Green Hell

Teaser II

     The following is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual events, or to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

                                                ***************************
     For my part, I do not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith and my reason -- I wish, rather, that there should be war between them! ~ Miguel de Unamuno
                                                                                            

     We lay on our backs in the lush, untended grass on the blind side of the house, watching cloud castles erect and demolish themselves. Although it was midwinter, the capricious Georgia climate teased us with a false promise of spring: we’d left for school wearing full winter panoply, only to exchange sweaters for sweat by lunchtime. The unfaded fescue and ornamental vegetation – pine, fir, juniper, and holly -- on the eastern side of the house collaborated in the deception.
     I rolled onto my side and regarded her.
    She wore a pin-striped button-down shirt (her father’s I surmised) of a semi-coarse weave, and a pair of tight, faded jeans. She’d ornamented the latter by punching parallel rows of holes along either side of the fly and stringing a shoelace between them. The contrast of white on blue focused the eye and the attention upon the gentle swell below her waist, and threatened to weather a similar, but altogether less gentle feature into the topography below my own.
     Best to resume cloud-gazing – for now. To be sure, the sky was a glorious sight in and of itself, worthy of lush synthesizers and soaring lead guitar – Rush’s “Countdown” or “Subdivisions.” Titanic cumulus banks, washed and tinted in gold and orange, against an electric turquoise background. White on blue. I laughed and groaned silently: habitual, associative thought seldom afforded me the luxury of distraction, even when I most needed it. All synaptic roads did, in fact lead to Rome – or to Sodom and Gomorrah, depending upon one’s moral orientation.
     She rolled onto her side, tweezed the cigarette from between my lips with peace-sign fingers, and helped herself to a drag.
     “Penny for your thoughts,” she said.
     I yawned and stretched, arching my back completely off the ground.
     “You wouldn’t be getting your money’s worth.” I replied.
     It was a little, white, defensive lie.
    
     I’m thinking about what it’ll be like to spend the rest of my life with you. I’m thinking about thought itself – about the fact that you’re the first thing I think of when I get up in the morning, and the last thing I think of when I fall asleep at night. I’m thinking about the fact that I’ve never felt this way about anyone or anything before. I’m thinking about the fact that I love you so much, it literally hurts at times – it’s a physical ache that begins around my throat and runs all the way down to my guts. I’m thinking that for the first time in my life, I’m actually afraid of my own feelings. On a good day, I can bite back on the horrible rages. I can go into “machine mode” when I’m depressed. But this? I have no control over it. It’s like trying to saddle-break a horse – without a saddle or even a bridle.
    I’m thinking of how wonderful it will be when we can make love anytime we want – even in the daytime -- without tiptoeing around our parents or worrying about my brother or your sister walking in on us. And I mean make love: the real thing, not this “Who wants to go first?” bullshit. I want to see your face while we’re doing it, to watch your expressions and responses, and know that I’m the one making them happen. One thing I’ve figured out is that there’s a difference between making love and fucking. Before I met you, I used to look at other girls and think about what I’d like to do to them. That would be fucking. When I look at you, I want to do the same thing, but it’s a completely different feeling: they’re nothing alike. I wish I could explain it to you, but I’m not sure how to go about it. I don’t have the words yet. It’s too new, too alien.
      I’m thinking of what it will be like when we can share the same bed all night, and wake up next to each other, and not care that we have tangled hair, eye-boogers, and breath fit to knock a buzzard off a shitwagon. I’m thinking about a tune in my Da’s record collection: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” by the Beach Boys.
     I’m thinking of how beautiful and brilliant our kids will be. Mendel. The fruit flies we bred last year, in Biology. How did it work? I reckon our kids will have auburn or chestnut hair – maybe red, if the recessive genes combine. Eyes? Somewhere between blue and green, I suppose. I can’t remember which is dominant. Maybe they’ll be like mine – a little of both. Or maybe we’ll have a mixed pair, like my brother and me: he got all the Teutonic genes, and I got all the Celtic ones. And I’m sure they’ll be smart. Perhaps even smarter than either of us. I wonder if they’ll be as weird as we are, though. They could be crazy; insane geniuses – Aleister Crowley types, or mad scientists. Arch-villains planning to conquer the world. Wait – wasn’t there something called “regression to the mean”? That would suck. What if they’re dull, or even worse --- nose-pickin’ dipshits with question-mark arms, like the retards on Spaz Hall? That would really suck and give change.
     “These are our sons, Mangan – we call him “Mongo” – and Edmund – “Special Ed,” to friends and family.”
     That’s funny. People call us “gifted,” while the ‘tards are “special.” I guess it’s better to be special than it is to be gifted, then. What kind of gift is this, anyway? Why do the fuckin’ droolers and feebs seem so much happier than we are? Have you noticed how people fawn on the retards? But look at their faces when they do. That’s the only thing I like about the Spaz Hallers: they frighten people on a deep, gut level. There but for the grace of God and an uncontrollable quirk of DNA… They feel the same way about us, you know, but for different reasons. We’re all abominations. We undermine their myths.
     Think about it. We’re told that the future leaders of the country are the best and brightest. But look around you. Look at the rest of the TAG-fags. How many of us do you think will be running things when we’re grown up? Grover? Too nerdy. John? Too fat – and too radical. Joe? Too gay. Me? Don’t even get me started. I hate and despise every one of the motherfucking herd-animals, and I don’t pretend otherwise. I don’t want to rule them or be ruled by them. I just want to be left alone. You? You can’t make up your mind whether to be a whore or a wallflower. Wait. On second thought, you just might have a shot at it. You’d never be the head honcho, but you could probably find a respectable niche somewhere in the structure. You’d be more useful to them than I would. They have something you want, don’t they? Deep inside, part of you wants to be one of them, doesn’t it? You’re not fooling me, you know. It’s in your choice of words. But why do you want that? Why would anyone?
     Oh well. It’s just a phase. You’ll grow out of it. You’re intelligent enough to figure out what a fucking sham this is.
      Remember: we’re selected by IQ. How many of the nabobs being groomed to rule are in TAG? None of the fuckers. Not a fucking one of them.
     The retards make them nervous because they embody their insecurities. Retards are – well – retards. They’re ugly. They’re uncouth. They’re never cool, and never popular. But they’re safe: they don’t ask questions, and no one is afraid of a retard secretly laughing at him, or of being outsmarted by one. But what a horrible existence that must be – for the “wobblers,” I mean. They’re only happy because they don’t know any better. They can’t know any better. They’ll never understand what pieces of shit the “normal” people are --- and yet they’ll depend upon them for the rest of their lives.
     Let’s hope our kids aren’t feebs.
     Nah. We’re probably different enough to guarantee what they call “hybrid vigour.” We’re from different parts of the country, and our ancestors were from different countries, after all. And who says they’d both be boys, anyway? We might have one of each, a boy and a girl.  
     I’m thinking that I’ll be graduating in less than four months, and that you’ll be graduating in two years. Just a little longer, and we’ll be free of this fucking prison. Then we’ll have our whole lives ahead of us – and they’ll really be our lives. I’ll have two years of college under my belt, and I’ll have everything ready when you start, so the transition won’t be so abrupt. Jaysus! I haven’t even been back in-country a year yet, have I? I think I still have what they call “culture shock.” Yeah, I’ll definitely do whatever I can to ease the transition. And if you want to go to a different school? No problem. I can transfer. A degree’s a degree, right? It’s a piece of paper that proves you can play the game. That’s what a few of our teachers told me unter vier Augen, now isn’t it? They want me to play the game? Fine. I'll play it -- up to a point. You're worth it. Hmmm. Maybe we won’t be that free after all, come to think of it. Oh well. Fuck it. We’ll cross that bridge when we reach it.
    I’m thinking that once I’m out of here, I can assemble a real band and play real gigs, instead of fucking around in my parents’ basement. I’d love to keep Vortex together, but we can’t even find a regular drummer, and I don’t think the other guys are as serious about it as I am. You’ll get into all of our shows for free, of course – best seats in the house. I’d probably play better for knowing you were out there watching me.
   I’m thinking that I’d like to write a book someday, but I don’t know what to write about. It seems as if everything’s been done already. I have a whole box of short stories – stuff I’ve been writing since I was twelve, but it’s mostly fantasy and science fiction, and I’m too embarrassed to show anyone. Maybe I’ll let you read a few of them one of these days, just to see what you think. Well, there are a couple I’ll never show you –or anyone else – because you’re in them. I wrote them over the summer, while I was trying to think of some way to talk to you. That’s why I started taking evening walks, you know. I was hoping I’d “accidentally” run into you, or that you’d be out in your yard, and I’d have an excuse to say “hi.”

     I’m thinking that it’s only been a couple of months since we-
 
     We were standing on resurfaced asphalt, a quarter of a mile and three months away. My facial muscles clenched around a real or imagined affront, even as my hand clenched around an empty can of the criminally misnamed “Coca Cola Classic,” crumpled it into a near-hourglass, and side-armed it into a storm-drain. It clattered dully on the concrete, then again with a resounding echo as it came to rest in the pipe, awaiting the next rain to carry it to the fish-pond. For a moment, I wondered if oxidizing soda-cans were as toxic as antifreeze and motor oil – but the girl. The girl was the greatest of mysteries. Her competitors – and there were many; a thousand rude, jockeying thoughts an hour – could wait their turns.

    Her shoulders and head drooped, the veil of her hair highlighted in dull orange by the streetlamp.
    I huffed vaporized exasperation into the evening chill.
     “What’s this about?” It was more demand than inquiry.
     “Last night,” she said. Her voice was a newborn kitten’s.
    “What about it?” I asked, unable to blunt the edge in my own.
    “You were…” each word fainter and more hesitant than the one preceding it, “going too fast for me.”
   The anger (Had I really been that angry? And over such a trifle?) punched completely through what little reserve I’d been able to muster, its passage marked by an atomizer exit-wound. My face shifted, in nanoseconds, from a twisted snarl of cinnabar fury to an ivory death-mask as the blood rose and then ebbed, coagulating into indigestible black pudding somewhere between bodhran heart and witch’s knot intestines. (“Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favor’d rage, then lend the eye a terrible aspect.”) What was this about? Another of her damnable three-penny soap operas?
    I withheld the ice from my voice somehow, but the quality of boots on snow remained; the crunch was subdued, but audible nonetheless.
     I walked her home, and called it an early evening, pleading unfinished homework. And I told the truth in word, if not in spirit. Homework was a task I undertook on the day it was due; never the night before.     With a smile I didn’t feel (and I tried my level best to convey my insincerity), I kissed her goodnight and told her I’d see her at the bus stop in the morning. That part I did mean. I was angry, my feelings and my pride wounded, but I’d never have resorted to “put out or get out”: I loved her too much; with an intensity that frightened me at times. But I was in no mood for company – especially hers.
    
     “Mistah Kurtz, he dead.”   
    
     I spent the next few hours lying awake in bed, listening to my album collection (including a few platters I’d borrowed from my father) and blowing smoke and frustration at the ceiling. Once again, popular social fiction had proven itself a wrecker, luring the ship of expectation onto the rocks of actuality. The times may have been “fast” at the imaginary Ridgemont High, but at Roswell High, they moved at the pace of a turtle swimming through cold treacle.
     I grimaced, stretched, and returned to luxuriating in perceived rejection and very real self-pity.
     “Each night I ask the stars up above/ Why must I be a teenager in love?”
     You said it, guinea-boy. That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. That’s-a one spicy meatball.  
     I was little given to introspection, and even less to empathy at the time, but as my anger – which, increasingly, seemed unjustified – cooled, I found myself ever more inclined towards dispassionate analysis; or at least towards analysis weighted more by regret than by rage.
    I was seventeen. I had spent the last three years in a foreign city, inhaling postmodern “decadence chic” and European sexual mores along with diesel exhaust and cement dust. She was a year and some months younger, and a product of the American suburbs. These were facts I should have taken into account. I enjoyed the additional and entirely chance advantage of being a boy, blessed by physiology with less to fear from -- and therefore less to consider about -- the consequences of indulging my baser urges.
    But how “base” were they,really? Weren’t they natural? And if so, how could they be wrong? Besides: didn’t love cover a multitude of sins?
    Then memory intruded upon rumination, threatening it with oblivion. My pulse accelerated as I recalled the sight of her, lustrous and moonstone-pale in the half-light, remembered the feel, yielding yet resilient, of her breast beneath my palm; the sensation of her nipple hardening between my lips; the infrared radiance of her body as it warmed, tensing and relaxing by turns, like a plucked guitar string; the dotted quarter-rest in the 4/4 rhythm of her breathing; the unfamiliar and nearly imperceptible scents that conveyed and confirmed information I had never consciously acquired.
     I stubbed out my cigarette, drew another from the concertina pack in my shirt pocket, straightened it as best I could, and fumbled for a light. Soft-shell digits scrabbled left and right across the surface of the nightstand (“I should have been a pair of ragged claws…”), and came to tentative, inquisitive rest upon a folded rectangle of paper. The note she’d slipped into my locker the previous morning. No, not my locker. She’d slipped this one into my pocket. Had I read too much into the contact? But how? Hadn't I given her more than one smirking, only-half-kidding pat on the ass? And hadn't I been feeling her up through her shirt --"two steps forward, one step back" -- for days now, working my way up her side until she finally stopped arresting my wrist with viselike fingers? What was up with the mixed signals?  
     The matchbook was empty. I stomped to the door, each footfall emphatic enough to make the needle on the turntable skip, robbed my laughing brother of a pack of matches, and returned to my locked and barricaded sanctum sanctorum.
     
      "Going too fast for me"?
      I'd thrown away all my nudie magazines for this?
     What a crock of shit.  

    Enough of the record-player. A punch on each of two buttons, and it was 96 Rock – and “Suffragette City.”

     "Hey, man!"
     I executed half a wrestler's bridge, and looked through the tops of my eyes. It was my brother: speak, or even think of the devil, and he apppears. He snorted and hawked theatrically,leaned over me, and went through the motions of playing "The Pit and the Pendulum" with a mucilaginous, orange juice loogie. Thoughts of impending manhood raised their shields, lowered their spears, and coalesced into a phalanx, set to receive the barbarous charge of teenage reality. I gained my feet with the reflexive speed of a dropped cat. 

    "Ma said to tell you dinner's gonna be ready in half an hour."
    "Thanks. Now fuck off, dicknose." 

     

Teaser

    An excerpt from book #3. (Or perhaps book #4 – my editor informs me that #3 is getting long enough, as it is). If everything goes as planned, #3 should be in print by St. Paddy’s. The working title: Irish Need Not Apply.

     It isn’t the kind of thing I usually write, but I just can’t see myself doing the same thing over and over again. What's the fucking point? “Palimpsest,” from the Biohazard anthology (which, as it happened, was semi-prophetic in that we predicted a hemorrhagic fever epidemic in the US of fuckin’ A; my story implied that the Federal Gubmin’t had deliberately released it in order to reduce the number of “useless eaters”) was so unrelentingly grim and bleak, I didn’t want to write – or even read – another post-apocalyptic, quasi-sci-fi story for months after I finished it.
   My wife liked “Friar’s Lantern,” my contribution to First Love (see below) – still available, and a steal at $8.50 plus postage; include a topless or nudie photo with your money order, and I’ll even autograph it. Just kidding! Just kidding! I’d have a hell of a time explaining that one to my wife…), under my nom de –uhm, “nom de keyboard,” I suppose – Jefferson Behan, and opined that I should stick to writing stories along the same line: more upbeat, and less drenched in bitter, vitriolic mockery of myself and the rest of humanity (especially the shitheap of pretentious superficiality that is yuppified, post-modern, post-American America – “the Land of the Gated Community and the Home of the Gas-Guzzling SUV”) than my usual offerings. I was inclined to agree with her, and kept the stories in the upcoming volume a bit lighter, except for a revision of “The Homecoming Queen,” which treats with some rather ugly subjects.
     I tried to the keep the "nookie" in this one from becoming too graphic, as I don't find any particular challenge in writing porn. I also tried to explore the emotional elements of the story, rather than cranking out a "Dude, I got my rocks off!" piece. 
     The following, of course, is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. 

