ’s sake, those grim exterior walls recalled a ghetto rather than a house of gambling. The Queen had fallen on hard times. She would take what she could get. He told himself he’d give  it a try. At the first sign of trouble he’d bobble back out, or the second. It all depended. Everything with him depended. There was no future, not backstory to finesse, only the present. And the present was mostly a dull fever lit with momentary glitches he would use to try and read the tea leaves, try and see, try, and see. His eyes, and his mind at counterpoint, locked into some code even he was confused by. The jingle from a slot, the tinkle of a piano, the love song of clinking glasses. He would wait and see. The first sign of trouble often was just that, a sign that barked out orders, and never amounted to anything more.

He checked his hair, in a streaked mirrored window, tamping down the obtuse angles jutting out, and upward, daring the desert heat to tame them. But soon he gave that up, remembering how bad hair worked to your advantage in some cases. Gamblers ran greasy, sweaty, anxious hands plied with lack of concern, with nervous chemicals, salted by desperation, through their scalps. They had no concept of shame, before, during, or after a long night at the tables. Bad hair, he remembered, could secure your entry. Despite the brilliance of the flashing neon, the signs and street lamps adorned with valent circuitry, a cavalcade of light emittance, despite that bright illusion, the real economy traded on habitual losers, rarely aware of anything that fell beyond the narrow confines of their frame of reference. Pit bosses dreamed of the near sighted, and glassy eyed. Buttoned down, well-groomed types fizzed Alka Seltzer in their low balls.

Bad hair channels luck, he remembered, flicking his hands away from his own tangled mess.

Good gracious, he said, let there be light.

For years, the town had slowly beaten down its own standards. Why not? Lowest common denominators served the rest of the country well, why not here, in the palace of sin. Where the knee highs, and the socks with sandal types came for a piece of the action they did not want back home.

Where once a song lingered, near the entrance, now lived a series of loud blasts. But not today, for he noticed this Queen was a throwback. Hers was a delicate confection, a forgotten mood, the timber of restraint. Most of the other places had gone with music-less songs jacked up to volumes so loud the distortion ground down your teeth, and with that, every fiber of your attention, leading the dazed into the casino in an escape from the assault. It was a trick. The kind of scam carnies thought up, and brought with them when they tired of traveling from town to town. Finesse departed these environs long ago, perhaps left buried in one of those holes you always heard about, on the outskirts of town.

Everyone eventually made reference to the holes, their secret history not so secret, mapped by missing bodies of dead Mafiosos and their low rent imitations, chopped up, mulched, or buried in one piece, where the desert took over from the cultivated suggestion of propriety. You couldn’t have a town like this, without a rumor like that. Route 157 west, turn off into the dark sandy nothing, and start digging. A hundred buried rumors, a thousand, whoever was keeping tabs had lost count.

The siren’s song levitated an emotion he had little defense against, the wistful reverie of nostalgia, where memory belies truth, where big-heartedness erases historical fact. He had no option. He would go in. He had to. This was a gambler’s town. The line said, judge not the cover of the book, for in between those mangy slabs could be the shiny, last pulse of providence. No, no, you never turned back the possibility. This was a man who parlayed unsuccessful plays routinely. When he did win, he did not do so in formidable amounts. Instead, he ran along the same unlucky streak day and night, ably congregating just enough change to fund his descent.

A black man the size of Olympia stood watch over the Queen’s entrance. His name hand written in block letters on a tag clipped to his garish vest. Clarence. Clarence wore the fatigue of life as a glassy expression, too many punches, too many deceptive ideologies, too many too manies.

A stool lurked beneath him, on top of which sat an ashtray with Clarence’s smoldering Black & Mild cigar. The smoky mix of nicotine and fortified fruit flavor a bad combination at any hour, but poisonously rancid at this one.

Must be my lucky day, he said to the onyx giant.

Excuse me?

Lady luck, Queen of Hearts. My lucky day.

Oh. Yeah, ok. Must be.

Clarence jabbed his thumb toward the door.

Slide on in, Mr. Lucky.

I had a dog named Lucky, once, the man said not going anywhere just yet.

Get to know the help, he thought, the help will lead you like a punch.

He had all of his legs…

Who had all his legs, Clarence wanted to know.

The dog, my dog. All his legs but we still called him Lucky. Most dogs called Lucky, they only have three legs. A bad joke someone started long before I was around to tell it. And we didn’t know it. Our dog had four legs. Wagged his tail with a furor, Lucky did. A furor.

Clarence didn’t care. He looked past the squash faced drunk, to the tide of morning traffic, slipped on his sunglasses, and surrendered to the fragmentary bombs of his thoughts. Clarence had taken bullets, and knives and punches, and he had let them go, save for a few scars on his hide, and the gross of memories that explained how he came to get them. A glint from a windshield could spin him out on those reels for hours. The smell a clutch makes as it burns out, that could do it, too.

The Queen of Hearts sat closed for five years. And in those five years, this was the second day it had opened for gambling. A closed casino opened. That’s right. For while the owner sat on the property, awaiting some ludicrous offer, a law was passed. In order to keep your gaming licenses, every closed casino in town needed to open its doors every two years, for one eight hour shift. As these dead beat glass tower operators sifted through tax dodges flavored with pyramid schemes, and shell games, the Queen’s doors swung open to the public, and showered them with her loving cup, two, four, six, eight hours a day. Without a gambling license, the property value barely hovered above inconsequential. Worth as much as one of those holes punched into the desert.

And as Clarence drifted off into mindful excursions, Mr. Lucky wavered at the door, remembering his wife. And the way they chose to live together, until she could no longer stand the sight of him.

No one moves sideways the rest of their life, or stays exactly where they are, she told him, bags packed, anger but a tone of voice.

No one. Bums, idiots, scholars, they choose a path, a course of action, at least for a little while.

I don’t think so, he countered, the heat of irritation taking him. He remembered his intention to remain silent, to let this blow over, but that heat kept coming, kept blowing over him, until…

This whole town is sideways, and burnt to a crisp, he said, his voice lingering near an unspoken threat, layering the air with pugilistic compunction.

No, I think I can make it fine without you, he pointed to the door, and then, for some reason went to kiss her, placing a hand between her legs.

She did not slap him, or brush him backward, only stepped back, and effortlessly let herself into the car he had bought for them.

It’s my car, he said.

She smiled, and started the engine. The V-8 rumble stifling her response. While he could not hear her, he understood. As he watched the car drive away, he raised his drink in memorial. And when he poured it to the ground, this was not consolation, it was just another in a long line of useless gifts to no one in particular.

No cocktail waitresses, no tarmac length of floor, no Pai Gow, no Roulette, no Black Jack. Nothing but some ancient wooden dining chairs around a few folding tables, a single row of slots by the rear wall, plunged in blackness, save for their animated flashing screens. They had the room cordoned off with dark, improperly hung curtains. Everything stopped at the curtain. On the outside, and the inside, the place reeked of imperfection. The decorations were half assed, like some dimwit local carved the dump out of the desert back when no one ever ventured far from the strip.

A small man with a nose that bent forward over a thin, waxen mustache, worked a crossword behind the bar. Dressed in the same vest as big black Clarence, the same worn out expression on his face.  Mr. Lucky, however, was bubbly. He felt alive, enchanted by this strange and forgotten spot. Energized him.

He looked where his watch would have been, and headed for the barman. The whole way, running different drink concoctions in his head. The drink you ordered established your personality, your style, if only for an hour. A drink is like a card game, a drink, he thought to himself, a drink, a drink, a drink. He licked his lips, tasting the future. The bartender looked up from his paper. Nodded.

Let me have, now let’s see, how about a, what about a Gimlet?

We have Jim Beam. And Coke. That’s it.

You don’t say?

He searched for something witty to add, but nothing came, and he looked to the bartender’s vest for inspiration. No nametag. All choice was gone.

A double shot, I guess.

The bartender pulled out a plastic cup, and gestured toward a cooler.

Ice?

Neat.

Oh, luck was with him, after all, and had given him a choice where he thought there was none. Thank you, thank you Queenie.

He fished out four crumpled ones and pushed a them across the bar.

Five even, the bartender said.

He added another one to the pile, and the bartender slipped the money into a lock box by the sink.

Even Steven, he said, and like that, bee-lined for the far slot machine.

A few minutes later he returned, and placed a ticket on the bar.

You keep that, it’s yours. You earned it. He went back over to the slots.

The bartender shook his head and looked at the ticket. Ten dollars. He had worked these license vivifying affairs for a year, solid. The most he’d seen anyone win was 75 bucks. No one left him tips, barely anyone ever showed up at all. His boss, Mr. Rose, sold booze instead of giving it away. To keep any, and all comers off kilter.

If a machine hit, Mr. Rose, the man sitting at the corner table drinking coffee, had his bartender trade the ticket for cash, a thing he did not like to do. He did not like it so much, he only kept a few thousand, mostly bundles of  ones and fives, stuffed in his lock box, then insured it for ten large, in case of attack. And, he rigged the machines. No one hit it big in Mr. Rose’s house. No one. And while he was not connected, as they liked to say, Mr. Rose operated for connected people. His company was the company in the world of license renewing eight-hour casino operations. He rented his machines to you, ran them for you, operated your bar, and brought protection, all for one lump sum. For Mr. Rose was shrewd, and kept the price fair, neither low, nor high, fair enough, closed casino owners regularly beat on his door, hoping to resuscitate their own, eventual windfall.

He hired a new crew every few years, two at the outset, always sending the old staff off to live casinos, with just the right amount in bonus pay to lessen the likelihood they might interfere with his operation. Rose did not advertise his events, likely, the only pit boss in town who truly preferred an empty casino. He drank coffee throughout each shift, switching to decaf after the first pot ran his blood pressure up the mast. Without advertising, the imposing doormen he employed kept his rooms empty. Any stranger stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb.

Because of the rigged machines and Mr. Rose’s skepticism regarding chance and luck, the man’s winning ticket caught his attention. Rose changed tables, to better keep an eye on this sole customer. Immediately, another winning ticket puttered out of the slot machine the man played. Usually, if something went awry, in a case like this, the cheater poured his winnings back into the same machine; that being the only machine he’d fixed. This one however, got up, stuffed the ticket in his trousers, and moved to a machine closer to the bartender. He wanted to sip and talk, while he spent money earmarked for various things. Rent. The dentist. Food.

The bartender, having been plied with money, felt some camaraderie with the man. He was game.

You always this lucky, fella?

Oh, I ain’t that lucky. I’m Francis, and he reached over the bar to shake hands.

What’s a four letter word for follower of Mary, said the bartender, not offering his own hand, or name.

Lamb, Francis replied, refocusing his attentions on the machine before him.

Nah.

I can prove it.

Come on, then.

Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb.

What’s a four letter word for nuts?

I ain’t nuts.

For the crossword. Starts with L.

L?

Yeah.

Luna, no, wait, loco.

Loco it is.

Francis pounded on the video screen, happy to have been right.

Let me have another drink.

Mr. Rose got up and went behind the bar, pretending to pour himself another coffee. He stayed out of their way, but kept a leery eye on their interaction. When Francis produced his ticket, Mr. Rose stepped up, and grabbed it first.

How much did you win last time?

Same thing.

Not unthinkable. The machines paid out a little, every now and then. They had to. To rewire that circuit you needed an electrical engineer. He had little use for engineers, or electricians. Or anyone.

What’s with this place, it’s like you want it empty, and quiet.

But Mr. Rose ignored the question. He pushed a ten across the bar and went back to his table.

Francis wasn’t surprised by this behavior. Rose was management, and management just did not go for Francis. They took his disheveled appearance and daffy atmosphere as an insult. It was always the manager who made trouble for him, the waitresses and barkeeps and dealers quieted by the steady stream of tips he left in his wake. No, on those occasions when his presence was rendered unworthy, it was always the managers having him escorted from the premises. Pit Bosses saw past the red lines strung through his eyes to something else. The hunger, they called it. The hunger was a manageable disease that whittled down your dignity while upping your tolerance for pain, and humiliation. A good pit boss could fill a room with malnourished losers like Francis, and keep it that way the whole shift. Hungry types searching the tables for misplaced chance. Their heads bobbed desperately, anxious buoys on a clamorous ocean of luck. Only, this sea knew nothing of luck. The half domes on the ceilings, the pit bosses, the table supervisors, the dealers, they operated on a premise divorced of chance and luck and happenstance. This was not a land built on opportunity, it was one manicured to imply favor, and yet it thrived on fixed, regimental corrections. You took in a little. Then, the house took it back, plus whatever else you had leftover in your pocket, and, one that was gone, the house went for your bank account. And then it set off to ruin your credit, until your eyes were distraught saucers ringed with loss, and you plied the juiced slots at the airport with the last few coins you possessed. Corrections.

The bartender reached for his pack of Parliaments.

Let me get a pack of smokes, Francis said, patting himself down for a pack he knew did not exist.

We don’t sell ‘em.

You what?

We don’t sell cigarettes.

Well let me have a P-funk all star.

Instantly, the bartender regretted opening up to this man. He liked to spend his shifts doing the crossword, in silence. The low hum of the slot jingle his only interruption. Around five in the afternoon, he made himself a cocktail and after that, he shut things down. An easy part time job that came with a full time salary.

Huh, the bartender asked, bother stitched in his gruff expression.

Let me have one of your Parliaments. Only cigarette named after a funk band.

The bartender handed over his lighter and a cigarette. Francis turned the whole process into a big ritual, hands swooping in to cup the flame, a tilt to his head, an eye cast toward an unseen horizon.

Who’s the bag man over there, Francis said nodding, to Rose, while smoke trailed from his nose into his mouth and back again.

The bartender shook his head, and went back to his crossword. But Francis was not deterred.

What’s the deal with this place, one type of booze, no people, no cigarettes, grumpy staff, no chicks. I mean…

The bartender cut him off.

Why dontcha ask the bag man.

But Francis wandered over to another machine. As he put his coins in, he turned sideways, so he had a view of Rose, and the bartender. Then, he let his finger drag across the slot’s screen, accumulating new cards, and a thin film of dust. He held his finger up, first to Rose, and then to the bartender.

For my next trick, Francis said, but the miniature siren atop the machine interrupted him, flashing, and spinning, sending a bordello red up and down the colorless walls.

Mr. Rose’s suspicion had been aroused, a scent came off of Francis’ continued win, whether it was real or not, Rose was on it, like a cheap detective, angry at being roused from a boozy nap in his office. He stashed the strong box behind the bar, and stomped over to Francis.

How’d you hear about us?

Francis put up his finger again, as if deep in thought, and, again, dragged it across the screen, keeping one eye on Rose. The siren did not sound.

Not this time, he said, rolling his shoulders back into their slump.

I asked you a question.

Yes, yes you did, Francis stated, gently slugging Rose on the arm.

I can’t answer you. It just happened. I know how it happened and I’m starting to think I know why, but, I have been wrong before. Many times. Many, many times.

Rose followed him to the bar.

You see, Francis said, I was out drinking, like every night. I’d had to vacate one establishment, because I looked, well, wrong. They didn’t tell me to leave, but there was a tone, a lag between drinks. I can read between the lines, Rosie.

Mr. Rose brushed imaginary lint from the shiny pinstripes of his wide lapel, so as not to admit the anger welling up in him.

It would seem a man like you might prefer a bigger room. The bells and whistles. Something more than what we offer.

That’s just it, Rosie. I’m all for experience. And, really, I’m nothing if not habitual. I follow a code. But sometimes, you’ve got to shirk the system. A man like you understands the need for chance.

He reached out to gently slug Rose on the arm, again. This time he missed, as his target ever so slightly dodged the blow, leaving Francis wobbly. This relieved Rose, for it appeared as if Francis made too pronounced a swing, and was going to topple to the floor. Then Clarence could legally remove him, for public drunkenness. And peace and quiet would return.

