“Relentless pessimism about the state of the nation infuses Sexton’s … accomplished poetry and short ﬁction … The title piece, about hard life and untimely death in the ghetto, introduces the book’s dark atmosphere: ‘Being and begetting, struggling and/ enduring … as gunﬁre crackles and sirens wail/ and her fate is sealed with cofﬁn nails.’ Sexton’s characters – Nowhere Men as much as Everymen – are war veterans, hobos, sex workers, and blue-collar employees facing job losses … His settings are urban wastelands. In ‘The Penworn Papers’ an impoverished artist recalls his degenerate life … in ‘The Gift,’ a Jewish satire redolent of Shalom Auslander, a young man reverts to emptiness in his old age … The palette is Edward Hopper’s, the ironic tone O. Henry’s. ‘Our Town’ playfully afﬁrms Thornton Wilder’s morbid vision through gloomy imagery. The poems (are) rich with alliteration, internal rhymes, assonance and puns … They have broader application, universalizing human depravity …Sexton’s talent for social commentary and character sketching marks him as – in a title he gives a character in ‘Chop Suey’ – the Modigliani of the Mean Streets”

Kirkus Reviews

“Earnest and emotional, Constant is the Rain embraces desperation in tone, subject, and even in diction. A yearning for meaning in a nonsensical world comes to shape much of the text, forming the image of a people and a country existing without any deﬁned meaning.

“Sexton’s poetry generally forms isolated scenes of hardship and makes up the bulk of the work. ‘Like cruciﬁxion crosses dangling weary ghosts,/ the telephone poles along the lost roads of America/ ﬂash past me.’ These images, producing small segments of reality, combine to show the complete picture of a fragmented people looking for solace in a world of hard truths. From the individual seeking understanding to the drug addict seeking a reprieve from existence, the characters are … easily recognizable and empathetic ﬁgures.

“Complimenting Sexton’s poetry is not only prose but his artwork … most impressive about the prose … is the continued attention to detail in diction and syntax … the result is a work accessible to all … that imparts a feeling that is for the people rather than simply about them.”

Alex Franks

Foreward Reviews

Praise for Paper Moon

Renowned surrealist painter Rex Sexton is also a highly regarded writer, imbuing his ﬁction and poetry with the same startling vision and mastery he displays in his artwork. His newest novel, Paper Moon, dazzles with words, just as his paintings do with form and color … Sexton creates a dizzying madhouse of a world that exists beneath the surface of “normal” life. The descriptions are extremely visual … images as vivid as dreams and often as feverish as nightmares … the cadence so perfect sometimes that passages beg to be read out loud. Fans of Coleridge and Blake will not miss the allusions and undercurrents … Sexton is both clever and creative, and Paper Moon is refreshingly intense, unusual in its complexity, and disquieting in its revelations.”

Five Stars (out of ﬁve)

Cheryl Hibbard ForeWord Reviews

“Ingbar’s an artist in a tough world. The sensory details — from the memories of his childhood through his imprisonment and beyond — give us to know, consistently, that the inner life carries its own salvation. If this is not adherence to “the same themes that engaged the great writers of the past,” nothing is.

Julie Nichols New Pages

“[Paper Moon] shows a broader picture of how stupidity and greed have made a shambles of society and the economy … a poet and artist [Sexton] has an ear and an eye for detail, and the impressionistic descriptions help illuminate the narrative. … Sexton proves to be an impressive wordsmith …”

Kirkus Reviews

BOOKS BY REX SEXTON

Fiction

Desert Flower

Paper Moon

Fiction And Poetry

The Time Hotel

Night Without Stars

Constant Is The Rain

Artwork, Poetry, Biographical Notes

X Ray Eyes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rex Sexton is a Surrealist painter exhibiting in Chicago and Philadelphia. His award winning art has been exhibited in museums, televised on PBS, written about in newspapers, reproduced in magazines and included in national and international exhibitions. His poetry and prose have appeared in cutting-edge literary magazines. His short story “Holy Night” received an Eric Hoffer award and was published in Best New Writing 2007. His poem “Orchard” received the 2012 Annual Editor- in-Chief Award from Möbius The Poetry Magazine. His poem “Ashes of Winter” was runner up for The 2011 Doctor Zylpha Mapp Robinson International Poetry Award. His poem “Gift Wrapped” was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize by Kind of a Hurricane Press. He is married to the neuroscientist Dr. Rochelle S. Cohen.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to thank the editors of the following publications in which many of these poems and stories have or will appear: Edgz, Waterways, Hazmat Review, Clark Street Review, Mobius, The Poetry Magazine, Art Times, Nerve Cowboy, Bear Creek Haiku, Taproot, Left Curve, Back Street Review, Soul Fountain The Pen, Write On!! Struggle, Love’s Chance, The Stray Branch, r.kv.r.y, (A Brilliant) Record, Saturday Diner, Plato’s Tavern, The Rusty Truck, Fighting Chance, Lone Stars, Daily Love, Nut House, B&R Samizdat Express, Poet’s Haven, Conceit, Babel, Point Mass, Children, Churches & Daddies, Napalm and Novocain, Pyrokinection, Yellow Mama, Rusty Typer, Dead Snakes, Indigo Rising, Hell Roaring Review, Wilderness Review, The Legendary, Slavia Transcendent Visions, Caveat Lector, Poetry Corner, Marquis, Nite-Writer, Miracle, and Talking River

Passages from this work were broadcast on “The Language of

Imagination” “Talking Stick” wwwLuver.com, Berkeley California.

An E-Book format of “Constant Is The Rain” is available through Quench Editions (www.samizdat.com/quencheditions)

DEDICATION

For Rochelle S. Cohen.

Also for poet/composer Bryan Miller for insightful discussions, and the Philly bartender extraordinaire Michael Dougherty, whose bar stories are a writer’s envy.

RECOGNITIONS

Candles and shadows, whispers and echoes,

windows and mirrors, lit by the moon’s glow;

and on the card table, the hand that life dealt

you. Win or lose, living’s a gamble.

If you came from where I did, the odds are

against you. If you don’t like the odds, go

ﬁnd a rainbow.

They say we have souls. Is that what the body

knows? They say life’s a dream. Ever hear

someone scream?

CONSTANT IS THE RAIN

Being and begetting, struggling and

enduring, all of it bewildering as time

passes and the church bells ring.

Like cold rain running through her

veins, the chilling feeling as Delphi

walks the ghetto streets each day,

shivering even when the sun is

blazing. While across the city

where the girls her age look so

pretty, strolling in their fashionable

clothes along the tree-lined lanes

and avenues, is where she prays

she’ll live someday, somehow,

someway

Shadows stalk her shivering steps.

Life shifts through a freezing mist,

as gunﬁre crackles and sirens wail

and her fate is sealed with cofﬁn nails.

FLESH AND BLOOD

A loaf of

bread, a

crown of

thorns, to

make ends

meet I sell

my blood.

That “bank” is

the only one I

can make a

deposit in since

the recession

began. “Take it

all.” I told the

blood lady the

last time I was

there. “I can’t

afford

to make anymore. The next time you

see me I’ll be in a morgue.”

The economic

recovery is going

slowly, they tell me.

Just enough jobs are

created each month

to keep up with the

population growth,

almost. The young

and the desperate get

ﬁrst dibs on the

starvation wage gigs

that provide no

beneﬁts.

Old hands like me,

doomed at ﬁfty-

three, can fade from

the scene. We’re just

walking dead letters,

which the

Republicans hope

will never be

delivered to

Medicare and Social

Security. A decade

or so without food or

shelter or medical

attention should

eliminate that budget

problem.

The place in Jersey where I went to sell

my kidney got raided the day I was supposed

to get my surgery.

I need to ﬁnd

another body parts

chop shop, and

quick.

Blood and guts are all I have left.

TAPS

Crawl for cover,

feel death’s ﬁnger

slide up your spine

as bullets ﬂy and your

buddies die.

Think of your mother,

brother, sister, father,

lover, your Uncle Sam

who got you into this

jam ﬁghting for your life

in Vietnam.

Tell the rosary on the beads

of sweat that run down

your face, neck. Turn a deaf

ear to the moans and groans

all around you that send

shocks through your bones.

Now you are alone, wasting

away in a back street cheap room,

shot to shit at sixty-six from all

the bad habits you picked up in

combat: drugging, boozing,

hiding from the enemy which

came to be reality.

You survived the ambush that

day and many more that

came your way

But they made you pay.

CRACK POP BANG

Dirty rain and crack cocaine, some in the cellar feeling for a plump vein to puncture that will shine an inner light on the darkness of the ghetto night and send a glow through the body and soul

“Come with me on my dream odyssey.” Mother’s little helper whispers. “Feel the glory of being free from poverty and misery, at least temporarily. Beware, though, it will cost you your life if you OD.”

If you could call this a life – drive- bys and gang ﬁghts, poverty and urban blight.

They were born into a combat zone. More soldiers in Chi-town’s conscripted army of the damned would die each year than in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Come with me on my dream odyssey!”

At least they knew what they were dying for. No more, no more.

DEVILS AND ANGELS

Curls of color crowd my work in progress.

They look like tear drops or rain drops or

the outlines of alarm clocks.

I squiggled one on the canvas and then kept

them going, for no reason I can fathom.

Maybe they are a code which holds

the DNA for the painting I am attempting?

A race with time? a nursery rhyme? an

ode to the sublime?

I stare at them through the smoke from my

breakfast of champions.

What’s next? Where am I going with this?

In this strange bedlam we inhabit, wedged

in between monkey and human (and being

stoned in addition) anything can happen

in my imagination.

I remember the story Henry Miller wrote

about the angel he painted when he was

loaded. I never painted an angel. Maybe

I’ll ﬁnd one hiding in my canvas when I

connect the dots or tear drops or alarm clocks,

whatever is curled up?

An angel today, a devil tomorrow, nothing

unusual for an artist’s studio.

This is the sort of place one comes to ponder

good and evil and to confront that meeting

between thought and instinct, peace and

violence, greed and giving, which we all

share if we dare.

TICKET TO RIDE

The moon was

gone. Black

clouds closed

over the city like

the lid of a

cofﬁn.

Thunder boomed

and the winds

picked up,

blowing through

the windows of

the inferno below

him like an angel’s

breath, soothing

the body, not the

soul. That would

always stay

trapped in Hell.

Tim sat on the roof

of his sweltering

tenement. He

watched the tiny,

hobo ﬁres shivering

by the tracks

beyond the slums,

that dark jumble of

buildings falling

down.

He imagined

himself running

along side a

freight car as the

train slowed to

make

its turn, grabbing a

rung and climbing

on, another lost soul

on a ghost train,

going nowhere,

going anywhere,

ghost town bound,

maybe not tonight

but soon.

Staccato images of hardscrabble slum life

ﬂash before him with the lightning,

a battle no one can win, or survive, not

without

beco

ming

dead

than

alive.

“No

where”

was

better

than

here.

Any

where

was

better

than

here.

Anything was better than nothing, and here

nothing was all there was for him.

SLEEPWALKING

Remnants of wreckage tangled

together, Franklin Foster wanders

the downtown streets in tatters.

Mouth open, feet dragging, pale

eyes staring, horns blaring, as he

ghosts across the busy intersections.

Franklin remembers falling, screaming,

howling in his nightmare, arms

ﬂailing, legs kicking, clutching,

grasping, plunging. Finally he

awakened. Nothing was clear,

as Franklin slowly picked himself up

from the gutter, neither the past

nor the present, nor the future.

The future? Franklin almost remembers

a line by Shakespeare, something

about day to day in a petty pace?

Other memories emerge, shadowy,

ﬂeetingly – faces, places. All gone

with those winds of time that life

erases. The crowds bustle past.

Like a ghost in a dream, Franklin Foster

shadows through the ﬂow, a step

at a time, although he has nowhere

to go.

LIFE LESSONS

Dead bodies never look like the

persons they’re supposed to resemble.

There’s something missing in them –

no matter how you make them up or

clothe them.

Kristy’d been to her share of funerals,

although she was hardly eleven.

No wonder everybody’d be all shook

up and crying at them, before

and after they’d be buried in their plots

– despite the elaborate decorum.

Dead ain’t pretty. Sure

ain’t nothin’ you’d

want to be. Sure ain’t

no redemption nor

salvation.

There’s a livin’ dying which is more

disturbing.

She’s see’d that too, over the years,

since they moved from the bayou to

Uptown Chicago, after the big storm

hit them, and they had to relocate, as

her parents put it, and ﬁnd shelter with

their relations, when she was hardly

going on seven.

But as soon as they were hunkered in

another storm struck them,

the recession; and they were as bad off

as they were in Louisiana only now

there were more of them, and all

turning into corpses together, with no

hope whatsoever, more dead than

living.

Her spindly legs dangling from her

perch on the El train’s railing,

a little hooded nonentity in her

raggedy parka of faded denim,

Kristy rivets her pale blue eyes on

the ﬂow of pedestrians, streaming

along the busy street, toting their

shopping bags, pocket books and

purses. It’s just like hillbilly hand

ﬁshin’, Kristy thought, wade in and

snatch a catch, run like hell and

you’re survivin’.

THE MACHINE

At the factory, Ramon and me would

slit boxes, all night, on treacherous

machines. A run of long oblongs and

then a run of squares, and then the other

way around, then vice versa; to be loaded

on conveyors for the crews down the line

for printing and strapping, to pass on in

stacks to the fork lifts who hauled it all

to the trucks on the docks.

Feeding the slitters and clearing the jams

was the main challenge. The machine

settings were merely simple adjustments.

But ﬁngers could be lost in the operations –

not exactly the job of choice for an aspiring

artist and classical guitarist.

“What you humming, amigo?” I would ask

Ramon. “Is that a new composition, or is

your stomach growling?”

“My stomach was OK, my friend, until I

saw your new painting.”

Somehow we managed to get through each

shift without being mutilated, although many

times we were both high on the stimulants

we took to keep us awake, after classes all

day. “Maybe you paint better with no

ﬁngers,

my friend? Maybe you don’t paint no worse?”

“Your music sounds like machine noise, amigo.

Can’t tell the difference.”

Ramon got killed in Vietnam. I got drafted

as well; but I was spared the danger of that big

slitter the

politicians keep

running to maim

and murder each

generation, which

they operate so

well.

CHILD’S PLAY

Everyday, as kids, we watched the trucks haul cattle & pigs

to the slaughter houses.

The trucks were rolling wooden cages.

The cows and pigs looked pathetic.

You could hear them moan and screech all the way down

the block.

Our fathers worked in the yards as butchers or sausage makers.

Even as Mallet Men, the guys that crushed skulls with spiked

sledge hammers for a living.

Our fathers drank a lot after work. Who could blame them?

One day we would work there, too, we knew. We’d get drunk,

too. Maybe, all that death got me thinking about the meaning of

life? Life looked pretty scary, pretty grisly.

I thought a lot about art too.

Maybe, the act of creation was a counter to all the destruction?

I was dazzled by the stained glass windows in our neighborhood

Cathedral. I tried to imitate them with cheap watercolor pictures.

I liked to listen to the biblical stories as well. Noah’s Ark,

David and Goliath, Moses, Jesus.

I was equally dazzled by the comic strips. I used to create my

own – stories, captions, pictures, heroes and villains, often

while my grammar school classes were going on, which got me

in a lot of trouble with the nuns.

I always knew what I was going to do with my life, paint and

write. I lived in many ghettos and slums, waiting for my art to

catch on, stories too.

I went cold and hungry many a

day. Nothing new, comes with the

territory. Being an artist never was

for sissies.

PERDITION

Labyrinths of lost lanes, twisting, turning, every which way, all lined with massive trees so old and bowed that their branches seem to touch, as I tunnel through the darkness. And then a dark rush of nothingness, as the highway leaps up: its white line unraveling beneath the heavy Southern mist like a silk snake from the sleeve of an illusionist

The illusion doesn’t stop, even after the blazing sun comes up, and in between forests as dense as any that I patrolled in the service, twisting through crags and cliffs and hills and bends, the ramshackle houses, crumbling brick boxes, shacks, shanties, all smothered in dense foliage, ﬁll the windshield again, along my vigil without end.

The Hollows, as they call them, which I learned asking for directions, has nothing to recommend them if anyone is looking for American Dream residences. Forget about white picket fences, good schools, community centers, manicured lawns, swimming pools, golf courses, luxury condos, McMansions.

And it probably would be good to remember, for all those who do, somehow, happen there, not to wander too far from where you parked your car. There are no street signs anywhere, no addresses either – you’ll never ﬁnd your vehicle again, even if by some miracle it isn’t stolen. The houses are claptrap at best, unpainted shacks ﬁlled with few trees to shade the rickety maze. The sidewalks don’t end because they never began – just worn paths through tuft grass next to cinder roads on which shattered liquor bottles and syringe needles sparkle like gems in the blazing sun; just to let everyone know someone had, however ﬂeetingly, if only in their minds, escaped this Dante’s Inferno.

What gets me in the gut is the weedy yard around the burned down house where, it appears, by the broken toys scattered there, children play on packed clay, amidst a ﬂeet of, not broke down but stolen, cars stripped for parts and rusting with the smoky rains. Or maybe it gets me in the heart?

No kids today. No one anywhere. Too hot. The streets are empty; except for an old man standing on a corner and eyeing me warily.

“Can you help me?” I ask him.

“No suh, sure can’t.” The wrinkled old man answers, eyes askance. “Can’t hep you no way.” He starts to move away.

“I’m looking for a friend.” I stop him. The old man must think I’m the law or something. “His name is Junior Dell. We were in the service together. I stopped hearing from him. We were real close friends. I drove down from up North to see if I could ﬁnd him.”

“He gone.” The old man ﬁnally looked at me.

“Gone?”

“Yeah, Junior gone.”

The old man stood silent and grave.

“Gone? Here at home?” I stammered.“After he made it through Afghanistan?”

The old man looked embarrassed.

“Junior gone.” He said solemnly as he walked away.

I looked around. Maybe we should start at home from now on with world changing and nation building. Junior Dell was ﬁnally out of hell..

THIS NUMBER IS NO LONGER IN SERVICE

Like cruciﬁxion crosses dangling weary ghosts,

the telephone poles along the lost roads of America

ﬂash past me, eerily, as I rocket down them.

Our American Dream was a scream.

There are ﬁlms, books, photographs to conﬁrm this.

Picture ensembles, too, capturing party time in

the red, white and blue – those glory days in the USA

when to be born here, beneath the banner of the stars

and stripes, was to have a charmed life. A birth to

celebrate.

Now everything is falling apart,

here, there, everywhere.

The ice caps are melting, the farmlands

are dying, the oceans are rising.

The world is rapidly crumbling due to global warming.

There’s no hope for surviving.

I roll down the window, as the

desolate whirl of wind rushes in.

Together we howl a duet of regret,

just for the hell of it.

THE PAWNSHOP

“Twins ride a see-saw, as storm clouds gather over them. Each catches a glimpse, in turn, above the other, of a star on the horizon. The grim one ponders hers and ﬁnds profound insights through it. The happy one peeks at her own, bewildered and bemused, until it ﬁnally shines on her too. It is the star of life, for one magic, for the other a wonder of science and physics. Each, identical in every way except for the way their brains were arranged, balances and enables the other in their teeter- totter journey to nowhere. As they ride up and down under the clouding night sky, the grim one sees that soon her star will vanish in the storm. Her sibling will see that too but only when hers is covered and is gone. The lonely cry of a train’s whistle wails by like a one note lullaby.”

Heather paused in her reading to push away another avalanche of chestnut hair that had tumbled across her glistening face, veiling her vision, pufﬁng out strands with each word, as she gripped the wobbly podium, which Michael must have borrowed from some rescue gospel mission, and to swallow an ice cold mouthful of bottled water, which went down the pipe, just right, as her grandfather used say of his whiskey, which she wished she were drinking instead. In the back of the room, resplendent in diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and every other pricey doodad she could attach to her voluptuous, platinum haired, tanning salon, presence, her rival gazed at her haughtily, yawning periodically as she fanned herself with the night’s program. Now and then, the Gold Coast socialite would turn to smile ﬂirtatiously at Michael who stood by the door looking, as usual, like the count of some mysterious somewhere or other, dressed like a pasha in a ﬂamboyant silk woven evening jacket,

camel hair slacks and cashmere turtleneck, set off by a hypnotist sized diamond ring and solid gold watch, all unclaimed remains from the clandestine hoardings of his father’s hock shop (the watch probably left by Midas) to greet any latecomers held up by the snow storm. Heather suspected that Pasha and Prima Divorcia (she must be hitting ﬁfty by the record of her mega buck marriage hops, although she looked no older than Heather due to the miracle of cosmetic surgery) had slept together last night, one swept away by the moment (everyone had been a little drunk) the other using her well worn witch broom to ﬂy another conquest to her magic midnight bedroom. It was apparent by the smug look (or was that the only expression that’s left after your umpteenth facelift?) she had directed at Heather when she made her grand entrance and handed Connie, Michael’s assistant, her sable for safe keeping.

“Years pass.” Heather continued. “Each sister is now far from her

home in Kansas.”

The gathering of Chicago aristocrats, seated in rows of folding chairs before her in the brightly-lit, steam-hissing cellar, looked like nothing so much as a comedy skit— some parody one might ﬁnd on Saturday Night Live Comedy Central. She couldn’t stop the imp that ﬂashed a smile across her lips. “Is there something wrong with this picture?” should be the caption under the photographs the Tribune was taking for its “Society” feature. She wondered if the spread would also include the front entrance? Michael had never removed the three balls that hung above his father’s pawn shop when he converted the space into an art place – “So the little shop of sorrows became a bargain basement of miracles.” He said, with a shrug, when she asked about the incongruity. “It’s still a place of lost souls and dreams and it’s still all about money, sadly. Like the pawn guy says on TV. ‘Everything here has a story and a price.’ Instead of my desk I probably should transact sales behind a cage wearing my father’s visor, sleeves rolled up. Besides it lends a touch of Duchamp to the ambience.”

All dressed to the nines in Dior and Armani, the tycoons and Grande Dames sat uncomfortably, sweated profusely, and listened politely to (of all things) poetry recited by a banshee haired, pixy faced PhD. She still looked, she knew, at twenty-eight, more like the freckle- faced daughter of the Keebler elf than Big Jim McMahon’s brat kid, runt of the litter that she was. “I wanted Heather to learn the construction business and someday take over,” her father had told the revelers at her doctoral graduation celebration. “She’s got more brains than her brothers. They’ll be the ﬁrst to admit it. But she kissed the blarney stone instead, disappointing her old dad. Well, the world got a great poet and a pretty one at that. What she creates with words will last longer than what I put together with brick and mortar.” Not yawning, yet, but fanning themselves with their programs, as much to stay awake as combat the heat, her audience sat wondering what they had gotten themselves into as they listened to her rant. Now and then, they would turn their bewildered attention to blink at the mural-sized paintings of barrio life that surrounded them. Depicting, in clashing colors and expressionistic ﬁgures, drug lords and drive- bys, hookers, beggars, gangsters, horror, squalor, and other urban nightmares, the pieces were created by the Hispanic inner-city high school student, whom Michael had awarded, out of his own impecunious pockets (which were about as deep as a conversation with the platinum haired “Black Widow” would be if she got stuck talking with her later at the festivities) a full scholarship for art to whatever Chicago academy was his wish. There were two more such prizes, totally exhausting, she learned, his entire savings, one for poetry, in which she was the judge, the other for science.

“Diego Rivera,” Michael had whispered to her that day they had strolled together through the settlement house exhibit where the young man’s works were on display, “with a touch of Hieronymus Bosch thrown in?”

“And maybe a few amphetamines?” She mused, looking around at the chaos of colors and ﬁgures, which could easily get the kid arrested for assault and battery to the senses.

“And maybe a few more again.” Michael laughed. “This is bravura work, an artist taking on his own inner demons while he battles social injustice in the process. I’ll check out the rest of the students on my short list but I’m sure I’m done.” Michael frowned. “I know art isn’t supposed to make statements anymore and each of this kid’s works is a Holocaust, with no let up. Not one like my father’s. You couldn’t even make art out of that! That story was best told by newspaper photographers, documentary ﬁlm makers or young girls who kept diaries while hiding in attics from Nazis. This is riveting stuff, packed with the pathos, and all the tragedy being human can be. I could see these gut level recreations of ghetto life coming but I didn’t suspect so many would be so good. I knew, of course, I would be taken by whatever came in. But then Jews don’t have to bend their brains much to ﬁnd beauty in such visual nightmares. They were born to a surrealist dream and they bear the legacy of their exotic genes, which lend themselves to Symbolist renderings. Besides, a bit mashuguna is what everyone I ever knew thought of me.”(Gee, I wonder why Michael?’ She refrained from commenting. Can it be because you do things like give away all your money?) ‘That’s what many of the real art experts think I am anyway. Art for me has to involve itself in humanity, express feelings, emotions, not word games or mind games. They don’t agree. But what do I know? I’m just a small time art dealer, the son of a Holocaust survivor turned pawn broker. I guess empathy is my eccentricity. Much of what they show looks like fun house stuff to me and maybe belongs more to an amusement park than a museum or art gallery. Contemplation doesn’t follow the confrontation no matter how jolting that may be. Maybe they’re mashuguna? In any event, now that the mayor and the leading citizens have generously agreed to take over the scholarship competition, I guess because it drew some local

and national attention, and make it an annual event, actually adding a few more categories to the grants, they can pick their own judges and do what they want. Traditional cityscapes, avant-garde experiments, whatever turns them on. It will be their call from now on. I just wanted to get this project off the ground. I’m not even sure why. After ten years of dealing art, a situation that came about by accident, I found that I had half a million dollars in the bank and, since my needs are small, nothing I could think of to spend it on. I suppose I could have expanded my business. Instead I did this. I’m not sure I know what art is anyway. Who does these days? A curator at the museum told me they call au courant endeavors ‘spaghetti.’ They throw it all at the wall and see what sticks. All I know is that what I like effects me deeply. But maybe it’s just a pawn in a game? And a big money one. In which case the three balls above my door are appropriate. I may know writing. I’m the classic caricatured Jewish bookworm. That art form only works if it says something. Your book, ‘Leprechauns in the Attic,’ is a joy. That’s why I came to you. Your words, the people that inhabit the poetry of your Gallic-magical-realism world, with all its myths and folk lore, paradox, irony, joy, tragedy, mystery … the migration of the Irish Catholics from the potato famine to the present … the lace curtain years to the nouveau riche … the ironies and satires of the American dream … are roses in a garden one doesn’t weed, because the wild growth is as much of a wonderment as the tended part is. This kid’s urban jungle has such ﬂowers in it and those moments of magical truth.”

“Gee thanks, Michael.” Heather remembered thinking as she looked around at the blazing walls which threatened to explode. “An unweeded garden.” Maybe she should use that quote for the back of her next book? Maybe she should use it for the title? My Unweeded Garden by Heather McMahon But there a wild beauty in the Hispanic youth’s works. They were violent but poignant, ﬁlled with heart stabbing portraits of impoverished families in the backgrounds, trying to live their dreams, and sad-eyed children lost in a bedlam. The poems were the same, touching

and disturbing. If the aristocrats thought they were being tortured now, Heather mused as she watched them glance around furtively, wait until her winner, a seventeen year old African American girl seated in the ﬁrst row with her invalid mother next to the mayor, dressed almost as a counterpoint to her gritty text in austere Sunday-go-to-meeting attire, a frail, timid creature, read her works.

“All bitter pills to swallow I’ll bet.” Michael had sympathized with her as she waded through the “short list” the panel had sent her – which wasn’t exactly short: ﬁfty poets with ﬁve works each. It wasn’t that the works were difﬁcult. They weren’t loaded with metaphors, symbolism or references that one had to ponder or decipher. They hit you like a sock in the jaw. They made you shiver and, if not cry, sometimes brought a tear to your eye.

I walk among the lost,

where chasms have no bridges,

over bottomless abysses.

I live alongside the longing.

I live amidst the yearning,

side by side with the struggling,

in the ghettos and the grottos

of misery and suffering.

I am that haunt you sense in the

mirror. I am you in despair.

Hustle or muscle – that’s the

only way for the boys to get

by in the ghetto: deal, steal,

pimp, kill – each day the same

ole crime of being alive.

Bars without spaces to look

through surround you. That’s

because no one outside wants

to see your misery, hear your

cries … that deaf ear, blind

eye, as you slowly die.

Not exactly “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” but effective nevertheless. They were sleeping together by then. It hadn’t taken long. Life comes at you quick. Ironic, since she had wanted no part of this obscure “art dealer’s” scholarship competition to begin with. Although the honorarium was generous. It seemed like a gimmick, some promotional stunt some “shylock” on the make cooked up. She turned Michael’s letter of request down with the warmest wishes for the competition’s success, begging off due to prior commitments. Her excuse was valid. She was already swamped with similar requests, as well as those for readings, lectures, panel discussions, from colleges and universities throughout the country. Since the university had published her book, which had received much praise and numerous awards, she was in big demand. Maybe big amends was a better angle, her slender volume receiving a kind of compensatory recognition for past women writers the ﬁeld had neglected? Whatever, the dean, whom had gotten wind of the request for Michael’s contest, ultimately talked her into it. There was a lot of “buzz around town” about the competition. He informed her. The president’s speech on his “agenda for academic excellence” had inspired the art dealer according to the papers. Obama had mentioned and thanked the generous small business benefactor from his home town Chi-town, the city of big shoulders and hearts and urged others, if they could, to follow this good citizen’s example. Involving herself in something that was garnering a fair amount of attention would be good for her book. The dean pointed out, as well as the university. The winners were going to appear on various television programs. “Maybe the judges too?” He mused. Hinting at a prospect no writer could refuse.

“One twin lives in New York and is a scientist.”

Michael was gone. Connie stood in his place by the door next to the security guard. He said he would slip out for a drink when the proceedings got going, brace himself for the ensuing commotion. “You know how I hate schmoozing.” He winced. “A couple of stiff ones in some quiet place will get me through it.”

“The other resides in LA and is an artist.”

Heather couldn’t possibly guess what would show up at her ofﬁce, when she ﬁnally caved into the dean. She still thought there was something ﬁshy about the whole thing. No one shelled money out of their own pocket unless they expected a payback. She felt like she was being played

– these students, too. To start something that would get the attention of the president and local as well as national newscasts was pretty shrewd. Maybe some bonvivant wearing an ascot and a beret? Some ﬂim-ﬂam man with a con artist grin? Some Hollywood wannabe wearing shades, a toupee, and calling her and everyone else babe? What walked in was a magician, tall, dark, handsome. But, despite the high-style clothes and mesmerist’s ring, he didn’t seem like a guy who had something up his sleeve. Later, after she got to know him better (and Michael explained that he wore his glad rags and assorted accoutrements because he accidently discovered – Michael seemed to discover everything accidently – trying on garments and sundry ornaments from the pawnshop’s storage bin for fun, that the outlandish concoctions impressed his clients and helped sell paintings) that ﬁrst impression of a mystical esthetic, slowly became somewhat altered. The dark devouring eyes, starving for truth, beauty, the meaning of life, not acquisitions, the biblical aquiline nose, sensuous lips, formed a semblance belonging more to someone lost and searching than a practitioner of the black arts and hocus pocus. At forty Michael’s face retained some kind of the wayward poster child persona of a wandering soul looking in a window, maybe, shadowy, haunting, searching for a doorway to get out of the cold. Which was understandable given his neglected childhood, which sounded like a tale Charles Dickens might

have written. It would have made her want to adopt him even if she hadn’t already taken him for her lover. It was the main reason she hadn’t strangled him yet or turned him over to her construction worker brothers who would have given him a friendly warning of what would come if he ever gave their sister the runaround. Beware Black Widow, she mused, the ﬁghting Irish was in her too.

“Where on earth did you get this bed Michael, a ﬁre sale at the Cook County jail? You know with half a million dollars you could have gotten a pretty good mattress. At least one without lumps. I guess you never thought of that?”

“Not really. I suppose I’m used to it.”

“And your lovers?”

“They don’t seem to notice. Too preoccupied with other things. If you know what I mean?”

“Sure, get right on to the pleasure principle and avoid the pain. Well

we better get at it. I’m on top.”

He proved to be a magician in bed, both his lumpy one and hers, as well as numerous others over the years, she came to learn. He seemed to run into old ﬂames everywhere they went, bars, nightclubs, restaurants, amidst the glitter of their Gold Coast jaunts. “Michael! How good to see you! Robbing the cradle as usual? And you must be one of his new artists. Fresh out of school are you? You’ll enjoy Michael. He’s a maestro. Don’t enjoy him too much, it will be over before you know it.” So he was hocus pocus after all. Now you see him, now you don’t, according to the gossip that went around. A master of the vanishing act. Houdini with a hard-on? No his psychological problems, she came to observe, went deeper than that. He was an escape artist – from responsibility, commitment, from any domestic involvement, from realities of every kind, especially if they involved the ties that bind. Intimacy was not his forte. Empathy maybe, but not if it involved him other than existentially. He was afraid of it. She suspected that that was why he had suddenly gotten the urge to give away his money. It was a

grand gesture, of course. He kind-hearted, nice in every way. But the money was a trap. At forty he had to do something life changing with it – settle down, get married, raise a family. Become a real businessman. He had gotten into art as a lark. “I had this dead end, monotonous job as a supervisor in a medical records department, something my half brother – you met him, the surgeon – got for me. It was OK. At that age, I was an aspiring writer anyway. I still think I have one book in me. Then my father, unexpectedly, left me his little property when he died, which, since the neighborhood went so upscale, is worth a lot of money. A million dollars probably. All I had to do was maintain it and pay taxes. This being Chicago’s main art district, I went with the ﬂow and to my amazement became fairly successful.”

What was amazing to Heather wasn’t his success as an art dealer but his total lack of introspection as a voracious reader and aspiring writer. He needed a shrink for a girlfriend not a PhD of poetry. Anyone could see that the art he was attracted to was exactly what he lacked in his personality – feeling, or a running commitment to it. He was caring, affectionate, loving, with someone, for a small intense time, it seemed, then he drifted away, back to his lost soul state. A shadow on the loose with no one to claim it. Yet he was drawn by these compassionate renderings like a moth to a ﬂame. He was a connoisseur of such haunting sentiments captured with paint. The artists he represented were magniﬁcent. Their works were wonderments. They were moving, often disturbing. Each one captured profound truths in some way whether by fable, or the surreal, or the expressionistic, or representational, about being human. She loved hanging out there surrounded by them. The two of them together as if in some wondrous dream; which was why they usually ended up staying together there rather than her plush new condo with its view of the lake. Even the lumpy bed and his small, cozy living space in the back seemed an extension of the gallery’s nether world ambience. The walls were packed ﬂoor to ceiling with old, gilt framed black

and white photographs of the building, the pawnshop, life along the surrounding streets, taken, judging by the clothes and cars, mostly in the late forties and ﬁfties, and ﬁlled, she assumed, with family, friends, relations, many Orthodox Jews, the men bearded, the women wearing extravagant hats. Rag- or junk-ﬁlled wagons rolled through many of the antique street scenes drawn by horses wearing funny hats.

“Back in the day,” Michael mused as they lay together and gazed at the photographs, “my mother owned the whole building. That is with her ﬁrst husband. That’s their wedding portrait above the menorah. My mother, as you can see, was very beautiful. What you can’t see is that she was lame. She dragged her right foot after her until the end of her days. Their marriage was arranged. Marriage brokers weren’t uncommon in those days. The groom was the same age as her father. He has a kind face and it was a good match, since he was a landlord and the owner of a pawnshop. It was the best one she could get with her foot. They lived right here behind the shop. They both worked it. The rest of the brownstone comprised a small, seedy, backstreet hotel where street hookers would rent rooms by the hour to service their customers and down and out transients ﬂopped for a couple of bucks. The whole neighborhood was seedy back then, as you can tell from the pictures – the streets ﬁlled with gin mills, strip joints, greasy spoons, pawnshops. Now it’s gentriﬁed. You can ﬁnd some of that old Chicago ambience near the YMCA along Chicago Avenue or by its intersection with Clark. At night it’s still something of a no man’s land, at least for a couple of blocks. My father entered the picture later. He’s that brute over there with the bushy eyebrows and thick curly hair. He was the son of a butcher in a village in Czechoslovakia. Most of the village, all of his family, was exterminated in the camps. He survived because at fourteen he was as big as a man, with a thick neck and huge hands and of course the stamina of youth which enabled him to get through a year and a half of that hell on earth. They put him to work on a labor crew and used his muscles for the Fuhrer. By the time the camps were liberated, he was dead inside. Their marriage was arranged by a broker, as well. My mother was a new widow then with two children, my half brother and sister. She needed a man, and a big one at that, who could take care of business and with his ﬁsts if it came to that. The neighborhood was still bad. In some ways it was worse, or at least wilder. Glittering strips of gangster owned nightclubs were springing up everywhere, bringing swarms of revelers, along with pickpockets, muggers, drug dealers. Baby boomer teenagers, many from rough neighborhoods, roamed the streets in gangs. My father, a Mallet Man at the stockyards, that’s the guy who killed the cattle with a spiked sledge hammer as they were herded down the fenced off aisles, was out of work. The yards were rapidly closing down. Initially, he was brought to America by distant relatives. They tried to set him up as a kosher butcher. But that didn’t last long. He was a drunkard and a brawler. The camps, ﬁrst Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, had turned an amiable but somewhat slow-witted boy into a monster. If looks could kill? You can see murder in his eyes in his wedding photograph and all the rest. It’s the only look he ever gave me, or my mother or anyone. It was frightful being around him, especially when he was drunk, which was often. Who can blame him after living surrounded by barbed wire and witnessing beatings, hangings, mass shootings and the human smoke billowing from the crematoriums. I hold nothing against him. They made the contract. He learned the business, collected the rents, scared off thugs and robbers probably simply with his presence. He helped raise, in his own way, the two kids. I came along next, unexpected and uninvited. They were middle-aged by then. Bernie, the oldest, was Bar Mitzvah that year. Rhonda, as beautiful as my mother, was popular, a big hit at school with oodles of young boys chasing after her even then. She married well. They both did well. No scars inﬂicted that I can tell. My parents seemed to have had little to do with each other. He had his whores, loose women, kept to himself. They lived together like work mates, survivors of a hard fate.

