Or

Let Your Alimentary Canal Do All The Work

by

W.R. Marcy

INTELLIGENCE IS NICE, BUT

PERSONALITY IS IMPORTANT TOO

     Having applied to two dozen colleges in 1982 that transformed the carefree daily visits to the Post Office into a pallor draining psycho drama for the benefit of my forty two year old frazzled and bedraggled overworked mom, Beverly Beauchamp, thereby forestalling the near occasion of heavy lifting, I awaited word from any one of them.

     Days turned into weeks, weeks became months and everyone had something to say on the silence of academia.

     The seventy-year-old school bus driver, Mister Buster Clark: “If you are a believer, I mean a true believer and if you love Jesus more than you love the thing Emily Egan does with your barcelona on the bus you need not fear.”

     I am so toast. I love cheeseburgers, mom, sci-fi movies, and Bob Marley. I do not love Jesus. I never met Jesus. I don’t think there ever was a Jesus, and if there ever was, why didn‘t he get himself born in China or the Bronx, okay, maybe not the Bronx, but Bethlehem? Who gets born in Bethlehem? For that matter why did he get himself born in the first place, why didn’t he just appear, you know, like Elvis?

      Besides, why would I love somebody I never met? Do I love Grover Cleveland or Leonardo da Vinci or Ava Gardner? I do not, well, maybe Ava Gardner a little bit,  okay, okay, a lot. But I really love what Emily Egan does with my barcelona on the school bus. I love that more than somebody I never met that probably never was. Does that mean I believe in nothing? That sounds about right.  

    Emily Egan: “Well, thank you Billy Pie Beauchamp, I am so totally flattered. Nobody else ever said that they loved me more than they loved Jesus. But just to be on the safe side you naughty boy, I think I’ll start wearing a glove.“

     Do not put words in my mouth, you temptress. I said that I love what you do with my Barcelona more than I love Jesus.

     Sheriff Oaks: “Don’t much care if you get inta college  or not, Beauchamp. Still ain’t goin’ ta ‘mount ta much.“           

     You’re looking real pleased with yourself today, Sheriff, shoot some little kid’s gerbil?

     Sheriff Oaks again: “I’m not knowin’ what you want to be when you grow up, boy, but I know what you are now. You are one hellacious pain in my ass.”

     Mom: “Maybe you should major in mathematics. I read where there is a big demand for mathematicians.”

     Okay, mom, if the only other choice is lethal injection.             

     Miss Fagnano, the forty five year old Guidance Counselor with the hip flask in her purse: “What is it you’re going to major in  .  .  .  mathematics? Ha, ha, ha, mathematics! Ha, ha, ha, ahh, ha, ha, ha. No way, come on, seriously.”

     Mom again: “Get your head out of the clouds.”

     My head is not in the clouds. I’m seventeen. It’s not that I don’t know who I am, and I don’t. And it’s not that I don’t know what I want to be or what I want to do with my life, and I don’t. I don‘t care. I only know I want sex. My only firm requirement is that it is sex with a live female. It would be nice if it was of the same species as me but that’s no deal breaker.        

     Miss Fagnano again: “C‘mere, Billy, go ahead, tell Mister Coyle, heh, heh, heh, what you told me, you know, heh, heh, heh, what you’re thinking of majoring in, ha, ha, ha.”     

     Mister Coyle: “Goddamit Beauchamp, I used to think you were a test of God, I was wrong, you’re a pain in the ass.”

GOOD GRADES ARE OKAY

IF YOU’RE INTO THAT SORT OF THING

     Deciding to go to college was not the panacea nor style setter I had hoped, because despite my applying to all the Ivies I was accepted by none. Whatever could the problem be? Insufficient postage? Did they not find something devoid of all pretense with my gallant, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may application? Were they not touched by the down to earth quality my 68 overall average brought to the table of life? Was that the problem? Was there no room at the Inn of 95’s and 100’s for a proud but humble 68? Was my offer to bear Myrrh and frankincense to the director of admissions lacking? I would have offered to bear an IOU for gold too if accepted. Did they find my 480 combined SAT score off-putting? Did they not have it in them to rise above such numerical hobgoblins and see the bigger picture, the glass is half full picture, and that a 68 is not so much a measure of failure as an authentication of spectacularly good guessing? Were they unaware that I suffered from Post Puberty Persistent Pythagorean Problem Puzzle Disorder a medical condition only recently discovered by scientists working part time in the Witson, Kansas K-Mart stock room, that afflicts brilliant students heretofore presumed poor college material but where subsequent studies have validated the intellectual worth of said students as confirmed in a recent issue of the National Enquirer, and that an inability to pass a test in high school was indicative of nothing but the cosmic connection of any one thing to all things, I mean, so I spelled my name wrong, big deal. One little mistake and that’s it for me forever? Was it not clear despite one or two periods of laggard behavior that deep inside of me was an indomitable spirit, and that good guessing has its place in the scheme of things.

MOM IS ALSO THRILLED

ABOUT MY GOING AWAY  .  .  .  TO COLLEGE

     “This constant warfare with William,” aunt Ethel says to mom, “has you at your wits end. For your own peace of mind try to lighten up.”         

     “Lighten up my ass.” 

     “Let’s remember who the adult is, Beverly.”

     “When he’s a pain in the ass in your house I’m the adult. When he’s a pain in the ass in mine he’s the foul smelling IT whose name no one else dares speak for fear IT might come and live with them in their clean and tidy house, bringing with him the eye smarting landfill better known as the Billy’s room which is such that even the tumbling tumbleweed size dust bunnies do not go for fear of terminal contagion. There are unidentified food stuffs in there from the fourth grade that have petrified into gray door stops, and I swear to God I saw one of them move the other day.”

     “Oh dear,“ aunt Ethel said, fluttering her hands to her lips, “tell me again, darling because I’m getting old and I forget, which of us is the drama queen?”         

     “He drops his clothes onto the smoldering toxic waste that was once a bedroom floor for the mom maid to pick up. Clothes, be forewarned to be handled only with disposable forceps and heavy workmen’s gloves, mindful of the pulsing orange glow and distinct hum that comes from it that sounds a lot like either Smoke Gets In Your Eyes or the National Anthem, I can‘t tell which. Eats his body weight twice a day, and could bring down a squadron of coal mine canaries with what he does in the bathroom every morning that leaves behind a consequential reek that no living thing should be capable of producing while alive. I got your drama queen, sweetheart. That kid has a curse on him. No, no, there is a curse on me.”  

     “He’ll be off to college soon. They only get farther away after that.”    

     “By farther away,” mom said, the alarm in her eyes almost audible, “you mean one day he’ll march out the door to conquer the world? Is that what you’re saying? And he’ll no longer live with his gray haired and wrinkled old mom, but that he will go and live with some other lady, and I will no longer have to use a weed whacker to walk from room to room, or a gas mask to shower. Is that the way it’ll be?”     

     Suddenly, serenity replaced the alarm in her eyes. “So what‘s the bad news?”             

     “You need more fiber in your diet, sister.”

     “I know what I need and it isn‘t fiber.”

     “We’re on that subject again, are we?”   

     I remember clearly thinking it’s interesting that when I’m not being yelled at and if I sit perfectly still, nobody seems to know I’m in the room. I could make a career out of sitting around the Kremlin spying on the Russians if I could stay seventeen.

     “There are pleasures in life,” aunt Ethel says, “besides sex.”

     “Oh yeah, name one?”

     “I can’t, but that’s what our mother, the Virgin Mary told me.”       

     “Which goes a long way to explain why dad, who went to the store twenty five years ago for a loaf of bread, never came back .  .  .   Poor dad, but a super move”      

     “So that’s what happened to him, I was wondering where he went as I hadn‘t seen him around recently,” aunt Ethel giggles. “But returning to what we were talking about, your life would be less stressful if you were to find someone.”  

     “There is not a rock in Kansas I have not looked under. I’m on the look out all the time for the man of my dreams, okay, okay, a breathing male who made it over the asylum wall with all his parts, but this is Witson, Kansas, darling, and Witson, Kansas is the undisputed asshole capital of the world.”

     “You go girl; knock ‘em dead with that Witson charm.”   

MISTER LEE ISN’T AS THRILLED AS MOM

          Mister Maximum Herodotus Lee, the Super, a skinny, short-tempered, mocha colored, sixty-seven year old who is a foot shorter than me and whose hygienic regimen is such that he emits a body odor rare for someone without a bona fide death certificate when he learned of my plans, said, “College? You? Hah! You as much chance a gettin’ inta college as I do a gettin’ a Christmas tip out a you momma. I be seein’ ma forty acre and a mule first and don’t I know which end of the mule I be havin‘, that be the one come with the manure shovel. White scum bags been workin’ out ways to screw the black man for onto two hundred and fifty year. Don’t sleep right at night for worryin’ on it they do. They ever figure how to make a buck on mule shit it’ll be jess me tryin’ to haul a plow over that forty acre of rock and heartache.” He glared at me, “What they gonna teach you in white man college, boy, hmm? New ways a doin’ an old and poor black man outta his Christmas tip? I know you momma would sooner celebrate the birth of Jesus doin’ me standin’ up against the hallway wall than part with a Ulysses E. Grant.“

     “That’s Ulysses S. Grant.”

     “Don’t you go correctin’ on me when I’m talking ‘bout banging you momma. Last time that woman got any was way before a man walk on a moon and it probably wasn‘t with a black man who would a done a good and proper job of it so it don‘t rightly count.”   