But Francis never hit the floor; the alcohol kicked in, giving him a vulgar reconciliation of movement and he regained his composure. He made a sweeping bow, and headed back to the slots. He sat his drink on a stool, and without turning to face anyone, addressed the as yet untried machine before him.

Ruthie was my kind of gal. Ruthie. Oh, too old for me, too old. But I loved her, the idea of her. Never any money to her name, and yet, always, always drunk. Her lips had once been slender and seductive and men thought long and hard about kissing them, but by the time I met her, they were curled into weapons. Ruthie. She had a duck, and a leash for the duck, so Ducky had to stick with her. Actually, there were a series of ducks. Every time the duck got old enough, off came the leash, and the duck waddled into traffic. The streets ran one way, but I guess ducks are stupid. Not one of them ever figured that out. Always looking in the wrong direction, at the wrong time. What’s a baby duck called?

Duckling, the bartender answered instinctively, the knowledge gleaned from a recent crossword.

Duckling, Francis repeated.

Baby duck sounds better. Duckling calls for an order of orange sauce to compliment it.

He won again. He clutched the winning ticket to his chest, for a moment, then shook it over his head while the siren went off, and the cheap red light whirled around the room again.

Francis got another drink at the bar, Mr. Rose rocketed over to the row of slots. He and Clarence set them up with space between them and the wall, so Mr. Rose could make adjustments if something like this happened. He shimmied behind them, unplugged the winning machine, and like clockwork, stuck a Phillips head into a socket, and gave it a couple of quickly vicious turns. He got to his feet, almost smashing into Francis.

This is where the magic happens, huh?

You’re not allowed…

Oh, Francis interrupted, I’m sorry, just looking for the floorshow.

He backed his way out of the space. Mr. Rose pretended to adjust the other machines. Francis stood nearby, happy to have for someone to talk to.

You ever know anyone like that, Rosie? Like Ruthie?

Mr. Rose came out from behind the slots.

There is no Mrs. Rose, if that’s what your after.

I’m just after some conversation.

Then why don’t you go to another casino? The city’s filthy with them.

Clarence, alerted by the flashing lights, appeared, and tensed by the tone of Rose’s voice. But Mr. Rose waved him off.

Think I’m gon’ take myself a little break. Clarence stretched each word out into defensive jabs so Rose wouldn’t dare challenge him,  and stepped over the cordon, disappearing behind the curtains.

What’s with all the secrecy, Francis asked.

Mr. Rose gave him a taut, clean smile, said nothing, and went back to his table.

Francis steered himself to the entrance, go cup of Beam in hand, hesitantly poking his head out into the sun. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the pair of bent sunglasses he kept to protect against the vampire’s kiss.

Insipid apartment buildings painted salmon, or coral, or just plain pink, with white roofs, once inhabited the block. They were long gone, replaced with monumental towers that lavished the otherwise cantankerous landscape with the sheen of success. Francis glanced up to the sky in an unenthusiastic attempt to determine the time, having pawned  the watch his grandfather gave him long ago. The old man had told him so many times the story, how the watch came from France, how it was the only thing he purchased there, the rest of his take looted, like ransom. He paid for the watch because a watch was something you handed down, from generation to generation. A watch was the kind of thing that needed clear provenance. You didn’t give your people stolen goods, that act would never instill a sense of pride. You gave them something you scraped your fingers to the bone to pay for. Francis still had photo of the watch, somewhere, in a box, in a room with no stove, or refrigerator, just a toilet, a shower, and a bed. Placed atop a pile of letters bound with twine from friends he no longer had.

Clarence reappeared in the doorway, and ignored Francis, who blithely refused the giant’s offer of silence.

You only live twice, right, he told the big man.

Clarence pulled a knee up against the wall, and relit his smoldered cigar.

You only live twice, nine lives. All adds up the same way. Numbers are like, they’re our own construction, they ain’t got nothing to do with the rest of this planet. Just a mental thing. An idea. Time, same thing. A theory. That’s what leap year is, an admission of our failure. Got to clean up the mess every four years.

Francis watched the Queen’s tower while Clarence spoke.

What’s behind the curtain?

Oh, there’s a whole world, man, empty promises, peeling paint. Pand-a-fucking monium back there. Just a little bit quieter. A might easier to handle than out here, on the promenade.

Clarence, Francis realized, was a deep thinker, stranded in the wrong town.

He left the colossus outside with his crumbling philosophies, and ducked back inside.

Mr. Rose did not get up.

I thought we got rid of you.

It’s not that easy, Rosie. A glutton, I tell you, I am a glutton.

Francis needed a drink, the sunlight drained him, reminded his body of all it lacked- sleep, food, sustenance.

The bartender reached for a fresh cup and offered it to Francis.

You want another one?

With ice, Francis agreed. I’m not feeling so neat.

He took the cup with him, and sat it on the slot as he fed it bills, happy enough that the machine took his crumpled money. And slowly, he lost track of himself, and swayed to the snippet of digital music that came as the machines took his money.

Whether he knew it or not, Francis moved to town to lose himself in its carpeted expanse. He met her early on. He had a flat stomach, yellow not yet  on his teeth, his eyes, his heart. He retained a jovial charm, a momentum and it brought her to him. And then lashed them together, so that they dreamed of splendor in tandem, his mouth hanging open as she spirited him from the touristy areas, to the hidden failures, the mighty wreckage, fenced in, boarded up, awaiting demolition. Waiting for replacement.

And she saw him marvel at her, as she ticked off names instantly associated with the desert bonanza. Brilliantined hair, black dinner wear, pegged pants, perfectly affected toupees. And here he was associating with her. Glamour by proxy.

She had been all things to most men. Strumpet, confessional Madonna, drinking partner, harpy. So she had a tendency to get lippy. Her zaftig curves provided well for her. He had his own approximations to distill, to tangle with, when his eyes were closed. In the beginning, those were things that made them expert partners. Her eyes widened when his slit, and vice versa. They tangoed in the Flamingo Buffet line, causing onlookers to applaud. She smiled with him, at him, about him. In the beginning, neither one of them sought the future, and that was their fatal mistake. Once she was gone, he shriveled up. He sat at card tables, and roulette wheels, and poker machines.

He hit again. The ticket trickled out to its dot matrix march. In his head, well after the initial sound retreated, it beat the Morse code. At the bar, he turned to  Rose.

I gotta big winner, Rosie. Bring that box of yours over here. A whole lot of Rosie.

Mr. Rose looked up, but not at Francis. Commotion annoyed him. Not this time, this time, his eyes traveled to the slot machine in question, and there was the gleam of an idea sparkling upon its still flashing light. He swung his attention to the ashen-faced bartender, who held the ticket with a shaking hand, his decision solidified. Mr. Rose sprang up, grabbed the tan strong box, and cradled it to his chest. His appearance, sure willed, weighted with self confidence, emptied Francis of the steadfast but forged confidence he had accumulated. Over Rose’s expression came an evilness that fluttered beside his eyes, in the deep lines etched beside his mouth.

You listen close, Rose said, riveting his words with a ferocious stare.

He grabbed the ticket from the bartender.

And you listen, and you learn, because this is a lesson, see? You don’t mess with me. Ok?

Francis took the last chunk of ice from the plastic cup, and pretended to gnaw on it.

That’s a winner, Rosie. My winner.

I beg to differ, friend. And I’m glad you brought that up. Because what I’m going to do is make a deal with you. I’m not paying this ticket out. But, I offer you the opportunity to register a complaint with the gaming commission.

With that, Rose threw some change on the bar, change he excavated from the silken expanse of his tailored slacks.

The commission is over on Washington, near the cemetery. That should cover the cost of the bus ride there.

Francis instinctively pulled the coins toward him. By the time Rose had shut up, they were in his pocket. And his fingers rubbed the faces of ex-presidents entombed in mountains of precarious myths taught to school children, the lofty ideals of these founding fathers propagandized and methodically restructured into legal and civic codes which allowed for this outright robbery to occur.

Right, Francis said. Right. You won’t pay that ticket. That particular ticket. Right. What gives you the right?

Mr. Rose started to answer, but Francis dumbly spun on his heels and weaved back to the slots and fed his last five into a machine he had not tried.

And so he did not see Mr. Rose walk out the door, strongbox under arm, and pull the giant inside and point Clarence his way.

Clarence tapped on Francis’ shoulder, as a new ticket buzzed into the tray which once congregated the coinage of winners, who greedily stuffed the material issue into plastic oversize cups emblazoned in crude neon script, the Sands, or the Stardust, or the Queen of Hearts. Francis ignored it. He produced the coins Rose had given him, bus fare, an insult, and shoved the money into the slot. The screen glimmered sporadically, cutting through an overcoat of fingerprints sprinkled with the grit of inertia. Long months had gone since anything had crossed over top of it. And the colors shifted their hue, going from red, to blue, to a strange empty shade Francis did not recognize. Badly connected wires were responsible, leaving the digital ornamentation, once bold, and bright, but a whimper of shameful idiosyncrasy. Francis rapped on the screen gently, and, briefly, the colors came back, full tilt. Animated cards flashing crisply. He chose a hand, while dancing tremulous reproductions of scantily clad ladies hovered in the background. His fingers followed the coercive ladies, until, the mélange set off a trapdoor in his mind, and internally he collapsed down memory’s chute, skidding in the ionic channels and bursts of neural transmittance, until, he was no longer enveloped by the Queen of Hearts, but someplace else. Twelve or thirteen years old, holding a cheap wooden wand, painted black, with white tips. His hands quivering like a fledgling conductor, directing a student orchestra. His father sat in the wing chair, reading Life magazine. Undisturbed. With reservation, young Francis waved the wand.

For my next trick, I’ll pull a bouquet of flowers from thin air.

He cleared his throat.

Dad?

Go ahead, boy. I’m watching.

Francis raised his arms until they bent before him. And then, in a quick, awkward movement he shot them out, dropped his left arm under the other, at just the right moment, concealing the collapsed bouquet as it popped out of his sleeve.

Voila.

The paper came to rest on his father’s lap.

Well, I’ll be, his Dad said. How did you do that?

Aw, you weren’t watching.

No, I was watching, the old man said, ruffling his paper to the next page.

How about that? Fascinating.

Clarence’s finger poked in rhythm, tap, tap, pause, tap.

I know, he told the giant. I know. But listen. There’s more to this story.

Clarence glanced back to Mr. Rose, who had settled down with another coffee, his back to them.

Ok, little man, you tell me your story. Then, out you go. He gestured toward the smoked glass doors.

Ok?

Ok.

Clarence removed his sunglasses. He meant what he said. This was no trick. You had to be able see the eyes if you were going to trust someone. If you wanted them to trust you.

So Francis spoke to him, the forged confidence stoking him once again, telling Calrence just what he had been remembering, drifting from one point in time, to the next, without reason, guided only by memory,  but his voice almost strong, unencumbered by pause, or lack of focus.

My father told me about hybrids, it was a hobby of his. Plants, seeds, soil. He loved to fiddle around, and make hybrids. Genetically altered to suit his whim. The first cross was F-1.

What are you talking about, Clarence asked, unable to trace a line from this mumbo jumbo back to the situation at hand.

Hybrids, F-1, the first cross. You know, flowers, mules, hinnies.

Hinnies, Clarence repeated, confused.

A hinny is like a mule, only harder to find. Female donkey and a male horse get it on, voila, the hinny.

And that’s an F-1?

Exactly. First cross.

Clarence looked over to Mr. Rose. And to his surprise, Rose appeared to be enjoying the show, switching from coffee cup, to their conversation, a noxious look sealed on his face. There was no way that drunk was getting any more money out of him, it said. No way. Rose signaled to the bartender, Francis was cut off.

A happy jingle issued from one of the slots. Francis lurched toward it. Clarence moved between him and the machines.

Is there anything else?

Yeah. Of course there is. I have a demand.

Making demands was not part of the deal.

It’s an easy one, as far as demands go. I want one last drink, and then, I’m gone.

Ok, Clarence said, relieved an end this simple was in sight.

The bartender, having overheard, pushed a generously filled cup toward Francis.

Uh-uh.

What do you mean, uh-uh.

I want it in a glass, filled with ice, and then I’ll leave.

Everyone in the room watched Mr. Rose. And waited, until at last, he nodded in acquiescence. He’d seen this before, men so far down the rungs of the ladder they became increasingly adamant about the last few things in their control. Bartering away their last vestige of dignity. What did Mr. Rose care if Francis exchanged plastic for glass?

The bartender poured the contents of the cup into a tall rocks glass, going so far to add an extra splash of booze to it. Despite it all, the bartender liked him. They usually did.

Clarence backed to end of the bar, ready for trouble, rocking slowly on the balls of his feet.

Drink up, now.

Francis looked first to the doorman, and raised the glass, a salutation. He tipped the drink to his mouth. Mr. Rose again turned his back to the interloper. The bartender began breaking down the bar. Clarence stopped rocking on the balls of his feet.

When Mr. Rose next looked up, Francis stood outside the Queen, glass in hand, sending yet another toast back to the proprietor. Clarence started for the door, but Rose admonished him.

There’s work to be done. Let him have his glass.

By then, the flow of traffic ran between Francis and the Queen. A bus passed, expelling a sooty cloud of exhaust. The light changed.  Traffic stopped. With the roadway clear, Francis threw the glass high above his head, and fell to his knees just as it exploded onto the asphalt, eyeing it, like the smashed glass would somehow predict his next move. Mr. Rose clicked his fingers at the bartender.

Call 911. That drunken jerk is smashing glass out front. Tell them he’s scaring away our business. Tell them that.

A few minutes later, Francis still had not left, as a squad car rode up, and pulled to the side of the road where he sat. Both the officers got out. Cars struggled to ease past the cruiser’s open driver side door. Traffic backed up. People hit their horns. The cops ignored them.

What’s the problem? You breaking glass? And you ain’t cleaning it up?

There’s no problem, he said, offering his wrists resolutely to the cops. But they did not cuff him. The one cop helped Francis to his feet, and then the three of them walked to the cruiser, the first one gently placing a hand on Francis’ head, as the cop eased him into the back seat.

What’s the matter? You gotta have a story. What’s what?

That’s a good question. And I don’t know. It’s the silence. I never make much headway in the dark, or when it’s quiet. It’s a point of view. Life is rarely fair.

Easy, the cop said, don’t get kooky on us. Slow it down.

But that’s just it. If I slow it down, if I ease up on the pace, then, the emptiness comes back. I’m better off in jail.

The second cop eyed him. Then spoke for the first time.

We’re not taking you to jail. There’s no reason. If everyone that broke some glass went to jail, there’d be no room at the inn. You know what I mean? Where d’ya wanna to go. We’ll drop you.

He couldn’t answer. That there would be hope, and possibility was beyond him. He shuddered, remembering he had spent the last of his money.

Listen, the first cop said, as if he knew that his charge had emptied his wallet. Like he expected it all to be about the money.

Here’s fifteen bucks. That’s all I got in my wallet, and I gotta say, I know better than this. But you can’t get into much trouble with fifteen bucks, and like I said, we’re not taking you to jail.

Francis took the money.

You can go.

He didn’t wait for them to change their minds. He got out quickly. At the light he turned left, toward the glistening shaft of light awaiting the coming night, blisters of imperfect hybrid dreams, blasted with greedy hopes, and the possibility of only inadequate results. Same as twenty four hours ago. But five dollars richer.

Take Me Somewhere Nice

1.

This world of ours is a huge place. Frantic, and beautiful, awful and splendid, often in the very same split second. When two like-minded people meet each other, it’s a complication of errors, compounded by hope. That’s bliss, there’s no doubt about it. We need each other. The trouble starts when life shifts out of focus, and blooms in ways no one ever expects.