Maybe drunk one night he forced her? Who can say? I never felt like a son to either of them. I was something unwanted. Maybe the product of a regretful rape?

My mother died of cancer when I was ten. My father converted all the ﬂats into Condominiums, including the one we all lived in and sold them to put Bernie and Rhonda through college. Bernie’s education, of course, went on and on and cost a small fortune. My father and I moved down here. I learned the business, worked my way through a useless BA at Circle campus, took the job my brother got for me. Sometime I’ll show you the root cellar. It’s a little storage space dug out under the basement. You get there through a trap door in the ﬂoor, covered over by that Persian rug. That was my room. The walls are cork-lined That’s where I get all my glad rags from.”

As well as his “sad rags” – Heather lamented, that inability to keep a deep relationship. He told her later that he was often locked down there by his father. Sometimes as a punishment or when his father wanted to party with his women or friends. He would come in late at night, glare at him and point at the trap door and then shove a heavy chest over it to make sure Michael wouldn’t go to the washroom and bother them. He peed in a can. Whatever else was his life she could only imagine. It was a lonely life, lived mostly through books, roaming the streets when he could. When he was older, he told her, he went to the museum a lot. What he liked about that experience, almost as much as the art, was being around the patrons, bright-looking and well-dressed. A relieving contrast to the sad souls who came into the pawnshop to hock their poor treasures. Heather ﬂashed on the poem that made her pick her winner.

Dead of winter, shadowing down

streets as black as any nightmare,

although it wasn’t even time for supper.

“I got dizzy, Sweetie.” “I knows Mama.”

She came home from school and found

her mother on the ﬂoor. Her baby

brother and sister stood there by her,

scared. They had gotten home ﬁrst,

tried to lift her. Impossible when the

dead weight of the curse was on her.

They couldn’t ﬁnd her pills. They

brought her blankets and pillows.

“Where’s your purse Mama?”

“I ain’t got no money, Honey.”

Her mother looked ashen, like the

embers of coal burned.

“I needs to get your medicine.”

“I ain’t got no more. I was going

to the drugstore.”

Her purse was on the ﬂoor, right

next to her, covered by the blanket.

There were no more pills in the vile

she kept tucked away at its bottom.

“I get you a reﬁll.” She pocketed the

container. “You two sup on that lunch

meat wrapped up in the fridge.” She told

her siblings. “Get Mama some tea. I

bring you back some candy.”

By now every predator was out there,

prowling through the icy dark: rapists,

muggers, gangbangers, killers. She

pulled on her winter coat, cap, mittens.

The contest was an ordeal. Michael’s stories were an ordeal. They made her reﬂect on her own youthful years. One summer in her teen-hood made her shudder. How arrogant they were, all of them, she and her friends, so full of themselves in their privileged lives and pretenses. Her parents were afﬂuent. She grew up in a big house on the North Shore. Nothing was denied her, or her siblings or any of their friends. There was travel, country clubs in which to swim and play the summers away, private schools, mentors, tutors, Barnard eventually, shopping sprees with her friends in the plush suburban malls or along Chicago’s beyond upscale “Magniﬁcent Mile,” concerts, museums. When she was sixteen she and a few of her schoolmates formed a fun trio and billed themselves “The Ghetto Girls.” They dressed funky, sang rap songs which she cooked up lampooning the North Shore, the Gold Coast and making parallels to their “sisters” in the slums. They sang at weddings, parties, dances, the country club once, anywhere they could stand in front of a band. They were so cute, clever. They were a big hit that summer. They didn’t mean anything bad by it. What were they thinking? How embarrassing to have as a memory now. What was that Categorical Imperative by Kant? “…whatever we do or say or think should be a moral imperative for all humanity … our slightest whim or action … a transcendental law for all time …”

“Still identical in body and soul,” Heather gave her winner a smile, signaling that she was ﬁnishing so take a deep breath because you are up next, “although what each does is often mistaken for an opposite pursuit,” she wanted to tie in the art and science aspect of the scholarships, “the twins still balance and in turn lift one another to get a glimpse of that star.”

Of course it behooved her to thank everyone, after the applause ﬁnished, for attending the ﬁrst of an ongoing commitment to Chicago’s inner city high school students – their graciousness and generosity; while at the same time reﬂecting that they wouldn’t have to drag themselves out in the snow, sit sweating in an overheated cellar and shell out dough, if they simply paid their employees, in all those enterprises and factories they owned, a better wage so they could take care of themselves; or maybe just pay their fair share of the taxes so the government could handle it.

All around Michael in the night, like icicles dangling from the winter sky, towers rose, sleek with glass and reﬂections of the nebulous. Strolling below, amidst the parks, gardens, walks, fountains, the quaint Victorian mansions and smug old brownstones – most of which had been converted into pricey eateries, watering holes and Gold Coast condos – began to assume an illusion of fairyland as a heavenly lake effect snow descended on Chicago and ﬂakes as big as dove feathers transformed the spires and gables into enchanted castles.

Michael glanced at his Midas watch and slipped into the posh, park nightclub. Within, tourists, travelers, amiable neighborhood residents were sipping cocktails and watching the magic show from the ornate French windows as they listened to the piano echo the dream outside with its mellow notes.

“Now you know what it means to be alone.”

The North Shore Chanteuse who was wailing her tales of sorrow like some god forsaken angel as he found a small table in a corner, ordered a drink, and waited for the jeweler who would meet him

“A broken heart

A dream that fell apart”

The track lights above the golden-voiced beauty glimmered like moon glow. Seated atop a black piano, her intonations, breathless, tragic, her sultry ﬁgure smothered under cascades of silvery hair that fell like rain showers across her shoulders, as she whispered her dark melodies of love and rapture, while women wept and men sat mesmerized and

Michael wondered again, as he wondered when he was dating her, how such a cold, stone-hearted, bitch could capture and deliver such soul shattering loveliness? Go ﬁgure artists!

A homeless family, bundled in rags and carrying bags, shufﬂed through the park searching for somewhere to settle for the night, a small stone bridge over a stream, maybe, which they could use as a shelter, or if they really got lucky, a park maintenance shack for which they could easily jimmy the lock. They trudged through the drifts into the darkness and disappeared into the falling snow and frozen unknown.

Meshuguna. Michael brooded. Reality was crazy, always had been, always would be. “The poor are always with us.” Some luminary noted. So are the oppressed. So are luminaries come to think of it. He was broke, wiped out, kaput. He lifted his drink in a silent salute to his father, to all the persecuted Jews over all the ages and to all others who had been enslaved, cleansed, exterminated, tortured, abused, wherever they were, had been, would be, forever and amen. It was for them he had given up his money, all the oppressed of humanity. At least that was his notion. He had looked into a madman’s eyes since childhood – his father’s eyes, pondered that grim expression, those numbers scrawled on his arm. He felt ashamed of himself. Why? He couldn’t say. The survivor syndrome? Because he became wealthy easily? What did the world look like to the lumbering village boy after the hell he lived in those camps? He always wondered. Each face a phantom version of a human face? Each ﬁgure ghostly? Every street a shaft of smoke and mirrors? Every moment inimical? He had to make that grand gesture. He had to make it also for the poor souls who came to the pawnshop everyday to pawn what they held dearly. Thank god no one was after the Jews anymore, he reﬂected, except investment bankers and luxury car dealers. They were safe here and most everywhere. Those persecution days were ﬁnally over. They were safe in Israel, too, on the whole. Despite their relentless enemies on all sides. They took care of each other. On his fortieth birthday he decided to give away

his money, sell the gallery and move there. For forty years he had lived like a ghost in a dream, not a real person, certainly not his own. He wasn’t even sure what that could be. He had no friends as a kid. He had to hurry home and help his father, who became more wasted every year, take care of the shop. He had no family to speak of – his half brother and sister were all but out of the house when he was born and soon they were gone. College, marriage, their busy lives went on separate from his own. When they did get together, on holidays or other occasions, he never felt comfortable. He didn’t ﬁt in. Religion had ended when his mother died. His father hated God. He wouldn’t set foot in a synagogue. Who could blame him? How else would one feel about the grand master of it all after what he’d been through, what he’d seen? Michael was an atheist. The mysteries of existence belonged to and were solved by science. The revelations they came up with were far more amazing than the visions of old time mystics. We are all orphans, lost or abandoned in a land at once dangerous and enchanted. All we have is one another to rely on. We are our own angels and demons. Prayer is a shelter made of wind, salvation earth bound, sermons words and images that are heart found not handed down. Not that he wasn’t moved by cantors’ voices, the ceremonies and services, the poetry in the prayers, the candles, rituals, the rabbis thoughtful proverbs. He was, of course, moved by all passionate expressions of the inner world and its longings. What he yearned for was that Sabbath sense of sacredness and spirituality, everyday in a secular way and that feeling of mutual identity in a community. He was a genetic Jew. No one would take him for anything else. It was written all over his face, embedded in his being. He thought if he moved to Israel he might ﬁnd a home, inner peace. America was a giddy Disneyland with showbiz on the one end and make believe on the other, glued together by greed – most of his brethren no exception. He needed something real after his life in a shadow world, some shared community that was meaningful. Even the art world, which he had enjoyed being part of for many years, was going sour on him. The current big guns were shrouded in the mystique of investment manipulations. There literary world. No one read outside the academies. Everyone was glued to the boob tube or arcade-style computer games. There was little left, especially in politics, that wasn’t bogus. When he was young America was number one in everything – science, culture, education. Now they were at, or heading toward, the bottom. The students ranked lower than any westernized country on test scores, while they were ﬁring teachers and cutting down on grants and programs! The outlook for the future was pretty gloomy. He wasn’t lonely. Maybe existentially. It had been a long time ago that he roamed the streets of Chicago with his hands in his pockets, head down, wishing he had a friend. There had been too many women to ﬁll his time since then. But with them there was always something missing. Maybe something in him? If so, that was at an end.

“Sorry I’m late.” Zubrowsky, the jeweler, suddenly appeared at the table looking like a Jewish polar bear. He was covered, head to foot, with snow. His glasses were fogged. His red nose dripped. He stomped his boots on the carpet, slapped his fur hat against his leg. “I couldn’t get a cab. Buses passed me like sardine cans with engines. I had to walk the whole way. They announced on the radio a blizzard for Chicago. People are ﬂeeing the city. I don’t know how I’ll get home if it doesn’t calm down. I almost couldn’t ﬁnd this place. I walked in circles. The world got erased.”

“Good god Zub.” Michael stood and helped him out of his coat. It was really coming down now, just in the last few minutes. He hadn’t noticed. In the windows was a white out. Swirling ﬂakes ﬁlled the air. “Have a drink, warm up. You should have called me. We could have put it off.”

“Put it off? Rush you said! A rush job! Life and death!”

“Well, maybe it wasn’t that dramatic.” Michael smiled. “Just seemed like tonight would be the perfect time. But have a seat. Relax. Let’s see it!”

Zubrowsky sat and took a velvet box out of his suit jacket, Groucho

Marxed his bushy eyebrows and laid it on the table.

“Well open it. Don’t just stare at it. It’s a big step, I know, but they

won’t bite you.”

The diamond rings were dazzling. They made Michael’s hands tremble as he studied them under the light of the table candle. Legend had it that the stones belonged to a giant ring, owned by a very prominent woman who had to give them up during the Great Depression, which Michael had Zubrowky reset into an engagement ring and wedding band. He had been astonished to have found them still in his father’s hoardings. Maybe he was saving them for his old age? Maybe with his heavy drinking, black outs, and foggy thinking, he had simply forgotten about them. They were worth a small fortune.

“God they’re beautiful!” Michael marveled.

“So tonight it is you pop the question?” Zubrowsky sipped his drink, pleased at the reaction to his handiwork. “There’s two ways to do it. There’s the Gentile way and the Jewish way. The Gentile gets down on one knee, takes the woman’s hand and asks her for it. If she accepts he slips on her ﬁnger the ring with a kiss. If she says no he bows politely and goes. The Jewish way is exactly the same only the ring is shown before he asks anything. More impact, get it? Hedging your bet. I’m just kidding, Michael! I’m making a joke! But in your case maybe you should think about it. It would put a little omph into the proposition. Why take chances? Ice like that you might convince her. I’m just kidding again! Well Mazel Tov.” He drained his drink. “I’m off. Keep in touch. I’ll mail you the bill. No charge for the delivery. A little extra maybe for the doctor when he treats me for frostbite and pneumonia. Send me an invite! Goodnight!.”

It a big step. Michael’s heart pounded as he turned the sparkling box this way and that, watching its multicolored diamonds catch ﬁre under the ﬂickering ﬂame in all their facets. He kept picturing Heather wearing them and how they would sparkle on her hand in classrooms,

at lectures, out to dinner, the theater, whatever. Of course she was always smiling in his imagination but actually Michael was afraid she wouldn’t even like them. They were sort of over the top – more than a bit ostentatious. She didn’t wear much jewelry, make up or showy clothes either. Her tastes were simpler, what you would call prim and proper. She got that from her mother and grandmother and beyond that probably from ancestral Irish how to act-like-a-lady instructions. Prim and proper, that was Heather, except, of course, for her hair which, no matter what she did with it, made her look like she had just stuck her ﬁnger into an electric socket.

“Shocking, say it, shocking!” she’d scream getting dressed for a night out and glaring at her reﬂection in the mirror while she dragged a brush through its tangles, the bristles of which Michael wasn’t sure he’d use on a horse’s mane.

“Your hair is becoming.”

“Becoming? Oh really? For what, a clown’s fright wig, or the lead singer in an Irish rebel band? My hair is exploding!”

“Your hair is very sexy.”

“Then why don’t you ever run your ﬁngers through it?” “Don’t I?”

He supposed he could try. He was afraid they might get stuck and it would be awkward trying to pull them out.

“I’m sure I do all the time. You don’t notice. How could I resist?” “That’s it!” Heather slammed her brush on the dresser. “I’ve had

it! I’m shaving my head and buying a wig! Don’t your Orthodox kinswomen all wear them to cover their heads? Bet that would turn you on! You’d be a Chagall ﬁgure ﬂying upside down!”

“You turn me on. Your hair turns me on. Everything about you sends me swooning. Look I’ll run my ﬁngers through it.”

“Back off! Don’t touch it! I’ve just spent the last hour trying to comb

it!”

He’d bet her family would like the rings. They would be impressed. They weren’t very impressed by him – a middle-aged Jewish art dealer who lived in a cellar. He was probably even more unsuitable as a suitor than the other unsuitable suitors: tweedy English professors, dialectic materialists, organic language deconstructionists, Heather had brought home over the years.

“Look Michael,” Heather had briefed him before she sprang him on them, “my father and brothers are basically beer swilling, sports minded, dwarf-tossers. Never mind the country clubs they belong to and the ﬂashy cars they drive. Do you play golf? It doesn’t matter. We’ll talk about the scholarship you’re sponsoring. After all, that’s how we got together. My mother will ﬁnd it romantic, and noble. My father is an ardent Democrat. You know he and Richie are buddies, as was my grandfather and Richard the elder. They’ve worked on big contracts for the city, and will do more. They’re friends now with Emanuel. We’ll steer the conversation toward politics – the Tea Party, Birthers, Republicans in general, Sarah, Fox news. He won’t even notice you’re not Irish. There’s nothing to be anxious about. Just don’t tell them you gave away your last penny. Or any money.”

So courting was ever easy? Her parents were nice. Her father was a stand up guy. So were her brothers. There would be no problem there. They all knew he loved Heather and that she loved him. They were made for each other. She had moxie. He had chutzpah, sort of. They were both mashuguna. “Why don’t you call your next book ‘Leprechauns In The Bed?’ Michael kidded. “Meaning?” “Meaning Ms. Prim and Proper acts pixilated when she gets under the covers. “Complaining?” “Hardly – exclaiming!” They read together, discussed books, liked the same movies, music, enjoyed the company of each other like some old married couple instead of one that had just gotten together. It had been like that from the ﬁrst instant, as if their relationship was a reincarnation, each moment a reenactment of sometime ancient, their togetherness something intense. “Michael, we scare me.” Heather would shudder after some heated love

making. “I know what you mean.” Heart pounding, Michael stared at the spinning ceiling. “True love’s a many scary thing.”

Israel was over. He could have a life here with Heather. He couldn’t imagine any other. That crazy gesture of giving away his money had brought him everything he had missed in his life and longed for. It was all like some biblical proverb. Just last night he had gotten an offer from Muriel Strand to be the new director for Strand Foundation’s charitable division. “Our current head is a crook,” she told him, “skimming money and cooking the books. I need someone honest.” The salary for that position, he imagined, must be staggering and made his head spin. She wanted to celebrate the occasion with a night of fun and games. Bouncing around in bed with the platinum-haired socialite bombshell was quite a temptation but Michael had resisted. He conﬁded to her that he was proposing to Heather. She laughed and said: “Michael being honest to the core can be a bore. We only demand ﬁdelity from our directors in money matters. But that’s a good sign. I’ll really know my money is in good hands when you sign all those dotted lines. A woman scorned is hell to deal with but you took that risk. I’m doubly impressed.”

He snapped the box shut and looked at his watch. He had better get back. Zub was right. Chicago was getting hit by a blizzard. He’d never get a cab. It was a good eight blocks to the gallery. By the time he got there he’d look like a snowman or a dybuk come back from the dead.

“Snow White in a glass casket was what I had been aiming at with my Surrealistic portrait of the Dead Zone’s crack racket, trying to symbolize the lost soul in the black hole of the ghetto, and the living- death-quest of hopelessness all around us. But the chaos of contours I created in the fairytale beauty’s features, after I started slashing paint on the canvas, and the undulating rhythms of brush strokes with which I concocted her cofﬁn, had her come out of my backstreet fable as an angel wearing a death mask of sable, asleep on a billiard table. So maybe ‘Dust’ was the thrust of my journey into oblivion in a game you can’t win, because a drug is a drug and there’s plenty of ‘Dust’ in the hood. Besides, while Picasso said that what one paints is what counts and not what one intended to accomplish, he also said that if you know exactly what you’re going to do there’s no point in going through it. Life lives as it does, I guess, and you go with the ﬂow. I’m no Picasso, let’s face it; but neither is anyone else working now. Kiefer, Richter, Viola, the late, great Munoz are my heroes, but still no Picassos. From the past Goya is the best.”

Heather wondered, anxiously, where Michael could be, as she stood amidst a handful of benefactors who had remained, despite the storm, to listen to José expound upon his paintings. He had sold three. Michael should have been there. Connie, of course, handled the sales expertly but she was getting nervous too. You could tell she was being overwhelmed. The guests had begun to slip out during her winner’s recital and were all but gone by the time the pale Russian came to his science demonstration. The cellar’s tiny windows looked like Whirlpool washing machines, the snow swirling, blowing, drifting in them.

“It was the dead of winter, like now, when I did this one.” José rambled on, the sales, like steroids, pumping through his veins. “I looked out at the falling snow from my ghetto studio at the ragged ﬁgures roaming the streets below, dragging themselves through the drifts – bag ladies, homeless families, dead-enders. There were more each day as the recession swept the country. Rolex watches, wedding rings, good luck charms were ﬁlling the pawnshop windows as the ghetto became a ‘Rainbow Coalition’ like Jessie Jackson always shoots for but not in that way. So I thought: ‘Hey, fairy tales can come true and it can happen to you.’ And I put down a little sketch of Hansel and Gretel and then I went loco.”

Heather looked at her watch. Maybe Michael left a trail of breadcrumbs? She couldn’t get him on his cell phone. Lucky for him, if she did she’d blow out his eardrum. “I loved your reading!” The face- lifted, bust-expanded, liposuctioned, dyed-haired, salon-tanned Grande

Dame squealed at her as she was leaving. “It was so compelling! Is that from your new book “Bats In My Belfry?” “No. And the book is entitled Leprechauns In The Attic.’” “How charming! I’ll have my maid pick it up! Tell Michael I’ll see him Monday. Tell him not to be tardy! I guess we can’t tell a book by its cover can we?” She studied Heather with a bemused scrutiny before she said goodnight to Connie.

What the hell did that mean?

The radiators were rattling, the steam hissing. The lights started blinking. But it wasn’t a power out, it was Connie trying to get everyone’s attention. The security guard stood next to her, arms folded, smiling.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the weather service just announced that we are in for the biggest blizzard since nineteen sixty-seven. Remember that one? We thank you for attending, but I think we all have just a small window of opportunity, at this point, to get safely to our destinations. We bid you goodnight and safe passage. Leon will help you to your cars. Your drivers are here. Careful with the steps, they’re treacherous!”

Where the hell was Michael? Heather looked at her watch again as the tycoons ﬁnished their drinks and exchanged goodbye handshakes and the snow swirled through the open door where the smiling guard stood waiting to escort the guests to their cars.

* * *

“How much?”

“Where did you get these?” “How much?”

“I gotta know. I got to know how to go.”

“I found them on a body in the alley. It’s out there in the snow. How much?”

“I don’t know.”

The watch was solid gold. The diamond eye-blinder was worth a small fortune. They had to change, be rearranged. The watch melted down maybe. They would lose their value. That was a shame.

“A lot. I’ll let you know. You got lucky. Cash too?”

“Some. Enough for a little fun.”

“Have fun. A week, maybe two. The payoff will be good for both

me and you.”

* * *

Heather woke up when she heard the door slam. She had fallen asleep on the coach with a drink in her hand. The last of many. “Michael?” Michael stood in the gallery, shivering. He looked like a snowman.

“I never thought I’d make it home.” He slapped his hat on his coat and tried to brush off the snow. “You should see it outside. My cell phone died. First it was a wonderland. Then it was no-mans-land. I thought I’d break my neck getting the cat. How’d things go?”

“Are you drunk? Do you know what I’ve been through? I spent the last hour calling hospital emergency rooms! Where in the hell were you?”

“In an alley mostly. I heard this cat yowling. You couldn’t see your own hand if you held it in front of your face. The snow is falling that hard. But the cat was someplace high up. I climbed on top of this dumpster. I could hear it somewhere above the rain gutter. There’s this old, boarded up building down the block. I think that’s where I was. I couldn’t reach over it so I found this window covered with grating and managed to pull myself on the ledge. I still wasn’t high enough. There was a ﬁre escape ladder another window over so I edged my way on to that. I was soaked with sweat. I climbed the rungs but they led to a dead end. There was a chimney I had to get around. I knew the cat was on the other side of that, hunkered down out of the wind.”

“Michael where’s the cat?”

“In my pocket.” He reached down into his topcoat and pulled out a yellow and white striped kitten. “It was one, two, three after that, more or less.” He handed it over to Heather. “I edged along the gutter holding onto the chimney, precariously. I snatched it up and put it in my coat but we couldn’t get back to the ladder. The wind was blowing too hard. I couldn’t even see the ladder. Eventually I found the dumpster and swung down onto that.”

“We better feed it.” The cat purred in her arms as she scratched it. “There’s a bottle of milk left over from the event.”

“OK. Let me get out of these things. Will you marry me?”

“OK. But look Michael I had this dream. You’re not wearing that goofy watch anymore or that crazy hypnotist’s ring.”

“OK. I have something else for you. It’s in my pocket. I hope the cat

didn’t do anything on top of it.”

THE GIFT

So this guy, God, hands me a claim

ticket for a box with nothing in it.

“Enjoy.”

He yawned and life went on.

“What kind of gift is this?”

I asked my parents, as if they

might know or even think about it.

“It’s a whatchamacallit.”

My father said staring at the TV.

“Go ask the Rabbi.”

My mother frowned and glared at

me. “What am I supposed to do with

this empty box?” I asked the Rabbi.

“Put something in it?”

He shrugged and scratched his head.

Profound, I thought. I hustled and

bustled and tried to ﬁll it up.

By the time I got old the box was

as empty as when I began, the way

the stuff of life came and went.

I used it for my cofﬁn.

THIS IS NOT A POEM

Cold coffee, stale

pastry, cheap

whiskey, as the

winter sky slides by

the window of my

cheap room. This is

not

a poem. It is a postcard from

oblivion. Wish you were here,

whomever you are. Wish I wasn’t.

This morning I found a

message in a bottle ﬂoating

in my toilet bowl. It said:

“Lost dreams, failed

schemes, unrequited loves,

please ﬂush after using.”

The winds howl, the

shadows prowl, the walls

shriek, the windows rattle,

the ﬂoorboards creak and

the sewers run to the sea –

wait for me.

THE NOT OK CORRAL

Drifting off, rain pounding the leaky roof

of the Crystal Palace, jukebox broke.

This sweltering night is all but over.

I’ll leave it in a stupor, stagger home

down busted backstreets, over broken glass,

cracked concrete, amidst the rotting remnants

of torched buildings some slumlord set

ablaze for insurance.

I try to remember better days. I look in the bar

mirror and shake my head. Those times when

going to work meant making a living not

just surviving.

This ain’t no palace in case you were

wondering. Never saw any crystal in here

either – no sparkling glassware or chandeliers.

This is just a Chi-town dive. It was named

by the crazy owner after some famous cowboy

bar in Wichita, Kansas. Wyatt Earp used to

drink there, I hear.

Most of us are just trying to make it through

the summer. Those of us who do will have to

face the winter. There ain’t no Miss

Kitty in here neither, nor anything like her.

What we got, instead, is why God

invented darkness.

They’ll never ﬁx that jukebox.

RYE WHISKEY AND ROSE

Up at dawn she curses the sun – blood oaths

that doom all of

creation to death and

damnation By noon

she’s settled down,

slurping cabbage soup

and munching garden

onions, taking a breather

in between the daily

rounds of scrubbing

down her dwelling from

top to bottom to rid the

rooms of the demons

that shadow in when

the sun goes down. We

all know what she tries

to scrub away, death

and destruction – the

same indelible evils that

befall everyone

everyday.

“Out damned spot.” As

someone once said. But

the spot won’t go away

no matter how

vigorously she applies

her embattled energy. It
is here to stay. The

evening is merry with

TV and rye whiskey.

At night Rose sings her

secret song, A melody

from the old country,

eyes tearing, voice

trembling in memory of

her belated husband.

“Lost in the moon’s glow,”

she croons with her bottle,

“we chased the dream

shadows, down the lanes of

love’s wonder through the

heart’s mysteries.

Holding each other, we waltzed round a

rainbow,

dancing on stardust to our own melody.”

The heart is a lonely

hunter. Lonely are the

cards dealt in solitaire. A

game no one can win no

matter how practiced one

becomes.

“Goodbye my darling it

was lovely to know you.”

Rose warbles. “Farewell

my angel may God grace

you with peace. We’ll be

together before its all over.

We’ll dance again in the

heavens. We’ll laugh and

we’ll sing.”

And so to sleep in her rumpled bed to embrace her

dead lover in her longing arms forever. A bottle of rye

whiskey and Rose snuggled under the covers

together.

FINDING THE WAY

Lost in the limbo

of life’s torturous

labyrinths Manny

lights the last puff

of smoke off the

stub he found

under his mission

bunk. It hangs like

a holy ghost in

midair and then

disappears.

“Any job,” Manny

pleads, “any woman,

any tip, skinny, lucky

penny.”

He is talking to the

bearded guy in the sky,

whom he never saw

before he was born and

probably won’t see

after he dies, shivering

atop his Salvation

Army cot, clutching the

threadbare blanket and

staring at the ceiling,

which is as cracked as

he is, hungry, cold,

alone except for

the winos in the

surrounding bunks

snoring happily in their

dead drunks.

“Truth to power is

what we got here.”

Manny ventures.

“Why is this my lot?

What did I do? Who

did I screw? Life’s

winners are always

the most corrupt.

Any smidgeon, Manny

wheedles, “any tidbit,

snip it, crumb of the

action would

be most welcome. I’m

not asking this time! I’m

telling you! My life is

unfair! I never got my

share!”

The next day Manny ﬁnds a wallet on the

sidewalk. He buys a bottle of wine and a

lottery ticket. After he collects the

hundred million dollar jackpot, he gets hit

by a bus. Nice funeral

HELP NEEDED

I order a drink at Finks,

poke

through the
Our Times

classiﬁeds.

Help

Wanted is

the agenda

but I warm

up by

perusing the

ads for cars

I can’t

afford and

apartments

I could

never rent

unless

money

came to me

heaven sent.

I muse

through

descriptions

of women

who

wouldn’t

want me

and women

I wouldn’t

want – who

probably

wouldn’t

want me

just as

much.

There are

sundry adds

for items I

have no use

for and others

that I do but

know that

it’s no use to

want them

because I can’t

even pay the

rent.

WANTED: Security

Guards, must be ﬁt and

armed. Interesting. But

you need to supply your

own transportation and

weapon. I just saw one.

I ﬂip back, a sawed off

shotgun. I can swing

that. The car

too. Fit I can’t do.

WANTED: Bartenders for new, exciting

Gold Coast

nightclub. Must pass polygraph test.

Interesting: They actually expect to ﬁnd a

barkeep

who never poured a little more.

WANTED: Clowns who

are not scary but look

merry. Interesting. But,

let’s face it, no matter

how I’d paint my mug

I’d still look like a

character from the Night

of the Living Dead.

I quit my job to move on,

but as far as I’ve

gotten is a regular

stool at Finks tavern.

No luck today. But

tomorrow is another

one. Get up at dawn,

hit the

pavements. Not getting anywhere this way. Time for

a last round and maybe a beer to chase it down. And

then maybe another for good luck. I could use it.

And cold one to back it up. That should do it. Wow,

the game just came on. The cable guy just de-cabled

my system. Can’t miss this one. But after that I’m

gone.

THE SLOB

A big, burly, bushy-eyed brute

with the battered features of a punch

drunk pugilist gazes pop-eyed at me

quizzically.

His cheap

suit is in

disarray,

his chintzy

street

vendor’s

tie

hangs loose

from the dirty

collar of his r

umpled shirt.

He looks like he had just come

from a night of drinking and arm wrestling

in some dead end dive down a

seedy backstreet where big

busted whores sat clapping and

yowling at his each sweaty

victory.

His thick black hair is slicked

back with grease. He hasn’t

shaved in a couple of days.

He looks like a criminal in

a “wanted” poster or

maybe some degenerate

in a porno ﬁlm seated on

a bed about to take off

his clothes, and you know

he’ll never manage it

because he looks like he’s

about to pass out

at any second.

“The hell with undressing.”

I tell my

reﬂection in the

mirror, lay back

on the mattress

and watch

the ceiling spin until everything goes black

and the world disappears.

GO ASK ALICE

Drugs, sex, into the vortex.

Carrie was learning fast that urban life could be a surrealistic blast.

It wasn’t Kansas anymore, that was for sure.

What it was these days was never clear.

It was a dream, a scream, a screaming dream, sometimes a nightmare.

Sometimes she wasn’t there.

Sometimes she wasn’t anywhere – there was another girl staring back

at her in the mirror.

Drugs, sex, into the vortex through a guy called Tex.

He pulled up at the corner in his sports car, smiled, tipped his cowboy

hat, and that was

that.

Kansas became Chicago. Chicago became the “Twilight Zone,” the

“Outer Limits,”

“Through the Wormhole.”

Before Tex showed up life was a bore, a slow motion yawner, in a little

white-picket-fence

town where watching the grass grow and paint dry was about all anyone

did to add a little

excitement to their lives

Bright lights, big city, parties, orgies, after time Carrie was pretty.

But

sometimes she

feared that, one day, the strange girl in the mirror would make her

disappear.

THE KINGDOM

Key in the wrong door, maybe it will open

to something better?

I hear two doors close behind the locked

one The sound is ﬁnal, my visit done.

I grew up near a race track, horses, dogs.

All the races were ﬁxed.

There was a sign staked near the

entrance someone hammered into the

ground. “Jesus Finds The Lost.”

Lost bets I wondered?

No, the lost ﬁnd Jesus, I concluded.

Not as good as scoring money but

they have to win something.

I’ll end this poem with a conversation

with a homeless person.

“Are you lost?” I ask him.

“I’m homeless. Can you spare some

change?”

“Maybe. I’m writing a poem. So far

it has no meaning. I was hoping you could

give it some.”

“You want meaning from a bum?”

“I’ll take it from anyone.”

“You need the right key to open the right

door. If you never ﬁnd that key you’ll

be locked out forever.”

I gave him some change anyway.

ROTTEN EGGS

Like a “crack” brat crying

for another lethal nipple full

from mother’s toxic tit,

I cut the deck.

The dealer laughs.

The house wins all the hands,

at least by the margins.

You bet you can forget any

bet.

All bets are off the second you place them.

Fate will erase them.

The ones you don’t place are the only ones

you’ll win, because you don’t lose any

money on them:

lesson one in gambling 101.

Lesson two is that if you think you can

beat the odds you are a fool.

The cards are not dealt, to us,

as we sit at the table like so many

Hansels and Gretels.

They are discarded, as the dealer ﬂips them at us,

like the dead leaves of Autumn scattered in the

gutters.

Gambling is a cross between mental illness

and a memorial service.

Like a gambler’s lucky streak,

some gamblers vanish without a trace.

Some gamblers are born without a face.

The day that you get hooked is the day

you leave the human race.

Some eggs are

scrambled, others

fried. Some crack

open rotten.

You eat them anyway with toast on the side.

I WAKE UP SCREAMING

Madmen crawl under the covers,

with me and run amok through my

dreams. Not the one’s you see sitting

in doorways with a bottle of cheap

wine and glassy eyes, muttering; but

the other kind who wear pinstriped

suits, designer hairdos and pinky rings

and shout sermons with glee on late

night TV.

“I bring you love!”

“I bring you joy!”

“I bring you peace, happiness,

prosperity! Give your soul to me!”

We chase through the midnight streets.

The madmen stepping on the lamp-lit

shadows I toss off as I ﬂee. All the

doors are locked, all the alleys are blind,

all the windows barred. There’s no way

out of the maze and they are close behind.

“We bring you mercy!”

“We bring you meaning!”

“We bring you compassion, forgiveness,

understanding!”

They hoot, holler, scream until the sun

comes up and I wake up in a cold sweat.

Got to ﬁgure out how to block out my

neighbor’s blasting TV before I nod off!

Maybe sleep in earmuffs? The old deaf

Bible-thumper in

the room next

door, and his

Evangelical

stations, is going

to drive me into a

mental institution

THOSE WERE THE DAZE

Coming apart at the seams through amphetamines –

due to my heavy use of them I was painting like a

madman, drawing and coloring at the same time

directly onto the canvas like Van Gogh or any asylum

inmate doing art therapy for some shrink in bedlam,

no studies, doodles, sketches.

My schoolmates were teaching me how to paint with

oil. It was surprisingly easy and I picked it up fast. I

couldn’t imagine how Picasso had such a hard time with

color, ﬁrst going through a Blue Period, and then a Rose

Period and through Cubism, poking his way along, before

he really got it together and became a color master.

Maybe he needed an injection of uppers? I had been painting

all night. My head was in a fog. My body felt numb. Fog

ﬁlled the window and I had the illusion I was sitting in some

gypsy woman’s crystal ball. Suddenly my life seemed unreal.

The image I was concocting on the canvas seemed a dream.

That’s when I knew I was getting somewhere. I deﬁnitely

had something going on – drug hallucinations.

THE SAD SHEPHERD

Not my day.

All my words rang

hollow. All my

gestures felt

unnatural.

There was nothing

inspiring in my

delivery: no hope,

promise, to lead

anyone down the

road to

salvation, much less the promised

land.

Sweat broke out on my brow.

My hands trembled, and the

more I struggled, the more my

ﬂock turned away. Off stage, so

to speak, I raged.

I blamed everyone else for my poor

sermonizing and apparent lack of faith.

I know the gospel. I know the

path to take. The pitch to make

to inspire, elate.