     To which I replied, “Duck ew and ruh flkbgthn horse ew rode egn on!”   

WOMEN WORRY NEEDDLESSLY,

MEN KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING ALL THE TIME

     “William Beauchamp,” mom hollers, “stop moping, there’s not a thing more you can do. Besides, it’s most likely on its way as we speak.”

     Meaning my acceptance to the Sorbonne or a summons commanding me to appear forthwith before a magistrate to explain how with an IQ of cream cheese and a distaste for the academic as demonstrated over twelve years in the Witson, Kansas Public School system, and with not the smallest drop of ambition, that had the system been fearlessly honest and not passed me on like a bogus twenty or a case of the crabs, I’d still be doing hard time on the rock pile of the seventh grade, I had the numbies to apply to anything beyond bartender’s school.   

     To which I replied, “Arh frah give ut goddam.”

     “Well said, my darling, I think.”

     Later mom and aunt Ethel are at our kitchen table chattering and nibbling on a wafer like snack with their tea that looks like a Ritz cracker, but are so bloated, saltless, and soggy they had to have been in the cupboard since FDR’s first fireside chat. 

          “These crackers are simply scrumptious,” aunt Ethel says, bright eyed and effusive. “They have that .  .  .  that unpretentiousness about them. The cracker of the common man, modest but dreadful. What compost pile did you get them from?”

     Mom is describing the tribulation of the college admissions process, torn between the damage to my sense of self worth if I am rejected, and fearful of the practical consequences if accepted .  .  .  “with bored  indifference to the money matters I have to figure out while decoding his answers to my questions in that teenage mouth noise they all use that comes in one piece without commas or spacing between words that confuse the hell out of those who have to pay their bills.”

     Mom pauses for breath; aunt Ethel jumps in. “I cannot understand a word he says. I thought it was me. I’d all but decided to see a doctor, you know, to see if I’d gone round the bend. There’s so much in the paper about dementia these days, people seem to come down with it like the flu. I was prepared for the worst had I gone ahead with it, I mean, look at poor Eleanor Higgins, she can’t .  .  .  ”

     “.  .  .   and everyone of them powerless to think of anything but sex, a new world like discovery they’re all keeping from us old folks who would be shocked speechless and require the upstairs maid to run in with the smelling salts to revive us from our swoon if told the unexpurgated facts of life. I get the cold sweats when I think of him trying to cross the street by himself.”

     “Be thankful it‘s girls he’s interested in, someday you may have grandchildren.”        

     “That could be the Wednesday after next if I ease up on his leash in the slightest, and I’ll have to go into hock for those little bastards too.”

     “Way to go, girl, let that smile be your umbrella.”

     “I used to think his babbling to his imaginary friends in his bedroom when he was small and clueless was something to worry about. Little did I know that when he was grown and clueless I‘d pine for the good old days and his secret friends.”

     “You had an imaginary friend too, remember?”

     “Yeah, her name was Sara. But I had an imaginary friend because Miss Wonderful at everything she did, and especially those things that she didn’t do big sister who would not abide forays on her cooch at the Route 6 drive-in by Jack Talon, the senior class gynecologist all the girls voted Yummiest Maleman To Deliver The Goods to Your Malebox, and brought home report cards with so many gold stars she looked like a walking planetarium to go along with her perfect attendance prize and attagirl notes from her teachers in little pink boxy envelopes so revoltingly sweet they made me want to vomit, but who couldn’t find two seconds during the day to acknowledge my existence.”

     A three beat pause ensues while mom smirks and aunt Ethel sighs.

     “I will be bigger than you and ignore the brief that you, my baby sister have secretly harbored with me lo these many years, one that she only now makes known in the sunset of her days to her arithmetically enhanced sister with the youthful glow to her skin, and had she spent half the time in High School doing her homework that she spent promoting forays on her cooch, not at the drive-in, no, no, no, nor at the nocturnal importuning of pimply face scuzz, but at the drop of a hat, and being the mooncalf child that she was through her teens, she too might have brought home a report card that could have been handled by human hands without pot holders.”

     “Bigger than me? I keep snacking on that greasy crap in the diner and in two weeks there won’t be a goddam thing in creation bigger than me. My fat ass will eclipse the sun, it’ll blot out the Milky Way. Godzilla will look like an itty-bitty butterfly shrimp in one of them little plastic yellow baskets we have for Tuesday specials.”

     “But on the other hand, I’ve always admired your sense of perspective.”

     “If he’s accepted, what in the hell am I going to do? Bonnie and Clyde would have a better chance than me of getting a bank loan. Hell, they’d throw in a toaster with their loan. And just for the record, my mouthy and sympathetic sister, what he is, is a colossal pain in the ass.”

     “I hope you didn’t tell him that, did you tell him that?”

     “Of course I told him. He is a pain in the ass. Everyone who has ever been run over by his lip says he’s a pain in the ass. I’ve got Sheriff Oaks stopping me in the street to tell me what a snarky mouth pain in the ass he is. Because of him principal Coyle put a vending machine in the faculty lounge to make Preparation H available to the staff.”

     “No, no, Beverley, I meant the money side of it.”

     “You’re damned right I did.”

     “I could have saved you both needless worry.”

     “Girl, he don’t worry ‘bout nuthin‘! The division of labor around here is, I do all the work, make all the money, and do all the worrying. He sleeps till noon, eats all the food and makes all the problems. We have it down to a science, things around here run smooth as silk.”

     “Had you talked with me first .  .  .  ”

     “Talk about what? The pity it is we didn’t get born to royalty like I’m always suspecting we did but our anal mom burnt the adoption papers, wicked old bitch that she was, and by the strength of our noble blood and our haughty good looks more credit worthy? I mean, If you were a bank would you lend me money?”       

     “If  you’ll allow me one uninterrupted sentence. If I had it I would gladly give it to you, but lend it to you? Your checkbook is an ongoing crisis; your bookkeeping, nonexistent. You pay the same bill three times in the same month and the poor slob who has a family to feed has to threaten you with courthouse full of lawyers to get paid once. You do know that you must enter all the checks you write in your check register and deduct them from your balance? You know that don‘t you?”

     “Jesus, allowing you one uninterrupted sentence is a day wrecker.  You mean to sit there and tell me that the balance in my checking account is not a quarter of a million?”

     “You’re thinking about this backward. William gets the loan, not you. He doesn’t start paying it off until after he graduates. Now, does that make a manageable molehill out of the Everest you were building?“

     Long silence while the two women stare at each other.

     “What happens when he can’t get a job, huh, huh?”

     “Don’t be ridiculous, he’ll be the only one within fifty miles of here with a college degree.”

     “Yeah, yeah, I know all that, but what happens if he can’t get a job?”

     “What is it you want me to say? That I’ll open my femoral artery If that happens? Is that what you want? Will that make you happy?”

     “A little bit.”

     The trench warfare of eyeballs continues.

     Aunt Ethel sighs. “Do not sit there staring at me like there’s a quiz today and you didn‘t do your homework again last night and I‘m going to holler at you. Say it, say it out loud, tell me I’m right, that once again your sister has saved the day for you, go ahead, make me feel wise beyond my tender years, and that I don‘t look a day over thirty .  .  .  five.”

     “Yeah, yeah, okay, you’re right.”

     “Feel better?” 

     “No I do not feel better. I feel shortchanged. I feel overwhelmed. I’ve got to go through a goddam wringer every time I try to get anything done around here while you manage everything without ever breaking a sweat, it isn’t fair.”

     “Oh, I am so sorry, I didn‘t know you wanted fair, forgive me .  .  .   Would you like to do all of that over again? I could read a magazine while you have another go at it. Have we our copy of the Lady’s Home Journal laying about? You could do the whining part too if it makes you feel better. It doesn‘t do anything for me, but who am I to complain?”

     “Maybe I’ll just go down to the bank and hold Mister Sutherland up anyway, you know, pass Agnes Evans a note in her teller‘s cage.”

     “You went to High School with Agnes Evans.”

     “Yeah, we were best friends.”

     “Meet me after school at the Malt shop? How much do you think that note will get you?“

     “Malt shop? Ha! We used to go to Mickey Costello’s garage, smoke marijuana, drink beer, and watch dirty movies in the back room.”       

     “Now I understand why you never did your homework, you were otherwise occupied with more elevated pursuits. I can only imagine what mom would have said?”

     “Whore of Babylon has a ring to it. Besides, there never was a malt shop in Witson. We got saloons up the gazoo but no malt shops. Think about it, when you’re of a mind to drown the sorrow of living in No Place, USA, a malted milk ain’t gonna cut it  .  .  .   Hey! Somebody ate all the crackers. Want more? I got some spray cheese I can put on them. I‘ll pop them in the microwave and we‘ll have boiling near cheese and soggy tasteless cracker sandwiches .  .  .   sort of.”

     “At long last I find out the secret recipe of your uneatable soggy Ritz cracker sandwiches, eat your heart out, Julia Childs. We can only hope you do not pass it down to those little ones who you refer to as your bastard grandchildren. No I do not want anymore crackers, stay focused. That’s what your problem is, you don’t stay focused.”

     “No, that’s what you think my problem is. I know what my problem is. It’s the same problem I’ve had since I got to be thirteen.”

     “In any event, Mister Sutherland would probably recognize you since you have a checking account there and you serve him his breakfast most mornings.”

     “The breakfast thing, good point.”

