The Singing Wire and Other Stories by Frank B. Ford This book of 42 short stories is (c) copyright Frank B. Ford. For all rights refer to the author. An on-line version of this work, with other works by Frank B. Ford, is available on the World Wide Web at: http://las.alfred.edu/~combeff _____________________________________________________________ The Singing Wire and Other Stories by Frank B. Ford MIAMI AND OTHER VICES 1. [1]The Purse 2. [2]The Spoon 3. [3]Leftys 4. [4]The Bebop 5. [5]When Everything Is Funny 6. [6]The Surprise 7. [7]The Secret Word IMAGE AND FLAME 1. [8]The Present 2. [9]Little Candles 3. [10]Word 4. [11]Avia Morrisey 5. [12]The Ceremony 6. [13]Operation Dessert Form 7. [14]Lips Smooth As Oil 8. [15]Fish Story 9. [16]ORANGE, GEORGEOUS ORANGE! 10. [17]The Chastetree 11. [18]Urban Dialog 12. [19]Chapters 1 and 2 13. [20]Nothing Made of Words 14. [21]BODILEEWOMPA 15. [22]The Heights 16. [23]He Tells Me; I Tell Him THE GOLD TRADE 1. [24]The Morning Program 2. [25]The Men 3. [26]Standup American Guy 4. [27]Reprise 5. [28]Talent 6. [29]A Decidedly Minor Canyon 7. [30]The Hamburger 8. [31]The Last Book 9. [32]Introduction 10. [33]Little Things Mean INSTITUTIONS 1. [34]Transactions 2. [35]Two Documents 3. [36]"No Sexual Intercourse Aloud" 4. [37]The Three P's 5. [38]All a Dither 6. [39]Tug 7. [40]The Progress of the Breast 8. [41]The Experiment 9. [42]The Singing Wire _____________________________________________________________ MIAMI AND OTHER VICES _____________________________________________________________ The Purse Strolling to think, he thought, in Coconut Grove, an arty neighborhood in Miami, Skip heard a groundglass "Get him!" from a wide woman attempting to exit a Cadillac. A burly man had grabbed her purse through the open window and was running. Skip planted his feet: "I'm on vacation!" But nobody else chased the robber except the victim, she nearly as bulky in a trenchcoat. He trailed behind, hoping some of those at sunny breakfasts outside Angela's Restaurant would join in. Running almost unconsciously, his long strides carried him well past the fat woman. He slowed then, not desirous of catching anyone, but sickened to see the robber trapped in a blind alley behind the Coconut Grove Theater, jerkily revolving to confront Skip amid rocking garbage cans. Skip thudded to a halt just before he felt someone leap onto his back. "You just hold it, Handsome!" she squealed, as two officers puffed by them, one flashing handcuffs. "Why hello there, Honeybun!" the other officer shouted to the robber, who closed his eyes thrusting out the purse. It was soon tossed back with a "Here you go, Gretchen!" and the woman dismounted from the amazed Skip to catch it. "Wouldn't want to lose the famous departmental pocketbook," she winked at Skip as she placed the purse on the asphalt, and removed her trenchcoat. GRETCHEN WEBBERLY announced the bronze nametag. A muscular, hard-eyed woman in her uniform, she asked, "What do they call you?" flipping open a notebook. The flash of its aluminum cover made Skip jump, and Gretchen smile. "Skip," he answered and her smile widened. "Skip. Uh huh. Well, since this is for a police report, we tend to be a bit more formal--even in Coconut Grove. So let's have a last name too, shall we?" Skip moved quite close, almost a reflex when talking to a woman. He bestowed a benign grin on Gretchen Webberly, it fading as her questions went on. "Patrolperson Webberly calling Planet Skip!" she eventually yelled, floating her pen across his gaze like a miniature silver spaceship. He had forgotten the incident and almost everything else until the the next day's phonecall. "Hello hero!" Gretchen began. When he protested she defined a hero as one who gets a chance to desist and doesn't. "Well I took a pretty long time."--Skip added to this concept by shrugging with meditative drama, as if she could see him. "Uh, that is I, whatchacallit, desisted. And I was doing some of that when I was running too." "You're just a thoughtful person then." "Nobody ever said that before." "Well I'm sure of it." laughed the officer, who asked additional questions for her report. During the next phonecall, Skip learned that "We have to do more than just a regular job 'cause this is part of a big national crime survey." Marital status came up. "Divorce." After a pause Gretchen whispered, "Was it a sex thing? Don't answer! How completely unprofessional! The most irrational things bite at me sometimes. It's so schoolgirlish!" "I don't care," Skip shrugged. "Anyways, couldn't be. Anyways it's over. I don't think about it anymore." "Then it was!" "No! At least I don't think so. I can't see how." "Are you uncomfortable with my asking you these things? About sex?" "I don't think so." He held the phone with his chin and began combing his hair, pondering his image in the gummy glass covering a yachting print above his motel bed. "Well don't worry..."--a stifled laugh--"there's a cure." Was somebody listening at her end? A woman often phoned him with another listening; with all the giggling it was frequently hard to decipher the words. Often, too, she would call back to apologize...before opening her heart for some reason. "Say? Why not meet for lunch at Angela's or The Pirate's tomorrow? I mean it's mostly social but you have a need to talk about all of this," Gretchen erupted. "I do? Oh. Well, yes. Of course. You're the expert on that sort of thing I guess." "Masters in Criminal Science and Psychology. Your ideas could be important in my doctoral work at University of Miami." "My ex said I didn't have any." "Well that wasn't very nice. Sounds like she was making you up for her own sick reasons--excuse my saying so." "I never thought about it, whether it was or not I mean. Nice I mean. But...she did make me up a lot. She did that a lot," Skip frowned, petulant over one blond wave, borderline frizzy. "Whatever. I'll have to come in drag, my macho cop outfit. The department dresses the women as boys but our hips give us away." Her hips give her away all right, mused Skip on a bench at the Coconut Grove Marina that following day, an hour to kill before meeting Gretchen. He suddenly pictured the thin Betsy, his ex, carrying an armful of her clothes from the apartment just after repeatedly thumping his head while saying "My...Playgirl Bunny! You just stay lovely with nothing really gunking up anything in there. And now when I go out the waitresses and shopgirls will actually start paying some attention to me! Hey, why fight it, Skippy? You make women happy with your simple simple presence. Hey it's not your fault! It's the Sexual Revolution, and we now have the right and obligation and privilege, and especially the burden, to create our own brainless blond dollbabies, anatomically correct, with little penises that just poke out in their innocence." That kind of talk was the trouble and it started after she took a course at that community college with some feminist bunch. "They used to just have those courses in cooking and shit like that," Skip had pouted to male friends while outlasting a one-sided game on Monday Night Football. She was making him up all right, just like Gretchen had said. "In fact they're always making me up!" That's something he resolves to think about right then and there on the bench, by reliving a few samples of the many arguments with women: forever being accused of ideas--often triggered by supposed motives of such intricacy that they trapped him, somehow, inside another's overwhelming craziness. He stares up to the sailboats; a chop in the water makes them roll, their ropes snapping in front of muddy clouds. "I thought I was just being Mr. Nice Guy," he declares. A pale young man inside the marina office proffers a steaming coffee mug in the dark window. With a curt smile Skip mostly ignores him. "Yeah, they give her away all right," he whispers. Other hips, with a blue and white Igloo cooler, alight from a sailboat. Skip laughs, it being so easy to visualize the flesh under the sweaty shorts--the first easy thing. Dr! Webberly, Gretchen will become with his help. Oh well, it'll just end up sex on demand again and again. That part was easy, but for some reason they all got restless a few months after, throwing their hair around in all kinds of fits. The frame of Skip's mind expands to accommodate blonds, brunettes, redheads...a file of young women stretching up the marina boardwalk all the way to the Chart House Restaurant and flopping around in the overcast light like a thousand rag dolls. He has risen from the bench to maneuver himself into the light flaring through surly clouds, stands in trash from an overflowing barrel, pigeon-toed, a hand thrust down into his crotch: Male Venus in a seashell of styrofoam and foil, bright hair whipping. In front of him, the girl with the cooler is asking "Yes?" He must've said something she didn't quite hear. "Got a minute?"-- Skip burns his second-best smile on her. The guy in the office window renews his offer of coffee, vapor curling up from the brilliantly white mug. The girl, reflected, sunny, is pulling up her halter with one hand; now she rests the cooler on the bench in order to tug down on her shorts with the other. Yet another scene visits Skip: He is the robber among battered garbage cans, thrusting forth the purse to a crowd of women tossing their heads helter skelter. Oh why couldn't they just love him for himself? Suddenly the ample Gretchen breasts the wave in the smelly alley. "Just my jumping on your back must have been traumatic. You're not a horse after all!" "Clothes horse, Betsy, my ex, said, and later...sawhorse." "That was mean!"--but this from the hazy young woman in front of him. What he uttered to an imaginary Gretchen has made sense to her also. A little smallish but cute, what with her wearing her cap backwards like a baseball catcher, Skip determines...and the type'll believe anything. Not long after, cardboard gets produced from the cooler. Neither has a pen. "But it's okay!" she giggles. "My work phone is on there. Ask for Marna. It's from a cookie package! I work for the bakery!" "And I bet you're the sweetest thing there!" How his ex would have been surprised at that quick one! The young man snaps back from the marina office window, a black thread of coffee hanging in the air. The clouds have lifted and the light dazzles as Skip walks to his lunch date, playing with the nautical cap Marna had placed on his head. "It'll end up bad with this Gretchen police chick, but not be so bad in between," he pronounces, thoughtfully. Drunks from off a shrimp boat are kicking around a shiny ragball in an impromptu soccer game: " Whatever you say, Captain!" one yells and the others chorus, upsetting Skip's concentration. He plays with his shrimp cocktail at the Pirate's. They are hemmed in by tables of various laughers. Cars contend in the nearby street, throwing back harsh sunlight. "It's a cruel world," he informs Gretchen after deeply mulling her remarks concerning this or that study proving something or other. A tear fashions itself in his squinting. "Yeah it's cruel all right, but we got a way of making it nice." She looms, the blinding street behind her. Shimmers from the water glasses and the cutlery roll upward to her shadowed face, her eyes twin pinpoints of ice. A horn blows, Skip shudders. _____________________________________________________________ The Spoon "Well flip a coin then!" She flung up her hands at his usual caution. Huh! That's the way you'd do it! But it's a very important business decision, M'am. A subject you flunk most greviously." He shut the drapes against the light off the blue water, his back to her. As he turned around, she snickered at the drapes, an assortment of sunflowers and dragons. "No," she insisted from the sofa, hugging her knees when he began fiddling with the television console, "I would just, simply, decide." His tuning grew agitated. "I have seen you decide! Just grab anything out of the chaos!" "Nonsense!" she shouted with fiery conviction at his multicolored profile, the wild television picture splashing around the small, darkened apartment. "Oh it's been that way sometimes," she mused. "But at least I don't wait on pins and needles for yet another phonecall." "Oh yeah? Well just thinking of you making some half-witted guess gives me apoplexy." He was bent over and talking into the TV, where electronic confetti bobbed. "You just leap at things!" He suddenly chuckled in amazement at her, and at the picture which mysteriously snapped in on the huge screen. Squinting, he revolved, basketball players flying behind him. "You are fifty-five years old!" she informed him, and he stiffened in order to stand as straight as possible. "Does that mean I have no future?" he pleaded. "It keeps getting narrower." She squeezed her knees harder and her whole body seemed to diminish on the sofa. "So why flub around when time is so precious?" He approached in mock fear and flopped beside her, his cream-colored slacks and turtleneck softly immaculate next to her jeans and sweatshirt. "Why are you here?" he asked. "In the short run I was invited to watch the Boston Celtics on your ridiculous TV. In the long run..." she trailed off. "It's starting to sound serious," he quipped, intently watching the screen. But she continued with her original thought. "I wouldn't even know if Harry Bird was playing with a square basketball." LAR-ry Bird," he exhaled, as if that small mistake could ruin the game--though the last few moments consisted of players speeding to and fro incessantly, and with no points scored. "Turn it off and let's go out you damn cheapskate! It's the middle of the day. I'm sorry," she told his astonished face, "but I just can't stare at it like you do, comatose. And what's left? Those horrible drapes that you must have gotten on sale like everything else in this suffocating apartment and life." He pressed forward beside her--she thought in reaction to her comment--but someone had almost scored, the ball spinning round and round the hoop before falling into the midst of anxious giants. Even in the muted sound level of the television their grunts and squeaky sneakers were audible. "What, uh, what about the long run?" he inquired absently. "Well now what about it?" she slapped her knees in exaggerated heartiness. "They missed again! Oh well. You, you started to say that in the long.... How can you forget things a few seconds past, and yet remember some tiny alleged hurt ten years ago? Is that female or something?" She waved off his comments and looked to him with a face so kind he trembled. "In the long run I'm here to bury you." His eyes widened and he fell so far back into the cushions that she had to twist round to see his face at all. "The few friends and relatives you had you've absolutely alienated. I'm the only one left," she sighed. "Alienated! For God's sakes," he whispered, "we..."