Of course, it was my fault my

congregates strayed! “Step right up

Ladies and Gentleman! You can’t win if

you don’t play!

For only a dollar, four meager quarters, small

change, you can spin the wheel and become

a player in the American Dream!”

It’s hard to be a carnival barker. That’s all I

have to say. Oh well, tomorrow is another

day.

COPS AND ROBBERS

Everyday outside Tony’s pizza shop

two fat cops sit idling in their squad

by the bus stop, waiting for me to run

out with their daily freebie, a jumbo pie

loaded with toppings and giant cokes

to wash it all down as they cruised

around. “Keep your nose clean pal.” Is

the

only tip they ever give me. In a while

they’ll stop at Dunkin’ for coffee and—

on Dunkin’.

After that it’s the sub shop for heroes,

or the Taco Shack where my friend

Juan will run out with greasy bags of

goodies for Chi-town’s ﬁnest, gratis.

Hey no skin off my nose. I just twirl

dough and toss it in the oven for a living.

Just mentally noting that “law and order”

seems to have taken on a whole new

meaning since the ﬂat feet used to walk

the beat in the old neighborhood when I

was a kid.

An apple a day maybe from some vendor.

They’d polish it shiny on their uniform

sleeve, bite into it and give you a wink

and a grin. You messed with those guys

and they’d do you in. But they’d give

you a break now and then.

Whenever I see the party lights

from this new breed of giganto

gourmets in my rear view mirror,

I’d know the party is over, for sure.

No breaks from these guys,

unless it’s your bones.

That’s what you deserve anyway

for the occasional time

you let their food get cold.

RACK ‘EM

Green felt tables with pockets to catch

comets. Magic sticks to perform tricks

with the laws of physics. Constellations

in a dark bar colliding from the impact

of a shooting star.

Shooting pool can get cosmic if you’ve

spent a lifetime at it.

Every night Maury out drinks alkies,

out smokes lungers as he waits for the

shooters to pack into Hustlers.

Guts sagging, hands trembling, sight

gone, life squandered, Maury takes his

obligatory practice shots, nerves a tangle of knots.

All under the scrutiny of the usual suspects

waiting to place bets. Suspected of what?

You name it. Watch how fast they leave

town when the law makes another

crackdown..

Maury has been beaten, stabbed, robbed

over the years at Hustlers. When

you go in there you take your life

in your hands. Not just from the men

but the women too who will not only

stab you in the back but give you a

dose of the clap.

Maybe he should quit? Maury often wonders,

hang up his stick, take a job from his

ward-heeler brother, be a political gofer

But why jump the gun? Hustling

pool can be fun. Maybe tonight

he’ll have a lucky run.

He is way over do for one.

THE PENWORN PAPERS

Bars and booze, sleeping in cheap rooms, with rats and roaches, or on park benches with other hobos. Cops hammering at his door, screaming whores hammering at his head, drunk tanks in strange cities, thugs and bed bugs, tattooed ladies. Cause and effect, unless anyone thought he chose this mess? Did he ask to be endowed with heightened sensibilities, superior mental and emotive facilities? Penworn asked his fate as he was dozing off.

Tucked, as a kid, Penworn recalled the comfort of his childhood bed, between electrical static and cool jazz in the attic he got hip quick. Hard drugs, beat poems, wild women, lack of monetary ambition, alcoholism followed, as well as a stint in the army during Vietnam to avoid incarceration in prison for drug possession, although the reduced charge for cooperation was from originally dealing. Looking back at a lifetime of degenerate living and artistic creation, Penworn came to this conclusion: in order to get by in life you don’t really have to know what you’re doing.

It was midnight. In the dark, in his makeshift bed, under its covers of old rags and newspapers, Penworn dreamed of tornadoes, cyclones, bombings, earthquakes, of ship wrecks on high seas, of monsters and shrill screams. He pondered the lightning ﬂashes under his eyelids, as the windows rattled and the walls shook and the ﬂoorboards beneath him quaked, sending his inebriated body vibrating across the room, while ceiling plaster fell on his face.

No, Penworn knew, it was not a hurricane, nor was it Armageddon, nor some pathological, recurring hallucination. It was the Midnight Special roaring past the rickety shack he temporarily inhabits, outside

the freight yards of Chicago, between no man’s land and take-a-hike drive, where no one except a poet could survive, having broken in on a whim and deciding to occupy for as long as he can.

Ghouls rode the ghost train. Penworn has seen them in his brain, laughing and jabbering in the dead of night, as the wheels clack, and the earth rocks and the whistle shrieks and he chases in circles through nightmares that won’t cease, looking for lost keys, puzzle pieces, unlisted numbers, blank directories, forgotten voices, faces, names, foggy memories, up and down, round and round, while goblins gambol, and witches scream and the daughters of darkness dance through his dreams. During the day it was OK. Penworn braced himself and drank cheap whisky from the change that he caged on the streets.

He better get out of his lodging at the train shack anyway. If he had another night of rattling across the ﬂoor as the ﬂying freight cars roared, his tired old body would fall apart.

Today’s forecast, Penworn studies the street. Lets start at zero, he broods, and see how things go: no room, food, love, money, luck. Got to improve on that. So, OK, I’m a sad bum, Penworn muses, probably got what was coming. But he’d still like to eat, sleep in a bed, take a shower after having had a lover. Nothing grand – in fact, he’d be happy if any part of that happened.

Everyday people started to stroll the avenues. It was a ﬁne day and Penworn knew that it was hard to ﬁnd a good Samaritan when it rains. Most everyone would knock you over running for cover. Penworn stood on the corner, hand extended – another poor guy down on his luck who wouldn’t harm a ﬂy. “Not I,” Penworn offers a sad smile to the throngs who stroll past. Once again he looks up at the sky. To each passerby it probably looked like he was praying. In a way he was. Stay sunny, Penworn is begging.

He’d slept on park benches, mission cots, in cardboard boxes in vacant lots, barrack bunks, army tents, in jungles swamps, transport trucks, conjugal beds, death beds, restraint beds in psycho lockups, box cars, brothels, artist’s lofts. He’d slept with inmates, cell mates, lovers, bugs, in Grand Hotels, cheap motels, wind rattled shacks. His dreams the kind you fought to wake from for that ﬁrst cigarette.

Penworn sat in the Laundromat, puffed on his cigarette and thought about this. The place was empty. So was the street, maybe the city? The world could be. It wouldn’t have surprised him. It was two A.M.. Penworn had ducked in to get out of the rain, ﬁguring when someone showed he’d blow. Where he didn’t know. The place should have closed hours ago, by the business times posted in the window. So, either the attendant forgot to douse the lights and lock the door or he was lying dead in some closet or down in the cellar. Maybe he was simply dead drunk somewhere? Either way Penworn had a “clean well lighted place” to sit out the night and stay out of the rain. Not exactly what Hemingway had in mind when he wrote his famous story – but he’d take what he could get.

MIRACLE MAN

“Doom walks on stage, looking for the Queen

of Darkness. He’s dressed in an undertaker’s

black suit and wears a vampire’s cape. The

Queen is resplendent in nothing; her stark

nudity adorned with tacky, costume jewelry.

Less is more; no better example for this

trendsetting lore. She’s hiding behind her

dominatrix-slave-handmaids. She doesn’t

want to bed down with Doom. He sleeps in

a grave and she’s afraid she’ll never be

exhumed. “Hey, let’s blow!” Doom spots

her and thunders. “This ain’t ‘Waiting For

Godot!” She stamps her foot and says:

“Oh damn!” But she goes to him and they

embrace and he enfolds her in his cape,

while the whip and handcuff, black leather

babes dance around them in a circle, while

the fat lady sings: “Amazing Grace.”

“There’s merit in it.” The off, off,

Broadway critic for The Voice says to his

colleague from The Times, who writes his

“Off But on IT” column for the stuffed

shirt, wannabe, section of the yuppie rag.

“Profound.” His colleague nods. “I haven’t

the faintest idea what any of it is about.”

They both decide to give it rave write-ups.

Way, way off Broadway in Wishbone,

Wyoming, the author, old, withered, gray,

sits dead drunk in “Voodoo Lady,” a strip

joint the “Citizen’s for Decency” have been

trying to close down since 1963. He’s a

regular there. It’s where he wrote his play

and all his unpublished novels that

followed, drunk as a skunk, and jotting

down erotic fantasies, about the strippers

that strutted across the promenade. Rumor

has it that he is dead: the script having been

dug up from dusty ﬁles in theatrical

archives. In fact it says so on the playbill:

‘The author of this

ground breaking play died poor and

unknown and is buried in an unmarked

grave.’

Not yet!”

Penworn pondered the poem he had just scribbled on a crumpled brown bag just to pass the time. Another masterpiece he concluded, satisﬁed. He signed it with his nom de plume Robert Penworn, rose, shufﬂed over to the bulletin board in the corner and added it to the mix of photographs of missing cats with the available thumbtacks.

“What the hell you doing in here?”

A gruff voice growled.

Penworn turned to see a hefty, balding man dressed in a custodial uniform lumbering toward him from the back, gripping a giant wrench.

“Laundry?”

“We’re closed pal!” The lummox said ﬂatly. “I know I locked that door!” He glared at it and then back to Penworn. “Now beat it!”

“I ain’t ﬁnished.” Penworn said, haughtily.

“I don’t see nothing spinning, old man.” The lummox sneered.

“Except your head is gonna be in about another second!”

“I ain’t started.” Penworn pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket

and waved it tauntingly.

“You gonna wash that hankie with the rain” The big guy smiled and lumbered toward him. “Along with the rest of your useless self. Now beat it before you eat it.” He waved the wrench.

“Ten bucks!” Penworn hollered as he darted around a clothes folding

table.

“What?”

“Ten bucks or I start up a machine!”

They went round and round the table, the custodian waving the

wrench.

“Ten bucks will get me a ﬂop!” Penworn sneered. “That door was open! I came in to wash my linen! I ain’t leavin’ until I get some compensation! And you can’t catch me! You’re hufﬁn’ and pufﬁn’ already!”

“You’re a dead man!” The custodian growled “Wait ‘till I get my hands on your scrawny neck!”

He chased the illusive Penworn this way and that, gasping and

sweating.

“Why don’t you call the cops?” Penworn sneered. “Tell them I broke in. They’ll have to ﬁll out a report. It will take hours. Then you’ll have to go to court. I’ll sue the city for false arrest and you for armed assault! Look it’s snowing!” Penworn stared at the white out.

Giant ﬂakes swirled in the windows. The cold rain had turned into a blizzard.

“Man I’ll never get home!” The custodian groaned. “Five!” He dug into his back pocket for his wallet.

“Fifteen!”

“Jesus! Here!” He slapped the ten on the table. “Now beat it and

don’t let me see you around here again!”

He wouldn’t see Penworn but he would know he was there. Penworn had a new place to post his literary works. He had been tacking his poems all over town for decades, buses, subways, public and corporate buildings. Every now and then the newspapers mentioned him “Penworn Strikes Again!” Or “New Penworn Papers Found!” He was the best known poet in Chi-town.

“OK.” Penworn studied the sawbuck. Why press his luck?

The black winds howled and the warped walls creaked. Under the bed rodents ate the rug. Snake-like hisses steamed from the radiator in the corner. Up and down the Hell Hotel, DT’S danced while wino’s screamed. “Is it for you that I am screaming Cara Mia,” Penworn wondered – mouth open, eyes shut, toes curled, ﬁsts clenched – “and your lips of ﬁre, mouth of ﬂame, warm heart, body heat, or do I need another drink?”

OUR TOWN

The streets, here, remember nothing

that matters. Night and day, the

pounding of machinery from the

smoke-stacked factories, punctuated

by the rumble of freight trains, is the

dream-stream that babbles through

your brain from waking to sleeping,

and in a mufﬂed way, dreaming to

waking. Funerals, weddings, the

patriotic holiday festivities, vary them,

now and then, with small gatherings

of working class men, women and their

children. But they quickly return to their

ghost-walked dead ends, amidst clouds

of smoke and bunkered-down residents.

These are mean streets, at best, lost in an

existential forgetfulness, much diminished

from the times that created them, when

hard labor brought enough pay to enrich

them – days when the incessant pounding

didn’t take its toll on your soul because at

the end of each your life had something to

show. These are streets which no longer

care to remember, but occasionally

reminisce about the good old days and

tales of lost bliss. Memories, here, are

like pennies now, all from heaven, of

course, because life is precious, yet at

the same time worthless. One each day,

perhaps for your thoughts, which you

lose as you

collect

them to the wishing

wells of

Time’s

misfortune,

dreaming

of other s

treets you

might have

walked, l

ong ago,

when

legend

proposed

they were

paved with

gold.

TROUBLE TOWN

Plant closed, her sister up and gone, nothing but trouble since she got off the Greyhound. Five days traveling and everything upside down. Room by the station, cockroach nation – still, more than she can afford since she was expecting free room and board. At least ‘til she got on her feet. Not that she could ever depend on her sister or anyone for that matter. She should have known better, stayed where she was even though her life was in tatters. Sheila drinks and wonders what else can go wrong.

“I’m living in a world of wonder,” the jukebox plays her favorite song. “happiness around each corner.” “Buy you a drink?”

She glances in the mirror at the greasy guy who sits down next to her.

“No thanks. I’m waiting for someone.” She forces a smile, tries not to look rattled by his zipper scar, demon tattooed arms, lightning sideburns. “Ain’t no Prince Charming gonna come, Hon, not to this dump, if that’s who you’re waiting on.”

His expression is blank, frank, grim. “Then I’ll learn to live without one.” She shrugs. “So long.” She toasts him.

“It’s been fun.”

“The fun ain’t begun.”

He studies her and sips his beer.

OK Trouble Town, Sheila sighs, bring it on. Your day was long but your night is young.

MOUNT MONEY

From the backstreet brothels in third

world countries, in those murky cellars

or ﬁlthy hovels, where the proﬁts from

child’s play aren’t made from selling

lemonade and the boxes of goodies

don’t refer to girl scout cookies …

From the underworlds and

netherworlds of warlords, drug

lords, tyrants, gangsters …

From the under-the-table entrepreneurs …

From the under-the-radar market

manipulators … money ﬂows into the

banks of Switzerland, where see, hear,

speak no evil is the mantra of a neutral

people.

It’s a beautiful country: snowcapped

mountains, pristine lakes, each city a

little diamond, perfect for vacationing.

We feel at home there, ﬁt right in,

because we’re neutral too, Americans,

once we get ours that is: jobs, healthcare,

a way and means to live. Those of us

who haven’t are not our concern. God

helps those who help themselves, is our

saying.

Even if he doesn’t it’s no skin off our

noses. They can always ﬁght our abundant

wars – the young ones anyway. That will

get them healthcare and pay, a roof over

their heads, even a pension if they live.

I guess we’re a lot like the Swiss.

Except, of

course, for

the social programs t

hey have

to take care

of their

citizens

from cradle

to grave,

which goes

against our

grain.

CLOCKERS

We rotate shifts every week

here, from ﬁrst to third in a

continuous progression, so no

one is ever quite sure what’s

going on with their bodily

functions. Morning, midnight,

the moon at noon? Your head

gets in a mess. Makes life even

more of a dream than it would o

rdinarily be as a cog in a

machine, repeating the same

function over and over again,

with no concept of time to

keep things in equilibrium.

It’s supposed to be good for

production. Bodies in motion

with no brain to distract them.

Morale too, because everyone

gets to grab their share of that

OT pay for time working those

shifts when the rest of the

world is at play or in bed or

having a beer and watching a

ballgame. Got to hand it to the

executives. Way to go,

geniuses! I’ll give them a

thumbs up next time I’m

working the nine to ﬁve and get

to see them. Hope I remember

to make the correct gesture.

Things get mixed up,

more now than ever.

SCARY MOVIE

In my cheap room, lit by a TV screen, after I climb ﬁve ﬂights, each night, up a stairway to nowhere, I sit and stare at Hollywood daydreams, which feature movie queens, heroes and villains, happy endings. Each one showing, that in the USA, the bad guys lose, truth wills out, the righteous win – which keeps us going. It’s how we survive these hard times, as we sip our beers and eat our popcorn in a world that’s broken. Even in this dead town where misery abounds, and jobs can’t be found, and what was up crashed down, like so many Humpty Dumpty’s who can’t be put back together again, not even by our constitution, nor our institutions, or our business leaders, rabbis, priests and preachers, nor our politicians who all have other eggs to break and fry, as they scramble those happy endings for their busy lives. Which have nothing to do with our sorry stories, because they don’t have to live them. They don’t even have to watch them. They can select another station. They inhabit another nation.

A SHOT IN THE DARK

An evening star above the Black Moon bar,

as another sun sets on my calendar of regrets

– something to wish upon before I drink

myself into oblivion. The darkened room

reeks of bad booze, sweat and cheap

perfume.

The jukebox is playing “Born To Lose,” while the

TV deadpans the evening news: more war, corruption,

poverty, shenanigans on Wall Street, sports, picked

ﬂicks and the weather in between.

“What can I get for you?”

The barkeep leans over and wipes the counter.

A job? A woman? Faith? Hope? A laugh or two?

Peace on earth?

“Whiskey. Any kind will do.”

SPECTRUM

Holed up, at my worst, waiting to see how bad things can be and how much more life has in store for me to endure. It’s a deﬁnite struggle, that’s for sure. At my age good days are rare, bad ones to spare. I started out poor, looks like I’ll go out the same. In between, I suppose, I lived the dream: wife, kids, job with good pay. Now it’s just me, or may as well be, hanging on by a hair with Medicare and Social Security Yesterday’s gone. So is a lifetime. Didn’t take long.

THE BEAST

I stare at it, dare it.

I have hands. I

lift them, strong,

deadly if they

have to be.

I ﬁst them.

Plus steel toed working

boots eager to see some

It snarls. I grin.

We begin.

Bites, scratches,

punches, kicks,

grunts, growls,

ripped ﬂesh and

then my alarm

clock goes off

and I wake up.

Another day

making minimum

pay. Another

losing battle for

survival amidst a

time of futility

and turmoil.

Another prayer

that the

recession will

end before it

does me in.

A CUP OF COFFE

Black winds chase across the manmade canyons as Carter leaves the bus station. Towering structures hover all around him, while snow comes billowing down the shafts of darkness.

On street level, designer dream worlds, in which stylishly dressed mannequins play act a high-style life of eye popping riches, appear in storefront windows everywhere, as shadow shapes bundle past them from every direction, paying them no attention, going every which way in a ﬂurry of commotion.

The big city, Carter shivers. He has to ﬁnd some work here. Nothing going on in his hometown since they closed the plant down and shipped the whole kit and caboodle to Mexico, leaving everyone jobless and hopeless. It was scary, this giant city, where everything was too big and everyone was in a hurry.

“You can’t let life bring you down!” The preacher had told the congregation. “You can’t let fear hold you down! You have to move on! The Hebrews were afraid to go on. They were afraid of the desert! They were afraid of the danger! They were afraid of the unfamiliar! But they couldn’t go back to Egypt and despair. Moses made them go on. Moses said: ‘Trust in God!’ So they followed him. And God parted the sea for them!”

There were beggars everywhere, families dressed in rags shufﬂing through the cold, their faces ﬁlled with fear. There were drunks, and what looked like dead bodies huddled up in doorways and shady looking characters watching him from alleys. Carter had to get inside somewhere, get out of the blizzard. He had to get his bearings, get his head together.

He slipped into a diner and sat at the counter. Everyone looked like sleepwalkers. The counter seemed crowded with ghosts and phantoms. “Coffee.” He told the waitress who looked at him askance, like the only reason he was there was to get in her hair.

“Trust in God and the sea will open!” The preacher said.

Well there was no going back to Egypt, Carter thought. That was for sure. There was nothing there anymore. That door was closed, the lock changed, the bridge to it burned. His town was good as gone.

God better part that sea soon for him. Carter knew, or he’d drown in this big city with the rest of its denizens.

BLOW THE MAN DOWN

One foot in the gutter, the other the grave,

the days pass in a haze. Each sentence a

word game scrambling for meaning in my brain.

Body the same, rubbery legs trying to navigate

a sidewalk which rocks like the deck of a

battleship. (Too late to avoid falling through

those cracks from which you never come back.)

While the blur of what was, is only recalled

in blinks between drinks.

The blur of what is stinks, but in many ways

it’s better than that time I could recognize the

pain in my own and other’s eyes: that world

weary expression, those looks of desperation

which became more hopeless each day of the

never ending recession.

It was the same look of despair I saw each

morning in the mirror before I found the magic

potion that made it all disappear.

Once I had an ofﬁce, a small business that

thrived. A welcome stillness amidst the madness

of existence, where I could gaze out the window

at the small park below, watch it rain, watch it

snow, watch the wind blow through the trees as

we lived above our means trying to grab our

share of the American Dream – a futile enterprise.

Even without an economic catastrophe, the

country can bring you to your knees.

Once I had a family, kids and a wife, friends

and colleagues.

Once I had a silver cigarette case. Once I was

part of the human race.

SWIFTLY PASS THE DAYS

The big fat yellow sun, dawn,

and pretty soon noon, then

the moon, life went on.

It was freezing outside, Tanner

knew, screw the phony

baloney glow in the walk-up

window.

This was Chicago. He’d be

lucky if the temperature climbed t

o zero and it didn’t snow. He

showered, shaved, dressed in

his

best, fully aware that in the ﬂimsy

topcoat he’d freeze his butt off.

“How Not To Live While You

Die.” Tanner pondered the

title of his forthcoming novel,

as he hopped the EL for his daily

journey through hell, applying

for jobs that, like the little man

upon the stair, weren’t there.

“The compelling story of a guy

trying to get by. It will make

you cry.”

The train sped through the frigid

streets, racing toward noon, racing

toward night, toward the morning

of the next day and another big

fat yellow

sun glaring

at him, like

a blind eye

in the

winter sky.

FOR EVERY SEASON

Summer heat, the town asleep,

I walk empty streets in the

hallowed light of a full moon

night. Above me, the stars sparkle

like gems in the heavens.

All around me a jubilee is celebrated

by the crickets as they perform their

nocturnal rhapsody – to accompany

the lullaby the hushed wind whispers

through the leaves of the trees which

canopy the winding lanes that

wander up and down the hills and

dales of our small town.

Come the dawn is there a reason to

go on? I wonder.

The days shall go on: full moon,

new moon, Autumn, Winter,

Spring, Summer again, world

without end. Round and round the

planet circles the sun, time passes

on, life moves along.

Tomorrow morning the Plant shuts

down. Our lives shut down and soon

comes a ghost town.

MOVE IT OR LOSE I T

Panting,

sweating,

cursing, praying,

bones breaking,

heart aching, I

push harder and

harder at the

mountain that

stands in my

way. “Give it up

you idiot!”

My friends laugh.

“Maybe you

should try to

climb over it?”

“Maybe you

should try to

tunnel through

it?” “Or go

around it!”

The top of the

mountain is

lost in the

clouds. The

cliffs, crags,

nooks,

crannies,

peaks, ledges, l

ook

treacherous. I

would need

an expert

climber to

help me. Even

then I might

not make it.

All I can

muster for

tunneling

tools is a

shovel and

pick. I

couldn’t make

a dent in it.

The journey

around the

mountain is

not measured

in miles but

lifetimes. One

is all

I’ve

got.

I’d

hate

give

it up.

“Stop

you

clown!”

friends

are

laughing

so hard

they’re

falling

down.

“Enough!”

“You’re killing us!”

But I can’t

stop.

There’s

nothing in

this valley

but misery

and

poverty.

The good

life is on

the other

side. Neat

trick to be

born there.

Few are.

Be great if

those that

were gave us a hand. Small change to

them:

lifts, tunnels, rapid transit. You can

forget

about that. But I’ll make it yet. Faith

moves mountains, doesn’t it?

My friends are splitting their sides. Tears

stream from their eyes.

A TAIL OF TWO KITTIES

“Out there, beware, lost souls

everywhere, misery, poverty, murder,

robbery.” The Fat Cat said to Stray who

happened to pass his way. “In here,

good cheer,” he gestured toward the

high, arched door he was about to enter,

“nothing to fear, nothing to long for,

comfort, camaraderie, peace and

prosperity. The way life should be.”

He tipped his top hat and wished Stray a

good day, not without irony.

A door man bowed to Fat Cat, ushered

him inside, and went back

to guarding the entrance again.

Gender? No. Race? No. Nationality?

No. Country? No. Neighborhood?

Social status? Heritage? Family tree?

Parentage? Siblings, anybody good for

anything? No, no, and no again!

“Curiosity killed the cat. So what!”

Stray thought. He was half-dead

anyway. He sat “out there” in a seedy

bar and made a list of what he was

responsible for in his life and what he

missed when things were

handed out by God or Fate or the Force.

Whomever dealt the cards and

got him into his mess.

“Looks? No. IQ? No. Talents? Math,

science, art, music, athletics, no – like

everything else worth having, money and

inﬂuence especially, talent had to be

inherited, a gift from lucky gene

combinations. Education?

Sure, Harvard or Yale. Ha! Lucky he

didn’t end up in reform school. Not much

came with that birth certiﬁcate. Stray

brooded. And then you died at the end of

it! Stray felt gypped, cheated. He was a

patsy. Why was he handed the short end

of the stick in everything? Why was he

just another mangy alley cat, and an

unlucky black one at that, yowling in the

darkness? It wasn’t fair. He was just a

workus. When he could ﬁnd work.

While

these

whosit

s were

blessed

“The

fat cats

feed

off the

nation.

Stray

scribbl

ed on

his bar

napkin.

“The

strays

their

hope

for

salvati

on.

The hip on jubilation.” He continued.

“The cool on calculation.

It’s a dog’s life.” He ﬁnished.

Hey! He did have some talent! Stray reread the poem

he had just written. Not bad. He was a poet and didn’t know it. A

lot of good that would do him. Just another useless occupation. Thank

you Lord, Stray sighed, once again for nothing!

“JACK IN A BOX”

Fist hit days knocking them off their feet and no way out, not tomorrow, maybe never, rain pounding down sad enough to make one weep, all day, everyday.

“Punch out and pull your pay, everyone, we’re closing down.”

With the weighted steps of weariness, they walk the stormy streets, looking for anyone, anything hiring, bills to pay, mouths to feed, hearing the music of life’s mystery play in shadowed souls and haunted heartbeats as they search the city, restlessly.

STOCKS PLUMMET, BANKS FOLD, JOBS LOST, HOUSES FORECLOSE

Tattered newspapers ﬂutter down the walks, grabbing at their steps. When they ﬁnally get home, at the end of each payless day, their working class houses seem to huddle together like headstones in a graveyard. Every street sign seems to read Death’s Row instead of Pine, Maple, Elm and Oak. And there’s no going back to what was before because it isn’t there anymore.

Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the lord my soul to keep and if I die before I wake I pray the lord my soul to take …

Dreams ﬂoat without soul, each night a new death. Each day a postmortem on dreams abandoned. Eight months out of work and counting. All the days bleak, bitter with the early onslaught of winter. No heat up yet, holding off on that. Kids colic, wife stoic. Jack’s teeth start to chatter as he lies awake trying to imagine their fate. He gets up and throws another blanket on the bed, gets back under the covers with a shiver. Julie hasn’t slept yet either.

“Do you think we’re going to make it through this?” She asks. “Sure, we can raise some cash.” Jack says soothingly.

If they could sell all their trash – furniture, house, used car, knick knacks, clothes. Factor in his unemployment checks for as long as they last. Add whatever handyman gigs he can put into that. Government food stamps?

“I’m afraid.”

“No need to be. We’ll be OK. Take care of our needs – some kind of roof over our heads, heat, food for the kids.”

Jack stares at the darkened ceiling of the bedroom. Fire sale! Fire sale! Flames leap. The night stands ignite. The bed burns, dressers, tables, chairs, drapes, the whole sprawling ranch house swirling in ﬂames, boy scout, girl scout, little league pictures erased as plumes sweep each the room

“Try to get some sleep.”

Jack ponders the mob in the mirror. They look like a convention of those background characters in the funny papers, always outside the main action, doing pratfalls as they move things around trying to get the world’s work done. He used to be one when life was fun.

Finnian’s bar is packed to its corned beef and cabbage rafters (shamrock clocks, Leprechaun tap handles, emerald green walls stacked with paintings of smiling Colleens, potato farmers, trout stream ﬁshers, and other Celtic doo dads, drawings, carvings, thing-a-ma-gigs – not to mention the all Irish jukebox where every other play seems to be “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?’) packed, stacked, maxed with Granton’s ﬁnest ﬁxiteers: roofers, plumbers, mechanics, barbers, house painters, brick layers, H&R Block ﬁnancial advisers, trash collectors, dog trimmers, street cleaners, carpenters. Fifteen million out of work including him but the ﬁxiteers still reveling in the American Dream. Something always needed ﬁxing, except luxury foreign cars because no one could afford them anymore.

“Having any luck big guy?” Old McGinty the plumber asks Jack’s reﬂection as he slaps his broad back. He means ﬁnding work.

“Sure am Mac, but it’s all bad.”

“Fuck that shit!” Mac waves his Pabst. “Next one’s on me! Guy with your skills don’t got to worry ‘bout a thing!”

Except house payments, food and a congressional extension on his

unemployment compensation.

“Pickin’ the lotto?” Bob the barber looks over Jack’s shoulder as Jack scribbles numbers on a cocktail napkin trying to ﬁgure out how much he owes everyone.

“You got it Bob. That winning ticket will ﬁx it.”

“I always play important dates: weddings, birthdays, deaths,

anniversaries.”

“You ever win?”

“Not yet.” Bob looks kind of scary as he ponders this. Come to think of it, it’s the same puzzled expression you see on his face in the mirror when he’s standing over you holding a pair of scissors or a razor. “But it’s all in the planets, damit, ain’t it?”

There she goes again. Rosemary Clooney crooning about some “Londonderry bird” with a “cheery word” and “lads and lassies “sighin’ Torralay.”

How much could he take?

Skills. Jack glances at McGinty in the mirror. Skills weren’t paying

the bills.

Jack and Julie went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack broods as he scribbles out more numbers. The numbers are mind numbing. The sum total brain boggling. Their house was a white elephant. They had traded in their bungalow for a humungalow. Why not? He was making good money and the family was growing. The economy was growing. The country was ﬂourishing. Now they couldn’t sell it and they couldn’t pay for it. Its current market value was half of what he owed. Same with the car. The Benz was a behemoth guzzling him up. But again why not? He was, or had been at the time, a kind of big shot on the imported car lot and got a super discount on anything he bought. It came out no more than a Cadillac would have from a different dealer. After his promotion didn’t he deserve that? Mortgage, car payments, credit cards, health insurance, property tax, heat, food, new furniture – but why not new furniture? Julie was the best and she deserved the best, and those new bikes, but his kids were the best, his family deserved the best life, which he could well afford, at least before the bull market turned into a hibernating bear who ate goldilocks and was snoring in his lair. Who expected what happened? Did anyone mention the Great Recession? They had no savings! Married ﬁfteen years and he hadn’t put a dime away for a rainy day! How much could he have saved anyway? Life came at you fast, like a bomb blast. OK maybe America was having itself one big blast but did anyone say that blast wouldn’t last? Who said last call? Kudlow? Cramer? All he heard was rock on! Jack fell down and broke his crown and Julie came tumbling after. And Tim and Beth and little Jimmy.

He tried to ﬁgure out how much he had lost with the market crash on his 401K retirement investment. All he had left for his retirement was his burial plot. Maybe he could sell it back at a discount? The money would help. The whole country had fallen down and broken its crown. Everyone was tumbling. The ﬁxiteers would get theirs as the misery trickled down and spread around. The party was over. The American Dream was a nightmare. You didn’t even have to read the papers. The living obituary featured all your friends and neighbors. His brother was out of work too, laid off from the plant. His father had been forced to take early retirement. His sister’s ﬁancé, just out of college, couldn’t ﬁnd a job. They were postponing their marriage until the economy rebounded. “Now I pronounce thee – NEVER EVER.” Watch the news and feel the blues. No sign there that Jack’s ﬁxiteer profession was going to get better in anything like the near future. Fixing Lamborghinis, Maseratis, Porches, Rolls Royces, Bentleys, Benzes, Jags and Beemers for Luxury

Imports was like trying to survive off vanishing species. For the last two decades more and more of these exotic imports were ﬁlling the streets of Granton and all the neighboring towns as credit got looser, dividends higher and status symbols grander. You had to park something in front of your McMansion other than a crummy Caddy or Lincoln. Hell even the farmers were buying them and his ex boss, Mr. La Ponte, became a multi-millionaire selling these dream machines to the noveau riche in hamlets and townships for miles around. And then came the recession and repossession and La Ponte consolidated his business and left Granton. He was now operating exclusively in Cherry Hill, New Jersey where he had been well established (Granton was a satellite location) since the sixties.

Every mainstream place Jack applied, Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota, not to mention Nick’s Quick Mufﬂer said he was overqualiﬁed. They said that he would jump their ship as soon as he got a better offer so why should they bother? Well, yeah, maintaining super expensive imports paid almost as much as the average Granton GP took in each year and you didn’t have to buy malpractice insurance. Life had thrown a monkey wrench into his internal combustion engine. His life was a lemon. He was “too old” for dock work. Too big and scary to sell insurance. No one said that but that was his impression. That and that he wasn’t a people person, which you could translate “Not good at ass kissin’.”

“Life is simple.” John Jasper, the photographer, squeezed in next to him, elbows on the bar waiting for Finnian to reﬁll his glass of bourbon, and said as if he just read Jack’s mind. “Saw it on TV: The Discovery Channel. The Big Bang, the primordial soup, reproduction, evolution, monkeys and missing links, Homo sapiens, knowledge, conﬂicts, survival of the ﬁttest, plagues and famines, the Age of Reason, civilization, globalization, polarization, nuclear proliferation, global warming, Armageddon. Why? No reason. Even if you put God back into the equation. To top it off the global supply of oil is running out. Cheers.” Jasper downed his drink and disappeared.

Jesus Christ! Jack watched him melt back into the mob, camera strapped across the shoulder of his safari outﬁt. What a bummer! What were the gas guzzlers supposed to run on? Flubber? Didn’t anyone talk about sports anymore? John was getting weird. Maybe everyone was? Maybe the recession was driving everyone nuts? He studied his reﬂection in the mirror. The same boy scout face he had worn since he was eight – trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, the same clean-cut crew-cut haircut and incurious hazel gaze — stared back blankly at him at thirty-eight. No signs of impending insanity that he could see. But then his vision was starting to blur from all the beers. There was a screw loose rattling around somewhere. He could feel it clank and clatter. He was no boy scout anymore either. He was back to tuning up cars around the neighborhood for small change, something he did when he was a teenager; but now, unlike then, he was cheating all his customers – charging them for parts he never put in, nickel and diming everyone so he could join the ﬁxiteer crowd at Finnian’s. This lunatic asylum was a haven for him? And the amount he was drinking now! So far Julie hadn’t said anything but most nights lately he would actually come home stinking!

Jack the Beanstalk. Jack recalled his nickname as a kid. Jack the Giant killer. It had evolved into by the time he was a high school senior. He stood six feet six inches tall and it was all muscle back then. Jack the Nimble, Jack the Quick, Jumpin’ Jack – he was the star center on Granton High’s only, to date, championship basketball team. Jack Frost, no scoring on Big Jack, he’ll block your shots and freeze you out! Life had turned queer. His nickname now would be Jack the Ripper, he’ll rip you off for a drink of liquor! What was happening to him? How far down the ladder into hell could he descend?

“I work in an All Nite Laundromat.” Some guy Jack didn’t know, who looked like a troll, squeezed into the place Jasper had just vacated. “I take care of the machines, keep the place clean. Mostly loners come in with their bundles. Inside, they sit back and stare and watch the

machines cycle, dry. I see them, blobs and sacks for eyes imitating life with blank expressions and occasional automaton movements.

“When I started having dreams of ghosts staring at me from white Whirlpool cofﬁns, ghosts shivering, ghosts grinning through the window in the washer’s door, I knew, yes I knew it was time to put a new spin on my life.”

Who the fuckwasthat guy? Jack stared after the troll as he disappeared back in the crowd with his fresh drink. Marley’s ghost? Was this some kind of cosmic joke? Was he the bearer of some cryptic message? A new spin on life? Life was spinning him. Life was out of control. Life was no longer black and white, wrong or right. Life sure as hell was no rainbow with a pot of gold. Ghosts in white Whirlpool cofﬁns? Was that supposed to be him? Did this guy know his name? Mickey’s? Was this a prophecy? A premonition?

“Jack Black …. Black Jack … Mickey White … White Mickey … Jack sipped his beer and reminisced about the clusters of pretty teenie boppers that always surrounded him and Mickey – the jolly white giant and the sleek Afro-American – back in high school at dances, malt shops, parties, the giggles, laughter, as he dead panned his play on their names, while Mickey mugged along, in silence, with a befuddled expression on his sculpted ebony face, pointy ﬁngers poking in all directions … “white Black … black White … see girls … Jack would lift his hands and roll his eyes … we’s all messed up!