ALTERNATE INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER LEARNING    

LURK IN THE BACKGOUND

     I did not give a thought to how we were going to pay for college when mom didn’t have the money to pay the light bill. Had I done so I might have taken the next step and considered that mom might have a plan B and that we might already be in it, and that plan B might be me getting off  my dead ass and getting a job, one that I was totally qualified to do, like shoveling shit against the tide to pay the World Famous Correspondence School for those convenient courses in the comfort of your own home in Small Appliance and AM Radio Repair with easy payment plans for up to twenty years, longer if it adversely impacts your final decision to matriculate and you meet two basic requirements, the first being your body temperature does not remain at ambient for more than three weeks while having an unpaid balance at WFCS, and second, you absolutely must maintain a grade average of at least 35 to uphold the scholastic standards of WFCS, lower if you choose to be graded on a curve, and lower still if you irrevocably commit prior to the first open book small appliance exam, to the Doctoral program in AM radio repair with yet a different payment plan open to all whose signed deposit check clears in one of the first six tries, unless there are extenuating circumstances such as, insufficient funds, and who have not discharged their irredeemable pledge to the Organ Donor on Demand program like the one I signed up for by lying about my age so Emily Egan would be impressed. Actually, Emily was more concerned than impressed.

     Emily, frowning. “Taking out a healthy person’s liver, colon, and trachea to give to someone else doesn’t sound legal to me, and,“ she added, “You didn’t promise them, you know,” she said not so demurely, “your important organ, did you?” 

     “Of course not.” I replied, “I promised them only the internal ones, you know, my bowels.”    

     “Yuk! Why would anyone want those?”   

     “Beats the hell out of me. Maybe it’s to help them poop better?” 

     “That’s one more reason I’m glad I’m a girl.”

     “Girls don’t have bowels?” 

     “No, and they don‘t poop either.”

     “I didn’t know that.”

     “Yes, only the male of the species is so gross.”

     “Mom says,” I said, beaming, proud as punch with myself, “I could clear out a zeppelin hanger full of rogue elephants with head colds and stuffed up sinuses with what I do in the bathroom in the morning.”

     “You sure know how to get a girl’s motor running, don’t you, Billy Beauchamp. Could we talk about something else?”

THE ELECTRIC BILL CONTINUES TO BE AN ISSUE

     Mom having packed the dishwasher so, that someone employing the nanotechnology skills of an operating theater full of neurosurgeons to that end could not replicate, and to the despair of the Electric company’s control and command Bunker that was at DEFCON 2 as they had not seen a check from her in four months, the Accounts Receivable Manager, Mister Garret P. Duffel, his claw-like hands, their long pterodactyl like nails yellowed from evil deeds and self abuse in the Men’s Room while everyone else is on a coffee break, hovering over the well-worn mushroom head of the fire engine red OFF button, awaiting the signal from the supreme being of the Kansas Power and Light universe to terminate Beverley Beauchamp, and when the signal comes, Duffel, something green and wet, a slimy snot-like substance stretching up and down out of his nose like a yo-yo, looking over the hump on his back at the toned guy in the silk suit, lets out a screaming cackle, then lisps, “Yeth, mathster,” mom stood in her tiny kitchen drying her hands, trying to give my ego a lift despite my not having received a single acceptance letter, to which I pretended indifference to by tossing off an uncaring, “I frah give ut goddam,” which mom decided to decipher as, “Think I’ll go to my room and pack my bag now, I don’t want to be late for my higher education.” 

     “Your father could not have said it better, clearer maybe, but not better.” Her eyes darting from side to side symptomatic of the panic attack that began seventeen years ago. “You who are the fruit of his loins.”      

     “I am not oh hruut.” 

     “No, dear, I didn’t mean that you were homosexual, I meant .  .  .   well, it’s like if I use the word fruit in that sense it’s not .  .  .   it’s actually a, you know, the word I think begins with a B that I can‘t recall at this particular moment, no, not bastard, buoyant? Buoyant is good. No, that’s not the one, it’s close, it’s very close, and I like it a lot, but it’s not .  .  .   biblical, that’s it, that’s the one, yep, biblical, no, that’s not it either, oh, Jesus Christ.”      
The end

(Sometimes I’m even confused with Cary Grant)

By

W.R. Marcy

BEING TAKEN FOR A NATIVE 

I FIT RIGHT INTO THE NEW YORK CITY SCENE

     I arrived in New York in the dead of winter, staying at one of the finer hotels that one finds in a typical Cole Porter Manhattan setting, a part of town with adult entertainment and GIRLS – GIRLS – GIRLS in an off Broadway revue across the street from it featuring pole dancing that even I assumed had nothing expressly to do with fun-loving East Europeans.

     The name of the hotel that I was staying in was ROOMS, which besides being easier to remember was cheaper than the Waldorf Astoria and gave me the option of paying by the quarter hour, the hour, or the week, the week being much the cheaper, I opted for that as not even I could flop in fifteen minutes. But as my bankroll was such that it would not sustain me in ROOMS for any extended time, I was seeking more affordable quarters to no avail when fate intervened in the guise of doing an ordinary kindness.     

     The day after I started at the commission I went shopping at the local supermarket picking over the greens and displaying an urbane vivre et laisser vivre for the fruits, feeling very New Yorkerish and captain of my own ship, trying to economize: a small can of Spam, a loaf of Wonder bread, and a bottle of generic cola that I fancied was close enough to the major food groups that rickets would not set in before I exited the market or my teeth would not fall out while I slept. However, upon assuming formal responsibility for my $300 a month student loan payment and mom got her parole from the chain gang of higher education, I would look back on my purchases today as the makings of a health freak’s banquet, and as for my teeth, pshaw, who needs them when one is reduced to one bowl of gruel a day.

     I would put my purchases on the fire escape as there was no fridge in my room, but then I remembered that was unnecessary because the temperature of the room I slept in the previous night was identical to that on the other side of the window and when I had gone downstairs to complain of it to the consumptive desk clerk, he said, “I’m the desk clerk, I don’t handle complaints.” 

     To which I replied, “Who does?”

     “My guess is, Housekeeping would.”

     “Okay, where’s Housekeeping?”

     “I said Housekeeping would, but that’s if we had a housekeeping department, which we don’t.”   

     “Okay, where’s the manager?”

     “We don’t have a manager, only a desk clerk .  .  .   Where do you think you are, the Waldorf Astoria?”        

     So having paid for my purchases I walked out of the market and the first thing that greeted me when I got to the street was the disquieting sight of the old woman I had been standing behind in the checkout line leaning against the store front struggling to breathe. I asked if she needed help. She seemed to recover somewhat with my offer and asked me if I would carry her groceries to the end of the block where she lived.

     We walked slowly, saving what little breath she had, ignoring the impatient growls of persons of great self importance who were delayed a full picosecond with our pace, some of whom would have knocked her down or beat her up I’m sure had she not an escort, resting between parking meters as it took everything in her to make it to her building.

     When we got there I asked her if she’d like me to call a relative or a friend or maybe her doctor. She shook her head, and said she‘d be fine as soon as she got to her apartment and could rest for a minute. We climbed a set of front steps as steep as the north face of K-2, then two sheer flights to her walk-up where she unlocked her door and, turning around to relieve me of her grocery bag, fell over dead.

     I ran and got the super who assessed the situation instantly, and said after the shortest mourning period in the history of New York City superintending, “You need an apartment?” 

     Shocked by the question, I shook my head, unable to comprehend why he was not calling an ambulance or the police, and why the dead woman on the floor was being ignored by him.

     “$1200 a month, payable to me in cash or money order, and it’s yours,” he said, waving his hand at the open doorway where the old woman lay, “plus of course the one time gratuity of $500 for the Widows and Orphans Fund of which I happen to be the treasurer of, whaddaya say?”

     “The woman who lived there is dead at your feet. She likely gave you a Christmas tip, greeted you by your name when she last saw you. Brought you a bowl of chicken soup when you weren’t feeling well, don’t you want to let her corpse cool off first?“ 

     “Yeah, yeah, yeah, tragic, and I’m all broke up, but life goes on and she don’t have any people, and she ain’t gonna be deader if you don’t take the apartment, now is she?”

     “Pardon me for being old fashioned, but we call people like you where I come from, scoundrels.”

     “Oh now I get it. How long you been in town?”

     “Week and a half.”

     “Give it another three days, and you’ll be helping’ me stuff the old lady into a black contractor bag to put out on the curb and throwing a house warming party twenty minutes later so loud I gotta call the cops.”

     There are several things I should have done, but I did none of them as there was $2000 left of my bankroll and the rent at ROOMS would gobble that up in three weeks; if I also wanted to eat, make that two weeks, so I grit my teeth and did the math. The rent and student loan would leave me $460 a month to cover food, utilities, and personal expenses. Further calculation revealed a discretionary income of $3.16 a day.  Bill Gates better watch his ass.

     Later, when I walked into the apartment, the body having been removed at an amazing speed for New York City, meaning before serious decomposition set in, and I was sure without sentiment or ceremony, cash having changed hands and a rent receipt tucked in my wallet, I was struck with the bits and pieces of her small life that the super hadn’t looted. The odds and ends were as old as she and appeared to have been lovingly cared for. I felt guilty, I felt soiled, but most of all I felt relieved to be out of ROOMS.

GOTHAM HAS NEVER SEEN

A SLICK LIKE ME

     I came to the Trade Commission in a rumpled, lizard-shit-brown gabardine suit that the salesman said gave me that man on the way up look, a man to be taken seriously and someone to be paid notice, scuffed shoes filled with something cold and wet, and a six foot, one hundred sixty pound frame, a nose with a sniffy look to it, and an abrupt manner, in short the persona of the civil servant.  