The instant Jenny Kent found out Uma’s name was really Jenny, she felt the slow burn of one of those monumental moments in her belly. Like that first taste of whiskey, as it chars through your body.  And that moment, there on the poured concrete stoop of the student union, before the sterile glass doors that led into the cafeteria, there in the middle of nowhere, Ohio, the twinkle that shot from one pair of eyes to the other cemented the deal. That’s no small accomplishment, when you’re 19 or 20, and full of suspicion

Jenny and Uma did not share any classes. They were not roommates. They found their friendship at meals, or studying in the library basement, between gunmetal grey stacks of books. They drank tea together in the afternoon, and sometimes spent their weekends with Uma’s parents, sunk down in the Ohio valley. Their fingers dangling in a stream Uma had known since childhood. Quiet hours, where they blinked their eyes, and changed position, but said no words. Everything green, and hopeful.

2.

Their final year, Uma met a boy. He stood tall and slender like Uma’s father. His skin was very white, giving him a fragile appearance. A delicate muscle. Everyone called him by his last name, Wicke. Within a week, they smoldered at the sight of each other.

One more letter, she teased him, and you could be so evil.

Wicke would sometimes ask her about the future, hoping she would mention him. She did not. This was college, and though she loved him furiously, she knew and end would come. They would eventually split apart. Wicke did not know this, or if he did, he hated it. He worked against it, and plotted ways for them to survive, deep in thought, awaiting the swish of the long skirts Uma liked to wear.

Say it, he said. You don’t care. Say it. SAY IT.

I do care. I told you I loved you, and I do. I love you.

That’s impossible.

To him it was. Wicke needed constant affirmation, and Uma tried so very hard. But he tested her. Pushed her away. This time, he’d borrowed a car, and would soon be off to the Dressed To Get Laid party at Oberlin, two hours away. Uma knew if she asked him not to go, he would not. And she also knew that if she asked him not to go, he would feel like he had won. A victory neither would cherish, but she thought he was being childish. So she behaved that way, too.

I don’t care where you go, tonight. Jenny and I made plans to see a movie, and that’s what we’re going to do.

She noticed his floppy brown hair made him seem young.

If you go to this thing, you’ll have fun. You’ll see just what I mean. I don’t want you to meet anyone, but I’m not going to be manipulated.

I’m not manipulating…

Yes you are. You’ve been counting on my protests. It’s like you’re fishing for comfort, for my hope in us.

Fuck you, she said.

Fuck you.

The words hurt him. She knew they would. She continued.

I tell you I love you every day. What more do you need?

The torment in his face made her lower lip tremble, and she hoped he would not notice. She watched the pain ripple over his skin, usually smooth like a tender piece of fruit.

Around 4 a.m., the phone started ringing on Uma’s hall. It was Jason, the boy who lent Wicke his car. Wicke was dead. She knew the moment the phone first rang, a siren, placed there just for her.

I’m so sorry.

The boy choked back a small sob.

Wicke had been driving home from Oberlin.

Dressed in just the toga.

No wallet, nothing, but the toga, and his sandals.

He went to pass a pickup with a camper top on the back. It was a bad place to do it, against the double line, in the rain, on a bend. He pulled the 4 year-old brown Norwegian car past the pickup, and immediately smashed into an 18-wheeler that smothered him, and then scraped him off the highway, down an embankment, and into and around an ancient beech tree. The State police called Jason’s parents, wrongly identifying the body from the registration in the destroyed car. Jason’s mother called Jason’s hall, but when he came on the line, surprise caused her to break down, before his father took the phone, and explained.

I called you first of all, Jason sobbed. I don’t know what to do. I never knew a dead person before.

His words trailed off into silence.

It will be ok, Uma heard herself whisper in the phone.

Don’t worry. Get some sleep.

She marched to Jenny’s dormitory in her bare feet, and bathrobe. They smoked cigarettes with Jenny’s Goth roommate, Marge, until the sun came up, smoke sticking in their hair like hatpins, their eyes pinkened from tears.

Jenny and Uma were never closer than right then. Death activated a mitosis between them, covalently bonding the girls to each other. No thing, or person, or word, or sound, would get that close to them.

For Jenny this meant happiness. The distinct failure of her family, and their polite distance, left her with Uma, and only Uma. And Uma stood up to this unspoken connection. Even as she mourned in her Jackie-O sunglasses, draped in black from head to toe, when they walked through town, when they retrieved their mail, Uma basked in the gaze of her Jenny. She luxuriated inside of it. And somehow Jenny knew the pain that Uma felt, knew the bleakness her friend found herself confined inside, a place perhaps all girls discover. Lined with the despondent insulation of crying jags, and the dashed hopes of childhood, this was where Uma spent the nights after the accident, as a death defying Wicke asked her to say things to him she would not say.

Tell me a story, Uma said one night as they sipped from forty ounce bottles on the overgrown front lawn.

I need to think about someone else’s life.

I think, Jenny began, when I was fifteen, I felt invincible. Up to that point, nothing could stop me. Just too young to know caution. Like I was impervious to disaster.

She dragged on her menthol cigarette, exhaling the smoke through her nose. She’d been smoking them for weeks, since the day Uma went to pieces at Fred Daley’s grocery, standing in line behind a boy with a haircut like Wicke’s.

Just be cool, baby. Jenny winked, and fetched a white and forest green pack of Kool’s from the rack. Uma laughed the first real laugh she’d had since the accident.

I had a good year for fifteen, Jenny continued. My grandmother’s health deteriorated. Suddenly she stopped being so bitter and repulsive to my mother.  I know that sounds bad. But really, when she was healthy, oh, she was ice, pure ice.  When she was sick, not so much. My Dad and I would drive into the hills outside of town, and before long we’d be in Pennsylvania. The grass just as green as Maryland, the same loping hills that crested back to the valley before they got too big. School had ended. And, I developed these things, finally, after years of being one of the guys, too tall, and very flat. Very flat.

She paused, and drank from the bottle. Uma brushed her hand across Jenny’s knees, drawn up into her chest.

I knew my mother and her mother, and her mother before her, they all had breasts, they all were zaftig. I assumed I was this anomaly, our family’s breast aberration. I told myself I’d have boyfriends out the wazoo. And it’s true, those first couple of weeks with my new breasts, all the boys turned my way. Even the popular ones, they stood there dumbstruck, when I went by, wracking their brains searching for my name. My name, damn it.  I’d let them twist up like that. I could have just told them, but I knew there was something nefarious, something down right rotten behind all this attention, and it wasn’t that the other girls at school were giving me a hard time. I went to a school of big chested gals, I suppose. No, this was trouble that boys are responsible for, geeky unsure kids with too little parental supervision. Calls into the night, heavy breathing, rude comments. Mean stuff, Uma, just mean, mean things they said.

My Dad wanted to change our phone number, but mother stopped him. She told him that was how boys behaved. She started answering the calls herself. Worst than that, I caught my Dad listening in on the extension. Mother had launched into some hardcore raunch. I guess that was the whole idea. Give them an adult dose. And there’s my Dad completely mortified. When he saw me, he tried to hide his disgust. So, I thought to myself, that’s what love is.

Uma put her arm around her friend.

Let’s go to New York, she said staring into the stars.

She took the bottle from her friend, spilling the very last drop down her chin. Then, she tossed it into the air. They watched it float there as a bat hesitated half a second, before swerving deftly from its path.

3.

The graduating class was small. Students, strained by years of inadequate programs, of lawns that were never manicured, of policy changes implemented in midcourse, left for the Alaskan fishing fleet, the Honda Factory in Marysville, or, simply, for other schools. The ones who stuck it out, stoners, militant lesbians, and furry headed film students,  lived off campus, and went at their degrees piece meal, working through five and even seven year plans.

After the improvised graduation ceremony, the girls joined Uma’s family in the deluxe local restaurant that survived on these yearly graduations, a sort of Christmas time in spring. Uma rubbed Jenny’s pale hand in her own. Jenny sat across from Mrs. Mcnally. Alcohol had turned the woman’s curiosity vicious.

Just who do the two of you think you are?

Mrs. Mcnally glared at the now pallid Jenny; cosmopolitan and sleek in contrast to the velvet curve of Mrs. McNally’s matronly figure.

Uma eagerly changed the subject, explaining their plan to move to New York. The girls were there already. Their minds raced as one along imaginary subway cars and stations before finally stopping in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, just across the bridge from Manhattan. Uma watched her mother. A stranger since they were perfectly disconnected from the umbilical cord.

We’re subletting from a friend, Mom. She went a little batty, decided to prolong the inevitable and head to grad school.

Jenny touched Uma on her knee, beneath the table. A touch that said, maybe this was the wrong tact to take.

It’s a sweet deal, Mom, you’ll see. And anyhow, we both have jobs.

They had secured jobs at the Strand bookstore on the corner of Broadway, and East 12^th, whose sign claimed, ‘18 miles of books.’ But these were part time jobs, and would hardly pay the rent. Uma drained the last of the wine in her mother’s glass.

Don’t you worry your pretty little head.

Had she seen the look on her Dad’s face as her hand patted the top of her mother’s skull? He shot up like lightning, motioning for waiter to bring the goddamned check.

During their first week in the city, Jenny found herself slipping into bed beside her friend, as night terrors over took the girl while she slept.

Uma screamed Wicke’s name out the second night. Screamed until she could scream no more. After the week was over, she began to sleep through the night. Jenny moved back to her bedroom. The trains that passed by their window worked themselves into their lives; their mechanical rumble soon equated normalcy, predicted comfort, a clanging anesthetic. Uma missed Jenny’s touch on her skin. She made do. She transferred the trembling kindness from Jenny to the trains. Soon enough, it was their rumble which eased her slumber.

An after hours club behind their apartment struck their fancy. So many beautiful, slender boys with bodies of concentrated exuberance, their creamy skin, their coffee skin, their lemon skin creating a bouquet of tantalizing cultures that sidled round the room. It was as if a pair of Cuban heels clicked twice and sent them all afloat atop the druggy music, only setting them back down when the lights came on. They were as seduced by their mid American approximations of New York, as they were by what it truly offered.

Jenny took to a handsome English drummer. His accent warmed Uma’s initial jealousy, if only for a heartbeat. Then her pride got in the way. Hadn’t she been the popular girl, the one with all the suitors, that mysterious being who took her pick of the litter, any litter? Now, she trembled. Now, she faltered. New York, New York.

His visa was expired, months, maybe even years ago.  He was imprecise about that. About all things. Where he worked, what bands he drummed for.

This did not concern to Jenny. She dedicated herself to his cause, endlessly researching the legalization process. She trapped accented employees at lunch and forced from them any information they had about the INS.

Uma’s mission was not quite as clear to her. She sat in the Strand, day after day, sifting through endless boxes of books, searching their spines for an answer to her own desperation. When they stepped off the plane, Uma had been Jenny’s one and only concern. Where they had sought shelter and solace in the cavernous anonymity of New York, what they found instead was that the magnets inside of them were no longer sympathetic.

Jenny partied into the night. Every night. Absolutely fulfilled by the listless purple and orange jumble sundown packaged her inside of. She bought a second hand amplifier, and guitar on which to play her callow songs. She sang them into the night, while awaiting her beau. Arctic Polar bears of Brooklyn.

While Jenny’s New York expanded, Uma’s city shrank to fit her despair. To combat this, she explored the neighborhood.  Every day, a new examination of a different part, until she knew all the avenues, and all the streets, and where they went when they left Brooklyn, the City of Kings. That’s how she came across the after hours club, the men who ran it both standing outside of it, one day.

I need a job, she said, steadily, ignoring the anxious pangs in her stomach.

Really. I need a job.

And one of the men grunted, and said sure. The other one was not so impressed.

What’s in a martini?

Gin, or vodka, vermouth, olives. In no special order, according to the customer. Sweet vermouth, dry vermouth, a jigger of that, a jigger of this.

Uma felt a little bold for the first time in months. They hadn’t said no yet.

What about a gimlet?

Look, I’ve been to your place. It’s shots and beer. All night, every night.

They gave her two shifts a week.

The English drummer, and Jenny had started a duo of sorts, purveyors of sad songs that went from quiescent folk to angry spurts of noise in the time it took the two of them to cast the other a glance. Uma found herself beguiled by the sounds that came from their apartment, even as she grieved at the distance developing between her and Jenny.

Those strong sounds giveth, and Jenny’s black eye taketh away.

I fell, she said.

We were loading his drums, and I fell. So stupid.

She turned away from Uma’s accusations; aware her words were the same words so many other women uttered as they also wandered into a barbaric life.

Bottles piled up in their apartment. Malt liquor bottles, and a proliferation of pints and half pints of the rotgut scotch the drummer favored. And almost as quickly as their rambunctious duo caused its stir, they quit applying pressure. Rehearsals were replaced by angry fuck fests that drove Uma from the apartment. Afterward, the two rusty ice picks lurched over to the after hours club, or Miss Mae’s, where Julio, a lukewarm low level dealer, peddled his wares from behind the bar. It was here Jenny’s drummer boy bought coke, on Jenny’s credit. Bad girl Jenny started ‘borrowing’ from Uma’s stash, an old Medaglia D’oro espresso tin on the dresser. Uma figured Jenny did not come to that decision by herself. A decision bound to bruise her, one way or the other. Warm Jenny, warm, sweet Jenny, where have you gone?

Uma learned how to make the block long walk last an entire pack of cigarettes.

4.

Mr. Bravo de la Serna owned the bodega across from their building. He ran it with his wife. His arms were strong and firm, but a hefty belly dented his Yankees apron. His wife was younger, and darker, and only came out of the back to upbraid him in her brusque Spanish. One Saturday he spoke to Uma. She was buying cigarettes. He spoke to her like they were old friends, as if they’d known each other for years.

I put tables outside the other day. No one sits there. Go and sit, will you? Have some coffee, on me. My wife makes too much for me to drink it all.

From then on, each Saturday Uma woke up Jenny, and the two of them, would sit at one of Mr. Bravo de la Serna’s white plastic tables.

Mr. Bravo de la Serna liked the two pretty girls sitting out front of his business, a badge that offered the neighborhood proof of his value, his trustworthiness. That was well worth two bottomless cups of coffee.

There is a place, Uma was telling her boss at the Strand, and it makes this place seem appropriate.

But her boss was not listening, and the words Uma spoke wandered into the rickety stacks of books, sliding from one lovelorn romance to the next, until, finally, they fell through the floorboards, into the basement.

There, in that place, it doesn’t matter what you think. It’s what the writer thinks, so probable, so accurate a story he pieces together, the world of imagination turns into the world of reality. And these books here then represent the lost hopes of all readers everywhere. All the dirt and the shit and the homeless people that come together like lemmings here in this store make up the difference. You know? The fur lined majesty of make believe? It’s all predicated on the hope. That hope, the hope.

Her boss looked at up sourly from the box she sifted through.

I can’t stand the dirt, Uma. There’s no magic needing Lava soap to wash off the scum of miscreant collectors, who died with armfuls of pulp novels. Books I forever dig through, hoping to find a sliver of paradise, a book of monetary value. You know how many million books I’ve combed through?

Jenny came to relieve Uma, but ended up accompanying her to lunch. The night before, as Uma switched off her light, she heard Jenny confess she was pregnant.

Isn’t that great, Jenny squeaked hopefully into the phone.

Call me when you get this.

It had taken all of Uma’s nerve not to get up and go punch her in the face. Pregnant by that lout, and telling him by way of answering machine, who did that?

Guess what, Jenny said, tricking herself into a grin.

Uma wiped her nose on her sleeve, and stared at her.

What?

Jenny stood there, still wearing the forced smile.

What, what, what? What?

I’m pregnant.

I heard the phone call.

I’m asking him to marry me tonight.

What’s the rush? Tonight? I’m working. Isn’t he supposed to do the asking?