Him and Mickey, smooth and tricky. They scored as much in the back seat of his old Ford as they did on the basketball court. But they were heroes then, at least in the eyes of Granton. Mickey was his point man. He would dribble the ball down the court and set the plays, feed Jack perfectly timed shots to make, hooks, dunks, spinning layups. Whatever was appropriate. Their sync was telepathic, their precision in execution like the workings of a Swiss watch. He could read what moves to make by the look in Mickey’s eyes. They were like brothers all though high. It had been a long time. Jack couldn’t even remember the last time he had seen Mickey White. Rumor had it that he was doing great. He owned a bar in Black Town and a penny arcade. Not that Black Town wasn’t a part of Granton and of course nobody called it that. They called it South Town. Granton was one of those Midwestern towns with shady streets and manicured lawns surrounded by white picket fences, and divided into sections around the lush Town Square by the court house and main streets.. It began as a farming community but over the course of a century had attracted business and industry because of its location in downstate Illinois between the big cities of Saint Louis and Chicago and its population had substantially grown into a kind of mini city.

Mickey was the play maker. He could read the scrambling, shoving, jostling for position situation, time and feed it with the perfect play. He knew how to play life too. He didn’t fuck up like Jack had, getting crushed by hoop dreams, and jock imaginings of glory beyond his ability. Mickey ignored his offer of a big ten basketball scholarship. After Granton High, he went to work in his uncle’s bar, just a joint, as bartender and manager. Eventually he inherited the place and after a while he bought the mom and pop grocery next to it, which he turned into a pinball and computer arcade and that little daily trickle of money, mostly from teens, is where his fortune, such as it was, was made. It became a hangout “Mickey’s Arcade,” actually something of a rage, and he promoted it with old newspaper articles about the trophy winning team, pictures of himself dribbling down the court, Jack making dunks and blocking shots, team portraits. “Be A Champion” was lettered over the display in reference to playing the games, in which there were on going prizes and honors. Come to think of it that was the last time he saw Mickey, at the opening. Mickey was practical not delusional, street smart, life smart, not egomaniacal and suicidal like the jolly white giant who screwed himself up royal and had to struggle, back then, for his mental survival.

“Cabbage soup, cabbage salad, stuffed cabbage, boiled cabbage, sauerkraut …” Not this story again. Jack looked in the mirror. The

General had squeezed in next to him. “Everyone in the tenement ate cabbage everyday, everyone in the town. You had to eat something. You couldn’t breathe anyway. The factories smothered the town with toxic clouds. Smoke from their chimneys ﬁlled the streets and alleys. It could have been London. It could have been Heaven. Maybe angels ﬂew with the wind. Who knew? You couldn’t see anything. My father had a face which looked like a kicked in door. My mother had a face which looked like a cabbage cooker. It’s hard to describe hell well. I got drafted — three squares a day, meat, potatoes, pie à la mode. The air was ﬁlled with bullets, explosions. I re-uped anyway, over and over again. The food. Now I’m back to cabbage. The army pension don’t cut it. I can’t get a job. Least you only have to breathe your own cabbage in Granton. That’s something.”

“Hang in there General.”

The guy gets a pension and he’s still complaining? Jack watched the General retreat into the mob. Jack wished he had a pension.

The tall happy life of Jack Black almost ended after its ﬁrst act. The scholarship he got from Michigan State was contingent, of course, on his athletic performance. He was too short to be an NCAA center but they thought he would make a good forward – a white Dennis Rodman. With his build he could muscle in and grab rebounds; with his speed steal balls, with his agility be able to break away and score points with jump shots and layups. None of that happened. Everyone was a step faster and a shade quicker. They would slap the ball from his hands, block his shots, even the lanky guys managed to muscle in on him and steal the rebounds. He was dropped from the team after his ﬁrst season. Suddenly Jack was nothing. He could have gotten a free degree in some other respectable college or university. He had been recruited, along with Michigan State, by many. But he was afraid. Jack had completely lost his grip on things. What if he failed again? He’d be less than zero. He’d just be some giant clunk who wasn’t really a hero

at all but just bigger than the other seventeen year old boys in his own and the surrounding small towns. Maybe he really didn’t have any skills at all? That was something he didn’t want to face. His ego would have been totally erased.

After he ﬁnished his ﬁrst year, basically roaming the campus in total despair, Jack dropped college altogether and borrowed money from his father. He used the loan to enroll in an automotive technical training school in Detroit. He had been messing around with cars since he was a kid and was good at ﬁxing them. He needed to get back to something he was good at. It wasn’t basketball and it wasn’t scholastics. It’s not like he was going to graduate from anywhere at the top of his class.

These were two dark grueling years for him. He had to drive from Granton to Detroit three times a week, sleep in his car there and drive back to his parents house where he felt he was holed up like Kafka’s giant cockroach. He lived like a hermit. He avoided Granton like the Black Death. If he ever accidently ran into anyone and they asked him about Michigan he would lie and say he hurt his back but when it got better the basketball team wanted him back. In the future he would tell everyone the same story and add that his back never got better – fate, whatever.

To get the automotive engineering certiﬁcate Jack had to completely reassemble a disassembled car from scratch, start it up and drive it around the campus. He was the only guy in a class of ﬁfty whose junker performed perfectly! Jack was back! Jack could name his ticket. Maybe not in the NBA or anything that grand in prestige or pay but in something that would get him through life in a good way – or should have. Now even that was up for grabs.

“I met her in a blind alley bar.” A voice next to Jack whispered. “She had Queen of Darkness written all over her. Roadkill dripped from her lips. She drank from a bottle with a skull and crossbones on its label. ‘Are you the one,’ she batted her Black Hole eyes at me, ‘looking for some fun?’ I downed my beer and went home.”

Finnian just kept the beers coming, without asking. The money he laid out on the bar was disappearing. One more for the road and he was gone. The wackos kept coming too.

“You know that waitress Molly, Jack? In the dark in bed she said: ‘Damn the torpedoes full spread ahead!’” Finnian’s was a loony bin. He had never noticed it before. But then he had always just stopped for a couple after work. Jack in the box didn’t pop out much. He was a family man: church, picnics, little league, camping trips, visits with the uncles and aunts, grand mummies and granddaddies. It’s not like he drank and hung out with louts. At least not until his life fell apart.

Liquidate, evacuate, relocate. Jack brooded as he pondered more numbers. That was their fate. But to relocate he needed a stake. He couldn’t even pay off his debts. He had gotten a nibble from a Chicago Bentley dealer. Nothing that great. Nothing like Luxury Imports. But old La Ponte’s business had been a mechanic’s godsend. La Ponte had cornered the market. He carried everything, new, old, in between. He dealt in volume, kept them coming and going. Jack could ﬁx anything. Jack knew cars. Lately, he had made a hobby of studying the G.M. electric lemon the Chevrolet Volt, paid for by zillions in tax money with that government bailout. What absurdity! If only he could get his hands on that thing! So they were to leave their home in Granton, their friends and loved ones for a gritty city where the pay was shitty? A move like that would kill Julie. The kids, to say the least, would not be happy. They would probably get into gangs, drugs, become juvenile delinquents. Maybe he could commute? Three hour drive back and forth. Julie and the kids could stay with his parents, or hers. Be kind of crowded. Maybe they’d have to split that up? His brother was living at home again. God things were fucked up! It was getting to be a strain on everyone. “The great unraveling,” as someone said – that Jewish guy, who won the Nobel Prize – was actually happening to him!

“Moments lost, withheld, passed over,” Pete the pipe ﬁtter squeezed in next to him and waited for Finnian to reﬁll his draft beer, “moments at the bottom of a wishing well, from which we could have drank our ﬁll. But we never went there. Me and Sarah. Maybe we didn’t dare. Across the table, she gives me her icy stare. I give her my lethal glare. Must be love, we’re still together.”

Jesus! Jack watched Pete take his beer and retreat back into the mayhem. Was that going to happen to him? Was that what was coming? Julie had been giving him icy stares, lately. He had been giving her glares – not lethal, just drunken. Julie was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him – aside, maybe, from playing on the high school championship team. She was the one and only ray of light in those dark days of his despair. Tall, blonde, beautiful, just out of high school, she was waitressing at the diner he’d catch breakfast at now and then before the long dreary drive to Detroit. She was a few years behind him at Granton; but, of course, she knew him as the star of the championship basketball team. You’d think Brad Pitt had just walked in. The team had given her the greatest thrill of her teens. She gushed. She told Jack she cried when they lost in the regional ﬁnals. She felt so sorry for them. They had worked so hard, gone so far. She was saving for college, taking general classes at Granton Junior. Her dream was to be a veterinarian. She loved animals. She hated to see them suffer. They never knew why they were suffering. The reason was beyond them. She was afraid she wasn’t smart enough to get in. Even if she did, it was super expensive. Jack certainly had been a suffering animal. Maybe that was the initial attraction? He told her his sad story about his back injury and that he’d never play serious ball again. Her heart went out to him. He told her he was studying to be an automotive engineer. It wasn’t anything fancy like law or medicine but he liked cars and had a knack for ﬁxing them. He had magic hands. She thought it was heroic, the way he traveled so far “to the Motor City” and slept in his car so that he could study and learn. The way she said “Motor City” you’d think she was talking about Freud in Vienna or Einstein in Berlin. They dated. When he got his certiﬁcate they married. Julie became a homemaker. The baby making

was delayed. Julie had problems with her ovaries. But then she was a mother! The best ever! Julie was a saint – a wonderful wife and mom. He couldn’t live without her! She was trying her best to ﬁnd work too. Anything, even waitressing. But there was nothing. Anything available went to the family and friends of the posters of the wanted adds. If she got a job they weren’t sure anyway how that would work out, with three small kids. Jack glanced at his Rolex, remembered that he had hocked it, just as he had sold or pawned everything he could turn over to keep up with the bills, including the power lawn mower. The shamrock clock said ten o’clock. He had to move his big ass, get something accomplished. The Benz had to go. Mickey’s Arcade was still open. Right now Mickey would be sitting in the back room counting his money. He’d offer him the Behemoth. Mickey could afford it. It was a good deal. In fact it was a steal. Mickey was tricky; he would see that, once again, he had gotten lucky in a business buy. And he had, due to Jack’s misfortune. One hand washes the other. Hell Mickey would buy it just out of friendship.

“Rocking around, Jack, laughing out loud, about everything, and nothing,” Carl the carpenter wedged in next to him, “no clue to or inkling Jack, sad to say, of anything except the party going on, day and night, in the space between their ears, where the sun and moon and everything in between pass before their eyes without rhyme or reason, like some recurring dream. Your kids are young Jack. Kids are cute at that age. Mine are teens. Six years of the teen beat! Do I cry or scream?” “You just say something about my kids?” Jack tried to wrap his head around the barrage of words that Carl had just uttered. “You just say my

kids are fucked up?” Jack stood up.

“No Jack. I was making a joke about my own! Teens in a dream!” “Put him down Jack!”

“Where the hell do you get off talking that way about my family!” “Calm down Jack. Put Carl down. You’ve had too much to drink.

Jack, I’ll have to call the police!”

“Fuck you Finnian!” Jack dropped Carl. “Fuck this place! It’s a

loony bin!”

Jack shoved his way through the mob and staggered to the door.

South Town? He blinked and looked around – left, right, up, down?

The lights were off in Mickey’s Arcade. but peering through the bay window Jack could see the silhouette of a husky black youth sweeping the ﬂoor in a darkness illuminated by a few safety lights on the ceiling and a ﬂashlight which the kid moved across the checkered, tile ﬂoor with his foot, beaming his push broom’s path in secret across the room, as if he were the clean ﬂoor fairy or a dirt burglar.

Go ﬁgure. Jack watched the kid as he bent and swept the dirt into his dust pan, poked the ﬂashlight along with his toe and started another row. “Hey.” Jack rapped on the window; but the kid ignored him. “Hey kid!” He rapped again, harder. Without looking around the silhouette, lifted its hand and ﬂashed him its middle ﬁnger. Jack stormed to the arcade door and pounded it with his ﬁst. He rattled the handle, slapped the glass. The kid ﬁnally came over, studied the drunken, giant, white guy, and opened it a crack.

“We closed man.” He sneered. “We close at ten. Don’t rattle that door again.”

“I’m Jack Black.” Jack gave him a lethal stare. “I need to see Mickey.

Jack Black. We go way back.”

The kid slammed the door shut. Jack looked at it. He lurched over to the bay window, saw the kid shufﬂing toward the back where a crack of light appeared and the kid came shufﬂing back.

“He’s in the back Jack.” The kid glared at him as he let him in. “Don’t trample on my shit! Some jerk or another always wantin’ in,” he muttered to himself, “even the black out don’t keep them out! You stay exactly behind me bigfoot, hear? Don’t go slip sliding here, there and

everywhere. Give you the broom,” he muttered, “Black my ass, honky

goon.”

They tight roped down the middle of the narrow room which was lined on either side by pinball, (oddly making a comeback with the kids in Granton) shufﬂe board and computer games. Posters of sports ﬁgures packed the walls. “Be A Champion” was lettered here and there. Mickey’s ofﬁce was more like a ﬁve by ﬁve closet. He sat behind a small, gray metal desk – nothing more than two ﬁling cabinets with a sheet metal top. There was a box-safe next to it. He was counting money, stacks of singles, piles of change, nickels, dimes, quarters, and scribbling in a ledger.

“Have a seat Jack.” Mickey smiled but continued with his work. “I’ll be with you in a minute. How long has it been? Not since the opening. You surviving the recession?”

Mickey looked natty in his camel-hair blazer and burgundy turtleneck sweater. Dark brown slacks and wing tips completed the ensemble. A London Fog trench coat hung on a coat tree in the corner, beside which a Mr. Coffee set brewing on a stand. Jack lowered his giant blue-jeaned, Old Navy jacketed, drunken body on a folding chair, suddenly feeling a little grubby and disordered. Mickey looked youthful, successful, happy sitting in his closet ofﬁce counting his money. Mickey looked pretty. His sculpted ebony face had hardly aged – not like Jack’s had with its pouches, wrinkles and beginnings of a double chin. There was just a streak of gray on each temple of his crew-cut, jock haircut which he could easily have brushed away with Grecian Formula as Jack was starting to do when he went on job interviews. But why would Mickey bother? They gave him the dash of the debonair.

“Looks like you are.”

Jack watched with fascination as Mickey slid his pillars of change into little canvas bank bags marked with the appropriate denominations, his long manicured ﬁngers looking as nimble as ever, reminding Jack of how young Mickey could handle the ball, dribbling it under and through and around his legs and back again as he ran down the court. Mickey was tricky and apparently lucky. Jack saved change in a Maxwell House coffee can. His bank account, he joked, which he promptly cashed in when it got too full to cover with the plastic lid. Jack knew change. Take ten times that in everyday, minus the overhead, not much, taxes, upkeep, Mickey owned the building, and you were sitting pretty. He also owned the bar next door.

“Livin’ off the fat of the land.” Mickey laughed. “Just kidding. More like living off the lean years. Getting by on nickels and dimes. I put together a cheap place to have fun and then came the recession. You know I bought this place with the intention of expanding the bar. I wanted to turn it into Granton’s ﬁrst Black jazz and blues nightclub. Lot’s of Blacks now in Granton, and in the neighboring towns. I ﬁgured I’d clean up. I couldn’t get the backing from the banks or the approval of the city council. I think everyone ﬁgured it would turn into some kind of drug and hooker shoot ‘em up joint. Not that Granton doesn’t have its share of those tucked away, black, white, and every other color of the rainbow, or cesspool. Just not so close to downtown. I may give that another ﬂy someday. So I put together this kids arcade. Just for the hell of it really. My uncle had all this junk in the bar’s basement. Shufﬂe board, pinball machines, I dragged it out. Never thought the kids would go for it like they did. Hard times I chalk it up to, mostly. Many of these kids can’t afford the latest, coolest computer games. “Be A Champion,” clippings of you and me and the winning team. No ﬂack on that! It’s a good thing too. Kids need somewhere to get together. Keeps them off the streets. Keeps me off the streets! But how are you doing?” Mickey ﬁnished his accounting and with a big grin stretched over the desk and grabbed Jack’s hand. “Been forever, man! What can I do for you!”

Trade places? Cut me in? Nice little set up Mickey had. Nice of his uncle to get him started. Instead of sleeping in a car in Detroit and sweating out mechanical jigsaw puzzles it must have been nice to have had life settled.

“I was hoping I could do something for you.” Jack got the ball in his court. Sometimes turning back the clock can cause a shock. “Make you an offer you can’t refuse. I have a business deal. If you agree you’d be helping me, as well as yourself. I’m in a game I can’t win, Mic, and the clock is running out on me. I lost my job. I’m about to lose my house, car. I’m totally wiped out. All that separates me and my family from being out on the streets is unemployment checks. You know that ain’t much and they’re running out fast. But I have a few shots I can score some points on. Everyone wins with this one.”

“Gosh, I’m sorry to hear that Jack.” Mickey shook his head. “I heard you were a Top Chef mechanic. Never would have ﬁgured anything could go wrong with that.”

“Supply and demand, my friend. Those gourmet feasts everyone was gorging on gave them indigestion. They couldn’t afford them. I partook of one: top of the line Mercedes Benz, black, fully equipped, every bell and whistle packed into it. I bought it off the lot, brand new, two years ago. I got it for a song – twenty percent off. With that kind of discount and with my trade in, plus making double payments, it’s half paid off. But I can’t keep it up! I can’t even afford the insurance! I’ve missed two payments and it won’t be long before they repossess it! I need to sell it quick and pick up some cash, just ﬁve grand more than I owe on it would give me a stake. I got a job offer in Chicago. Half of what I’m used to but after being out of work for six months anything will do. We’re selling the house too. They’re going to foreclose on that also. It’s the same situation. We used the sale of the bungalow for the down payment, and over the last few years, despite the fact that we had the new place completely furnished, managed to make a big dent in the mortgage. Business was booming at Luxury Imports. I was working double shifts. But the house now markets for half of what we signed for. And despite that we can’t sell it! We’re just hoping to break even. I don’t want bankrupt on my credit rating. I got trouble enough. It’s another good investment. Buy low, sell high, when and if this recession ends.”

“Goddamn recession is killing everyone.” Mickey frowned. “My brother Rodney lost his job. Remember him? I got him working at the bar, although I really can’t afford the extra hand. I don’t know man. I tell you quite frankly that house is out, although I know what you’re talking about. You bought one of those long, rambling ranch style jobs with the ﬁreplace that’s open on two sides, between the living and the dining room, stone-stacked wall in between. Me and Trudy took a peek at them. Now that’s living! We’re living with my mom. When my dad died we moved in. She was really down. Man, I was down. That was a big blow. I could have used you bro. I was kind of hoping you’d show up at the funeral. But, anyway, it works out real nice. We take care of her and she takes care of us – or at least her grandchildren who she spoils to distraction. We decided to stay there even when she passes. Hell, me and Rodney and Floree were raised there and we came out OK. Never felt deprived in any way. When the time comes I’ll have the house appraised, give them their share. Besides, we’re saving big time for the kids’ educations. Not leaving that to chance. Better to play it safe than be sorry these days. Now that Benz is mighty tempting. Always been my dream to own one of those high class luxury machines; be the big shot of the Granton High School Class Reunion parking lot! Let yawl know what’s what! Yeah boy, what a toy! I drive a Prius. Talk about a boring, married with children suburban! Let me turn that over in my mind. That’s a deal that has facets to it. If I don’t want to drive it I can sell it for a proﬁt. Or I can drive it for a while, for the hell of it, and then sell it. God, I’d probably pick up a quick ten grand. But that deal has its own problems. Insurance, as you know, is a lot higher in South Town than in the rest of Granton. So is theft and vandalism. I got two places to run; so Trudy would get stuck dealing with the sale, calls, visits, test drives. I’d have to talk with her ﬁrst. Let’s see what develops. We really can’t seal any deal tonight, Jack, in your condition. Looks like you been partying pretty good. Let’s both sleep on it and tomorrow we can meet for lunch. On me man, we can catch up. Maybe I can make

some calls in between, see if any of the brothers are still solvent and in need of a badass machine. Maybe we can put our heads together and think of a game plan. You know that house foreclosure problem may not be exactly like you think. Takes a good year for the powers that be to evict you from your property. You land that job in Chicago and you can start building up some cash while you live rent free. Going bankrupt is common enough these days, given the situation. Getting your credit back ain’t exactly a snap but the right lawyer can make that a lot easier. I know a guy you should talk to. Here’s my number.” Mickey scribbled on a business card, smiled and handed it to Jack. “Call me tomorrow, brother.”

“Oh, I got your number – brother.” Jack folded his arms and glared at Mickey’s outstretched hand. “Tricky Mickey, slick and slippery. You think I’m so drunk I don’t see when someone’s jiving me?

“Say what? Now slow down Jack.”

“Jack-off is what you’re handing me! I’m the big Jack-off! I blew my money and can’t take care of my family! Not like you can because you’re the man with the plan! Every other sentence you been rubbing that in! If you really wanted me at your father’s funeral you would have reached out and shared! What, I’m supposed to read the Granton Gazette obituary? What else you trying to imply? Maybe that Trudy and Julie haven’t exchanged recipes lately and now I come in with my hat in my hand? You’re glad I showed up so you could show me up! You been sitting there in your high chair counting your money with that shit eating grin! You been laughing at me ever since I got dumped by Michigan! Not you! You’re no fool! You’re the man with the plan. You’re not dumb enough to get sucked in by some hoop dream! Not tricky Mickey!”

“Now wait a minute Jack. I never thought that! I’ll admit I never believed that hurt back business. All I knew was you went for it! You gave the big time a shot! You put your balls on the line! I admired that! I thought maybe you been avoiding me all these years ‘cause I chickened out. Hell, I knew the competition I’d be facing. Nationwide! I didn’t

want to take that lickin’. It is what it is and it ain’t what it’s not. You got to keep that straight in life.”

“Not like me right?” Jack stood up. “I can’t keep things straight and I can’t straighten things out! I’m just old Jack-off the fuck-off! But I’m good enough to promote your penny arcade! In between yuks that is!”

“Look man sit back down! You got it all wrong!”

The husky black kid appeared in the doorway gripping his push broom like a weapon, ready to take on all comers. Jack threw him into the Mr. Coffee maker.

“Are we going to make it though this? Are we going to make it through this? Jack? Jack?”

With a shaky hand Jack grabbed the tumbler resting on the cushion of the billiard table. He closed his eyes, tasted the thunder.

Death.” The whiskey whispered.

“Bring it on.” He softly answered.

Half-wits and whores, drunks, degenerates, undead corpses, living

obituaries no one would bother to write surrounded him in the night.

Mickey Mouse bought a house for Minnie and Prince Charming and Cinderella and little Jiminy. The house that Jack built. The house of cards. The house he couldn’t pay for anymore. All there in black and white. Mickey White, Jack Black, no going back. His magic castle in Disneyland. Next stop The Twilight Zone. Julie my jewel, Julie my angel. Fire sale! Fire sale!

“Double-cross in the corner.”

Jack slammed the pool-stick and watched the colored balls collide like constellations in a sky gone wild, criss-crossing, cascading, ricocheting.

“Life sucks in the side.”

He buried the eight ball and hung up his stick, staggered through the shadows, and collected his bets. The Granton police, tasers ready, were waiting by his bar stool.

“Jack Black? You’re under arrest!”

The juke-box wailed some song in the darkness about hard times, heartbreak, hopelessness.

“Never again, only a dream, never your eyes longing for me, never your heart beating with mine, never your touch deep in the night, never your smile, never your kiss, never your tender embrace, never your soul to soothe me through life, only my tears which you can’t erase …” Tears ﬁlled Julie’s eyes as she sat at the kitchen table and listened to the sad song on the radio. Tim and Bethany were off to school. Jimmy was asleep. The table was still cluttered with breakfast dishes waiting to be loaded into the high tech washing machine. But everyday Jack was away she found it harder to get started. When she woke up some mornings and found herself alone in the big bed she found it impossible just to move and had to force herself to get up and take care of the kids. She never liked this kitchen. Jack had loaded it up with every latest innovation to make her life less demanding. It didn’t really look like the place where mom cooked. It looked and felt more like the control room for some Star Ship. Jack had to teach her how to operate each gadget. Sitting in it now, all disheveled in her robe and tangled hair, made the nightmare she was living even more disturbing. … “only the wind, only the rain, only my prayers we’ll meet again …” The singer was lamenting the death of her young, soldier husband who had been killed in Iraq by a roadside explosion … “beyond the moon, beyond the stars, beyond life’s dream, someday in heaven …”

Jack. Jack. Julie shuddered. Please come back – intact.

“Jack’s in a straightjacket.” Her father-in-law had informed her after he returned from the Granton police station that night the world had come to an end. Big John had gotten a call from Mickey White, Jack’s

old friend. Mickey didn’t have Jack’s and Julie’s number so he called the old man. Julie had been calling everyone in the family, that night, and all their friends, as well as all the hospitals and emergency rooms in the vicinity, frantic with worry. “They keep those things at the station to stabilize the odd violent drunk. I guess Jack was one.” John Bernard Black was a mountain of a man. That night he looked more like a mountain in the midst of an avalanche, tumbling, crumbling, caving in. “They think he’s nuts.” Tears streamed down his creased face. “They’re going to put him in a loony bin.” He sat slumped in a curved kitchen chair and stared straight ahead. “Jack attacked this black kid in South Town. The kid’s in the hospital, neck broken. Word got around. When I got to the station an angry mob was outside shouting and screaming. Cars had been turned over on Main Street, shop windows broken. Police were running out dressed in riot gear. You could hear sirens everywhere. Jack had beat up the two cops who tried to arrest him. They had stunned him with tasers but he came to before they got the cuffs on him. He tossed them around the room. They’re in the hospital too. It took the entire bar to bring him down. You’ll read all about it in the paper tomorrow morning.”

Big John ﬁnished and broke down, sobbing while she sat stunned. And it was all there in the Granton Gazette the next day and more. Jack had attacked another man earlier in Finnian’s bar. “He was like a monster.” The man told the Gazette – Carl, the plumber. She had known Carl forever. “Like Godzilla, or Frankenstein. A human demon.” “It was wild!” One of the patrons at Buster’s Billiards, who had helped subdue Jack, told the Gazette. “That big dude couldn’t be stopped! There was ﬂying cops! We piled on him and went for a ride! Finally he tumbled down and we managed to pin him until one of the cops crawled over and got the cuffs on! He had his gun out that time. He wasn’t messing around!”

Julie had read the paper with disbelief, shocked, rocked at the descriptions and actions of her husband. Jack couldn’t harm anyone! He couldn’t even bring himself to discipline the kids. “Wait ‘til your father

gets home,” never entered into the family punishment program. She got stuck being the bad guy every time, which she resented. Jack was a pussycat, and the kids took advantage of that. So did the neighbors and everyone who knew him.

There was a picture of the black youth in the paper lying in a hospital bed, his neck in a brace. There were pictures of cars turned over on Main Street, photographs of rioters. Fortunately no one got seriously hurt. There was an old photograph of Jack in his overalls at Luxury Imports, smiling and waving with his head under the hood of a new Porche. The Gazette had done a story on him a few years before. The new caption under the picture read: Maniac Mechanic In Mental Institution.

“Your husband will be with us for evaluation for thirty days, Mrs. Black.” The director of the asylum informed her when she ﬁnally got an appointment with him. They wouldn’t let her see Jack at all. He was in isolation. “If at the end of that period no deﬁnitive conclusion as to his state of mind can be made, he will remain with us for another term of equal length.” The institution was something from a horror movie. The Gage County Asylum For The Insane was a great, stone, prison- like ediﬁce set on acres of asphalt and accessible only through iron gates. An unsmiling armed guard had met her car at the entrance and after checking her ID against his roster and recording her license plate number grimly let her in. More uniformed security with cuffs, Billy clubs and tasers attached to their belts prowled the grounds. Inside burly attendants stalked up and down, while zombie-like patients in medicated stupors roamed the halls. The walls were battleship gray. The windows barred. The guard led her through a dreary maze, each hallway long, wide, the ceilings cracked and high. She had dressed in her Sunday best. She should have worn sackcloth and ash. She felt like the canary in the coal mine, all bright and chirpy and naïve to the fact that the reason it was there had less to do with life than it did death and fear. “If after the end of that period, Mrs. Black, no conclusion still can be reached your husband’s stay with us will be indeﬁnite.” He had paused brieﬂy for emphasis. “Jack Black is a danger to himself, the community and

possibly his family.”

She remembered the director’s ofﬁce with a shudder. She was amazed she hadn’t fainted there. The dark, windowless room was a setting from some old Boris Karloff movie, cavernous, mysterious, ﬁlled with light ﬁxtures and furniture that were turn of the 20th century relics. He had spoken to her across an antique desk as big as a raft, with piles of yellowed papers stacked on it. Despite the ﬂoor to ceiling library of books, which should have smothered each word, his monotonous voice still echoed in her ears. Just remembering the director scared her. He was tall and stick thin and he looked more like a mannequin than a man. The tight white ﬂesh of his face had seemed painted on. It seemed to be stretched over his huge skull. The shaggy, black mop of his hair looked like a wig worn backwards. He wore a tweed jacket and a bow tie. The collar of his starched, white shirt was too big by a size. His scrawny neck seemed screwed into it. His lips were thin and his expression wooden. The thick, black framed glasses he wore seemed to magnify his eyes, which were cold and bright. Julie remembered wondering if they had the power to hypnotize. She wondered if the director could read her mind.

“But Jack’s not like that!” She had protested.

“Jack snapped.” The director had reminded her. “It’s not like we can just snap Jack back. Comatose is his current status. That means he’s locked in a dead man’s dream, to put it simply. Jack’s mind is in limbo. Nobody home.”

“What happened to Jack?” Julie had wailed. Her body had shaken and she sat twisting the straps of the purse on her lap, as she was twisting her handkerchief now sitting alone in the high tech kitchen crying and listening to the sad song on the radio.

“Something old,” the director had shrugged, “something new, something borrowed, something blue. We won’t have an inkling until we can pick his brain and we can’t do that until he starts to communicate.

In the meantime we’ll continue to medicate. It’s the level of physical violence he displayed which is troubling.”

“You don’t still have him in a straight jacket?”

“No, he’s wearing one of his own. He sits docile in a chair and stares. But wait,” The director had suddenly remembered something and shufﬂed through some papers on his desk. “This is a step in the right direction.” He looked at a memorandum. “I remember reading it this morning. Jack ate today, or at least he drank. He drank his cocoa. Maybe we won’t have to force feed him anymore.”

“You force feed my husband!”

“Once a day, state law you know, but maybe that’s over. He blew on it. The cocoa.” The director held up the memo. “The nurse made a note.”

“He blew on his cocoa?”

Julie was stupeﬁed, trapped in the Twilight Zone.

“Cocoa is hot.” The director put down the paper and glared at her. “He didn’t just swallow it down and burn his mouth. Good sign. Shows that he’s conscious, at least to some extent.”

“… suddenly I’ll see you there inside a cloud walking my way …”

What had that meant, conscious to some extent? Was Jack brain dead? She had screamed at the director, hysterically. Where was he? How come they wouldn’t let her see him? She was his wife! She had her rights! The mannequin man must have pushed a button on his desk. A giant woman in a white uniform immediately came in and sat next to Julie, arms folded on a metal chair, while the director continued to blandly rattle some incomprehensible rigmarole about childhood abuses, traumas, tumors, chemical imbalances, stresses – all possibilities in the Big Jack Attack as he called it – amidst innumerable other facets and factors which had to be considered

All through the following week, hordes of case workers, social workers, institute investigators swarmed the Black family, Julie, the children, her family, friends, neighbors, in a Kafkaesque inquisition probing every nuance and facet of their existence from past to present. Did Jack beat Julie? The kids? Did he touch them funny? Was he beaten, as a child? Did he pull the legs off spiders? Porn? Violent movies? Monster video games? Were any of those his thing? Big John and Efﬁe were stunned. Julie had to listen to her mother say once more that she had told her so. Jack had always been a “big jerk” according to her. Jack’s not like that! Jack’s not like that! Julie kept screaming to herself. Aside from his obsession with the GM Volt, which he nicknamed Dolt, bombarding her with sketches and diagrams which she couldn’t possibly comprehend concerning cabin forward and trunk battery storage and gizmos and gadgets and computer programs, Jack was normal, as far as she could tell, judging by the other men she knew, if that was any clue. Jack followed sports and read Field and Stream. All men cursed and screamed at the sports teams on the television and got depressed when theirs lost. Nothing abnormal about that, if you were a man. He didn’t hunt but he and Big John liked to go ﬁshing, even though they had wonderful ﬁsh at Skolowski’s market and they seldom caught anything. Otherwise pizza and a movie was his main form of recreation and relaxation, although they didn’t seem very relaxing with all those ﬁghts and shootings. He had begun drinking lately and talking funny, that was true. “Fe ﬁ fo fum.” He muttered to himself, sitting in the living room with her, both staring at the ﬁre. “Excuse me?” “You heard me. I’m that giant in the story. The one with the golden goose. I’m the other guy too. That dope with the bag of beans who ﬁlched it from him. My bean was a basketball. It grew my stalk to you. What if I told you you married a fable, Julie? That you married a zero not a hero? A fake pure and simple. What if I told you the truth?” Jack shook his head. “It was wrong. You could have gone to school, met someone real. Degrees, pedigrees. I should have left you alone.” “Jack I married you because I loved you, and because you loved me. Everything will be OK. That job in Chicago sounds great.” “Chicago. Leave Granton and live in a slum. Kill the golden goose and the golden eggs too.” Jack had shaken his head. “It was wrong.” Jack repeated. “I should have left you alone.”

Maybe she should have told the mannequin man about that? Maybe that was important? Maybe she should tell him now? She didn’t know what to do. The nightmare didn’t let up. The neighbors either snubbed her or they leered at her. She hated to leave the house. She had the groceries delivered. When she went to church no one would sit next to her. No one offered her sympathy, inquired about Jack, asked if she needed any help with anything. The minister shunned her. She could sense gossip all around her. The kids were bearing the brunt of it. “Where’s daddy?” Beth would ask. “Jane says daddy is crazy. I miss daddy. Where is he?” With Tim there was recurring violence. “Hey Tim how’s your pop, Jack in the Box? “or “Hey Tim, I thought Jack went up the hill not down the river?” or simply: “Hey Tim, how’s your nutcase old man? Like father like son?” Tim would come home battered from ﬁghting, bruises, fat lips, black eyes. Meanwhile they repossessed the car, foreclosed on the house. Bill collectors called day and night. “Well,” her mother lorded it over her, “what do you expect? If Jack is declared incompetent they can’t collect. They’ve bet on the wrong horse to pay its debts. You can’t always pick a winner; but you’d think, taking a good look at Jack, they would have known better.”

If it wasn’t for Jack’s old high school friend, Mickey, Julie would have gone crazy. He called her everyday. He was soothing and reassuring. “Julie don’t worry about a thing, hear?” There was always a smile in his voice. It made her feel safe. “Jack had a breakdown, but he’ll come around. And don’t worry about that clown Tyrone. Broken neck? I’ll kick his butt! Callin’ the police over a little shove and then getting hisself all lawyered up! You know Tyrone played football in high school? Now he’s so fragile? As regards those police charges, I talked to the prosecutor and from what I gather they don’t hold water. They can’t hold someone who wasn’t responsible for his actions. Jack wasn’t himself. He will be soon enough; but that night he was out of it and there ain’t no doubt about it. Now my lawyer is going to stop around with some papers tomorrow. He’s going to explain how you can stay in your house for a year, free and clear. He’s also going to make sure that you get Jack’s unemployment comp. without any bureaucratic hassle from the government. You are entitled to a little welfare help too, he’ll explain that to you. Trudy wants to come visit, bring a cake she baked. She’s bringing the kids. They’re about the same age as yours so they can get together and play with each other. Milton’s got some hot new video games. Stuffs not even on the market yet. I get them at the arcade ﬁrst to test. Him and Tim should have fun with them. I’ll call you tomorrow, and remember it’s always darkest before the dawn. Did I say that? What corn! What I meant to say is every dark cloud has a silver lining. That sounds pretty corny too, but stay tuned Julie Moon.”

Mickey was so nice. Julie wondered why they never got together with the Whites. Jack loved him. He could talk about Mickey endlessly. Life was funny. Suddenly Julie wanted to be in Jack’s arms. Life had blown up at Jack, like that roadside bomb had blown up on the soldier in the song. Fortunately the tests on Jack’s brain had all come out OK. There were no tumors or brain damage. It was all psychological not physical so they could treat it with therapy. She wanted Jack to hold her. She wanted “his smile, his tender embrace” like the sad woman sang about. She wanted to feel his touch again “deep in the night.”