--he brushed lint off his sweater--"s-speak--if it's absolutely necessary." "They will all flee! Flee when you keel over!" "Alienated is a strong word," he kept pouting, buried even more in the cushions. "They're all strong words when you think about them." Her "insights" always annoyed him who thought that no generalization could be applied to life with the least degree of certainty, although something could prove valuable if it made money. "Listen Miss Smart-Ass, I've just been checked by Dr Sam. He took a hundred tests and checked my orifices and..." "Your precious orifices will last no longer than anybody else's." "Everything excellent!" he proclamed while following the parabolic three-point shot of Larry, not Harry, Bird. She bounded up from the sofa to shut off the console. "Just when the action is...!" he began protesting. As the picture slowly died behind her she spun round. "Doc gave me the results before you got them--at the bar of the sailing club." "How wonderful! One's intimate details discussed over light beer." He was fingering inside his turtleneck. "You know Dr. Sam for goodness...!" "Yeah I do. He goes from office to hospital to sailing club. Does he even have an apartment? I know he's never been on a boat of any type in his life, let alone sailing..." and he fluttered his hand as if it were an agitated sail. She shrugged. "So he tells everybody everything. So what? People and their supposed secrets! What a joke!" She was pulling the drapes open, and startling light flooded past her small and somewhat ragged figure. "Anything else I should know?" he inquired from the sofa. "Yes. A testicle didn't descend or something?" "I was a little kid!" he sputtered, closing his eyes against the light and against his so-remote past. "Yeah? Well they're to keep an eye out for something now...men of your age? I think he said something like that anyway--if I didn't read it somewhere." "What? Look out for? Big C?" he squirmed. "So say it" she hissed. "Cancer. Say it. Say things." He didn't say it. "Oh my God!" he said. "Anyway, not that definite. Besides, that or something has always got to get you in the end--or in the crotch even. Oh now don't put on your prude face. You weren't always so prudish I recall." She formed his too-familiar words with her mouth as he was saying them. "Never mind all that!" He looked up and caught her. "Now please knock off the clowning and tell me what Dr. Sam said exactly." "What I told you. Exactly. Vaguely. Whatever. Phone him. Ask him yourself. It's not a confession of weakness to do that. 'Something to look out for.' I think he said. That's all. An afterthought! You're making too much of it--at least I think you are." "Close the drapes! I can't even see you. You look like some low-budget Hollywood version of a saintly vision. It hurts my eyes. I fervently hope that's not a symptom or something." She made a large, sweeping gesture to include the brilliant blue water and a few creamy sails just then entering the bay. "That's home. Out there. Where we came from, where we're going." "God I can't talk to you for ten minutes without the morbid drama coming out." "How could the truth be morbid?" she snapped. "Truth isn't anything but itself." "Another of your INsights?" He shifted uncomfortably on the sofa. "Uh, how about putting my beloved Celtics back on? I really have no money to go out. Do you?" He was raising himself just enough to turn a pocket inside out. "Aw come on! You must have a dollar or two left over from your trip. Come on! We'll get on your beautiful sportcoat--the only thing to my knowledge you didn't buy on sale." She raced to the bedroom and came out with the coat. "Hah hah! I thought so!" and she plucked out a wallet of travelers checks from an inside pocket while waifishly dancing though pools of light on the wooden floor. "What makes you think they're mine? I have to turn them in to the accountants." ""Who owns the company?" She stopped dancing to point at him. "I shall tell you exactly what to tell the accountants. You needn't improvise. And I will take charge of these." She had fingered inside the slim wallet, having already peeked at the denomination during her dance: five one hundreds she deduced. "How much is there?" "A couple of hundred or fifty. Don't worry about it. Since your funeral'll cost you nothing, we'll take out a little at this end." "Funeral? Funeral? Please stop before you spin yet another fantasy!" She didn't stop of course. "You'll be alone at one of your selfish little lunches at Angela's or The Pirate and then FOOP! your face ends up in the crab casserole!" "Foop indeed! Why do your fantasies always extract my dignity? And not just your fantasies either." "They'll call me up. They know me. And I'll tell them oh it's only a spell. He's had them a dozen times." "I've had no spells. Ever! Zero." "Get you across the street. I'm little but wiry," she remarked to his incredulous face. "And as to spells I'm talking future tense, five years from now--or beginning tomorrow maybe." "And then...up to this apartment?"--his question indicating that it was a perfectly good place to live but... She tried to drag him off the sofa by way of a dress rehearsal. This effort, futule, left her winded. "No, uh, not up to here you absolute lump! Right to...water. Leave you there a minute. 'Now don't go away, y'hear?' Then up here to fetch hideous drapes. Then go get my sailboat--I know the winds and tides." "Then that's all you know." "I'll get you to a spot where you'll travel out to sea for sure." "That's enough!" he begged. "And then," she nodded, her eyes closed, "a few personal words...release dead-you and horror-drapes to God and the wide sea-world and eternity! Eternity!" "They'll think you murdered me. The authorities will." "I'll worry about that then." "Oh that's you all right!" he pronounced. "So come on! Let's motor! Have some fun. You need a..." and she managed to shove and punch him off the sofa and onto the parquet floor..."push!" There he sat as she draped the coat over his shoulders, resigned to the punishment she had, and would, inflict, enjoying the game of it too in his ironic way. "It all sounds expensive," he shrugged. "Leave that to me. I'll forge." And of course he protested all the way from the botique (where she bought a simple daytime dress and sensible heels and they stored her jeans and ragged sweat shirt in a Wynn-Dixie bag) to the waiting limo she had arranged that morning, and especially at the Grand Cafe, where she ordered lest he see the menu. And onto the pubcrawl all of the bright afternoon. She lost track of the spending but smiled in the darkening limo coming back, while feeling the irregular ridge,indicating that all the traveller's checks had been ripped out. As they both looked straight ahead she found herself talking quietly and slowly. "We live such deprived lives, you and I. We know all there is to know about each other and that's wonderful, as well as deadly at times...but a letting-go like this every few months or so... hey I need it too! I might go around most of the time looking like Tugboat Annie but..." He waited for her to finish the thought but she just stared at the blue flow of the early evening traffic. "I bore you, I know," he whispered. "I bore myself. But I could..." The plush upholstery all but swallowed his soft words. She took his hand. "Oh it's too late for any changing or promises. I love you period. When you bore me or when, like today, and though kicking and dragging, you help make life a little more exciting." "Before I die, yes?" The violet light deepened the wrinkles in his face, the tweed of his sportcoat. He figured his question had been humorous but she nodded severely. "That's right. Loosen you and your wallet up before it's too late." "Well I never thought I'd say it, but I had one hell of a good time! That one waiter was so snobby he didn't even want to take the whole tip!" he giggled. Wanted to save us from being branded noveau riches or something I guess. He pondered the red light they had stopped at. The limo ticked away, young people in shorts crossing in one chaotic wave. "But that's what I am all right," he continued. "Hey! Old rich, new rich, or poor. He got his tip. That was his only business with you. Take things a moment at a time." "Square basketball!" he laughed softly. "I could never come up with anything like that...too batty and too imaginative." It was still somewhat light over the bay when they returned. They sat separately as they often did, this time to watch a windsurfer outlined in weakest fire against the dark. He disappeared for a few seconds out in the chill vastness of water. Then his sail emerged much further out, looking almost like an inverted teaspoon, its bowl holding all of the remaining light. After a last glimmer, that, too, folded into blackness, and they could not hear the other's breathing in the small apartment, or, later, the weeping. _____________________________________________________________ Leftys Rhonda Crabshaw ranked as the last to confide in, and in the blue fluorescence shot off by the Pepsi machine, she looked even more threatening. That brow! thought Larkie, it's like a balcony. But he had to seize the moment, even to admitting his shyness "...so I just wanted to ask your advice, see, because, well the women are forever teasing me, and with all the overtime lately, the only ones I meet are on the force, but I'm reluctant to ask any of them out in case they really do think I'm some kind of nerd." Officer Crabshaw picked up a clipboard and seemed to be reading the solution to Larkie's dilemma off it, her forehead even more massive under the boyish haircut. "If they think you're a nerd, then it's their problem. Anyway, just don't bother with them--not enough time. You're twenty six or so, right, Larkie? Wasted too much of your life being nice. Somehow got to start accelerating. Ac-cel-er-a-TING!" she drummed the clipboard with a pencil, and then abruptly ceased, shrugging "I'll...give you the course. But no tell!"--drawing a rough finger over his lips, she laughed alarmingly. "On second thought, go ahead and tell if you want! I don't know what reputation I've got left and I simply don't care. What am I here for? To be a police officer, right? One of Miami's Finest! My personal life is personal." "Well I wouldn't ever," Larkie started reassuring her but leaked steam rapidly. "Uh, if...you decided to...uh, ultimately..." Then he became convinced that Rhonda was aping the familiar, distressing pattern: "Uh huh! You're...kidding me too, Rhonda, am I right?" "Nope. Never! Uh uh. No-oh-way. Nein. Nada. And negative in whatever language I'll have to take to qualify for my Master's in Criminal Justice--if I got that last word right. I don't kid; you'll find that out." Her gray eyes held twin, somber Larkies. "But I thought you were...locked up with some dentist." "And safe therefore? Shut up for now, Larkie!" She began smashing at the Pepsi machine with an open palm. "I thought before this that you were even too shy to talk, and now you're suddenly Officer Gabby. Anyway, that dentist knows gum disease but not how a woman feels." She rocked the machine, repeating the sentiment. "Tell me to stop, Larkie!" she finally breathed, hoarsely. "It's only a stupid device...and not a dentist. For one, it's better looking. And I've only lost half a dollar and not a significant portion of my only life." She bounced back from the rocking machine with a smile of vengeful glee. "Ooooops! Well I guess I'm on the rebound, hey? Do you know what that means?" "Uh. No." "It means, my bashful one, that I'll be twice as good to you and twice as intense." In the icy emanations from all the snack machines her eyes took on the color of mercury. "Well! Judging by your look you got more than you bargained for. Wanted sisterly advice and ended up with a real woman instead! Your lucky day!" ... Me and the poor dentist, sssss-scarred bodies by the wayside! I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul, he mouths the words of a country-western song. Actually my body!--I think that's what this is called, what's left of it. Larkie, in departmental trousers with powder blue Cuban shirt, sits on a bench at Dinner Key, half-watching the sailboats tie up. A phone rings in the marina office, recalling the one message on the machine blinking among scattered, unpacked boxes in his Coconut Grove apartment: "Come on back. There are things I can change. I've thought extensively about all of this." An old boat groans into its berth. "Everything aches," Larkie whispers, "body and soul hangover." Out on Biscayne Bay, a sail dazzles against humpbacked clouds which are dark and yet brilliantly outlined. The sail, too, goes black though its edge remains sunlit. Larkie senses fire scouring his very bones. Knees stuck straight out, a blond young man careens past him on a too-small bicycle. Suddenly he slips off backwards, lifting it above his head, wheels spinning. It's a folding model, and a quizzical attempt ensues to break it down to carrying size-- which act Larkie must tune out, a pitch for attention from this apparent incompetent in droopy white shorts. After a few minutes, the sound of the bike being thrown into a shrub nearly coincides with the young man thrusting himself backwards onto the bench, enormously sighing. "Keep it simple, right?" "If you can," Larkie shrugs. "I can. Believe me." "Then you're lucky I suppose." "Hope so. Say! You're in blue and I'm completely blue, and so why not be that way together?" "I wouldn't even know where to start with that kind of deranged thinking!" sneers Larkie. "In the first place, I do believe I come from another sexual direction." "Don't even try to start. With my deranged thinking, I mean. Don't you even try! In the meantime, while you're not trying, I'll just sit here like a little lamb-y-kin--very short and very funny." The blond young man turns his knees and elbows inward, so as to diminish his size. "And if I feel any more lost, why then I'll ask you for sexual directions." "You will huh? Did you get your highschool's award for chutzpa?" "Just...shyly...wait. Uh, at your discretion." "It's a free bench--unfortunately." Larkie shuts his eyes against the intruder. "I'm WAIT-ing!" the young man eventually sings. "Still here?" asks Larkie. "Then I'm to do something, huh? Is that it? Well, not bloody likely! I just came off an episode where I did things. Boy did I! May be better off not to even think for awhile." "I know what you mean, and I have no trouble at all in that pursuit--or lack of pursuit. So...here we sit, and when you sit, you can't chase anyone, can you? Or any idea either. I'm not moving. How about you?--outside of your shaking on account of those nasty ole memories I mean." He wiggles closer to Larkie, smiling broadly, as if primed to explode into teasing laughter. "Don't you mean it's my move? I get that strong implication. Perhaps it was the sly wink--the cheapest trick in this silly seduction game you're absolutely wasting on me. And don't crowd!"