     The Commissioner, Mister Irving Glickman, a dwarfish, balding, pot-bellied man in his mid-fifties who evidently bought his suits from the same prevaricating salesman that I bought mine from took me aside on my first day, and said, “Tips to live by, kid. Don’t burn the building down and try not to step on your dick.”

     Having thus conveyed the essentials for a successful Civil Service career he escorted me to my cubicle and told me his door was always open, an inexplicable assertion given the number of welds, chains, seals, and dead bolts on his portal that he kept shut tighter than a U-boat under a determined attack in World War II by the Royal Navy in the North Atlantic.   

     Consistent with his hands-off, slammed door, it-ain’t-my-problem style of management, Mister Glickman, a minor someone working the fringes of corruption and snatching at scraps of the spoils system by way of his trove of political  IOU’s, would disappear for a couple of afternoons a week to play house with his teenage girlfriend, his old maid secretary having been directed to inform those inquiring of him, an event with the frequency of a Geologic epoch that he was on Commission business and was not to be disturbed, a bar to communication that would have had it ever been the case exuded such fulsome sighs of relief from the inquiring individual, that in sheer gratitude he or she would have blurted out a proposal of marriage to her. 

     My job was to stonewall the phone. I was to answer it after the tenth ring, shouting, “Help! Help!” followed by a high pitched shriek, then fall silent.

     Mister Glickman explained, in a New York minute was coined at the Commission decades ago to convey the speed at which a Manhattanite will hang up a phone when faced with impending involvement. He also apprised me that plausible deniability was another phrase likewise coined at the Commission in the unbelievable event that some Gomer in this city actually responded to, “Help! Help!”                                                                             

     As for a personal life, the confluence of a civil servant’s income and a dishrag personality transformed every female sex maniac I met into a self propagating member of an alien species giving me cause to believe that a conspiracy existed wherein my likeness hung in the Ladies Room of every single’s bar in New York.    

WARNING!

AVOID THIS MAN

PRETEND YOU ARE A CARMELITE NUN

WITH A YEAST INFECTION

AND TWO BROTHERS NAMED VITO AND CARMINE

     Weeping in self-pity as it was spring and the tubercular New York City tree was coughing and budding, and the only blade of grass left in the city tried valiantly to save itself by pretending to be any other color than green, while the plucky last first robin of spring tried his best to chirp, but hoarse from the exhaust fumes of midtown traffic could bring up only phlegm, and the skirts of young women were on the rise whilst the sap of young men was in full flow, I renounced the libidinal pantings and soggy droolings of the single’s bars and withdrew into semi-celibacy.

     Mister Glickman, a married man of many parts, the favorite of which he regularly inserted into his nineteen year old Brazilian girlfriend who he had put up in a Brooklyn love nest allowing me ample time to use up a week’s worth of discretionary income taking in a movie, or girl watch in Battery Park without having to be at my desk much before four, a far more civilized hour for the people‘s business to get done, and still  perform my primary duties of fetching him his weekly quart of Jack Daniels, his daily three packs of Lucky Strikes, and the latest issues from the lavish cornucopia of spanking publications offered on newsstands in the financial section of Manhattan, he and Miss DeGama having taken to the dismal of human intimacy.                                 

     “Keep up this outstanding effort,” Mister Glickman said much, much, later, as I slid the booze, butts, and smut under the door of the stall in the privy where he was at the time conferring with his digestive tract, my eight years of grovel still a day late and a dollar short for entree to his office, “whatever your name is, and you just might be getting a cubicle by the ventilation duct, you know, for business related breathing purposes and all.”

I GET THE CALL

     Two weeks later Mister Glickman and his assistant, Miss DeGama, returned from a meeting of Commissioners in Albany, and summoned me forthwith to his office eliciting the poser, what matter of such import required the delivery of my suck ass self at long last to the sanctum sanctorum?   

     There were two ways of looking at the order to deliver myself to his lair. It was either bad news or very bad news. Having been the beneficiary of enough very bad news to be able to sense it in the air, and as the air was at that moment incandescent with disaster I took the polar route to his fiefdom, conducting a tactical delay to allow time for an intervention by the supreme power then perhaps a miraculous happenstance to occur such as a meteorite to come crashing through his window and thereby distract him from his unholy business with me.

     My circuitous path took me past the receptionist who lived behind a shoulder high desk front and who had not looked up from her copy of Cosmo in the eight years I had been with the Commission and other than the top of her head that I noted was neatly parted and dandruff free I had forgotten what she looked like and would have passed her on the street as another head of cared for hair in the crowd.

     Stopping at the cubicles of people who had started at the Trade Commission before me and who I had only a nodding acquaintance with, I asked them if they knew the name of the girl at the front desk? They shook their head then one by one they rose and called out to the person in the next cubicle, “Yoo-hoo, Miss Whatever your name is, what’s-his-name wants to know what the receptionist’s name is?” Ten of the twelve responders who were Yoo-hooed shrugged their shoulders and scrunched their face, and two didn’t know that the Commission had a receptionist.

     When I arrived at the desk of Miss Fish, Mister Glickman’s secretary I asked her about it and she said a girl out front had started at the Commission on the same day as she. Then Miss fish said, she had not seen the receptionist in so long she assumed something had happened to her and then she heard that she had died in a hunting accident in Africa but now that I mentioned her she was glad that what was then a young woman was well and still alive but did not recall anyone knowing her name even back then. Miss Fish suggested I try Personnel or payroll. They could help me but no guarantees, as both departments are very guarded about what information they will give out.

     “It’s a matter of turf, you understand.”

     “No.”

     “Well if they tell you then they’ll have to tell everybody else, you see?”

     “Why would they have to do that, and if they did do that why is that a bad thing?”

     “I don’t know. I often wondered about it but I’ve never said anything because Mister Glickman doesn’t like people to make waves.”

     “How could their telling me the name of the receptionist make waves?”

     “You know, now that you mention it I don’t know how that would make waves other than it would be a change to the status quo which is something else that Mister Glickman doesn’t like.”

     “I see,” I said, not seeing at all.

     I could have ignored Miss Fish’s advice as the only thing I wanted to know was the name of the receptionist, but I came to the depressing conclusion that it would have been a far better thing, not that I wished her any harm, if the girl out front had been trampled to death by a rogue elephant fourteen years ago. I was also left with the impression that Miss Fish felt that way too, and certainly Personnel and Payroll would feel that way if I were so rash as to go full steam ahead and make my reckless inquiry as it would have necessitated a decision on their part whether or not to release the information I requested, and the willy-nilly release of information being the wave maker that it is at the Commission, would have created a tsunami of problems, the humongous white caps of which would break upon the tranquil-because-that’s-the-way-he-likes-it beaches of Mister Glickman’s office, and someone’s ass would be thoroughly kicked. 

   Making a note never to take that route again, I tapped on Mister Glickman’s door and was rewarded with a bellow to enter.

     Crossing the carpeted floor of his office, a work space the size of Zeppelin hanger without a file cabinet or an arm chair, I lowered myself onto the raw wood stool in front of his desk that put me at eye level with it, and peered at him across an empty expanse broad enough for a safe docking of the Hindenburg.     

     Glaring at me, he said, “Well?”  

     “Sir?” I responded, confused by a question that in its present and incomplete form was a non sequitur.

     He nodded at one end of his desk. On that one corner of the desk was a smoldering meteorite the size of a soft ball.

     “You know anything about that?”

     One does not have to do much pretending to affect genuine surprise at the discovery of a smoking meteorite on a desk.

     “No sir, had I known about it, you would have been the first person I told, sir .  .  .   Sir?”

     “Yeah, what?” 

     “Shouldn’t we put some water on it?”

     “I didn’t get to be His Gracious Commissionership by going into a new-boy panic and wetting my pants and browning my shorts every time a goddam meteorite came whizzing through the window of my office. I think things through, step by step, consider all the alternatives, analyze everything, weigh all the options, consider what my predecessor, Samuel F. Crumshott would do, and come up with the best solutions to all problems, we better put some water on it.”

     “Yes sir, good idea, sir,” I said, running to his water cooler. 

    He glanced up at the hole in his window. “Goddam thing missed doing me in by inches.

     “You were lucky, sir,” I said, pouring water on the space rock.

     “What do your mean, lucky? Luck had nothing to do with it. It was my lightening quick reflexes that saved me.”

     “Yes sir,” I said, slapping myself on the forehead in a display of public penance for a careless suck up. “I forgot you play a wicked, take-no-prisoners, croquet, you know, with your trained reflexes and all.”

     “Good sucking up, kid, that makes up for the fumble.”

     “Thank you, sir.”

     “But that’s not why I called you in here, kid, and by the way, you took your sweet ass time getting here.”

     “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

     “We move at the speed of light around here, kid. If you can’t keep up, get off the beam.”

     “Yes, sir, I’m making a note of that right now, sir. No moving at less than the speed of light, sir. Sorry about the delay.”

     “Kid,” he said, “it’s time you got to be a player.”     

     “Yes, sir, if you say so, sir.”     

     “Somethin’s come up that we gotta finesse.”     

     “Finesse, sir?”     

     “Yeah, you know, bullshit.”     

     “Oh, yes, sir.”     

     “There’s a problem with a lady, if you get my meaning.”     

     “Yes sir,” I said, not knowing his meaning.     

     He opened a drawer of his desk and pulled out what at first appeared to be an itsy-bitsy hot pink handkerchief.        

     “I found these panties in my luggage when I got back.”     