I know. It doesn’t matter anymore. Does it? I’m going to ask him at your bar.

Very romantic.

This is important to me.

To me, too.

Her habits betrayed her. Jenny knew what she was thinking.

You’ve got it wrong, she said, and walked away.

I don’t have it wrong at all, said Uma into the exhaust of a passing bus.

Shortly afterwards, Uma gave her notice at the Strand. A few more months with these bitter souls, she’d become Miss Billy, the Ukrainian who worked the register without ever looking you in the eye.

Fat, and widowed, and blank.

I’m sorry for you, books, I’m so, so, sorry, but I have to go, I have to, I have to, Uma whispered, dragging her ring finger down the skeletal spine of a tattered volume by George Sand.

Jenny on the other hand, was happy to have the work, and had been taking every extra shift available, the boss issued her a full time schedule, and the honor of medical benefits. I’m finally, truly happy, Jenny purred into her roommate’s neck. Uma wasn’t so sure.

Jenny was steadfast. They could get married. They could live that ever after life.  He would not worry about Immigration. She would never be alone. His hand in hers. Her hand in his.

A few days later, after Jenny’s search continued in futility, Uma held her peace no more.

Answer me this, Miss Moneypenny: where is that lovely limey of yours now he knows?

She regretted saying it so casually, and went to Jenny and hugged her and brushed her fair hair from her eyes. An icy calmness ran through them both; that English drummer had gone for good.

I’ll be here, Jenny. I’m not leaving.

And that was true. She wouldn’t confuse her loss anymore, not for sexual attraction, not for loneliness.

I know, Jenny said in between brief hiccups of tears nuzzling her face into the cursive letters of the name of their alma mater, printed across the front of Uma’s hooded sweatshirt.

It was the first cold blast of winter. Jenny slipped her arm in Uma’s as a snowflake licked her eyelash. Uma squinted at the tall buildings obscuring the sky from them.

What happened to autumn? I never saw a leaf fall from a single branch? My favorite time of the year and I missed it. Completely.

I’m going to keep her. I don’t care. It’s not political. She’s mine, that’s all.

The snow came down fast, padding their neighborhood in silent inches of white. Mrs. Bravo de la Serna scooped the snow off the steps of the bodega. She stopped when she saw them, came over, and placed her hand on Jenny’s belly.

Muchacha, she said, and went back to shoveling.

How does she know?

Jenny put a finger to her lip..

Watch the snow. It’s so quiet, so smooth.

As her belly expanded their fourth floor walkup became an aggravation for Jenny. She handled like a truck and did not remember what it was to be pretty, and thin. Yet, she discovered something she hadn’t expected. The pregnancy liberated her. Only madmen rape pregnant women. No, she thought, even madmen know better than to rape a pregnant, single woman.

When her water broke, the stairs became Everest, an impossibility. Uma and a cabbie helped her down. She had the baby in a squat pea green room lit by fluorescent overhead lighting. Uma gripped her hand, and a stocky nurse named Tanya told her to breath, and push. Uma wiped the sweat from her brow. Then, from out of nowhere, Tanya pulled the seven pound three ounce baby girl from between Jenny’s pulsating thighs like the infant was a sack of granulated sugar. The baby’s pale pink skin, smeared with placenta, gave her the look of an excavated ancient Greek figurine snug in the nurse’s strong dark arms.

Jenny stared at the baby, speechless. Tanya swaddled the infant, and let Uma hold her. Uma placed the baby in her mother’s arms.

Uma, Jenny said, at last.

Tanya excused herself.

This place, Uma said.

This fucking place, insurance, water birth. Where’s the Doctor? They’re going to charge you for him, I fucking know it.

Uma.

I can’t stand the way they do things here. Not here in New York, but here, in poverty. They think we don’t know any better. Well, I do know better.

Uma, I’m naming her after you.

Jenny wiped away the last bit of afterbirth from the newborn child’s skull. Uma collapsed in the chair beside them. Another nurse came and took the baby down for an hour of observation.  The doctor appeared, recorded Jenny’s vital signs, and disappeared before Uma noticed.

Then they were home.

The search for daycare was fruitless. Jenny scanned every last corner of the neighborhood, attached at the hip to her baby. Other new moms popped up, and cooed, they discovered she had been abandoned, and slipped off as well, treating her as they would a bruised vegetable or melon at the market.

Jenny and the baby Uma stopped in the bodega for Gerber’s, or maybe that night it was diapers. Mrs. Bravo de la Serna was talking animatedly but under her breath, in Spanish, very quickly. Her husband nodded his head, trying not to acknowledge Jenny and baby, right there before him. But he could not avoid them. The argument was over. Mrs. Bravo de la Serna proudly stepped up to Jenny.

If it is all right by you, she said, my husband and me, we offer to care for your baby, in the daytimes.

Uma got home late that night, but Jenny had waited up to break the news to her.

You think I can trust them? Oh can I?  I mean, of course, I can.

Jenny, there’s nothing to think about. They’re right next door. It’s not like they’re going to steal her. That’s not what people do when they kidnap someone. They cage them up. They never let them go.

Uma, really.

You can go back to work. We’ll have enough money to be poor again.

Uma laughed.

Look at this place.

They stood in a plastic sea of empty formula bottles, and Top Ramen packages. The wooden floors they refinished were plagued with tabs from disposable diaper fasteners, white caps to the waves of their piney ocean. Little Uma tucked into the antique wooden toy box Jenny’s mom had crafted into a ‘proper’ cradle, and brought it with her on the train.

This is what our college degrees have gotten us.

Optimism doesn’t run in your family.

Oh yeah, like it just rains down in yours?

That night with both Umas fast asleep, Jenny went about the apartment, watching over these people she loved, and from each room, she peered out the window to the Bravo de la Serna’s store down below, and across the street. What did any of them know about this baby?

5.

New York knew was something different to them, more than a catalogue of boroughs collated into recollections you retrieved at garden parties, at the Falafel cart across the street from the Strand. It was the surreal beam of light thrown off the elevated tracks every few months that no one bothered to explain the same way twice. It was the pack of mangy dogs that prowled their street, not once baring their teeth at either of them. It shot up around each one of its implications, every single rumor, and won, despite prediction. Born of tribes that marked themselves with painted blood, and snarled knives, that gave way to bent subway platforms and endless lines of taxi cabs. Half a lifetime, sometimes more, spent in the tumult of travel, from work, to home, back to work. New York was an implied glory, the sum greater than its parts. In between twilight and dawn, clouds tumbled from one red hue to the next, and collapsed into themselves as darkness came again, and again. Here the buildings scraped the sky, an action they turned to name. Here, the demarcation of exploratory hope was a surgery that sent the dredged silt of the Hudson deep into New Jersey. Jenny smiled like some waifish debutante examining her lilywhite gown for the first time. Its exquisiteness flourishing against her fingers. She tipped her foot into the baby’s cradle, rocking it gently.

The morning sun came into the apartment, differently, like it, too, was swayed by the cherubic addition. It played with the dust mites and struck up geometric patterns that they watched over coffee. Jenny took her baby, bundled her up, and left her with Mrs. Bravo de la Serna.

She rode the subway. She bought some flowers, she found a pink and green jumper for her little girl. She purchased cards to explain the last year of her life to the people she thought would like to know. Cards emblazoned with little red roosters crowing out her news. Her moments hovered on second hands, tick, tock, tick. The caress of the future.

At six p.m., Uma picked up the baby and brought her home.

The sun was down as Jenny looked one way down the street, to the changing traffic light. It blinked green and then yellow. She lifted her calf from the curb, distracted by her day. She never saw the black blackened gypsy cab barreling toward her.

Uma brought a bottle of formula from the fridge to give to the baby. An ambulance prowled nearby. The siren came closer and closer, until its lights shot onto the kitchen wall. The baby cried out.

A little light never hurt no one, baby, Uma whispered, hugging the little girl to her chest.

But the flashing lights kept on, pulling them further into the night.

Our Brief Madness

When we found out our dog Horace was dead, my brother and his pal Andy were sitting in the den, drinking beer and lying to their girls. Mother was upstairs, getting ready for a date.

I hovered over the oven, broiling steaks.

The rain had been coming down for a quarter hour. The doorbell rang. A stranger stood there. I’ll never forget how well his rumpled suit matched the rumpled expression of his face. Certainly, he seemed too young to be that plowed under.

Ours was the house trouble built. The neighbors knew all our slights, our shame, our miscreant behaviors. The trash men knew, the postal workers knew, the yard men, and the public works crews assigned to our street. Dad stormed down on Mother, my older brother, Pat, down on me.

Being baby was not all unsweetened chocolate. There’s a light touch you come into, as time expands. Being baby, you emulate patterns of success, to cover artful transgressions, discovered and preserved, in the small hours.

Very little of childhood doesn’t affect us. I slept, I was not affected. My eyes opened, a whole other story.

Adolescence changed the flow of our atomic family of four. Adolescence, plus, one other thing.

Dad caught Mother in between the sheets with someone. Wednesdays he liked to come home for lunch, though none of us could remember why.

Mother and her paramour first became friendly at dinner parties around town. You went and mingled, left your wife behind, a calling card, that’s how Dad viewed those things. The man in question asked Mother to share a cocktail after golf. They became friendlier. He drove her home. They became the most friendly of all. This was my first life lesson. The kind doled out rapid fire, but which instinct deflects, born of the raw belief that abhorrent situations DO NOT predict the way things really are.

Except, mostly, they do.

In no time, gossipy fabrications made the rounds. Some leaned to Mother’s side, some to Dad’s, and surprisingly, some leaned in the direction of the gentleman in question. His reputation was that solid. Shame covered us all, especially attracted to my brother and I, our youthful innocence luring the monster closer.

That’s hooey. My brother, me, we hardly managed innocence. I spent school days haranguing upper classmen, looking to score pot. Upon success, I became hopelessly lethargic. Pat drank seven cans of beer in rapid succession before the S.A.T.’s. His scores improved. When our parents took a last ditch trip to England in scurvy attempt to resuscitate their drowning union, we rang the dinner bell when the first keg was tapped, to let the other neighborhood kids know how it was done. My brother had been mixing cocktails since the age of eleven, testing his stranger concoctions on me, using just the bottles Mother kept for visitors but did not drink herself; refilling them with water and food coloring matched with a precision that far outweighed his years.

Dad drank only the special Vodka lodged in the freezer, above the stewed lamb leftovers, Eggos, and ice cream sandwiches.

Gorzalka, he’d say, home from work.

To burn.

And burn we let him. All alone, the first few drops erasing the soot of his daily to and fro.

Ben Hogan in hand, he chased after Mother and her “friend” slashing in the air, menacingly. A plume of exhaust sputtered from the Metallic colored German sedan as Mom’s suitor found the next gear. Then, Dad tripped. That’s how he broke his ankle. He limped dramatically back to the house, the golf club as his cane. He moved out the next morning. He seemed glad to go, released from the scene of his greatest defeat.

Their divorce came through, after a final hiccup drew them back together: their lawyers collusively swindled the hapless couple. No one sees clearly in anger, all lawyers know this rule.

Shysters, Dad said, calmly, searching for his glasses, the first time he came to get me since he’d left.

Men should be what they seem, that’s Shakespeare.

I slammed the big door shut, and he drove us away in silence, in his own Metallic colored German sedan.

Pat opted out of these weekends, remaining at school instead, triumphantly leavened, recreated. His reputation ironed, creased, and starched.

Don’t call me Pat anymore.

Okay, I said, but that doesn’t change anything.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It’s true, that’s how come it’s a cliché, he said.

There’s no use arguing with bliss.

The rumpled suit stood there, struggling for words. I had refined none of the skillful manner adults acquire for situations like this. So, I checked the clock over the oven, first. 4 more minutes, and that’ll be done. Finally, he stopped wilting, straightened up, and spoke.

Is your dog Horace?

Oh, yeah, yeah, I said, happy to have a prepared response, was he humping your bitch?

I told Mother to get him fixed, she said it was my brother’s dog, and he doesn’t want him fixed. Pat is cock proud, that’s for sure.

The guy stood there, dripping.

It isn’t that.

Then what, I said, whisking the potatoes, covering my unnamed fear with annoyance.

What, what, what?

I ran over him. He’s dead.

How you handle death in times like this, I’ve heard, is how you’ll handle life.

The rumpled suit looked like he might cry, and I was not going to have that.

Did you hear what I said?

I heard you, ok? Is he dead, for sure? Pat is gonna be pissed.

The rumpled suit continued nodding his head, needing absolution, absolution I keenly refused. Once a man starts blubbering, it becomes contagious.

Horace belonged to none of us. He roamed the streets of our neighborhood in a ceaseless excursion, returning for meals, and for sleep. He visited friends both canine and human. He sat like Dad, in the wing chair, a paw propped on the arm.

He was sleeping in the road, the rumpled suit said excitedly.

I swerved, but it was too late. I mean, who teaches their dog to sleep in the road?

That’s enough, I said harshly, shutting him up. Who was he to judge us, the murderer.

You go follow that stone path to the front door. I’m going to get Mother.

His sigh of relief was not an insult, though certainly a delusion. An adult would handle the situation, but our parents flung themselves far away from that wise renaissance long ago.

Do not ring the doorbell again, you understand? We’ll be down in a few minutes.

I shut off the burners under the cream of spinach, under the potato mash, then walked through the foyer, up the stairwell, and turned for my room. I sat on the bed and bawled. Horace had been our paste. Now he was paste.

There you are dear, Mother said, help me clasp this dress, Fred, er, Mr. Allen will be here any minute. Did I hear the doorbell?

I pushed her onto the bed.

What’s come over you, she said, making sure she didn’t muss her hair.  I went to New York to have it done, you know, a low threat coming into her voice.

I told her the story.

He’s downstairs waiting for you. Right now.

That cracked her façade. The muscles tightened at her jaw line for a moment, ballast against the impending storm. But they could not stop it, and she broke. Her flesh rippled past her elegant freshly lifted chin, only the sour notion of crying in front of her baby saved her from having to reapply her make up.

Where downstairs, she asked, temper clouding her grief, powering her forward, me following her down.

She almost tore the heavy oak door it off its hinges, revealing, once again, the rumpled suit, a saturated newspaper bent over his head.

I’m very sorry about your dead dog, he said, bravely.

Mother cut to the quick.

You God damned murderer.

Ma’am?

Don’t Ma’am me, your old enough to be my brother, you fuck.

Mother, I said, taking her arm.

She yanked free, her finger dangling in the man’s face, as he backpedaled, a move purloined from her husband. Ready to launch into a tirade, but gratefully, was stifled when the tears came.

Wait here, I told him, carting Mother toward the stairs. I stopped, and turned back to him.

Please, I added, not very sure he’d be there when I got back.

I hustled Mother into her room, and shut the door before the psychosis returned.

Meet me in the back.

The suit stepped inside, thinking I’d let him come inside. I shook my head.

Down the stone path, I said, closing the door.

He wasn’t a guest. He was bearing bad news.

Pat and Andy were stuffing cans of Budweiser behind their seat cushions.

You my friend, are unwelcome, Pat half-yelled at me.

Next time, knock.

He got off the couch, to scoot me out of the room, but I dodged him.

Patrick, there’s a guy outside, he says he ran over Horace. Mother almost beat him to death. He’s your dog. This is your responsibility.

What do you know about responsibility? He turned to the girls.

The pampered wimp speaks, he said.

It’s no joke.

It better not be, or else.

But really, or else what? Or else he’d beat me into a pulp? I’d broken his arm with a ten-speed bike the last time. I knew his threats were atrophying.

He opened the door, and there stood the suit, a glutton for punishment.

I hear you killed my dog.

Pat was dressed in his casual uniform, khakis, loafers, a pale sweater over an Izod shirt, collar upturned, clothes that screamed lily on anyone else, but on him barely contained his taut aggression, his proud masculinity, announcing to the rest of us there was something to contend with, in spite of the travesty our parents created.