--Larkie inches away. "It is and it isn't your move. And, golly gee, if I winked I didn't even know it--maybe it's just squinting from that damn sun coming out! I like cloudy days--more mysterious. Easier on the wrinkles too. And, say, you yourself are not above a little teasing either, are you? In your, of course, capital-B, butch heterosexuality?" "It is and it isn't," Larkie repeats his benchmate's words. "Like everything else, I'd say. And butch, huh? I sometimes wonder if I was Butch or Bambi in my last...demolition derby, but why on earth am I telling...?" "Because I'm open and warm. Mhhhh!" the young man briefly embraces himself with enough force to rock the bench. "Hadn't noticed. Agressive is more to the point, I think." "Excuse me for saying so, but you think too much." "I do excuse you because you're right." "Oh I wouldn't want to make that a habit! Although a little wouldn't hurt in my case. My wrongness index is way way up there. Typical fate of the dumb blond with, ah hem, innocent blue eyes." "I'll buy the blue part," snaps Larkie. "Hmmmmm? I'm not sure that'll be enough. See me wondering? I'm WONDER-ing!"--again he breaks into song. "Oh? Still in need of guidance?" "You could say that. Or direction." "Good! Then how about you go that way?" Larkie points brusquely towards the Chart House Restaurant. "And pick up some lonely businessman on Master Card. You get a lobster and give your all, and I get to stay here and continue sulking--without interference, or songs and dances with and without bicycles. Listen! If it were another time and place--and dimension--and we were two different people of the opposite sex...?" "Nope. Can't just split like that. For one thing, I've probably been sent to be a whatchacallit, medium, to relieve all your tedious anxieties, and for another, we've known each other too long, wouldn't you say?" "No! What else can I say?" "Anything you please." "Then let me say that I...gave her my heart and she... ate the fuckin thing! Then started on my soul for dessert." "Past tense!" He smilingly claps his hands as if to dismiss Larkie's gloom. "Past tense!" "Again, yes and no." "Feeling ambivilant then?" "Not in your sense I'm not. Sorry." "Don't worry. I don't want anyone's soul. My own's enough of a mess. Good gosh if I could see it I'd drop dead!" The blond young man sinks his head to his chest and pretends to die, twitchingly. "Who wouldn't? And snap up! Don't want anyone to think I'm sitting here with a cokehead or someone. It's bad enough. But...why...am I enjoying myself with the likes of you?--at least somewhat. And telling you things too? It's crazy. I never tell anybody anything!--at least I won't ever again, not after confiding in...someone, and barely living to tell the tale. God just listen to me whine!" Larkie slaps his forehead. "So whine a little! Who are you not to? Which of these yachts is yours by the bye?" "No such luck as I know you know--always deflecting the real, aren't you? Anyway, I guess I'm just going crazy. I can only hope that I'm imagining you! Especially that...eye shadow or whatever it is. Just how weird are you, exactly?--not that it's any of my business." "I am an all-natural product! You can take me anywhere. And I'm sincere!" "You fake it well, saying what you think I want to hear: your strong suit I'd guess." "If you cut me will I not bleed? And did you know a snake has two penises?" "Oh? How does he throw out a line in Coconut Grove?" muses Larkie. "Excuse me Bridget, excuse me Bo." "Oh there are all kinds of ways! And I know the places where you see them all, believe me!" The young man nods quickly, continues nodding in a slower and slower rhythm, his bright hair rising and falling, then he stonily stops. "Don't you think you give things a tad too much drama?--if that's what that is. But, I'm...maybe one tenth of one percent intrigued about hearing of these alleged places where one sees everything--at least I think that's what this is." "Don't worry. Just an emotion, I have them all the time-- you can't always name them." "I bet you do have them all the time, to the exclusion of everything else." Larkie shakes his head while his benchmate shrugs. "What else is there? Don't answer. You know, you amuse me more than friends I've had for years? Mr Man-All-In-Blue whose answers are conventional but whose heart's a bit wilder, I'm guessing." He dons his most burnished-looking smile as cloud shadows race over them. "Well I'm glad to be good for something," Larkie chuckles, "such a wild heart in a square world is me! Give me a break, you...you sub-literary fraud!" The quick breeze rills their hair, swirling candy wrappers, rocking the sailboats in their berths. "It's called Leftys, the place I'd like to show you? No apostrophe!--ever hear the radio ad? On South Beach." Gee it's a lovely wind now, isn't it? Just...lifting everything, hey?" "Nothing. Nada." Larkie shakes his head. "Well, that's a start. What's apostrophe?" "God but you're a perservering...faggot!" "Oh please! I hate that word perservering. Oooops, watch it! Caught you really laughing. He's LAUGH-ing!" repeatedly sings the young man, ranging from bass to soprano. Hopping off the bench, he's soon down to one knee, golden in a shaft of sunlight. O De sun shine East De sun shine West O my dat sun He a terrible pest! "Not as bad as you! And Al Jolson is long long dead," giggles Larkie. We ALLLLLL'S gonna be! Dead you see! And that there's gotta be My only guarantee! "You'd try to manipulate God himself!" Larkie bursts. The young man rises to hitch up his shorts and studiously brush his knees. "As long as we all understand each other." _____________________________________________________________ The Bebop They were all whores anyway and the younger ones just starting. Thus Randy Midden didn't feel all that bad to be without a clinging female in the vast, snow-filled parking lot of the shopping center, crunching towards the one-week old blue Dodge Aries he had parked far out from harm's way, just inside a circle of weak yellow-white light. "It's a curious--of the light. Osity. Cure-osity. Curiosity," he explained to no one in regards to the narrowness of the car he approached head on, experiencing a wave of despair as he imagined trying to explain such a phenomenon to the girls he left behind him at the Bebop Cafe. "Bends rays, something... forget it." But even in his distrust of women's general intelligence, Randy tried another illustration: "See? Looks like color of puddles, car does, like puddle stood up." It seemed at that freezing moment the most hilarious image ever created and Randy hugged himself and giggled, puffs of dark vapor surrounding his scarlet face. The pickup with the huge knobby wheels and enormous mirror-finish bumper was gone from atop the snowbank beside his space. It would have been pointed up past the moon, so bright and high now, but too low for the young man trying to pose next to that truck earlier, his leather jacket ballooning and his white scarf whipping as his boots slid sideways--moon rising behind his tremulous underbelly. Idiot, recalls Randy, as a snowy wind slams into him. "Idiot!" Randy Midden had pronounced earlier as his hand reached for the cold brass handle of the door to the Bebop Cafe. Despite his efforts to remain stock still, Pepper Stutzman, the now twice-remembered idiot, had slid entirely down the snowbank and into the blue Aries as Randy Midden was strolling to the Bebop. Pepper Stutzman spat on the car then, and pronounced "Wimp Bucket!" And, having nothing else to do, he followed the wimp who owned it into the Bebop Cafe where he met Traction, another member of the Four-Wheelers. "Stutz-my-man, this place sucks," Traction told him. Traction sported a glass eye from a hot-rodding accident and Pepper always stared at that eye as if not to do so was rejecting a challenge. Traction nodded towards Randy Midden who was already talking down to two blonde sisters seated on the floor amid rocking dancers. "Talker," sniffed Pepper Stutzman. "You gotta be talker. Like that asshole. "We don't like talkers," affirmed Traction. "We don't deal with no lines of shit," Pepper Stutzman informed him over the throttling bass of the huge speaker they sunk next to on the apron of the empty stage, "'cause what we say we do, and what we want we take." "Amen, Stutz-Bear." Traction pointed to the S T U D stencilled on his own t-shirt. For the next two hours the young men sipped Old Milwaukee from resonating styrofoam cups, and watched the verbal and dance techniques of Randy Midden. Finally Traction suggested "Let's take him out and fuck him up the ass," his good eye blinking violently. "Not classy enough," came the light, shy, laugh from Pepper Stutzman as a record changed with a clunk. "Then what? Stutz-My-Man, our leader!" "I'm, whatchacallit, thinking." While incomprehensible punk spewed forth from the speaker next to them, Traction thought a moment about what Pepper had just said. Finally he blurted "I can't stand this fuckin place no more. I gotta move, Amigo." He stood up and a dancing couple avoided him drastically. "Go fuckin home then, Traction." "No-o-way!" "That's an order. I'll call you and the others when I decided." "I haven't got all fuckin night and besides, when I get there the ole lady'll whine about my never staying home." "I gotta piss, man. Man where you piss?" a greenish youth in a pink tomahawk haircut inquired of Pepper Stutzman. Pepper threw his arm at the hundred dancers just before a wave of them engulfed the youth whose pink hair bobbed in their midst. "Anywhere, man. Like...anywhere," he shrugged. "I aint fuckin kidding!" the youth told someone as Pepper turned back to sneer at Traction "We threw out a lot of shit about the regulations in our constitution to let married assholes join." Pepper's clear eyes drilled into Traction's glass one. "We can change that shit you know. Now give her a quick bang and stay by the phone." "That an order too, Stuntman?" "Engage. And give her one for the club." Engage meant put your vehicle in four-wheel drive, and therefore, get with it, or sometimes, in a milder tone: okay, right. "I have to give her the gift, then. I'm loyal to the club." "All there is that's worth it. And don't forget it! Brothers before bitches." Pepper punched him on a bare arm in a grazing way. "Now get your coat." "I don't wear no coat. Hey! I'm a Four-Wheeler!" Randy Midden was attempting to grope a fat, drunken girl in the forest of coatracks adjoing the wall holding the telephone when Pepper Stutzman finally made his call to Traction, who knew to call the others. "Engage?" Pepper signed off. "Engage engage!" Traction indicated that nothing could go wrong. It didn't. Under Pepper Stutzman's direction the high knobby-tired pickups formed a circle with the blue automobile in the center; then after his scarf and Hitler salute shot through his glistening truck's open window along with the shrieking "Engage!" the trucks fishtailed in furious white smoke. A few seconds later, throwing snow straight back they ploughed into that Aries with the simultaneous precision of the club's Wimpmobile Mash. After impact they careened off in different directions, later to convene near the opposite end of the shopping center at SEAR'S AUTOMOTIVE EMPLOYEE PARKING, since Pepper knew of a Camaro with a bottle of Mad Dog under the front seat. He toasted them all with blood trickling down his hand because he had to smash the window when Traction, t-shirt stiff with icy sweat, couldn't pick the frozen lock. "Better get that hand looked at, Commander," the blue-armed Traction shook. "Man it's fuckin nothing!" admonished Pepper Stutzman. _____________________________________________________________ When Everything Is Funny On the subway with a playful mind and should he ask? Oh why not? It's innocent. She goes ballistic, hair spiking, face a twisting horrorshow. He couldn't have guessed she was insane; had picked her, in fact, as the most normal one, her primness. "Sorry, but it's really no big deal!"--moving further away. Rumor sweeps; he speeds. -grabbed that woman by the tit -hadda be worse than that, just look at her! -'tween her legs, said filthy, disgusting things! What are you doing? What kind of pig are you?-- pummeller, black, intervening. I'm sick to death of us getting blamed for this kind of shit all the time. -to death -to death -to death (with each blow) Lilla Darra-Rhoden had just an hour ago flung her swarthy male instructor all over the mat while shrieking empowerment mottos...but then Costanza Wong had hissed -Grab and twist my testicles with both hands! -Huh, I knew it! Why YOU'RE even afraid to SAY testicles! -Might as well society keep giving YOU wall job. (Sneer.) Here's the wall job for YOU! And I'M the wall, pervert, she does say now, karate chopping. The pummelling black and she nod, acknowledging no time for proper introductions. Please. There's some mistake. All I really said to her was... Reggie the transvestite is prompted to join the dialog (sold Mary Kay Cosmetics): -Bash a gay and now you pay! But it was a lady and I didn't touch her and she misunderstood or something. That's all. Stop! Please! All of you. Terrible misunderstanding. Now listen! Please just listen to me! -bash a gay becomes gash a bay in latter services -also ball job -seth (sick to death) Giddy within such linguistic faults, this three, but blows never slacken. -Hey. Wait a little minute. Don't kill him. ...soft voice impossible to attribute gender to WHY NOT? WHY NOT KILL HIM? WHY NOT KEEP HIM FROM HUMILIATING OTHER WOMEN? OR men even! this new person snaps, squeezing a fist through the fury. But do let's hurry. I gotta get off next stop. I'm a rabbi and taking grad work. -rimless spectacles--kind eyes, gray Please. You. Man of God! -Hey! and don't I get sick of that old tune! That lady was crazy. I said almost nothing! -Yeah! Right! (chorus) Whereupon, they hammer in silence. (His coverup becoming flaccid.) -mufflyness when clothing stuck -more melony, flesh These sounds prove funny too. Echo. Overlap. -a good time -for citizens -best, solidarity, racial and sexual -like the many advertisements around them -on the subway, NYC _____________________________________________________________ The Surprise _Man_ What the bleedin' hell! _Cyclist_ Oh I'm so sorry! _Man_ Minding our own business in a quiet cemetary and over the wall some IDIOT throws a bicyle!