     “They’re very attractive, sir. A gift from that special someone?” I said, with a wink and conspiratorial lilt to my voice, tiptoeing through the minefield of his indiscretions, trying for the big enchilada, the rarest of the rare, a full set of double suck up points. “Something cool for a hot Commissioner on those close and steamy New York City nights perhaps, or maybe a lady’s favor, as perchance Marcel Proust might have said in one of his more poetic moments, of a delightful dalliance past or maybe .  .  .  ?”     

     “Cut the crap, kid, my girlfriend planted them in my luggage for my wife to find.”     

     “How awkward.”     

     “Awkward? Awkward? You ain’t married, are you? And wait a minute, you’re not who I thought you were. Okay, okay, who the hell are you? I mean, I think I’ve seen you around, you work on the 18th floor, right?”     

     “4th floor, sir.”     

     “Oh yeah, you’re Feinberg, the guy in Archives we hired last week.”     

     “No sir, Archives is on the 9th floor. My name is Beauchamp, sir. I’m the Second Assistant to the Associate of the Telephonic Communications Supervisor‘s second in command. I’ve been with the Commission eight years.”       

     “Never heard of you. Never heard of Telephonic Communications. Didn’t know we had a fourth floor, which is strange when you think about it, since here we are, the both of us, on the twentieth floor, go figure.”     

     “If you think it’s strange, sir, I think it’s strange.”     

     “Good sucking up, Bowchamp.”     

     “Thank you, sir.”     

     I heard of Feinberg, he’s doing a job, got a future, kisses ass like his face should be on a toilet seat. See the ass, kiss the ass, the goddam Babe Ruth of ass kissing, that’s Feinberg. If anybody’s ass gets kissed around here, you can bet the farm that Feinberg’s lips are close by. I got blisters on my tochis from his lips. Mark my words, he’s going to be in the ass kisser’s hall of fame someday, a huge building on the West side with nothing but pictures of bare asses on every wall as far as the eye can see and Feinberg bending over and kissing every goddam one of them. Scares the hell out of you at first, but forget Archives, think proctology. So how come I never heard of you? Forget I asked.”     

     “Yes sir.”     

     “You Jewish?”

     “No sir.”

     “You have just made my dead mother and all my ancestors back to King David very happy.”

     “If  mom’s happy, I’m happy, sir. As for King David, I never had the pleasure of meeting him but  .   .   . “

     “Are you making sport of me? You’re making sport of me, aren’t you? You’re sitting on your ass in my office stroking my johnson, and making sport of me.”

     “Stroking your what, sir?

     “My johnson, goddamit! My johnson! What the hell are you?”

     “I’m the Second Assistant to the Associate of the Telephonic Communications Supervisor‘s second in command.”

     “Tell me this isn’t happening, that it’s all a nightmare.

     “Yes sir, it’s all a .  .  .  ”

     “First of all, get off the Jewish thing, we don’t need you, we got enough problems. And second, you’re not a fruit, are you?”     

     “No sir, sir.”

     “Can’t have fruits working here. Wouldn’t be able to use the facilities, what with the giggling and primping and falsetto singing that fruits get into in Men‘s Rooms. The Men’s Room is for the serious business of real men, whip it out and let ‘er fly, and when you’re finished, reel it back in and stow it away, right Feinberg?“

     “That’s Beauchamp, sir.”

     “Whatever, and don‘t correct me again. We get an outbreak of fruits working here productivity will fall off. Everybody’ll sit around reading poetry and wearing purple.”     

     “Yes sir.”     

     “Are you sure you work here? I mean, it could be an honest mistake, like, you work somewhere else but you come here every day instead, you know, like, oops, here I am again at that place where I don’t work, I mean, it could happen to anybody, right?”     

     “I don’t think so sir. My coffee mug is here. This is where I wait for five o’clock. I pick up my paycheck here. I have my Roy Rogers pencil box here.”     

     “Well, I don’t like any of this one goddam bit.”     

     “Yes sir. If you don’t like, I don’t like it.”     

     “Good sucking up, Bowchamp.”    

     “Thank you, sir. Sucking-up is what I do, sir.”     

     “Okay, Bowchamp, let’s explore, awkward. The wife finds the panties, I kiss my twinkies goodbye, verstehen Sie? The girlfriend is looking to renegotiate her contract, verstehen Sie? But I can read the clock on the wall as well as the next guy, and when it gets to be cherchez la femme time, it’s time to au revoir it on down the road, verstehen Sie? You speak Portuguese? Forget I asked. Now don’t you go misunderstanding me, Bowchamp, I respect the living hell out of women, especially them that’ll clear a man’s sinuses without tripping over their tits, if you get my meaning?”     

     “Yes, sir,” I said, unable to conjure up in my mind the astonishing picture of what he had just painted.

     Motioning me to climb onto his desk, I crawled over to the near proximity of him where he took hold of my ear and hollered the Brooklyn address of his girlfriend into my eustachian tube. “Don’t go gettin’ brilliant. Just hand over the panties and tell her Colonel Spielen got called back to the Fatherland.”     

     “Colonel Spielen?”   

     “Listen up, Feinberg, there are two things you can bet your wilmers on. They got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil, and there has never been a goose-stepping sonofabitch that they don’t love. You speak German? No? Okay then fake it. Amerikanish shvine, vee half vays huff megging hew tock. By the by, do you know how to disarm someone pointing a large bore handgun in your face? Forget I asked. Tell her Colonel Spielen will give her a call when he takes over Poland, got it?”     

     “Uh, excuse me, sir, large bore handgun?”     

     “Didn’t I tell you to forget I asked, didn’t I? Doesn’t anybody around here listen to me? What is it with all of you people? Do you think I talk just to hear myself talk? What’s the point of being the Gracious Commissionership if nobody listens to a word I say?”     

     “Yes, sir, sorry, sir. May I get off the desk now, sir?”     

     “Goddam it, Bowchamp, what are you doin’ on my desk? You are definitely acting like a fruit. You sure you’re not a fruit? A tangerine, for instance? A mango, maybe? Forget I asked. Look, I got plans for you, kid, so don’t screw up.”     

     “Yes, sir, I understand, sir, thank you, sir.” I said, slithering off the desk and back onto the stool.     

     “One more thing. When she lets you into the apartment, keep your fly zipped and your hands off her ass. If I work it right there’s still a roll or two in the hay left for the old Colonel, got it?”     

I DON’T KNOW WHAT ANYTHING MEANS ANYMORE

     Stay in school, study hard, and make something of yourself.

     If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

     Keep your fly zipped and your hands off her ass.”

     She ain’t gonna be any deader if you don’t take the apartment.

     It’s a matter of turf, you understand.

     We don’t have a manager, only a desk clerk .  .  .   Where do you think you are, the Waldorf Astoria?        

SOME THINGS ARE NOT MEANT TO BE

     Getting off the bus a week later with one suitcase and a garment bag at the cross roads of route 6 and Main in Witson where I had returned after eight years with my mind in a splint, I looked down the empty road of my life and saw it all laid out in front of me. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, then finally:

WILLIAM BEAUCHAMP

1965 – 2043

Mister Beauchamp was seventy eight years old and waged a long and losing battle with irrelevance. A lifelong resident of Witson except for that fling in New York and the less said about that the better. He was a graduate of Calvin Coolidge Senior High School in Witson since what else was there to do with him, the thinking being, having not learned the multiplication tables in his twelve years in the public school system, what would a thirteenth year accomplish? A graduate of the university of Kansas by divine intervention. He didn‘t amount to much. Didn’t give much thought to anything. Was dumb as a bag of rocks. Never married. Women found him boring. He had a dog once. Its name was spot. It ran away. He didn’t belong to any clubs. None would have him. He sold used rubber bands on the corner of Main and Elm at a nickel apiece for thirty five years. Folks fondly remember him calling out to them as they passed him by, “Buy a goddam rubber band you cheap sonofabitch.”

Viewing hours

7-7:10 P.M.

Biewald’s Funeral Home

Interment to take place at 10 A.M. tomorrow at:

THE FINAL SANCTUARY OF

THE PERPETUAL LOSER’S CEMETERY

  Everyone is invited.

     As Mister Beauchamp had no friends, and did not believe in the existence or the divinity of our lord, Jesus Christ. And he mocked the Clergy, the pope, Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman in The Bells Of Saint Mary’s, and Jennifer Jones in the Song of Bernadette, a crowd smaller than usual is expected. 

I FINALLY HAVE THE LIMELIGHT

     They’ve laid me out in your basic single breasted lounge lizard powder blue polyester suit with green felt lapels and a white ruffled front dress shirt and emerald colored cuff links that will be on the Sixtieth Anniversary Sale rack at Dobbs Haberdashery advertised as a one of a kind Elvis Special by tomorrow noon and I’ll be put down in my altogether, my face a mask of friable brown like Miss Elsie’s, the eighty eight year old Madam of the one woman whorehouse outside of town who’ll come to pay her respects to her best .  .  .   to her only cash customer. 

     “Don’t know what the make-up brouhaha is all about,” she’ll say, “he looks fabulous to me and as for the other business between us, one never speaks ill of the dead, but who do I see about all of the IOU’s he gave me for services rendered, and taking into account what he had to work with I‘d give him an A for effort .  .  .   where‘d he get that swell lookin’ suit?”