Listen, the rumpled suit was saying, it’s really coming down. I couldn’t see him. But, I’ve got him with me, in the trunk, I wrapped him in my trench coat.

That’s when I saw the blood on his shirt, oxidized and spreading across the wet blue cotton, like rust.

Throw him in a dumpster, Patrick said, and shut the door in the man’s disbelieving face a third time.

Keep this closed, he growled at me, shutting the door to the den behind him.

I looked at the oven, remembering the steaks. The potatoes were almost ready.

What about dinner?

That’s my moment of insurrection. The house emptied within a half an hour, Fred came for Mother, primed with some of Dad’s frozen left over Vodka. Patrick similarly attached to a bottle of Tequila his blonde Presbyterian girlfriend smuggled out of her parents’ house.

I left the steaks in the oven, until they were charred crisp, and rockhard.

Sunday, Patrick and I caught a ride to school, leaving Mother alone in the house, acutely aware a new dog meant we’d have to spend more time there.

So, no more dogs.

Patrick graduated that spring. Dad sat on one side of the auditorium, Mother wore a hat fit for the races, wide brimmed, white with black polka dots, an aqua ribbon that screamed I’m available, though, honestly, she only raised that sail to spite our father.

The Academy sat in the western part of the state. That morning, the morning of graduation, I broke into the infirmary and was caught scooping all the pill bottles I could find into my backpack. The nurse brought me to the Headmaster, who expelled me on the spot. For graduation purposes, I was remanded to Mother’s care. Her proud stature led astray by the fact that her baby boy, seated to her left, drifted in and out of reality. High as a kite.

Patrick and our father went out to dinner at the one and only fancy restaurant in town. Mother drove me home. She turned the radio on upon discovering my state prevented her wrath from making a dent. When a song came on she knew, she harmonized with it, and that was tremendous, I loved her for that voice, delivered with no care, full and bright with ease. But I could not tell her.

Dad rented an apartment above a group of widowed blue hairs. The walls of his building ran thinner than slices of Prosciutto wrapped around melons at the fancy morning buffet he liked. There was a guardhouse at the entrance.

I can’t control you, Mother said.

Then don’t.

You haven’t given me any other choice.

You haven’t looked at any other choice.

Don’t leave like this, you know your father needs you, she sulked.

This is my home, too.

No. You’re dangerous, you don’t listen to a word I say.

I wanted to say the same thing about her.

One day, Dad came home from work early. I had rifled through his service medical bag, and stood in his kitchen, fingering an ampule of Morphine, dated 1967.

You’re a bum, he said coming toward me. I cracked the tip off and jammed the thing into the crook of my arm.

The morphine went right to work. Patrick was born in ‘67, Dad’s first whole year back in country since they had married.

Dad’s angry voice floated above me.

Why? God damnit. Why?

But it was too late, I was on the nod.

That was the year I taught Autumn how to steal cars. She lived down the street from Mother. Her family moved in around the time Horace died. Her hair was auburn, and she had a beautiful nose. Her parents warned her about our end of the street, they themselves having been warned by their neighbors, witnesses, through slits in their blinds, to a host of our embarrassments. They probably even said we were rotten to the core, unable to resist the play on words- our family name is Apple, modified at Ellis island, from Apilowski. Vodka swilling Polish Catholics to the last.

Father’s people did well, and, in the beginning, Mother gloried in that singularity, sure she had at last shorn her heritage. Her people were encyclopedia salesmen who worked strip malls, educated in public schools. They matched comb-overs with plaid sports coats and black socks.  Dad’s family might have been royalty (they were not) for all she knew.

When pressed about for a nice thing to say about him, boy, she’d say, the man could wear a Brooks Brothers suit.

Autumn and I got caught when I tried to sell her parent’s station wagon to the dealer who sold it to them. I didn’t know what a pink slip was. I’d have forged one if I had.

The arresting officer asked Autumn what happened.

He kidnapped me, she said.

He cut her loose.

This could be bad for you, he told me.

No, I corrected him, it’s been bad for a while.

Luckily, I understood their separation and divorce assisted my adverse inclinations. And so I blew the horn of dysfunction as my own proud song. The court appointed me a therapist with a permanent furrow curved in his brow. I did time in his chair an hour a week. We sprouted theories of psychological meanderings. I charmed him. He said things like, don’t worry, none of this goes on your permanent record. And, you can tell me anything, in confidence.

But I didn’t trust him. I made up stories. He believed them. His brain warranted freedom, liberation. He would liberate me. He told me that himself.

My parents agreed I had squandered my prospects, and put me on a train, to D.C. to meet with someone Mother termed an educational consultant, suggested by the therapist. He, too, was a therapist, a job Dad said had been devised by and for people lacking the initiative to study either medicine or psychology. This guy was all business.

Cash on the barrelhead. I handed his secretary a check Mother had given me, only then did she usher me into his office. He wore a monk’s tonsure, but not by choice. He said his specialty was putting troubled people in the right place- troubled employees, troubled bosses, troubled teachers, troubled students, all the trouble you could brew up in a vat, with two other witches at your side.

It could have been worse, kiddo

You think so?

You could be dead.

Or in Jail, I added.

Hey, I’ve seen it all. I’ve got people who ratted on their partners to keep out of there. I get them placed somewhere nice and cozy.

A sign on his desk read, arrested adolescence does not mean troubled teen.

He tested my mental skills, my emotional skills, my memory. The high scores puzzled him for a moment, and then a flash lit up his face. He stuck out his hand, agreeing to take me on. Those scores did not have the same effect on my parents.

With a mind like yours, how can you abuse it without remorse, Dad said, at Penn Station. It wasn’t a question. I wasn’t supposed to respond.

Mother took a different tack.  She moved me back in with her. At night, she toasted me with French white wine.

Make me dinner, she directed, some ill conceived punishment.

I got blotto with her, taking longer and longer pulls from the cooking wine. I wore a patient frown, informed by the vinegary taste, while Mother surmised about her ex, my father.

He was terrible in bed. And a sadist.

Dad wore sweaters and creased charcoal trousers. He read spy novels and poured over essays by Richard Feynman. A picture of repression, a healer, with the ego the size of the house he used to live in. If sadism played into it, it did so only in his theoretical criticism about the way Mother pronounced her ‘o’s.

And that was how it went, the two of us lingering over portmanteaus, boozily crafting alliterative sentences, until my report card came.

It says here you’ve been absent.

I nodded yes, and swayed toward the bottle of wine on the table. She raised her voice

The Whole semester.

I fixed her a tall glass of the fine chardonnay she liked.

It’s true, I said handing her the glass.

I’m going to have to find someone to marry, she said, licking her lips, impressed with diversion, able to collapse into fantasy at the drop of a hat. And I could do it, too. We didn’t say another word about school that night.

By the start of summer vacation, she’d found her man. True to her word, they married soon after. I worked his nerves, and took his car for late night drives, without permission. I stole his cigarettes and smoked them, wore his monogrammed shirts, took them with me to Dad’s apartment, where I left them. Lawrence was a member of the old boy network, a trophy Mother had long sought. Something Dad eschewed. I called him Larry.

His children hated all of us, and why not? Their perfect familial idea was sabotaged on the same ruinous rocks as ours; they wanted nothing of what we represented. We repulsed them. They lived in the house to the left of Autumn’s. I was a kidnapper, a car thief, a criminal through and through. My failed attempts at schooling were remarkable only in the Herculean efforts of school administrators to rid themselves of me.

Then, there was Patrick. The preppie Adonis had flunked out of college after his second semester, upon discovering he would rather do bong hits and listen to the Dead than declare a major. He grew a thick beard that glazed him with a broken look. His eyes buried themselves, like rifles in turrets on a Normandy beachhead, but without the retributive force. Everyone was appalled. Mother most of all. He smelled wrong, chemically altered, that metallic k.o. homeless crazies have, their sockets empty of attention, their brains and bodies out of sequence. Anachrony gone wild.

We were the enemies.

And while Catholicism scraped us out of sin, and worship allowed for salvation, we fizzled deep in the heart of Protestantism, who’s rule of thumb allowed for little outward emotionalism. No failures need be mentioned. Less might be expected, as more was ignored, as even success served notice: remain in light too long, the walls come tumbling, tumbling.

The cross to bear outwardly neglected, and inwardly sewn up with hair.

I came across Sydney as an uninvited guest at a pool party she threw. Lucky me, son of a Doctor, no stranger to forged prescriptions, an able supplier of amber bottles of pills to children of privilege. They understood when to offer a standing invitation. And I rarely declined a good time.

Sydney wore a tight bikini, and her brown hair, while no pure match for Autumn’s nose, luxuriated an ideology all its own. Sydney had something Autumn could not match, for she bore a respectable pedigree, something passed on by her father, seller of insurance to Larry’s business needs, and therefore, indemnifier nonpareil. She offered an umbrella for the derisive downpour of my parents. Bronzed debutante as tonic.

We shared few friends in common, though one girl, Gail, or Maude, or Bryn bought drugs off me sometimes, in the parking lot behind the Burger King, and they were her legs I originally determined to part. It was Gail, or Maude, or Bryn who told me Sydney’s prom date had matriculated in the back seat with some college girl, giving me my opening. I asked if I could take her to her prom. She accepted.

Stick with me, I told her, decked out in her skimpy bikini, but I could giver her no reason why.

That is, we were not to be for long.

It was the summer of car wrecks. We steered her Volvo wagon into empty produce trucks, and other teenaged vandals hell bent for hospitals. Our love succumbed, splayed on a gurney outside of the Union Memorial Hospital. Her father, an honorable man, rolled up his sleeves, and prepared to duke it out with me, while Sydney collected pieces of the night in a gash on her forehead, and one in the milk of her left thigh.

When I got home, leaving Sydney to her own ivy fate, Dad was there to meet me.

Your brother is in the mental ward.

Patrick, unable to distinguish reality from television, regularly held conversations with David Letterman, or the Energizer bunny.

That’s right, he said to the bright Zenith, I keep going. And going, and going…

Where are you headed, Mother asked, hopefully.

Still going, said Patrick, a skip in his vinyl. Still going.

Our parents achieved yet another temporary peace accord.

Should I go and visit?

It was an empty suggestion. I retracted the offer, right after, my father’s silence coldly directed me away from him.

And besides, what good had Patrick done me? We irrigated canals of resistance, accompanied by this story: As a newborn, I’d been at home one week, when Patrick patted me down with confectionary sugar, and syrup. He brought his puppy, Horace, over, and tried to feed me to him. That’s hardly brotherly.

Would they send hot wires to his head, I wondered. Were they waiting to shock me into submission, as well?

In the nick of time, my life coach reeled in a northern New Hampshire school. Bring us your wolfish, your wingless, and your wretched, your kids on the skids, we will incubate them until some college is induced to accept them.

The first hour on campus the Dean explained that I would be “looked after” by two of his most esteemed students. The three of them stood before me in tweed coats, with matching elbow patches, and tortoise shell eyeglasses. Their wide whale corduroy pants were different colors, to inject the notion of individuality.

I’m honored, sir, I said, dabbing my eyes with a handkerchief I’d only recently emptied of Valium, that you’d take so much interest in plain old me.

He stroked his beard. Took off his glasses.

Son, this is hardscrabble country. Limestone, that is what you’re used to. Here it’s Granite, and Granite makes you a man. You can’t bullshit stone.

Obviously, he strung out this line to a few boys, and hooked them with it. To me, it was a speech of provocation. We stood there with disciplined smiles displaying our etiquette magnificently. For kicks, I slapped the old man on the back. Ensconced in these rugged environs, what did I have to lose?

Listen, I said, my voice coddled by the tingling Valium, where can a kid find a stiff drink around here?

Decorum wrote that he must take it in stride, a joke, though I’d be lying if I said he laughed it off. He loosened his collar, and dismissed himself, a gruff acknowledgement of the customs he’d authorized his hooligans to undertake. Primly dedicated, stiffly neat, his appearance trimmed by the land he cleared stump by stump by stump.

But this was his mistake, meeting me head on, spelling out his secrets, that way. Who speaks in symbols best? A student body. Always ready to coax that eternal “us against them” struggle into play, aided by every witless breach of confidence the Dean by nature of his job, would have to make.

We coalesced. We defamed, we rebelled. I stood front and center, to such a degree, months passed slowly, ebbing at last, with the Christmas holidays.

Rather than head back to Baltimore, I cashed the plane ticket sent to me, bought a roundtrip bus ticket to the town nearest Larry’s New Hampshire cabin, scammed some booze, and set out. A catastrophe waiting to materialize. Only, it didn’t. People take pity on the young and idiotic, in the great state of New Hampshire, a fact I hadn’t banked on, but proven by the endless cars that stopped as I trudged from Larry’s cabin to the nearby village, and proven again at the Village store there, as groceries were issued on credit. Larry’s neighbor, a man who spent his life hunting bears, came over and got the heat going, saying but three sentences.

How ya holdin’ up?

Ok. Cold.

I’ll fix the heatah.

Thank you.

Only thanks I need is ya call ya mother before I have ta.

I don’t know who was happier, about this happy accidental endeavor, Mother, who was delivered an uneventful Christmas dinner, or me. For while I am unsure I experienced happiness, or self-reliance, or a facsimile of either those things, in the woods of the White Mountains, something happened. It was too cold to stand outside the State store trying to convince granite puritans to buy me more booze. That pushed the boundaries of their clemency. So, I chopped wood on Christmas day, beneath an overcast sky, and prepared for the crystalline flakes of snow that came that night, muffling all sound.

I fantasized about quitting school altogether, and sticking it out the rest of the winter. At the last minute, I caved.

The standoff broke, upon my return. Weekend passes kept the student body stranded in the doldrums of February. By withholding them, Dean Stewart vacated my ranks. I sat in my room each weekend alone, ill prepared for whatever finale awaited me. A day student named Brian offered me shelter.

The dean said I could have you over.

He said that?

You can get out of here, and clear your head.

I’ve got him where I want him. Don’t you see? He asked you to take me.

He just wants to ease this tension, Brian interrupted, before I reached crescendo.

What did Brian know? At night, after homework, he went where he pleased.

In the hold of loneliness one night, I remembered spying cooking Sherry in the school pantry. I dressed quietly, snuck through the snow to the kitchen, pushed a frozen log through a window, and let myself in. Within minutes I had a case of Spanish Sherry in one arm, and a bottle of the stuff at my lips.

I carried my bounty into the forest behind the dormitories, found a place for it, and covered it with leaves, and dirt, and snow. Taking a last tug of the sherry, I spotted my folly. The tracks of footsteps in the snow led from dormitory, to kitchen, and up to hiding place.  Too drunk to hatch a plan, or find an excuse, I trudged back to sleep it off.

The next morning, the dorm master woke me.

You better get up, he said, the Dean wants to see you.

What’s new, I said, and flashed a victorious grin.

He did not smile with me. Slowly, the night before reconstructed itself. I saw the trouble was deep, and my spirit vanished.

The Dean drove me to the bus station in the next town, and dropped me off.

We’ll send the rest your stuff just as fast as we pack it, he said, slamming the door shut behind me.

I watched the van weave back into traffic, thinking, at last, I’ve been abandoned by someone I do not care about.

And I thought about the time, when Mother loved Dad, and we went sailing almost every weekend of the summer. Pat dutifully cranking the winches, bustling with freshly forming muscles, Dad lazily gripping the tiller, black wayfarers cinched high on his nose. Mother in the cockpit, watching them both.

And me, below deck, sunk down in the forward cabin, a speck of sea salt impregnated with mold, imagining our demise. Horace our only known survivor. The rest of the world sorry for the decline, unaware our deaths exchanged at a higher rate than what they truly cost. It is always the losers, always, that come back as something better than what they were.