Strange place – at night the yard below Jack’s window was ﬁlled with darkness, shifting shadows. The darkness was visible, the shapes he sensed, like equations on a blackboard in a schoolroom, long forgotten, which have been erased. During the day, it was the other way – light too bright, ghosts at play. Three squares a day, meds, shrinks, burly attendants

– all you needed between the clock and the bed. The days popped up like white rabbits in a magician’s top hat. Each night Jack vanished.

“Whiplash?”

“Yeah, I got whiplash, Mickey, when that big white dude shove me.

That what my doctor say.”

“I’ll bet he did. And I’ll bet your lawyer got you your doctor.”

“What if he did?”

Tyrone lay in bed with his neck-braced head propped up on pillows. Tyrone’s mother had given Mickey dirty looks when she led him into the rock, movie, and sports poster ﬁlled room. The monster who attacked her son was Mickey’s friend. “Now baby you let mama know if you needs anything mo.” She patted Tyrone’s leg and gave Mickey another lethal glare as she waddled out the door. Tyrone had been shoveling down ice cream when Mickey came in. There was a big bag of potato chips in the bed next to him. A plate of chicken bones lay atop the dresser. The football game was blasting on the TV. Tyrone lowered it when Mickey moved around the armchair and sat down next to him. It looked as though Tyrone wouldn’t have to ring the service bell for a while.

“Tyrone, you know the difference between jivin’ and lyin’?” “Everbody know that.”

“Jivin’ is funnin’; lying is destroying. Ain’t nothing funny about a lie. Ever hear the commandment: ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness ?’ Ever hear: ‘The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?’ Ain’t nothin’ wrong with your neck Tyrone. I had my lawyer look into it. The X-ray showed nothing. The doctor who examined you found nothing.”

“It hurt.”

“Tyrone you played football in high school. You probably got pushed harder gooﬁng off in the shower room!”

“Whiplash funny, Mickey. Don’t show up no way.”

“Tyrone, your lawyer must have told you can’t sue Jack Black. Mr. Black is in a mental hospital. No matter how bad Mr. Black’s actions were he can’t be held responsible for them.”

“We knows that, Mickey.”

“I knows you know that, Tyrone, and I knows in my bones you about

to sue me.”

“Never sue you, Mickey, we’s homeys. We be suing your insurance

company.”

“And that ain’t suing me? What about the bad publicity? You know someone broke my window? Look Tyrone, if by neglect, chance, or accident I had caused you any injury I’d be happy to pay you and your lawyer anything. But you ain’t hurt Tyrone. I know you got roughed up and I feel bad about that. But the person who did it had reached his limit. His mind broke down. These are hard times. Everybody’s hurtin’, sufferin’, some of them exploding. And there you go acting like you got your neck broke and causin’ racial trouble. You’re the boy who cried wolf! The guy who yelled fire in a theater! You got to think about this Tyrone, turn your story around. You got to be a man, do the brotherly love thing, show empathy and compassion. You can’t just lay there lyin’ about how you dyin’!”

“My lawyer wouldn’t like that, Mickey.” “You trust me?”

“Sure. I guess so.”

“More than you trust your lawyer?”

“Suppose so.”

“If I told you I had a better game plan than your lawyer did would you believe me? That in my plan no one would lose and everyone would win, even your lawyer, and that your mother, father, everyone would be proud of you. Would you want in?”

“That moment in the night, big fella,” the old man who sat across from Jack in the day room leaned forward and mumbled, eyes like crystal balls, “when the echoes and apparitions of the tenement’s evicted-from- life former residents, began to haunt the tumbledown premises, amidst the clanging of old pipes, the creaking walls and groaning staircases, the hiss of radiators, with their moans and spectral appearances, was my cue to grab my coat and get my hat and hole up in one of the neighborhood’s booze and blues rattraps, until I could numb myself from their cries and sleep before the bed bugs started to bite.

“I know they all needed closure from their victimization by fate and that they would never rest in peace until they got it off their chests and attained some catharsis. But I’d heard their stories before, seen them on TV, read about them in history: slum landlords, usury, discrimination, exploitation, tyrants, death camps, ethnic cleansing, aristocrats, bureaucrats, slavery, iron ﬁsts, holocausts – every misery one can imagine involving man’s inhumanity to man. I saw the sequels of their tragic destinies all around me in the misery and poverty I moved through everyday in my life as a starving poet. Yeah, big fella, I have my own sorry story to relate, which I’m sure I’ll do when my hard-luck lot is through and I clatter around in my chains. You only live once. There’s no second chance. When you never got your due in life wailing through eternity is all that’s left for you. I developed a theory nursing my nightly drinks in the ghetto gin mills, surrounded by lost souls almost as dead as the ones I ﬂed. Tenements topple, ghettoes crumble, civilizations fall to ruins – all of them replaced by new habitats that will also be erased. What do the ghosts haunt then? I think they roam the wind, form a civilization of howling phantoms, cause hurricanes, tidal waves, change the climate, melt the ice caps. I believe everything they say about carbon emissions, toxic waste, air and water pollution, all greed and gluttony and abuse propelling us toward the end of the world. But I think the haunts contribute as well, big fella, with their tales of living hell.”

“In one dark doorway and out another, big guy,” the fat man leaned forward in his chair and whispered to Jack, “all of them locked, block after block – private dwellings, public places, theaters, shops, pubs, cafes. The city was empty, big guy. But you could see this vanishing act developing if you were paying attention; and I was. The man who wasn’t there that I met upon the stair. The ticket to nowhere that the postman made me sign for his ledger. The game of blind man’s bluff in which ‘getting colder’ couldn’t have been shouted at me enough. The expired passport, the lost key, the anonymous caller who hung up on me. The desolate buildings were like an eerie dream. I searched the city desperately, looking for anyone, anything living. Now they crowd the night cafes out there, big guy, the ghosts of the end of days. They drink hemlock on the rocks under broken clocks while they listen to a church organ play.”

“The world dropped into night,” the little man lisped to Jack, “that day I ﬂew my kite, up and down the school’s playground. Lightning ﬂared, thunder rumbled, but I held on tight, spellbound as it danced, ﬂuttered with the black winds in the stormy sky, until the rains came and it tumbled.”

“Intelligent Design, pal, Intelligent Design is what it’s all about.” The thin man with glasses peeped at Jack. “Intelligent Design saw a cosmic sign and wondered: ‘What if I use the slime to start a “line” to me the Divine on which waving hands can bud as they climb along a vine out of the mud to say “hello” to me and perhaps, eventually, grow up and form a tree and from that height will see that the next step to be like me is collectively to pull out of the ground, jungle bound, and crawl around, independently, on little pegs which develop legs which lead to feet as they move around adapting in shape, size, savvy and learn to use their limbs to clutch, and spiky thorns to munch tasty meat which will give them a brain so that, technologically, they can appreciate, when becoming humanoid is their fate, that it was ‘The Divine’ from where they came. Intelligent Design, pal. That’s the name of the game.”

“Talk about nowhere,” The old man with the crystal balls eyes was seated before Jack again, “I was there. We lived in a bungalow on No Man’s Road, near the intersection of Dead End Drive and Take A Hike Turnpike, in a well populated village with few living inhabitants, where ‘you’ll never take us alive,’ was the welcome mat for most of the residents (along with ‘don’t wake up the dead, we need them for

our overhead’) and the only industries, before they opened the small factory where my father ﬁnally got himself a job, were the innumerable cemeteries to which caravans arrived, periodically, to deposit their loved ones in the lonely, willowy, burial facilities.

“I was ten. Both my parents were working then. My mother commuted to her ofﬁce job in the city. My father put in long hours at the factory. They signed their “rest in peace lease” and buried themselves alive to pay the bills and raise their offspring, me.

“School was out. I was alone. There were young couples about with babies in the other bungalows. No kids my age. Mists, fog, eerie lights, howls, moans ﬁlled the days and nights. I roamed the graveyards. They were my home away from home. My friends became the names chiseled into the weathered headstones. Everyday was a dream of Halloween. Every night, in sleep, the departed would creep from their tombs, vaults, mossy mausoleums, graves and visit me.

“Life, death, the mystery of being, joy, sorrow, and everything in between came with them as stories written on the wind between the birth and death dates and transferred to my imagination. Before I knew it I became a poet. Talk about nowhere, big fella!”

“This place is just like Finnian’s!” Jack looked around at the huddled ﬁgures in the crowded room, where a giant ﬂat screen television blasted in a corner and inmates ran amok in various stages and degrees of mental disorder, playing, ﬁghting, laughing screaming. “Everybody’s nuts!”

“Grover? Hey my friend, this is Mickey White. I thought I’d gotten your voice message again! Your voice sounds exactly the same in real life as it does on the recording machine, ﬂat, rehearsed. How you doing buddy? Splendid? You’re splendid? Well splendid! Oh, you know, the same ole same ole. Look, I just wanted to congratulate you on that black jack job you did on Jack Black in the Gazette. Got the whole Chicago media down here to cover it and the racial conﬂict, which, unfortunately for them, was short lived and long gone before they got here with their talking heads and cameras. Media everywhere! You’d think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had ended! Must have been a ﬁrst on the trials and tribulations of a small town like this. ‘Things have, momentarily, calmed down in Granton after the brutal assault.’ Don’t you love that guy! I watch him every night! That photo of Jack you dug up with the caption ‘Maniac Mechanic In Mental Institution’ under it was an especially nice touch. Must have made Julie and her kids feel real good and proud. Didn’t you date Julie in high school, Grover? And after that, if I remember, you were still courtin’ her at Granton Junior College until Jack cut in? Yeah, long time ago. Yeah, I know you were just doing your job with the Jack Black expo. Did a good one too. Got a ﬂicker of national attention before it was over. Maybe they’ll offer you a job at that paper where all those inquiring minds who sniff glue, or don’t need to, want to know? I’m funny too? Na man, lame compared to you; and that Humpty Dumpty photograph of poor Tyrone in the hospital was really touching and heart wrenching. I’m surprised we all didn’t rise up and go after Jack Black with torches, like some folks in South Town did who are employed, from what I heard, in various low level capacities by the Granton Gazette. Not that I’m implying the whole thing was a set up. What? I’m out of luck if I want to cancel my full page weekly add for the arcade in the Gazette? I’m bound to a contract? Gee whiz Grover, I don’t want to do that! I want to add another full page add promoting a charity competition the arcade is featuring with a new non-proﬁt game, all the proceeds for which are to help a down and out Granton family devastated by the recession. I was hoping to sound you out about the layout. You’re the master of spin. Before we get into that, though, I’d like to know when you’re going to do a follow up story on the Jack Black tragedy? Say what? You’ll do a ‘The bigger they are the harder they fall kind of thing, maybe?’ Is that what you just said? ‘Jack

Black’s Black Hole, Self Dug’ would be the title? Funny Grover. You’re a funny man. No, my friend, I mean like local hero, family man, credit to the community, knocked out by the recession, sort of thing. ‘Jack Black already had his ﬁfteen minutes of fame and his ﬁfteen minutes of infamy?’ Gee Grover, I didn’t know you were so clever! Guess you can’t tell a book by its cover. But slow down now, don’t put Jack in the box just yet. You know that news feature on national TV that comes out of Chicago ‘Someone You’d Like To Meet’? Well Tyrone’s the one you’d like to meet this week. He’s the one who thought up this new arcade charity game which is called ‘Hoop Dreams.’ We ran the story past the station and they went for it, wanted to cover it. The idea of the game is to make as many baskets as you can in ten seconds – all miniaturized, of course. Got cash prizes, trophies. All the proceeds go to helpin’ the Jack Black family because Jack Black, after all, is a local hero who fell on hard times, and the Black family has lived in Granton for a century, goin’ way back to the farmin’ days and we can’t turn our backs on them in their time of need. They helped out their neighbors, plenty, over the years. Hell, Grover, their sad story is all of ours these days. In fact, Tyrone wrote a little poem, which he recites in the interview. Now Tyrone ain’t no Shakespeare but I think it’s pretty cool. He calls it ‘Born to Lose.’ Goes like this: ‘Like a death rattle of wind chimes, playing the desperate cries of hard times, through dark, despairing notes, across the rhythms of their hearts and souls, the lost generation wanders the recession, searching for salvation from life’s regression, hoping too little, too late don’t be their fate like it was for Jack Black, which we all regret. It’s the music sensation that’s sweepin’ the nation, the beat of a dream’s retreat. You can hear it in Chicago, in the Motor City, in Philadelphia PA, all across the country.’ No Grover, I ain’t shittin’ you! They shot the segment at the arcade this afternoon. You can catch it on the evening news, and all week in fact. Tyrone is the grand master of it; sittin’ in his neck brace in a wheel chair and talkin’ about how we got to help our brothers no matter what color, ‘cause we all in this together and how he don’t hold nothin’ against Jack Black, the man who attacked him. He understands. All he wants to do is help him. Brought a tear to my eye, man. I was trying to demonstrate the game but I got so broke up I could hardly make the shots. Mercy! There you see me cryin’ on the TV. Now, I ain’t sayin’ this is Pulitzer Prize winning stuff, Grover, but hey, you never know! Better the Granton Gazette covers the Jack Black story with all its pathos and American tragedy than some hot shot from the Chicago Sun Times, or the Tribune, or the Reader, or New City. ‘Course they probably all gonna be there anyway seeing that new kid the Bulls just signed for umpteen gazillion dollars is going to be the ﬁrst to play the game at the opening. Yeah, that’s the one. Tyrone a big fan of his. He’s on the kid’s Facebook or text list or something. You know Tyrone ain’t shy. Real nice guy that kid. Got to get that on the layout we been talkin’ about. Him showin’ up. Gonna be pretty crowded that night. Yeah, Tyrone’s still here. Yeah, he got a copy of the poem. You’ll be over in an hour? You want to bring your cameraman? Hey, no problem!”

They ﬁnally let Julie see Jack; but it was from another room where the burly attendants and the security guards sat and had breaks and kept their eyes on the inmates through a two-way looking glass.

“Jack’s making progress.” A male nurse sat with her, munching on a bag of chips. “He doesn’t talk yet but we can see that he listens. He eats, feeds himself, dresses himself. He looks around, takes things in. It’s still kind of blinky but you can tell the world is coming into focus for him. Dr. Stroger was tempted to let you visit him in the conference room but he thought it better to hold off at this stage of things. Reality might cause a shock. We don’t want the big guy to go ballistic on us. He’s very patient with the other patients, though. And they can be annoying. Yesterday one bounced a volleyball off his head, repeatedly, and Jack didn’t get mad. He didn’t look too happy about it; but on the other hand if he had been that wouldn’t have been an encouraging reaction would it?” The nurse smiled at her and winked.

Tears ﬁlled Julie’s eyes as she listened to the nurse and watched Jack sit alone in a corner and stare. The “day room,” as they called it, was a nightmare – something out of some penal ﬁlm or that old movie Snake Pit. It was a vast, square, barred windowed room, lit dimly by cage covered ceiling light bulbs which cast shadow shrouds across the Spartan furnishings, which consisted of threadbare sofas, worn metal folding chairs and battered card tables, as in some homeless, charity shelter.

The patients were all dressed the same in drab, gray uniforms. They looked like gulag inmates with name tags instead of numbers: but just numbers or a mass somehow remained their identity. They were not human beings. This was the violent ward and except for the big screen television, which nobody seemed to be looking at, and some scattered toys, which no one seemed to know what to do with, and stacks of box and board games on a long table, which some of the patients grabbed, now and then, and took with them, only to spill out, or ﬂing around, or examine, nothing – no ornamentation or decoration – relieved the depressive atmosphere of the room. The walls were bare, no inmate drawings like she had glimpsed in the “day rooms” of the other wards. “They eat them.” The nurse had told her when she asked. “Or burn them. God knows where they get the matches. Of course we have them draw; and what some of them do is most interesting. The psychologists collect them. Gallery owners come around to take a look and sometimes buy some. But we can’t display them.”

The patients played in their minds, it seemed to Julie, not with the toys or games. They walked around talking to themselves, sometimes erupting into ﬁts or seizures. The one’s who actually interacted with each other still seemed locked in their own realities, just simulating exchanges or conversations. Julie guessed that they weren’t really connecting but colliding with shapes, shadows, phantoms that surrounded them each day.

“The patients nicknamed Jack ‘little Jack Horner’ because he always sits in his corner.” The nurse informed her. “Jack has a presence here. The patients like him. Many have taken to sitting and talking with him. The day room has become much calmer since he appeared.”

“Jack, Jack.” Julie twisted her wedding band and wailed inside as she looked at Jack trapped in the middle of bedlam. Jack had a boyish face, round and innocent. He looked bewildered, helpless. Her “Band of Gold” was all that was left. Just this cold band of gold which had once been a dream but now was a nightmare.

She didn’t cry there. Not like she wanted to. She broke down at home. She was home alone. Big John and Efﬁe had taken the children on a vacation to Disneyland. “We got to get the kids out of this town.” Big John had declared. “They got to get away from this, have some fun.” Depressed, lonely, maybe half crazy, she buried herself in the family albums and revisited the ﬁfteen years of their marriage. Jack was such a clown. He grinned from ear to ear in nearly every picture from their wedding and their honeymoon to the photographs of them and their growing children. Was something wrong with these pictures? They all looked like “Kodak Moments” to her, capturing a happy couple and family. “What went wrong?” Julie wondered. Jack had the new job in Chicago. They could have had a new start. Was it her fault? Did he think the job wasn’t good enough? She never nagged him, like many women did their husbands, about money or material things. She had no interest in keeping up with the Joneses or the Joneses period. It was Jack, who was the material man with his obsession with the latest, greatest whatever: the big house, car, Weber grill, lawn tractor. But Jack didn’t really care about them either. They were like trophies that he collected –collected and neglected, never polished or dusted. But he had to have them. It was a mania with him. Julie wondered if they took the place of those trophies he had always gotten for his athletic abilities as a boy, which ended when he hurt his back? Maybe they made him feel like a champion again? She wondered if she should ask the mannequin

man about that? But he was a champ husband and a champ dad. Was it her fault that he didn’t realize that?

The dream of love, marriage, what was anything if Jack wasn’t there with her? She couldn’t take it anymore. Jack had to get better! Life had to get back to normal! And what was Mickey up to? Just when everything had begun to calm down and be forgotten, Mickey brought it all up again! That’s why Big John took the kids to Disneyland; to get them away from Mickey’s circus. “What are you doing Mickey?” she had asked him on the phone. “I appreciate what Tyrone said on that news program but couldn’t he have just made a statement to the Granton Gazette? And this arcade game you have to help Jack – it will just keep things stirred up!”

“I’m doing what is necessary, Julie. You’ll see.”

“Don’t you think Jack would be better off if everyone just left him alone and he had a little peace and quiet? You’re playing a game Mickey! Like you two did in high school. Like you have in your arcade! You’re trying to score points, turn things around, win! Life isn’t a game, Mickey!”

“Sure it is, sweetie. It’s a puzzle. We gonna put this one back

together.”

Or kill Jack trying, she almost said, completely destroy his mind!

But stopped herself and hung up instead.

* * *

That dark spiral down, even beyond the reach of the reach beyond, staring at the day as if life took place in perpetual night. Jack sat in the “day room” and saw a comic madhouse of shadows searching some maze they had all wandered into, trying to ﬁnd the path of bread crumbs which would lead them back.

“That’s what you get when you ﬂy without a net!” He heard the voices of Granton hoot and laugh in his head, enjoying the show from righteous row. “That’s what you get when you can’t hack it!”

Watch the clowns tumble down. “That clown got what was coming!”

“That clown never was good for nothing!”

So, blow the trumpets, bang the drum, gather round, rejoice, have

fun.

“Jack, Jack, are we going to make it Jack?”

Julie?

A woman wrapped in sunlight appeared to him in his delirium. She

was tall, blonde, beautiful, kind.

“Every soul is a rainbow, Timmy, Beth, remember that. Every soul is hallowed.”

“Julie?”

“Hey Collar, this is Mickey. How’s my favorite preacher? You and God still talkin’ to each other? He been talkin’ to me? And Tyrone? Maybe brother, I don’t know. Got your phone message. Glad to hear you’re coming to the opening. Having a man of the cloth involved in my poor doings is highly ﬂattering. Maybe you can say a blessing? You’re bringing the whole congregation? Get out! It’s my arcade or hell? Get out, you didn’t tell them that! Sure I know you were just jokin’ them. No, I didn’t hear about the bake sale. Angel food cake bake-off for the Blacks? Trudy gonna want to get in on that. Black angel cakes? How does that work? They taste the same? Who thought of that? Ain’t she sweet. Yeah, I know Collar, lot of us don’t like what’s goin’ on around here. What? You’re gonna hold a revival meeting at the opening. Just kidding again? Yeah, my friend, don’t know about that one. Look bro, I got to go. Got to make some phone calls. OK, thanks. Nice talkin’ to you. God bless and see you at the opening!”

Mickey checked his watch. One more stall call and then he had to get some balls. You got to make hay while the sun shines. You got to strike when the iron is hot. Where did he pick up all this corny shit?

“Mayard? Mayard it’s Mickey. Mickey White. Mayard get it together man, we done known each other all our lives. Mickey White, right, we see each other every night. Look Mayard, I just wanted to thank you again for that little ditty you scribbled out on the bar napkin for me. The poem Mayard. The recession poem. Never mind, just making sure you know the drinks are on me this week; so don’t go laying down any money on the bar like you did last night. Right, all of them Mayard not just most of them, like usual. Rodney be there, he’ll take care of you. Rodney. My brother. You known him all your life too! When you come in he’s going to give you back what you left when you left. You put it in your pocket, hear? OK Mayard. See you later man, stay cool.”

Now, the big one. The one he’d been stalling. Mickey stared at his phone, hesitating again. He took a deep breath and looked around his ofﬁce. Grover had just left with his cameraman. Grover had taken notes. His partner had shot up the room – all preliminary sketches for the grand opening. The next issue of the Granton Gazette would be awesome. Mickey reminded himself. All the Chicago papers and media would cover it too, at least with a snippet. He reminded himself of that as well. “Quit stallin’!” He told himself. Shoot the shot!” Instead, he ﬁshed into the papers on his desk and looked over his backup. Hell, he might just throw this letter into the conversation to add to his pitch, point, whatever it was he was selling, myth, man, mad add grab, bottom line numbers. Some Billy Bob NASCAR racer wrote him a letter and wants the “Maniac Mechanic” on his pit crew team. Interesting. Must pay OK. But Mickey thought he could do better than have Jack run around the back country with Red Neck drivers. Timmy would dig it. Maybe Jack too. But he couldn’t see Julie and Beth enjoying it. Besides it wasn’t exactly stable. It was another risk. Well, hell if all else failed. You had to hand it to those hillbillies, though. Nothin’ tight ass about those folks. They were wild as the wind, hard as steel. Chance was their dance. They were real. OK, Mickey took a deep breath and eased it out slow. Time to make the donuts. He picked up the phone and dialed the magic number.

A secretary answered.

“This is Mickey White. I have a phone appointment with Mr.

Sumner. We’ve been corresponding and he asked me to call him.”

“The smell of blood would hit them, lads, as soon as they turned our corner and we’d watch them from our porches change from docile to demented, jostling in the cattle trucks, which rattled past our houses, hauling the herds each morning to the stockyards down our block. Inside the prodders would poke them to the slaughter rooms in a procession, wild eyed bellowing and shaken where the mallet men would kill them, spiking their skulls with swift strong blows before they hung them by the chains which dangled from the ceilings. That was childhood back of the yards friends. That was life, back in the day, as you know yourselves all too well, unless you were among the affluent who went to college. Steel mills, industries, factories, hard labor, nothing pretty. Hardened us all up for ‘Nam I guess. Or those of us who were in the industrial neighborhoods that were the targets for the draft, blue collar, ghetto, working stiff, rural. Bad as it was I bet we all wish those days were back. Least there was work. Everybody had food and a roof over their heads. The hard times paid back, in nickels and dimes maybe, but you could play and get paid. Kids nowadays are all high-tech. Don’t do them no good. They ship those jobs to India or other third world countries same as the others. Another slaughter going on by those greedy tycoon robber barons, killin’ our children. I got two just out of college, both with advanced degrees, and another, the surprise one, graduating high school. Raised them in this nice clean town, gave them top notch educations and none of them can make a living.”

“I hear you man. All I know is work comes harder while the pay gets smaller and the hours longer and if there’s one thing I learned by growing older it’s my life went nowhere and it’s getting shorter.”

“What’ll I have beautiful? How ‘bout you in the back room unadorned by that rufﬂed, frilly Irish waitress uniform?”

A perfect day. Clouds like whipped cream ﬂoated across the sky like a dream. A bad one. I couldn’t ﬁght it. There went my diet. I headed for the Dairy Queen.”

You’d think one of these days I’d get the one every dog’s got coming, mates – like now and again, from time to time, something to do with the moon and stars and planets and signs. OK, I saw my sign when I was knee-high, big middle ﬁnger ﬂashing at me from the sky. My ole man hit the bottle and me too and my brother and sister and mother. So I got in trouble, didn’t do well in school, had a little problem with the golden rule. Someone told me to pray and the Lord would show me the way. All that got me was sore knees and allergies from the stuff they burned at their rituals and ceremonies. Someone said I should read these books about positive thinking and inﬂuencing people. All that got me was a stretch in prison. There’s no moral to this story, mates. All I want to say is if you ever got that day you did OK and if that big hand in the sky never threw you a bone you’re not alone.”

“Sure sugar, we’ll have another round.”

“Yeah darlin’ we want to drink ourselves cross-eyed so we’ll see

two of you.”

“There’s an eyeful.”

“Cabbage soup, cabbage salad, stuffed cabbage, sauerkraut,

everyone in the town ate cabbage everyday.”

“She was the one, gentlemen. She was the one. It’s over and done, but she was the one. I had my fun playing love on the run, Sexy and young, saucy and fun. I sure got stung. I sure was dumb. I had life’s plum. She was the one.”

“Yesterday I said goodbye to my brother. He outlasted most of his charmed circle, playing a lucky hand from beginning to end. ‘Time is money.’ Is all he’d say. Think he’d toss any my way? ‘Life is a gamble.’ Glad he cashed in, the bastard. Even in the casket he wore that smug expression.”

“Hey babe, if I accidently drop my coaster will you bend over and pick it up for me?”

“What a night! What a fright! The ‘no jive ﬁve.’ The live until you die ﬁve. Together again, at last, for a reunion blast! The strivin’ ﬁve! More like a reunion of the cruciﬁed. The forum ﬁlled with boredom quorum. The 9 to 5 ﬁve. The better off dead than alive ﬁve. The upright, uptight, pay your bills, bite your nails, do not make waves, not even ripples, fellows. Or do I bore you guys?”

“The world began without a plan and soon may end, gentleman. I

saw that on the Discovery channel.”

I get up at noon, come here, sit in my corner, drink beer, eat lunch, scan the scratch sheet for a score, call my bookie, drink more, nail a winner, stay for dinner, chat with the regulars, all of us stuck in life’s rut hoping for some luck, work out the kinks in my system, recording odds, jockeys, track conditions, linger through the evening, bolt down a stiff one before leaving, go home, go to bed, dream about horses, wild, free, furious horses, like storm clouds driven by the wind as they race down the track never looking back.

“Death Row, that last hold on the invisible forces in the impalpable net of life’s coil of turmoil that entangles you, when you pay your dues, in the spider web of the living dead. Is that what’s next, after they ho ho over my portfolio, repossess my limo, foreclose on my big home, and I spend my last bonus check and hock my Rolex?”

“Bottom’s up beautiful. If you get my meaning?”

“It’s cock-tail for the guys, doll, and cock-tale for the gals. Get it?”

Good God!” Franny thought as she set her drink tray on the bar and jotted down the last drink order. Not ‘How Are Things In Glocca Morra’ again! If listening to these clowns babble all night didn’t drive her nuts that song would. She looked in the mirror. Her face was pale. Her hair was awry. The puff shouldered, mini skirted, Coleen Bo peep milk maiden, leg ﬂaunting, green costume she wore was already sweat- soaked and rumpled. Nancy was way late and Finnian was no help. He did more talking than bartending. She looked like she had been attacked by a wild gang of Leprechauns.

“Finnian!” An aerial shot of Sumner Motors car lot appeared on the television. “Finnian turn up the sound on the TV. Jack’s on! Looks like a new one!”

The Sumner “Maniac Mechanic Monster Sale” commercials were fun. Everyone enjoyed them. They were all basically the same; but they had their little variations. The next shot took you into the showroom and there would be Tyrone in his janitor uniform, sweeping the ﬂoor with his push broom. Jack would come stomping out in his auto repairman overalls, stiff legged, arms outstretched, a Zombie expression on his big blank face. “Oh no!” A close up of Tyrone’s shocked face would appear next. “The Maniac Mechanic is back with another monster deal!” Jack would lurch around ripping off the prices stretched across car windshields. New prices, even lower, would appear beneath them. “Someone should put this guy in a mental institution!” Tyrone would exclaim, wide-eyed, mouth open. Then they’d be together and in a dead pan voice Jack would relate all the grand deals on the new and used cars Sumner Motors featured and how good the service was because everyone at Sumner Motors went crazy over their customers. All the while Tyrone would give him looks and do that ﬁnger circle around his temple. Once they had a bunch of leggy women in short skirts looking at the cars who ran out screaming as soon as Jack stomped in. Another time there was a wimpy looking guy who fainted; and another was shot in the parking lot amidst the “acres of pre-owned Maniac Mechanic restored to brand new wonders.” In that one a little dog kept barking and nipping at Jack’s heels. Tyrone tried to chase him off with his push broom but the little dog chased him off instead. What really made them likeable was that everyone in the region knew the story and that Jack was in real life the chief mechanic and Tyrone the foreman of the Sumner Motors’ janitors. They were a big hit, except for the crowd at Finnian’s, which is why Franny always made it a point to announce them whenever they came on, which was often.

“You turn up that nut and I’m walkin’ out Finnian!”

Someone shouted.

“It’s disgustin’!” Another chimed in. “A guy who belongs in a loony bin making money hand over ﬁst because he almost killed someone!” “Yeah, hot dogin’ it around town in that Bentley like some big shot, when he ought to be in a straight jacket!”

“Straight jacket! Ha! The jackets I see him in are Ralph Laruen or

maybe even Armani!”

“And his wife, ﬂittin’ around town in that sports car like a movie

star!”

“Them kids of theirs don’t even go to Granton Grammar anymore! They go to private schools! And that wacko Jack Black is supposed to be some kind of local hero!”

“Jack is a hero.” Franny said ﬂatly. “He was in high school and now he’s a local TV celebrity. I think the commercials are cute! I think Jack’s cute and that Tyrone’s a riot!”

“They’re a riot all right! In fact they caused one! You forget that? Everybody forget that? We let that nut case run free on the streets endangerin’ the town’s women and children!”

“You better not let him in here Finnian! You do and I’ll drink

elsewhere!”

“He better be banned from here Finnian, sure n’ begorrah! That emphatic enough for ya?”

“Jack Black don’t drink in here no more.” Finnain smiled, sadly. “Jack Black got better places to go and people to be with than you poor fools and that includes me too. He stops at Mickey White’s new nightclub. Grand place, classy, cool. I go there myself, now and then. Great music! The whole Black clan is there, dancing up a storm, Big John, Efﬁe, Joe and Judy and their spouses. That was some wedding reception Jack threw there for his sister! Julie’s family comes too. Tyrone’s always there. He’s dating his lawyer’s daughter. Now there’s a looker! I guess the old man’s handling all Tyrone’s advertising contracts. Jack and Tyrone got more than Sumner Motors going on. They’re doing layouts for that Big Man clothes outlet. And of course, Mickey and Trudy. I’m takin’ the night off Saturday and going with the misses. Don’t get a chance to dance much in Granton, outside weddings. We used to go dancin’ all the time when we were courtin’ in Dublin. I think Jack and Julie got me inspired. They got stars in their eyes when they dance at Mickey’s. You lads should try it. Not that I want to lose business! But I think you’ll like it!”

“Enjoy it while you can Finnian! That place is about to be banned.

We’re all signin’ a petition!”

“Town counsel should never have approved it!”

“Bunch of crooks! Jack Black’s money backed it! It ain’t legal! He’s

a convicted felon!”

“Jack Black was never convicted of nothing!” Franny slammed her tray on the bar. “Now shut up and drink up! This one’s on Finnian!”

No tips tonight. But no more hoots, jeers, pinches, leers, either. Franny mused. The trade off was worth it. Now if she could only plug up Rosie Clooney she might make it through it.

“Nowhere is everywhere, my big friend when nothing is anything, and everyone is anyone when no one is someone. But everything is nothing when something is anything and everywhere is nowhere when somewhere is anywhere and no one is anyone when everyone is someone. So no one is somewhere, big guy, and everyone is nowhere and nothing is everywhere.”

“It was dark in the room when I awakened, my big guy. The curtains were drawn. I sensed evil in the shadows, an evil more relentless than my own. There were bars on the windows; you could see their outlines on the curtains as shadows. Restraints dangled from my bed. I was back in the violent ward, I knew. I could sense from the evil that I would never get out, big fella.

‘For your hands are deﬁled with blood,’ a phantom emerged from the shadows and said, ‘and your ﬁngers with iniquity. Your lips have spoken lies, and your tongue muttereth wickedness. You live in the dark like the dead, and you weave a spider’s web.’

‘Right,’ I said to the phantom. ‘So when is breakfast served?’”

“Fog theater where haunts wandered through an unscripted stupor, amidst empty bottles and broken clocks and each day was a sequel to a ﬁnal act, is where I lived just before they locked me up here, Big Jack. Such is the life of a starving poet. ‘If the world was as it should be,’ I’d brood each morning as I crawled out of my jerry-built, blind alley bunker, usually some cardboard box I’d drag away from the back of a Stop and Shop, coat color turned up against the blistering cold, ‘there

wouldn’t be so much misery.’ Around me, derelicts dug in dumpsters for breakfast. Church bells tolled throughout the labyrinths. Homeless families, jobless Joes, shufﬂed back and forth, nowhere to go. ‘Life is like a lottery,’ I’d muse, ‘winning numbers not for everybody.’ I’d head for a different church each Sunday to catch the high mass. I’d sit in the back lost in the darkness and warm up by candlelight, last row always, seat by the aisle, shivering by the drafty doors of the vestibule. My home away from homelessness, those houses of worship, along with the soup kitchens, rescue gospel missions, park benches, tunnels, viaducts, shelters, bridge basses, police stations, public libraries, museums on free days. In the warm and mellow illusion of transcendence, I would sit and reﬂect, big guy, upon the mystery of birth, life and death and feel a little peace and momentarily forget my permanent state of hopelessness: rooﬂess, jobless, friendless. ‘Bless me Father for I have sinned.’ I’d say to the man upstairs who probably isn’t there. ‘I cheat, steal, connive. But not like Madoff.’ I’d add. ‘Not like Wall Street. I’m just a poor poet. I sin to survive.’ And then, when the collection basket came, I’d steal it.”

“I don’t know how to describe it, Mayard.” Jack reﬂected over his drink at Mickey’s and thought about the characters he met in the loony bin. They sat at the bar and watched Rodney ﬁnish setting up, while they listened to the combo rehearse some of the new numbers they wanted to introduce that night. Mickey’s new place was plush. The wall behind the back bar was pure art deco, something one might have seen in New York in that elegant era when they made all those great ﬁlms with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The mirror-backed shelves, which rose to the ceiling, were ﬁlled with expensive and exotic liquor bottles, many of them made of ornate shaped crystal, all art works in themselves. The most expensive were set the highest and Rodney had to reach them on a sliding ladder. Spotlights lit the display. The rest of the room was darkened except for tiny lights, like little stars set in the ceiling so that you had the feeling you were sitting, dancing, drinking in a dream. All the tables seemed to ﬂoat. The chairs were as comfortable as clouds. Lush leather sofas and love seats were scattered around for anyone who wanted something more intimate, private. Every acoustical care had been taken to capture the best sounds possible from the music being played. “I can’t really even remember it. Everything got foggy, it had been getting foggy for some time, and then everything went black. Before that I remember feeling like that giant in Gulliver where all those Lilliputians had him tied down. I had to break loose, get everybody off me. I met some nice people at the mental hospital. There was this one poet there I always used to talk to and always felt better after. Then one morning I woke up and said to myself: ‘Another day. Why? I am. Do I need another reason? Does anyone? The steps go up. The steps go down. The spiral staircase goes round and round. But wait. Reﬂect. Linger for a moment on that staircase. Listen to the wails of sorrow, the laughter of children. Imagine the journey through life from birth to death – joy, love, heartbreak, despair, passion, triumph, tragedy, loss, celebration, all that we experience, quiet thoughts, blue skies, dream … but Mayard whatever happed is basically all still a mystery. But I better get going. Julie’s cooking up a storm. Mickey and Trudy are coming over with the kids. We’re all going to toss around the best way to work out this new charity we’re thinking about. Let’s drink this last round to the invisible lives in the slums, ghettos, grottos, hollows, who pray themselves to sleep each night, hoping their children can have a better life.”