.  .  .   in a casket that cost as much as an SUV, and Biewald’s demented grandson and heir to the undertaking business is drinking sour mash and pushing the casket like a shopping cart through a supermarket, riding the rear axle through the viewing rooms, hunched over one end, warbling a nasally rendition of On The Road Again while an electric guitar version of Abide With Me screams full bore somewhere in the darker recesses where the newly dead laugh and tell jokes, stay up late, drink Martinis in stem glasses with both hands, smoke unfiltered Camels and Cuban cigars, have unprotected sex, eat all the delicious crispy fat off a leg of lamb, and old people who have nothing better to do are dragged in off of the street and given a dollar to say something nice about me but all of them have to give the dollar back as the only thing they can think to say is something like, “Sheeez, now I remember him, what a loser.“     

The end

by

W.R. Marcy

     Rose got buried in the cemetery on the hill alongside her hard faced mother. Most of her friends and family having gone on to glory ahead of her and it being August we didn’t wake her long. One day and down.

     That night we had a party in Pop Lyttle’s saloon with pitchers of beer and cold cuts and macaroni and cheese, and potato salad and coleslaw and devilled eggs and rolls. And people made toasts to Rose,  and uplifting sort of words for her quick entry into paradise were on everyone’s lips. It was just like Rose always wanted with everybody laughing and drinking and dancing and having a swell time.

     I stood behind the piano while Pop played, singing the old songs with my pals from the bus company and drinking buddies from the saloon and when there was a pause in the singing to answer the call of nature, then telling everyone about the plans I had for going to Italy with the insurance money. Not a lot of money mind you, but more in one lump sum than the likes of me ever held in his hand at one time, a cool five thousand and don’t think that didn’t catch the eager ear of the widows in the crowd. And my plans were the same as Rose had if we won the lottery, like how I was going to sail down a canal in Venice in a gondola and sing, O  Sol O Mio, and eat a bowl of spaghetti in Rome, and climb the leaning tower of Pisa with a glass of  Chianti wine in my hand and make a toast to my Rose. And people were kind, oh God were they kind with their condolences and words of solace. It got me to weeping to be fussed over so.

     After the party I drove home to the Cape I bought thirty-five years ago. Back then Rose said, if we didn’t buy all’s we have when we’re old is a pile of rent receipts. I said I couldn’t afford it. She said, we couldn’t afford not to. I didn’t say anything else as I saw the beer  money I took from my pay envelope sprouting wings and flying away.

     Now the house is a falling down wreck, what with a leaky roof and rotting window frames, and broken thermostats, and wiring to make an arsonist wet his pants, and a water heater twenty-five years past its warranty period, and an outside deck that’s worth your life to walk on as it rolls like a schooner in heavy seas.

     I was never good at fixing things; didn’t fit my lifestyle. And I told Rose on many the occasion that money for repairs was an extravagance we couldn’t rightly afford, and she’ get cross because she didn’t know the first thing about managing money, and  she’d

say something like, we’d have more money if I spent less of it in the saloon.

     I stepped inside the house and its emptiness overwhelmed me. Till death do you part, the Justice of the Peace said in ‘58 down in Elkton, Maryland in his parlor. Rose died, we parted, and anything worth wanting parted with her.

     The summer passed, the cold weather set in, and I celebrated thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s eve in Pop’s saloon. I hate the holidays. I mean, what have I got to be thankful for, and a lot of people got themselves born on December 25th but Jesus Christ wasn’t one of them, and as for New Year’s eve, that’s for amateurs.

     It’s hard with Rose gone. I have to shop and fix my meals and do the wash and clean the house and pay the bills and ten thousand other things I didn’t have to do before.

     Rose  was thirty when her breathing problems began. At first I thought she was blowing smoke up my skirt, you know, shirking her proper womanly duties, but when I saw she couldn’t climb the stairs to her sewing room, well I knew something was up.

     Emphysema, the doctor said. She told him that lately her emphysema had worsened. He said, emphysema doesn’t get worse, we get older and as we age we lose the elasticity that our tissue had when we were young.

     Emphysema put Rose in the hospital every year after she turned forty. When she was fifty-nine she had an adverse reaction to the Prednisone she got in the Emergency room  that would open her breathing tubes and she went clean out of her mind for six weeks until the antipsychotic medication, Haldol they gave her in the lock-up ward got her psychosis under control.

     Before her bad reaction to the Prednisone she took in wash to help make ends meet. But even with her thirty bucks a week the bills still came in over the backs of those we had just sent out and I’d get depressed with never having enough to be free and clear for one week, and while Rose  gasped for air over someone else’s dirty laundry I’d throw a paycheck across Lyttle’s bar because I wanted it to be like it was when I was young and life was sweet. But Rose wouldn’t let my being me spoil things, and she’d tell me something she remembered me doing that was kind and generous and she’d call me a good Joe and I knew she made it all up.   

     In late January I went into Lyttle’s saloon after work and drank more than I should have and I felt the grief coming on and those other women didn’t mean a thing, just a trap that weak men fall into out of boredom, I mean  I was still a stud in a gone to seed sort of way, and  my eyes spilled over as I thought of Rose, a person so much better than me. and her being dead and me alive was a wrong that bewildered the mind, and how  cruel of God to design a plan that needed Rose to suffer the agonies she did before He killed her. A loving God? Unjust and treacherous is what He is, more so than any that has pressed up against Pop Lyttle’s bar or the warm belly of a woman not his wife. And I stared through my tears and drank drink after drink  and wished, oh how I wished that my Rose had won the lottery and  could have traveled to Italy.  I was no saint and I didn’t do for Rose what a man should do for his woman and when I did I did so stingy and half-assed since I didn‘t have much practice to begin with. Yes I sinned against Rose but so did God. I sinned because  I’m mortal and weak and easily tempted. He sinned because He can and no one can do anything about it and wouldn’t that make Him nothing more than a schoolyard bully? 

     I wept and  looked for words of solace from the stone-still drinkers at the bar, but they had their own troubles thank you and didn’t have time for mine anymore. It was plain on their faces my misery was no longer welcome.  I’d have to take my grief home with me and crawl into bed with it. But you can be sure when I come back from  Italy it’ll be a different story. Then they’ll all want to listen. They’ll all  want to hear how grand it is in Italy, and the things I saw there, and the things I did,

     A man needs a friend in a town like Halsey-on-the-Hudson and what better way to make one than over a drink or two. Men like to talk about menly things from time to time and get away from it all. Women don’t understand that; Rose sure as hell didn’t. If  I was to have the relaxing drink after a full day’s work I’d find her in the doorway ready to give me an earful when I got home. It wasn’t like Rose didn’t have friends, especially in those last weeks, gabbling, nosy women with nothing to do and it made them feel good to do it in my house, serving Rose hot meals in bed on a tray and cheering her up with town gossip and the black woman what’s-her-name who bathed and powdered her three times a week and dressed her in fresh nightgowns and straightened the bedding and helped her on and off  the necessary and put ointment on her bed sores and kept her company. And visiting nurses who spent so much time in my house I should have charged all of them rent.

     Nowadays I go into the saloon and no one asks how I’m feeling. It was different when the insurance money came in and I bought drinks for everyone and everyone was kind and making toasts to Rose. That’s when Pop asked how I was feeling and I told him I felt fine,  that Rose and me didn’t part, that she’s waiting for me on the other side. Pop said the knowing that must ease the pain a lot, and I said thanks for saying so but it didn’t. Then the fairy who delivers my mail says to me from the far end of the bar, the death of a mate is a special loss,  and not to suffer the course of mourning is to belittle the depths of my love for my mate and the magnitude of my loss. And if anyone isn’t comfortable with my grief, just remember, they only have to live with it for an hour or so at a time. I have to live with it for all my days. What the hell does he know about the loss of a mate and of mourning,  he’s a  goddam  fairy.

     Rose would find out I cheated, and I’d say something like, men have different needs than women. She’d say, I’m your friend and I love you but I want you to know that’s the biggest load of crap I ever heard in my life. Needs? You need to grow up. Rose would say things I never had an answer for and I’d get angry and storm out of the house and down to the saloon where a man could always find an intelligent discussion of womanly responsibilities, and tie one on for the shame of it all.

     Near the end and before they took her to the hospital, her metabolism slowed and the build up of carbon dioxide in her lungs began to displace the oxygen until she’d be gasping and struggling to breathe and getting frantic and begging me to help her. And my not knowing if she was going to die, and under the pressure of doing it fast and doing it right I’d get fumble-fingered with the dial on the oxygen generator and then angry with all of it as I was doing the best I could and it wasn’t good enough. Then later when she calmed down, she’d smile and call me a good Joe, and Jesus Christ, I’d cringe in shame.

     The summer we got married I borrowed a small inboard and we sailed up the Hudson into a mild breeze, headed to a shoreline picnic grove I knew of. And while motoring along I stared at her young and perfect and scrubbed face when she didn’t know I was looking and I filled with joy because I saw the strength in her that I didn’t have, and even more, that it was okay with her that she had strength enough for the both of us and would handle everything the world could throw at us. We eloped two weeks later. Rose said that  was the summer she felt the most alive. How is it that someone like me can have a summer like that, a summer that is golden, where everything I did was right?  How is it I deserved that summer?

     A year or so after Rose passed, a Tuesday night, and it’s raining, I walk into Pop Lyttle’s saloon. The place is empty but for Pop handicapping the trotters and old man Taber at the end of the bar staring at the bottom of his glass.

     Out of the blue Taber says, “It’s time I died.”

     I look at Pop but he has horses on his mind. So I say, “You’ll make it to a hundred without breaking a sweat.”

     “I’m forty-two. Forty-two years of marriage to the same woman. All the before and after doesn’t count, just wasted time and lonely, especially lonely.”