Rampart and Dumaine

New Orleans

Nestled in clapboard neighborhoods, built on top of one another, comes the slow steamy catch up of anger, its voice unable to distill what brought it to boil. It is a low meridional twang, a dirge that commingles with the bassy foghorns coming off the water.

There is no doubt that the Mississippi river is a woman. She waits with steeled patience, to overflow, to deluge, scattering the French Quarter of its drunks, offering only more water to some hybrid deity messed up on the fumes of his own reputation. Streets seem too slender for those ritzy Detroit automobiles to ply their asphalt tracks, but they do it. Night and day. Black wrought iron climbs the walls with no true reason, a distraught vine, searching for salvation, and failing that, a finery of form. It gives the implication of movement, even on those stationary buildings

New Orleans belongs to rogues who beat their marks with a phenomenal accord. Hustlers take down arrogant, civic-minded souls, while house bands who reside and often flourish in the viny underbelly break up to knife fights, and reefer pulls. Welcome to the back room, a bare spot on the dog; its reputation laid out in the simple language of hard living. Dingy wannabes make love to the singers and rhythm section members; hold in their arms happy go lucky recording engineers, pleased to have somewhere to sit down for a minute. Here in these slender rooms lit by single bulbs, iced tubs of bottled Jax and Dixie beer reign as king.

This is a tale that swarms up and down that salacious Gulf Coast. That is infected with white hoods and devil horns, of black musicians beaten so badly by good ole boy policeman they can no longer perform the simple tasks of living, unassisted; of mobs that take to heart the color of your skin and not the rightness of your mind. This tale wiggles past lingering footsteps and implicated pratfalls, past the drunken blathering of full time losers. It whisks itslef into small storefronts turned recording studios. Little hide away arks with knobs and lights and tube powered control stations caressing the wilds of night. Performers float onto the sound, then, back out of it; some never to be heard from again. This is a story where you stick your hand in first to make sure it’s ok for the rest of you. A tale of two men turned from background fronds, to Generals, men who rule the nighttime breeze. A tale that sees them in the end, laughing quietly to each other, wondering what it mattered if those breezy sounds finally passed them by. What mattered? Not that.

Fess

He’s born at the close of the first World War, in a rickety back country that no longer exists. Bogalusa, Louisiana,1918, being pitch black was no way to go through life. Sharecroppers stewed corn liquor, and remained permanently on the lam from thistles of Klansmen. Henry Roeland Byrd’s world of nothing, for less, focused in fields worked by men chained to balls. A scarred history of sacrifice and disgust snuck up hills, came out from underneath floorboards, and filed off into the fallow humid night, with pride and suffrage redeemed. Byrd will change his name a number of times, and yet will always rely on the one word that sums him up.

Those were the days when the rigid stupidity of racism was worn on your sleeve, or, over top of your head. Dealt by no good white folks who- stoned on that same moonshined booze- could no longer tolerate a difference in hue. A byproduct of a South still lay shackled by the Civil War, cracked in its wake, with wounds both undeniable and indelible.

Economic destruction overran the biblically gothic kudzu’d covered lands on the heels of that war, and had not truly departed, ever. Human detritus laid either half alive, or in skeletal remains and lined the routes and state roads of these forgotten places, ignored ruins of an unwanted past. Horse drawn carriages became automobiles,  and motor powered trucks wheels carved deep into the rutted mud roads, and so they were overhauled into macadam, and then later, smothered in solid black asphalt, that encircled them all in a labyrinthine jungle of industrial division. Truck stops thrived where roadside fruit stands withered, pit stops devoid of the majesty country life could offer. In one fell swoop economic advancement trounced the very people most in need of it. That sad hum? The echo of pickaninnies, reverberating through stands of eucalyptus trees, stowed in small hollows, feeding on hope. A sound flew up into this maelstrom, sounds handed down from proud African royalty. For courage too, found its way aboard the slavers. And though courage briefly found itself finessed into a quiet submission, the sound continued. A measured intonation, from swollen tongues, a cadence alloyed with the roughened French Cajun dialects down the river. A new born sound.

Some songs are culled from fear, come from midnight toned tribesmen sold a certain fantasy that becomes implacable, songs which steady themselves into that sad low hum as any glimmer of hope empties into international waters, with the bodies of those who die along the journey. They return, broken down, and stapled to some sliver of land, salted by the barren vision they’ve seen. This is Death’s place. Worth felled by a swipe of the hand. Pride lulled by scythes. Prayers replace song. Bargains mumble up to the heavens each night until another song brushes the long faces of stevedores with a tangible sadness as they head into the gin joints for a bolt of relief. It’s black here, and that’s nothing to do with skin tone. They retreat into dense thickets of brush, following the Cajuns. No minuet parts their grief. These emotions hearken to more than one rhythm; have more than one heartbeat.

The Byrd family caught the smoky plume of industry and head to New Orleans, and its neon murk. Young Henry’s understanding of time, once swollen by outdoors lifestyle switches allegiance. He counts daylight’s dwindling with regret. His mother expects him home before nightfall. She won’t trust the boy to the city’s opalescence, after dark. His family falls with him into a small refuge. Henry discovers, to his amusement New Orleans blossoms to life, same as the countryside, only with different sounds. They still announce the daytime. Instead of crowing cocks, it’s garbage can lids, and delivery drivers throttling their engines. Henry sticks close to his mother. Holds her skirt in busy streets, believing she will make the most sense of it.  She does. They wander, small hand thrust into matronly palm, amongst the symphony. An orgy of colors twist and slap back at the inquisitive boy, hue up in gull cries and crescendo in tones he could not predict. She tethers him to her with a rope, the boy so prone to wandering out of her reach, and into the noise. She brings him to warm A frame wooden churches. Henry watches, enraptured, as this woman  picks expertly at an array of  musical instruments, whatever is handy-guitars and pianos mostly- whenever the chance arrives.  The boy mimics her movements, picking at  left behind guitars, plunking  piano keys before she gathers him up.

Gothic architecture of Victorian times booms in the city. It bounces through his skull.  Church songs melt into loved ones, to angry tales of men done wrong. Back to church songs.

All my songs, he tells his momma, gonna be ‘bout love, one way, the other way, mad, grieving, they say love somewhere.

So says young Henry Byrd, to his champion.

Henry observes the part of Rampart street where he lives turn to a throbbing mass of people each night, a sort of descent.  He watches with bemusement, and curiosity as decorum retreats, and its decay liberates his neighbors, usually so dull and without sheen. Voices come alive.

Y’all ain’t know me that well, a man calls, his face squished against a metal streetlamp.

Shut up yer cryin’ comes another man’s response.

The words highlighted by the yellow cacophony of laughing girls made up like women, flouncing in the streets.

Ah know a bettah  way, someone yells to no one.

Ah know the best way of all, Henry says, mimicking the unknown voice.

Ah do.

Wild in the street, with collars flung open, exposing skin hungry for a breath unfiltered by cloth, they connect with him, the boy with saucer eyes, taking in the sights. They bounce from barroom, to alley, to jumbled messes, plied with bottles, scars, stripped down  to undershirts. They impress upon the boy a sense of joy he never leaves behind. Strains of songs the jazzers blend from angry muses and corn cob pipes filled with sweat leaves, hang with the laundry, stewing with the gumbo, gather Henry from the stoop of their housing unit.

Carnival season strikes him most fanciful, gifting him with a permanent lullaby. It skids and carouses, like the neighborhood, on weekends, a country fair, but one free of white hoods and cruel vengeance. The city glistens. Floats hey work on across the river in Algiers, uptown by the Universities, in big warehouses by the river, ride through the streets, magical ships adorned with flower, and grace, floats so tall you’d swear there were whole buildings inside of them. Caked with people, radiating with delight, while glassine beads skid across the pavement chased with a frenetic gladness unfound elsewhere on the mighty Mississip’- in that two toned world of segregation that binds all of the south like spiked reins on a pack mule. Everyone and everything infected with the electric buzz of circumstance, the bright fervor of carnival. Here a parade, one long and rolling party, follows a dizzy pie-eyed cadence. The thump of marching drummers the blaze of the flambeaux combine in sound color and feel, the whole town erupting together. This is the song mothers sent in whispers to their small children’s hopeful ears. Whispers to quell inequality, to keep care alive. Whispers which intend to walk tall in the heads of children who don’t know better. Children like Henry Roeland Byrd.

The city’s lustrous glow charges his mind, temporarily blinding him to woe. Just in time, his father’s strong arms shot down to keep him from being trampled by horses spooked by drunken revelers. Mr. Byrd continued gathering him in, puling Henry off of floats too complicated to climb, off of trees too full with people to add him to their branches, out of the way of biting mules pulling the waste carts. With no effort, he tossed his son onto his broad shoulders, the child’s crazy legs scrambling for the most prime of throws. His father’s voice a bellow.

Follow my lead, it said.

Listen to me now, it said.

Look at me when I call you, came his father’s untroubled voice, booming down on Henry.

The small boy whimpered some mousy response.

And reached his long rope of a muscle into the crowd, to catch the speckled toss lighting fast.

This, Henry, this, his father said collecting the booty, and handing it upward, nodding his head.

This he’d say. There’s something here for you, boy. But Henry knew that already.

In Congo Square, the place their ancestors had been bought and sold like cattle, the noise burst, a noble gas, ghostlike, swelled, commenced, maniacally into war whoops, peeled screams of ecstasy, reclaiming all that whipped them down into the dirt. Carnival celebrated an end to the oxidized links worn by their forebears. His father said as much, with wet eyes, a fresh bottle of beer rolling across his forehead, chilling his sweat, his animosity, allowing a new year of work, of put downs, and assaults.

Drunken choirboys snuck Henry his first taste of corn liquor.  A Creole teenager urged Henry onto greater, stinging sips of the warm booze.

The first sip tastes like a punch in the face, follered by dog hair, but the next one  tastes better, by the third one, that’s the one that gets you got.

The same Creole held Henry’s head while he threw up, the same one later giving Henry another swallow. So stop here, in the sweep of adolescence. Drunk, but with hands ably informed by church learned rhythms, still unbent. A good son. But happy endings falter in stuttered crawls, and mechanical mistakes lay out tumblers on the hard wooden planks of the barroom. Up ahead in the future, an ill fated foray into counting cards sets him straight, freeing him to the back beat, while the winnings laid instruments in his hands. Henry learned well. Learned quickly. Learned which rules to break, learned which would support this new style of living. And most importantly, he learned the unwritten laws thrown in glances, and down turned smiles.

As keen as his eyes were, it was his hands in those card games which augured fate, called the song again. The ostrich pimpers who wore their women like clothing on their arms watched themselves rather than the quickness of Henry’s hands. He cased them, divined which ones lasted without bloodshed longest. Then took to that safer corner, and plied his trade, protected by the knowledge a winning hand created. The rhythms he found lazily spelled the normally inquisitive pimps and dealers, and gambling losers. Weak willed politicians ran afoul of the public, so the card games ran underground, toe to toe, with that oldest of professions. Henry kept up, busting out two beats, backbeats, three beats, any beats you got, beats just to squeeze out from under a bad deuce. Seeing things altogether different here, in that slowed down talk he had. Not quite ready to graduate. Sleight of hand, but also, slight of mind.

Deal me in, Henry says. Other man looks him over.

You’re kinda young, ain’t you.

Deal me in, Mister. I ain’t worried bout your lack of judgment. You don’t worry bout mah youth and good looks.

Older man deals him in. A few sporting women jugged in perfume rub against the slender young man. He waves them off, draws on a reedy cigar. Its smoke pools around his face. He hides his hand, and makes change to bet. Another instant, a new woman rubs against him, she’s rigid in the right spots, soft where it counts, a fine boned specimen. Henry makes no protest.

Get your hands off my wife, kid.

It’s her hands you got to worry bout, he says, not looking up. Still playing his hand, still puffing the cigar. Still.

Ah’m not telling ya twice, boy.

Henry plays the hand, moves a pile, as the metal scrape of a blade switching open quickens his mind, but stills his hands. A situation where the whole room shifts into low and then freezes up altogether. The band edges quietly off stage. Young Henry Byrd looks toward his cards, but really, he’s catching his assayer’s the reflection in the window. Behind him to the right. Blows a ring of smoke, and in the time it takes to filter into the man’s eyes, Henry rolls that table, blocking his assailant and flies through the rickety doors of The Famous Door. Runs off down Bourbon street, the would be cuckold inside, searching for the kid. 16 years old. Drinking brew for breakfast. Not what his momma taught him. He knows it. Mama Byrd knows it, too.

His easy adaptation to that place sprinkles the next few years for him, with an intoxicating fervor. The strain of running cons agitates him. He’s anxious waking up in the morning. He starts practicing piano, to kill the jitters, accompanying his momma, at her church. But when he’s up to snuff, it’s back to the Famous Door, this time on the stage. He is phenomenal, achieving true skullduggery on the keyboard. Lundi Gras. Mardi Gras. Oh how he immortalized that Pagan hearted holiday in song. Can you cram whole decades into sentences so they feel like time does as it goes? Impose no rule on the rules of age, where everything is for sale, and also, nothing at all. The greasy spots, drip right where World War II’s squalor turns to mid fifties overabundance. For some reason, they tired Henry Byrd on the heart of Saturday night, riding the highways that cut the deep south to ribbons of interconnected backwardness. He stayed home, fiddled with air conditioners and car engines, swept back the sweat from mopping empty hallways in the dark hours, a hip flask full of liquor to keep his lonesomeness at bay. Can you speak of the mitigating factors that made a genius sidestep glory for the role of almost was, or would be, and the hidden recesses of the has been file. He wrote songs they dance to, and mopped floors they danced to them on, not recognizing him. He faded away.

Talked to himself. Drank potions. Drank Taaka bottles full and empty.

I’m the Professor, he’d laugh. And wink.

Hungarian straight haired Professor, he said.

His eyes staring hard at the covers, so the bed would stop rocking, and let him have some rest. Tumbling tumblers, as his face wears the mystery that hangs on those who can’t or won’t see past the next shot.  Maybe he’s no fool, but Mr. Byrd knows what it tastes like to be beat. A multitude of Mardi Gras days, a year of them, ten years; a lifetime of carnivals swollen in the river, hibernating in his head. The song percolating with hope, with a strong oaken beat, with a brazen stamp the world gave to Henry Roeland Byrd allowing him to be first a Hun, and then, the Professor.

Cosimo

It’s a great corner. A still spot. Street lamps used to be gas lamps, got electric guts, now. There’s usually a few people making a pilgrimage here, listening to Winn Dixie tape of the Professor shouting out the names of the two streets. No one trades beads for exposed titties here. There’s just the liquor store and the Laundromat, the grocery down the street. But it is here. The sound from Cosimo’s back room bled too many nights not to drench the corner with its essence, whether you heard it or not, it stayed there, and thrived. The songs pulse in shadows, and growl in the rain, bawl in the humid rays of the sun. The old man nods his bald head as he walks back home.

He moves differently, his gait inhabited with age, and heft gained from too many beloved muffulettas. He is every bit the Italian Catholic he was as a boy, a step, two steps, slower than when he turned the knobs in the studio, while liberating actual songs from recalcitrant over tones. And spilled amps, and leaked notes, all caught on his tapes. His tapes, not Winn Dixie’s.

Noble buzzes, he called them.

A noble buzz, he says to no one.

He makes it through his childhood with little trouble. His father is the hellion, the boy sometimes spends his nights enraptured by the spell of their radio. Goosed out of his perch by his well-oiled father, home now his bar had wrung all use from him. Those years rendered to their own reel, Cosimo’s soft feet padding through the back rooms of his father’s grocery store, through both sides of the segregated, split down the middle barroom. Those memories feel impermanent. They go missing, one minute, the next.