BLACK AND WHITE IMAGES OF TEN PAINTINGS BY REX SEXTON

“A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE”

I sit in the empty theater, smoking

cigarettes, sipping liquor, which I

can do here since I am, perennially,

an audience of one and won’t annoy

anyone in this old movie house no one

else can enter (why would they bother?)

watching archival ﬁlms with unknown

actors – comedies, tragedies, romances,

mysteries, all magical deliriums like all

ﬂicks shot in cinemascope and Technicolor.

There we are together, side by side, and

holding hands as we enjoy our ride, through

life, inside the streetcar named desire. How

young we were! How happy! How

beautiful life is

“It’s so wonderful!” You exclaim.

“Not as wonderful as you are.” I declaim.

“Nothing is, or ever will be.”

“I love you.”

The reel breaks. The theater goes black.

I sip my drink in the darkness, smoke

cigarettes.

AGAIN

Years like dried leaves

blowing in the winter wind.

Your breathing next to mine

again, your body next

to mine again, your heart beating next

to mine again – I see your eyes

in heaven, hear your laughter

in the wind. In every dream

you are near me. I can never

love again.

NO EXIT

Spider’s silk, the thread that weaves love’s web …

we hurdle into it, our bodies simulating ﬂight

as it shimmers before us in the sunlight,

moonlight, day and night.

Maybe we pray, as we alight, that we

will survive the glimmering net of magic

or regret in which we became entrapped?

Moonlight through the window of

an artist’s garret in a ghetto long ago …

I still see you in that glow,

posed like the statue

of an angel

forged in ﬁrst love’s crucible.

O-LAY

I met Juanita at a taco stand.

It was like that song … “brighter than

all the stars”

Somehow, I found myself paying for

her food.

Next thing, I buy Tequila and we’re gazing

at the ceiling in my cheap room by the factory

that worked me mercilessly.

She looked like ﬁre on snow, blazing

on the sheet of the bed.

Her eyes were ﬁlled with black furies.

Banshees howled as we tangled.

Mexican gods danced across the walls.

It went like that every night.

“You so beeg baby!” She’d moan,

wildly. I ﬁnally ﬁgured out, she only

howled that on pay day.

She dumped me when I got canned.

A KISS IS STILL A KISS

I caress the slender neck,

cup

palm

around

the

voluptuous

bottom,

breathless,

young

groom

his

honeymoon,

the

star

crossed

lover

who

magically

chances

upon

his

yearned

for

other,

eyes

closed,

heart

racing,

soul

braced

anticipation

the

coming

moment

tighten

embrace,

press

lips

the

mouth

the

bottle,

tilt

head

and

swallow.

DEEP FREEZE

Zero cold, the night black, and white with snow;

love like a crushed rose in his back pocket,

another bounced check for his empty wallet.

Tanner sits in the corner of the crowded bar at

a small table near the front door, where the frozen

night waits to greet him again to rub it in, and

steadily bolts the poison down, round after

round. “What don’t kill you will cure you.”

He remembers the folk remedy for tragedy. But

he’s dead already. Her kiss of death pressing

his lips to say goodbye is when he died.

“Never again, now you’re a dream,

never your eyes longing for me.”

Some crooner on the jukebox sings a soft lament

to serenade his ghost existence, and Tanner closes

his eyes and leans over her one last time in his mind,

searching her features, tasting her breath, feeling her

quiver beneath him as he eases inside her and sighs.

“Never your heart beating with

mine, never your touch deep in the night …”

Unrelenting the song drives the nails in his cofﬁn

with words as black and white as the deadly night.

“Never your smile, never your kiss,

never your tender embrace …”

while bright chatter and laughter echo all around

him and he drinks himself into oblivion.

HOCUS POCUS

Now you see

him, now you

don’t. Connie

said to herself

as she slipped

out of her robe

– Mr. Master of

the Vanishing

Act.

Watch the rat pull a

rabbit out of his hat!

leaving her with an

illusion that she

couldn’t

comprehend or

grasp!

The bastard was an escape artist –

from responsibility,

commitment, from

any domestic

involvement, from

realities of every

kind, especially if

they involved the ties

that bind.

Intimacy was not up

his sleeve. Connie

reﬂected as she

slipped into her dress.

Love was not included

in his bag of tricks.

It was one night stands f

or him not wedding

bands. He’d come

around, now and then,

to drop his pants.

Houdini with a hard-on?

“Derrick’s a prick, and

I’m sick of it.” Connie

said to herself, as she

studied her hair in the

mirror wondering about

the color. “It’s cock-tail

for the guys, and cock-

tale

for the gals.”

The slob said at

Bennigan’s last

week, lifting his

glass and leering at

everyone. His

magic wand had

one trick. He was

only concerned

about enjoying it.

He was all hocus

pocus, Connie

mused, as she

sprayed on some

perfume, all

smiles and jive. Derrick the prestidigitator.

Derrick the magician with the magical

erection.

She’d like to cut him in half. Both ends

were useless. She looked at the clock. He

was on his way. She better put on her

makeup.

TWILIGHT

Dusk, lust,

between soft shadows

love awakens,

’

Inside your tunnel of love

we plummet along a Ghost Train’s

meanderings.

The

both of

us are

spirits in

this

rushing blacknes

ﬁ

and exploding

and measureless,

the two of us

blazing and breathless.

SWEET NOTHINGS

Fragile as a ﬁgurine, her husky voice is always startling – a whisper chamber with no secrets to keep. Her life and times

are there for all to see – too many cigarettes, too many Jim Beams, too many lovers, hard times, dead ends, lost dreams, same as me. “What?” She rasps as I sip my drink, looking up from her own which she’s been contemplating.

“Nothing.” I grumble and stare at the gin joint’s TV, momentarily jostled from my reverie.

Same page, as always, different books. No big thing. We know

what we mean.

HAUNTED

From night to day to night

again the clock’s hands

grasp illusions. Love

knows nothing of time.

Love knows passion, fever, reaching

for someone to hold onto

forever. Like a sorceress, or

prankster witch, you left your

memory in the dark to haunt me

each night when I turn out the

lights. I sleep with ghosts,

dream of you, wake up with

shadows.

What went wrong? Who’s to

blame? Why does love fade

away, when hand in hand

through good and bad, side by

side through thick and thin,

sharing laughter, joy and pain,

one day you wake up from a

dream and all you were died that

day?

VALENTINE RHYM

Another dandy day in the good ole USA. In every look an angry glare, on every mouth a smirk or sneer, behind every smile a hidden jeer. Like coming and going under machine gun ﬁre through ﬁelds of barbed wire.

Now at dinner I have a holy hunger, And I’m sure you do to, for some angel to sit at my table and transport me from life’s nightmare.

Isn’t that what mates are for? You and me, babe, me and you.

AS THE WORLD

TURNS

If you could

record

everything

that is

happening

everywhere at

any given

moment and

fed this

information

into a

computer, you

could predict

the next one

and its

consequence

and so on:

how, when,

where, why,

Frankie killed

Johnny, or

Sluggo kissed

Nancy, or

Albert

decided to

square energy

instead of

money.

But you can’t, so you leave the choice

of your

life and life’s mate to fate.

In the corner of

my eye, I catch

her glaring at me

as we watch TV

– if looks could

kill! She shifts

her gaze when I

glance her way,

pretending

I’m not there,

nor is she, her f

ace ﬁlled with

loathing. The

world does turn

doesn’t it: from

undying love to

love deceased,

only the corpses

have to live

together at the

scene of the

murder – it’s

their just

punishment for

killing each

other. “You

want a

divorce?” I ask

her.

We both know

the answer. We h

ave pondered it

enough, s

eparately and

together.

“Has the ink dried?” Her eyes ﬂicker.

“On which

document,” I humor

her, “the marriage

certiﬁcate, baby’s birth

record, mortgage

agreement, home and

health insurance, car

installments, loan

advances?”

The world does

turn and we t

oss around in

it like ﬂip-

ﬂopping

clothes in a

washing machine: his,

hers, ours, all

jumbled

together

forever and

ever.

Has the ink dried? Has the sky fallen? Has the

Messiah arrived?

Half time, game tied, I head for the fridge, grab a

couple of beers, chips too, gives us something to do.

THE SORROWS OF

YOUNG WURTHER

They

dream of

hard

bodies,

slow

dances,

sun-

tanning

by the

sea, but

not of me.

They live for satin dresses,

soft caresses,

magical

romances,

and all the

inexpressible

thoughts that

make their

lives a

mystery, but

not with me.

They speak

with animation

to each other,

smiling and

laughing about

unfathomable

inscrutabilities,

tossing their

hair with

cosmic savoir

faire, a joy too

see; or they

speak quietly,

serenely,

clandestinely,

secretively, but not

to me.

They party, date,

love, hate,

celebrate, feel

agony or ecstasy,

fulﬁllment or

disillusionment, but

not in any way,

or sense that

involves or

includes me. I’m

not griping, or

squawking. I’m

just waiting to

become a teen,

and then we’ll

see who’ll they’ll

moon over endlessly.

GIFT WRAPPED

Things tied with strings, or wrapped

with ribbons, my life, until the package

unraveled.

I married a dark eyed girl, raised some

children. I lavished them in all the

nine-to-ﬁve amenities my blood, sweat

and tears could bring them – we were broke a lot to sum it up, never broken.

Love, marriage, the baby carriage, OK

by me, both of us – our blue heaven shopping

at the seven-eleven. Anything beyond that

either ﬂat left us or left us ﬂat. We were

OK with that.

The great mysteries, God, existence, destiny,

were moonbeams lighting our home and

we left them alone content with the glow

they added to life in their own opaque

way. Now the man who lives here isn’t

there,

not in his head or bed, upon the stair or

anywhere. The dark eyed girl is gone, maybe

to heaven, away from our blue one. Life

lingers on, she lingers on, some, in the

presence of the children whenever

I see them, which isn’t very often.

HAIL MARY PASS?

Whirling and

twirling through the

smoke ﬁlled room,

McSweeny’s “Irish

Colleen” costumed

barmaids careen

around the tables

with frothy trays of

beer. The Steelers

are winning.

McSweeny’s

patrons are roaring.

The jukebox is

playing Irish ballads

everyone but me is

ignoring.

With a body so

light, slight,

cloudlike, Heather

ﬂoats through the

uproar balancing a

fresh load of

foaming mugs on

her shoulder. Her

eyes sparkle and

her smile shines as

she circles and

spirals around the

rowdy mob of

guys, like an angel

from heaven

pirouetting on the

wind.

I sit sipping

sadness, locked

in solemn

stillness, frozen

in shyness, as I

watch her and

wonder if today

is the day I make

my play? While

the love songs

on the jukebox

hit their lethal

mark, shooting

arrows through

my heart.

ROYAL WEDDING

We could have been beautiful,

like Bogey and Bacall, Gable and

Lombard, Jackie and John.

We could have been magic, instead

of tragic – the stuff of legend

passed on to future generations.

We could have been wondrous.

We could have known happiness,

two star struck lovers made for

each other. You were a ﬁgure of

splendor, a princess in your wedding

gown. I wore my smile like a crown.

Life was a cake walk. We were the

confectionary ﬁgures smiling at the

top. We could have been grand.

But then life happened.

“BRIDE’S HEAD”

“It’s the jitters.” Dori told Sarah, as she wrapped her hair in curlers.

“Every bride gets them.”

Sarah sat dazed in the salon chair, still shaken from her nightmare. The dream had been so real. In it Mark, her ﬁancée, had been trying to smother her. When she ﬁnally managed to pull herself out of his grasp, twisting and struggling with her blankets, her head was in such a fog that she had to grope her way across the bedroom and study her reﬂection in the dresser’s mirror to see if she was really there. The shower did little to wash away the night of horrors. Her body actually hurt, as though she had, in fact, been wrestling for her life with Mark. She called off work and after a breakfast she couldn’t stomach, staring at the TV with its morning chatter and breaking disasters, she called the beauty salon to get redone.

“Remember that runaway bride on the news?” Dori mused. “Whatever happened with that? I lost track. Never mind. I’m just saying doubts, fears, second thoughts – every bride has them. And the horriﬁc dreams don’t disappear just because prince charming puts a ring on your ﬁnger. I’ll have a dream about Tony cheating on me and I won’t talk to him all day. At least not ‘til he makes up to me in a big way. Dreams are crazy. I just did a woman’s hair who had a nightmare about being dead. Bad enough you think? But no. The bad part was that she was too fat to lie down in her cofﬁn – so she had to stand there while everyone at her wake laughed at her!”

“Is she that fat?”

“Poor dear, she could hardly squeeze into the chair.”

“So there was truth to it,” Sarah reﬂected, “her subconscious telling her to go on a diet and throwing death in as a warning to get her going? Forget the perm Dori. We’ll do something different today.”

“But I thought Mark liked it that way?”

“He does. But we’re going to make a change. Mark’s a bit too conservative. Die it red. Make it zany. I suddenly want to look wild and crazy.”

THE GUILTY

The room is like a cofﬁn, sleep a death-dream of childhood delirium, sweating, tossing, running, hiding … “Come in from the night.”

A voice says from behind a door the kid has never seen before. It’s a trap door and the kid will hear many more voices that beckon him over the years from the ghetto’s prison.

While outside the sounds of the dead zone abound: sirens, gunshots, screams of terror, howls

of despair.

“Come in from the night.” The voice will say again. “Never Never” is always the ghetto’s answer: because it is only the wind, he will learn, mocking him.

WANT

Want is need. Want is greed.

Want is poor. Want wants more.

Want is the wolf howling at the door,

the treasure hidden beneath the ﬂoor.

Who do we admire, the ﬂy or the

spider? What is desire?

What lifts us higher?

What makes us suffer?

A drop of blood,

a glass of wine,

on Sabbath Day,

we worship the

Divine.

LOCKED OUT

’

ill

I’ll

ﬁ

I’

isn’t there anymore?

SACRED RITES

I go to church everyday,

but I never pray.

I go maintain the illusion that

God

sits on a throne in the heavens.

I go for the solace.

This holy ediﬁce is a fortress.

This holy ediﬁce is wondrous,

with it’s domes and towers

and spires and steeples and

sacred chambers that make

you feel sheltered

from that black abyss

of nothingness.

ORDERS FROM

HEADQUARTERS

Do not enter the All-Nite diner in your torn Field Jacket and rumpled trousers. They complained again. They’ve reached their end.

Do not parade down the promenade or loaf in the Town Square dressed like a beggar. You are an eyesore. Our community won’t accept it anymore. Do not bother the citizens with your nonsensical blather, mooch cigarettes, cage change, act deranged.

So you were born here – we all were. That doesn’t give you the license to act weird.

You went to war. Many of us did, too. We didn’t come back like you.

At the edge of town is where bums belong. Stay there, and remember, today I’m talking to you like a friend.

Next time the Law side of me steps in.

FALLEN SOLDIERS

The homeless vet bums a cigarette, as he leaves the public library, wondering, while he smokes it and enjoys the small comforting glow of the burning tobacco, where he’ll go next, to survive the blistering cold of Chicago.

Death like a bullet shot from a gun, is coming for him, and everyone, jobless, rooﬂess, hopeless – thousands just like him in every city. His comrades in arms, now missing in action, abandoned by their country. Dead on the sidewalk, dead in the alley, dead on the asphalt – the vet knows death. He’s seen enough of it. .

The night is a war zone.

You survive or you don’t.

PARADISE FOUND

It is cold in the ghetto.

Night winds rattle

our garret windows,

and the grim world

below moans its

apocalyptic death

throes.

As in a dark cave,

lips pressed

together,

spellbound as sleepwalkers,

hearts beating faster,

rain pounding down,

arms holding each

other, bodies merging

together, under the

covers,

we devour each other,

two hungry lovers.

Tomorrow it will snow,

white veils, like angel’s

feathers, descending

on our ghetto,

transforming our gritty

streets, and tumble down

tenements, into fairyland

enchantments, as crystal

castles

and other fairy tale marvels,

replace our ramshackle hovels.

We’ll fashion angels in the

snow, as holy spirits dance

around us in the drifts, swirl

and pirouette,

and shapes of mystic whiteness,

give a brief glimpse of heaven to our slum

which we all will cherish,

which soon will perish.

CROSSED

Star or Double –

that’s what it’s come to,

at least here in America,

where the disparity between the haves

and the have-nots

gets bigger every year.

The rich grab everything.

The middle class take the rest.

The poor get what’s left,

next to nothing at best.

In Canada, Scandinavia, Europe, the Netherlands, Israel, parts of Latin America and Asia, all the socially minded democracies, things are better. In these countries the middle class is growing not shrinking. Half of this country is living in or near poverty.

Most of the rest are waiting to join them, due to outsourcing, automation, shrinking paychecks, jobs with no beneﬁts, computerization, dirty politics, the one percent, and then some, not

paying their fair share of the tax burdens.

I got mine. They got theirs. Go get yours. Vote. Vote smart, for yourself, your families, your interests, every time, and you’ll survive. Actually, you’ll thrive.

BLIND ALLEY

The Uptown police jumped t

he gun. That’s understandable

in a slum where most

every dwelling looks

like a crime scene and

every male inhabitant a

perpetrator of some

kind. It wouldn’t have

happened if I resided in

the Gold Coast –

the arrest, the

incarceration, the

charge of suspicion,

not for just walking

down the street. Of

course I’d be dressed

better there and there

wouldn’t have been

the murder.

“So how do you want to plead?” The public defender yawned at me. “Not guilty?”

“Okay.”

“I mean there’s no prints, or weapon or witness or forensic stuff. There can’t be.”

“You found the body.”

“The body found me. I tripped over it in the alley.”

“But you didn’t call the police.”

“I ﬁgured they would ﬁnd it without my help.”

“But Wong Foo saw you when he was closing up his shop.” “Saw me what? Walk out of the alley? So what?”

“And there’s the alibi for the time of the crime. You don’t have one.”

“I was sleeping. I woke up and went out for cigarettes.”

“Which you never bought.”

“Hell no. After I tripped over the body I went back home.”

“Not guilty. Okay. Let’s do the arraignment.”

He yawned again. “Can you make bail?”

“I’m dead broke.”

“I’ll ask the judge to release you on your own recognizance.”

He chuckled and gave me a soft punch.

BOMBED

Winter moon, round and bright,

lonely night … Blake drifts between

death and dream, searches for

meaning in shots of whiskey, down l

ost lanes, seedy back streets.

It might have been that roadside

bomb, in Iraq, that did him in,

body parts strewn around –

not his, close, but not that time, nor

any other. Blake’s shell from hell is

invisible, like his internal wounds

which will not heal.

It might have been their love

gone wrong, him gone wrong,

and so she’s gone.

It might have been those bitter

ends to whatever began, or shall,

because that thrill the song says

you’re supposed to ﬁnd on

Blueberry Hill ain’t worth a dime

once you’ve lost your will to

accept and not regret the way of

the world.

It might have been, it should

have been, it could have been, it

is what it is and always has

been, will be, world without

end, ﬁlled with lunacy, death,

destruction.

“I found my thrill through liquor

and pills, along dead end gin

mills.” Blake sings to himself.

What else? Why else? Where

else? God can we save o

urselves?

Winter moon, round and bright, lonely night …

STILL WATER

“Hear me, boy and understand.” My father said when my mother died. I was ten. “I will do what I can, at least to keep you from being an orphan. I will remain. You won’t be alone. Take comfort in that. But you are on your own.”

We lived in a shack in back of the tracks.

He drilled water wells with his partner, Slim, for the haphazard housing developments that scattered the landscape back then, popping up at random across cheap, scrub land only the poor would call home and be willing to live on. He had all the equipment loaded on his rusted truck. A dying trade, they traveled a lot, from county to county, keeping one step ahead of city water and other amenities, like sewage, sanitation, the sprawl of civilization.

Didn’t see much of them – living wild and crazy I imagine, drinking, gambling, whoring, ﬁghting.

They stopped by now and then, left me some cash and took off again. I could fend for myself. That was never a problem.

Then they disappeared altogether when I was a teenager, probably following their dying trade to the land of never never where they could stay wild forever. Looking for adventure around every corner, what most any man would go for. That’s always a temptation: live free or die trying. The call of the wild. The roar of the lion.

They say if you stare hard enough at any critter, monkey, dog, turtle, whatever, you’ll start to see a human face in there somewhere. I guess you might say the same about Slim and my dad. Me too, even though they got these bars in between me and you.

SHERRY

Cold morning, still raining,

I park my car, run for the door.

My brother found her, dead from

an over dose.

Good night Sherry. I guess she

went peacefully.

Her face has an aura of serenity.

I was stocking the bar at Flanagan’s

when the call came in.

I still managed to beat the ambulance.

Sherry didn’t belong to anyone.

She was just crashing with us,

another hanger on.

She crashed big time, this time.

Sweet dreams, Sherry.

“We clean”

I ask my brother.

The ambulance guys have just

arrived.

D.O.A, D.O.D.

“I moved everything.”

Not that the law would ever

come back to poke around into

this rat trap or Sherry’s doings.

She was just another junkie

ﬁnally out of their hair and out

of her own misery.

A LEG UP

Jim Beam, mary jane, cocaine, caffeine, nicotine, amphetamines, is what he lives on, if you can call it that, as he battles reality between disability checks, cheeks sunken, hands trembling, unshaven, the old vet who pushes his wheelchair up the Pleasant Dale shopping mall hill each day to beg change by the grand entrance, after he yanks off his prosthetic leg and props it against his shoulder like the automatic riﬂe he once carried as a young inducted soldier through the jungles

of ‘Nam, amidst ﬂying bullets and exploding bombs and blazing napalm, fallen bodies all around, “a leg up, a leg up,” he croaks in a monotone, face expressionless, until the mall manager rushes out and drops a twenty in the helmet the old vet sets upturned on his lap – not out of kindness, more like pest control, because as soon as he performs this daily tribute to the troops the old vet goes. “Shop ‘till you drop!”

Is the battle cry of the mall patrons. “Fade away for Christ’s sake old soldier!” The mall manager prays each day.

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT

She lies naked on clammy sheets,

stomach swollen, and stares at the

ceiling, sweating. Her name is Corina

and she’s almost ﬁfteen. She knows

hunger in a lean world, meanness and

sadness. She knows love and passion.

She’s learned they are not lasting.

She feels abortion is murder. No

preacher had to tell her, and while

that could be an answer it’s how you

feel that matters. She knows she was

a sinner. Not because of what the

bible says but because of the kind of

man she foolishly let embrace her. She

knows she’s not going to pretend

she’ll never do it again, because

without that little bit of love life is a

lonely dead end. She knows there’s

a little bit of love growing inside her

and that’s the cause of all the groans

and moans that come from her mouth

despite her. She knows she’ll have to

learn how to care for it. Someday it

will call her mother and that little bit

of love is all she has to sustain her.

A WAY YOU’LL NEVER BE

My head was in a fog, stayed in a fog, for a long, long time. I would see myself staring at myself from across the room. I would then walk away in someone else’s body: a doctor or nurse or orderly.

I’d have to snatch myself back into my own reality.

I spent months with echoing voices, lights too bright, shifting shapes and shadows.

My dreams were like acid trips, vivid, unreal, super real, 3-D extravaganzas in Cinemascope and Technicolor featuring chaos and disorder.

I dreaded sleep and the nightmares that might follow.

I was in between dimensions, upside down, demented.

One night I had this dream about Tony and Judy’s wedding reception. They were getting married, soon. I was to be the “best man.” I’d be OK by then, out of the hospital, back home, on the mend.

In my dream everyone was wearing black. Judy’s wedding dress was black. The bride’s maids dresses were black. Even the wedding cake was black. No one was dancing at the reception. Everyone was standing around not saying anything.

The next day I learned that Tony got killed in a car accident, along with Jack, another friend.

So instead of a wedding there was a funeral.

I had the ability to see what was coming, for some reason, after my own near death and coma.

When you know what’s coming, life isn’t worth living.

The mystery is gone, all the magic, wonder, that surprise around the corner.

Most of the surprises in my neighborhood were bad ones anyway. I had to live them twice – in the caverns of my mind and then again in real time.

“STILL LIFE WITH DEATH”

Artists live where all dreams end. Truth, Illusion are a dance of apparitions. You try to capture them. Smoke and mirrors are what you usually get – but sometimes life’s magic.

The blackened windows of the Chinatown streets are ﬁlled with plucked ducks hanging by their necks. Philly has seen better days. So has every city in the USA. Fortune Cookie Avenue ran out of lucky sayings.

Homeless in doorways, or asleep in alleys, huddled under cardboard, or shivering in the moonbeams … as dreams of glass shatter across the shimmering cities, making towers tremble and angels tumble like the ashes from a modern Dante’s Inferno. The moon is American: our baseball in the heavens. But the game has been lost, the stadium in pandemonium.

In my rundown tenement, where empty pockets don’t feed the family or pay the rent, we all wait for some miracle which is heaven sent. One bad day we all say. Tomorrow will bring another one. They go on and on.

Five ﬂights of steps to my ghetto garret, where I can see the moon round and bright, tonight, above the urban blight, shining like a tower guard’s spotlight on the prisoners below, huddled in their hovels, or tossing in the shadows, or cooking scraps for their families on leaky gas stoves. A China moon to inspire me to paint the magic of humanity, somewhere down there, hidden in the misery. Not so easy after my noon until midnight bartending gig at Hoo doo where crime meets voo doo.

Champagne sells cocaine … Tequila in a Tumbler, mary jane … a shot of Jack with a Becks back, crack … B&B in a snifter, young men… White Wine in a stem glass, women … Mint Juleps, hot gems … Amaretto on the Rocks, Armageddon. Each of my regulars, in the dive I bartend, holds a ticket to some bliss in a tight, gloved ﬁst. What they drink tells the shadows that drift in, now and then, the Joe sent me code

– “buy you another one of those?” for whatever treat they want from whatever trick they need to deal with. Which is none of my business. I just pour. Not by choice but to make a living, as the shadows come and go, and the clock ticks, and I count the minutes, and count my tips, and count the seconds until I can get back to my studio and make some art, as the days come and go.

In this bright room where ghosts walk and phantoms stalk and nightmares bloom and madness looms and angels cry and all dreams die, I paint lost souls as church bells toll on the hour, day and night, amidst the endless rows of urban blight. Gunﬁre crackles as I sit at my easel. Sirens wail. I shiver and inhale another cofﬁn nail, as the wind howls and my canvas ﬁlls with midnight exiles abandoned by the world, huddled in doorways, or asleep in alleys, or trapped in rundown tenements, in the grottos of the ghettos. Truth or beauty, what is an artist’s duty? I wonder each night as I turn on the lights: Christmas cards or human graveyards? I think of my favorite painters, Goya, Van Gogh, Hopper, Goleb, Bacon, and then of course there are those galleries in every museum where wild ﬂowers and butterﬂies dance on walls under sunny skies – Matisse, Miro, Calder, Mondrian, Chagall and all the heaven on earth Impressionists with those sweet colors and dreamy ﬁgures making a harmonious symphony of life in their dream of living: Monet, Renoir, Degas at least with his ballerinas. Some artists can take you to La La land, where life is beautiful and everything is grand. I never was quite sure where they were coming from. No place I’ve been. But more power to them. We all need to take a look through rose colored glasses now and then. In this bright room I paint what I see, Reality.

Sometimes that can be as surreal as any dream, such as the painting I’m working on now which I’m trying to capture from a memory. When I was a student in Boston, the newscasts featured the tragic story of a young, and very beautiful, African American woman who fell four ﬂights to her death when a ﬁre escape, on which she was hanging clothes, collapsed. She was wearing a white summer dress. The dress billowed as she tumbled, toppling head over heels in her freefall, arms outstretched. There were photographs of this. A photographer was passing. He heard her scream as the bolts of the ﬁre escape cracked and the platform snapped. “I put it on automatic.” He told the tabloid in which the pictures ﬁrst appeared. “And the camera captured it all.” Not all – nothing about her hard life in the slums, negligent landlord, corrupt city ofﬁcials, orphaned children, indifferent citizens. The page was turned; the commercial messages followed; we shivered and forget the nightmarish images; life went on. Not the same way for me as for most of the rest of the viewers who witnessed her tragedy. I was a poor student living in that slum a block away from the ﬁre escape that collapsed. I passed it everyday. I became a poor artist when I graduated. Is there any other kind? Not to any statistical signiﬁcance percentage-wise. I was destined to live in slums the rest of my life, that is if I stuck with it, made it my total focus. But why wouldn’t I? Isn’t that why I studied it? So, I know why I’m here. I chose it. But what about my neighbors? It chose them, through whatever unfortunate circumstances befell them. Since I chose it I deserve it and knowing as much can handle it. They didn’t and they can’t. Especially the children, all orphans in a storm they were abandoned to before they were born.

Something is happening down the block. There are shouts, curses in the distance. Crushing out my cigarette, I slowly get up and go to the window to take a look. The building could be on ﬁre, for all I know, just my luck. Peering through the pre-dawn darkness, I see ﬁgures merging, mingling, swarming together, like the riot of colors in an action painting, swirling, dazzling. There are cries, screeches, both desperate and menacing. Women are ﬂeeing, kids scrambling, old folks quickly shufﬂing out of a mad dream scene, which was slowly changing and rearranging from Pollock to Goya – characters captured in ﬂickering light and shadow, dramatic, chaotic. Gunﬁre crackles; screams echo, as arms wave and bodies tangle. There is a fresh wailing of sirens, ﬁrst faint, then piercing, as ﬂashing lights rake the lower ﬂoors in the blackness below and squad cars whoosh past. Another ghetto masterpiece, improvised before my eyes, “Still Life With Death” or maybe “Mourning In America” once you added the blazing sun, which was about to rise and illuminate the bloody bodies outside.

I switch off the lights. Enough truth and beauty for one night.

THE FAT CAT WITH

THE CADILLAC

Silk suit and satin shirt, alligator

shoes, diamond rings and cufﬂinks,

the works, the fat cat struts up our

sidewalk, a black, sweet scented

cigarillo between his lips, and gives us

a sniffy look as

he ascends the broken steps of our

stoop, stepping gingerly around us as

we chill in our little group, watching the

sun

descend over the tumble down tenements,

as if we were so much pigeon poop.

After a moment inside, he descends

with the sensuous Maria on his arm,

long raven hair and dark, unfathomable

eyes. The scent of her seductive

enchantment, as always, raising among

us adolescent erections and dreams

of vast fortunes, ravishing women, which,

we all know, is unlikely to happen.

REMEMBER WHEN

we drank and danced and I

held you in my arms and the

sky was ﬁlled with shooting

stars and the band played

magic melodies and we fell

in love in the garden of delight

under the moonlight?

“Time in a Bottle” was one of

the tunes the band played

that night.

Time in a bottle …

Now another white haze,

another lost day, and I sign

my name to another blank page

in the story of my life. While the

shadow of you shadows me,

down every lost lane, into every

blind alley and I stagger through

my delirium of drunken oblivion.

HEAT WAVE

The redhead in the hot pink dress sears the brain, scorches the ﬂesh. She has no need for tenderness, a soft touch, gentle caress. She’s not looking for a haven in which to nest. Heat and ﬂame is what she waves, whirling around the dance ﬂoor like a wild blaze.

Willard’s ﬁngers curl into tortured ﬁsts as he watches her ﬂash her ﬂesh, siren eyes, dare you smiles; and

he imagines their thighs brushing together if ever they were to slow dance with each other. Being short and stout, bald on top, as regards this romance, Willard may be asking a lot.

SNOW MAN

No heat in my ﬂop, I bundle up and go out

into the Hawk. That’s what we call winter here,

our name for the predator. Falling snow, deadly

icicles, drifts like grave mounds, shifting with the raw

winds. Teeth chattering, old bones shivering, I trudge

through the shrouds that blanket the ground. I know a

bar

that’s open ‘til four. It isn’t far. I’ll hole up

there. I’ll be half passed out when they call last

round and throw me out. The cold won’t

matter.

CUT

Drugs, sex, into the vortex, as the spinning

world wobbles on its axis, each day a no

show swallowed by a black hole.

A woman came up to me at a party. She

told me she regretted ever having met me.

She told me I was one of those ﬂings not

worth remembering, not worth repeating,

not worth experiencing.

Pity. Pretty

face. Nice

ﬁgure. I

was just

about to hit

on her.

Been there, done that, no sequel, prequel, remake, just

another unwatchable collection of outtakes.

Love is a ﬁlm shot in a foreign language, with

blocked off bits

of dialogue written under the action containing

totally inaccurate and inept translations.

One of the challenges of real time lights, camera,

action.

THE HOUSE OF BLUES

Where there’s plenty of bad news,

which the lost girl at the honky

tonk piano wails about, tearing

your heart out, as she sings her tales

of a cold and heartless world,

amidst the drunken toasts, smary jokes,

cigarette smoke, asking what can you do

when no one follows the Golden Rule?

Or where can you go when you’re down

and there’s no way out? Or when will true

love conquer all? Is there any love in the

world at all?

You sit, drink, try not to think. But the lost

girl is like the shadow you thought you erased

when you slipped into this dark place,

crying out to your soul, about everything

you needed to escape and don’t want to know.

TAILSPIN

Rag and bone, the fallen Angel, vibrant once with tenacity and talent – playing the guitar and singing like

a bird, for hours on end, with all the classy combos, up and down el Camino mambo – until the trill inside him became a rattle, and not only in his throat but in his brain as well; and his magic hands turned into rubber bands, from all the drugs he shot through his marimba throbbing veins. Now it’s wine he craves.

It’s all he can afford from the small change he manages to cage, mostly from his former fans and few remaining friends.

Sometimes in the night you hear a cry outside, as from a lost child, and you look out the window to see him picking through the garbage for survival – the song bird with the magic hands and golden wings, who ﬂew like an angel over an enchanted land.

THE LEGS OF A WOMAN

Past midnight — time to make the

dark right. Billy’s will be closing

soon and then it’s me and my

bottle in a lonely room.

The legs of a woman, whose face

I can’t see because of the crowd

blocking my view, rivet me,

dallying, crisscrossing, like a

hypnotist’s chain-watch swinging,

shapely, silky, like satin, like heaven.

“Buying a drink for the lady on the

other side of these guys.” I tell Billy,

as I slide more money across

the counter at him. I shift, stretch, but

I still can’t catch her reﬂection in

the mirror from my angle of the bar. “

Are you sure?” Billy glances over.

Am I sure? The legs of a woman,

the arms of a woman, wrapped

around me, tight, all through the

night. The heart of a woman beating

next to me. “Shouldn’t I be?”

Billy shakes his head and then I see

my ex-wife glaring at me.

The legs of a woman can be deadly.

HEAVEN CAN WAIT

Lips, teeth, a silky tongue get it going, a tangle of arms and legs and that sweet spot in between keeps it rolling.

It’s what’s up front that counts and what’s behind to pillow the mount. In ﬁve minutes I’m cleaned

out! I mean my money too!

The Las Vegas ladies are a pricey screw. Slam, bam, thank you ma’am. But the momentary howling is what saves you from an asylum.

What happens in Vegas stays there and that means your dough. The gambling racket doesn’t hack it, never did or will.

So?

Maybe I should shoot a bullet through my brain to cure the fever? You can’t keep hoping for that hard eight forever. Except you can’t beat it when you hit it, the “Jackpot,” and every now and then you get it.

Think of Rocky jumping up and down on the Philly museum steps. Think of Churchill’s WWII proclamation: “Never give up!” On luck, in this case, when it comes. It’s better than anything, better than heaven! Heaven can wait, while

I roll those sevens and elevens and test my fate – in between, of course, the snake eyes and high-maintenance Sin City thighs.

THE MOST WONDERFUL

TIME OF THE YEAR

Steak and ale at a table by the window. A slice of apple pie will most assuredly follow. I try not to drool, as I stand shivering outside O’Tool’s and watch the dapper diner devour his meal.

Beyond my plump friend, young people laugh and chatter and raise frothy beer mugs into the air, smiling from ear to ear. Christmas cheer. The pub is resplendent with yuletide merriment – wreaths, candy canes, strings of lights cover everything from ﬂoor to ceiling. In the corner a popcorn encircled pine tree glitters.

I ponder the dollar in my hand, just given to me by a good Samaritan. Along with the panhandled change bulging in my pocket I could join the festivities for a few beers at the bar, eat some pretzels, listen to jukebox Christmas carols.

That would be jolly. Or I could buy a pint of cheap rye down the street, curl up in an alley, visit the ghosts of Christmas past as I nod off to sleep.

Whichever. Cheers

OUT OF THE PAST

Dark circles under bloodshot eyes,

creases running down the sides of

her mouth, face as pale as any

inmate in jail, those cascades of

golden hair that made men stop

and stare, tangled, unkempt. She

looked burned out, spent.

“Lorraine,” I almost whispered.