     Next day I go into the diner for breakfast and I find out Taber died in his sleep. Natural causes, they said. Natural my ass.

     I sold the house to a couple of starry eyed newlyweds that don’t know squat. He’s a carpenter but they’ll still curse the day they bought it. They won’t have that house off their backs or out of their purse until Flynn the undertaker takes them for that slow ride up Cemetery Hill.

     Moved into the rooming house behind  Pop’ saloon. Can’t say much for the appointments but it’s convenient. I’ve got a bedroom and a bathroom. After closing expenses on the Cape I’m sitting on fifty-five thousand dollars. Like I told Rose, you’ve got to know how to manage money.

     I go on a bender. When I sober up I’ve lost eight thousand dollars on the trotters. I’m sitting on the edge of my bed, holding my head in my hands and telling myself that if Rose were alive it would never have happened. How many times does it have to happen  before I have to say, it would have happened. Oh Rose, all the before and after is so meaningless and lonely, especially lonely. When does the wisdom kick in?

     A year passed since I sold the house and I drove back to see what the newlyweds had done with it, and while on my way I remembered how happy Rose was when we first moved in, eager and proud and bubbling over at having her own nest.

     I parked across the street and sat staring at it. They had turned it into the place Rose always said it could be if we put some sweat

and money into it.

     They gave it a new roof and new window frames, resod the lawn, cut back the brush, and pruned the tree limbs. The outside still needed a coat of paint but like I use to say to Rose, they didn’t build Rome in a day either, to which Rose said, she didn’t want one of the seven wonders of the world delivered to her front door, she wanted her bathroom painted. I started the car feeling down in the dumps. Rose and me, we could’ve done as well by the house.

     My stomach can’t do the job is used to do: a double order of fried grease, please and hold all of them greens and  anything else that might pass for a healthy meal. Can’t drink like I used to either. Before Rose died I could drink diesel fuel. Now a beer or two is okay, but mostly I drink red wine. Then there’s the personal thing where the pills I have to take has an adverse effect on my, you know, my rise and shine. Makes me omnipotent.

     Then I tried to win back the money I lost on the trotters. Pop and me are at the track, it’s the ninth race, I’ve had eight losers, and I’ve got two hundred dollars left. Pop pins the sheet with his finger and recites the Lord’s prayer of horseplayers. “The six horse, it’s a mortal lock. Go for your lungs, he’ll pay telephone numbers.”

     I look at the six and bet it all on the two. The six goes wire to wire and pays $82.60, which would have gotten me near even for the year. I tell Pop I bet the two horse, and his grin falls into his socks. “You figured out the two horse all by yourself did you? No, no, don’t tell me how you did it. I don’t want to know how you picked a  one-eyed horse with a limp that should be playing bingo and shuffleboard with blue haired ladies in Florida, instead of creeping around a racetrack. You could be gumming T-bone steak tonight, but, it’ll be hamburger helper again, and you deserve it.”

     I tell Pop, “ I don’t have the belly for long shot anymore. I’m running out of money.”
“He says,  the way you pick horses, well I’m surprised to hear that.”

     A month later I’m in the saloon. It’s Monday morning, McGurck the beer salesman is buying and all of the soaks have appeared out of thin air. Alfred the mailman  is sleeping one off on the bar having been on a bender since Thursday when he got stood up by an oiler for the Hudson Rail Lines, and is going to lose his job with the Post Office if he doesn’t call in sick soon.

     Pop Lyttle is at the other end of the bar snickering with all the rest of the bums, telling them a story that has them laughing and glancing at me.

     Suddenly McGurck is an expert on my life, saying, “You give him an eighty two dollar horse and he jumps on a loser. Ask me if I’m surprised. Closest he’s gonna get to Italy is the Pizzeria down the street.”

     Then a soak, saying, “Hope he don’t forget his camera. He keeps promising to show us pictures when he gets back   .  .  .  Now this here one is a large pizza with anchovies, and this here one is a meatball parmigiana wedge, hah, hah.”

     “Sweet Jesus,” Pop says, “if you’re only guessing your gonna be right once in a while. You’ve got to put a first class mind to it to be that habitually wrong. I’m not talking about forbidding matters like Allen Einstein dealt with, I’m talking little things that in the end are harder for a woman to bear with than a man who has the get-up-and-go to warrant a place in the witness protection program.”

     Pop lifts his glass. “Here’s to you McGurck, and here’s to the woman of your house.” He downs the beer, smacks his lips, and wipes is mouth with his sleeve. “My grandfather, God bless him, jumped ship in New York harbor eighty years ago with a dollar in his purse, ran Scotch whiskey down from Canada, knew the name of every cop on the take from Watertown to Yonkers, never left a  racetrack a loser, raised a family of twelve, was faithful and true to my grandmother and had hisself a fine life. Then,” Pop says, with a glance at me, “Then there are them born to this country who never missed a meal and still managed to live the sort of life a man would scrape off the bottom of his shoe,, which isn’t the worst of it, and that being the unfortunate woman who believed his lies and  pledged her troth to him. McGurck,” he says, “we’re all sinners, God forgive us, but she deserved better. You should have seen her when she was young, an angel she was. As sleek as a panther and a smile to make the heart melt inside the breast of the beast.”

     I had supper in the diner as usual, then went back to the saloon that was empty but for Pop who poured me a glass of wine and returned to his newspaper without saying a word. And now it’s one more middle of the night and I’m on the edge of my bed thinking, maybe I’ll get myself a TV,  and I turn my head to ask Rose what she thinks about it. Twenty years from now it’ll be something else, something small, and I’ll turn to her to tell her about it, and she won’t be there, and my eyes will spill over because she isn’t.

     I dreamt of Rose. I heard her calling me, her voice young and fresh and clear, “Come on, Frank, come on.”

     I want to go but I’m afraid. I don’t understand what she means, I don’t understand what she wants me to do. I know damned well what she wants me to do but I can’t bring myself to do it because I’m afraid.

     It’s three A.M. and I’m laying in bed watching Frederich March in Death Takes a Holiday, which it never does with the sound off on the TV I picked up at a tag sale. I don’t go in the saloon anymore. I don’t know why I ever did. The way I’m living is pitiful, but if Rose were here, just the way things are, a single bed and bathroom, me without two nickels to rub together, it would be paradise. We’d snuggle under the sheets and watch Frederich March chew the scenery and we ‘d fall asleep in each other’s arms. But that’s not the way it is, and the way it is, is I sneak wine into my room and I don’t go looking for solace anymore.

     You should have seen Rose the first night we went out. Her grandmother answered the door and told me that Rose would be   with me in a minute, and a minute later, there she was in a little black dress, and all the rest of it is hogwash. It was at that moment that she  struck me speechless, and I was so much in love I wanted to cry.

     Rose was in the hospital sixteen days. When they first brought her in they took her off the ambulance oxygen and put her on the Emergency room supply, then  listened to her heart and lungs with a stethoscope. Her lungs were clear and that took a load off as so often they weren’t. Then they checked her ankles because being bedridden, gravity made the fluids settle in her lower extremities  causing her ankles to swell, and the more fluid she retained the harder the right side of her heart had to work.

     Her blood pressure was low and her pulse was high which was normal for Rose. They drew blood then pricked her forefinger and smeared slides with the small bead that formed to measure her blood gases and especially her carbon dioxide level. They did an EKG then prodded her abdomen with their fingers, and while they were doing that they got her into a hospital gown, and asked her how she felt and where it hurt and how bad the  pain was and how long she’d had the pain and all the while nurses and doctors kept popping in and out of the curtained area where Rose was along with the woman who gave her her breathing treatment,  and after a while I lost track of who was who and who was doing what, but even so, I had been through this so many times I knew as much about Rose’s emphysema as any of the doctors.

     But this time it was different, this time she was in pain. When they took her to the hospital in the past she’d be struggling to breathe like she was under water and drowning. But this time I could see the pain in her eyes, and the way she held herself, bracing her body against the hurt, and how the tendons in her neck stuck out as if she were straining at the end of her rope and that made it harder for her to breathe.

     Rose had trouble moving her bowels for a week and I thought all she needed was an enema and that would take care of it. The nurse’s aid who came in regularly helped her with her enema but it didn’t do any good, and she was still experiencing pain I thought was cramps, but other than constipation I couldn’t guess what was wrong with her. Another doctor came in and asked her a lot of questions and Rose told him about the constipation and he slipped a rubber glove on and put a rectal smear on a slide that seemed to have blood in it then he disappeared.

     They admitted her an hour later, and Rose, just before they sent her down for X-rays, sent me home for her robe and makeup and underwear and white cotton socks because her feet got cold in the hospital, and her crossword puzzle book and a number two pencil. I had taken two steps and she hollered at me not to forget her lipstick, the one in the vanity. I took another step, and she hollered at me again not to forget her hairbrush.

     I got back as fast as I could which was two hours later and when I got there a doctor told me that they did an emergency exploratory and found Rose had colon cancer that had spread to the liver and abdominal wall. I nodded  like I understood but I didn’t, not a word of it. I swear to God it was like he was  talking Chinese.

     Rose was dying.

     Of course Rose wasn’t dying. Where did anybody get that idea?

Wait a minute, I know what happened. They must’ve mixed her test results up with somebody else’s. You read about that in the paper all the time. Anybody could see Rose was sick, but they’d give her an antibiotic to make sure it wasn’t a bacterial infection and small doses of Prednisone as I had already cautioned the doctors and nurses in the Emergency room that Rose had a bad experience with Prednisone, went completely out of  her mind for six weeks, and if they could use smaller doses, you know, something around 5mg was my suggestion, why Rose and me would be real appreciative. I’ve found that if you take the same professional approach with them that they take with you, why  everybody gets along  just  fine.