He has spent seventy some odd years in this damn neighborhood, unknown to most of its new denizens, drug deals spilling out underneath the same lamp which lit his first kiss.

He peers over his bifocal wire rims at fruit and produce, fetches them, when they fall into the cracks. His sons grow, and become distant visions of his father, not of him. Their ears know no golden sound, but ring with registers, and index finger calculations. All around the creaking floor boards of this room are the scuffs success has delivered, years of it ticked off in the lackadaisical paint jobs, while broken hearted register girls cry on his shoulder about the same rotten boyfriend, the wood moans quietly, unheard by all, but him. He hears its song.

His two boys stand stout out front, greeting customers, neighbors. Gray hair laps at Lou’s temples, flecks into John’s beard. Paunchy, in eyeglasses of their own slipping down that magnificent, Etruscan, Matassa nose. The same corner he waltzed their mother over top of, their hair thick and mostly black, thin, and snow white on his scalp. Lost to the fabulous recording sessions of the fifties and sixties his ears ushered in. Golden ears that walked taller than the gin blossomed drunkards prowling Rampart and Dumaine today, devoid of pride, absent of wit. Slide trombones and second line backbeats fade into the grooved reveries of his recordings, receding into a patch bay of forgotten music. In his little record factory, Cosimo sat on a purloined barstool, headphones on one ear but off of the other, the meter on the red line. The old man could name for you, right now, every last instant the songs stood the hair upright on his arms. Scratched acetate disks popping with hiss, long gone men in silhouette, pouring out their souls to tape, night after night, a new batch off the oil rigs and riverboats, each changing year.

He talked quickly to their mother.

Stick with me kid, I’ll give you radishes as big as diamonds.

She would chuckle and punch his arm.

I stick with you, it’s me gonna be doing the giving, she’d chide him, the curl of her texas accent tightening the rope around his heart.

Stick with me, kiddo.

Where you think I’m gonna go?

They returned to this old routine out, some nights, if sleep was slow to come.

John and Louie wanted to be grocers, and barroom keepers, like their grandfather.

It’s in our blood, Louie told him.

John’s got the numbers, Pop, and you know I’m good with people.

All of it was true, how could he blame them for that? Someway he did. His fingers searched his scalp, in off beats, wondering what fueled them, his whitened tufts catching in the breeze like tumbleweeds, running over Dauphine street, down to Dumaine, up to Rampart. What a corner it was.

The grocery housed bygone stories amidst its piles and boxes of foodstuff, its drunken deli boys pocketing fifths of booze. Fancy store managers mocked him with their bitchy back talk. Coked up register girls laughing when the old man ran afoul of the I.R.S.

A flat voice asks how the old man got the kids to give him back the store

He didn’t, he works for them, another clerk says, clucking with full disdain. He hears this song, too.  His response plays back in his head, a different response the more it repeats, until the fun in that evaporates, and he’s cold.  And not even the knowledge that their faulty voices can no easier hum a tune in the same key they started in can comfort him. He watches them, because he does not understand them, like he doesn’t understand his children, but mostly so they won’t over ring Miss Betty, from the house across the street, whose eyes are too far gone to see what change she’s gotten back.

He watches his boys bicker with their own kids, his grandchildren. Three quarters of a century on this block. Children’s children. And all of them taken care of. The sign out front until recently read the letters of his last name, but with a little finesse and a special filing, the sign has a new name, because maybe one of those two numbskulls works as hard as he should. Or possibly because both his boys focused on a largesse that never existed, and it took the sign being painted something other than the letters of their last name to get them to notice.

Dad, it ain’t like that, Louie says.

What’s it like then, Cosimo barks back.

What’s it like, you tell me what its like.

It ain’t all his fault, says John.

That much I know, he says to the ghost of their grandfather, who proudly swayed beneath the old sign in the evenings, a bottle of beer for company. The very ghost who knew his only son would not go into business with him, and so held out for his grandkids to come of age.

The name can be changed back, in a few months, the lawyer showed me how to do it.

Louie, always thinking.

Ok, the old man says, I’d like to see it up there, again.

You’re a doll, says Miss Betty, handing off her bag of groceries to John.

Ok, John says to Miss Betty as he takes her back across the street.

All of their sweat has seeped into the guts of these buildings- the corner, the back alley behind them. The bar split into two. Into knife fights, and cherry cobbler. Into a bottle of Champagne his father cracked on the the curb the day Cosimo married his girl.

The good ship Matassa sails again, his father sang out.

And the woman he married those fifty years ago moves with a molasses of intention. He watches her as she her takes the stairs from his office; her body struggles away from where he stands, hidden by the stairwell banister. She’s preparing herself for the short walk back to their house. He can remember her hair long and the color of horse’s coat, piled on the top of her head, tending to those troublesome boys like they were nothing more than five pound sacks of sugar.

Boys, she would say with a clap of her hands, leave your father be.

Her voice their comfort, and their rule. His comfort, too.

But Momma, John would beg, Momma, please, we just wanna watch.

Yeah, Momma, Daddy said he had magic lights.

They’re only magic for him, let me tell you, let Merlin be, magic power and light.

The joke wrapped up in her scent trailing back to him, at the control board. A smile comes to him, recalling the combination. Magic, power and light.

He moves his fingers back and forth across the calculator, perhaps today he believes diligence will slay the song’s impermanence. Banging it with those numbers ’til his head blots out his past, the rest of his life numbed into multiplication tables and margins of profit and loss. Numbers perch where rhythms once lived. Crowd the drawers he reserved for patch cords, and electronic schematics. Taking over the place where the electric hum of his memories once cavorted.

Their names melt. Memorial services and skeletons speak only when he sleeps. Alzheimer’s, strokes, alcoholic pancreatitis. A list that knows its own beat, kept breathing, kept alive, by this cyclical, perpetual motion. A kinetic song, a song of retribution. You got it bad? Not for long.

Goddamned second lines, he says to no one.

Another one comes along every week. Whose left?

Store employees overhear him, from time to time, and some pause to ask the old man how he is.

Can I get you something, a stock boy offers, at his age, he won’t refuse.

You gonna be alright?

Sure, I am, sure, Cosimo says, taking off his glasses, and inhaling the Pine Sol rivered into the floor.

Long as that second line skips this corner, long as it ain’t me they’re singing for.

He doesn’t remember the names of all the Professor’s children, or where they scattered to- a myriad of streets, of muses, of Greek themed delusions that sit tight in wards of debilitation, drunk. Not any one of them, not one name at all. Maybe there is such thing as too much information. If anyone has it, it’s him. Information circling up above his head, pillowed beside hers, as they strong through the victory and loss life has given them, their sleep the one true habit of love.

He hums songs in his sleep, and wakes her sometimes.  She will creep up to an elbow, and watch his, rotund and barrel-chest, bounce along.

I know where you go at night, she thinks, I’ve always known that.

Day in and out, he spends his time watching, rolls back his eyes in remembrance. He regrets the closed off feeling that rises in him, far from the trace of his prime, freed by the studio he hammered with his very hands into something that produced more than the sum of its parts. Of a time before his dour look infiltrated his expression. The gruff exterior not yet in place, instead the root of excitement, of exploration tangled the fuzzy tufts of his hair, and wiped the sweat off his brow with quick gesticulations, and hopeful, yes hopeful, movements based in guesswork.

He’d have missed so many of the main New Orleans musicians had he been ruled by racism and withered taste. Instead of projecting worth on worthlessness, Cosimo kept an open door policy. It worked, because, while more has beens came in than not, on the sleeves of their coats came some fresh kid drummer, or hot fingered piano player. A kingdom built on unknowns, who got the chance to shake their feathers in the air, in the makeshift isolation booths built from empty produce and wine cases– sound flurrying into bent corners, and dead spots, to create… HIS SOUND.  He extracted music from broken noise. He guided it on wearisome trips down that river, into the dark heart of it all. A whole generation of backbeats assembled in the walls of that room.  His keen ear, and gentle demeanor sending off the alcoholic once great singer, with a kind addendum to tell that band to swing back his way when they got a chance. The thing here was how he said it. That art was what got those kids to his place in the chance of time, through the luck of  his kind heart.

Before they knew monetary comfort, he’d slipped between the sheets, and found the cottony warmth of her grasp. How can you tell someone here, in this city of all places, to be good, behave and there will be your reward? Because he had not behaved, his reward marked the strain that lined her face, with coercive regret, passing beside the ghosts that wander their building, in search of a final home. Debts the I.R.S. collected from one Cosimo Matassa helped close his magical rooms.

The studio becomes a bar in the early 70’s, and after than, an apartment house. Finally it turns into an automated Laundromat, whose ghosts tumble in long unencumbered dryer rides that get them nowhere, and quiet them none. Here he sees 1963, and 1958, wandering like hollow amnesiacs, disobeying floor plans, calling after employees long since passed. 1949, 1972, one minute to the next, caterwauling in spastic somnambulance, making a hodgepodge of progression, regression. No, time does not move, but, to him, it beats in a rhythm uncontrolled, and uncontrollable. No one harnesses time. Time harnesses man, and works him like a mule.

I hear you, he says, the room empty but for a few slices of sunlight, I hear you.

Some off beat notion. Like you were a wave crashing.

I hear you. I could call out to you,

You’re here in this room, with me. Waiting.

Bad or Good, it doesn’t matter.

Familiar sounds creep onto empty unknown ones. Old routines rough his shoulders as he falls deeper into sleep, and his reel. Beside her.

Fess

He finds himself in low spots, Dew Drop Inns, messing round with booze, and nothing else. Better times outfitted right with beaded spangles, and headdresses that spoke of hidden glory, gave the stage show a half wit brilliance. His slurred vocals followed after, while he set about training those drummers, like sheep to the crook. They trailed off into his ether, following behind the ignited glory of his howl, his banshee playing. Sometimes Fess, himself, jumped behind the drum kit and smacked the beat back down like they were his very frustrations. Bleeding the vileness out of his veins.

That’s what Ah want, he says to whoever slips in behind the kit.

That thar roar. Like an ocean. Ya heard me?

Right here ya lift off, get out of these clubs and go somewhere cat, somewhere.

Right here, listen, between the clink clank ice cubes mixing with the booze, that’s the sound Ah want.

That’s the sound Ah want.

That silver lining a little imaginary locket round his neck, case things start dimming, and the future starts to blur. But the Professor changed. He became uninterested, riding in automobiles, even short trips to Biloxi or Houston drained him. So he sat it down in New Orleans for good. Bringing in the new day from whichever bar would have him.

He’s been after Cosimo a hundred times before, get them drums more snap, but Cosimo has something on his mind. Turning over dimes and making them dollar bills. Eventually, Ahmet, the Turkish record label owner swans down from Manhattan, a true friend of the darker skins. The Turk was not adverse to shaking his rump while the Professor did his thing. He liked to have a nip. The Turk has a way of looking over Cosimo’s shoulder, bent over the knobs, with a kind familiarity. Cosimo does not shoo him off.

Too many horns, Fess.

Aw, you can’t never have too many horns.

The Professor was always quick with a smirk, but when a smile crossed him, it would split him open with triumph. Out would come the flask.

Oh, I concur, the Turk says.

I absolutely concur.

The three of them going about their way, guided by forces both seen and unseen.

The Professor drops a key when he talks, half in, half out of some syncopated dialect from his childhood. The Turk laps it up, dressed in a finely tailored elegance alien to most. Cosimo stands there, grinning at the both of them. When the Professor extemporaneously sings the studio’s address while they record his Mardi Gras anthem, they, all three of them, shake in a weird concoction of faith, satisfaction and awe. Because at that moment they know that it’s the end for this. They’ve taken it as far as it can go. The sound has come undone and it won’t get back to what it was in its adolescence: hard, rhythmic, and true.  Professor’s gums go to bleeding. Turk’s liver gains an ulcer. Cosimo’s dimes unwillingly, and with much contention, file off to the taxman. The shrinking platform they all stand on in 1964 creaks so loud, they fathom its implosion together. But, then, the rest of the band breaks in, and them three are lost to any premonitions. The tape quits, the recording session breaks up. Out flows Fess, stooped from drink, bleary from more than just song, in a Captain’s sailor hat. Turk, his nice, juicy, New York suit hangs open, while he sits laughing into a bottle of red wine that always finds it’s way to his mouth. And Cosmo, like a shroud behind them, lamp lights their darkness, improves their sum, reducing the noisy hiss, compounding their excellence.

New Orleans falls down dead drunk on a secret brotherhood of rituals. Mystic Krewes need little explanation, only the fact that sets the drunken orgy in play. Their corrupt tales leech into the Mississippi. Tinkled ivories encourage into myth the shadowy characters hanging out by the Laundromat, there on that dim lit corner. Junkies, split lipped drag queens, cover up the buzz that trickles off of them, as fable sets their hair, and turns Desire from streetcar to bus.

This place has a sanctity its denizens do not know. It’s a place guarded by an old drunk hovering near where a piano once lived. Be still, his bruised reminiscence, as his leaves fall to franchises of pizza joints and hamburger huts. Of theme ridden restaurants and a Japanese invention called Karaoke. Arms akimbo, not akimbo in the reduction of the Professor’s fame, lingering in piano crawls, always accompanying himself with bottles of gin brewed in rat trapped warehouses off the Mississippi, that for a bit, he mops up, after the work crews empty out. The Professor stays hidden under corrugated tin roofs, bemoaned in rainstorms, warped from sunrays.

Lights shimmer from across the river, in Algiers point, where a mockingbird blue house mocks him, taking the years of his passage to mediocrity, and waving them like ripples and white caps on the Mississippi. Ambition is sliced from his hold, and squandered in the drunken world no one admits he’s fallen into.

But gracelessness founders below the salt of sea level, and evolves. One shift worker recognizes him, calls out,

You’re the Professor.

Turns to the other people in the room.

It’s Professor Longhair.

No one cares. No one turns.

The kid  is a hippy, working part time for beer money. A child of the times in appearance only- his love for the Professor’s songs is the love of memory, shaped by the purity of a child’s devotion. So, as the river rises, and descends, the hippy kid convinces Fess to let him put the old man through his paces, and once again, a piano finds its place underneath his. After weeks of practice, he’s back in the swing. Instead of saloon halls, he rides upon the shoulders of these adulating hippy kids, and they create a festival, which they all say would be impossible were it not for him.

This was really something. A sea of white kids throb to his maniacal phrasing. Then grab at the chance to pay him money for 45 minutes of talking and piano playing.

It was a gas. And it was good for him. Prolonged his life. The Professor always loved an audience

This means more to me, he gestured to the crowd, in Congo square, where his ancestors were once bought and sold.

This means more to me. He stops, again, and takes a swallow from a can of Schlitz, to keep the tears at bay.

Just means so much, he manages, before the hippy kid hops up onstage beside him, and showers them both with beer foam.

An audience.

He did not care the drums were left up to young guns comepletely ignorant of what the Turk once sought, of what Cosimo bent down over those antique electronics and gathered up in bundles of hard fought tempos.

He did not care.

And more kids came, rode down in their momma’s automobiles,  eager to suck in all the greasy rhythms Fess could lash to their their sides, before they had to pick up stakes and head back to wherever it was they were from.

A sea of people, a river of them, mutate, shimmer in his glasses, shift into makeshift band halls, teetering, jeering, waving their fists, triumphantly.

An audience.

He was their king; crazy, black, baldhead became Rex. And so, when that majestic feeling came, it cleansed him. Cosimo, a man who never missed a thing, stood in the corner, and nursed a bottle of Dixie, nodded when the drummer went soft on the offbeat. The Professor raised his drink high, and the crowd, confusing the piano player’s wry salutation, raised theirs to him. Cosimo grinned, hidden in the wings, his arm raised, too. Swaying like palm fronds unfurled by the humid swelter that comes off the river before summer finally sets down, out of breath, waiting for the afternoon rains to cool them off.