                                                                        ******

     It was late March, and in Georgia, March, whether coming or going, bears no resemblance to any species of animal, carnivorous or herbivorous: it is more a war between blind, insensate elemental forces. The day was warm – almost uncomfortably so after twelve weeks of winter. Although the air-temperature was in the seventies, we’d had snow less than a month before.
    I locked my bedroom door and double-checked it. Just to be safe, I wedged an aborted woodshop project between the sill and the bottom of the panel. I lowered the needle onto the spinning disc of black vinyl on the turntable, to be rewarded by the opening riff of Quiet Riot’s “Breathless,” while my scuffed Dingo cowboy boots skimmed the floor at acute angles to one another and thudded against the dressing-table and bedpost. As Kevin DuBrow wailed over the urgent, galloping crunch of Carlos Cavazo’s guitar, I shed my denim jacket, spiked wristbands, and plaid button-down, and drew my Black Sabbath T-shirt over my head.
     Afternoon sunlight streamed through the window, gilding her skin, bejeweling her eyes, and burnishing her hair with highlights of auburn.
     My control/ That’s what you take from me…
    She lay supine on my bed -- a life raft amidst whorls and eddies of discarded clothing and unalterable circumstance -- with the sheet drawn to a hand’s breadth below her collarbone, tucked between her arms and ribcage.
      I was stirring and stiffening before I finished unbuckling my belt, and completely at attention by the time I stepped out of my jeans and briefs.
      Damn my soul/But you won’t let me be…
      The tautness of the thin fabric served to reveal and accentuate, rather than conceal and downplay the fullness of her breasts and hips, and the convex, mirror-image curves between them.
      Stop me in my tracks/ There’s no looking back...
    I crossed the room naked, and lay down beside her, one elbow on the mattress, my palm supporting my jaw. The other hand roamed, with casual purpose, over the expanse of linen, and the flesh beneath it. A slanting ray of sunlight transformed her eyes into lamps of jade, and I experienced a peculiar temporal disconnection, as might a man abruptly emerging from a coma. Six months earlier, I’d begun dating a girl who’d recently had her braces removed. Although the metamorphosis had been too gradual to notice, she and the indescribably beautiful woman sharing my bed were one and the same.
     I can’t see…  
  We exchanged a kiss, and I marveled briefly at the proficiency and fluency we’d acquired in the expression of affection. It was neither the clumsy, lip-bruising, crash-dummy impact of our first date, nor the unwittingly parodic, triple-X double-helix of tongues to which we’d shortly progressed. It was long and improvisational, shallow and deep by turns: a fantasia of passion, nonetheless possessed of discernible, if fluid, elements of composition, rhythm, and dynamics.
     It’s much too late/ I feel faint…
     She’d shed a few pounds since midwinter. Slender and light-boned as ever, I had little weight to lose. The return of the sun had given her a touch of color, and added highlights to her dark brown hair. It had had the latter effect on me, as well, although heredity – the genetic legacy of Ireland and northern and western Britain – had left me with only two choices of complexion: ash-white or beet-red. Given my slightly delicate features, her pointed chin, our large, glistening eyes (hers green, mine given to shifting from green to grey to blue), her mid-back length hair, and my own, which spared neither my eyes nor my collar; a third party, observing our embrace might have mistaken us for a shojo comic come to life.
     You take my breath away.
     We separated for a few heartbeats, during which I looked directly into her eyes. What I saw – and I hoped that I wasn’t succumbing to self-deception – was a reflection of my own emotions.
      We shared a smile, which quickly metamorphosed from wistful exercises in portraiture to very teenage grins. I brushed her lips with mine again. Then her neck, as my hand, following a carte du pays it had long since memorized, slid beneath the sheet, drifted up her bare thigh, traversed her belly, and found her breast, thumb teasing a change of condition from her nipple. I continued kissing my way downward, buzzing her collarbones (the gold, heart-shaped locket I’d given her for Christmas lay between them), each breast in turn, her stomach; leapfrogging to her legs, just above the knees, then blazing a new path upward to the inverted trapezoid of hair between them.
    When I surfaced some minutes later, her face was flushed, her eyes sparkling in a way I’d learned to recognize, but never to describe precisely.  I lay atop her, braced on my toes and palms, as if executing pushups in P.E., and we kissed again. As we did, her hand gently closed upon the appendage to which my thinking often devolved when she and I were together.
     Her expression of feigned surprise, and the exaggerated tone of her “Oh, my! Willy’s certainly on the up-and-up!” left me mildly embarrassed – and even more excited, if it was even possible: Energy and enthusiasm may be squandered upon the young, but flattery never is.
     I kissed her again, and submitted to gravity. As I did, she began to submit to me, her thighs parting a fraction of an inch at a time, until I was directly upon the threshold. I kissed her again – the deepest, most heartfelt kiss I’d ever given her. I spent an inestimable stretch of time looking at her face, the loveliest I’d ever seen, and never lovelier than it was at that moment, and whispered, “I think we’d better stop right here.”
     She smiled, and said, “I think you’re right,” in the same tone. And then her demeanor and aspect changed entirely.
    The vulpine grin was back, her voice bantering and playful.
    “Your turn,” she said, reversing our positions with speed and ease that belied our relative sizes. She sat astride me as if she’d won a wrestling match, her hands kneading my shoulders. The sun disappeared as the curtain of her hair fell over my face.
     She dismounted and rolled onto her side, ear and cheek on my chest, her hand -- seemingly endowed with a mind of its own -- somewhat lower.
    Then her head was on my stomach, and thought, analysis, observation – everything but raw, physical sensation departed.
      She took her time, knowing that this was the last chance we’d have for quite a while.
     Although mental clarity is difficult for a boy of seventeen to achieve, let alone maintain under those circumstances, I marveled once again at the steep acclivity of our learning curves. Despite our having done this dozens of times before, it was a new experience.
     In a euphemistic note she’d slipped into my locker months before, she’d said she enjoyed this particular expression of affection – “diving,” we called it.  I hadn’t known whether she was sincere, or catering to the insatiable ego-demon who, even then, amused himself by spitting in the face of my self-conscious social ineptitude. Uncertainty left me atop a narrow, crumbling causeway between maelstroms of vanity and insecurity.
      Fuck that shit in the ear, dude. Don’t be such an ankle-grabbin’, queer-bait fag. Just enjoy it.
      For once, the voice of unreason had it spot-on, fuckin’-A right.
     She was the loveliest, most intelligent girl in the concentration camp we called a “school.” My love for her was as profound and implacable as the Erinyes of black depression, blacker rage, and neon-chromatic levity who lowered their necklines and raised their miniskirts at me a thousand times or more a day: her only real competitors. And she was mine. 
      To all appearances, she enjoyed the voluntary, trusting submission on my part, and the temporary power the act conferred upon her, but I didn’t imagine that was the same as enjoying the act itself. It was, however a position I could see, albeit from a different perspective.
 
     When first I’d initiated this level of exploration, she’d been nervous.
     No -- more than nervous. She’d been taken completely aback.
      She was well into one of her inexplicable and often frustrating crying-jags that evening, and I‘d finally lost my patience with her. Although I experienced them as well (bipolar disorder is a harsh and unpredictable mistress), I isolated myself whenever I spotted the menacing, telltale clouds on my emotional horizon -- as much from pride as from reluctance to inflict myself upon others whilst in that condition. Years later, I realized that experience should have left me more empathetic, but upon a teenager, it often has the opposite effect: immitior quia toleraverat.
     Empathy is as lacking in the young as youth is wasted upon them.
     Her tragic muse inspired an ode of groundless self-deprecation, a truncated, asymmetric chorus of cartoonish teen angst.
     Antistrophe need not apply…
     I was confused and annoyed by the sight of anyone of her beauty and intellectual prowess foundering in a mire of detraction so reflexive and devoid of reflection.
     She claimed to be fat – although the tape measure refuted her with silent but emphatic objectivity. She claimed to be ugly, apparently oblivious to the lowing herd of rivals with which I contended daily. She claimed that no one liked her – although I loved her with a single-minded intensity verging on certifiable madness.  I smothered the thought before it drew its first breath, but I wondered, for a fraction of a second, if this wasn’t projection; a cowled and cloaked admission that it was she who liked no one. And if she saw herself in such an unflattering light, how did she see me?
     My thinking and behavior have long been heterodox (sometimes inconveniently so), perhaps even more so then than now. Moreover my teens were an uninterrupted flight of extraordinarily vivid imagination.
     Fortunately, there is no necessary dichotomy between creativity and pragmatism.
     Aleister Crowley had once defined magic as “the science of bringing about change in accordance with the will.” Although I found the assertion reductionist and over-general, I had to concede it a measure of qualified validity. If this is or was the case, then some forms of magic require neither complicated ritual nor exotic paraphernalia.
     I lifted the curse of her melancholy with a counter-enchantment of my own, an operation calling for nothing more elaborate than audacity and prehensile digits. Abracadabra, presto, hocus pocus, and alakazam: in an instant, her jeans were around her ankles, and my head was between her legs.
     “What are you doing?” she gasped.
      To my mind, the question was as obtuse as it was self-answering. I gathered that she’d never seen an X-rated film, or perused an issue of Penthouse’s Forum.
     Instead of plying her with colloquial expressions for the act (too vulgar) or the technical term (too clinical), I answered: “Shocking you.”     

  Strangely enough, she was resistant to the final outcome, as if by inducing sensual release, I’d somehow misappropriate her self-control. When I’d finished, I nearly laughed at the sight of her: shuddering, her eyes tightly closed, warring with herself to regulate her breathing. To me -- no longer a child, but not quite a man: and yet completely male -- it seemed ridiculous that she’d resist my efforts to ply her with pure, physical enjoyment. The satisfaction and excitement I derived from the experience were consequently the results of a perceived victory as much as of the sincere desire to please the bewitching creature I loved as deeply and madly as only a seventeen-year-old could.
     We’d spent the next few minutes in what Aristotle described as “falling action,” reconciling ourselves (although they were very different forms of reconciliation, and motivated by entirely different forces) with what we’d done. As I held her, nuzzled her, stroked her hair, she relaxed. Her face was still flushed, but her eyes, when she opened them, were soft, dewy, unfocused, and her smile was one I’d never seen before: drowsy, loose, as if she were slightly stoned. And somehow, she looked older.
      For the first dozen heartbeats, I experienced a rising sense of protective concern (but from whom was I to protect her? Myself? Herself?), coupled with the barest hint of guilt. I wondered if, once again, I’d “gone too fast for her.”
     But then we changed places. The last thing I remembered her saying before she disappeared beneath the sheet was “I can’t believe I’m actually doing this.”
     To my relief, there was no awkward silence as we dressed, no “I have to go. I’ll see you tomorrow” when we’d finished. We were arm-in-arm as I walked her home, her head on my shoulder. The goodnight kisses – just one more; always just one more – and embraces took no less time to complete, and the next morning, nothing had changed between us.
 
    On that spring afternoon, though, something had changed. She prolonged the act well beyond what was normal for us, and there was a new intensity to her efforts, an intensity to which I enthusiastically responded.
     Despite the unrestrained, elemental sensuality of the episode, it never seemed dirty or pornographic to me, then or afterward.  It was as natural an expression of love as any I could think of; perhaps even more natural than most. I could conceive of of no greater declaration of devotion than refusing the offer of what I’d most wanted from the moment we met and it occurred to me that perhaps she was acknowledging the tacit assertion in her own way.
     Finally, and as all good things must, it ended. My hand tapped a gently frantic tattoo on her shoulder, and she pulled away.
    When I was completely spent, she fetched a handful of tissues from the box on the nightstand, and teased me about a matter that had become an inside – if mildly embarrassing, for my part – joke between us.

     The refusal to take her, even more than the gold, heart-shaped locket I’d given her for Christmas was the hypostasis of my feelings for her. But a disconnected shard of me wondered: Was she the true entelechy that drove me, or merely the concrete symbol thereof? The thought was disconcerting, and I tossed a thick, black coverlet over it, as one might conceal a frayed, unattractive piece of furniture when expecting houseguests. 

The Chase is INFINITELY Better Than the Catch, Ch. IX (Fiction)

     “Quick! Back inside!” I said.
     As one, we  retreated to the shelter of Walpole’s house and watched the proceedings from the darkness of the kitchen. As lights winked on throughout the subdivision and Bill’s dogs raged anew, a lank silhouette gangled across Veronica’s lawn, to the Tennis Club parking lot. A moment later, the SUV rolled past us, going back the way it had come. In tenebrous contrast to the surrounding houses, the light in Veronica’s window went out. To me, this indicated a good chance that she was looking our way, to see if we’d been involved in the row.
     Poor thing, I thought. If only you knew. From the look of things, you’ve got far worse than the likes of me to worry about.
    
      The clock read a quarter to three, and we continued to discuss the tragicomic ballet dance from which I was – belatedly, I admit – about to bow out.
     “Man, this whole thing keeps gettin’ more and more like a Twilight Zone episode,” Walpole said.
     “Worse’n that!” said Bill. “Hell, it’s worse’n readin’ DOE-stoy-yevsky! I need to start takin’ notes just to keep up with all these oddball characters.
     “We got the narrator, here,” – beer sloshed onto the floor as he indicated me with his bottle – “the love-interest what ain’t really a love-interest on account o’ they don’t really love each other – they’s jus’ fuckin; the ex-husband, the pushy ol’ hag, the dead kid, the booger-eatin’ feeb, the K Mart version of Elmer Gantry, and now…”
     “And now You-Know-Who,” I said. “It’s quite the witches’ brew, ain’t it? Eye of newt, tongue of dog, arse of horse, you name it.” Owing to the direction in which the conversation was now inevitably headed, my choice of metaphors was deliberate.
    “You think things are getting weird now, Buckos? Well, just bide your time. They’re about to become exponentially weirder. Walpole, you still have a land line, and you’re in the book, right?”
     “Yeah, Bro.”
     “Then count on the phone ringing before daybreak. If it’s Veronica – and it isn’t likely to be – tell her I’m not here. It’s not a lie, you know: my mind is in a thousand places at once, at the moment. If it’s a man, and if he asks for me, agree. But only on the condition that you put him on speaker-phone.
     “What you just witnessed, august colleagues, is colloquially known as a ‘game-changer.’ Fuck me dead! I could see him doing something like this, but I never thought it was a likely scenario. I’d always imagined he’d be content with his bells, books, and candles.”
      “You think he’s gonna pull a ‘Tet’ on their asses?” Walpole asked.
      “Nah. Not in the physical sense. This guy’s obviously been keeping an eye on her for a while. A very close eye. When it comes to ‘PTL’ over there, he appears to have known what I only suspected. Obviously, he could have greased them both by now.”
      Bill nodded to Walpole, who tossed him a set of keys. Bill left the room, and was gone for some time. Walpole offered me another beer in lieu of an explanation. When Bill returned, he handed Walpole an M2 carbine. In his own left hand, muzzle ceiling-ward, was an immaculately cared-for M21.
     “Dude! What the fuck?” I blurted.
     “Common sense, Baby Bro,” Walpole said, as he opened the bolt and checked the chamber. Satisfied that it was empty, he lifted his buttocks from the chair, reached into his pocket, and removed a ten-round mag. The years, I marveled, seemed to slip away – even as ingrained habit didn’t. He tapped the metal box against his forehead twice (for all that it was unnecessary – the M1 and its derivatives had no history of jamming or failing to feed properly), then seated it with a slap as natural as a yawn. His eyes were blue flints, his lips an almost teenage smirk as he jacked one up the spout. With an uncharacteristic and, to me, disconcertingly lupine grin, he said, “Sat Cong!” to no one in particular.
     “If this butt-nugget knows ‘bout them,” Bill explained, as he seated his own mag and flipped up the lens caps on the ‘21’s scope, “he knows ‘bout you.”
      “I just said he wouldn’t get physical, you bloodthirsty gobshites! How much have you had to drink tonight, fer feck’s sake? Item: he just passed up an opportunity to zap the both of them.”
     Bill’s facial expression and tone of voice were equally belligerent.
      “Could be him’s too hon’r’ble to waste a ‘tard’s ma in front of him.”
     “In which case, he’d be too honorable to play ‘nitrocotton ninja’ with me, right?”
     Chins nested in forked fingers as they pondered my contention. In my heart of hearts, I thanked God that I’d forsaken the botanical imp of cannabis well over two decades before.
     “Item: He just passed up an opportunity to wire the fuck’s ride for sound. Didn’t even damage it, fer feck’s sake. Just lobbed a tennis ball. Think about it. Obviously, he didn’t want to be caught. What’s one tennis ball among the dozens lying around that court? And tennis-balls don’t hold fingerprints. DNA, maybe – but who the feck is gonna launch a federal investigation over a car alarm? A stray cat could set one off.
     “No, he wanted to embarrass Veronica, to flush our boy into the open within sight of her neighbors. And it being as the mark lost his cool and made a break for it, there’s a good chance that at least one of these crypto-Nazi, Neighborhood Watch types will be on the lookout for his vehicle from now on. That’s sure to put a kink in – well – in their ‘kink’ for a few days, at the very least. There is another possibility, but I consider it less likely: that he’s trying to play that dipstick and meself off against each other.”
     “I think this calls for a sitrep,” Walpole said.
     “Fine,” I sighed. “I’ll pick up where I left off. “Why can’t reality be as formulaic as fiction, by the way? Plot point A, plot point B, climax… neat and tidy as you please. If life were a book, the author would be panned as a hack for dabbling on the fringes of deus ex machina every other feckin’ scene – but in a much nastier way. Perhaps we should call it ‘diabolus ex machina’. Reality is like that feckin’ Desolation of Smaug abomination: ‘Oh, here we go again. Thorin drops the key, Bilbo drops the ring, Bilbo drops his scramasax, Bilbo drops his trousers, Bilbo comes down with Ebola, Bifur has a grand mal seizure, Oin slips in a dollop of dragon shit, Gandalf has his first bout with Alzheimer’s –and all within a single, three-minute scene!’ Fer feck’s sake! It’s enough to make a man throw up!”
     “And it sure is hard to figure,” Bill muttered.
     Our aged, boonie rat/flower child of a best friend missed the reference, and for that, at least, I was grateful.
      “I’ve already mentioned her shortcomings – and the fact that many of ‘em aren’t entirely her fault. I’ve already mentioned that she’s a mess. I’ve already mentioned that we’re at opposite ends of every spectrum you can imagine, and that we have nothing in common. We don’t like each other, we don’t agree on anything, and we can’t even agree to disagree. Well, she can’t at any rate. See what I mean about us being opposites?
     “There are a few superficial similarities. We might laugh at the same scene in a movie, for example (although we’d never cry at the same scene, and that’s worth pondering, in and of itself) – but that’s no base upon which to build anything enduring, even if I cared to. And I don’t. Neither does she, from what I’ve seen. She’s just afraid of getting old alone.
     “‘Prince Lucky Charms’ knows it, too. Let me get back to the party I was telling you about.
     “The guests were all married couples, except for our boy, and the incongruity wasn’t lost on me. Three married couples and three single people, you see. Transparent as glass, but that’s what passes for veiled intent among that bunch. I blame the public schools.”
     Bill chuckled.
     “Don’t fuck with ‘Ol’ Psyop’ here,” he said to Walpole.
     “Jaysus! Does anyone still call me that? Never mind. I don’t want to know. My faith in humanity is weak enough at the moment. Isaiah was right, you know.
     “Their point was to emphasize that all of them were members of the same church, and I wasn’t. And that three of the pairs were ‘legitimately’ married. And that therefore, Veronica was up for grabs, by their rules. I suppose they were too dim to realize that she was up for grabs by mine, as well -- and by her own. Why bring a shotgun to a turkey dinner? The contrast, though, induced what passes for guilt with her – well, not so much guilt as the urge to conform. You see, boys, there’s no point in trying to elicit Veronica’s compliance in anything through guilt as we define it: she doesn’t have enough of a conscience. Shame, in contraposition, works like a charm.”
     “Man!” Walpole laughed. “You guys really are opposites!”
     “Well indeed we are, don’t ye’ know we are? Too-me-right-fol-loo-ra-laddie, well indeed we are. Not sure whether it’s cultural or a matter of personalities, though. I’m too asocial to feel much in the way of shame – or perhaps I’m just too brash, or too contemptuous of other people. Or perhaps I’m too much of a classicist. You can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay, or you can call me --”
     “A motherfucker who’s hintin’ at wantin’ another beer?” Bill asked.
     “Well, since you asked,” I said, swirling the half-inch left in my bottle, for emphasis.