Sensing me, maybe, she looked up

from her drink, saw my reﬂection

sitting beside hers in the barroom

mirror just like old times. She didn’t

blink.

I swallowed hard at the coincidence

And then she closed her eyes. This

blast from the past couldn’t last. She

must have been thinking. It was a trick

of the eye, some other guy.

When she opened them I was gone.

I left a ﬁfty next to her whiskey.

I had to pay for my own drunk when

she split on me.

Those cascades of golden hair which

made men stop and stare.

Too hard, too soft, too hot, too

cold, nothing was ever quite right

for her. Goldilocks we really

rocked. I’m out of here. I wish you

luck.

COUNT DOWN

You get the goods in rundown neighborhoods. Cruise around. When you see the extraterrestrials moon walking in circles, you know you’re on the right block and it’s time to blast off. The space station is just around the corner – park, knock, shoot through the wormhole into the black hole of cosmic limbo. Sex, drugs, rock and roll – it’s all there, set in the wild and crazy bar scene from Star Wars. What more can you ask for?

Everywhere the air quickly disappears.

The sky falls and the world howls as the stars explode and reality dissolves.

Next day, after the aliens which invaded your brain have found another space cadet to drive insane; and the bawdy house bugs which followed you home and drank half your blood, have disappeared under the rug; and you sit wallowing in self pity because your body feels like a laser blasted city; you can revel in

the replay of your interstellar journey and plan another midnight ﬂight through the backstreets, warp speed.

HUSTLE

Head down, holding

his breath, treating

each shot from his

pool stick with the

same laser focus he

did with his riﬂe in

‘Nam, Farrow cleans

out the house, like a

burglar

ghosting in and out, now

you see your money now

you don’t. Hustling pool

is not a contest. The

objective is not to win,

that’s a given, but to

avoid getting caught as

you pick your opponents

pocket.

Sniper eyes and steady

hands, scores to settle

with his fellow man for

starting some stupid war

and drafting him,

Farrow began his career as a hustler

in the USOs and compound

Time was a pool shooter

could make money on e

very corner. Every town

had a pool hall. Every bar

had a table. There were

gambling houses, down

every back street, two bit

casinos.

Now the action, or what

there was of it, was in dead-

end gin mills or honky tonk

joints on rural roads – just the

place at sixty-eight to get

your throat cut or your

thumbs broke.

Farrow sat at the bar

nursing his beer and

weighing the dangers of

the pool game in the corner

and the challenge, if any,

from its players.

“If you were young you’d

have to begin all over again

at some other con.” Farrow

told himself.

He guessed he’d had a good run.

He’d hustle a few bills from those

truckers before the night

A blonde and a red head,

both scantily clad, sat on

chairs atop the bar at

either side of the mirror,

like bookends.

A brunette dressed the same

poured the drinks.

Every now and then, they rotated

places, just to keep things

interesting.

Every now and then, one or the other of them would

disappear with a customer in the back room.

Nice to know hustling was still going strong in some things.

INDIAN SUMMER

Top down, Stormy

beside me, blonde hair

tossed by the wind,

streets of amber, scarlet,

gold, leaves ﬂying,

whirling as we cruise

along, listening to the

radio and its top ten

songs. Each day

dazzling, the majesty of

autumn

gathering on the sidewalks,

rooftops, in the gutters,

down the gangways, ﬁlling

the alleyways, every nook

and cranny, with bushels of

color, turning our humble

town into a treasure chest

of splendor, which even Ali

Baba

and his forty thieves would

lustily desire. At night, the

harvest moon, shinning round

and bright like a theater’s

spotlight over a nocturnal

ballet of waving tree limbs and

dancing branches reaching for

the heavens.

It is a mystical moon,

beneath which, star-

crossed lovers, lost in the

spell

of its glow, chase life’s

dream down the lanes

of love through the

heart’s mysteries.

“NIGHT LIFE”

Night haunts, night spirits, slipping through moonlit rooms, down starlit stairways, past mystery doorways into dream chambers, where love potions splash on ice, and music plays magic melodies for sleepwalkers who dance in a trance, arms holding each other, eyes blazing with rapture, mouths pressed together, as they devour each other, before youth is over.

“Conﬁned in my cloud prison,

An invisible enchantress in an echo chamber sings on a CD played

in the posh nightclub through surround sound speakers.

“I watch a rainbow arch across the heavens.

The crowd encircles Solo as she drifts away from her partner and dances on her own, something she does each night at the stroke of midnight.

“Dreams shimmer through fate’s prism. The language of her body is a visual calligraphy, describing to every mesmerized yuppie, passion, love, mystery – the slants, angles, spirals, tangles, as her black eyes ﬂash and her raven hair sweeps in perfect circles.

“I fall through life’s crystal ball.”

Beauty is a commodity, Stiletto knows. Even amidst night life’s harem of glamorous, high-maintenance, lynx-eyed temptresses scanning the scene for Prince Charming, Solo took desirable to a new level. Why wouldn’t she? Solo was a breathtaking anomaly for the young titans of capitalism whose lives, however grand, tended to be as manufactured as the products they bought, sold, made or invented – a trophy wife not only for show and domestic enjoyment but for erotic and existential fulﬁllment. She was a breathtaking anomaly to him, as well, who had seen everything and had stories to tell.

“She would never dance away from me.” Stiletto brooded, as he stood like a night world shadow behind the bar in his fade to black Fab club designer uniform, satin shirt, silk slacks, jet black hair pulled back in a long, tight, braided snake down his back, his sculpted Aztec face with its high cheekbones and smooth skin, like a pre-Colombian bust in a museum, polishing cocktail glasses with the ﬂourish of a magician and waiting for the next drink order. They would dance together in rapture forever. Lips of ﬁre were pressed to his, at least in his imagination, as he watched her ﬂicker like a ﬂame across the dance ﬂoor, waving her lithe, Latina body in syncopation to the echoing songstress and the sensuous bongo rhythms. They were locked in ﬁre. He was breathing ﬂame. Their bodies burned as their passion blazed. Even their souls were an inferno.

“Life’s road is a scar, Stiletto,” she had said to him the ﬁrst time she sat at the bar and he introduced himself and asked for her drink order

– maybe his name had suggested the allusion? – “cut by a butcher. You can only cover it up with playa powder.” She had said this with a sigh, a shrug and ordered a bottle of Champagne, which Fab club served its glam guests in a silver bucket as shiny as Mercury. She was dressed in a stunning rainbow weave of fabric, with silver and gold threads lacing through it, rich and exotic. Her cosmic, black hole, midnight in the unknown eyes seemed to look through him, not at him, as she talked softly to him, from some far away reality which was completely beyond him. Heaven? Armageddon?

“God would never let life scar anyone as beautiful as you are.”

Stiletto had said, not gallantly but matter-of-factly, as he ﬁlled her glass with the sparkling French delicacy.

“The tears of life cloud everyone’s cup.” She took a sip. “Each day is a balloon which ﬂies away from us.”

An anomaly? No an unfathomable mystery. In their subsequent brief encounters at the bar, before some yuppie Lothario whisked her off to a table, his exchanges with her were equally inscrutable.

“This morning I saw a robin, Stiletto. It was building its nest with black ribbons of mourning. Do you think that was a warning?” Or: “When I was a little girl I would stare up into the dark and make wishes on the stars. I thought they would fulﬁll all my dreams. But now it seems the dark beyond those dreams is the real meaning of living. Somehow, since I was a little girl, something happened to the heavens.”

What was she doing with these commodity exchange zombies? The BP oil spill, the Great Recession – greed beyond comprehension. That gas pipeline they wanted to cross the country with from Canada, now there was a weapon of mass destruction. Could she ﬁnd, love, passion with men with minds like adding machines or scrabble board games. Hearts? Souls? They had traded them long ago. Aztec gods danced with her across the nightclubs walls. Like ﬁre on snow Stiletto saw her lying naked on their nuptial bed. “She would never dance away from me.” Stiletto brooded again. Stiletto was tall and lean and handsome. He looked exotic and women went for it. Over the years he had had more than his share of love affairs. He found most women were much the same. So were men. But Solo inhabited a planet of her own. You could see that by the way she danced. Solo had a soul. She would free herself of her partner and express the passions deep inside her, mysteries which whispered her name. “She would never dance away from me once she got to know me.”

But what did that mean, to know Stiletto? He was the son of illegal immigrants, Indians from a village in the mountains. They rode the Death Train across the Mexican plains when they were teens, hurtling

in wonder atop, inside and under the box cars. They settled in the San Joaquin valley. Stiletto was born in a shack, delivered by a midwife, his American birth duly recorded with a birth certiﬁcate. His citizenship was the harrowing journey’s purpose. His mother was “with child” on the Death Train. More than likely his parents had never married.

As a boy he worked along side his mother and father harvesting cotton, grapes, other crops. They travelled continually around the valley and lived in workers camps. His parents were caught and deported, complications with their green cards, when he was seven. Stiletto was left to be raised by the migrants.

When he was thirteen he and his friend Juan ran away to LA. There began a life for him in an urban underground, harsh years hiding with “illegals” in an underworld brotherhood, working low paying jobs and surviving brutal barrios. Stiletto was sharp. That’s how he got his nickname, not merely because he carried one for protection and let that be known.

He had another gift, beside citizenship, from his parents: he was handsome. His mother was as beautiful as Solo, his father a stunning man. He knew this from the photographs left to him. Stiletto caught on quickly in the restaurant business, moving from dish washer to chef’s helper to waiter and bartender and when he ﬁnally got his GED, after much self studying and struggle, manager. He came to Chicago two years ago when the owner of the restaurant he was managing in Hollywood asked him to help his son with his new Rush Street club, manage the bar, the Latino kitchen staff. Stiletto was rich – at least from the perspective of his humble prospects.

Stiletto saw Solo hiding in his shadow. One day she would see him in hers. That’s what love was. That’s what his parents had. He could see that in the photographs. That’s what sustained them on the Death Train, in the worker camps. Without that love one was dead.

“I’ll have a Gibson, Pedro, whenever you wake up from your dream world.” The Junk Bond King of Chicago was suddenly seated before him at the bar, blonde, blue-eyed, brash, young, younger than Stiletto, a baby faced billionaire, resplendent, as usual, in his designer glam-guy garb. He was staring past Stiletto into the mirror at Solo, his customary arrogant smirk twisting into a sneer as he studied her. “Dry, shaken, arctic cold,” he continued “and try to remember, Pancho, it’s garnished with onions not olives. Por favor.” Eyes riveted to the mystery in the mirror, who threatened with each movement to disappear, he ﬁngered a diamond cufﬂink as though to reassure himself that what he saw was really there and that he was a young master of the universe and if he chose he could own her.

“Me llamo Stiletto.” Stiletto placed the drink before him. This was a game with them, initiated by young titan who thought it was amusing. Someday, the wrong day, it would have a bad end.

“Stiletto? Isn’t that the heel of a woman’s shoe? Does that mean women walk all over you? Not very macho.”

“Stiletto is a blade señor. A weapon for Chicano Zorros. Call me Zorro if you like. One day, I will be happy to demonstrate.”

“Touché José.” The broker lifted his cocktail. “Who’s the spic chick?”

The song ended and Solo rejoined her partner at a candlelit table. Regge played and new couples ﬂickered in the multicolored light show. Stiletto searched out her silhouette and tried to fathom what kind of intimate conversation Solo and her latest beau could possibly be having. It must have been as hopeless as their syncopation when dancing. He supposed she just sat graciously and listened.

“You have already met the beautiful señorita.”

Stiletto let the insult go. Every restaurant would go broke if they didn’t regard their obnoxious customers as jokes. Fab was a deck ﬂush with them: a full house of jokers in every hand – Cobra ladies looking for young men, drug dealers, high priced hookers, sirens, doctors, lawyers, commanders of corporations, chiefs of nations, upscale bedlam.

“Yeah, we had our little moment. Not very illuminating. Fill me in.”

Last week the Junk Bond King had discovered Solo at the bar and

immediately sat down next to her.

“Hola Chiquita. Mind if I take this seata?” He set down his laptop and settled in. “Rough day in the trade but I made a killing. Do you think it’s nice in Nice? I’m thinking about traveling”

Solo turned slowly and said to him thoughtfully: “We see death’s door at the end of every corridor. Before we go through that one we should open as many of the others we can.”

“How about I open yours?”

“I’m never there.”

“Where are you?”

“I am never anywhere.”

She said this after deep reﬂection and seemed to be surprised by her

own situation.

Her escort came and they went away to a table in the corner.

“I never talk about the customers.” Stiletto took away his empty glass and served him another. “But I will in this case. I will tell you the rumors. You can hear them anywhere. Maybe, after you hear them, you won’t bother her. She is Rush Street’s beautiful mystery. She has slept with no one, despite the parade of nightclub boyfriends. She comes and goes, from where no one knows. Some say she is the daughter of a Columbian coffee plantation owner. Some say she is the daughter of a South American drug cartel overlord, or his wife. Some say she is on a Holiday, some that she is here studying, others she is in hiding. Solo is an enigma. Solo inhabits a world of her own. Solo is a phantom.”

“Interesting.” The baby faced billionaire sipped his drink. “But maybe she grew up in a Chi-town ghetto? Maybe she still lives there? Maybe she weaves those clothes out of the fabric she’s stolen from a day in a sweat shop in Chicago’s underground garment district? Her ﬁngers look as nimble as her body. Imagine the Braille she could write over your skin in a night of passion! Maybe she’s just another Fab club gold digger, but one more clever? Maybe I’ll have a detective agency investigate her. Princess, pauper? Whatever she is maybe I’ll have her for a night of pleasure. Money can buy anything, one way or another.”

Maybe you better not bother her. Stiletto brooded as he wiped the bar and moved away to another customer.

Stiletto had already shadowed Solo. He could not help himself. They were made for each other. He had to get to know her better. He had to sit and talk with her. He wanted the same one dance/one chance rendezvous as the others, for that’s what was going on. One Fab club interlude with Solo and if something was wrong you were gone. Everybody knew it. It had become a Fab club tournament – which prince could win the princess. No one was insulted. In fact they enjoyed the challenge. They were all too full of themselves to be offended. Besides, they had no hearts to be broken. Even the lynx eyed lovelies weren’t disturbed. Solo did not come as an eclipse over their sugar plum planet of French perfume, manicured nails, styled hair, tanning salons. If anything she made it easier for them to catch a man on the rebound. Solo was looking for a husband and she knew what she wanted – no dating games, party life, or one night stands. At ﬁrst it seemed a little old fashioned and quaint in a world where “now” is all that matters anyway and nightlife was a drug one shot through ones veins, each night a new ﬁx, night after night you looked forward to the next. But that soon changed into a fabulous Fab club game of speculation – who could tempt Solo into a second date?

Solo wanted a soul mate. Stiletto knew if she got to know him she would see how right they would be for one another. But it was impossible here. He could not come back on his days off – it was against the rules. They were his rules. Fab was not to be a party place for the wait staff. It generated too many problems. He had learned that lesson managing the restaurant in Hollywood. This was not the right setting anyway, not for a meeting of soul mates. As far as the Junk Bond King’s speculation that she was just another gold digger and very likely a poor one, Stiletto had already considered that. If that were true – and after his obsessive

stalking he still didn’t know, it was more complicated than that – her poverty might work to his credit. It was another bond they could build a life upon.

Stiletto was no longer a poor man. Stiletto was an afﬂuent young professional and he had plans. Between the tips he declared and the tips he hid, which were tycoon generous, plus his salary as a manager in one of Chicago’s most exclusive nightclubs, he easily made as much as a doctor – at least one who was in general practice. Small change, of course, in this rariﬁed world of corporate magnates. Yet enough to live in grandeur – a deluxe apartment in a high rise in one of the world’s most beautiful cities where he could sit on a terrace, surrounded by skyscrapers, and look down from ﬁfty stories at a forest of parks, a treasure of mansions, museums, Cathedrals, public gardens with sparkling fountains, amidst a luxury of tree lined streets, abundant with art galleries, bookstores, cafés and expensive shops, all of it spread out along a sparkling fresh water sea dotted with cruisers, freighters, sailboats and yachts. One day he would open his own Gold Coast café. He had the savings, connections, backing, credit with banks. He knew what he was doing and everybody liked him. In time he planned to become a legendary restaurant owner. This bold renegade would carve a Z with his blade – a Z for zillionaire not zero, which he was when he was migrant worker.

“THEM,” he once made up a poem when he was tired, defeated, working on his GED and fed up with how he was treated, by fate, society, because of his dark complexion and poverty. “They come with nowhere to go but the ghetto. They do their time at the bottom of the heap and the back of the line. There is no end to THEM. We keep letting us in.” Now in Arizona they wanted to have a law where there was no citizenship for Hispanics like him born in America from what they called illegal aliens. They were against pathways to citizenship. Many states were.

He wanted to talk about his life with Solo. He wanted to tell her all his dreams and sorrows. He wanted to know hers. But shadowing her had been a bad idea. He had unexpectedly hounded her into a world of horror, puzzling and disturbing.

“With all the whores before me, Zorro, wither shall I point my dick?” The Junk Bond King asked Stiletto and laughed. “To paraphrase Mary Shelly, if you have any acquaintance with literacy.”

The drunker he got the more angelic he looked, with his blonde, designer hair and white, chiseled features. You had to look closely to see that his thin lipped smile got meaner. Angels and demons all morphed together – Heaven and Hell in the same Dream Chamber. This time of night, after hours of booze, drugs, echoing music and multicolored lights, the goblins, witches, and demons came out of the shadows. Fab began to resemble a vampire’s castle. “With all the world before me wither shall I bend my step?” Mary Shelley’s monster wondered. Junking up a line from Frankenstein – how appropriate, how Junk Bond clever. Down the road to perdition is where they were all headed and taking everyone with them.

“I was the bard of Harvard Yard, Zorro. When they called me the Wiz Kid they meant in bed. You want to talk numbers? There’s only one amigo. Numero uno. Got a new name for you my friend: Apocalypto. Ever seen the Gibson ﬂick? I started drinking these after it.” He lifted his glass. “You look like that doe-eyed Mayan guy, or whatever he was, running around naked in the jungle trying to save his ass after his village got mashed by the big boys. They all thought they were something those Aztecs and Mayans. Just like you do. It cracks me up the way you think you’re so cool with your braided, Indian pony tail. Must be something in the blood which muddles the head. So the ﬂick goes from that piss ass little village of gatherers and hunters where all your relatives lived, to the big kingdom of the gods with their pyramids and witch doctors, where everybody thinks life is really rocking. That ﬂick cracked me up. What a bunch of deluded fuck ups! I thought of you when I saw it. ‘Cause BAMMO! WHAMMO! Horror of horrors! Here comes the Conquistadors! That woke them up. I love that last scene. The big ship with the real masters of the universe ﬂoating like a nightmare on their piss ass sea. You can run little savages but you can’t hide from me! I’ll have another Zorro, I mean Apocalypto, dry, shaken, arctic cold, and remember those onions, por favor.”

“But of course.” Stiletto leaned over and took his empty glass. “But let me tell you something.” He lowered his voice. “I mean what I say sincerely, my friend. I don’t like you.” And one day I may kill you, he added to himself. “But I feel that I must warn you. You must be very careful about Solo. For her sake as well as your own. There are things that you don’t know, things none of us know. You may get into a situation you don’t want to – or create one.” His mind ﬂashed back to the mean streets he had shadowed her down, the dangerous characters, the mysteries. “I must warn Solo about you, too. About the detectives you mentioned. I told you Solo inhabits a world of her own. She is something of an enigma. One must be cautious about involving themselves in the affairs of others. There is a saying among the people I grew up with. It was to remind them to stay out of trouble with one another. ‘Don’t start a ﬁre you can’t put out.’ George Bush could have used that for Iraq. Maybe Obama for Afghanistan, deﬁnitely for Iran. And the bankers before they created the bubble that broke and brought on the recession, in which we still wallow to some extent. Although none of you seem to be suffering. One must be careful in life, proceed judiciously.

“You don’t warn a conquistador,” he smirked at Stiletto, “especially with barrio folk lore. All I need from you is the drinks you pour.”

Conquistadors galore – Fab was ﬁlled with commodities toreadors. Stiletto shook his head and made the drink, moved down the bar to take care of the next customer. These “masters of the universe” were masters of disaster to the world, themselves, their families ultimately. They couldn’t feel and they couldn’t think beyond their own lust for money and their power trip. This was a bad turn of things, muy malo. Stiletto wondered, seriously, if he should kill the Junk Bond King tonight, follow him out and cut his throat in the dark. If he looked into the affairs of Solo, as Stiletto had, he might cause her trouble. Was the day the dark side of Solo’s life? By what he saw it seemed that way. Was she involved in a South American drug cartel? Chicago had its tunnels, funnels, cross currents like every world city. Maybe they led to a South Side Chicago drug running operation? Rich or poor, was she working Rush Street dealers? Was that what she was doing in Fab and the other high end watering holes? Was ﬂirting and dancing her cover? her mode of contact? Was she on the run from a lover or husband with a stolen score from South or Central America and was cashing in on it, like a dying butterﬂy, across the night scene, door to door?

Stiletto’s mind was spinning with the mysteries and possibilities. All he had were the rumors, the puzzle of Solo and what little he had seen. She was staying in a grand hotel downtown, the Palmer House, an old money estuary with a lobby you would only ﬁnd in a Hollywood movie. He had followed her there and watched her disappear into the rooms above on an elevator. The domed ceiling above him sparkled with chandeliers. Beneath it the lush, plush, expansive room was ﬁlled with overstuffed chairs and antique style tables at which one rested and enjoyed a cocktail. The wait staff, dressed in formal attire, ran around taking care of the guests like maids and butlers. Statues, fountains, paintings, completed the lavish grand hotel ambience. This was all ﬁtting. Where else would the magniﬁcent Solo be residing?

The lobby became his home away from home. Before work, on his days off, days he called off, he would hang out there, sitting in a plush chair, reading, having a drink, hoping he would catch a glimpse of her coming or going so he could casually run into her. But she never appeared. There were too many other entrances and exits to the grand hotel which she apparently preferred. Security began to eye him suspiciously. He had to give up the ghost, the ghost of Solo, admit defeat.

But then, quite by chance, he did run into her at the museum. Art was a passion with him. If Stiletto could wake up one morning with the ability to paint like Miro or Picasso he felt he would ﬁnally

possess a real soul. She was standing in a gallery in the contemporary section with her back to him. She was dressed, casually, in a dazzling, autumn print, gypsy dress with puffed shoulders and billowing sleeves, over which her raven hair cascaded like a tropical storm’s renegade showers or a poet’s dream. She was looking, intently, at the almost Surrealistic rendition of the beautiful opera singer Maria Callis by Gerhard Richter. With staccato brushstrokes of grey, white, black and silver, the artist captured the majestic woman descending a staircase from heaven – or certainly some grander realm than the one we live in – no place Stiletto had been or could imagine. The portrait brought to mind those old black and white silver print photographs of the glamorous stars of the Silver Screen from the Golden Age of ﬁlmmaking. But of course it was even more otherworldly and breathtaking. The painting shimmered. Maria looked like she would vanish before ones eyes even though her presence was supernaturally vivid. She was at once haunting, chimerical, yet rivetingly real. She looked like Solo, Stiletto suddenly realized, or a future manifestation of Solo which time and maturity would bestow. Yet despite the beauty and majesty of the woman descending the staircase, the expression in her eyes, her features suggested tragedy. There was a determination in her gaze, a stoic look of resignation, as though descending those stairs, into wherever she was going, was her obligation, even mission. Was this Solo’s story?

Suddenly Solo had turned away from the painting and looked at him. Her face was stricken, with terror, horror, devastation. Her black hole eyes looked hypnotized. She walked passed him, shaken. She didn’t see him standing in the doorway. She saw nothing. Stiletto was too confused to move. Heart pounding he watched her zombie down a hallway and disappear around a corner. That was the beginning of his stalking nightmare.

She left the museum. He spotted her on the street getting into a cab. “I’m undercover.” He said crazily to the driver as he hopped into the cab behind her. “Follow her.” “Want to run that past me again? The cab driver looked in his rear view mirror.

Stiletto tossed a ﬁfty in the front seat.

The driver studied it and started his ignition. “We never had this conversation.”

They followed Solo to the worst Latino ghetto in Chicago. The buildings looked like bombed out shells in a war zone. The streets were crowded with gangs, as bad as any he had seen in East LA. They brought back memories of drug lords, stabbings, shootings. Stiletto was scared. What could Solo be doing in this dead zone?

“Far as I go amigo.” The cab driver pulled over to the curb. “I go

down a side street I may get into trouble.”

The streets were closing in on themselves, dead ending as they toppled through their own small jumble in the urban jungle. Her cab was gone. Stiletto could have pursued her on foot but it seemed hopeless, and dangerous. He was too well dressed, a target. Sure he was Latino but he didn’t belong. His accent was wrong, as were all of his expressions, everything about him. The gangs out there would be on him in a minute. “Take me back.” Stiletto reluctantly told the driver that day. He had

to give up the ghost. A phantom was what Solo remained.

“Would you like to dance?” The voice of Solo roused Stiletto from his dream world. She was suddenly seated next to the Junk Bond King sipping her Champagne and staring challengingly at him.

“I don’t dance standing up Chiquita.” The baby faced billionaire stared back at her and grinned. “What I do is the Swim. One partner on top, the other on the bottom.” “Let’s test the water.”

Solo got up and walked out onto the dance ﬂoor. The young conquistador smirked and followed after.

It was like watching a swan mate with a monkey, or a goblin chase a ghost, or a devil chase an angel through the ﬁres of Hell with his pitchfork. The Junk Bond King, who was tall and gawky, slashed menacingly at

the air, determined, it seemed, to slay the beautiful creature before him. Solo eluded his lethal blows, weaving and feinting and twirling in and around him.

The crowd began to clap. They encircled the clashing couple, one who whirled like a dervish, the other who stalked like a monster. It was a horror show and yet it was beautiful and they raged against one another in dazzling disorder, eyes riveted, mouths twisted, with passion? deﬁance? It didn’t matter. Stiletto knew that he had lost her.

Doors in the rain, locked, lonely all the same, where the endless night never sees a glimmer of daylight, and life falls through fate’s cracks like a vanishing act.

“We see death’s door at the end of every corridor. Before we go

through that one we should open as many of the others as we can.”

Death’s door. That was the only one left down Stiletto’s corridor. Or so it felt. He sat bundled up on his terrace, the city sparkling below him with its panorama of Christmas, and read in the papers about the marriage of Solo and the Junk Bond King on Christmas Eve in a little town in Guatemala which no one had never heard of.

“Life’s road is a scar, cut by a butcher.”

Solo was a teacher there, according to the article, who came to Chicago to visit her childhood friend on a holiday. The woman, Maria, was a dress designer who wanted to establish her fashions in America. She was living in poverty, illegally. Now Stiletto knew where she was going when he followed her that day and where Solo got her magniﬁcent clothes. The Junk Bond King took care of Maria. He bought her a shop on Chicago’s Gold Coast, ﬁxed up the legality of her residence. The Junk Bond King was taking care of everything. He was building a school for the town Solo came from, and a hospital, and a factory where the people of the town could manufacture the products from his other vast holdings.

Stiletto could read between the lines of the Cinderella story. The town had collectively raised the money, just as the migrants had for one another many times in his childhood to help the others and themselves. They sent Solo to America. The beauty had done her duty. She had married money.

“Conﬁned in my cloud prison,

Stiletto replayed Solo’s song in his head as he read, watched her

dance again.

“I watch a rainbow arch across the heavens, “Dreams shimmer through fate’s prism,

“I fall through life’s crystal ball.

DO YOU STOP

at the red light in the dead

of night on the lonely

street where the winds

howl and shadows creep?

A COLD ONE

I did a year, no time off for

good behavior. I could have

done ten, but “with intent to

kill” was dropped in the end

(due to a friend of a friend of

a friend and a couple of grand).

It was a bar ﬁght that got out

of hand. You know how that

goes: punches are thrown and

then a pool stick is swung and

someone’s bell gets rung and

“deadly weapon” is part of the

jargon. “Yes I understand, your

honor. Things got out of hand.

I’ll never do it again.” Hell, the

ﬁx was in. I didn’t mind sucking

up to him. Things went different

in prison. I found it hard to mix

in. I didn’t get along with

anyone: inmates, guards, Chaplin,

warden. Didn’t try very hard,

didn’t care – it was only a year.

Now I’m here,

no parole, probation, free and clear.

Think I’ll get me a beer.”

THE HIDEAWAY

Night fog ﬂoats in off Lake Michigan, erasing Chicago, as if no one would care or notice. Which they probably don’t, at least not in here, where fog is the way to get through each day.

It is midnight in the Mortuary – one of those places which is short on conversation, quick on retribution and eye contact is forbidden. Where the jukebox never plays, and Happy Hour is only some memory of long dead days. It is one of those places where even the bartender never talks or listens, and the telephone never rings.

“They took my blood again today, “Sweeny mumbles to himself on the stool next to me, “sweat and tears too, as usual, in their little ways, so you’d hardly notice. But of course you do, because you know the difference between what you think and what you feel and what they want you to.

“They were after my soul, forgetting that they got that long ago. My broken heart they leave alone. But you never know – they may want that before long; somewhere in there sleeps a song.

“Life’s a shot in the dark.” Sweeny sipped his drink. “One miss, or the lack of your promise wipes the slate clean of everything: love, money, happiness, dreams; and there you are back to wishing on a star. You have to make good on every chance you get or you may as well forfeit. Burnt offerings for breakfast,” Sweeny muttered, “sucker punches for lunch, death for dinner – the usual leftover. Before, in between, during and after, bloody knuckles from battling shadows.

At night I tear the air into shreds,” Sweeny demonstrates with violent gestures, “hang myself with the tatters, drink till my brain is dead.

In the morning the sun peeks its blind eye into each window to remind the living dead to rise and join the damned in Zombie Land. ‘It’s time to do it all over again!’ The morning grins. And I gaze at the stranger staring blankly at me in the bathroom mirror. We shrug at each other and wonder why we bother.”

Maybe you’ve stopped here for a beer? It’s where the fog hides when the sun shines.

BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATERS

Just out of hell, Jason rents a room

in a cheap hotel, not much better

than his prison cell.

The state pays the rent for one whole

week. They give Jason ﬁfty bucks to

eat. Three years passed like thirty. In

prison each minute is stretched to it’s

limit.

He was in for drug possession – dealing,

or so they said – nothing like assault and battery

or armed robbery.

But the amount of dope he had in his

car – Jason’s turn to make the run to

“Drugs

Are Us” for a pickup – was pretty heavy

duty.

The Judge had no

mercy. Jason has no

family.

He has nowhere to go when he runs out

of dough.

Maybe they’ll put him back in the

slammer for vagrancy? These days,

Jason quips,

that must carry ten to twenty?

Jason learned how to be a barber in prison –

a lot of good that will do him.

He tried to complete his high school

education, get a GED. He was a drop

out when they incarcerated him.

Too many lockdowns, yard ﬁghts,

beatings, killings, too much intimidation

and tension, he never got it done.

He ﬁnally joined a gang for protection.

He wears their Satanic emblems on his skin.

In his soul, he wears something equally

as menacing.

Is Jason in a spot?

The Big House embodies many mansions,

ﬁlled with schemes, comrades and connections.

Jason knows which doors to knock on.

RAZOR’S EDGE

Razor sliced clean – his too-quick smile was your bad dream.

At night, in the Hood, when the street lights

glowed, blood ﬂowed.

Sometimes you could hear the screams.

Razor was a friend of mine

He would slice you anytime

For nickel or a dime

Fifty cents for overtime

Stop the poem! This next stanza is a

disclaimer! I never knew anyone named

Razor! Or any other psychopath who

would steal, cheat, murder for proﬁt or

pleasure! I’m making this up! (Can’t get

bumped off or sued by a whacko!) OK, I

grew up in a slum. But

I moved on. I saw nothing, heard nothing,

remember nothing, know

nothing.

I keep company, now, with the cream of

society: bankers, brokers, politicians, the titans

of industry and commerce.

Maybe I shouldn’t write about them either?

HAIL TO THE THIEF

I wanted life wide open. In the early days I learned the way of it, bent on grabbing all I could get from it. There is: “A sucker born every minute.” (And two to take him is the rest of that inspiring epigraph.) “Let the buyer beware.” “No skin off my nose.” “Time is money” was another good one to memorize when I was young. Every instant is a threat if you don’t learn that! If you do and you have no fear, and hold nothing dear, you are there! Where? Where the mountains are highest, and the rivers bluest, and the forests thickest, and the grass greenest, at the top of the world where you are worshiped and cherished. OK, so maybe no matter how many times I ran and how hard I tried and how much I lied, I still couldn’t get elected president. No plan is perfect!

GRAVE THOUGHTS

No ﬂowers bloom on my grave

for any mourner’s passing

gaze. I had none to share in

life either,

now that I think of it, resting

here. Maybe someday, somehow,

one will grow? It’s never too late

you know.

NOCTURNE

There’s a nightclub in a cellar (in my dream)

small, dark, empty. A ghost woman in a

gossamer gown sits at a piano under a spotlight.

She sings:

Man in the moon

Lord of the night

Talk to the whispering

Winds in their ﬂight

Man in the moon

Tell them to sigh

I have a new love

The singer’s eyes are like holy mysteries.

Her pale skin is so perfect, it seems painted on.

Her voice is like something you’d hear in heaven, and

I’m wondering if she sings her love song to everyone,

lying on a slab in the county morgue.

BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE

I slice through the

rain, collar up,

head down, the

Regal Street

rooftops blocking

the brunt of the

onslaught. The

game gets out of

hand now and

then, doesn’t it,

when you’re living

“free and mean” as

they say in the Slam?

Working against time,

hard and harder, and

never getting any

smarter, you get

to wonder how many

nuts you can crack

before they send you

back.

The chain link fences,

how hard to climb? The

blackened windows with

electronic alarms, the

double bolted doors, are

you ready ﬁnally?

Look back at the

child, hunched and

hungry, gawking at

all those glittering

streets paved with

money.

The night train has no destination.

I hopped it without hesitation.

Everyone on it heading

the same way, looking

out the windows at the y

ears that disappear, no

stops ‘til you get there,

end of the line nowhere.

Fireﬂies and s

tars, ﬁelds of

ﬂowers, you miss

them most when

you’re behind

those bars.

DREAM LOVERS

Thrills and frills and booze and pills,

chills and spills and unpaid bills,

as we pick cemetery ﬂowers off

freshly dug graves, where butterﬂies

ﬂutter on wings made of razor

blades, cutting the black winds into

ribbons which we tie into bows to

decorate our clothes, skipping over

headstones and singing off-key,

merrily.

Row row row your

boat Far out upon the

sea Water makes waves

Waves make graves

Life is just a scream

While brambles and bushes and

old gnarled trees sway around us in

the darkness and stars sparkle above

us and a pale moon shines as in a

nursery rhyme and we soon

fall asleep.

OUR BEAUTIFUL BALLOON

In shadowy rooms with locked doors, and grimy windows shut tight, we needle-stab our punctured arms, because they are there, because we don’t care, and drug our way through life. Faster faster, comes the rush, never fast enough. We ﬂoat

in dreamland, glide through heaven steeped in sweat soaked inspiration. Life is many stories below, death also and all our troubles as we stroll on wobbly legs, through stars and moon glow, where everything is possible, and nothing is probable, and everywhere is anywhere, and all of it neither here nor there.

TROUBLED SLEEP

The cop knock rocks everything and everyone within hearing in your building, not just your own crib but your neighbors and friends. That ofﬁcial pounding on the door you can’t ignore. You even hear it when it isn’t there. It is embedded in your nightmares.

They’d come for my ol’ man, who was always in some jam with is friends, stealing, dealing, maybe killing. But grabbing anything and everything with their hungry hands. Now they come for me. I keep them busy. So long as the money comes easy

“That ﬁnal dream to help you let go, my ol’ man said last time he was on parole, “like that last meal on death row.”

We were drinking at Gabe’s, shooting the breeze, watching the game. Death got into the conversation. One of his buddies died in prison. He got going on every man’s last dream.

“A nightmare wouldn’t be fair,” He shook his head and stared, be like the law knocking at your door. My ol’ man got a little stir crazy over the years. “No, got to be your best night ever, your last one. With the best dream you’ve ever known, that last dream like that last steak dinner everyone’s got coming.” He nodded and sipped his beer. “Win the battle, win the damsel, ﬁnd the hidden treasure – when all that happens, in your dreamland, it’s a warning. You’re a dead man in the morning.” Cheers.

RESERVOIR DOGS

We bought it,

so now we sit and sort it

out in the back room,

smoking dope and sipping

brew. “We bought it.” Plugger

broods. “Set up.”

“Tip off.”

“Lucky fucks.”

Corbet means the cops.

“Someone shot his mouth

off.” Stacy dead-eyes

everyone,

hoping to catch the one who blinks,

or casts his eyes down.