--I don't believe it. _Woman_ That's what we were doing all right. _Cyclist_ Boys chasing me. Said they kill me! Said the rock concert was cancelled at the school, and for some reason I was going to pay for it. _Boy_ I can still see the light from that bike, faggot, if you think you're hiding or something!...well look at this scene! Like something from out of art class or something. _Man_ I hope you can run, wiseass. Boy I know YOU can't, fatass! _Man_ GRRRRRRRR! ... _Cyclist_ Uh, cold? _Woman_ No. _Cyclist_ My jacket? _Woman_ It's okay _Cyclist_ Sorry. I mean...my intru...uh, crit- critical moment. _Woman_ There are critical moments and there are critical moments. _Cyclist_ He he won't run far, I mean, uh, like he is _Woman_ Yeah he will. You don't know him. _Cyclist_ I'll stay here till he gets back _Woman_ No need. _Cyclist_ All kinds of weirdos around. _Woman_ No argument there. _Cyclist_ Are you sure...jacket? _Woman_ No. I like the way I look and feel. Breeze on me you know? You would too, if you looked at me. _Cyclist_ Excuse me? _Woman_ We were only having sex. No big deal. Ooops, I do hear him coming back. I suggest you get out of here. He can be crazy--you heard him growl. _Cyclist_ If you think I should. _Woman_ Give me a call. Delky. I work at this church here. I know it's a funny way to meet, but I like biking too. _____________________________________________________________ The Secret Word Driven by insults to play touch football with them, Buzz hoped Cecily would come to the field anyway. "You're too sweet on her! Be with the fellows sometimes! Why she's making you into a regular sweetie-boy!" elbowed Josker Albright as they walked back to their side of the ball after a chaotic play, the other team jeering. The shirtless Buzz halted a moment to squint, his face green from the brilliance off the grass. He was trying to find her in the bleachers, and those jeers intensified now, with his name being hooted by players from both sides. Some began squealing Cec-i-LEEEEEEE! When Josker flipped the ball to him after another botched play, he added, winking, "Give her something to think about, Buzz, old man!" The something to think about proved to be the uncoordinated Roger Reddington de Graf, who stopped by 16 Songbird Lane with orange mums, jerking alongside them in blinding light as the slim Cecily flung open the white doors. Buzz had to start Lehigh University that next week; Roger stayed in Stroudsburg to help his father sell Fords. Unknown to Buzz, he devoted the rest of his time to Cecily. Unknown to Cecily, Buzz threw himself at beer drinking and those girls of Bethlehem who shared that activity--often cleaning him up afterwards. On the verge of flunking out two months into the semester, he began sending a series of cards to Cecily, usually showing couples in fog, either among ancient forests, or on beaches crowded with driftwood. The verses of these cards his roommate, nicknamed Drunk, labeled muzz-fuzz-haiku-y-looie. moon on the pond and then..... a stone..... and many moons my footprints yours..... two paths..... one, to..........eternity............... a heartbeat a shudder a silence of flowers Buzz chose not just these artistic expressions, but others of more pedestrian strain. Thinking of You... Just a note to say You're one who's not forgot. Sorry there's been some delay 'cause I care for you a lot! I know I'm not clever. That much I have to say. But a true friend is forever, For this and every day! Towards the end of first semester, after a brutally dry period of hitting the books, Buzz catapulted back to the local girls. He had spent Thanksgiving break at Drunk's parents' house in Scranton, and for Christmas vacation had joined his own parents at an aunt's retirement village near St Augustine--zero chances to see Cecily. No more cards were dispatched until Valentine's Day, when for some reason he sent a comic one in the shape of a gold key. Hey why not open that trunk? AND LET MY HEART OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!! A little like a shellshock victim clamping onto an obscure faith, and after he and three town girls--an intense week each--had gone through each other, Buzz finally got around to writing Cecily his one heartfelt, if circuitous, note: somehow begging that she reform him while he, presumably, awakened her sexually. It had been immediately, too, after religion had swept in, prompted by a revival meeting in Bethlehem which Dean of Men Brendenhof had strongly recommended to him. Buzz had been saved and afterwards met over hot cider and cinnamon donuts the one local girl, Gladys Alderfelder, who knew she could tame him. "I told my mother about you," she informed Buzz a few days later, "and she's says you're oversexed and should see a doctor, that young men can ruin themselves and never have a good career. You'll never be a good engineer, Buzz, 'cause that's all you think about." That one sincere note to Cecily had arrived after her elopement with Roger Reddington de Graf, and she sent it back with all the cards and a tissuey note saying Dear Dear Buzz, the reasons one marries can't just be that one and that one alone. She had written from her new home on the lake, full of the antiques Roger's mother had given the couple. After college, Buzz worked as a designer and model maker for The Foothills Toy Company, owned, strangely enough, by the Pocono Mountain area's most flagrant Socialist, Bret Hansen, who became very fond of the apolitical Buzz. He retained the bundle of cards Cecily had sent back and eventually rubber-banded it when the lavender ribbons disintegrated. His upfront wife, Evy, whom he had met at a toy industry convention in Harrisburg, had already proclaimed, and more than once, "Your past aint my business and vice versa--if you're one of them gets jealous notions." Buzz kept the cards and Cecily's note in a locked desk drawer, and actually did get upset thinking of what Evy may have been hiding, making a fruitless search one night when she was at her canasta group. After ten years or so, Roger Reddington De Graf and Cecily bought a one-third interest in the toy company, on the very day Buzz was hospitalized with a hernia after lifting the clay model of Monstro-Robot. Cecily and Roger, upon reading of his hospital stay in THE POCONO MESSENGER, sent him a card of a cartoon man, very bony, swathed in bandages and on crutches, surrounded by broken machinery and scrawny dogs. I might be too old to cut the mustard seein' all this rout, but I'm still full of beans and sauerkraut! He visualized her at sixteen by the moonlit lake, and repeated quietly from his hospital bed, "How many moons? O how many moons?" Nurse Lucille Nitti overheard. "Yeah and lots of water under the dam too, huh, Honey? You do b.m. yet, Honey?" "I will inform you," he pronounce firmly. "I like the sound of that, Honey!" she fluffed the pillow around his rigid head. The years, and the moons, flew and the couples had each a late child, Gwen for Buzz and Evy, and Roger Jr. for Roger and Cecily. Both Dads were thirty-three. The children went to different schools and ultimately attended the University of Pennsylvania, but never met, either there or in Stroudsburg. On Buzz's fiftieth birthday old man Hansen suffered a fatal heart attack, and diehard Socialists from all over the country attended the funeral. He made provision in his will for Buzz which the New York lawyer had to explain several times: "You must immediately retire, and then you receive a generous monthly stipend for the rest of your life." As Buzz shook his gray head, the lawyer explained further that Hansen felt that his heirs and the other owners might, he quoted him, "sell out to sharpies. And the first thing they do in the land of the brave is to raid the pension fund." "That sure sounds like him," offered the shaking Buzz. "Some West Germans did just that to A&P Store employees. We don't have enough thieves, we have to import them," the lawyer shrugged, a grim young man dressed Wall Street save for a blood- red cravat. Had Buzz kept a diary the sole entry for the seventh year after retirement might have read: Roger takes over company completely and milks it, sells most of the patents to the Japanese. The one for the eighth year would read My Evy dies shoveling snow. After Evy's death he sold the house and contents at auction and went to Florida to live in Coral Gables near his daughter, Gwen, who taught ballet at The University of Miami. That very year they cut the dancing program, so she's off to Tulane with her Latin lover Carlos, who she claims has only been helping her with the electric in her Coconut Grove studio. (He did, in fact, show wiring plans to Buzz who told him "You don't have to draw me a diagram.") After they leave, it proves cheaper living in Miami Beach but the angry faces of many of the other retired people irritate Buzz. Sweetness, the black counterboy at Wolfy's consoles "They're all New Yorkers and they grew up snapping at each other about business. Only now they got tans. And no business. Don't take it serous. People are the same under all the styles." Roger dies, and THE POCONO MESSENGER featuring the front page obituary touting that civic leader also contains an article about senior citizens sharing houses. Buzz finally moves back to Stroudsburg to a shared house owned by a Mrs Lahr, where he is greatly appreciated, being, among other thing, Friday's cook. One of the sharers, Miss Meniffee proclaims "I always look forward to Friday!" It's nice for her to say, but for some reason things begin slipping--anybody can do Sloppy Joes and Fritos admits Buzz to himself. Maybe I'm getting too old to cut the mustard--which brings back the silly card Roger and Cecily had sent him so many years ago. In the back of his mind he has thought of contacting Cecily after a decent interval. Such a time has long passed when he sends a birthday card on a whim. He had walked to the mall and was out of breath reaching The Little Card Shoppe, a franchise operation in the throes of a nationwide promotion, and therefore full of metallic balloons which moved about in the air currents and kept bumping him. "May I help you?" inquired a gum-chewing young woman in very elevated, sharply clicking heels. Her badge read Merrie, asst mgr. "Yeah, stop stocking all these gushy cards. And I'm coming in here with a pin next time!" She, amused, led him noisily through the balloons to a spin rack labeled TASTEFUL CONTEMPORARIES. He eventually chose a card featuring a black and white photo of a blind man with a cane who sported, though, huge orange sunglasses. "Hey! Long time no see I gotta say..." read the caption snaking from his mouth, and then inside the card, a platinum blond in a mink cape and nothing else kicked up her orange heels, a bottle dangling from one hand and a down-turned champagne glass in the other. but feel free to have yourself one HELL of a birthday! She was a kind of pink soft-sculpture of amazingly elastic flesh. The day he mails the card one crocus breaks through ice on the tiny lawn of the post office. A week later a note comes back signed by Jacqueline Naismith, MSW. We are honored to say that Cecily is a guest here at Bide a Bit now. She asked me to report that she'd sure love a visit!!!!!!!!! He goes to see her and is confronted by a muttering, prematurely old woman in a wheelchair in front of a bright window, wisps of pale hair brilliantly vibrating, her flesh pink and purple, hands spasmodic, jumpy. Before he can speak she warns of the Pennington boys as he is holding her icy hands down. They had been stealing, he gathers, riotously digging up bulbs too, and going wild on the garden swing. Actually he had walked by that big house on the lake earlier, only to see a comic wrought iron sign featuring two doctors over a mound-like patient and the legend THE GYNECOLOGISTS SPEISENGLASS. Cecily stops talking and stares at Buzz for many moments, her eyes bluer, and younger, than he can remember. "Are you Roger?" "Roger is, was you husband. I'm your old friend, Buzz." Fat Roger Jr enters and Buzz drops her hands. Roger wears a too- tight blazer with a FORD logo, open, his shirt beginning to spill out the front like laundry from a truck. "I'm Buzz." Buzz extends his hand. "Isn't everybody?" counters Roger Jr who storms into a monolog about not being able to depend on his new service manager. "Now don't let her pull that forgetfulness crap on you either," he suddenly shouts from nowhere. "These guerilla fighters of the Altzheimers Brigade aren't above a little manipulation." "She's been just fine," assures Buzz. "Say, you worked for the toy company, didn't you? I saw you in some old photographs in the mess of my father's estate. That was one lulu of a communist used to own it, wasn't he? So you, especially, shouldn't be so rough on my Dad. He was fine until..." and Roger Jr nods in the direction of silently chewing Cecily. "Huh! She eating air again?" "I never was rough on your Dad or easy on him or anything else," Buzz asserts. "I retired before..." and Roger Jr stares at him as if he's the one with Altzheimers. "Anyway, how's the business?" Buzz tries. "Which one? Oh, toy company? We sold to Koreans last year and they moved it lock stock and barrel to Jamaica would you believe? They just make the one thing now, Destructo World you probably seen on TV--that flies apart when you say the secret word? Complete junk, I mean complete! And they can't make enough of them." At that moment the sunlight amplifies frail Cecily and they both look at her. She drools but nonetheless quickens enough to pop: "Say the secret word and win ten dollars! It's something you hear every day." Roger whispers "Now she's getting religious or something!" But Buzz tells him she had been alluding to a TV quiz show with Groucho Marx. "If you said the secret word a rubber duck dropped down with a Groucho moustache and cigar." "Yeah, well that's all too intellectual for me. I like sports." (And Buzz had thought all along that Groucho was mean until he softened with one contestant, a confused man, and was completely kind--Oh well that's one on me he remembers telling his wife. In fairness to her, Evy was in the depths of her PMS and she snapped "Grow up Buzz!") But he remains hurt, even now in this sunny room of the convalescent hospital. In fantasy Groucho says "Buzz, I would never make fun of you." "Our toys were creative," he tells Groucho...and the alarmingly real Roger Jr. "Yeah well, spare me that part of any business. I mean, spare me! There's nothing but the bottom line. Forget that and you're ready for a place like this. These cunt doctors bought the house? They wanted a rakeoff 'cause they would preserve it and all that good shit! Yeah! Sure!" Buzz staggers a bit, ashamed he had abstracted for so long, and gotten a bit dithery himself. Cecily emits a squeal as Roger Jr hammers on, his shirt entirely out of the front of his pants: "Bottom line's the bottom line the bottom line--didn't somebody say that? Well, it's about a rose or daisy or some such shit but it's the same thing." Now Cecily tries talking but can't, her head nodding vigorously and her hands out of control. Some hairs vibrate on her shiny chin and her son blurts "We ought to have Gillete in here sponsoring this show!" Finally she grates out secret and starts on word. When she says love, Phyllis Heller, blocky LPN, materializes to spin her chair around. "She talking dirty again? Are you, Miriam? Ooops. Not Miriam! Sorry about that! Miriam got a mouth like a longshoreman!" But Roger Jr. waves his hand before she can spin Cecily back around to face them again. "It's okay," he tells her. "These Altzheimers pretty much all look the same. Like the Japanese cars my competition sells. Anyway, we're through. Stick her on the sundeck." Back in his room, Buzz, shaking, examines the bundle of cards again. The reasons we marry can't just be that one and that one alone the faded brown ink still maintains. Two paths he reads from a card, two paths, and Buzz sees Cecily, in white, walking by the lake and murmuring over and over The reasons we marry can't just be that one and that one alone, and he grows sick with remembered moonlight and cries softly into the dusk seeping into his room through the half-opened door. "The secret word...is love" he whispers. Mrs Lahr interrupts. "Hey! I'll agree to anything, but let there be light! I'm not that cheap that I won't treat you to a little light from time to time." She flicks on a switch and spots the bundle of cards in his hand: "Getting rid of the evidence, hey? Don't mind me. Nosy! I know you kept them all locked up, probably because they were so naughty!" Buzz suddenly visualizes the inside of his small Sanyo cube refrigerator, sees frosting aglint in the dark. He pushes the cards aside and rises to fetch the Entemen's Ring Danish. In no time he is frisking to the coffee percolator also, dragging a sleeve over his face to wipe a remaining tear or two, an action quietly noted by Mrs Lahr. "Is this the new light kind?" she inquires about the pastry. "No calories at all," winks Buzz, "not a one." His hand is trembling as he cuts, or rather hacks at it, with a butter knife. "I know you'd never lie to me," she laughs. He sits in his Lazy Boy recliner and she on a desk chair by the window as they eat and drink, a dark magnolia tree looming in back of her squat profile. After she places her plate and cup and saucer in his small sink he ventures, "Why go all the way back to your chair? Plenty of room here." While bouncing Mrs Lahr on his knee, insofar as he can, a prelude to tugging her back further into the recliner, he will intone with a straight face, "I bet you've never done this before." And her eyes will assume a glee which contrasts to her usual rosy calm. "Never!" Pulling off fragments of his remaining Danish to feed him, almost singing: "Let's just do the best we can, Buzz. That's all we can do." _____________________________________________________________ IMAGE AND FLAME _____________________________________________________________ The Present "Vot a lucky boy! The birthday boy!" "You never mind who's a lucky boy or who's not a lucky boy!" his grandfather informed the old man. He wondered how this tattered bum even knew about his birthday. Then his grandfather announced: "This is who Gramps told you about! Your present!" immediately beating the other man around the head and shoulders. "You too!" he screamed. "Smack him good!" The boy whaled away, but only could reach midway up the black overcoat, which shredded and unbuttoned as he pounded. He scraped across a greenish brass beltbuckle and quit, but the grandfather persisted until out of breath, then stuck a ten dollar bill in the beaten old man's overcoat pocket. With the boy watching from the window, the old man staggered down the porch stairs, pausing at the blinding sidewalk to extract the money. The pocket came out with it, disintegrating into a purple dust as the old man squinted. Meanwhile the chortling and puffing Gramps was dancing, reliving in exaggerated form some of his punches. "Grandfather, will there always be Nazis?" "Yes!" he windmilled, scarlet, "and always us here to bop them good!" Gramps stopped to place a bony hand on his shoulder. "But look," he panted, noticing the few dots of blood on the boy's frail knuckles, "let's patch that up--you know your father and mother." _____________________________________________________________ Little Candles "It's simple. It's selfish. You help others and it makes you feel good. You do it for yourself really," shrugged Rebecca, a diminutive redhead pouring coffee into a mug. "Hey, I don't catapult out of here to a bar every Friday now." The lanky Gerry bit her lip. "Well I'm afraid to miss my Aerobics. It's Jeannette the instructor. She whines if somebody doesn't show up. Holy God when I think of it, everybody's a terrorist in my life!" She twisted the string around her tea bag to coax a few more drops into the styrofoam cup. They dented her reflected face in the middle of luxuriant chestnut hair. "I do their will!"--she looked up from the tea at Rebecca--"to prevent emotional catastrophe! My...mother comes to mind. Her will be done or watch it! So, anyway, at any rate, after Aerobics and before Trevor I can give up an hour or two. So I will come--but I won't like it. My life is busy enough, cowardly though it be." They sat side by side now, atop a cluttered desk. "What's Trevor like?" asked Rebecca. "You have thirty seconds before my boss arrives. He's young and tries to make sure breaks are precisely timed." Gerry couldn't reply at first, but then sputtered "He...owns things. Every time I see him he owns some more. Always the best quality and something that does...more somehow. I have a little CD player but he has one where five or so discs sit on a sort of round thing, turntable"--Gerry put down her tea and stirred a hand in the overheated air as copy machines shuffle-thumped in the room behind them--"and ...this turntable clicks around or something depending on how you clap your hands." She clapped her long hands in wonderment. "Does that sound right?" "Yeah, but he can't be that much of an asshole," answered Rebecca, staring ahead. "Well he's nice from what I can tell. I've never been out with him before but he's been in my company a few times--double dates or just a gang of the girls meeting him and some guys." "I don't want any more of that." Rebecca was shaking her head, the thin red hair vibrant in harsh florescent light. "I'm running out of time." "To get married?" "To get anything. I can't do any more of those Gulags." "That desperate?" laughed Gerry. They had been looking out the window at gray rain-blackened trees being shaken for the last of their foliage--but turned to each other now. "I guess I've read all the wrong magazines and books--self-help, new-wave, you name it." Rebecca affected a visionary face. "Hey! If they'd said to smear my tits with lard and watch the men pant around, I'd do it. Well I wouldn't now. I don't do anything anymore. I don't have to. I help people who piss their pants, those far, far less-than-zeros to the Trevors of the world. And you know? It's the best thing I've ever done: I can be myself and nobody cares what I wear." Rebecca smoothed down her miniskirt. "You always look nice, so petite." Gerry said. "Whereas I sort of lumber." "Uh uh. It's okay for you to be yourself in any situation because you're tall and pretty. Well...beautiful it pains me to say. Whereas! Well let's face it, I'm a halfpint and...well what my mother's girlfriends call plain. Oh I do have this natural mole and thoughtful dimples which drill in when I'm quizzical and can't fuckin decide anything." She pushed a short finger into her cheek. "Then all of life goes by, smiling through its asshole and carrying a whole bushel of self-help books." Gerry laughed lightly as Rebecca went on to demonstrate the dimples. "I fake them really, only piquant factor I got going, by sort of s-ucking in my cheeks like this, see? Chipmunk style. I can become dangerously cute! Any men around? Hate to waste this." "Shouldn't I gather some?" Gerry flicked her chestnut hair in the direction of the inner offices. "With you here it's a wonder they're all not sucking around already," Rebecca said, bending her bare knees inward as if to make herself smaller. "They...won't get too religious on us and the unfortunates at this soup kitchen or whatever it's called, will they?" Gerry inquired, sliding forward to the edge of the desk. "Don't worry. Hell, I was born Catholic but don't believe a thing they say. Anyway, you'll like Sister Lucy. She's the one I promised her I'd bring along another warm body tonight--if you can understand the alleged English of that. And believe it or not she likes a raunchy story if you can get her to sit still and listen. Actually she reminds me of my father in that way. He was a church organist who carried a portable one around with him--a lay church organist. After he finally left, Mom took to watching this show The Christophers, where they said it's better to light one candle than to curse the darkness, you know? So that's what I do--the darkness is the area without a boyfriend." "Well I'm in darkness and a Presbyterian to boot." Gerry drained her tea with exaggeration. "It's okay, the bums won't care. Mother became a Baptist. They deal with drunks better--she's also a drunk. The Baptists got her into a home with bible-beating souses destroying each others' ears. Thus have they made of their hell a paradise!" Gerry, still perched on the very edge of the desk, pondered that comment with a wry smile and crossed her long legs, a balancing trick considering her position. Next to her, little Rebecca crossed hers a short beat afterwards--as if they formed a kind of show business act. When Gerry got to the shelter's dining room that early evening, a regal if frail black man appeared in his underwear and as quickly exited when Rebecca came out from the kitchen, her red hair frazzled in the middle of a cloud of steam. "Hi! That was Mr Chostermill-- Loony Tunes and Merrie Melodies." She whirled a small hand around her head. Gerry waved her own trembling arm to indicate the scruffy room full of long tables covered in oil cloth. "Not, uh, quite the office." "Hey Mr Chostermill is at least interesting, whereas all the people around us in that office are vapid bores. Even in my old place, deadly though it was, I at least had a hot affair," Rebecca whispered, placing a hand on Gerry's shoulder and staring up into her eyes with mock gravity. "You never told me." Gerry, too, was whispering, but then Rebecca spoke out in a quite audible voice as individual men sidled in and sat at the tables. "Yeah it was with Paper Cups, that's what I called him. Life and death struggles about paper cups! He was honcho for that stupid part of the entire stupid operation. Married man would you believe?" Rebecca attempted to arrange her steamed hair with her hands. "Perhaps I'm expiating that part of it with this charity-- so-called." Her qualifier cued a bag lady to stagger in from the street and plop herself and accessories down in the middle of the floor. "Anyway he had to choose finally between the wife and me and paper cups. You know what he decided, and we both threw him out therefore. And then the company threw him out too. Even paper cups betrayed him. We meet for lunch sometimes, wife and me--always in a fancy restaurant where we go dutch, appropriately enough, and don't run the risk of any paper cups." The bag lady snored. "That...was miraculously fast," remarked Gerry, her profusion of hair and her slimness noted even by the half-aware bums waiting at their tables. "Just Madame. Madame Marta!" Rebecca yelled abruptly. Madame's eyelids shot up in a nest of several coat sweaters. "Germans took it, Russians took it," she sobbed. Mr Chostermill re-entered, still in his underwear. "Her home," he explained. "That Europe is the god-awfulest place," he confided to Gerry. "Even worse than this." Sister Lucy materialized from the kitchen, tiny and darkeyed, wearing a sort of army shirt over her habit, wiping her reddened hands on an apron. "I don't think we need your help on this one, Mr Chostermill," she informed him, but he didn't hear her, or anything, for he had lapsed into a wall-eyed gaze. Introductions were made and Sister Lucy asked Rebecca to deal with Madame Marta, and Gerry to help Mr Chostermill find some clothes. "He...looks dead." Gerry gasped. It was as if a fine gray net had descended on ebony Mr Chostermill. "Just a few million more brain cells checking out," Rebecca was chuckling. "He'll snap to." He did and they're soon at his locker in a dank dormitory room. The inside of the door holds a pinup of Betty Grable in bathing suit and heels, standing by a silvery airplane inclined towards deepest blue sky. Her head is twisted round to glance over a pink and creamy shoulder, under which her rear resembles a plump inverted heart of salmon red. Gerry spies one pair of trousers and one shirt hanging in the locker, both crisp and clean in steel-gray light. "Let's see-eeeeee now," Mr Chostermill ponders what to wear. Choice generally presents itself along a wider front to Trevor Tressor. He has of course many more than one pair of trousers and one shirt, but just one creamy Alfa Romeo, and, alas, one Macintosh Computer sans color. At the restaurant he dwells on this particular lack until Gerry worms in her experience with Mr Chostermill, growing uncharacteristically excited when speaking too of Rebecca and Sister Lucy and Madame Marta and the crushed men who came in to eat. "I don't know what I was thinking of when I bought it!" Trevor must explain when she stops to breathe. He is tall, nearly cadaverous, and the immense sockets holding his dishwater eyes darken in defeat. "What's the problem? You want color, you get color!" she very nearly shouts at him. He peers at her with melancholy, stung by her insensitivity to his misstep in consumption. It seems at this point that all eyes in the Turkish restaurant rest on them, but as she lifts a sesame cracker dipped in hummus to her mouth she quickly fears that the crowded room is attentive only because her hands smell vaguely of urine, and she visualizes her last task at the shelter, sorting laundry with Sister Lucy. She had rushed to wash them in her own bathroom, before the punctual Trevor came, but a perfumed liquid soap called SO-OHHH SUBTLE! proved not up to life that particular day. The restaurant is a converted gas station and the metal locker in the Ladies' Room fortunately proves to be not merely a prop, still containing the gritty powdered soap of the mechanic. She likes the pain of washing with it while making faces in mirror imitating her instructor Jeanette, the aeroic whiner, and Trevor. "PRINcess of Sweat!" she announces finally, "you must get to meet the...Hamlet of the Consumer Culture!" While putting back the box of soap and slamming the metal door she sighs "Oh gee Mr Chostermill I want your choices! Marry me, sexy Chostermill! I'll get my own