Cosimo

Cosimo hears his wife’s voice, knows the exact timber it had, when he ruled this corner, now drowning in the fumes of busses and in the aroma air conditioners make just before they seize. The acrid perfume of smoke covers everything, lost tape reels, ribbon microphones.  Out of there, the Professor comes, strolling carelessly, his head bobbing, what hair that’s left, kinked in tight gray curls, spitting out from under his patchwork golf cap.

Hey, look it, mah main man, hey, the Professor says, slipping a hand onto Cosimo’s back.

Hello, Roeland, comes Cosimo’s never changing greeting for the Professor.

They sit back on the metal, folding chairs Cosimo brought out for this very occasion. The Professor comes back across the street holding  a six pack of beer. They sit, watching the traffic while neighborhood kids ride past, three to  a bike, making a song with their squeals of joy, with the squeaks of the bikes sagging beneath them.

I Hear The Music Of A Heartbeat

Jane Wall had been in this very influential, somewhat successful band in the early part of the decade. After a few years circling the charts, they broke up. Rolling Stone wrote an article detailing the horrendous infighting that tore the group to pieces. Shredded the friendships, left bitter vitriol in their wake. Maybe, maybe not- there were rumors the article made it to print only to sell more issues of Rolling Stone that month. All I know is that in high school, I used to drive along Benjamin Franklin Parkway by the museum, singing right along with Jane’s kewpie doll voice. Sometimes, hearing her songs, that voice, it made me forget I had a girlfriend. It made me forget everything, altogether. Everything that is, except Jane Wall.

 

She was bringing her new band to play the club. This was my first big show, after buying into the place. When they pulled up in their enormo bus, and the band members got off, I was there to greet them. They came through a couple months before, as the backline for Butch Carson, that grand lion of punk. They were all few years younger than Jane, barrio kids, from east L.A. The road manager stumbled off behind them. I’m Fox, he announced, sadly lost in his own estimation of self.  Fox couldn’t stop talking, in love with his own voice, always happy to discover a fresh ear to bend. You know, he told me, must have been ten times that night, this is the best job in the world for me, the best one. That is the sort of thing, when someone tells you once, you believe them. I love drinking on the job, Fox said. I love it. So, I knew then, it really was the best job for him. This point was further driven home when I watched the band wait, as Fox threw up all over the front tire of their bus, and Jane stood next to him, holding his ponytail in her hand, out of harm’s way.

 

I didn’t know Jane, but a friend of mine did, had been her confidante on Nantucket for years. When Jane got up on the stage, to set up for the show, I walked over to her. Katie Rooney told me to tell you hello, I say to Jane Wall, former idol of my tender loins. She looks overtop her glasses, and scrunches up her face. How the fucking hell is Katie? And we’re off to the races. Jane melts like a handful of chocolate delight.

 

The rest of the night, long after the show, we’re telling each other stories, about our friend, dear Katie Rooney, about legendary indie curmudgeon Dave Karona. Oh, please, she assures me, at one point, Karona’s a total doughboy. That whole I’m the angriest man in the world is such a put on. Get him in an isolation booth, he whimpers like a toy poodle. I mean, he’s Albanian.  She pauses. You know, she says she nudging me, like John Belushi. Jane says things so convincingly, bats her sultry brown eyes so alluringly, I have a hard time remembering that my fiancé, Stella, is sitting there with us. Jane wags her tail, and the bartender leaves his post and brings each of her drinks to her, the rest of the night, all 6 feet of him trying to curl into itsy bitsy Jane Wall’s lap. It’s late, after hours, a hazy free reign descends behind our locked doors. And then it’s time for them to go and marvel at Fox’s denouement.

 

So, I’m happy. The whole experience invigorates me. More than that. Their show crested and crescendoed, leapt and bounded. It had heart, Jane Wall’s heart. My band starts to rehearse with a new exuberance because, over night, I’m hopeful about music, again. I’ve seen Jane go through her motions with such a deliberate peace, I want more. I need more.

 

Six months pass. Due to a few choice bills I’ve forced our band onto at the club, we generate some press, and coerce a local label to issue our maiden release. We’ve received an invitation to the Ride Into The Sun festival in England, somewhere. Dave Karona booked the event.  He asked us along because he recorded the sessions for our disc, on Jane Wall’s recommendation. Much to my amusement, Karona enjoyed what we did. The indie scene across the ocean is as nepotistic as it is where we are. Tim the bass player says yes, at the band meeting. Our Scottish drummer says yes. Johnny lead guitar nods his head. Meeting adjourned. I send an email. We resolutely accept the offer.

 

Ride Into The Sun basks in an ultra hip glory, which means, it’s not yet a household name. The press coverage it does warrant is littered with cucumber cool innuendo. Hipster magazines like Flawz and Boast take notice. This bodes well for everyone, but most especially, our unknown band. We book a flight from Philly to Reykjavik, and from Reykjavik to London. April lights do not descend to darkness as we fly through the dead hours, hours normally unlit, dedicated to a secret pitch. It’s 2 in the morning, it’s 4 in the morning, and the sun stays with us. Cloudy puffs billow atmospherically seducing us, huge cottony balls that glisten down the wing, come hither, they say, come out here and play. And I want to. A statuesque stewardess leans over Tim, and his mouth falls open as she fixes his pillow, and winks at him. I want to live in Iceland, he says. We land.

 

Our drummer leads us from airport miasma, to the underground, and into London proper. We have to catch a train to the coast. The station we are to depart from is a wrought iron extravagance the likes of which I’ve never seen. School kids in short pants, with knee high socks, striped ties and blue blazers, miniature Angus Youngs, bump into us as we collapse onto our duffels. We wait an hour, and then, another. This is the West Coast Mainline, our drummer informs us. Well, isn’t that very nice, says Tim, getting up from his bag, I adore what you’ve done to the place, nice you’ve gotten the junkies off that mainline tit.

 

Our train arrives. On we get, and off we go.

 

Everyone ever involved one in any aspect of indie rock heads to the same small coastal town we’re headed for. All of the United States’ eastern seaboard, most of Chicago, and at least half of Louisville have converged on this small British port and have taken over for what hopes to be a memorable weekend.  A feast of thin framed and pale skinned people in clothing much too tight, with unruly swaths of hair ricochet off of each other, in a twisting line a quarter mile long, each of them awaiting the hoe down.  Now, I’m sober, but as much of a rapscallion as I ever was.  The drinking started to get in the way of that, and so I gave it up. It was my problem, no one else’s. But I’ve also quit smoking, and that’s forced things a bit out of focus. I’ve got some anxiety.

 

We arrive at the front gates, skipping to the head of the line. It’s a holiday camp, an English innovation if ever there was one. Pete Townsend wrote his frightful Rock Opera, Tommy, about places like this. Our drummer tells me it’s true, these holiday camps really do promote inappropriate behavior, and dare he say it, rape. At first, I think he’s joking, but oh no, he’s not. Cheap, garishly painted, plastic dinosaur sculptures crop up everywhere, some with sand boxes, and swing sets placed beside them, which the younger festival goers have taken over. They sip from bottles of Belgian beer, from cans of English stout I’ve never seen before. I’m not afraid to admit I pine a little for a taste. But then we’re accosted by a pixie with a clipboard in her hand demanding to know who we are.

 

We tell her the name of our band, one time, two times, the third time just as she’s telling us nice try, that all the tickets have sold out, Kevin Hand, a rocker with some renown, swoops over and declares us to be, in fact, an official Ride into the Sun band. She’s hesitant, then, amazingly, she discovers our band on her list after all, and like that, we’re issued four all access badges. Never let them out of your sight, and I mean never, our pixie advises. I’m not about to make up anymore, not for you, not for anybody. She spits on the ground in emphasis. Ever the English rose.

 

Kevin leans over to me, and he whispers something unintelligible, accompanied by that sweet dew of alcohol. It’s the early side of afternoon, though he’d be hard pressed to tell. I pass him off on a bent journalist annoyingly hovering beside us, and we head off to find our lodgings. The room. Ah, the room, four of us will share this runt of a room for the duration of the weekend. It’s outfitted with two bunk beds, and one luggage tray. A TV sits in the corner, next to the bathroom door. In the closet is a mini fridge. Empty, but working. A note on the bed from Karona tells us when we’re playing, how to get there, and that the equipment we requested is here, somewhere. That’s a joke, Tim says. I’m not so sure.

 

There’s a line-up schedule for each day. We are to play this 1^st day, to take the stage in just a couple of hours. Jane Wall’s band Iris is the headliner, and they’ll close the festival. Stella, now my wife, has not made the trip. For a moment, I think of Jane, her dark and compact beauty no slight contrast to Stella’s lithe blondeness. For a moment, I hope things a married man should not hope.

 

Someone turns on the TV, and after a moment, it becomes clear that it operates on a closed circuit. There’s a placard on top, and sure enough, it lists a program that suits the flavor of the event. Each night at midnight a different Godzilla movie will be shown. Throughout the day, videos of all the different bands playing will be televised.

Over and over and over again.

 

Both of Jane’s bands have made plenty videos, Kevin Hand made two that I know of, and Wire, they made some during MTV’s late 80’s heyday. For the most part no one else has. That’s a short list. But then, none of us came here to watch television. Let’s get pissed, says our Scotsman. Indeed, I say. Pissed.

 

No one knows who the hell we are. There’s a little crowd when we play, but they are mostly over flow from the upstairs show. They talk over top of each one of our songs, until Tim throws a cup of ice at two American girls jabbering on their cell phones. Evan, the drummer from Iris, is there, and Jane Wall with him. She winks at Tim, when he plants his foot on a monitor during our last song. In mid verse I wonder why the ladies always wink at Tim, and not at me, but then look down to the ring on my finger. An old teacher of mine would tell me that was selfish rationalization. Whatever gets you through the night.  Some Irish kids help us break down the gear after we finish. Thankfully, they each buy a disc, and a few shirts, and we have some spending money. I’m jet lagged, so I extricate myself from the post show conversation, making for the room, and the sultry bottom bunk.

 

When I open my eyes, it’s the next day. No one else has slept in the room. I turn on the TV, and there Jane Wall is, crooning into a huge sun flower, Love, love, love, her satiny voice sings, kiss me boys, love is not a gun, no, love dusts your soul with pollen, love is no locust, love is a flower burning in the sun.

 

I call Stella. When she doesn’t answer. I become uncertain if I have followed the international dialing protocol correctly. Maybe my call went to Hungary, or Sweden. Maybe Stella is out.

 

My band mates pop up over the course of the day. The Scotsman drags me with him to the town of Rye, about a mile from the Festival. He stops us in front of an antique store. This is the place, he announces wryly. It doesn’t look very special. I start in anyway. Play along, he says, stopping me with his arm. This is really the place, he says again, this time pointing at something. I stare back at him blankly. Look at the sign, he explains, deflated. The Glory Hole. Do they know what that means, I ask him? He shakes his head, I don’t think so. We should change our name, I say. He nods wisely, but let’s sell some records, first.

 

Back at our room, Tim, and his guitar-playing make pretend brother, Johnny, are well hung over, and no, they will not join me at the beach, they declare abruptly, as they crawl into separate top bunks. Both are fast asleep before they hit the mattress. Before their boots leave the floor.

 

I had not intended to go to the beach, but I head off that way, wiping the weak drizzle from my face as I go. And there for all to see is the same windswept misery Pete Townsend must have also once seen, overcoming the sparse long grass growing on the dunes. At the water, I turn around, and for fuck’s sake, there stands an arcade, a proper palace of pinball. I’ve seen this beach before, in films, in television shows on PBS. In Quadrophenia. Throngs of fest goers have deluged the arcade, while the owners, two Persian gentleman, huddle outside smoking cigars, trying to decipher their good fortune. I look back to the ocean, and watch as a squall, complete with sea spout, works its way down the coastline. 

 

That night I relax enough to realize I’m having a good time, when I look down at the mess on the floor and notice I’m standing in raw sewage, then look up to see Jane watching me watch the sewage seep into my shoes. She points at Karona, oblivious, a dark blue jumpsuit over his short wiry frame, marching our way, and puts a finger to her lips.

 

His black boots splosh in the shit, and Karona grimaces when he sees what it is he’s stepped in. He looks at Jane, then me. Without missing a beat, he reaches down into the sewage and tosses some onto both of us.

 

These people are in there 40’s. And me, I’ve given up the life of crime, and here we are listening to Wire, half covered in poo, somewhere in England. At one point Karona’s band, Lambaste, wrote a song entitled Jane Wall’s Lacy Underwear. The much-ballyhooed song ended their friendship for a year or two. And though they’re friends again, the memory pulses in their undercurrent. An undercurrent with which I’ve just come into contact.

 

Later, Kevin Hand breaks out of his proto-punk revivalist shell long enough to tell a rapt audience about the time we barely made it to the Engine Room in Louisville in time to catch the Derby on television. The point of his story is a matter of contention we’ll never settle, though it’s his belief we got lost on account of my need to find liquor in the land of dry counties. He’s heckling me about it, and people laugh with him, at me. My cheeks redden, but the thing is, these are the very same people who were there as the van clamored to a stop outside the Engine Room, 10, 15 years ago, that decidedly warm and beatific Derby day. There’s Stephen, from Camp Fire, and standing next to him is the old drummer from Catahoula, each and every possible member of The Scarlet Court, the guy who used to book the Black Forest, Kevin’s zaftig ex-gal pal, Leslie, whose U-No-Me label everyone makes such a big deal about these days. I unabashedly beg of her later, Leslie, please, please, help me to be as big of a deal as you. She doesn’t seem to remember me, and walks off, then slowly spins around and calls back to me, you already are, aren’t you, dear, she says, you don’t need my help. And she blows me a kiss. I take this as a compliment. I hope that’s a compliment, I say to the same bent journalist, perennially standing next to me, fishing a cigarette butt out of his pint.

 

The last night, Iris plays us out. The whole lot is creamed, wasted. Audience and band members, make pretend journalist alike. I am THE lone sober person riding into the sun. However, I’ve been drinking Red Bull, and only Red Bull, because the tap water is foul, in it perhaps a trace hint of the sewage we were stepping in the night before, and maybe that’s how come there’s no tonic water or club soda left in the place. I ride the red rocket. My skin itches, my brain itches, even my heart itches. Stella.

 

I listen. Iris’ set is rollicking and sugar coated. They sound strong considering how well oiled Jane is. She spies me when she looks into the crowd at one point. She flashes me the finger, and winks, in between slurred verses. The people around me think I’m someone extra fancy and they close in. All that attention goes straight to my head, for a minute I feel like  a bonafide star. So tall. So dreamy. It is their last song, and when they finish the lights come up. Those English birds are fickle, and they scamper away from me quick as bunnies, to get the last of their drink tickets punched at the bar. All the better I think. All the better.

 

The Festival is over. The next morning we scamper off in different directions, the drummer to his parent’s house in Northern Scotland, Tim to Gatwick airport, Johnny to a weeklong stay in London. I book a taxi to the Heathrow. I need the hour drive to decompress. So much music, so much puke. Maybe the pleasant countryside will massage my itchy smokeless soul.

 

And it does. As we pass this brilliant, perfectly English estate, with its gigantic Tudor mansion, resplendent with a finely thatched roof, and lushly tailored lawn, the driver leans back and says, you seem like a music fan, that’s Roger Daltrey’s manor, over there, on the right.

 

The place, it’s magnificent. Gorgeous. It is a palace. And I’m crushed. Karona, Jane, Kevin Hand, none of us will know that kind of opulent life style. But then I figure none of us actually want that. Too confusing. Too Bombastic. Well, Pete Bracken, maybe, the Scarlet Court’s lone original member, but he’s genuine Kentucky gentry, a county even bears his name. A dry county.