     “Glad we bought that ‘suitcase nuke’ before we went out,” Bill said, as he handed me a fresh one a few seconds later.
    “I entertain the possibility of being too much of a classicist,” I resumed, “because I see shame as the result of violating mere social norms, the punishment for transgressions the Romans called mala prohibita. That’s subjective by definition. Guilt, in contraposition, is the result of knowing that one has done something inherently evil – mala in se. Not being a moral relativist, I’m more prone to guilt than shame. Given the distinction, it’s entirely possible for certain social norms to be inherently evil. As a matter of fact, even a good social norm can be evil when adhered to with malicious intent; when the letter of the law supersedes the spirit. Was man made for the Sabbath, or the Sabbath for man? But I’m fissioning again.”
      “What did you do, Bro?”
       “Me? I sat on the couch in the ‘alpha spread,’ radiating alpha, beta, gamma, and perhaps even delta tau chi particles of ‘Suck my fuckin' Irish dick!’; and invited everyone to have a seat – never mind that it wasn’t my house. Then, while Veronica was bringing in refreshments, I made an obvious display of checking out all the other women – but not in a lewd way. Keep that in mind: there will be a pop-quiz after the lecture. One of ‘em primped her hair, and the other one did the blink, blush, look-at-floor bit. Those two, I decided to leave alone. Not so the other idiot’s wife. I’d made her for one of the instigators from the beginning, and decided then and there to play the part of sledgehammer, by way of testing the fractile strength of their union. I suppose I should explain in greater detail."
     I pierced Bill's rolling eyes with my own, and continued.
     “She was a tougher nut to crack, because she obviously disliked me. Too uneducated and too unimaginative, though, to understand the implication: she was investing emotion in me, even if it was of a negative sort. Big mistake. In a horrid, robotic way, Veronica’s psychopathic indifference is more sensible. She’d make a better hired killer – or a better Judas Iscariot.
     “The target was very, very pretty, but not stunning. Beautiful in her own way, but not to all beholders. I mean, I’d do her, but—anyway; she’s a little older than we are, and she obviously struggles with her weight – which is in all the right places, for the record. Well proportioned, too. Think of one of those plus-size models, and you’ve got the picture. Pays very close attention to her makeup, her hair’s a little too wild not to be the product of considerable effort, and her clothes are just plain enough to leave a good bit to the imagination. Note that in order for that to happen, the imagination has to be engaged in the first place.”
     Bill nodded slowly, and tugged at his greying beard.
    “I seen the type,” he said.
    “Yep. And like as not, you’ll see ‘em officiating at church bake sales. That’s where I first saw her, actually. Bustling all around, in a waist-to neck sweater – that just happened to fit like tar and feathers. Never seen her wear a skirt much above the knee, but they draw the eye to what’s above – in the old days, they called ‘em  ‘child-bearing hips’ – and below: calves like inverted bowling pins, real silks, and heels just high enough to accentuate ‘em. Sure and I reckon sex is good for selling more than beer and cars; it seems to work for cupcakes and oatmeal cookies, as well.”
     “I’ll be she’s, like, a Scorpio, man,” said Walpole.
     “Or a cat in heat. And make no mistake: she’s hot, but she won’t be forever, and she’s acutely aware of it. No one displays the wares like that, without being on the lookout for a prospective buyer – on the subconscious level, at least. And it’s a short trip from subconscious to self-conscious.”
     Wapole sighed.
    “Baby bro,” he said, rubbing the outer corners of his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, “I don’t like this, you know, this predatory side I’m seeing. It’s not the Dave I know.”
    I leaned forward, elbows on my quadriceps.
    “I’m not a predator, Obi Wan. I just got sick and fucking tired of being the prey a long, long time ago. I hope you take this the right way, but think about when you were in ‘Nam. While you’re hunting Charlie, Charlie’s hunting you. And if you wanna catch Charlie --”
     “You gotta think like Charlie. OK, I get it. But you can’t like, become Charlie, you know? Otherwise, what’s the point? It’s just, like, us against them.”
     “All wars is us against them,” said Bill. “An’ the farther you are from home, an’ the longer you stay gone, the smaller the ‘us’ is. Same same VIET-nam, same same Somalia. Hell, three months in the Moge, an’ I wasn’t fightin’ for no Goddamn mom an’ apple pie no more. I was fightin’ for my outfit.”
    Truer words were seldom spoken, I said to myself. Although I’d never worn more of a “uniform” than a leather coat with a gold shamrock tacked to the collar, I knew all too well how the baying dogs of concrete war silenced the voice of abstraction – often by tearing out its throat.
     “As do we all, here or abroad,” I said. “Which brings me back to this broad’s outfit. She was tastefully dolled up that evening, as usual. Denim skirt, and a button-down cowgirl-lookin’ blouse, buttoned all the way up. Some kind of shiny fabric – I don’t know shit about women’s clothes, except how to get ‘em out of ‘em, so pardon the dearth o' specifics. Very modest – except for the fact that when she moved, the space between the buttons would open up just enough to show a hint of bra. And as I think I’ve mentioned, her D-cup definitely runneth over. I’m sure she was aware of it – and of the fact that other people would be aware of it, to boot. I’ve already said that she’s neither educated nor especially intelligent, but she does have a fair measure of what Spurgeon or Lewis – I’m too buzzed to remember which – called ‘a fool’s attempt to counterfeit wisdom’: cunning.
     “This being a ‘casual’ affair, she was bare-legged – which is daring, for her – and she’d used whatever it is women use to give their legs that subdued gleam when they finish shaving ‘em. Veronica has metric tons of those concoctions in that pigsty bathroom of hers, by the way. Thank God I’m a man: soap, shaving cream, deodorant, toothpaste, and no danger of slipping in a puddle of cosmetic snake oil and fracturing my feckin’ skull.
     “Now this head-turner was also wearing a pair of – I don’t know what to call ‘em. Cork soles, they have, but they look kinda like the high sandals the women wore in those 1950s gladiators-in-loincloths movies. Does the term ‘platform sandals’ work for you? You know what I’m talking about; they were popular in the ‘70s. And they were just out of style enough to attract notice and serve as nonverbal conversation pieces, if you will. These offered good arch-support, though, and she’d done her nails in red – eye-candy-apple red. On anyone else, the combination might have looked vulgar, and I’ll lay you a sawbuck she knew that, as well. What else? She has China-blue eyes, and brown hair, which she frosts or highlights or whatever you call it, with a touch of blonde.”
     “I got a question,” Bill said, raising his hand after the manner of a schoolboy.
     “What’s that, boyeen?”
     “How the fuck do you notice all this shit?”
     “I’m overcompensating for a clueless youth, dude. Life sucks when you’re obtuse.
     “Not that anyone would’ve needed to be razor-keen to penetrate this one, of course. The more work put into the exterior, the more rickety the foundation, as often as not. It’s human nature. My best guess was that she wanted external validation.  
     “Veronica’s more intelligent, and a little more attractive, overall. I could argue that she’s not as pretty, but she’s more interesting – the few times a month she 'forgets her lines,' I mean. This put our matchmaker at cross-purposes. A house divided against itself, and all that.
     “And all that made her – ironically, in the true sense of the word – the weak link in the chain. Now there, boys, is where you aim the laser.
     “The alpha spread annoyed the livin' feckin' piss out of Frankendork and his kinsman, as I’d figured it would. In essence, I was staking my territory, a territory to which I had no legitimate claim. Sure and it’s a tragedy, to be culturally and historically illiterate, Buckos. An educated man would’ve taken one squint at me – I’m not looking any less Appalachian as the years pass – and seen that I was asserting squatter’s rights.”
     Walpole removed the Scunci from his silver-blond tresses, and began to comb out the tangles which had set in. He fixed one cerulean eye upon me, and said: “Kinda sadistic, young Padawan. Almost uncool.” Unbidden, Bill retrieved a wooden barstool from the kitchen, and seated himself behind the silvering hipster.
     “Coolie or Viking, dude?” he asked.
     “Coolie, Bro. I can do Viking myself.”
     “Uncool how?” I asked, as Bill began weaving our elder brother's locks into a single plait.
     “Well, man, it’s like challenging a drunk to a fight,” Walpole said, punctuating his speech by stabbing the air between us with his Meerschaum. “What’s the point of pulling a Bruce Lee on a guy who can hardly stand up?”
     “Quit yer fidgetin’,” Bill snapped. “Ye’ gon’ make me fuck up. Then ye’ gon’ look like a extra from Road Warrior. Ye’ want that? Go walkin’ down the street, an’ have people say, ‘Look! It’s one o’ them guys from the Road Warrior!’? Then they’ll commence to yankin’ their kids off their Bigwheels an’ hustlin’ ‘em inside, an’ then they’ll call the SWAT Team an’ the DHS, an then…”
     “I get the point, man,” Walpole said in a resigned tone.
     “Point conceded,” I replied. “But it’s an imperfect analogy. I was surrounded by seven ‘drunks,’ as it were, Veronica sure as shittin’ didn’t have my six, and they were the ones offering to give me five – across the chops. The way I see it, it was self-defense, and the best defense, as the saying goes, is a good offence.”
    “Gotta admit,” Bill said, “ain’t nobody as offensive as ol’ Dave here.” He finished with Walpole, tossed me the comb, and sat Indian-style on the floor before the couch, his back to me.
     “Don’t block the ashtray, y' inconsiderate shit-fer-brains,” I said around the filter of my cigarette. Obligingly, he reached out and pushed it a few inches to the right.
     “How do you want it?” I asked.
      “Gimme a Qui Gon Jinn,” he said.
      “Ain’t gonna be much of a Qui Gon Jinn,” I said. “You’re thinning as fast as I am, Buckeen. How ‘bout Samurai hair, instead?”
     “That’ll work.”

       The tangles in this squalid, community theatre melodrama, as I couldn’t but notice, were as snarled as the elf-locks I picked from Bill’s red-brown hair.
     “Jaysus!” I said. “What do you comb this with, a feckin’ eggbeater?”
     He answered with his middle finger.
     “Anyway, by now, I was ready to rock ‘n’ roll. If this bitch wanted validation, I was more than glad to punch her ticket – and whatever else she’d a mind to present. So once again, I found m’self fucking a woman from clear across the room.
    “She had her legs crossed, the very picture of well-bred middle-class femininity, ladylike as you please. Excellent posture, chin up, and both hands clasping one recently pumiced knee. Well, first thing I did was to rest one ankle on the opposite knee and interlock my fingers just over my belly button, like so. Then I yawned – but I dropped my jaw, kept my mouth shut, and did it through my nose.”
    Bill and Walpole howled with mirth. When they regained their composure, I continued.
    “That pissed her off, even though she was looking at everyone but me. Stiffened just a bit, and then started a conversation -- with everyone else but me. Being a woman, she’d known I was giving her the once-over, of course, and she wasn’t expecting me to break contact that abruptly, let alone to yawn. I didn’t have to yawn, naturally. Hell, I could’ve scratched my nuts, farted, said ‘How ‘bout them Dawgs?’ or complimented one of the suits on his ride, and the effect would’ve been identical. Suddenly, I was no longer interested in interesting her.”
     I paused for a moment, as I finished Bill’s Nipponese topknot.
     “I was also free-balling that evening – no need to jump up so fast, Billy-O: I may swing loose at times, but I don’t swing that way – and I let my imagination run away with me. Owing to the way I was sitting, the fact that I was semi-hard was obvious to anyone who cared to look closely enough.”
     Bill arose, returned to his chair, and tossed the comb to Walpole. The latter caught it, took up the barstool, and seated himself behind the couch. Despite my recent assurance, both looked closely enough to ensure that I was neither semi- nor completely hard.
     No better time to change the subject, if only momentarily.
     “What the fuck are we, the Spartans at Thermopylae?” I asked.
     “That’s up to yer cum-dumpster’s pissed-off ex,” replied Bill.
     “Say, Bros, when are we playing next?” Walpole asked as he began combing. “You got split ends, by the way,” he added.
     “January,” said Bill. “We’s in between some outfit called ‘Partial-Birth Preserves,’ an’ our ol’ buddies, Necropilharmonica. Feckin’ cunts.”
     “Sure and you can say that again!” I blurted.
     “Feckin’ cunts.”
    “Wait a minute,” Walpole groaned. “You mean we gotta wear that corpse paint shit, or whatever you guys call it, and play a bunch of, like, speeded-up and slowed-down covers?”
    “Yep,” I said. “Sounds like it to me. Hmmm. I wonder if I can sweet-talk me Ma into sewing a codpiece to a pair of overalls.”
     “More like she’ll staple it right to yer cods,” Bill observed.
    “You’re probably right,” I conceded. “Sure and trying to reconcile popery and creative freedom is a fool’s errand.”
    “So, like, we are gonna be noisy mimes again?” Walpole inquired, in what from him, approximated a petulant whine. “I’m gettin’ too old for this shit, man.”
     “We’re too old for this shit, Walpole,” I said. “But we’re still having fun. Think of it as Woodstock – in sub-microcosm, admittedly – for the new generation.”
     “Yeah, but at Woodstock, they were passing, like, watermelons and joints, man; not pig guts and human skulls and shit.”
     “I draw the line at innards!” Bill thundered. “I cain’t stand seein’ good food go to waste!”
     “Neither can I,” I said. “Which is why I was damned if I’d let a dumpling like Marlene – that was her name – go un-sampled. We got the gig, by the way, Walpole. Just deal with it. She was ignoring me – but studiously ignoring me. Naturally, I returned, the favor – but casually. The fact that I wasn’t faking it didn’t hurt, as you may have grokked. What was I going to do, fer feck’s sake? Suggest a Roman orgy to that bunch?”
    “Knowin’ you…” said Bill, his volume and pitch-contour fading to a charred echo.
    “Fuck you, asshole. Anyway: she took command of the situation as soon as Veronica popped in with the cordials and canapes. This, of course, was the fun part. Veronica apologized for looking a fright – counting on everyone to disagree, as yuppies do. What no one else knew – or cared to acknowledge, at any rate – was that she’d put two feckin’ hours into looking a fright. No nail polish, and no real makeup, excepting a bit of mascara – Say, did you guys know that some chicks have learned to dry-brush mascara, just like we do when we’re painting miniatures? No shit! Sure and it’s a wonder they don’t get sties the size of crabapples! – and a hint of lip-gloss, most of which she’d licked away. Her hair, though, was washed, blow-dried, and brushed long, shiny, and loose. She was also wearing a pair of flip-flops, and a very flattering pair of broken-in jeans: just enough to cover her anatomical sins while emphasizing her virtues. The happiest of media between sackcloth and camel-toe, if you get the picture. Atop it all was a – I don’t know what you’d call it – imagine a knit baseball jersey with three-quarter sleeves, but a quarter-size too small. Knit or not, it was tight enough to show that she was wearing a bra – which only led one to wonder what she’d look like without one; the men wondering from lust, and the women from rivalry. Do y’all understand why I’ve learned to think the way I do, by the way?”
     “Told ye!” Bill said to Walpole. Walpole ceased his combing, and rustled through his pocket. A twenty-dollar bill slid past my ear and nested in Bill’s hand.
    “What, exactly, did you tell the oul' bastard?” I demanded.
    “”Bout why it ain’t good for a boy to be raised mainly by his ma,” Bill replied. “The ones as don’t turn fag makes ye’ wish they did.”
    “Well, for my part, I couldn’t have wished for a better evening’s entertainment,” I said. “We can’t all have Tidewater flowing through our hardening arteries, but every born aristocrat knows that a gentleman is supposed to rise when a lady enters the room - not that Veronica, for all her charms, is even a stinky, purple-scripted mimeo of a lady, for the record. But since the dynamic had changed -- my role as catalyst bein' debatable -- Imagine my amusement when the ‘Boobsy Twins’ had to take a cue from the two nebbishes. All the better, it was, when the ‘Prairie Princess’ had to remind her dumber half of certain basic social niceties. And y’all know damn good and well that I couldn’t resist unburdening Veronica – and serving my enemies first. To be sure, I may not have heaped burning coals upon their heads, but Black Forest ham on that Godawful, ‘Owens-Korningquist’ insulation the squareheads call ‘crispbread’ ain’t a bad substitute.
    “This left our gal in a real bind – and I’d be a liar if I claimed not to have been visualizing her in a right more literal bind: one involvin’ leather and a brass, Victorian, four-poster bed. She had to acknowledge my hostly largesse by thanking me – unless she preferred playing the boorish, ingrate sow to the freshly shampooed Kennel Club bitch. What can I say? Prevarication is as dangerous to the parochial as it is off-putting to the truly inquisitive. As it happened, I was the heart and soul, the spirit and image of curiosity."
   "Hell, you was just all curious 'bout the image o' dumpin' a big ol' sack-load o' 'sprit' 'tween them smoothy-whatever thighs what done led yer soul astray," said Bill.
    "Don't change the fuckin' subject!" I snapped. 
     “I let the ol’ eyeballs warm and soften – just for a second, mind you – and told everyone how nice it was to meet ‘em out of church for a change.”
    “You mean you played Rhett feckin’ Butler to a chick who was helpin’ her husband help his brother or cousin or both dog yer feckin’ bird?” Bill sputtered.
     “That’s like, exactly what he means,” said Walpole, his face a mellow night-light.
     “I also helped her to a look at my ass while I was playin’ Lord of the feckin’ manor,” I continued. “Had a quick gander at one of those disgusting, framed posters Veronica thinks are ever so fucking avant-down-to-earth, and noted that 'Mata Hari' was following me with her eyes. Not that I gave a shit, you see. I was just hoping Veronica would notice – which she did.
     “Sat down right-smack next to me, she did; thigh-to-thigh, brushed a few imaginary crumbs off me shirt, and helped herself to a puff from my cigarette. Who says females don’t mark their territory? They’re just less obvious, fer feck’s sake!
     “My rival, of course, was fit to be tied – to a life-support machine, and an IV.”
    “What did you do then?” Bill and Walpole asked in chorus.
         
     To be continued  

The Chase is INFINITELY Better Than the Catch, Ch. VII (Fiction)

     As I followed the hallway from the bathroom to the sitting room, it occurred to me that like idols of gold, silver, or bronze, technology was a false god, and that like wine, it was a mocker. Pity that we had yet to invent a device whereby trepidation, conscience, and regret could be flushed like so much metabolic waste.  But deeper reflection suggested that perhaps we didn’t need to, after all.
     Passing through the soft, clicking scintillation of the beaded curtain, I considered the distinct possibility that Veronica could perform the operation with practiced, unaided facility. The thought elevated my spirits more than it did my estimation of her.
    It also emphasized the unavoidable necessity of parting with her: I was acutely conscious of the fugacity of her passions, and of the perdurability of my own -- when something actually succeeded in arousing them.
    When I retook my seat, I saw that Walpole had retired the bong in favor of an anachronistic, hand-carved meerschaum, and was puffing away at a bowl of delightfully vanilla-scented tobacco. The soft, multi-hued light diffusing through the halo of smoke about his head lent him the appearance of a folktale wizard. Bill partook of the same leaf, but from a corncob pipe. The twin jets of smoke issuing from the corners of his mouth let him the appearance of a chimerical hybrid: half cartoon dragon and half demented Huckleberry Finn.
    
     “I don’t know how far, exactly, ol’ Clarkie and Staci were going,” I said, “and I wasn’t too keen on finding out. Given the kid’s age, though, I think it’s safe to assume that they weren’t just holding hands. And I don’t even have to assume that Veronica had figured it out – the situation had her on pins and needles.
     “I sympathized, by the way. Her concern, to her credit, went beyond her dislike for the girl. Suddenly, it occurred to her that her own conduct over the years was hardly a sterling example for the kid to emulate. I’d imagine my old man encountered the same ‘Do as I do, not as I say’ conundrum when he tried to alert me to the perils of Demon Alky-hol: the warning would have been more credible if he hadn’t had bourbon on his breath.
     “Her greatest fear was that Clark would knock the chick up and ruin both of their lives. And it was one hell of an all-pervading fear, at that. Jaysus, but she must have aged five years in that one! Until then, I didn’t realize that expressions like ‘That kid is giving me grey hair!’ were more than just figures of speech. In this case, it was literally true.
     “The absence of a father-figure didn’t help matters, and that was a role I was just-plain unequipped –not to mention unwilling – to play. I didn’t dislike the kid half as intensely as he disliked me, and I think I understood him better than she ever did. When they reach that age, though, you can’t just insert yourself into the picture and start acting the part of Ward feckin’ Cleaver. With ‘Duddits,’ it would’ve been easier: like most ‘tards, he’s on the docile side. Clark, though, was about as docile as I was at his age.
     “He was showing all the signs of impending trouble, of course. Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that boys who grow up with absentee fathers really are more prone to antisocial behavior. God knows, I certainly was. And it wasn’t just a matter of him finding himself in a single-parent household on the threshold of puberty; there’s also the fact that Veronica’s Type-A personality doesn’t leave much room for maternal instinct.
    “Oh, sure and she’ll let the crocodile tears flow like bullshit at a campaign fundraiser when it’s to her advantage, but she really is unfeminine in many respects. She isn’t a man, of course, but she’s mannish, a most unflattering trait in the fair sex. ‘Modern’ women like her are really here nor there, you know: they talk the talk, but they don’t walk the walk.
     “All of which combined to leave Clark walking straight into a world of shit, at an ever-accelerating pace. I’d say something about it from time to time, but it never sat well with her.  ‘Don’t presume to tell me how to raise my son!’ she’d huff – forgetting all the while that I have one experience she’ll never have: I was a boy once upon a time.
    “This leaves us with a ‘BoBo’ mommy chasing her career, and a latchkey kid who’s finally developed an interest in chasing tail. And to be sure, he didn’t want for opportunity to chase it. Between the traffic in this neck of the woods, her working late every other day, and her compulsive class-taking, Clark had entirely too big a window for mischief. Which is to say that he didn’t even have to bother parking his jalopy under Staci’s. Why go out for burgers when steak is willing to deliver itself to your house?”