shirt and pants and throw everything else away! All the shit I've surrounded myself with, so I can keep working to buy more of it. SO-OHHH SUBTLE my ass! Made, created especially for advertising. No wonder it's lousy--like everything else in this country. Insane!" But she's feeling guilty about making fun of Trevor since he seems decent enough. "Trev," she whispers, turning away from the locker, "there's got to be more to you, but for some reason I'm just not seeing it because that sexy, wily old Chostermill is seizing my attention with his dying brain! Old, dark hypnotist!" Gerry returns to sit opposite an enormously fat, caramel-colored man studying the tall menu. She babbles "I know it 's the last thing you want to hear, Trev, but I've got to talk more about what I did today. It was just a couple of hours or so but..." She looks up a few minutes later, breathless, expecting to see Trevor's bored, heavy- lidded eyes. Instead the moon-faced man with gold-rimmed glasses explains "You must forgive me for letting you go on. I lost my wife recently and you're so like her in your fresh loveliness and vitality and enthusiasm--I feel uplifted, honest to God! I came here just wanting to stuff my face and get a little drunk." She mutters something she instantly forgets, and there's suddenly Trevor to escort her back to their table, like a patient who had wandered away from the ward. He, of course, knows what she needs, and it surely isn't helping negroes in slums or restaurants; she, of course, wants to get out of there fast, so he stuffs a breadstick in his mouth. Something quickens in her during the ride to her apartment, the only sound the spin of the wet tires, and her lungs all but burst while bolting from his car after she had bit off "Thank you and I'm really sorry for the--" Her hair flies back red and black in the faint, dappled light of a streetlamp in the midst of lurching, skeletal trees. Sister Lucy answers on the first ring and Gerry unleashes a ten-minute flurry ending with "Do you have to be a Catholic? I must be going crazy! But what I do in that office is so awful and so useless. Oh I am such a little asskisser! Where is my life? I mean I think it's somewhere but I can't find it! Oh I know this all sounds addled and schoolgirlish to you! But I just had to, was compelled to--" She goes on a few moments more before Sister Lucy yells "Whoa there! I'm sure as hell not Mother Teresa and neither are you. Well I shouldn't say that about you. We don't know about you yet." Gerry begins sobbing and then gasps "Well I better hang up...I'm sor--" "Hold on, Woman! I didn't say we couldn't talk about other things. There are a lot of them, no? Life isn't just the shelter thank the Lord! Say anything. You just want to talk is all. Don't worry, I've felt that way. We all have." Hours later she removes the soaking receiver from her ear, hardly remembering anything she had said, only that she had to promise Sister Lucy not to come to the shelter until a week elapses. "Wired as you are tonight" sighed Sister, "you'd exhaust us all. But most of all, Gerry, I sense what we call a honeymoon. That's when people get all benign and moony and want to save humankind right after their own canonization is instantly declared. Whereas I worry not about my future sainthood or bringing humanity up to snuff in the next ten minutes, but where my next meal is coming from, or rather where my next thousand meals are coming from for the shelter. I'm talking about the grit of this business and the grease of politics. And...well, much begging in addition--what seems the basest part to most people is really the easiest." "I wouldn't mind begging!" Gerry had pleaded. "I'd much prefer it to shoving away the hands of every sleazebag manager I've every worked with." When I say anything at all I always say too much, she whispers into a dawn filtering through the many front window panes as pinkgray as the inside of a seashell. Her eyes burning and her hair matted next to her soaking ear, she becomes aghast at how long she had talked to Sister Lucy. "Shit no I'm not going to bed!" she exclaims as if a judicious person had suggested it. "Wasting my life that way too! Usually to sleep away depression. At least tonight'll be different. She ends up going through old music albums, sorts them into piles after flicking off the lights because of the glare on the album covers. They fell to drugs was one category...they fell from fame and strangled in middleclass life, another. "But it's normal life," she sobs. "What's wrong with it? It's what everybody gets! Whereas I'm ravening around my apartment in the middle of the night like a mad woman!" These fell from fame and became assholes! It comes to us all. "Yeah? Well not me. I'm getting out of this Gulag somehow!" She ultimately falls asleep atop the albums, wakes up trembling and frightened, and then puts on a heavy, musty sweater. "Am I of any use?" she asks, staring up at an airplane, its red and blue running lights sliding along the pinkish sky. "Hey, Betty Grable! I've got a nice ass too, she giggles, shaped just right if short on substance. I try to keep it to myself, although I'd like to use it in my arsenal of lovin' tools, Betty Grable, but oh the cost is so so high, to say nothing of all the bullshit you have to listen to. Did I tell Sister too much, Betty? I'm feeling too ashamed to see her again. And honeymoon is such a curious word, Betty, don't you agree? What kind of honeymoon could you have with bag ladies and frail, frail tramps?" The plane gone, a few stars still shimmer through the dawn sky. She goes into the bathroom to note in the lighted mirror her caved-in eyes and wild hair: You! So that's what a saint looks like? Shit you're no saint! That's for sure! "I don't care what I am I'm going to be better!" she exclaims aloud. Read that in a selfhelp book did you? Any more little mottos? "There could be." Gerry, you're just a phoney, going here and there whenever anyone asks or yells. You never had a fuckin thought before! What'd you use your head for? She is hitting it. The next moment she's slumping onto a sofa. "Go away all you thoughts now! I'm no saint and I don't have the verve to be a sinner either. Is it written, verily, that there there must be a Mr Paper Cups in my future?" she sighs. And she sees one, pudgy and benign, leaning back towards a backyard where kids play in and out of barbecue smoke, and wife stretches out in a chaise lounge, smoking, picking a shred of tobacco from her upper lip. She shakes loose that domestic image only to see the women who run around her neighborhood Acme Market around dinnertime for something, anything, to microwave for the family: their tailored looks and drawn faces...and claws of hands. "Sister said that happiness is a byproduct. Where's their happiness? The byproducts are in the meat they buy in those flat, frosted packages." She rises from the sofa. "Compulsion be dammed, hey Mr Chostermill and Madame Marta and Sister Lucy and Rebecca! We'll hold hands and dance in our own crazy circle, the rising smell of piss keeping all the respectable people away, all the walking-dead women in their drycleaned suits and cellular phones, all the Mr Paper Cups wanting to use me to dirty up their pallid lives." Gerry dances in the dim apartment. Later, she wonders if Sister Lucy will eventually let her stay, and how long--and how far to take the religion of the thing. "I'm really not anything along that line..." she remembers telling Sister Lucy. "I was brought up Presbyterian, sort of. I...just don't know..." "You don't know much of anything do you?" Her own voice startles her, standing close to a window and watching her haggard face in one rosy pane. Gerry goes to a closet to get the jacket she uses on solo hikes, crushes it to her face to smell the woodsmoke and dry leaves. "J. C. he said something like you have no mother or something, or let the dead bury the dead? Well I have no mother or boss or aerobics witch or state-of-the-art gentleman caller." She looks out on the empty street, a sheet of newspaper dancing fitfully, and imagines the lonely men lining up for breakfast at the shelter, this same newspaper wrapping around a straggler's legs as Marta Marta, affrighted out from cluttered sleep, keens to them of her lost European home. Stepping back, she notes her image repeated in the numerous panes; flickering, each, as a draft comes through the apartment. Puts on the jacket and massages her taut neck; then, for some reason, she laughs uproariously, eyes marvelously cool. "You are little, Sister Lucy. You can't hold me out! And don't you die, Mr Chostermill, at least not in the next hour or so!" She buttons up the jacket, rips a ski cap from a pocket. _____________________________________________________________ Word Flashes of chrome stab a sullen yellow light, and purple clouds mass behind a sudden pair of boys skidding BMX bikes to all but pin another boy to the chain-link fence he has rested his own BMX against. "Bad machine," compliments the larger one, his face and hands Oriental in that odd light, though he's a freckled redhead. "Word!" adds the smaller one to underline his companion's appraisal. Below, traffic thunders while merging onto the highway, and the lone boy suddenly feels the fence vibrating against his back as he engages in the compulsory sneaker check with them--identical brands and models, dirty hightops with laces undone. "You just move in dead Harry's?" Vapor curls from the larger one's mouth. "I guess." "He guesses," spits the small one into ash-gold weeds. "So why don't you know?" The two inquisitors straddle their bikes, the smaller one leaning far to one side. "Anytime, buck each, no shit!" The big one is pointing to the large silver bottlecaps laced through both wheels of this new boy's bike. A local brewery had attempted to promote a sort of carafe with a flat cap but couldn't get the seal to hold. "No big deal. My father give em to--" "Where you come from?" The big boy interrupts. "Parkside." "Stupid neighborhood. Why move here? From Parkside to River Edge. Just as stupid." "Word!"-- again this intensifier from the small one who shifts from side to side, his bike frame too tall for him. "My parents. My father mostly. He likes to...move." "Move? Yuppies and faggots move up to The Heights in Parkside. The faggots fix up all the old houses. You move in there and you get fuckin AIDS!" gushes this small one. A few drops of rain whip at them and darkened Burger King napkins flap around and are sucked into the fence as trucks hiss below. "We lived there with my real father before all the fags. He was Italian or something. What a slum! We lived there with my real father." "Shrimp always tells everybody too much." "Fuck you!" Shrimp's vehemence shocks the new boy but the other laughs, and then abruptly whispers "You ride with us?" "I don't know." "Come onnnnnn!" this bigger one coaxes, his red hair raised up like a fan from the dark wind, the stretching intonation meaning just for now, it's no big deal, nothing to lose. "We're gonna go back of Shop Rite. It's bad! There's a blueberry pie, I know." "Word! You should know," adds Shrimp, delighted. He has leveled his bike, his toes barely touching the pavement. "He means I smashed it in yesterday with my mother so they'd throw it out today. She goes: Will you hurry up? Why are you lingering? Rah-AN-dol-uph! She's hollering at me and I'm shoving in that fuckin pie box good!" "Lingering!" the redhead and Shrimp squeal it together, an old joke, and then repeat it several times, both nearly tipping over in their mirth, but the new boy doesn't join in. Instead, "Randolph?" he smirks, stepping towards them, a quick shaft of weakened sunlight skimming the spokes of the bikes and highlighting the bottlecaps on his wheels. "Rocks! call me." "I'm Badger," he invents, having an uncle who helped train some of the Wisconsin football team offseason in his health club. "My new mother don't 'llow no nicknames!" Shrimp winces as if awaiting her punishment. The light darkens abruptly on their faces as the luminous rim around the thunderheads narrows. "He's Shrimp but near his house, Victor-Emmanuel--that's some emperor in whatchacallit, Pizza-Pigout-Land or someplace. The new boy laughs and Shrimp reddens instantly, dropping his bike, both hands soon in a flurry grazing them: "I'll get you both for that!" The older boys take the scant threat in good grace. Below, there's a lull in traffic with just the occasional wheeze of airbrakes. "Hey Badger, was that lady crying your mother?" Shrimp couldn't wait for a reply to his big friend's question. "You'll get divorced, we got divorced," he sped. "She always cries. We don't take it serious," shrugs Badger. "Hey, mom's cry. They all do," affirms Shrimp. "I've had a bunch." "Word!" Rocks agrees. "Mine yells a lot more, but she cries too." "The same broken tiles like our last house? That's why I left. They were just talking and talking and talking about them, these fuckin tiles. They wouldn't stop," he shrugs again. "It's crazy! Mom sitting in the tub ripping tiles left and..." Badger stops; he is saying too much. Rocks nods. "Yeah they get off on little shit like that and then they go on fuckin-forever!" "Word! Yeah, parents. They never know when to fuckin stop talking," Shrimp underscores, vapors rushing from his mouth and hanging in the darkening air, "Was that asshole your father, one trying to fix garage door? He goes: one more minute and then I rip the fuckin thing off its... whatchacallits?" Shrimp is almost dancing, spit flying with his breeaths. "Hinges," Rocks injects. "Word!" Shrimp becomes hysterically emboldened, his real voice hopping a wet octave before diving into imitation: "I thought I'd shit! He goes!: Had it fuckin right fuckin minute ago!" But his basso version of Badger's angry father cracks towards the breathless, squeaky last, and now the three boys comprise a kind of menacing field within the heavy air as Badger moves ever so slowly towards Shrimp, and Rocks dismounts. "What shakes with this `asshole' bullshit?" Badger snaps at both of them, knowing that no one can call your father that until you do first, that it's a rule everywhere. Shrimp drains of color and Rocks steps aside as Badger approaches. The light becomes a dirty yellow flicker among them. Below, trucks shoulder in a lemony glow. Rocks blurts "He don't mean it in a bad way. We all call our fathers ass--" Shrimp backs away, and then scrambles onto his bike. "Yeah! Honest! Word! I got two and they're both...assholes!" Badger yanks him off the bike which jumps forward a bit and falls to the ground, its front wheel revolving slowly. Shrimp's head is forced down into Badger's crotch. "Stop you fuckin faggot!" Shrimp screams. Badger releases him. "What you so nervous for? Next time I'll let you kiss it!" "I don't go for no shit like that!" "Not yet, huh?" The three boys are scarlet as Randolph steps gingerly between the other two. "Shit! Badger," he whispers. "We never get that fuckin mad! They must all be crazy in Parkside." They stare at their sneaks in the amplified highway noise and don't know how to part. When the two larger boys finally look up, they see tears in Shrimp's eyes, his lip trembling as the sun breaks through suddenly. "Some..." he starts whispering, "some people take a bath once in a while!" "He will when he gets his old lady out of the bathtub!" Rocks yells and they all laugh, though Badger, his heart beating furiously, joins in late. In the brightness, Rocks' greenish teeth unsettle him further. Behind the dumpster at Shop Rite, they have eaten the smashed blueberry pie and flaunt their blue hands, then perform sticky high fives. "What'll we call ourselves?" pops Shrimp. "Three From Hell!" Badger screams, leaping on his bike, leading them past the loading docks to careen down the driveway and onto the sunny street in shrieking, breathless giggles. Buster Ianucci is shocked into flattening the trajectory of a blackened cabbage. It thumps the side of the dumpster. "You hear all that noise? There are women out there!" he informs Lucy Devaney, meat department apprentice. "They want my rotten cucumber!" Swathed in rubber rain gear several sizes too big, she is hosing down the platform. Deep inside of all that yellow her violet eyes hunger as she plays the hose on Buster, forcing him back into the store. _____________________________________________________________ Avia Morrisey 1. What the hell's the difference what I do? They froze me out of promotion and I'm finished! Where I have the means I'll help you, where I don't I won't, so I'm sending you to Colgate. You may have wanted to go somewhere else, I don't know, but that's where I'm sending you. And don't...oh I can't talk to women since your mother died. Well, anyway, don't...well, be careful, if you do, uh do, uh what...uh--anyway, be a nurse or something. 