I go with the lucky fucks

theory. The best laid plans of

mice and men and so on.

“So now what?” The Mic asks.

So now what? A shave and a haircut,

a good fuck, lying low and snorting blow.

Before you know, we’re back in the show.

EYE, AYE, I

am the man on the stair who wasn’t there.

I am the one looking at you looking at you

in the mirror.

I am the man in the moon, the stranger on

the train, the hitchhiker on the lonely road,

the shadow you played tag with when you

were a kid.

I am the one you will never know no matter

how hard you try.

I’ll be with you until you die.

C’EST LA VIE

Bad

checks

covered

most of

my debts.

Bad plastic t

ook care o

f the rest.

Now I have to

disappear,

cover my trail,

avoid jail.

Down the alley and around the corner,

hop on the Trailways, and now I’m a

goner.

Gone but not forgotten, you can bet on

that one.

The crook has ﬂed, let’s call the feds, the

chase is on from town to town.

Another city,

another bank,

another account

established with

a bogus ID and

a small cash

deposit. All to

my credit.

I’ve played

this game so

long I’ve

forgotten my

name

A rose by any other, I guess, still has

thorns.

I slide my hands down the curves of her

hips.

Relax, take a breath. I cup her breasts,

look into her

eyes. They have

narrowed into

slits. We kiss.

KNOCK ON ANY DOOR

And hidden within

may be someone with a gun

who will shoot you for fun,

or massacre your children.

Knock on any door and hidden

within may be someone with

a bomb who will blow up a

marathon, or someone with a

dungeon who kidnaps helpless

women for his twisted and

demonic idea of a love-in.

Knock on any door and hidden

within may be a bigot, rapist,

anarchist, racist, liar, cheater,

sexist, wife beater, child molester,

war monger, charlatan, corporate

raider, egotist, labor exploiter, blind

follower, manipulator, ethnic

cleanser, religious discriminator,

gay-basher, white supremacist,

trigger happy wannabe cop, or simple

two-faced hypocrite.

Knock on any door and hidden

within may be the most monstrous

creature in the animal kingdom –

a human.

“CEREMONY”

She wears a gossamer gown and a tiara of stars. The stone walls ﬂicker with torchlight. Incense burns. She is nailed to a cross. Pain stabs through her palms. Her spiked feet quiver together. Phantoms sit beneath her in the grottos of the dark.

“For your hands are deﬁled with blood.” A dark voice below her echoes, as rivulets of blood trickle from her wounds, “and your ﬁngers with iniquity. Your lips have spoken lies. And your tongue mutters wickedness. You live in the dark like the dead. And you weave a spider’s web.”

She sighs, shifts, struggles again. Her body feels shapeless. Everything is like hell. In the cavern below her, ghoulish depictions of herself, lighted by candles, appear in each stained glass window. In them her alabaster skin looks like a crude, pastel rendering done with coarse, grainy chalk. Her red hair is witchy, like a tangle of wildﬁre, storm tossed.

“Arise! Shine!.” The dark voice thunders. “For the light has come!” The phantoms lift their dead eyes and glare at her. She sees her mother and father among them, her siblings, relatives, neighbors and friends. She can tell by their expressions they are trapped as she is, captives of Satan. Wide doors ﬂy open. Sunlight ﬂoods the church. The white pall becomes a blizzard. She falls from the cross into a nether land, tries to run. Earth, wind, sky are one: ghost veils whirling in a winter storm. “Here comes the bride,” the winter whispers, all dressed in white.” She can see nothing, as she stumbles through the snow drifts.

The world is erased. Wind whipped shrouds swirl around like spirits in

an holy dream.

She is awake; her eyes are open. Half human, half shadow, Sarah rises from her bed, her troubled sleep and her troubled life like the frenzied ﬂight of a bat dancing in her head.

Light streams in from the window’s parted curtains. The room is thronged with ashen men and women. It is from a cofﬁn she has risen. Her bridal gown shimmers in the bright light of the sun. But there is no bride’s radiance in her, just doom and Armageddon.

“For as much as it is the almighty God’s ordination,” speaks a tall, pale phantom, “that ﬂesh hath soul and thereby is empowered with a spirit, so also may spirit retain the prison of the ﬂesh, even when it leaveth the ﬂesh and liveth as a thing apart.”

Dressed in the garments of the grave, still and silent, the gathering stares with blank expressions in her petriﬁed direction.

“And so, forever, as a thing apart,” the dark voice rumbles, “even from all thus parted, the damned must dwell in the realm of the damned, neither ﬂesh nor spirit, neither living nor dead.”

Sarah opens her eyes. The night is still there. In the blackness she can sense, all around her, the presence of the dead. “All dead, all dead.” She shudders trying to clear her head. Her old bones ache as she gropes her way across the room. The shutters bang and the rafters rock. Her withered reﬂection in the mirror, when she turns on the light, meets her with a shock.

Sarah is awake. Her eyes are open. Through half closed eyes she

sees the dead around her bed …

* * *

Rain moves in from the sea. Sarah sits in her rocking chair by the garret window and watches it drizzle. A black pall is drifting across the bay. Lightening ﬂickers in the distance. She can hear the wind wail and the waves crash across the reefs. Cross Cove will be hit by a hurricane.

The thunder echoes with the dark voice in her dream. It is the voice of her husband. They were so young. She never loved him. It was a pity she had to poison him. But there was no other way. Sometimes she can sense his ghost around the old house. He had the last laugh. Her lover, who was a ﬁsherman, was drowned soon after in a typhoon. “Here comes the bride.” Sarah sings softly to herself, as she rocks in her chair and the shutters bang. She remembers the beautiful gown she wore at her wedding. “All dressed in white.”

SUNRISE

Each day clouds race across the sky, a joy,

and at night, as you close your eyes to dream,

stars ﬁll the sky, a delight. In between is the

feast of life: love, friendship, wondering, all

yours, everyone’s, and all for the savoring.

SUNDAY

Kites with streamers, fast moving clouds, rain on the horizon, the wind sings a song. Dancing, the paper diamond on the end

of my string pirouettes in the heavens.

Church bells ring.

WHITE CITY

Cradles and

caskets, birth and

death, toys in the

attic buried in

chests, bright stars and

graveyards, cafes and bars,

snowﬂakes and

earthquakes, lovers and

wars … below the white

city, behind the locked door,

midnight

and magic, moonlight

and mirrors …

MILLIE AND THE MOON

One night Millie awoke to ﬁnd herself ﬂoating above her bed.

Outside her window a full moon shown, with the face of the smiling man who inhabits it, all aglow. She was alone, as usual, being, as they still called it in her small town, a spinster.

“I am in a place,” Millie said to herself, “which makes no sense.”

She wondered if, perhaps, she was dead? or, maybe, out of her head?

No free spirit by nature, the experience, none-the- less, thrilled her.

Balanced between mystery and dream, Millie fell back asleep.

She became a moon watcher after that.

Whenever there was a full one, she would hold onto her nightcap, dressed in

a gossamer gown

BLUE TATTOO

Midnight in a midtown dive – staying alive, trying to survive. I write realism, paint fantasy, No one can tell the difference, these days, that’s the tragedy. Once upon a time, there was a magician who turned ﬁns into limbs and ﬁsh walked on land. They became human.

His name was Darwin.

Not many Americans have heard of him.

The Blue Tattoo features cool jazz, rhythm and blues.

Silhouettes sleep-stream across the room, dance in a dream, make love in the mythic memory

of a blue lagoon.

LEGACY

Most dreams are out of your reach. But you dream them anyway, even though they leave you more lost and miserable, amidst the rubble of your troubles, than if you had let them go, knowing they were a no show.

Life is a stormy road. You head for a dead end as soon as you begin. Somewhere in the middle you start to understand that you are a stranger in a no man’s land where no one speaks your language and no one understands. It is the same for everyone. Yet passion burns and souls yearn and while dreams die they live again. There was lots of whiskey, warm friends, loving women, starry-eyed children eager to begin.

I’d do it again.

THE ASHES OF WINTER

Cold rain, winter closing in, promising snow, icicles, and ﬁelds adrift with mystic whiteness. There won’t be time to set things right. There won’t be time for everything.

Time dreams in a garden lush with life blooming. Days fall like snowﬂakes, melt with the spring rains.

Was there ever time … to do anything? You wonder.

Should you feel sadness, despair, as you sit in your rocker and turn the last page on the story of your life, a packed

journal bookended in black between two eternities, all the chapters incomplete, and soon to be erased?

But being here was never clear.

A mystery at best, all clues leading to enigmas, paradoxes, illusive suspects, artful dodgers that disappeared.

Shadows and dreams are all you remember of that ﬁre that burned bright between those existential nights, where you tried to do right by your family, yourself and your fellow man.

So at this end, should you be content, as you rock in that chair, a bundle of regrets and tangled hair, knowing all

that remains of the ashes of winter is the warmth you once gave?

Could you have given anything better?

BURIED TREASURES

Bring me vast riches – not little things like diamond rings, or fame or wealth or kingdoms’ keys, power, glory.

Who needs such things? Bring me memories of jubilees, love and joy and families. You know where to ﬁnd them, tucked away in treasure chests where those who shared them went to rest

THE SEACHERS

Shadow to shadow

each solitary soul

listening for the beat i

n the dark of another

heart …

ONCE UPON A TIME

I drank ﬁne wine on penthouse balconies overlooking rich cities, dined with celebrities. I partied till dawn, toasted the sun, slept with nubile women on sheets of satin.

Everything I wanted came my way Everywhere I went I was treated like royalty. My touch was golden, my manhood potent.

I had the worship of women, the envy of men, the respect of prophets, the awe of civilization.

Everyday I soared in my ﬂight through life, sleek as the wind, talons raised, swooping down on my prey

Once upon a time the world was mine.

I gave it up to be a poet, just for the heck of it.

THE ORCHARD

An ice-white sky with silvery

light shivering through the

swirling snow, as we bundle

through the cold. The raw

winds blow. Frozen to the

bone, we struggle home, across

downy drifts of death, both of us

draped in shrouds of mystic

whiteness, our old car abandoned

by the side of the road. “I’m

getting old,” Hester chatters and

grabs my hand as we stumble together

through the spectral land. There’s

still a ways to go. Both of us

know that the ground,

somewhere below, is all too ready

and willing to claim us as its own.

But we’ve been here, done this,

and we’ll

do it again, because we’re never

leaving this godforsaken land—

not as long as our orchard blossoms

in its season.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME

Near dark, door in hand, I linger for an instant before going in. As the shadows of the evening whisper their laments, I reenter the soothing shelter of my humble residence, spent from the fray of another grueling foray into the world of everyday. Family ghosts greet me with howls of empathy, as they ﬂoat across the room with their visions of eternity. The skeleton in the closet rattles out and grins, while the raven perched atop the television caws “nevermore” expressing his chagrin at the fact that I go out at all, knowing full well that tomorrow I’ll have to go back out again. Because someone has to pay the rent, as the black cat sitting on the cabinet consoles me with its purrs and I securely I lock us in to listen to

Bach and Haydn.

HUSH

In the rooms, between the rooms, down the stairs, around the corners, hallways, basement, attic, everywhere, secrets,

whispers, mysteries, in the house I grew up in, the house you grew up in, the world that we live in, the books that we delve in, like the ripples and eddies of a skipping stone as it softly

slips across a pond, or the acrobatics of a sunlit bird as it swoops, dips, circles and glides off, or the rustle of the wind through the leaves of a tree, or some half-heard, distant melody that reminds us we are lonely.

BEACHES

Like scrolls unrolled,

the waves unfold across

the sand and curl up

again, telling their

wordless chants, over

and over, about being

and nothingness,

dreaming and

forgetfulness, and the

ebb and ﬂow of the

mind

and soul.

The sea is colored by the

heavens.

The clouds are a

choir. The surf is

a prayer.

The beach is a

shrine to the

Divine, each

comber, like me, a

worshiper.

TOUCHING NIGHT

Full moon, no dreams, people missing,

people searching, when I try to get up

a voice tells me I’m dead so I stay in bed.

I make a mental picture instead.

This place I’m in, which seems to be a

playground, has walls all around.

They contain everything lost and everything

found. Someone is hiding in a corner.

God maybe. Someday I’ll look closer.

The see-saw goes up and down. The

whirl-a-twirl goes round and round.

The swings sway. The slide lets you glide

merrily down the slope on your backside.

While the monkey bars are lit by stars,

and the future is kept in Mason jars.

THE COLLECTOR

We spent the afternoon zipping around in his sports car, some kind of Jaguar, me and the hot shot from Denver.

“I like this town.” He looked around, happy with his new home: lush parks, majestic museums packed with the riches of civilization, grand cathedrals, sparkling fountains, boulevards lined with historic mansions. “Denver is cool, don’t get me wrong. It’s a happening city. More transplants from LA come in everyday.

But I like the antique looks of this place. That old money mystique. The women look wicked.”

Philly has its moments, I guess. It depends, like any other place, on where you can afford to hang your hat. He was here through a job transfer. He had a position which paid him in the high six ﬁgures.

How high is the sky? Who knows these days? He was ﬁlling the walls in his new home on Society Hill with my and other funky Philly artist’s paintings. He had brought in a bunch of such stuff which he purchased in galleries in Denver and LA. Now he had to ﬁll more space in his ﬂamboyant, eye catching way – cool car, cool pad, sharp clothes.

Old money, new money, “no money, no funny” someone once said. Confucius maybe?

Money is money. Just ask the wicked ladies of Philly, or anywhere. Does it matter where it came from or how long it’s been around? As long as it keeps ﬂowing for him, my collector from Denver will collect his women.

MAGIC

Life vanishes before your eyes,

like the glow you tried to hold

in your cupped hands

in the summer time

when you were a kid,

until winter came

and the ﬁreﬂies died.

I study the night,

and the passing cars’ headlights,

headed the other way,

chain smoke cigarettes,

count my lost bets

on my calendar of regrets.

I’m on my way to Kingdom Come.

Hard to fathom since I feel my life has just

begun – never mind how

long I’ve been around.

Before I get there, I’ll stop for a beer,

ﬁnd some company to celebrate my being here;

until I also disappear,

like the dazzle of ﬁreﬂies

and butterﬂies that ﬂickered

and ﬂuttered before my childhood eyes.

“CHOP SUEY”

Blocks of shadows ﬁlled the walk-up’s grimy windows – boarded up buildings, rundown tenements, burnt out shells with signs that said condemned. Like what around there wasn’t? The city could hang the same signs around his and Rachael’s lives, Malcolm reﬂected, as he sat in the gloomy corner he or his fate had painted them into and pondered his life’s disorder. It was a wonder the city hadn’t. Two empty rooms heated by death rattle radiators, which hissed at them like vipers, a mattress in the main one was their best effort at furniture, along with a couple of lamps, sans end tables or nightstands. The idle gas stove and the empty refrigerator were courtesy of the slum lord’s building manager. The alarm clock, which they never set, was purchased from a thrift shop in the time they were optimistic, along with the static-y Goodwill radio. The classical music Malcolm played on it always sounded a little shocked, as if it couldn’t quite adjust to the puzzling change in stations the current owner had made switching from talk radio and hard rock.

Each day ended as soon as they woke up, nothing to do, nowhere to go, no money to spend. Was there a point to even living them? The second room they used for their “artists’ studio.” That one had track lighting in it, as well as two easels with folding chairs before them, which could have remained folded for the amount of time either of them used them. As for time, there was nothing but time. They were rich in that; and art supplies, tons of it jammed into the closet, canvas, paint, brushes. Somewhere along the way, however, their spirits died. Neither of them felt inspired. Why would they? They were wretched and starving. The usual artist’s condition? Maybe back in the day. Neither he nor Rachael could quite get into slum life and poverty.

Feeling cold in his skin, like hardened wax, Malcolm sat in the studio’s bright glare and envisioned that soft inner ﬂame that should burn brightly for everyone, lighting the way as it had in better days when hope sprang eternal and anything was possible.

Outside, sirens wailed, lost souls screamed, the gutters ran with acid rain. Like a one note rhythm on a heartbeat drum, the cosmic clock ticked, the pendulum swung, as throughout the dead zone, each second the present fell back into the past, while it faltered toward a future, which ended before it began, marching in a lockstep down the calendar of regrets, tick by tick.

In black space the world sleeps, dreams, spins, holds its center together with stars made of sugar. Malcolm mused as he began to prepare his canvas, a rare occurrence of creative industriousness, driven by desperation more than inspiration and would probably turn out a mess. The cosmic clock ticks for astronauts. The subway rumbles through tunnels that whisper secrets no one can decipher. We paint our lives on air, naïve artists astounded by the miracle of being here. Love is the only color we remember.

“An Artist’s Redundant Rendition of Our Curious Congregation of Biological Gadgets Gyrating Uncontrollably to the Dynamics of Physics.” Malcolm gave a working title to his effort in progress. Apply gesso, he mused, convoluted convulsions of color follow, as ﬁerce bursts of chaos spin into a madness, which is ultimately harnessed by bold brush strokes that are random and meaningless. Not exactly art school procedures but they worked for Malcolm and form follows function – his being to paint what he felt and not what he saw because that rarely revealed anything at all. Poetry in color was what he was after.

In the painting an imaginary man looks up at a clock. “It must be time to stop.” He seems to be thinking, the way his jutting jaw drops.

An imaginary woman walks up to him. Does the rest of what happens ever begin?

A crystal ball is a mystical jewel. Time is a tool.

Parts make a whole and day after day one part ﬁts into another as

the future is made.

There is an imaginary moon above them, in a make believe night.

While none of it is real, all of it is delight.

At least, that is the intention. Malcolm pondered his emerging creation. Maybe his art dealer could sell this one? It certainly was more pretty than profound. Maybe it would match someone’s drapes? Put a smile on some socialite’s face? He would get a second opinion when Rachael came home. He would sound her out about it. “What do you make of it?” He could hear her now, envision her standing there, scraggly, scrawny, shrouded in hip length tangled black hair, dark eyes flaring, sourpuss glaring. “It’s a piece of shit. Paint over it.” Rachael the purist. Rachael had disappeared in the morning for parts unknown. Probably looking for a job, which he also should be doing instead of wasting his time with this Romantic concoction.

What Malcolm should be painting, he knew, was the scene that he was facing – the blocks of sorrow looming in his window. He could create a giant, cubist American stalag conundrum with Munch-like phantoms screaming in the windows, Grosz-like Gestapo ﬁgures skulking in the shadows, lost souls howling down the avenues. Spinach for the eyes to feast upon which few would care to swallow down. Ah, the artist’s dilemma: greeting cards or human graveyards? Reality? Or yet another “eye candy” collector’s day dream?

Food for thought was always dessert in the commercial galleries. Angel food cake was the staple of the yuppie collector’s diet. Bestseller books, blockbuster movies, toe tapping or hip gyrating tunes, who wanted something to ponder?

There was a way to get around this problem, for Malcolm and any artist. Kink up your concoction. Serve some Devil’s food cake. “Black” or “White” were your options in the art world if you wanted to sell. That’s how Malcolm got his little bit of artistic recognition in the ﬁrst place, two years ago in his last year of art school. In a way his ﬁfteen minutes of fame had come about by accident. Not that he hadn’t seized the moment. He had been making sketches of this street singer the neighborhood he was living in called Star, a teenage runaway who sang for her supper on a street corner. She was beautiful, tragic, an angel in a nightmare, as Malcolm saw it. She sang like a lark. It had been his passion as a student to paint her portrait. They worked it out. If he sold the picture he would pay her half of what he got. But it wasn’t about the money. He was deeply inspired by the sad, hopeless beauty.

The police found her body in an alley one night, raped and strangled, probably grabbed from behind while she was shivering in the cold waiting to perform, thrown to the ground, punched repeatedly until she was knocked out, dragged back into the shadows, strangled when she came to and fought her assailant. A picture of her ravaged body quickly appeared in the tabloids. Soon after, the story aired on the local news. The gruesome pictures, were also being ﬂashed across the internet. The Sun Times and the Tribune followed. Malcolm saw his chance. Collectors really dug that sort of snarky “street-life meets art” connection. He knew it was smary. He knew he was tarnishing his integrity. But he was fresh out of school and he was hungry for recognition, and okay fame and fortune. Richter made a bundle off the nurses’ portraits he cranked out from the pictures he duplicated from the papers after the Richard Speck slaughter – and they were only knockoffs after the fact, not the real McCoy of an unsuspecting victim smiling and singing as though life was worth living, like he had stashed in his portfolio. Didn’t hurt Richter’s career either. Nothing could do that. If anything it enhanced it. And look how Serrano cleaned up with his gory morgue photos. Malcolm could do a series of two-panel

before and after concoctions of Star, get the after from the internet or papers. At ﬁrst he struggled with the notion. It was the worst kind of exploitation. But not for long. He didn’t have long. When something went viral you had to get in on the action. If you passed it up you could blow your chance. That chance might never come again. Not in the art world where tastes, at best, were ﬁckle and had little to do, anymore, with how good you were or how bad either for that matter. Overnight he became the “Modigliani of the Mean Streets,” the “Gauguin of the Gutter,” at least in Chicago. A joke in itself. No one looked less like a denizen of the demimonde than Malcolm. He looked like a poster boy WASP, fair haired, blue eyed, tall and gangly, honest, thoughtful, helpful, friendly. His show, which he padded with other portraits of street people, adding a jagged scar to the face of some sad soul in a slum, changing smiles into leers, or planting a knife or a gun in a beggar’s outstretched hand, had all but sold out.

That fame didn’t stick. Malcolm never followed with another trick. He had already had a belly full of it and it made him sick. No trick no treat in art biz. Which nowadays was the same as showbiz: embalmed sharks or painted porcelain cartoon characters which were offered as pricey sculptures, kitsch or shock. But being a jerk had worked. He had made a name and dealers were willing to show him even though he was trying to be serious and wasn’t of much monetary use.

Fashion passion, Malcolm brooded as he dabbled, a kind of trance, or death dance, because fashion dies before your eyes, and a blink in the “au courant” cosmos can knock you out of sync. And then what would everybody think?

Now he had to worry about what Rachael would think. Rachael was his conscience. She painted wild and barbaric abstract pieces that could have been found in the caves of France. She invented her own primordial symbols and slashed them across the canvas like a pre- historical guru. They were a marvel. Here he was with all that soul-felt inspiration to draw upon selling out again. Angel food cake was what he was attempting. But could anyone blame him? Nag, nag, nag, the answer to that was an easy one.

His Devil’s food cake bake-off was how his romance with Rachael began, the angel and the bad man. Out into the angry night about a year after his smary big splash, out from another mind numbing space in the midst of his resolve to go straight, where fashion passion had once again replaced thought, feeling, grace, and money had replaced taste, Malcolm had gone reeling and screaming with a convert’s outrage only to be confronted by his own disgrace.

“Monet! Renoir! Van Gogh! Gauguin!”

Malcolm had shouted his frustration to no one, everyone, anyone, at the top of his lungs. He had had too much wine to drink. La grape kept ﬂowing at the upscale gallery opening, along with the mind numbing art babble, two indulgences his essentially poet’s head never had been able to handle. Wine made his brain ﬁzzy, art talk made it dizzy.

“Richter! Hopper! Pollack! De Kooning!” The featured works at the avant-garde art show had been like looking at human innards through somebody’s butt hole. “Rembrandt! DaVinci! Michaelangelo!” This latest concoction of the neo-insane had been especially lame – creature features, amusement park stuff without a glimmer of skill or talent, a clown act. “Rilke! Tolstoy! Kafka!” Malcolm threw in a few writers. Why not? Literature was as dead as painting or sculpture. Music too. “Beethoven! Bach! Stravinsky!”

Malcolm wanted a garden of wonderments ﬁlled with earthly delights, or Kafka-esque frights. What did the world give him? Another night of mental blight.

“Jack Daniels! Jim Beam! Johnny Walker!”

Malcolm would stop at the nearest liquor store. Those guys would help smooth things over. Nothing like a good jolt of hard liquor.

“Snoopy! Mickey Mouse! Spiderman!” Some mocking female screeched behind him. “Colonel Sanders! Long John Silver! Papa John!”

Malcolm whirled around and found some scraggly goth-girl stalking

him.

“So I’m hungry.” She shrugged, obviously drugged. “Mozart!

Vermeer! Ibsen!”

“Beat it Vampira.” Malcolm studied the dungeon-decorated princess who, for God knows what reason, was shadowing him. He had seen her before, somewhere, but why or when he couldn’t remember. “Go drive your parents nuts.”

He turned with a sneer and staggered away from the cryptic creature. “Double murder! Blood sucker! Grave robber!” The banshee

screeched in his ears. “Exploiter! Necrophiliac! Bottom feeder!”

Suddenly he remembered. It was that witchy looking girl from his old art school whom he had granted an interview during his show and who wrote scathing columns about his exhibit in the student newspaper. “Nag, nag, nag.” Malcolm gallows laughed. “Give it up already

screaming Mimi.”

“Sell out! Sell out! Sell out!” She shouted.

“Jesus! What’s it to you?”

Malcolm whirled around and looked Rachael up and down,

dumbfounded.

“We had a class together.” “So what?”

“I thought you were cool.”

Was he done? Malcolm wondered as he squinted at the painting he was working on. Less would be more with this one – less passion, less meaning, just a suggestion, like a memory, or a dream of midnight and moonbeams. It looked good to him. The window had darkened. It was “cocktail time.” Rachael would drag in soon. No job, no prospects, no follow up interviews as usual. They had both been there, done that, a thousand times; no teaching jobs, no menial jobs, no employment of any kind. Buddy can you spare a dime? Their parents had supplied the dimes, without being asked,

from time to time, which made them both feel like failures and moochers. At least they weren’t mooching at home but had a hovel of their own.

At cocktail time Rachael recently made the observation that they had become background characters in some seedy porno ﬂick in which there wasn’t much sex. “Cocktails for two” always concluded their days of misery and hopelessness. They sat cross-legged on the mattress, drank cheap booze, and talked about what it would take to make life live-able: the what if’s and what-so-evers, the maybe’s and when’s, until they got to the nitty gritty of all their problems.

“You’re a jerk!” “You’re a screwball!”

“I should have known you were a loser!”

“Beggars can’t be choosers!”

The clock ticked as they each got in their licks, taking turns pouring and chain smoking cigarettes, until the fog settled in as they ran out of gin.

“I’ve had it!”

“Let’s end it!”

Each night the same conversation. Each day the never ending recession.

Each moment trapped in a hopeless situation

Malcolm signed his romantic concoction. It looked like a scene from “Lifetime for Women” perhaps with a little Hallmark Valentine’s Day mixed in. It was well done. That gave him some consolation. Malcolm thought he better hide it before Rachael got home, bury it in the back of a stack Rachael would never check. Instead he dug out his cell phone and took a picture of it and beamed it to his dealer along with a text message. “Can you use this? Sofa size. If so can I get an advance? 5 Bennies maybe? Should retail at 5K.” “Pretty.” Came back in a ﬂash. “I’ll hit my snowbirds before they ﬂy away. I’ll bet 5 B’s on this one. Check in the mail.” “Make it out to Rachael.” Malcolm shot back. “Tell

her you sold that little piece of hers, ‘Spectrum.’ I’ll pick it up when I

bring this in.”

The miracles of high tech. Malcolm hid his painting, wrote CONGRATULATIONS!! on another sofa sized canvas amidst multicolored painted balloons and hung it in the living room. He called Wong’s for a delivery of Chinese food.

“FINDERS KEEPERS, LOSERS WEEPERS”

It begins: that ﬁrst step – I act, therefore, I am.

So do atoms. Do we move or follow them when we use our limbs, engage our brains?

Is it action, reaction, cause and effect that we walk into at birth?

Or are we free to journey through life as we please, as free as a breeze – free agents, spirits, kicking down doors, knocking down barriers, squeezing through cracks, looping though loopholes, driven and directed by our goals, desires, aspirations, from which, if we stick with it, we will ultimately achieve everything we want. Or is it something in between?

Is the way of the brain the same? Are we propelled in set directions by the mechanics of an action, reaction motion contraption assembled and programmed by biological selection to try to meet our needs for survival and procreation? Or is there, in this case, too, something more heroic going on, the machinations of a self-actualized entity and not an automaton? On the other hand, if you were raised by a pack of wolves what would you be? An astrophysicist contemplating the moon and stars instead of howling at them like your hairy brethren?

We awaken gradually from childhood’s sleepwalk with some facility to think and talk, at least, as best as each of us is taught. We’re not sure yet where or what we are or why we’re here or anywhere. That speculation will be ﬁlled in eventually, one way or another. Fortunately we were given a rethink mechanism in our survival kit, some things just don’t add up, and we can reexamine the life lessons of our mentors and avoid being brainwashed. Few of us use it. Nevertheless, we can

do a redo, weigh and measure and make ourselves over if we deem it necessary, aided by a shrink most likely.

Or is this something of an illusion, too? Is our makeup so complex that we don’t notice the subtle tricks of cause and effect, the action, reaction, slights of hand that perhaps shape all our decisions, from without and not within? We face the unknown, look back at the inevitable, they say. Is the smoke and mirrors of our life and times so chimerical that our redo is psychological voodoo?

In the midst of our fairytale bliss puberty hits. Nothing is uncaused and no one is self-caused and so the heat is on. The drums pound. The ﬁres rage. The hunt is on. The beat goes on, loud and strong, mesmerizing, stupefying. We take its rhythms to our graves. Yet existential progress is made. We learn to reason, reﬂect, investigate, calculate, meditate despite our breathless tumbles in the jungle. Do these abilities make us the masters of our fates?

We all have experiences beyond our control. The ﬁrst is birth, the last death. Sexuality is in between and of course there are those pesky taxes the government sticks us with. What other birth defects does life come with? What do we get to pick to put on our birth certiﬁcate? Gender? No. Race? No. Nationality? No. IQ? No. Looks? No. Place of birth? No. Neighborhood? Social status? Parents? Siblings? Family tree? Rich man? Poor man? Talents? No. Abilities in math, science, art, music, drama, athletics etc. like everything else worth having, money and inﬂuence especially, have to be inherited, a gift from lucky gene combinations. Education? You can get one if you have the means and we all know what that means. An ivy league school is not in most peoples’ scheme of things. That birthday suit sounds more like a straight jacket the more you think about it. Beyond that, life contributes to the lucky or unlucky star list. I lose my job and kill myself. You are in a car crash and die. A lightning bolt sets ﬁre to the theatre and everyone fries. My worst enemy wins the lottery. There is always the unexpected. Although some say that while not everything is predictable everything is, nevertheless, inevitable and if you could record everything that is happening everywhere at any given moment and fed this information into a computer, you could predict the next one and its consequence and so on: how, when, where, why, Frankie killed Johnny, or Sluggo kissed Nancy, or Albert decided to square energy instead of money. What we need is an existential warning system, something like the weather service provides so we can evacuate before the hurricane arrives. We need that in our lives. As free as a breeze? I think they go with the blow, warm or cold, gentle or bold.

This seems to be a cold, mechanistic planet we inhabit, the more you think about it, spinning in a universe indifferent to our wishes, dreams, fears, passions. One that will do what it must with us, as trapped as we are in its dominion of cause and effect and the laws of physics. Causal determinism says that there is an unbroken chain of prior occurrences stretching back to the origins of the universe and that the past and the present dictate the future. In this cosmic confection we are all players on a stage, not authors or directors. The script was written long ago, in one big bang, on which, as the stars burn out, the curtain will ultimately close and humankind is just a conglomeration of biological gadgets gyrating to the dynamics of chemistry and physics. Ouch.

Then there is religion, which is puzzling with its have your cake and eat it too supreme being, an all powerful entity who created everything and knows all that will happen, right down to every choice, so that one’s life must be predestined. Despite this, one somehow must choose good over evil, right over wrong or face hell and damnation and never get to heaven.

We are all trapped in time and place – for many the wrong one at the wrong time all the time. Just visit a slum. Freedom of thought fans, however, like the followers of Ayn Rand, ﬁnd free will, while an illusive concept, may be less illusory than the determinists make it out to be. Unlike our physical actions, which some say are directed by, and at preordained collisions of atoms in preset locations, making life a process

of keeping preﬁxed appointments, our cerebral life is evanescent. We meditate, ruminate, imagine, ponder, ﬁgure, calculate and can come to equally reasoned and convincing, opposite and opposing, conclusions about the same things, like volition and determinism and innumerable other matters, with the conﬁdence that we are not merely positing preordained collisions of our brain’s subjective proclivities, since we formed our opinions so carefully and see their rationale so clearly, either this way or that.

The volition proponents are more optimistic, at least on the surface, and don’t rely on the the god of the machine (Nature) and the ingenuity of its mindless inevitability to settle things. Free Will is having the power of choice in shaping of one’s life, in the absence of impediments of course: social, physical, political, psychological, intellectual, monetary, monetary, monetary. Did I leave anything out? In this way of looking at things, there are heroes and villains and prizes handed out for the winners of competitions. Everyone thinks they are going to get one. Really. All one has to do is keep ones’ nose to the grindstone, ones’ hand to the wheel, ones’ eye peeled and never quit until you’ve gotten it, the rainbow’s pot of gold, the brass ring. Whatever, it’s a sure thing.

Now we’re ready for that ﬁrst step! So step right up! Go for it! Place your bet, tot! Everyone can win! It isn’t in the stars! It isn’t in the cards! Your life is in your hands! No matter who you are, rich or poor, humble or grand, smart or challenged! You can make it! Yes you can!

You say the game sounds rigged to you, the dice loaded, the casino crooked? You say some get favored and most get gypped when things are handed out, and few, if any, could have built or earned whatever they have without those gifts of fate or luck. And you think it’s a pity that the mechanism cranking out our story has so little humanity, so much suffering and misery for which there is no necessity? You wonder why the script can’t be changed, the gears of the cosmic machine rearranged, at least on our small planet by social dynamics to make life balanced and fair so everyone can live a little better? You say you want more?

More! Well at least you said “please sir” but look you little beggar, life is unfair! That’s why we’re having this talk! Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers! Now suck it up! Get out there, you little whiner! Beat those odds

THE RUNNING MAN

My military stint in D.C. bordered on Twilight Zone lunacy.

Federal agents shadowed me.

There were 3rd degree interrogations by the C.I.A.

as well as background checks, psychological tests,

interviews with the Pentagon’s assorted military

brass. I was just a draftee.

They wanted to train me for a job that required a Top Secret security

clearance, absolute loyalty, and at least a year of specialized and

complex studying.

Better than ‘Nam & getting shot or bombed.

I was against their war. I resented being a prisoner. It was that or jail.

D.I.A was better than sitting in a cell.

I lived off post in a downtown D.C. ﬂop not far from the White

House.

I couldn’t live on post with all that spit and polish.

It was a sleezy cluster of backstreet dives and dumps, by the

Greyhound station, ﬁlled with cheap rooms, pawnshops, seedy bars,

strip joints, porno book stores, winos, druggies, muggers, pimps and

whores.

On army pay it was all I could afford.

Below the Mason, Dixon line it often was too hot to sleep. I sat

one

night

on my tenement rooftop smoking cigarettes, sipping Jack, hoping I would crash. I had to get up early, catch a bus to my post, change into my class A uniform at the barracks, report for duty, study photo images shot from space, try to decipher what they meant in the scheme of things.

Suddenly military choppers ﬁlled the air.

You couldn’t do this in Chicago, the buildings are too tall.

They swept the midnight streets with their spotlights.

The circled, crisscrossed, went back and forth.

Below them was a swarm of cops, chasing through the deserted

blocks. Five ﬂoors below and two blocks down, I spotted the

Running Man—

that’s how I always thought of the guy I saw futilely ﬂeeing for his

life— arms pumping, head thrown back, chasing back and forth like a

rat in a trap.

He was a husky man, athletically built, dressed in a tan summer suit.

Was he a saboteur? A spy maybe? An informer perhaps? He didn’t rob

a Seven/Eleven to create all that commotion

I wanted him to get away, drop down a sewer, disappear behind a

secret

door.

I wanted him to do a vanishing act. He was running hard, but he was

running

out of gas.

Was I rooting for the underdog? Maybe, but we are all Running Men

aren’t we?

Running for our lives, running from our lives, running from the Man,

running

from death, which will get us in the end.

Suddenly the choppers ﬂew away.

The cops went away.

There was nothing about the Running Man in the news the next day.

THE HUMAN RACE

Bloodshed in Boston,

spilled at a marathon,

killing, wounding, maiming,

men, women, children …

Patriot’s Day in the USA: a r

un not involving an escape

from,

nor a chase down, nor even a race

or competition exactly, more

like a celebration between

nations, a global gathering, a

chance for interacting peacefully,

peace a

too-rare commodity.

Two brothers from another land

enjoying asylum from

oppression in Boston bombed

everyone,

they could.

But the marathon goes on.

The global race keeps its

steady and unstoppable pace,

everyone running, not for

escape, not in a chase, here,

there, everywhere, running

together until, one day, we can

all cross that ﬁnish line at the

same time.

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