     I paused for a moment to collect my thoughts, then continued.

     “Lest I convey the wrong impression,” I said, “I want to make it perfectly clear that the poor kid really loved her, God help him. He was head over heels. Unlike many or perhaps even most guys his age, he had no intention of shagging and running. Even if I didn’t like him very much, I liked that about him.
     “I’ll never know the full story, and I have a feeling that if I did, I’d just fly into a rage – That bunch, and their plots, plans, and secrets! They’re like a real-life soap opera! – but I’m sure that losing her had quite a bit to do with Clark’s decision to pull the plug.
     “You see, boyos, Veronica had the girl’s number from day one. Unfortunately, she didn’t have her own son’s. She knew that Staci was too young and too fickle to share Clark’s feelings, but she also thought Clark was too young to experience anything but crushes and puppy-loves. And she never did understand the kid’s intensity. Didn’t even try. To her, it was something alien, frightening, and fit only to be medicated and ‘therapied’ into submission.
     “To shorten a long and tragic story, she did everything she could to come between them, and it worked. At her very worst, she even asked me to hang around the house for a couple of hours a day during the week, just to keep an eye on them. Needless to say, I told her to stick that idea where the sun don’t shine – and in those exact words.
     “Then she started asking all sorts of questions about McVann. Was he still in the business? What did he charge? And so forth. I explained – ASAP – that he’d retired in order to devote his time to writing, weaving baskets, and finding his inner self, or some such. I don’t remember the exact details – only that I did everything in my power to deter her. If she had any idea what McVann thinks of her, by the bye; she wouldn’t even contemplate trying to hire him. I suggested – gently – that if she was that concerned, she might try contacting Clark’s biological father, but apparently that was out of the question.
    “The rest, as the cliché goes, is history. I don’t think she knows that I know, but she’s the puppeteer who pulled the strings that tugged Staci’s father halfway across the country. That irresistible promotion didn’t just pop up out of the blue, you know.”
     Bill and Walpole shook their heads. It seemed to me that the older we became, the more head-shaking we did, when I gave the matter a sliver of thought.   
     “It’s just a variant on a tactic from her folks’ repertoire,” I told them. “If you recall, I mentioned that I was talking to ‘Mandrake the Magician’ a while back.”
      They nodded.
      “Well, he was telling me that he’d heard – and he wasn’t completely sold on it, mind you; he did mention that so much bullshit surrounded that family, and that they spent so much time alienating people and making enemies, you never did know what to believe and what to dismiss out-of-hand – that her old man had put in for a transfer to get her away from him.  Whether it’s true or not, it certainly is believable. And it’s entirely in keeping with their style.”
     “You know,” said Walpole, “The sooner you get yourself outta that mess, the better off you’re gonna be.”
     “Amen,” said Bill.
     “I concur!” I replied with a laugh. “The combined weight of their Machiavellianism is an awful lot to be carrying around – and my back ain’t as strong as it used to be, now that I’m pushing fifty.
     “Now Clark may not have done well in school, but that for lack of interest rather than lack of intelligence. That bored, smug, smartass façade he put up was only partially faked. He really was bored out of his skull. Staci was a bright girl, though, and although it never occurred to Veronica, she was the one thing that kept him from dropping out. The next thing you know, she’s gone. Took her all of a month to find a new beau, and rather than admit her own inconstancy and immaturity to herself, she sent Clark a poison-pen ‘Dear John’ letter. I have no inkling as to the exact contents, but I can guess: I received one myself, a long, long time ago.
      “At first, Veronica’s scheme seemed to be working. Clark was a mess, and for support, he turned to what he knew: her. This is where the Freudian shite comes back into play. Once again, I won’t accuse her of consciously playing Sleepwalkers, but her approach was too insidious for my liking, even if it was merely reflexive. Fact: the kid is seventeen or eighteen, and has just lost his girlfriend. Fact: Veronica still has it going on, for her age. She certainly isn’t the head-turner she was in her high school and college pictures, but she’s attractive. Fact: unlike our mothers, she wasn’t a ‘fulltime mom.’ In short, the normal, filial bond that we take for granted isn’t as strong – and neither are the taboos that go along with it.
      “In a subtle way, she was playing surrogate girlfriend, and I didn’t like what I saw. Suddenly, she had all the time in the world for him, and they were hanging out and being ‘buds,’ instead of mother and son. This has nothing to do with jealousy or territoriality on my part, mind you; I just thought it was a very, very dangerous form of manipulation; one guaranteed to cause more trouble in the long run. As it happened, the sequence of events bore out my misgivings. The first sign that all was not well was Clark’s increased hostility toward me – and towards her male coworkers. To me, it suggested that he was responding to those cues of hers, and not in a healthy way, even if the response was subconscious.”

To be continued

The Chase is INFINTELY Better Than the Catch, Ch. VI (Fiction)

    I started at the gritty minor chords and not-quite-dulcet tones of Dave Brock singing “Paradox.” Bill reacted in kind. Without either of us noticing it, Walpole had loaded three of his pirated, home-burned CDs into the changer, and punched the “shuffle” button. Prior to reseating himself upon the couch, he switched off the overhead, remanding illumination to the yin-yang care of lava lamps, fiber-optic “fountains,” candles, and the glowing embers in the hearth. The contrast between mellow reds and oranges, and sharp, crystalline blues, greens, and purples combined with the redolence of frankincense, myrrh, pine, and cinnamon incenses to suggest Christmases past and yet to come.
     Was it autumn again, so soon? Had fugitive time really gained so vast a lead on perception? Or was I – as was increasingly the case - merely indifferent to its passage?
     “I think my problem,” I said, “is one of taxonomy.”
     “Huh?”
     “Of classification, of scribing lines of demarcation. I’m afraid I’ve never been very adept at distinguishing past from present, or present from future. For a while – when I was much younger, and I’d rather not revisit the episode that precipitated it – I couldn’t envision a future. And I still don’t see the sense in treating it as an object, let alone an object of veneration.
     “This brings me back to Veronica, and her plans, goals, and purposes. She’s always looking to the future – but never at the road ahead. For my part, even when I regained the ability to conceive of a future, I never understood – and still don’t understand -- this sick obsession with chasing it. There’s no need to: We move into it with every breath, whether we want to or not. I suppose Veronica’s distemper is what happens when one treats abstractions as concretes, and processes as objects.”
     “Uh, I think I’m with you,” said Bill.
     “I’ll try to clarify. She had plans for Clark – but he rendered them irrelevant by ODing on her. She started planning for her retirement when she was in her twenties, but she still text-messages while she drives, thereby significantly reducing her chances of living long enough to retire. What I most detest about her isn’t so much her inconsistency as her inability to acknowledge it.
     “Bear with me. For all that I’m only fucking her -- this is to say that I have no long-term plans for her -- I don’t bear her any ill will. I’m more inclined to bear myself ill will for being attracted to a spiritual chancroid like her in the first place, but that’s beside the point. Unlike her, I do feel some measure of responsibility even to strangers – and she’s certainly no stranger. Well, we’re known to each other in the Biblical sense, at any rate.
    “Strangest damned thing: except in that Biblical sense, I don’t think she’s every really known anyone. There are stretches of days during which I all I hear from her is ‘I just don’t understand you sometimes,’ and ‘What is wrong with you?’ Stupid question for a person who tries her level best to radiate an aura of omniscience to ask, by the way. Being a man, I’m a complete literalist at times, and I once answered: ‘Rapid-cycling type II bipolar disorder,’ when she asked what was wrong with me, to which she threw up her hands in disgust. How was I to know that she never meant for me to answer the question?
     “I’m baffled. My life is an open book, and yet she complains that I’m impenetrable. She, in contraposition, goes out of her way to play the mysterious, private, inscrutable “secret squirrel” – as if she’s that interesting, or has any higher mysteries worth veiling against the profane and prying eyes of the uninitiated -- but she’s completely transparent.”
    I fumbled through my breast pocket for a cigarette, only to turn up an empty and crumpled pack. Bill leaned forward, made an ostrich of his arm, and tossed me a carton from beneath the couch.  I tore into it, nodded my gratitude, and laid a fiver upon the coffee table. He regarded the note as he might a pair of ‘skidmarked’ drawers, wadded it up, and bounced it off my forehead.
    “Yer money’s no good here, Davey-O,” he said.
    “I kinda wonder if it’s good anywhere, man,” Walpole noted. “He’s been spending an awful lot of time with Skeeter and Scooter lately.”
     “Those two bozos couldn’t counterfeit a wooden nickel,” I assured them. “Not that their ineptitude keeps them from trying. And neither does Veronica’s. It’s one of the reasons I’m leaving her, but I’ll get into that in a bit.
     “She was talking to her mother one afternoon, and I could tell that I was the subject under discussion, despite her feeble afterthought of an effort to disguise the fact. Odd that – for all that the feckin’ crone abhors me, she’s obsessed with me. As if I could somehow compromise her darlin’ girlie’s virtue.”
     My chuckle tasted vaguely of acid and bile.
     “There she was, agreeing with the oul’ bitch one moment, and defying her the next – I’m well aware of the fact that I’m playing ‘Bender’ to her ‘Claire’ half the time, by the bye; just the thing to piss her ma off, never mind that Veronica’s old enough to have a ‘Claire’ of her own – and changing the subject every now and then, assuring the cailleach that the future’s well in hand, and that she’s in complete control. She paces like a caged animal when she has that idiot-box welded to her ear, without paying any mind to where she’s going, so it fell unto my directionless, goalless, live-for-today lot to brighten her immediate future by steering her in the right direction before she brained herself on the feckin’ doorjamb. How’s that for black comedy?”
    If Bill and Walpole found it amusing, they kept their levity to themselves.
    “To backtrack a bit, Clark wasn’t acting according to plan the day I read her the riot act, and his disobedience presented a clear and present danger to her graven self-image. I’m all for honoring thy father and thy mother, but I could understand the kid’s reluctance to hand her the reins of his life. He was honest and astute enough to see what a midden-heap hers was, even if she wasn’t and couldn’t.
    “This was another occasion for the inconsistency she refuses to acknowledge to rear its ugly head. And rear it did, nasty as a pissed-off diamondback, and twice as venomous. I don’t know if you boys are aware of it, but ol’ Clarkie had a gal of his own – a gal of whom she disapproved. Now a few years back, before I started augmenting her daily protein allowance, I told Bill here that something like this was bound to happen.”
     “That he did,” Bill confirmed. “Right before you come over an’ took the piss outta Hansen.”
    “Was that the night you guys were wearing those wolf-skins and shit?” Walpole asked.
    “The very same, brother. The very same. Ol’ Dave here did predict that somethin’ of this ilk would come to pass – even quoted Irving if I recollect.”
     “There is no duenna so rigidly prudent and inexorably decorous as a superannuated coquette,” I said. “And what this coquette lacked in prudence and decorum, she made up for in petty, underhanded tyranny: over-mothering her son when she wasn’t busting his balls, picking his girlfriends for him, and such. All the working of what, in a human being as opposed to a caricature, would be symptomatic of a guilty conscience. And in the interest of fairness, I don’t fault her maternal instincts – however atrophied or deformed – or her concern for his wellbeing. I fault her for her dishonesty with herself – and him --- about herself, and for her refusal to admit to that the sins of the mother were being visited upon the child. Not that even I suspected they’d be visited upon the poor little bastard in such a horrid or permanent fashion, mind you.”
     Was this guilt I was feeling? And if so, was it born of regret for past negligence – or suspicion of Schadenfreude dismissed as acknowledgement of poetic and/or cosmic justice on my part?
     I made a mental note to increase the severity of my regimen of introspection, and then continued.
    “One day, Clarkie-O used Veronica’s menu for an asswipe, and came home with a dish she hadn’t ordered. Now nobody knows a heartbreakin’ bitch like another heartbreakin’ bitch, and ol’ Veronica’s pillar of cloudy obtuseness burned off like so much July dew at the sight of the little ferret. Knew what she was about the moment she darkened that ostentatious doorstep of theirs, and in this case, the truth did not set her free.
     “But then again, it never did. I’ve already pointed out that her brand of domestic tyranny was of the petty, underhanded sort, haven’t I? She was nothing like my old man – all fists and fury. She was more given to manipulation – which is vile enough when practiced upon adults, but inexcusable when inflicted upon a child – and of course, she had her self-image to preserve. As you might imagine, this served only to confuse the kid even more. She tried to make up for her chronic absenteeism with “quality time” – as she defined it; I don’t imagine his preferences ever carried much weight – and expensive presents; and she tried to be his “friend,” when what he needed was a mother. At the same time, she’d long since mastered the guilt-trip, the subtle innuendo, and even the black art of taking advantage of whatever latent Oedipus complex – not that I put much stock in that theory, mind you; I think Freud got it backwards – the kid may have harbored.”
    “Whoah! Whoah! Whoah!” Walpole exclaimed. “You wanna explain that?”
    “Certainly. I think Freud got it backwards, because it’s normal to be attracted to the opposite sex. Heaven knows, I sure am, at any rate.”
     “Ain’t that the truth!” Bill said. “Sure an’ I once seen this asshole stuff a week’s wages down some stripper’s…”
    “No, man! I mean about Veronica. That’s a pretty heavy accusation, young Padawan.”
    “Lemme finish my Freud point, O venerable stoner.”
    “Sounds like one o’ them Shriner or Ku Klux Klan names,” Bill said. “Illustrious Potentate, Imperial Wizard, Venerable Stoner…”   
     “Out of respect for and deference to my elders, I’ll phrase this in language Walpole is likely to understand,” I said.
    For reasons I didn’t care to investigate, my spirits were lifting. Walpole seemed to welcome the abrupt change of mood, for he only rolled his eyes, despite being the butt of what – for me – was a gentle joke.
     “Let me, like, lay one on you,” I continued. “Dig this, and see if you can, like, groove to it.”
     “Far out, man!” Bill said.
     In spite of himself, Walpole grinned. For a moment, it seemed that he was enjoying this, much in the way father might enjoy an affectionate ribbing by two grown sons, or a professor the same from a pair of favored students on the eve of graduation.
    “I’ve said that it’s natural to be attracted to the opposite sex, and I consider the assertion self-evident. Current population worldwide – seven billion and counting. I rest my feckin’ case. And a boy’s first exposure to the opposite sex is usually his mother. That’s why I’m of the opinion that Freud’s theory is bass-ackwards.
    “Now given Veronica’s intelligence, how likely do you think it is that she’s oblivious to her effect on some men, Buckos? Ah, good. Your silence speaks volumes. And has either of you noticed how casually she dresses around the house? Shorts, T-shirts a size or two too small, and, of course, that Godawful jogging suit. I do wish she’d retire the shorts, by the way. Her legs aren’t exactly her best feature. Betimes, she looks like a feckin’ egret in a pair of Depends. Her boobs, though, are one of her best features – or were, once upon a time – and I’d imagine that explains the ratty bathrobe.
     “Bear this in mind – and it’s very important. I’m not accusing her of deliberately waving the forbidden fruit under the kid’s nose. That would be completely out of character, and I’m certain that if I pointed it out, she’d take to wearing a mu-mu and a burqa. Then she’d piss away even more money on that useless therapist of hers, and perhaps even add to the cornucopia of antidepressants and mood-stabilizers she keeps in her purse.
     “I do think, though, that once he was old enough to notice that boys and girls are built according to slightly different blueprints, she took advantage of his natural curiosity, and of the fact that she had his undivided attention from time to time. Once again – and I can’t emphasize this enough – there was nothing premeditated about it: she was simply responding to a feedback loop, falling back upon what, by then, had become a default program. She’s very patternistic, you know. A regular atomic clock, in certain respects.
    “To continue with the clock metaphor, Staci – that was the girl’s name – jammed a hairpin into Veronica’s gears and sprockets. She had the same effect on Clark, and I don’t think Veronica’s previous approach to getting what she wanted from him helped at all. Ever read Peter Bagge’s “Junior” strip? Well, I’d imagine that Clark found himself in the same shadowland,in which the conscious and unconscious meet, and neither much cares for what it sees.The comparison ends there, though. Clark was nowhere near the loser Junior was. Much better looking, too.
     “And now for the ugly part. We’ve reached the point at which I’ll concede the validity of one of Freud’s theories. But first, I gotta concede the strongly diuretic properties of ephedera sinensis.

   To be continued

The Chase is INFINITELY Better Than the Catch, Ch. V (Fiction)

     Considered as a whole, the situation in which I found myself was a malformed cousin-german to certain forms of beauty, insofar as it exemplified the synergistic principle whereby the aggregate loathsomeness of a collection of horrors exceeded the sum of its parts. The same could be said for Veronica’s life – for all that she’d have been the last to admit it. In the vernacular, it was some seriously fucked-up shit.
    For a wild and irrational moment, I entertained Saturday morning matinee visions of turning over a new leaf, of breaching the chrysalis of morally suspect habit like a proselyte butterfly; of riding off into the sunset with a newly-minted honest woman seated pillion behind me (or should it have been side-saddle before me?), until theological and practical impossibilities chewed the reel of fantasy into a crumpled ribbon of mangled celluloid.
    Adultery, fornication, usury, crass materialism, petty intrigue, the retard, the Born Again, the was-he-or-wasn’t-he sorcerer: every element and character befitting a Greek tragedy, combined with the sordid banality unique to our own era. Perhaps it was best to make sense of it by further relating it.