2. Ah, love let us be true to one another! 3. So she left me to screw some Grease-Bum, my Mother! Can you visualize it, them sliding around the greasy sheets? 4. Gee you're smart in most ways but in that way you're retarded. 5. Honey they send you right place. If you change, you betta fast! If you don't, you bettah bettah stay same! Down here, everythings go so down, even sex don't help none down here. 6. Madonna oda wombah blundada. 7. NO RECORDS EXIST FOR THE AFORENAMED OFFICER 8. Wombah blundada automatique! 9. Madonna ada wombah blundada! Saintah Saintah! 10. MITZ-IH-IN-KUH!-KUH!-KUH! _________________________________________________________________ NOTES 1. From phone conversation, Captain Brandon Morrisey, United States Navy, about to be retired. 2. Matthew Arnold, and unnamed literature instructor, who, allusion-crammed, couldn't erect at critical juncture. For Avia, no critical juncture. 3. Avia couldn't visualize. 4. Again, Lucy Eccles, roommate. 5. Mona Many, drunken nurse in Susseluh-land who served The Gentle People. Drove a Jawa motorcycle even more battered. 6. The madonna with the wooden dick. Reference to the crude machine of monkeywood Avia cranked up with a galonna-shell handle in order to demonstrate The Rubber to Susseluh-land women as blank as she. 7. Morrisey, his captain's hat cocked, died at halftime in the bar of the Naval Officers' Club in San Diego after repetitively shouting "Go Army!" Army went on to lose 16-7. Since only the navy knew they were related, and it lost him, Avia was never notified of his decease. (Small estate ended up at Bide-a-Bit, where he had been drying out as she graduated Colgate in Public Health.) 8. In a moonswept clearing on an achingly gorgeous evening the machine very slowly elevated itself as Avia slept. Thereafter an entourage moaned after her on her rounds--scattered frequently by the careening Mona Many on her rusty Jawa. (The automatique is a linguistic remnant from a French occupation from 1884-191 9. The madonna without the wooden dick! A double saint! What The Burning-Patch People screamed as they rushed by her to throw themselves into the volcano. Had viciously elbowed aside The Gentle People along with their obscenity-spouting nurse, sans defunct cycle. Had been forcing Avia up and up the burning slope, their charred sores smoking. When it seemed they would hurl her in, she flung away the ascension device and huge prophylactic. Despite the flare-up of sulphurous fumes, it proved the right thing. 10. Exclaim today's young women after conferring for hours on end in her hammock with Saintah Saintah Avia. (A gutteral fricative-click- spit: most tortured outcry of Susseluh-landian sexual frustration.) _____________________________________________________________ The Ceremony Resembling a crowbar, the purple strip lurks in the low sky. Sharp crunching...then heel-strikes as she finds the path. Shortly he sees the vapor preceding her, the gloom behind pierced by streetlamps around which snow revolves. When he can discern her clothes he comments, Well you're certainly equipped for the task at hand! I couldn't get back to the apartment to change. Still the party animal, hey? You could say that. Her eyes blank in the dimness. Well, at any rate, I'm glad you came, he says, this might have to be the last until the Spring thaw. Glad? Never heard you use such an odd word. Have you gone crazy? A wet flake flops into her hair. It must have hurt--I mean for you to leave the party without a stranger. Oh? Still the jealous male? My my! But let me offer a discrete hallelujah: no prying bitty little questions this time--oh so very manipulative with their subtle, softest poisons. You're at least over that. Time, he shrugs in whispering snow, the cure and the kill. Oh yeah? Well I'm trying to accept kill, because then hope is dead. And yet, here we are once more. Stupid. We're hopeless. Absently, he turns a hand up as if to cup the sifting snow. You never know. And when you finally do it's too late. Well I hope--modestly, not universally--that this is the last, the woman sighs. He had fetched the tools from a car trunk as frigid as Siberia, keeps the shovel and gives her the crowbar. They look for the right place to start, the hard ground beginning to whiten. Almost as an antidote to their sniping, they dig a half hour without speaking, gulping in icy needles of air and panting out dark vapors. Soon they have dug--she, though unsteady on her heels, thrusting in with the crowbar, and he scraping away the clods with the shovel-- just enough to reveal the larger outline below them: its hair frost- whorls into which individual giant flakes drift. A...little more, he encourages--spasmodic puffs from his mouth darkly surrounding his head. She demurs, leaning on her crowbar. C'mon now, don't be a fuss...budget in this too! she gasps. But he wins. Listen this once! Just not enough...depth to really operate, really know when you're...s-striking home! They again dig in the odors of frozen mud and lye, she sobbing with each thrust, the snow arriving now in stinging, surging waves. I'll change. If you want to change. She blinks away the tears as he offers the shovel. So they reverse roles, he driving and twisting in with the crowbar, more deeply than she could, and she, beyond herself, jerkily scooping up after him. The depth of the exposed form is right, they silently agree. Much more would exhaust the energy needed now, especially as the wind has begun raging, slamming icy snow into them and whirling it round the declivities of the uncovered thing below. The tools are dropped, clattering away along the ground as the couple falls down on the form, their beating fists producing a dull, echoing hollowness. On they go far past exhaustion into a loathsome nightmare of sweat and icy slime. As the thumps become less and less audible to them, they are retching. Then, the grating draughts after they have, finally, stopped. After some moments they clamber up from out of the grave. In the fast-ticking hail, she on her knees and he above, hulking: the whole scene looking like some Medieval ceremony, swarthy knight and weeping maiden. Below, with matted hair aswirl in flowers of blackest ice, the horse. _____________________________________________________________ Operation Dessert Form We're best at two things as a nation. One is ultimately reconciling our differences between groups; two...well let's deal with the first, and let the other reveal itself like a print coming up through the developer. Our opposition finally agreed to a ceremony of reconciliation--with rigid ground rules. We'd both have roughly the same amount of time: that required to have a vehicle from each group drive by. Then we'd work to prepare the show. The drivebys ensued, noisy but effective. There followed an hour of feverish activity where displays were built, and immediately evaluated by judges with walkie-talkies, broadcasting to senior citizens of both sexes operating old manual Remingtons. (They insisted on being included--actually threatening suit--and would hear nothing of computers.) At any rate, the silver brigade toiled so feverishly that the index cards bore several strikeovers, adding, many felt. to the charm and authenticity of the event. I will refrain from pointing out which group prepared what among the exhibits, since that would mar the purpose of the day; besides, prizes were awarded on individual merit only. The first honorable mention was labeled TRIPLE CHOCOLATE, the Afro-American subject being posed with a bowl of chocolate ice cream on his chest, and with that set atop a brown mohair scarf diagonally thrown. The judge's card read Interesting materials but bowl too small and scarf material oversoft. Second honorable mention went to JALEPENO! a red pepper sticking up through a lemon custard in a soup plate between a Hispanic's teenager's legs. Simplicity! With the merest hint of sexuality. (Here I include a non-prizewinner. Perhaps for old time's sake. It was WASP WITH WASPS, a white male wrapped completely round with wire holding fuzzy wasps. Excellent execution though idea is perhaps a bit trite--too much visible wire also. Besides, you lost theme of show!!!!! To be fair, a petit four had been hastily thrust into the nest of wires but the judge apparently missed it.) CHEROKEE JUBILEE took third prize, an American Indian clothed in buckskin, with cherries intertwining both hands. It however contained, the judges said, too much red, literally and figuratively. Second went to BAKED ALASKA, an Eskimo peeking from a cardboard oven, set, according to a round gauge, at 500. # too small on oven therm was the only criticism. The display meriting both Best of Show and First Place featured a lovely blond in long white silk gown in heart-shaped box lined with a red satin dotted with the candy called nonpareils. VERY SWEETLY BLOND AND VERY VERY DEAD. Beautiful! sang the index card, echoes of Marlyn and of love. Masking of blood stains top-notch too! (That it was, and the less said of the other displays on that account, the better.) I should mention also the one the senators most objected to later, WHOM THE GODS DESTROY THEY FIRST MAKE EDIBLE, an oriental baby, heavily talced, in the middle of an angel food cake. Very tasteful, though baby too large for scale of whole piece. Try again. The crowd, mostly middle aged, came from all economic strata. They appeared to like the show, although Dr Hiram W. Jackman, retired dean of the junior college, sniffed, "Worst yet when it comes to gilding the lilly, or the flan, or whatever." My lasting impression is not a critical but an aesthetic one...sounding now a bit like the ghostly pre-echo from a phonograph record...blood whipping across the rough-textured wall outside. _____________________________________________________________ Lips Smooth As Oil From the balcony of the church, Ted spied the backs of the women seated below, picture hats floating between their shoulder blades. Each had flanked herself with a purse and a grayish-white praybook. He had gone there, the closest church to his new apartment, to check out the ladies. Something hit them, they'd splinter, he thought, signing the book passed to him by his pewmates, Dr and Mrs Marius Ohgo. After Ted x'd newcomer, writing his old address, the cherubic Dr Ohgo placed a beefy hand on his arm and whispered during a pause in Pastor Carruther's Psalms Never Before or Seldom Quoted, "You're to come with us afterwards for cookies. Mrs Ohgo's cookies are closer to heaven than even our seats here." Ted blurted acceptance and Ohgo winked, "From Erie, huh? Well, did you travel from Erie with any?" Judging from Dr Ohgo's ecstatic smile, Ted's Pardon? was just the right answer. Was it his hunger and the talk of cookies made him smell chocolate? They walked to the Ohgos through falling leaves--he puzzling over Dr Ohgo's bizarre digs at Carruthers while Ted shook the pastor's hand before escaping the church. Now Ohgo, his blowing hair whiter than the weak sunlight, was classifying love as Ted studied identical aspects of the neighborhood's architecture: "...and I love Mrs Ohgo too and her wondrous baking--exemplified by this majestic stomach preceding me everywhere--and you'll soon see my other love. And of course, as I said, I love the God encompasing all my loves." "Well one of your loves is different, Marius--I'll grant you that!" rang back Mrs Ohgo from the spinning leaves ahead. She limped, Ted noticed. At the huge hall closet, Ted witnessed Dr Ohgo as hanger meister, separating clusters of hangers meticulously before plucking out three for their coats. Mrs Ohgo donned her long-mileage smile which spoke forbearance; Ted shifted from footto foot in the vaguely chocolate- smelling air. Once free of her coat she brightened as to a "batch just ready to pop in!" and limped off. Ohgo shepherded him into the den, first having him close his eyes. Upon opening them Ted perceived smears, pink ones against thickly varnished knotty pine. He guessed they came from a small fire in the fireplace, but what sprung to focus proved to be large paintings of barebreasted girls in silky boxing shorts and burgundy gloves. One resting on the floor, a taunting blond with eyes of indigo flame, stood taller than Ted, almost as if he could, with some boldness, shake her gloves and wish her luck. "Did you travel from Erie with any?" squealed Dr Ohgo, his head an immense balloon floating against the knotty-pine, his white hair flaring in a sudden draft, his face even more scarlet. "Not with any of these I didn't." "The brassiere is an example of sound engineering but God, my Erie friend, has the touch of an artist," he preached, his eyes intensely green. "Can you imagine it says in Proverbs that their lips are smooth as oil but their legs go down to hell? Well their legs are rooted right here, thank you. And make of this beautiful earth even more of