     “Clark,” I said, “was an intelligent kid, at least. That brutish, indifferent façade he adopted was just that – a façade. In certain respects, he was too sensitive for his own good, and he paid for it. I really hate to say this, but she didn’t do him any favors by birthing him. To the best of my knowledge, he never did find out who is real father was; only who he wasn’t. I wouldn't wish that upon anyone.
     “I suppose it goes without saying that when all was brought to light, Ralph didn’t pay a farthing in child support – which is only fair.”
    “How did he find out, anyway?” Walpole asked.
    “Oh, well there was the obvious clue: they didn’t look at all alike. The confirmation, though, came when she was out of town on one of her increasingly frequent business trips or training seminars, or whatever other excuses yuppies use to convince themselves that they’re revolutionizing the way America does business, when to the rest of us, it looks like they’re getting drunk and playing golf. Did I ever tell you that I had the chance to witness one of ‘em a few years ago? Reminded me of something right out of the ‘80s, minus the ‘nose candy.’ Cocaine is passe nowadays, incidentally. I think the latest craze is mixing Red Bull and Luvox with Courvoisier, or something like that.
     “At any rate, she was at one of these shindigs, being ‘fulfilled’ by yet another guy who ‘fulfilled’ her for all of six months, when Ralph saw his opportunity and sent a clipping of Clarkie-boy’s hair to one of his geek buddies. That, as the saying goes, was all she wrote. Ralph, on the other hand, called a lawyer and wasted no time in having the divorce papers written up.”
     I paused for a moment, poured myself another drink, and pondered how best to weave the loose threads of this chaotic affair into a coherent fabric.
    “This is one of the reasons the kid was as batshit as he was. It didn’t help that she used her oul’ wans as free daycare until he was old enough to foist upon the Board of Education, either. To them, I’d imagine he was just another lump of clay, fresh for the molding and sculpting– a chance to correct an earlier mistake. The problem with control freaks, though – and this includes Veronica – is that they’re too obtuse and egocentric to understand that their perceived failures are actually unqualified successes: their children become exactly what they’re raised to be.  Sure and it’s a terrible thing to suppose that one knows everything: the belief presupposes that there’s nothing left to learn.
     “Do you remember when they first got divorced?” I asked.
     “Oh, yeah!” said Bill. “That was good for a week’s entertainment, at least, what with him comin’ in drunk an’ bellowin’ that ‘How could you?’ shit all hours of the day and night. Leastways she got a house out of it, I reckon.”
     “Well,” I said, raising a hand, “hang on a sec. I don’t know the particulars, but as I understand it, she put as much green into it as he did. To her credit, she may be the kind of chick who’d bang a superior for a promotion, but she’d never marry one for his money. Too proud for that.”
     “Wait a minute, Bro,” said Walpole. “Did you just say, ‘To her credit’?”
     When I nodded, he shook his grey-gold locks, and took another pull from his bong. Bill extended an impatient beggar’s hand to the battle-scarred sexagenarian, and availed himself of a puff, before asking: “And what’us up with this ‘too proud’ shit? Bubba, you’s pickin’ up some weird-ass values hangin’ out with them types. Turnin’ into a reg’lar dee-generate, tell you what!”
    “Really? Am I, then?”
    “MMMMMM-hmm! Damn skippy!”
    “Odd. I’d concluded that they didn’t have any values to absorb. Perhaps I was mistaken. If you’re right, I suppose that’s what I get for overestimating myself and underestimating the potential hazards of fraternizing with the enemy, sleeping with the devil – or succubus, at least -- and whatnot. Now stop getting me off the subject.”
    “He’s right, man,” said Walpole. “He’s bad enough about that without our help.”
    “I’m in a shamanic state of consciousness, you chowderheads. At times like this, I perceive the interconnectedness of all things.”
    “An’ I perceive that ye’s 'losin’ altitude,'” Bill observed. “Say, Walpole, you ever seen you a shaman with his fly half-unzipped?”
    “No, but I did once meet a guru-type who used to give ‘cosmic consciousness’ seminars,” he replied. “One time, he made it two whole blocks down Peachtree with about a yard of toilet paper stuck to his heel before someone clued him in. Told him I wanted my money back, man.”  
    “And someone should clue Veronica in one of these days,” I said, the demons of pride, alcohol and thujone fueling my resentment over being even momentarily upstaged during what I considered to be a command performance. “Shortly after they parted ways, ol’ ‘Corky’ was off with Ralph – joint custody, don’t you know. Well, I suppose it goes without saying that poor Clark was in a snit over it – and it’s impossible for anyone with the barest iota of compassion or empathy to blame the kid: none of it was his fault, after all, but innocence is tin armor before the mace of scapegoating.”
    “Nice metaphor,” said Bill, his eyebrows half-moons beneath a Zener Card forehead.
    Walpole held his hand a yard above and parallel to the floor, pitching it like a plane in the grip of atmospheric turbulence. “A little florid, man,” he said.
    “Fuck the both of you, you sons of bitches. Be done with your interrupting! Now where was I? While the autistic cat is away, the newly ‘liberated’ mice will play, and these two sure as hell did. Only Veronica would have her boytoy du jour over to thaw out the winter of her discontent – when the entire shit-blizzard descended because of their dalliance in the first place. But she did. And Clark, despite his tender years, was none too pleased. He took exception in the hurt, confused way a little boy who knows only that a huge chunk of his world had just imploded does, and…”
    “And?” Bill asked.
    “It was one of the most disgusting spectacles I’ve ever witnessed – and I’ve seen quite few of John Waters's earlier flicks. She just went off on the poor kid, shrieking like a fishwife, telling him that it was none of his business, and the she didn’t answer to him, and how dare he tell her how to live her life. I was halfway expecting her to squawk ‘You’re not the boss of me!’ at him. I think I’ve mentioned that she acts more like a bitchy teenage girl than she does like an adult, haven’t it?”
     “More or less, Bro.” Said Walpole. “Only you didn’t say ‘bitchy,’ you said ‘horsey.’”
    “Well, I felt like puttin’ on my Who’s Your Daddy boots and wedgin’ one of those puppies straight up her juvenile, as-yet-unidentified quadruped ass. The idea of a thirty-five-year-old woman lacing into a ten-year-old boy like that was enough to piss even me off.
     "A few years later, when Clark was in his early teens – this was when we’d just started; well, you know – I finally took her to task for it. I’ll allow that the boy hated my guts, but it was perfectly understandable of him, all things considered.
     “Jaysus! I was twice his age when my oul’ wans separated, and the thought of some bird dog takin’ a leak on Da’s fencepost still set my teeth on edge and my hair on end!”
     “’Filial piety,’ that’s called,” Bill explained to Walpole. “He done learnt it from readin’ all that Greek an’ Roman stuff, like when that O-restes feller done zapped his ma, Clytemnestra, for steppin’ out with ol’ EE-gisthus or whatever his name was. Come to think of it, Davey-O’s da was quite a bit like that AGGIE­-memnon, too.”
     “Wow, man. Is that, like, when the Eumenides latched onto him?” Walpole asked softly. Bill didn’t – and possibly couldn’t – furnish him with an answer, but I gathered that the aged boonie-rat-turned-flower-child neither needed nor expected one.
     “Speaking of snake-haired, dog-faced furies,” I said, “Veronica and Clark were talking on the phone – or, rather, exchanging recriminations over the phone – when he finally hung up on her. Just left her staring at the touch-screen and steaming from the ears.
     “Well, if she was expecting a pity party from me, she was a nympho snowed in at a Buddhist monastery and hoping for a bit of action. When I told her that she might consider cutting him some slack, she went ballistic.
     “ ‘ I don’t need you telling me how to raise my sons, David!’ And when she calls me ‘David,’ it’s supposed to be a warning of sorts. Not that I gave a shit – hell, I’ve got six inches and at least fifty pounds on her.
     "What was she gonna do, Bro? Send you to Vietnam?" Walpole asked the ceiling.
     “Exactly! ’Well someone certainly needs to tell you,’ I said.
     “’What the hell is that supposed to mean?’
     “’It means, you ball-busting gorgon, that you grew up in a feckin’ stable, unbroken home, that you, Stheno, and Euryale have the same parents, and that you never had to hear either of ‘em shag a complete stranger two doors away!’”
      Bill cut loose with a low whistle, and said: “Dare I even ask what she done next?”
     “Either she’s more human than I sometimes give her credit for being, or she ought to be on Broadway. Her eyes got a tad glassy, and she mumbled, ‘At least we didn’t move around all the time.’ Even that’s bullshit, of course. Sandy Springs, Marietta, ‘Tater Patch, all in the course of a decade – this is the longest she’s ever lived anywhere.”
    “Kinda nomadic?” Walpole asked.
    I shook my head.
   “Uh-uh. She applied the term to herself once, and I corrected her. True nomads may cover vast expanses of ground, but the pattern of movement is cyclic. They also –and this is where I called bullshit on her- maintain very tight, stable social connections. She’s not a nomad at all; just a typical, rootless, twentieth century drifter.”
      Bill began to laugh.
     “What’s so funny?” I asked him.
     “You,” he replied. “You couldn’t stand that little shit. But there you was, takin’ up for him.”
     “Billy-O, I stand up for people I don’t like all the time. “
     “Hey, man; I read somewhere that those minor depressive episodes or whatever you call ‘em cause, like, a high degree of detachment and objectivity,” said Walpole.
     “Detachment, my ass. And I wouldn’t know objectivity from obliquity. I’m a stranger unto both brethren, and an alien unto the rest of their mothers’ children, as well. The one’s a chimaera, the other a chameleon, and I never cultivated much of a taste for exotic game. No, this was a matter of principle. The kid had every right to be hacked-off, and I was a prime contributor to said condition of ‘hackitude.’ Sure and he may have had a chip on his shoulder, but it wasn’t a burden he assumed willingly.
     “By the way, Billy darlin’: What did you mean when you likened my ol’ man to Agamemnnon?”
     “Oh, I meant he’d never miss a chance to right a wrong done to a buddy – ‘specially when he could use it as an excuse to settle a score of his own.”
     “My God, I really am like that sometimes, aren’t I?”
     The fife-tone of the cuckoo clock sounding the hour drowned out whatever reply he may have ventured.

     To be continued

The Chase is INFINITELY Better Than the Catch, Ch. IV (Fiction)

     It was nearly 1:00 a.m. by now, and it being an October night – albeit a weeknight, and anything but soft, especially in the meteorological sense – even certain of the die-hard regulars were paying their tabs and belatedly metamorphosing from carriages into pumpkins, in a manner of speaking. Although Bartleby’s till wouldn’t have minded had we stayed all night, I had it on intuitive authority that his waitress felt differently.
     “We’d better steal us a car,” Bill said as we settled up. “We’re too shitfaced to walk.”  
     “Do you want me to call you a cab, baby?” asked the waitress.
     “I’d be eternally grateful,” I replied, attempting to favor her with what I hoped was a charming, disarming smile – without breathing on her. “Make it Checkmate, if it’s no problem.”
     “You got it, honey.”
     “Aw, not Checkmate!” Bill hissed. “Them cabs always smells like Reuben sammich farts!”
     “Yeah, but Skelly owes us a favor,” I reminded him. From sheer, pointless vanity, I popped a Listerine breath strip, savoring the sinus-clearing burn. For a moment, I also wondered if our mildly enamored waitress had a slightly older sister, but I arrested the thought to preempt further trespass.
   
     As we leaned against the storefront, awaiting the cab and watching raindrops reflect and refract the blue-white glare of the streetlights as they dripped from the awning, I observed: “You know, maybe she does like me, after all.”
     “Veronica?” Bill and Walpole asked in synchronized disbelief.
     “No, you fuckwits. The waitress.”
     “Hey, Walpole!” Bill said.
     “Yeah, Bro?”
     Bill twisted his arms into goat legs tipped with question marks; one wrist aimed earthward, the other heavenward. His tongue lolled from the left side of his mouth, his right ear nearly touched his right shoulder, and his eyes were crossed. He turned his knees inward so that they almost touched, and began to shuffle along the walkway, giving liberal and elastic play to the left leg as he did so.
    “Dave tink da waitwess wike him,” slurred. “He tink she wan’ touch his peepee!”
     Great. Now I was certain to awaken with “Eye Yam Sofa King Wee Todd Did” written on my forehead in black magic marker, did I dare to pass out on Bill’s couch when we arrived home.   
     “Fuck you, asshole.”
     Given my chemically enhanced inarticulacy, and the fact that my stream of consciousness had already begun to accelerate, it was the best I could manage. I reached into my inside pocket, and withdrew a special preparation I’d obtained from a friend on Arch Street, during our last visit to Philly.
     Given the overall sapidity of circumstance at the moment, what was one more bitter pill?
     I popped two of the buckshot-sized spherules into my mouth, and snapped my fingers at Bill. Without hesitation or question, he produced his flask and handed it to me. I raised chin and container alike, and washed the dose down with a slug of undiluted absinthe.
     We take the juice of e. sinensis and a. absinthium – and b, a, bay; b, e, bee; b, I, bicky-bye... The thoughts acquire speed, the bones lose minute amounts of calcium, the threat of osteoporosis serves as a warning…
    Bill and Walpoled watched me in hushed anticipation. And then it happened. When I turned to face them, I vibrated with every beat of my own heart, even as the hard, moonless blackness around us softened into electric blue.

     I said nothing during the cab ride home, only to make up for the surfeit of expression when we were comfortably seated in Walpole’s living room.
    I sat in an armchair, a fly-green bottle of the fairy, a bowl of sugar, and a still-warm teakettle on the coffee table before me, while Bill and Walpole, gradually taking root upon the sofa, passed a bong of Weimarish aspect – and of Walpole’s own manufacture -- between them.
    “What do you think, Bros?” Walpole asked. “I made it myself in a class at the Senior Center.”
    Through my laughter at the thought of him wearing his field jacket and patchwork leather pants among Bermuda shorts and faux Hawaiian shirt, I said: “I thought you had to be sixty-five to join up. Aren’t you a year or so too young?”
     He took a deep, gurgling hit, passed the device to Bill, and shrugged.
    “What are they gonna do, man? Send me to Vietnam?”
    “No, but they might send you to Guantanamo,” Bill snickered.

     “Guantanamo,” I mused aloud. “That reminds me of what Veronica’s told me of her childhood – not that she saw anything wrong with it, mind you: normality is often a euphemism for familiarity. Her parents, you see, were a tad narcissistic, with a bit of the control freak about them. Small wonder, as the traits usually go hand in hand.
     “If you’ll permit me to play armchair analyst, I think her mother was the worse of the two. The old hag was one of those inwardly bitter, thwarted types -- and probably still is. If I haven’t fallen shy of the mark, she blamed Veronica for the fact that she never went to college. Apparently, it never occurred to her to blame herself for marrying in haste, and for failing to use the pill – or perhaps it was the other way around. Every chicken is an ovum waiting to happen, an’ all. Funniest damned thing about narcissists, don’t you think? Despite the laws of probability, they’re never in the wrong.
    “As you can see, Veronica’s acquired the same eccentric wheel of a verdigrised halo.”
     Softly, Walpole began to whistle “Mrs. Robinson.” Bill joined him in eerie, double-helix harmony, and for a while, I was too enwrapped in the caduceus of sound to continue.  I picked up a forlorn guitar, and slapped out a decelerating, syncopated Bo Diddley riff.
     When the music died, I resumed my analytic and speculative soliloquy. Walpole arose and tossed another log on the fire, and I tossed back another shot of absinthe.
    “For all her glaring flaws – which are apparent to everyone but her – Veronica is extraordinarily intelligent. Beautiful, too, if you’ll allow that the eyes of this beholder are slightly myopic.” Even as I spoke, mine wandered to a pressed flower sandwiched between two panes of glass.
    “Dilated, too, Baby Bro,” said Walpole. “How much of that ma huang shit did you take, anyway?”
    “Just enough to weary the moon with my rambling. Only this, and nothing more.”
    “Ye’ know, mixin’ writers is as bad as mixin’ metaphors,” said Bill.
    “And nearly as bad as mixing feelings, I added.
     “She’s also fairly perceptive, when she’s not mired down in solipsism. And there’s another mystery – a Babylonian mystery shat by the queen of id-harlots and mother of abominations, the bastard end result of a buggering by the last, junkie demiurges of subcreation. How can anyone that externally motivated be so fucking oblivious to the world around her? But this is neither here nor there: it’s a subject whose time has not yet come.
     “I’m trying to put myself into her oul’ wan’s orthopedic shoes, and not enjoying the experience. They’re ugly, and they pinch. She’s vicious as an eel in a prissy, schoolmarmish, passive-aggressive way, and as unsparing as any coward weakling.  Almost certainly pea-green over the fact that the girl was more intelligent and more attractive than she, herself, but proud of ‘her’ accomplishment, all the same. Forgive the boy who envies his father, buckos – but beware the man who envies his son.
    “Poor Veronica was certainly bright enough to sense the alternating current, but like any child, too young to know what to make of it. Unenviable position, hers: both the scapegoat and the vehicle for her mother’s unrealized ambitions. And make no mistake: ‘Black Annis,’ in her own smug, passive-aggressive way, made certain that she was behind the wheel, and that Veronica knew it.
     “Pity the crone was such an incompetent driver.
     “Having no morals to speak of – and being equally bereft of courage – she never sat the poor girl down and gave her proper instruction or discipline when she fucked up. Rather, she chose the way and tools of the bully: the stick of put-downs in one hand, the carrot of approval in the other. The results, as you can see, were terrible to behold, ugly and scarring as leprosy; a horrid mix of rebellion and dependency. Poor Veronica’s spent her entire life trying to assert herself – and yet she’s precious little self to assert. Her folks saw to that. They excised her soul as if it were a tumor, but didn’t trouble themselves to pack or clean the wound. Consequently, her rebellion amounts to so much pus: an occasional eruption of dead leukocytes and foreign matter from the abscess. If, by the way, I haven’t mentioned it before, I’m not defending – only explaining.”
     Bill and Walpole nodded, apparently deep in thought.

    “I hope none of this surprises you,” I said. “I’m still breaking up with her – it’s the best thing for both of us – but I won’t demonize her. That’s her style, not mine. I don’t know how she’ll take it, though. She’s only been the ‘dumpee’ once. She’s far more comfortable in the role of dumper.”

    That, I mused, and only that, could transform the admittedly unpleasant prospect into an object of bowel- and knee-loosening dread. With any luck, the Jesus Freak would take her off my hands, and spare me the trouble of making her lose face. It was bad enough that to me, she was merely a symbol of unfinished business, a reasonable facsimile of a second chance to rewrite a chapter from my own past to my satisfaction.
     I’d have spent the rest of my life with her as matter of duty – for all that I’d never led her on – had I thought she loved me, but I thought nothing of the sort. At times, I even wondered if she was capable of loving anything. Granted, she spoke more of love than ever I did, but a handful of conversations made it patently obvious that although we employed the same word, we meant vastly different things when we said it. Half-consciously, and yet aloud, I quoted Kabir: “An emotion which is overpowering one moment and gone the next cannot be called love.”
     “Do what?” said Bill.
     “Oh, nothing. Sorry about zoning out.”
    Unbidden, my thoughts returned to the embittered warlock-suspect she’d left in her wake decades ago. His eyes, hellish lamps, still ablaze with agony and fury after God alone knew how many years, bespoke the truth of the adage, “Excessive love becomes excessive hate.” It was easy to imagine him as a pulsing collapsar of vengeance, emitting bursts of lethal, high frequency wrath as he spun within his magic circle.
     “I may never have proper revenge,” he’d hissed, through a death’s head grin, “but if nothing else – and it’s the only satisfaction I’m ever likely to get – I can rest in the certainty that no man ever loved her as much as I did, and no man ever will again.”
     I believe you. As I know all too well, no one can love – or hate – like a madman.   

    To be continued

The Chase is INFINITELY Better Than the Catch, Ch. III (Fiction)

     “’Overbearing’ is an understatement, actually. They were downright intolerable. This left Veronica swinging back and forth between being a good little girl and acting out. By way of proving that she was ever-so-fucking grown-up and independent, she ‘emancipated’ herself during her senior year of high school, and moved into a fleabag apartment with a few other disaffected, maladjusted teenyboppers.
     “Well, one night she did the dumbest thing imaginable: she went to a frat party with another bimbo, and learned why fratboys richly deserve their odious reputation. The douchebags made damned good and sure that her glass stayed full all evening – she doesn’t handle booze very well to begin with - and then they started getting impatient. Somewhere along the line, one of ‘em slipped her a mickey – Rohypnol, I think it was – and then a few of ‘em slipped her the meat. When she regained consciousness, she found herself in Prepositionville.”
     Walpole gave me an uncomprehending look.
    “Hung over and knocked up, iffen I don’t miss my guess,” Bill said quietly.  
     “She ended up terminating it, which left her fucked up as a football bat. It being as there’s no zealot so fanatical as a convert, she pulled an about-face in short order. She’s been a foaming-at-the-mouth pro-lifer ever since. Our rapist buddies, of course, were never brought to justice, partly because their daddies were too well connected, and partly because she and her folks didn’t want the story getting out. Liberty and fucking justice for all.”
     I lifted my bottle in a sardonic toast to toxic fairytales.
    “That’s when she met that scumbag boyfriend of hers; exactly the kind of predatory, bilge-rat motherfucker you’d expect to zero in on emotionally damaged girls. He was the second or third great love of her life – she finds a new one every few years, and gives every one of ‘em the same breathy, swooning, “I’ve never felt this way before!” speech -- until she finally got tired of him. She’s one of those chicks who does everything on a time-table and by a pattern, by the way: use and discard one boyfriend in high school, use and discard another one in college, then go through a series of ‘em until the ol’ ‘biological clock’ starts ticking. Get married, drop a pup or two, and then get divorced when the thrill is gone. When the prospect of facing middle age alone kicks in, find yet another ‘soul mate,’ and tie the knot for good.”
     I lit another cigarette and took a sip of beer.
    “And she wouldn’t settle for a reasonably normal man for all the tea in China. They’re all either sons of bitches, or nebbishes. You’ll also notice that they’re invariably less educated, less intelligent, and make less money.”
    “Yeah, I did notice that,” Bill said. “Wonder why that is?”
    “Makes ‘em easier to control and manipulate, as I suppose. There’s no middle ground with her: Hammer oder Amboss sein.
     “Now here’s where things get fun. You boys know why her old man left her, right? She’d made ‘legs’ the word of the day, and then started spreading the word with one of her coworkers. On top of that, the poor guy figured out that Clark was a bastard.”
     “Hey, I know the kid was kinda difficult, but don’t you think ‘bastard’ is a little harsh, man?” Walpole asked.
     “No, I mean a literal bastard,” I said. “Out of wedlock. Illegitimate. Misbegotten. Apparently, when she sashayed up the aisle with Ralph, and said ‘I do,’ she left the ‘other guys’ part unspoken. I’m surprised that it took him as long as it did to put two and two together, actually. I’m no Mendel, but even I understand the notion of dominant and recessive genes. Did you ever notice that the kid was darker than either of them, and that he didn’t look even remotely like Ralph? And to add insult to injury, Brandon is indisputably Ralph’s – but he’s a feckin’ retard. Once again, I’m not employing a figure of speech. He’s a bona-fide, short-bus-with-tinted-windows, Spaz Hall booger-eater. I know that drives her up the wall, because her very first boyfriend’s equally illegitimate daughter is a member of feckin’ MENSA.
     “I’ve met the guy, by the way. If she’s going to accuse anyone of practicing the Black Arts, it should be him. He’s a total sweetheart until you light his fuse. Then he’s one scary motherfucker.”
     “How’d you end up meeting him?” Walpole asked.
     “Oh, I did a little digging. I like to know what kinds of acts I’m following. And Jaysus! What an act he was! He’s nothing like the rest of them. Doesn’t fit the pattern any more than I do, which almost certainly explains the mayfly lifespan of their affaire de couer. His library’s even creepier than mine: The Grand Grimoire, The Grimoire of Armadel, The Grimoire of Honorius, The Lemegeton, The Goetia, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, The Picatrix, The Thesaurus Necromantiae, and even The Munich Handbook. If he was really, really furious, I don’t doubt that he’d use ‘em. As a matter of fact, I can imagine it right easily. Hmmm. Perhaps that’s why she has such wretched luck – maybe he is using them. Two deaths in the family, one right after the other, and come to think of it, ol’ Ralphie served her with the divorce papers exactly sixteen years to the day after she ripped out our boy’s guts and tap-danced on ‘em. Coincidence, or something far less canny? Perhaps his interest isn’t just an off-the-wall hobby. Perhaps the guy is a sorcerer, after all. As I recall, he mentioned that he was trying to obtain a transcript of the Liber Angelis, Annulis, Karecteribus et Ymaginibus Planetarum from the Cambridge Library. Perhaps he succeeded, and managed to work the Vindicta Troie. And perhaps I’m overly given to conjecture.
     “The more thought I give the matter, the more I wonder, though. As he was relating the tale, his face took on an expression even I found unnerving – and I’ve been told that I’m given to wearing unnerving expressions myself, betimes. He was no longer talking to me, strictly speaking, but he was certainly talking to someone, and he quoted Doyle verbatim: ‘…if you despise my love, I must see what can be done with fear. You smile, but the day will come when you will come screaming to me for pardon. Yes, you will grovel on the ground before me, proud as you are, and you will curse the day that ever you turned me from your best friend into your most bitter enemy.’
     “After hearing that, I decided that further cultivating his acquaintance was ill-advised. It doesn’t pay to be reminded of oneself too often, and the clearest mirror often shows the ugliest refletions.”
     “I’d heard that you were an Adeptus Minor, or something like that,” Walpole said, his effort at nonchalance failing miserably.
    I shook my head.
    “Uh-uh. That was almost twenty years ago. I haven’t so much as dabbled since then. Even that damned book my ancestors brought over from Scotland – the one I can never seem to get rid of – is locked in a trunk in the basement. He’s an interesting cat, this guy, and I actually considered inviting him over for a few cold ones, but then, as I've mentioned, I thought the better of it. I give wizards, warlocks, thaumaturges and necromancers a very wide berth, and with good reason. Nietzsche once said that if you stare in to the void long enough, you’ll find that it stares back into you, and the same applies to sortilege.
     “Seems she wasn’t much different, even in those days. Well, perhaps not quite as bad as she eventually became, but hardly a sterling character, by any estimate. He was telling me once – and I’ve heard the story from other sources, that she had a part-time job while they were dating. To make a long, sordid story a short, sordid story; she accepted a ride home from her boss. A male boss who was a few years older. Need I mention why this presents several problems?”
     Bill and Walpole shook their heads. Walpole rolled his eyes, and Bill lightly bumped his forehead against the tabletop thrice.
     “Exactly. It doesn’t look good, and it makes the boyfriend lose face. But that’s not the worst of it. As events were related to me, she repaid the guy’s act of chivalry with a half-and-half.”
    Walpoole angled his head like a dog in a television commercial.
    “What’s a half-and-half-?” he asked.
     “Oh, that’s when a chick blows a guy ‘til he’s right on the edge, then finishes him off with a wank,” Bill said – loudly enough to attract undue attention.
     “The story could be bullshit, of course, but that’s the story the boss man was telling – to anyone who’d listen. Unfortunately, the story got back to our boy, who, like Queen Victoria, was not amused. And it’s not out of keeping with her character. I’d imagine the experience was scary and exciting and naughty all at once, it was a chance to pull one over on her boyfriend -- and let’s not forget that she’s pathologically addicted to novelty.”
     “Yeah, an’ it was ‘bout the same time all them movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High was comin’ out,” Bill noted. “Could be she was a mite impressionable.”
     “Did you have to bring that up?” I asked. “I hated that feckin’ thing. Matter o’ fact, buckos, I hated every one of those feckin’ teenybopper flicks: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink – every Goddamn one of ‘em.
     Outside, a storm had blown up, sheets of wind-harried rain hammering upon the roof, and lashing and smashing against the windows. The lights winked out, replaced within seconds by dimmer lamps powered by the backup generator. Given the subject of our discussion, the atmosphere without and within was eerily appropriate. The waitress walked the perimeter, lighting a series of hurricane lamps with a foot-long fireplace match.  Although probably a violation of one or more arcane, local codes and ordinances, the devices softened abrasive existence into velveteen shadow, and lent the tavern a mellow, homey warmth. I was glad for their presence.
     I changed the subject without warning, reversing the flow of the conversation.
     “This brings us back to the porno flick, and a few other fuckups. On one hand, she could assert her independence by demonstrating her capacity for naughtiness.  She still does that, incidentally. She often reminds me of a horsey teenage girl: ‘Nobody understands me! Get out of my room! You’re not the boss of me!’ On the other, she could derive masochistic enjoyment from theatric repentance, self-flagellation, and playing the prodigal daughter, as it were. Another pattern. And an unattractive one, at that. When I consider her situation, I’m glad my life is as chaotic as it is: at least I’m pleasantly surprised fifty percent of the time.
     “I wish I could say the same for her, but I’ve long since grokked that she doesn’t handle the unexpected very well at all. Hence my gentle and charitable efforts to demonstrate how few things are actually within our control, and the futility of trying to impose our wills on anything or anyone but ourselves.
     “Pardon me for going off on a tangent, but I heard her pontificating to another of her soon-to-be ex friends a few weeks ago. He’s the same age she is, but less of a shitweasel, and of course, there’s nothing she loves more than playing the sagacious materfamilias role. I suppose that among the fuckwits whose company she cultivates, the act suffices – ‘in the land of the blind,’ and all that -- but I recognize her bloviating for the sententious, pseudo-gnomic bullshit it is. At one point, she claimed that despite their being same age, she’d lived more than he had. I was headed to the kitchen for a beer when I overheard them, and I was positively compelled to butt in. ‘Yeah, ‘I said, ‘but repeat experiences only count as one, because they show that you didn’t learn the obvious lesson.’”
     Bill burst out laughing.
     “Hoo-wee! I’ll bet that pissed her off something fierce.”
     “To be sure. I’d imagine it goes without saying that I went to bed with an unpolished knob that night, which bothered me less than I’d thought it would. It was worth it just to take the wind out of her sails. Besides, I’m just not comfortable shagging her with ‘Duddits’ two rooms away. She’s not a screamer or a moaner, but the damned bedstead is slightly off kilter, and tends to bump into the wall. I have no inkling as to the extent of his acquaintance with ornithology and entomology, if you will, but I’m sure he realizes that – well, that something’s going on, and that the party with whom that something is going on ain’t his Da.”
     “Won’t be the first time it’s happened,” Bill said.
       “True, but that doesn’t leave me feeling any better. I can’t help wondering how significant a role having grandparents and daycare centers act in loco parentis while she chased prospects played in Clark’s untimely demise.”

     To be continued

The Chase is INFINITELY Better Than the Catch, Ch. II (Fiction)

      Bill raised his hand and called for shots and chasers: Jameson’s for us Wild Geese, and Wild Turkey for Walpole. God knew, we needed them by now. In my quieter moments, I was detachedly stunned by the frenetic pace of my own life. This, more’s the pity, was one of those quieter moments. And for the seventeen-thousandth time in forty-seven years, I asked the perennially unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question, “How did I get myself into this shit?”
    On the jukebox, Blue Oyster Cult was a barber shop quartet, imploring us to raise our cans of beer on high and seal our fates forever; reminding us that our best years had passed us by, said years then referred to as 'the golden age of leather.'”
     Like many a man whose youth had left him little to remember fondly, I respectully but emphatically disagreed. 
     “I didn’t say anything about the credit card statement,” I told them. “Not a word. I wanted to see if she’d bring it up first. Not that I expected anything of the sort, mind you. Obviously, she was keeping everyone in the dark. Otherwise, she’d have let her insurance cover it rather than paying with plastic. I just sold some PA equipment I haven’t used in years, ate the loss, and kept my peace for a month.
    “Then I noticed that she’d been rooting through my notebooks – I don’t drink coffee, but there were coffee-stains on one of the pages – and I found a receipt from Tseng’s Herb Shop. I had a look-see in the liquor cabinet, and lo and behold, there’s a bottle of, well, you’ve probably guessed by now. I’d know the smell of dong quai  and Rehmannia anywhere. Sure and it went quite a ways toward explaining her newfound fondness for crème de menthe.”
     “I can’t believe she bought anything from that gougin’ bandit, Tseng,” Bill said, shaking his head in bemused disbelief. “Don’t she know Wei’s is much cheaper – and he doesn’t step his stuff, either?”
     “Shit. She wouldn’t be caught dead in that neighborhood, Bro. The first – and only – time I took her to a noodle-house, she kept lookin’ around like we were gonna get mugged by ninjas. For all that pretense of open-mindedness, she’s quite the bigot. I don’t think she’s ever lived in a neighborhood that wasn’t whiter than my Irish ass in the winter.”
     “He sunbathes nekkid in the summer,” Bill explained to Walpole. “Says he’s absorbin’ yang energy from the sun.”
     “That sounds plausible, man” said the old hippie. “When I was in the ‘Nam, we used to eat this soup made from hog balls and seahorses, or some shit like that. The ROK who taught me Hapkido turned me on to it. Tasted awful, but I swear, it was guaranteed to keep you locked and loaded.”
    “Angelica elixir,” Bill mused. His hand was in his chin, and his eyes fixed on a point miles in the distance.
    “Yep. First time I’ve ever had a chick try to get knocked up.”
     “You reckon she was trying to trap you into marryin’ her?”
    “Ah, hell no! Unless for the sake of keeping up appearances, or salving her convenient conscience. That Sunday-morning churchianity of hers really drives me up the wall at times. The older they get, the more they talk to Jaysus, as I suppose. Well, I got sick of the fib, the underhanded bullshit in time, and I ‘accidentally’ left the old credit card statement on the kitchen table one morning.”
     “Hooobooy…” said Walpole.
    “Yep. Went white as a sheet, and then tried to play it cool. You’ve seen her at it before. You know, when she ‘slums’ by hanging out with the likes of us, wearing denims to prove she’s oh-so-much feckin’ hipper than the average yuppie, and that on the inside, she’s a fun-loving, regular gal?”
     “I’m glad you said it,” Bill said with a sigh of relief. “Walpole an’ I was keepin’ our mouths shut, on account o’ she’s your bird an’ whatnot. She does know that I’m a hunnerd times richer than she’ll ever be, don’t she? The dividends on my stocks is worth more than her yearly salary.”
    “ ‘Matter o’ fact, she’s acutely aware of it.” I snickered, and a nasty snicker it was, at that. “Pisses her off like nobody’s business, the feckin’ Republican. When it comes to jabos, lettuce-pickers, and trailer-trash, there’s no such thing as fortune – we’re all the masters of our own fates, and some of us make bad decisions. But when it comes to anyone who inherits his wealth, it’s just blind luck. Funny, the double-standard, don’t you think?”
    “Yeah, Bro,” said Walpole. “It’s a regular fuckin’ laugh-riot. Totally bourgeois, man. They’re always better than you. If you’re poorer than they are, it’s because you made worse decisions – it’s a level playing field, and all that – but if you’re richer than they are, they’re still better than you, because they’re self-made men or whatever. How self-made can you be when your parents buy you a car, pay half of more of your tuition, and then you land your first job with your cousin’s company? No offense, Bill. For once, I'm, like, actually defending the landed gentry, man.”
    “Shit, none taken. When them megachurch yuppies try to guilt-trip me, I just take the Charismatic approach: I was born richer ‘cause God likes me better.”
    We enjoyed a good, if slightly malicious laugh, and I resumed my narrative.
    “So anyway, I called her out on the tiles. Sober as a judge when I did it, and I was in a bad mood at the time. Started roaring like a feckin’ nor’easter, and it wasn’t an act.
     “‘What is this?’ I demanded. ‘Are you still pissed off about the fuckin’ IQ test? Trying to prove to yourself that you’re more intelligent than I am? Well, you’re doing nothing of the sort. Cunning is a fool’s attempt to counterfeit wisdom, you gobshite! Nihil sapientia odiosus acumine nimio!’
     “Then she made a smartass remark about Latin being pretentious, which really set me off. As if she’s in a position to call anything pretentious.
     “‘Listen sister,’ says I, ‘Thank your lucky stars and whatever gods you revere that you’re of the concave sex, and thank ‘em that chivalry isn’t quite dead yet, either. If you were a man, I’d be out on the front porch, carving “H.M.H.N.S.” into the feckin’ lintel.’
     ‘Is that a threat? I have friends on the police force.’
     ‘Yeah? And I have cousins in County Antrim. Do you really wanna find out if Andy and Barney are a match for my kin?’
     “I think that scared the livin’ shit out of her, all the more so when she realized that I wasn’t speaking in jest. Do you boys remember when those rumpkin, wannabe Harley-Slobs roughed Skeeter up?”
    “Yeah, come to think of it, I do,” said Bill, feigning pensiveness.
     “How are they doing, anyway?” Walpole asked.
    “Still in the fuckin’ burn unit, as far as I know – the scumbags. Excepting the one who found the krait in his saddlebag, of course. I still owe Francis Tranh one for that.”
    “He is good people,” Bill noted.
    “And too bad Veronica isn’t,” I added in a tone more wistful and melancholy than I’d meant it to be.
    “‘Honey, if I was gonna grease you, I surer’n feck wouldn’t warn you, and even if I did, you’d still never see me coming,’ I told her.”
     “Damn, Bro! That’s wheeling out the heavy artillery!” Walpole said.
     “Apparently, she was of the same mind. Gave the ol’ crocodile-tear-faucet a yank fit to rip it outta the wall, and waited to see how I’d react.”
   “Uh-oh,” said Bill.
    “Thou hast said. That’s a raj.”
    “And a Rogerin’ as well, I presume?”
    “Mmm-hmm,” I said to my friends, and to the label I was flaying from the bottle.
    “Imagine a man giving a woman a sympathy fuck – especially when said man knows damned good and well that she’s trying to rook him into believing it’s a sympathy fuck. At least she didn’t fake the orgasm, the manipulative feckin’ she-troll. Had that stupid, flushed, dewy-eyed, half-stoned look on her face; the look that informs you that you’ve – for the moment, at any rate – graduated from a being a piece of shit to being the shit. And what else could I do? God help, me, I really felt sorry for her. I suppose it’s part and parcel of being a typical, left-brained male – the ability to flush solipsism down the pot, and get into the enemy’s head. Betimes, I think we’re more given to empathy because we’re usually more logical, and have fewer fears. Ever notice that when male dogs try conclusions, it’s only until one knuckles under and fucks off; but when females fight, it’s always to the death, and no target is off-limits? Well, that’s Veronica. She’s just that kind o’ nasty, twenty-four-seven. No wonder she goes through friends like I go through socks. It’s as if the thought of being tactful or diplomatic is anathema to her. Even scarier yet, she doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with her. She’s narcissistic to a point just this side of outright psychopathy, but she’s always whining about how feckin’ sensitive she is.  Sensitive, my ass! She’s about as sensitive as a godan’s knuckles.”