a heaven, am I right, Mr Erie? Did you travel here with any? Oh well, if you get it here that's fine too! Would you like to name that one you seem so enamored of? I'd call her that from now on if you did." Ohgo plopped into a director's chair facing the same painting. "I uh..." "No matter, tell me after Mrs Ohgo plies you with the other loveliness of the house." Dr Ohgo closed his eyes, knitted his hands across his belly, and sighed periodically until Mrs Ohgo entered some minutes later, ushered by puffs of, of course, chocolate. "Tomorrow, Theodore!" piped up Ohgo, "you'll remember that her cookies don't melt in your mouth, my friend, oh no! They melt your very mouth, Theodore. May I call you Theodore?" "What did he say, dear?" interrupted Mrs Ohgo. "That he's very very lonely." "Well I shouldn't wonder. Isn't a shame we couldn't bring these lovely lovely girls to life?" She put down the tray of huge mugs splotched a cream and violet. Misshapen from her ceramic class, and primal to Ted as they fumed, they encircled a dish piled with steaming chocolate chip cookies, everything wildly aromatic. "That'd be something all right, having them all here in the flesh: a heaven on earth, my Erie friend! Where it rightly belongs. Seek and ye shall find! I don't believe in heaven as much as I believe in here. I like them when they are ever so so so slightly burnt--the cookies not the girls--the chocolate melts in the air, becomes the air, the fragrance linnnn-gering for days. Ahhhhhhh! By the way, Theodore, butter, as you're finding out by the look of you, is another of Mrs Ohgo's secrets." ... Sonofabitch is a brick short of a load! is Cliff's conclusion that next afternoon during Ted's phonecall to the Gannon College Library. Did you ever figure what you traveled from here with? Dr Ohgo informed me that there comes a time when we must forget our baggage or it locks to us, like in the famous logo for Death of a Salesman. Yeah his sons left him babbling in the shithouse while they took off with whores. Sex can make you less than human. Don't say that! Hey it was just cookies! We got them here in Erie too! Even the priests eat them. Hot chocolate too! Double jepardy! Anyway, you never know what can, uh, start you off. I'll second that--we're at a dangerous age. But, Dr and Mrs Marius Ohgo, hey? What's he doctor of? Were the cookies shaped like tits too? I can see their coat of arms: a cross of cookies rampant on a field of breasts. Actually, he sounds like a lot of gabby, ball- breaking priests here, only they're warped by theology--I don't know their positions on breasts and women boxers. But they got one on everything else, that's for sure. Wait a second! Some horny padre wants to check out The Joy of Sex. How you doing, Father? No problem: he's just checking me out actually. I swear the spoon stood straight up in the whipped cream. That was something else. Elevate your gutter mind, 'cause I have real problems. Anyway, a nut and probably so's the wife and I scarfed in those otherworldly cookies for hours too long while Ohgo prattled on, but what the hell, I don't know anybody down here in Media. Well, didn't before... Ah hah! My hungry patience will be rewarded! After the pigout, the...? Well I had catapulted myself to a sugar high, and I figured a lot of black coffee'd calm me down?--I had an oat bran muffin too, healthy, at Dunkin Donuts. But then things took an even weirder turn. ... "I've been waiting a whole hour! He's a rotten bastard and you're all rot--" "Pardon?" "And look at this!" It's suppose to be fall, pretty colors in the trees and all that shit, you know? And that total asshole on the TV? Makes up poems about the weather? He didn't make up one for this, did he?" Wet snow clumped against the window of Dunkin Donuts, refracting headlights as cars slid into the parking lot. ... Look, I told her, I can see that you're upset. What she say? Then I must be the most sensitive male in this whole stupid Media, Pennsylvania--or words to that effect. Translation: sucker. So she asks me for a ride home, but then has to check me out with the help, which is a United Nations of giggling. You know, Is this guy all right? They don't know of course. Toothless Cambodian woman covered in white sugar yells, Hey take chance, Letty! How you can do worse? Look! I told them. I just moved here. I come from Erie. Which was a mistake because one of them, some sort of Hispanic Negro fat girl screams Erie! Snow up the ass, that's Erie! Then, of course, my name became Snow-Up-the-Ass until we got out of there. And thus t'will be each and every time you go back, the tool of ridicule being the only one left to the working poor in this great nation--like the gravedigger in Hamlet. Spare me the Sociology. And especially the Literature! First thing she says getting into the car is No funny business, you understand? and I say look I want to get home myself, I've had one hell of a strange day! And then she cries and cries for miles and won't tell me how to get to where she lives. Which is information you'd have to have. And asks me to stop, asks me questions as to why this guy would stand her up, etc. Maybe alien women got him. We can look for his story at the supermarket checkout. Whatever. Anyway there we were gazing at the woods, which she had hated just before in the quote-unquote stupid snow, and now finds beautiful because God did it and not people. Uh...the...comforting, uh, gets warmer, and man! Everything just turns furious. And at the end she cries twice as much and says she's happy because God put us together at the lowest moment of her entire life! It had been quite a religious day for you. What's she look like? A boy. I often thought that about you. Are you sure you know the difference? Probably hasn't read a book in her life. And everything is immediately emotional! Like, boom, right away. You can't think. Let me stop you before you get to natural rhythm, you typical little suburban snot-nosed snob!--but then we already know that. Look, I don't have time for your ten cent analysis! I seem to...have her now for some reason, and this is the even weirder part: I smelled chocolate at lunchtime from some brat ripping into a Hershey Bar at the 7-Eleven and...started getting a hardon. Well you can't be allowed on the streets like that--not good for much but giving directions. That passes for funny in your sealed sewer of a mind, I know, but... Food and women! Mmmmmm! What you got to complain about? Smear her with chocolate and you can die a happy man. Anyway, all those rosy tits at the mysterious and redolent Ohgos, you couldn't reign yourself in. Ah shall I compare thee to a slummer's lay? It it it it had started as comforting, innocent, uh mostly, and went haywire and now I don't know what the hell I'm doing! We had breakfast this morning before work, but first I picked her up at her place, and...then...before we could get out the door...Wham Bam again! I can't think! And she! She doesn't even bother. I never met a woman quite like this. No substances or bullshit needed. Out of control. I thought such a condition was devoutly to be wished. Well it's ripping the shit out of me. I mean this new job, man, with a lot of problems, and that's quite enough to make me nervous, thank you. I have to get down to work and knock off all this happy horseshit. I've got to catch hold and damn soon. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm sitting here now in the middle of about a thousand books they were supposed to inventory before I took over. And I thought Gannon's bookstore was screwed up! Well this is Widener, a university, so it's screwed up big time! Try the personal inventory first. You're a good guy; you just have no character. Get in control you mean, because, like, she's out of it, yes? Or is it that she's very much in it, o pale and loitering knight? Never mind the fuckin books. It's bad enough I got to peddle them. They're all shit. ... I swear I won't even mention Letty! But the weather here! Like, Erie has the reputation for lousy...but here it pisses gray mud out of the sky half the week and all of the weekend. It drips clammy gray inside your skull. And this is the time my boy-girl starts talking about getting serious, quote unquote. I am really not ready to go to the movies with her yet--even though we've gone a bit beyond that in the few months since...but I promised not to talk about her and I'm not...uh...anymore. So! How are all the Literary Lions at Gannon College? The same pitiful mess, and Nature is without her diadem up here too: we're about fifty-fifty mud and snow from a crazy thaw, but now it's hardening up as we're just now plummeting through zero as I speak. Looks like a grimy abstract out there under the frozen streetlights: how I visualize purgatory. I'm in it! Shit, I can't love her! Jesus Christ she's just a girl--which you can hardly tell by looking. Get her a pair of boxing gloves and some flashy shorts. Or better yet, you're capable of an even more infantile image. Cliff! Holy Jesus! I haven't had a life yet! To be serious, Ted, friend, you're having one right now. Who ever said it suppose to consist of big ideas? Ever think that maybe you're lucky? How can I be lucky and this upset? Cliff! What'll I do? Who knows? Your candle is lit and you're still cursing. Last night I...sat in a chair and cried! Yeah we do that sometime. You're no fuckin help! Trade her even up for Mrs Ohgo. Cookies outlast sex anytime. ... Ted walks past the Ohgo's, but can't ring the bell. The early evening's bluish fog eats dollops of snow atop skeletal bushes flanking their front door, a buttery mist shoulders under. Is there another young man in there perched in all that rosiness and aroma? Did you travel from Trenton with any? From Scranton, Philadelphia? Stockholm? Zaire? Do you find our fighting blond as overwhelming as did our friend from Erie? Speaking of Whom! And Ted sees himself in the den, sputtering "I had such a nice time, and I 'm I'm I'm thinking of joining the church and had a question or two." By then standing under a haloed streelamp, he hears Cliff's voice saying Belay the conscious phoniness; enough will filter through your depraved personality naturally. ... Letty is still there in powder-blue fake fur, seated on a milk crate clotted with filthy snow and smoking a cigarette, the knives of her knees wide apart. "Hey Big Shot! I was just getting ready to quit on you! Isn't this where you came in? When I was waiting for another so-called man?" "I'm sorry. I had to go back to a place." "What'd she say?" "It wasn't like that. It was something else. Something I don't understand." "Hmph! That's really overrated, that shit. What's so hot about understanding things anyway? It's what you do before you understand things that counts, and when you don't understand them. Who can't do things when they understand them?" "What did you say? I don't under-" "You heard me but don't understand." She flipped the cigarette away as they got in the car. "Can't. It's okay. You do your best, Snow-Up-the-Ass. That's the name for you all right." "Well mine for you is ssss-Screwball." He started the balky Datsun. "That's an easy one. For anybody. I never met anybody that one didn't fit." They parked by a playground. The night had become clear, starlit. His adam's apple and trousers bulged, with tension in between. "Not tonight--nothing--I'm too down," she broke the silence. "It's probably because..." he began. "Whoa. Shut up! I don't want you fuckin my mind anymore. And I don't wanna know why anyways. Right now it's just what is." They stared past the swings and sliding boards of the icy, glimmering, playground, through the pines and into the housing development beyond, the lighted houses like broken grins. "Well I guess we better...something..." she eventually sobbed. "There's screwing your life away and there's...babies." In the cold she tucked her feet under, making herself smaller--he experienced pity for an instant. "My God! There are so many things we'd have to talk about before...!" "Hey! You talk! I'll be too old by then. Old woman--not that you wouldn't try to screw me even then. Never saw anybody had to have it more. Even that first night I could feel it like nothing in my life ever. Now shut up before you begin to apologize or explain!" She tugged at him to force herself, "Mmmmm" under his arm. "I can't tell you how good you smell! How come you always smell so sweet?" "Ch-ch-ch-ocolate seized me one batty day." "Yeah! That's what's it's like, a little, chocolate or something." "And I don't appreciate your characterisation of me as some sort of animal." "Lighten up, Snow-Up-the-Ass, I'm teasing. Mostly anyways. Hey, with us it was like, instant! Explosion! So? After that? What?" By way of answer he thrust her back into her own seat, to deliver, with all the rational will he could muster, his farewell speech, laced with the highest sentiments he had ever announced. At the end tears stood in her eyes like dimes. ... What an insight! It destroyed me! What I discovered is that what's really really crazy is the domestic shit, that's what's crazy. I thought the way I used to live, the goddamn ravaging, wracking sexual drive and and and the horrible loneliness and the drinking all night and running ten miles the next morning and then puking and and...well, anyway, that's really not what's crazy, really crazy. Crazy is the Ohgos and all the people dying away in their snug little bungalows with all the burners and the ovens cooking, and kids pissing in every bed! It's good I met the Ohgos, 'cause they represent the so-called home in its most insane form. I mean, girls with b-breasts, b-boxing while you get fatter and fatter? A domesticated pig? This I want for my future? And and and and women like Letty, offering everything up with this smartass Mona Lisa smile and getting you you you babbling, and then instantly purring Just step this way to Domestic Death! Uh uh! Man I did it! I ended it and I never felt better! Like I'm burning with the feeling! Free, Baby, free! ... About a month later Cliff had an early dinner at a German Restaurant with a priest who taught philosophy at Gannon, and they argued so long afterwards--the waitresses huddling and pointing--that he barely made closing time at Toppy's Terrific Tuxes. He cast the plastic-sheathed garment into the cancerous Monte Carlo, fistailed out of boulders of squalid ice, flooring it all the way to Media. _____________________________________________________________ Fish Story Like other fish--if, as you said, you really wish to learn-- I do not like metaphors. So, as I said, I am a fish. It is a hard thing to explain to you: we simply are, and therefore need no figures of speech. As to the current spate of fish suicides, one must discuss the deteriorating mental health of the majority offish since 1982, and even before. I have lost too many of my friends,