      I fished through my pockets for a fresh pack of cigarettes, only to discover that my lighter was dead. Bill lit me up, and I continued.
     “I don’t what baw’bag coined the phrase ‘Forgive yourself and move on,’ but I sincerely hope he’s burning in hell, whoever he was. Veronica must say it three or four times a day. She’s like a broken record, for Christ’s sake. Not too long ago, she pulled some kind of below-the-belt stunt, and screwed a more deserving coworker out of a promotion. When she lit into the ‘Forgive yourself’ spiel, I couldn’t believe my ears. Nor could I contain myself.
     “'Veronica, you’re not the one who got fucked over,’ I told her. ‘It’s not your place to forgive yourself, it’s hers. Do you understand this?’ You know what, buckos? I don’t think she did. It just didn’t seem to register with her. It was like trying to explain Greek declensions to a feckin’ retard.”
   “I got a question, man,” said Walpole.
    “Sure. Fire away.”
    “Which is worse, ‘fookin’ or ‘feckin’?”
     “‘Fookin’, by far,” Bill and I said simultaneously.
    “Do you need some matches, sweetie?” the waitress asked. I replied with a nod and a grateful smile.
    “I think she likes you, Dude,” Bill observed. “She’s always callin’ you ‘honey’ an’ ‘sweetie’ an’ ‘baby’, an’ whatnot. She don’t do that to nobody else. You oughtta maybe ask her out some time.”
    “What? Nah. She’s young enough to be my daughter. I’d feel like a ‘Chester.’ She needs a nice kid her own age, not a promiscuous, middle-aged, bipolar weekend alcoholic. She is a pretty little thing, though. Pity she isn’t a few years older. But then again, getting older’s what turns so many of ‘em nasty in the first place, as I suppose.
     “Which, I further suppose, brings us back to Veronica. She’s not as hot as she was when she was workin’ that titty-bar on Franklin Street back in the day, but she’s still a looker, for her age. That’s the only reason I put up with her. Putting up, putting out -- speaking of that, did you know she did one of those amateur porno movies, once upon a time? She was lying when she denied it a few years ago. I didn’t know either, mind you. I was just baiting her at the time. She absolutely hates men she can’t control in one way or another, you know.”
    “Get outta town!” Walpole exclaimed.
    “No, I’m serious. Hates ‘em with a white-hot passion. But on the flipside, she has nothing but contempt for the men she can control – poor, fucked-up creature. She’s doomed to perpetual dissatisfaction by her own self-contradictions. Not that she’s in a position to look down on or be dissatisfied with anyone, of course. Her life’s a feckin’ mess, and so is she. All self-inflicted. We’re perversely similar, in a way. Some men are given to ‘whoring after gods,’ as the Bible puts it. I, in contraposition, am given to apotheosizing strange whores. Her interaction with graven images is slightly different, and generally more destructive. She deifies her paramour of choice to begin with – almost enough to convince him and herself, and then suddenly discovers the ‘fraud’ he’s perpetrated upon her. Note the role-reversal, in case you hadn’t.
     “The conclusion is foregone: idolatry is invariably the mother of the most violent apostasy.”
    Walpole clapped his hand to his forehead and said, “No, man! I mean about the skin-flick!”   
     “I shit thee not, Walpole. When I saw the cover, I just about left a skidmark in my drawers. It’s a close-up of her givin’ some dude a spit’n’polish, lookin’ right into the camera. I’d know those eyes anywhere. Took it home and watched it, and it was her, alright.
     “Well I’ll be.”     
     “She’d probably go into cardiac arrest if she knew it was still floatin’ around out there,” I said. “If ever get really pissed off, I’ll see to it that ‘Ol’ Praise the Lord’ receives a copy.”
      “Whew!” Walpole hissed. “I’m still having trouble believing this, baby bro.”
     “You boys wanna see the tape, do you?”
     He raised his hand, palm out, and shook his head.
     “I wanna see it!” said Bill.
     Walpole shot him the closest thing to a nasty scowl I’d ever seen cross the old hippie’s face.
     Bill ignored him and forged on.
    “So, you gon’ hold it over ‘er head, maybe?”
      I frowned and waved him off.
    “Nah, that’s her style, not mine. If I send it to the Holy Roller, it’ll have to be for far worse than anything she’s pulled on me thus far, and I won’t afford her the chance to anything of the sort.”
    “A skin flick, though,” said Walpole, the picture of bearded befuddlement. “That just seems so, like, out of character, man.”
     “Correction,” I said. “It’s out of keeping with the image she presents. Well, the image she’d presenting at the moment, at any rate. Most personalities evolve over time, in my observation. She, however, is fond of abrupt reinvention, which is a misleading term – the very bullshit I was bitching about earlier, because the practical definition of reinvention is erecting a façade before the same crumbling tenement. Before I proceed, I want you to understand that I’m not defending her, buckos – merely explaining. Is that understood?”
     They nodded. Bill darted a quick look around the room, then darted an exploratory finger up his nose. The clock had gone from peekaboo trepidation to wide-eyed voyeurism.
    “Veronica’s parents were what you’d call ‘overbearing.’ Let me order a fresh one, and I’ll relate the tale in its tragic entirety.”

     To be continued

The Chase is INFINITELY Better Than The Catch (Another Episode in the Perpetually Unfolding Saga of Bill, Dave, and Walpole)

     “I’ve never understood it,” I told the muddy, amber drink; the muddy, amber bottle; the muddy, amber light suffusing the barroom; and Walpole’s muddy, amber face. “People and their fuckin’ goals, I mean. Especially here in the West.”
     He replied with a muddy, amber nod, just as Bill returned from the john. For a moment, I braced myself, half-expecting him to announce that he’d left something muddy and amber in the pot. When held his peace, my relief was as profound as his own.
     “Dave was just sayin’ that he doesn’t understand Western goals, Bro,” Walpole said.
     Like a mildly besotted Atlas, Bill shrugged.
    “So? All kinds o’ shit I don’t understand about the West. Like why, if they’re so fuckin’ concerned about the environment, they gotta move to a Goddamn desert, which means irrigatin’ an’ buildin’ power plants an’ shit. An’ why, if they’re so into solitude, their cities are damn-near crowded as New York.”
     “I think he meant the western world, Bro.”
     “Thank you. That’s exactly what I mean. The whole, goal-oriented, purpose-driven, self-empowering, so-full-of-shit-they-squish-when-they-walk western world. I honestly don’t think al Qaeda hate us for our freedom, boys. I think they hate us for Dr. Phil, Wayne Dyer, Anthony Robbins, and Oprah fucking Winfrey. They’re what I hate us for, at any rate.”
    “ISIS,” Walpole corrected. “Al Qaeda’s old news, Bro. ISIS is the new existential threat to civilization.”
     ‘That’s part of what I’m talkin’ about!” I said. “And who’s gonna be the badguy next week, fer feck’s sake? OSIRIS? ANUBIS? And does ISIS work with a group called SHAZAM on Saturday mornings, by chance? These ridiculous, contrived acronyms are symptomatic of the problem! We’re suffocating under the accumulated mass of our own bullshit! Well I’m sick of it! I say we start our own group! Bellicose, Obstinate Gaels Tenaciously Resisting Overbearing Twats’ Temerarious Efforts at Reeducation and Social Engineering: BOGTROTTERS!”
    “Slainte!” said Bill, on a spray of ebullience and pilsner. His joviality and affection nearly dislocated my shoulder. “Now that’s the Dave I know! Bubba, you done had you a six-year dry spell! I was gettin’ worried.”
     “Me too, man,” said Walpole. “We been shadowing you, in case we had to do, like, an intervention.”
     “Damn Skippy,” Bill added. “We got our people watchin’ ever’ barber shop in town!”
     “No need to worry about that,” I said. “I’ve been living on beer and diet pills since April. And I think it’s over between Veronica and me. Those Virgo/Aquarius matches are doomed from the get-go, you see. It’s all very superstitiously astrological – rather like global warming and feminism.”
     “Told ‘ye them mixed marriages never work,” said Bill.
     “Precisely. That’s why I have my eye on a nice, compatible, Manchurian rabbit.”
     “Would that make her a snow bunny?”
    “Yes. And therein lies the rub – she is good at tui fa, by the way. I suppose she has some Cantonese in the woodpile – even though I only know the Mandarin word for what she does. But that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, Veronica wanted me to start shaving my chest – and my chin. Said I was too hairy. When I tried to explain that I was a goat, she wasn’t having it. Neither was she giving it, if you catch my drift. Hmmm… or perhaps I should say that I was pitching, but she wasn’t catching.”
     “Least she doesn’t have anything catching,” Bill added in an attempt to redirect our attention to the brighter side of perception.
     “Now I am a goat, but I’m a fire goat, you see. A red fire goat. This condition of zodiacal, elemental, and colorific servitude renders me artistic, spontaneous, and quite outspoken when something pisses me off.”
      Bill’s nod of assent was timeless and funerary.
    “This is to say that I’m horny as a billygoat, a smidgen incendiary, and inclined to go red in the face when others’ behavior is egregious enough to violate the moral order of the universe itself.”
    “No shit!” Said Bill, kicking Walpole’s ankle for emphasis. “You shoulda seen him at Megadeth, when he thought they wasn’t gonna play ‘Black Friday.’ It was only this far north o’ butt-ugly, tell you what!”
    “ She, on the other hand, is an earth monkey with a bit of the anole in her. And although I never really noticed it before, because she usually wears her hair long, she has ears like a monkey.”
     “Got lips like a snappin’ turtle, too,” said Bill. “Prob’ly on account o’ her walkin’ around with ‘em pursed, all smug-like.”
     “Funny that you should mention that. I tried to remedy the condition, but she always insists that I lie on my back when she does that. I prefer to have her kneel while I stand, to afford me a better view of the proceedings – and because it’s a dominance thing, and because I read too much John fuckin’ Norman when I was in high school – but she says it’s demeaning. ‘Yeah,’ says I, but when we do it that way, I can use them monkey-lookin’ ears o’ yours like jug-handles.’ That really lodged in her craw – no pun intended.”
     Walpole stared at us in horror.
    Bill nodded and said, “Yeah, buddy. This women’s lib shit is just-plain gettiin’ outta hand. An’ how come folks is so thin-skinned these days?”
     “Well, that’s not all,” I said. I interrupted my narrative just long enough for the waitress to leave a fresh bottle of beer, gave her the once-over as she proceeded to a booth across the room.
     “See-saw butt,” I said.
     “Beg pardon?”
     “See-saw butt: one cheek rises as the other one dips. I wonder if she does that on purpose? And those blue short-shorts make ‘em look like porpoises, after a fashion. Anyway, Veronica made a regular barnacle of herself when Clark had to be institutionalized. Even worse when he self-medicated himself into a first-class ticket on Charon Cruise Lines.”
    “Jaysus, Davey-O! Have some pity!”
    “Oh, I do! You have no idea. Given my own past, I had empathy gushin’ outta my asshole and poolin’ on the overpriced terra-cotta kitchen floor. But then she started gettin’ weird – lettin’ her looks go, gainin’ an’ losin’ weight like a yo-yo, and all that. Even worse, she took to ringing up her mother at all hours of the night, conversing in weird and worrisome whispers. I think the oul’ hag put it into her head that I was responsible, that I’d employed some ancient and hideous Druid cantrip to ensorcel puir Clark to his tragic fate. Got a little tipsy on trendy, Napa Valley wine one night, and asked me point-blank if I practiced the Black Arts. I told her that while I am arguably a noir writer, I was in the middle of a blue period when it came to ticking the canvas’s erogenous zones. Jaysus, the fit she pitched! It was a four-alarm conniption-hiss! Next thing you know, she’s made an Italian living room of the place, with kachina dolls, dream-catchers, crystals, crucifixes, and all that. You know she makes good money, right?”
   Bill and Walpole nodded and sipped in tandem.
   “So one day, she’s on the phone, askin’ someone about importing enough Lourdes water to fill the hot tub. Then she asks a priest to come and bless the swimming pool. And she’s a Protestant, even!”
     “She keeps that shit up, she’s gonna be an institutionalized Protestant,” said Bill.
    “To be sure. But I’m not finished yet. Somehow or another, she pinched some holy water from one church or another, and poured it into my beer when she thought I wasn’t looking. Then she started insisting that I wear this cross.”
    I opened my jacket and tugged at the collar of my t-shirt, by way of displaying the bauble.
     “Then it was asking me to say the Lord’s Prayer – which I did, in English, Latin, and Greek – and demanding that I say aloud that Christ is Lord, that he’d come in the flesh, and all that. But I put my foot down when she took to dragging me into church every Sunday.
     “First off, I have no use for her denomination. Secondly, I’m not at all comfortable tempting fate by going to church in an ongoing condition of sin, it being as what we’re at is quite bad enough, thankee kindly. To be sure, I took a few for the team, but my conscience made a termite of itself every time. Told I her I’d rather not spit in God’s face by fornicating one night, then attending services the next, and that since we weren’t married, it was all fornication. At that point, she went on the defensive, accused me of pressuring her, of taking advantage of her recent bereavement. Got even angrier when I said that it was an observation, not a feckin’ proposal. There’s no mollifying the bitch when she’s spoiling for a donnybrook – all quicksand and spring breezes.”
     “Damn, Bro. What did you do?” asked Walpole.
     “What do you think? I let the little stoat know she’d just badgered the wrong badger. At which point, she becomes a leaky pillar of salt! Went racing upstairs, and-”
     “And you done followed her?” This from Bill.
    “Of course. I could kick myself, too. Now I’m gonna have to wait for the season finale of Game of Thrones to come out on DVD. And if you gents’ll be so forebearing, I’ve gotta play my own ‘Game of Thrones.’ I’m thinking those fried green tomatoes were more green than fried. Back in a sec.”

     When I returned, the clock face peeked at us through frightened, acutely angled fingers. Bartleby had since dropped the blinds, turned off the signs, and expelled all but the regulars.

    “Where was I? Oh, yeah, heading upstairs, I was. Not that I had much of a choice. Had she not wanted me to pursue her, she’d have gone to a motel. And even then, she’d probably have wanted me to pursue her. Women are like that, sometimes. Then she regaled me in robes of woe: she was getting fat, she was getting ugly, she was getting old, she was losing control, and wouldn’t and couldn’t and shouldn’t complain and would understand completely if had an eye for a younger woman, and did I but know the circumstances of her life, I’d understand why she was the way she was.”
     I took a deep gulp of beer.
    “I wasn’t buying that horseshit for a second, mind you. Heard it all before, when I was young, dumb, and fulla cum. Well, in case it still hasn’t occurred to her, I’m neither young nor dumb these days. How feckin’ stupid do they think we are, anyway? I’m after being a marionette, but I was doing my level and charitable best to salvage the situation.
     “Don’t even say it,” I gave. “I dried her cheeks, kissed her like I would my niece after a nightmare, and put her to bed. The differences between them being that my niece is five years old rather than forty-five, doesn’t pretend to sleep when Uncle Dave has chased the boogers and buckaboos away: she really does go to sleep, and she hasn’t the guile to use one nightmare as pretext for generating another. Oh! And I hope it goes without saying that she doesn’t wake me up by….”
   They nodded – but horizontally this time around. And it was both disconcerting and touching to see a Buddhist and a Taoist cross themselves.
   “Peace reigned for a week or two or three, but it was an Augustan peace -- and we were trapped with each other and her prevarication, because the sky itself wept for our souls – and washed out the bridge over Buckley’s Creek. Oh, and I got laid off, temporarily. Seems that some employers have never heard of flextime – poor, hidebound, traditionalist bastards.
     “Anyway, she was Delilah of agreeability that week – if you discount the odd question.”
    “What kind of question, Bro?” asked Walpole.
    “My ancestry, for starters. As if there’s any question about that? Irish and Scottish, for the most part-”
    Bill raised his hand.
    “Yeah?”
    “Did you see this text-message Healy sent me?” he asked.
    “No. Can’t say as I was privy to it,” I replied.
    “Well, he says we look more like North Britons than Gaels.”
    “Did you tell him that several P-Celtic-speaking tribes lived in Ireland for a very long time?”
    “Sure did. That’s when he pissed me off. Congratulated me for being man enough to admit it.”
    “True to form. True to form. Did you explain to him that perhaps those La Tene culture-bearers were the legendary Milesians, and that the black-haired, green-eyed types were the Tuatha de Daanan?”
    “Yessir. Now he’s sayin’ I should look under the hood before I start the car.”
    “Good. That’ll teach him to question our pedigrees, the bastard. Speaking of which, I mentioned that I had a bit of Welsh in me, too. How do you suppose she replied? Made dovey-eyes at me and served me a load of coyly steaming tripe about stealing hearts. Next thing I knew, she was posing as a prospective employer, and obtaining copies of my high school and college transcripts. Have I ever mentioned that few things annoy me more than a clumsy snoop? Then it was the games – all of which were feckin’ IQ tests, fer feck’s sake.”
     “Holy Jodie Foster, Batman!” Walpole exclaimed. “Down with Nazis and eugenics, Bros!”
    “Wasn’t a problem,” I assured him. “Man, was she pissed when she found mine was two or three points higher than hers, though! ‘That’s why you should listen to me,’ says I. ‘I understand the transience of all things material.’”
     “That’s a cheap shot!” said Walpole.
    “No shit. She thought so, too – and served me an even cheaper one in return. How could I say such an awful thing, it being as Clark…?
     “More tears, and more wearin’ the green down to so much overcooked sloke. Didn’t even wait long enough to let me ‘test for echo,’ as it were. That made a five-day-old zit of my suspicions, you see. Of late, we’d been ‘flying without a net,’ her assuring me that given her age and whatnot… Yeah, she’s one of those chicks with ellipses hangin’ off every sentence like dingleberries from a dago’s ass. Gets it from her mother, I think.
    “Well, the shit didn’t hit the fan until I got my credit-card statement the next month. Now I love my beer more than most, and more than is healthy, boys, but even I’ve never been fucked-up enough to spend five-hundred bucks in a fertility clinic without my own knowledge. Seems she’d grabbed mine by mistake – my card, that is. She was grabbin’ my other asset with knowledge and intent.
    “This was before the born-again, Jesus-freak twelve-stepper, of course. Pardon me for getting ahead of myself. I tend to do that when I’m working on m’ own twelve-step program. Did y'all ever notice that twelve multiplied by twelve is a hundred and forty-four? Does this make me a closet Charismatic?”
    “The what?” gasped the antisocial antistrophe.
    “Don’t get all PATRIOT Act on my ass. And does either you know anything about remote viewing, by the way?”  

To be continued

Portrait of the Artist as a Consummate Arsehole (Fiction)

     "He's so….right brained!" the girl beside us cooed, as the apple-cheeked poet left the stage. His blonde dreadlocks nodded like louse-ridden, semi-conscious serpents as he jogged to the bar to top off his cappuccino.
     "And now," said the Master of Ceremonies, "It's my pleasure to introduce… Bill. Bill what?"
     "Just Bill," said Bill. "Charo ain't got but one name, an' likewise RuPaul. Iffen it's good enough fer them, it's good enough fer me. C'mon, Dave. Gimme a hand here."
    "B-b-but I'm no poet!" I stammered. "I'm a stream-of-consciousness pornographer!"
     "Aint gotta do no poetry. Just play the bongos."
    "We don't have any bongos."
    "Sure we do."
    He handed me two Maxwell house cans, joined by a six-inch length of 2x4 and several bent masonry nails. Reluctantly, I accepted the instrument; trying for all I was worth to remember when, exactly, I'd had my last tetanus booster.
     As we took the stage, Bill donned a bishop's miter (adorned with a jaunty ostrich plume), a prayer shawl he'd crocheted from sisal twine, and a pair of yellow Playtex gloves. I had to admit that the gloves complemented his platform shoes, even if they clashed with his magenta spandex trousers.
     "Alright, Johns Creek!" he hollered. "Are you ready to rock?" Confused silence reigned.
    "Excuse us," I said into the mic.
    "You know I hate it when singers say that, don't you? First of all, it's a stupid question. Presumably, anyone who's pissed away fifty bucks on a ticket is, in fact, ready to rock. It goes without saying. Secondly, the dumb bastards are setting themselves up. Imagine you're at Lakewood, in front of a capacity crowd. You holler 'Are you ready to rock?' and to a man, they scream 'No!' Whatcha gonna do then, huh?"
    "Just play the bongos, willya? You're bummin' my trip."
    I slouched off to the darkest corner of the stage, and gave the upended coffee cans a few desultory pats.
    "Oh, an' take this," he said. "It's what I call a 'Post-Industrial bodhran'."
    "What?" I screeched. "It's Plexi-glass, epoxied to a fuckin' garbage can lid!"
    "Language, ye' filthy-mouthed bastard!" he roared. "Ye' want these cunts to think we're a bunch o' fuckin' savages?"
    Bill cleared his throat loudly. Very loudly. He gave vent to a deep, rumbling cough, snorted twice, then hawked and spat. A shudder passed through the audience like ripples on the surface of a pond.
    "When you follow your muse, you follow that two-timin', Dutch-doorin' whore wherever she leads -- even if that includes the reproductive system, the alimentary canal, and the mucous membranes, am I right?" Bill screamed.
   Two fiftyish women in tie-dyed T-shirts arose from their seats and walked out, their lattes still steaming.
   I strode to center stage and cupped my hand over the microphone.
   "Dude, you're drainin' the 'pussy pool,'" I hissed. "All these feckin' middle-aged divorcees trying to 'find themselves'? Think about it.  If you can't score here, you probably couldn't score in a whorehouse full o' blind nymphomaniacs if your pecker was made of hundred-dollar bills. So ease up on the bodily function stuff, fer feck's sake! I wanna get my wick dipped."
    "You mean you'd bastardize -- nay! -- prostitute our art for the sake of shaggin' one of these frowzy ol' slags?" he screeched. "I mean, that bleached blonde over there has nice tits -- probably implants -- but other than her, there ain't a single leg-wetter in the whole fookin' room."
     Said blonde slammed her waxed paper cup of whipped green tea onto the table top, grabbed her hand-sewn purse, and stomped toward the exit, trying her best to radiate icy dignity.
    "Nice goin', gobshite. That was the one I meant to put the moves on. Now I'll have to settle for the Italian lookin' one over yonder."
   "Ya mean her?" he asked, pointing directly at her. "I dunno, dude. Maybe it's just that skirt, but she looks to have her a real big ass."
    My heart sank as another prospect dissipated before my eyes.
    "Dude, look here. This," I said, tapping my cranium, "is my hairline. This, on the other hand, is my waistline. Note that the former is receding while the latter is expanding. At my age, I can overlook a big arse. Dig?"
     "Looky!" he bellowed. "It's Walpole! An' he even done trimmed his toenails!"
    "I see he's gotten a new field jacket, as well. It's about time. He's been wearing the old one since 1969."
   "I once did a '69' with a chick who was born in '69," Bill said. "Tell me there ain't some kinda heavy-duty occult numerological-type symbolism there. Actually saw her at the mall a couple months ago. Come to think of it, she got her kind of a big ass, too, these days. Ye reckon it's catchin'?"
     "Wouldn’t know. Oh, I did a '68' with a chick who was born in '68, "I said.
    "What's a '68'?"
    "She went down on me, and I told her I owed her one."
    He laughed and we high-fived each other. Another three patrons headed for the door.
    Walpole took to the stage, and reached into the olive drab duffel bag he was carrying.  Without exception, the audience screamed and dove for cover. One didn't arise.
     "Look!" said the old hippie. "I brought my Aeolian harp, man. Made it from a Russell Stover box and some wire I got on clearance at the hardware store. Lemme just find a place to plug in this hairdryer."
     "Excellent!" said Bill. "Harps is the perfect accompaniment to epics like this one."
     The cacophonous jangle of the poorly tuned instrument was barely audible over the whoosh of the hairdryer. Bill didn't seem to notice.
    "Sounds kinda like early Hawkwind," he said to Walpole.
    "Without further ado," he said into the mike, "This one's called 'Stack-and-Pack Dystopian Colonic Irrigation, Part Six.'"
   I groaned inwardly.  This would be yet another of his endless, free-verse screeds, addressed to a party to whom he referred only as "Mr. Businessman."

      Spray Corexit on your jock-itchy corporate balls, Mr. Businessman," he thundered.
     Globalize and subsidize and outsource and downsize, high and mighty dollar-chaser!
     Prozac and Botox yourself into sitcom oblivion,
     Slip into plutocratic wet dreams of stinky French cheese and Napa Valley wine
    While the masses subsist on Velveeta and Boone's Farm.

    Walpole thrust his leathery fist into the air.
    "Kick out the jams, motherfucker!" he bellowed.
   I shrugged and beat a staccato tattoo on the coffee-can bongos. Apparently Bill had forgotten where we were. Although this was indeed an artsy-fartsy coffee house, it was an artsy-fartsy coffee house in one of the most affluent portions of North Fulton County. I doubted that Bill's anti-capitalist rant would resonate with the audience. It also occurred to me that, trust fund baby that he was; he didn't have much room to talk. But then again, what the hell? Bill was the kind of guy who'd turn a glass house into an indoor batting range. And it certainly wouldn't hurt to remind a few of these people that their environmentally friendly, reusable grocery bags were made by child labor in Third-World sweatshops.

     In China they do it for chili, Mr. Businessman!
     And in Chile, they do it for china!
     Wake up! Wake up and smell the burning condors!
     Get off your high colonic horse
     And use the pot like the rest of us!

     Walpole dragged his comb across the strings of the Aeolian harp, then reached into his duffel bag and pulled out a bedpan, which he attempted to use as a slide.

     You bum me out, Mr Businessman,
     And the winos you create try to squeegee
     My goddamn windshield even when it ain't
     Got no bird shit on it!

    Not in this neck of the woods, I thought. Winos are illegal. You can get five years in a private prison for even giving one a subway token or a gift certificate.

     Live in your gated, golf-course community, Mr. Businessman!
     Let the masses know you got something worth stealing!
    Use State and County funds to pave the roads,
    But don't allow through-traffic!

   The silence deepened from chilly to Neptunian-satellite frosty. That one had gone over like a turd in a punchbowl. I couldn't help smirking.
    "I call this part 'Post-Industrial Interlude,' " Bill said."It's kinda performance-art-like."
     Walpole rummaged through the duffel, and handed him a child's wooden-framed slate. Bill drew a wad of aluminum foil from the pocket of his sleeveless, plaid button-down, and popped it into his mouth before removing one of his gloves. Holding the slate a next to his face, he clawed the hastily wiped surface (the outline of an erect penis and a pair of testicles, crudely rendered in lime-green chalk, was - although faint -- still visible) while chewing on the foil. Every countenance in the room contorted into a constipated wince. Hands rose to ears. As he clawed and chewed, Bill loosed a high-pitched, gurgling caterwaul. The horrid combination of sounds was too much even for me, and I was glad when he finally tired of it.

     That’s the sound of progress, Mr. Businessman!
    It sounds like abandoned carpet mills,
     Like those squeaky farts
     That, kinda, you know, travel up the crack of your bikini-waxed ass;
    Or the kind you let in your marble bathtub,
    The ones that are so loud, they wake up everyone in the house!
     But the workers of the world have
     A 'silent but deadly' for you, Mr. Businessman!
     And them imported covers'll be over your head
     Before you know what hit you!

    
    “Can ye’ believe it?” Bill asked as we loaded the equipment into the car. “They gave us a hundred and fifty bucks!”
     “Yeah, but it was on the condition that we’d never come back,” I reminded him. “And we didn’t get laid.”
     “You’ve got problems, Baby Bro,” said Walpole. “Half those chicks in there were my age, at least.”
    “Bullshit,” said Bill. “They wasn’t in wheelchairs or wearin’ Depends.” He chuckled at his own wit.
    “I made the average at fifty or so,” I corrected. “Technically, they aren’t even Boomers. Besides, they don’t age as quickly as they used to. Pilates, yoga--”
     “Plastic surgery, tit-lifts,” Bill mumbled.
     I scowled at him and continued: “-- all that shit. It’s also worth mentioning that I ain’t gettin’ any younger, and eventually my looks are gonna go, as well.”
     Bill cleared his throat. Walpole coughed. Crickets chirped.
    “There are advantages to dating older broads, as well,” I said. “Their kids, often as not, are grown up. So you don’t have to play surrogate father.  And there’s practically no danger of knockin’ ‘em up.” Before Walpole could finish drawing a breath, I pointed my finger at him and said “Don’t even think of tellin’ that Goddamned angelica elixir story again. That was a fluke.”
     “You know,” Bill said, “I can’t believe half the bullshit you get away with. I mean, you got fuck-all in the way of formal trainin’.” He turned to Walpole. “I’m serious as a heart attack, dude. He just mixes up a bunch of Cherokee, Choctaw, and Hillybilly shit he learnt from his Daddy --”
     “Creek shit, not Choctaw,” I corrected. Bill ignored me.
     “-- and passes it off as Chinese. And everything else he knows he done learnt outta Kung Fu magazines. Hell, the only pressure points he’s got memorized are the ones--”
    “I think that’ll be quite enough, Bill.”

   But he wasn’t willing to let it go. Even as he backed the van out of the parking space, he said: “This here boy’s the Elmer Gantry of alternative medicine, tell you what.”
     “So where to for dinner?” I asked.
     “You think anything’s still open in Doraville?” Walpole asked.    
     “Anyway, said Bill. There’s this new coffee house down in Little Five Points, and I hear they have Open-Mic-Night, too. But I’m thinkin’ after tonight, we might have to disguise ourselves. So what do you guys think about wearin’ corpse paint? It’s a younger crowd down there, and I understand that the kids these days are all over that shit….”  

The End 

Fine Dining With Bill and Dave (Part IV)

“Will ye’ look at all these dumb-ass shops?” asked Bill as we strode through the gallery. “An’ what is it with malls, anyway? Is there some kinda law that says ye' gotta sell stupid, tacky, useless shit if ye' wanna rent a space in one? I mean; look over there, fer instance!” He swept his arm in a close imitation of a wing block before lowering his sights on offending shop. I heard a muffled crunch and, turning about, noted that his wrist had driven an inattentive patron’s cell phone into his cheek, knocking him to the floor in the process. The man (a nondescript twenty-something in nondescript casual attire) lay still and silent, while an increasingly strident voice issued from the phone’s speaker. I smiled, ground the device beneath my boot heel, and returned my attention to Bill.

"They're so cute when they're sleeping," I said. “And nice shot, by the way. The semi-mythical one-strike knockout. Perhaps you should make a series of martial arts videos. I hear it's a lucrative enterprise.”

But his mind was elsewhere. Aquiver with rage, he glared at the hated shop, one crooked finger pointed like a scorpion’s sting. My gaze followed the accusing digit to a blinking neon sign, which flashed the legend “All Things Scunci.” Hanging in the plate glass window beneath it -- and resembling nothing so much as a disembodied anus -- was an inner-tube-sized replica of a scunci. A horror of foil and floss, it dangled from the ceiling like a child's tire swing. Within the otherwise empty shop, I spotted racks and racks of scuncis of every conceivable hue and thickness, some as fine as spider silk, others nearly as thick as bungee cords. Behind the counter, a listless, bespectacled androgyne in a faded plaid button-down lounged against the wall, leafing through the previous week's issue of People. Noting the creature's close-cropped hair, I concluded that it would never need its own merchandise.

"Oh, do be progressive, Bill," I said. "Consider this yet another of the benefits of free trade: more choice for the consumer."
"And the stalls! The stalls! They're even worse!" he wailed, ignoring me again as he clawed at his hair. "Like that one over yonder! 'The Paperweight Pioneer'? What the fuck kind of name is that?"
"A right descriptive one, from the looks of it," I answered, however much I hated admitting it. The "booth" in question consisted of an unevenly stained replica chuck wagon. Instead of cookware and provisions, though, the proprietor had stocked the vehicle with paperweights of every description: crystal balls, imitation snow-globes, smiley faces, stylized buttocks -- even a few unpolished river stones epoxied to beer coasters.(These marketed as "folk art.") Perhaps sensing that he had nothing to fear from shoplifters, the owner - an obese, florid gent in a costume-shop cowboy outfit with a "Rainbow Pride" badge tacked to his vest in lieu of a sheriff's badge-- snored and started in a rocking chair that looked too rickety to bear his weight.

"I can see that this is upsetting you, Bill," I said, steering him in a different direction before he caught sight of the next booth, "Shits and Giggles." Under normal circumstances, he might have found the place amusing, but the incident with mall security had left him in an ill humor. As I was already familiar with the shop, I couldn't ignore the possibility of  Bill going completely berserk at the sight. There was a fifty-fifty chance either way...

"Shits and Giggles" specialized in fecal-themed merchandise: flatware with turd-shaped handles of molded plastic; turd-shaped key-chains, paperweights, earrings and teething toys; even a pair of molded foam house-shoes, labeled "Shitheels." Not to be outdone by Wisconsin's "Cheeseheads," the booth stocked an array of headgear that, in Lovecraft's words, "I cannot and must not recall." There were bath sponges dyed brown, turd hand puppets; stuffed, plush turds; and an unspeakable board game: "Shit Happens." Worst of all, though, was a ceramic horror that appeared to be studded with peanuts. Judging by the product's name, "Rocky Road," I concluded that it was meant to be a serving dish for ice cream. Standing bolt upright behind the counter, the shopkeeper, a pale, malnourished young man, kneaded and twisted one of the plush turds, his knuckles white. His facial expression, which apparently hadn't changed since last I'd seen him, bore an unnerving resemblance to Richard Kasso's mugshot.

"Jaysus," I muttered to myself. "Guess I'm goin' back to Mangan's sister empty-handed, after all." I wished I could have shared the joke with Bill, but I thought I'd seen the shopkeeper playing in local drum circles on a few occasions. Given Bill's visceral hatred of drum circles... No. I resolved to keep the two as far apart as possible.

 "Suppose we just stroll around and discuss what we've seen -- try to make sense of it?" I said to Bill. "I hear there's a new book stall on the next floor. Perhaps they'll have something interesting."
"Yeah," he said with a sigh. "I reckon gettin' all peripatetic an' readin' books beats the shit out of another goddamn assault an' battery charge."
"I couldn't agree more," I said. Looking over my shoulder, I noticed that the young proprietor of "Shits and Giggles" was holding one of his turd hand puppets aloft with one arm -- pale and twiggy as a birch sapling -- and viciously pounding it with a bony fist. His facial expression remained unchanged. In a way, I found the sight comforting -- at least Bill and I wouldn't attract undue attention...

We found the book stall, and all seemed well -- at first. The selection of titles was a little mainstream for my tastes, and I took a mild -- if immediate -- dislike to the proprietor. If it seems contradictory of me to describe a man as "cadaverous" and "corpulent" in the same sentence; then it's only because our species is maddeningly contradictory at times. His faded blue t-shirt rode up over a pale, hairless hemisphere of a belly, his wisp of a goatee hung nearly to his clavicular notch, and his eyes -- glistening but watery -- winked and blinked behind coke-bottle lenses. His hair was brownish, greasy, and drawn back in a ponytail even sloppier than my own. Worse still, a pimple in the crease just beside his left nostril fairly screamed to be expressed. The aforesaid irritants aside, though, I held my peace for Bill's sake.

Determining by his animated conversation on his cell phone, that the boy fancied himself a writer (and trying to suppress a rising surge of restless ennui), I asked if, perhaps, he had a copy of Nostromo.

"The title, sir," he snapped with ice in his eyes and voice, "is Alien. The ship was called the Nostromo. Oh, nothing, Abelard," he continued. "These dilettantes just..."

If the Celt truly labors beneath a curse (aside from his temper -- alternately mercurial and melancholic; his fondness for liquor, his propensity for violence, his dislike of order, authority and even coherence; his monstrous libido; and his loathing of gainful employment), it's his innate love of the written word.

As the wild, Celtic blood of my fathers drained from my face and roared in my ears; and my hands clenched into war-club fists; I resolved in my heart of hearts and soul of souls to reprove the cretin, not for myself -- no! never for that! -- but for Chaucer and Malory, Milton and Spenser, Shakespeare and Jonson, for Swift and Donne, for Joyce, for Yeats, for Eliot, for Conrad, for Wolfe, even for Irving. (But never for Wilde. I never could abide the pretentious little faggot.) I ripped off my sunglasses, bored into his eyes with my own, and drew back as if to strike him. Despite his greater bulk, he cringed back, not even assuming  a Hollywood kung fu stance.

"You and your kind," I hissed, "are an intellectual virus -- and I'm the antibody. And you call yourself a writer? A writer? Bullshit! Bullshit, I say! Your cheeks are full! Your eyes are neither hollow nor vacant, damn -- well -- damn -- uhm -- damn your eyes! There ain't the faintest whiff of booze, blood or despair about you (at that point, I launched myself across the counter, nostrils flaring and contracting by turns, in a last-minute 'reality check.' )   I've spent the last five minutes eavesdropping on your conversation, you smug philistine! I heard you say, with your own skinny lips -- and they're the only skinny parts of you, you buttery little beach ball of a man! -- that Lin Carter and Lester Del Rey were unappreciated -- for their profound insight into the human condition! What would you know of the human condition? You're more of an outcast from our species even than either of us!" I spat, grabbing for Bill -- who was no longer there. For a moment, I wished he had been; as, frankly, I didn't believe the last assertion, even as I made it. Consequently, I'd have found his menacing, homicidal glare and  "Yeah, what he said!" reassuring.

Ignoring his absence, I continued: "Or perhaps you're the distilled essence of our species! Why, you miserable, technology-worshiping, fantasy-obsessed maggot! You haven't even the balls to be one of Eliot's 'hollow men,' or even the substance to grieve, as Yeats did, the conflict between man's will and his ultimate fate! You're a tragicomic nonentity! Comic in and  of yourself, but tragic in that you can't apprend your own ludicrousness!

I raised my hand, but needn't have done so: his expression spoke volumes. I'd singled out a few subcultural stereotypes, but had otherwise only accused him of being human. In so doing, I'd convicted myself even as I'd indicted him. As the rage subsided, I turned to him and said "At least you have a soul, though."

"No he don't!" Screamed Bill, who had suddenly reappeared. "Lookit this shit!" In one hand was a New-Agey pop-psychology book, entitled Partial Re-Birthing Therapy. In the other was a slick hardcover entitled Aborting Your Inner Child.  

"Just so Bill. Just so. Now race you to the fountain!"
I then turned on my heel and sprinted through the crowd, pausing only to point at a lone silhouette on the escalator and scream, "Stop, thief!"
"Yer on!" Bill screeched. "Last one there gotta pay the lap-dancers tonight!"

If nothing else, I'd saved a human life.

"I'm glad you're in a better mood," I said, a few moments later. "You know how I hate dealing with manic episodes on my own. It's such a lonely feeling: having so much fun, and yet being unable to share -- nay, even communicate -- it. By the way, do you suppose the mob hurt that guy? I wasn't wearing my contacts, so I had no idea that he was Middle Eastern -- until they caught him and he started pleading for his life in Farsi."

"I wouldn't worry about that, Dave-O," Bill replied. "And I wish you wouldn't feel that way. You're selling yourself short. Why, 'communicable' might as well be your middle name at times. I do understand loneliness, though. It's the performance artist's curse, as well."
As he spoke, he stared pensively at nothing in particular. A thin stream of water dribbled from each cuff of his leather jacket, and his damp pockets bulged with coins.

"Let's go, Billy-O," I said, taking to my feet. "We've business to attend to."
"Oh yeah! I nearly forgot!" he said. "But what about dessert? That's why we came here in the first place, ain't it?"
"All in good time. Did you come prepared?"

"I sure as hell did!" he said with a demented grin. Reaching into yet another of his pockets he retrieved two heavy rubber bands and two small bags of paper clips.

"Ah is purfoundly ale-yer-nated, in the romantical sense o' th' word," said he... and I believed him.

To be continued...