     They told me Rose was still in Recovery and wouldn’t be sent down to the ICU until later. They suggested that I go home and get some rest, which I did.

     Next morning I thought that when I tell her the scare she gave me last night she’ll only wave her hand and tell met o go home, that she’ll call me when she gets a phone. Then I thought it’s them that better tell her that she’ll have to spend a week in the hospital. When she gets wind of that whoever tells her will get skinned alive.

     I entered the ICU and was looking for Rose when a doctor stopped me and told me much the same as I was told last night except this time I was told that Rose had gone into cardiac arrest in the night and had to be resuscitated. Then he told me they did a partial colostomy during the  exploratory. I knew what a colostomy was, but I didn’t know what a partial one was. What I did know was Rose would raise holy hell about it, so I asked him, since it’s partial could it be reversed, and he said that we’d talk about that later. My mouth was dry and I felt a lump of fear in my stomach. Things were closing in on me and I needed a  drink.

     Rose was awake. She had the colostomy tube, a bladder catheter, and a drain running out of the surgical wound so that she had three thick walled tubes running into separate bags under the foot of her bed. She could not breathe on her own so they had intubated her and put her on a respirator. A very narrow IV ran into her neck, a tube into a nostril, and fourteen bags hung from an IV pole, its needle stuck in the back of her hand. I think I was smiling at her, but I couldn’t tell if she smiled back or not. A nurse came in and gave her a shot of morphine and in a minute she closed her eyes and fell to sleep.

     Over the next several days Rose began to blow up from the Prednisone. Her forearm became the size of my calf,  and her calfs ballooned to the size of load bearing beams. She would try to write me notes but she couldn’t sit up and she couldn’t rest the note pad on anything firm enough to write on because she couldn’t move. When she did manage to write it was in the secret code of the dying, nothing but  slanted W’s strung together in different lengths  and she got more and more frustrated by my not understanding her. Then the nurse would come in , give her morphine, and she’d slip into sleep.

     On the twelfth day I  was standing beside her bed when  the surgeon lifted her gown and revealed the wound that ran up and down her stomach. He had stitched it so loose it looked like it could flop open.  Huge and undressed and threatening, it was the most gruesome sight I ever laid eyes on.  He prodded the wound for a  minute with a long swab in a way that made me grit my teeth and my skin to crawl, cleaning it, I thought, then pulled her gown down and her blanket up. Days later I realized that more than cleaning the wound, he wanted me to see it.

     When I left Rose’s room the ICU doctor took me into a room where he explained how sick Rose was. When it had fully sunk in, when there was no place for me to hide, no way to deny, the talk turned to a Do Not Resuscitate order. Rose could be kept alive on machines, but is that what she wanted?

     I don’t remember what I said. I don’t remember walking into that room. I signed something but I don’t remember what. I only remember pleading with him not to let Rose suffer. Then I watched as he and two nurses went to her bed and spoke to her, and without hesitation she made her mark, a string of W’s at the bottom of the form. Having made her mark there was nothing more to do but wait. The enormity of what I had done hit me and I went back into the room where the doctor had talked with me, covered my face with my hands for the shame, and cried harder than I had ever cried in my life.

     The next morning they took her off the respirator, and put a face mask on her to help her breathe and make her more comfortable. Then the IV bags began to disappear until by day fifteen there were two left, one of which was morphine. That evening they transferred Rose to the oncology ward on a morphine drip only.

     She died at  7:05 in the morning.

      Rose sighed and slipped away. That’s all there was to it. Forty seven years of marriage, sixty nine years of life, pain and struggle and heartache and disappointment and trying as hard as she could and she just slipped away. No comets in the night sky, no trumpets announcing the ascension of an angel, no heavenly chorus to comfort her, Rose just slipped quietly away.

     An older nurse came in the room, put a hand on my sleeve and asked if I needed anything. Then a clergyman, a man my age took me into the hallway and talked with me while the nurses removed the catheters and the last IV and straightened Rose’s bedding.

     The man talked to me for ten minutes, the long and short of it being how the death of Rose was part of God’s plan. He was a gentle and decent sort of man who meant well but at that moment I didn’t want to hear how God killing Rose was a good thing.

     The nurse came out of Rose’s room, smiled at me and said that Rose  was ready for company now. I shook the clergyman’s hand and thanked him for his kindness and went back inside. Rose was laying there like she was asleep. I sat down on the edge of her bed and stroked her hair and told her I loved her and I thought,  how does God expect someone dumb as me to understand His master plan when I can’t handicap a horse or shingle a roof or install a new window casement? No, it’s more than that, it’s not that I don’t understand His plan, and I don’t, I don’t give a damn about His plan, I only want my Rose back. Is that so difficult for the Master of the universe, the creator of everything to understand? How is it that God Almighty does not understand that one simple thing? A five year old would understand it. When He created us did He not know what He had created? Did He not know what we desperately need? Then maybe there is no God, or God just doesn’t care about us. That we are toys He made for His amusement and if Rose got herself broke, well so what? There are plenty more toys where Rose came from.

     I felt anger spilling over in me. And I must obey Him without question? If He didn’t want to be questioned He should have made me smarter or at least let me know what He wanted of me. He talks to  people who are crazy as hell all the time, and the crazier they are the more He has to say to them, and He has never said word one to me. His master plan? To hell with His master plan. I want my Rose back.

     Pop Lyttle died of pneumonia a year ago. Pop was a good bartender, a great storyteller, and an opinionated and self righteous sonofabitch. Albert the Postman died three months ago. The bender cost him his job at the Post Office. It turns out he went on the bender not because he got stood up but as he found out he had the fairy disease. He was a good sort who had a short and unhappy life. All the soaks died. They all seemed to go together like they all got the same bad glass on the same day.

     I didn’t realize how much I loved Rose until she died. Some men know things beforehand, almost as if they’re born with it printed on their brain. They know how to manage, know how to make money, know how to take care of their woman. Some men just know these things.

     Rose is dead and I’m not. Where is the intelligent design in that? So the louts and the bums and the drunks will inherit the earth? He gives us another world, a paradise we can’t see until  we’re dead and gives nothing but humiliation and heartache here?

     The couple I sold the house to had a baby girl and  before she arrived they turned the house into something special. They also bought the vacant lot bordering their property that I said to Rose when it first came up for sale .  .  .  only a fool would buy that worthless acre of scrub. Now there’s an acre of grassy lawn, a winding footpath, and a flower garden that’s a marvel. They’re selling the house at four times what they paid for it as they’re expecting again and need a bigger place. Only thing Rose and me ever expected was water in the basement when it rained.

     It’s six o’clock of a Tuesday evening at the end of October and I’m sitting in a window booth in the Halsey diner having supper. Whatever’s under the oily brown crap they call gravy in this place was lost for so long in the bottom of their freezer that it petrified and a chain saw couldn’t cut it. I get a piece in my mouth and I’m trying to chew whatever it is since it sure as hell isn’t anything that somebody would order on purpose, and wishing I had someplace to go after supper or someone to talk to, and I’m looking out the window at Pop Lyttle’s saloon across the street and I’m thinking how fast Main Street went downhill after it closed. There are places that ghosts naturally gather, and looking through the dark window of the saloon I see Pop at the end of the bar with his scratch sheet, but unlike the liberties with the truth that he took with the story of his grandfather, who it turns out was a cruel and unfaithful sonofabitch who died of the drinker’s disease, Pop never had another winner after the eighty two dollar horse, and old man Taber staring into his world of sorrow at the  bottom of his glass, and Albert the Postman nursing a drink and trying to be invisible and McGurck, a twenty on the bar and the soaks licking their lips, waiting for him to say the holy words, “buy the bar a drink,” words that gives McGurck license to be the instant expert on the life of the army of losers on his sales rounds, and in particular, one living in misery for his loneliness at the other end of the bar and by God doesn’t he look an a lot like me.

     I dreamt of Rose two nights ago. I was angry with her for something and she was ignoring my anger, laughing at me, as if my anger was something she didn’t have to put up with anymore since death did us part, and that made me angrier. So I threw the drawers with her clothes in it at her and her clothes streamed out of the drawers, including the nightgown she wore thirty years ago and I felt a panic that she would be mad at me  and when she walked away and didn’t look back I woke up frightened, thinking what if Rose doesn’t love me any more? What if she throw my sins in my face? What if she is with someone she likes better than me? And that really scared me as most anyone she met was better than me.                

     I go to the diner like always to have breakfast, and  while I’m finishing my second cup of coffee the owner comes around the counter and shakes my hand and tells me the diner’s closing for good on Friday. Business is so bad he can’t pay his gas bill and I think, with what he served last night I’m surprised to hear that. Putting out them kind of meals, why I  would have expected  caravans of people trying to break down the door to get in here but I didn’t say that, I wished him good luck  and told him I’d miss him.

     I walk out the diner into a gray December morning and look up and down the street at the boarded up businesses. In six months Halsey will be a graveyard and where will I go for my meals? But that’s in six months, now I’ve got a raging case of heartburn, no place to go, nothing to do,  and no one to do it with. I feel clammy and sick to my stomach and I’m thinking that maybe the diner shouldn’t wait until Friday to close, when a bone crunching pain slams my chest so hard I can’t breathe. I see Rose across the street.  She’s twenty and beautiful and wearing her little black dress. She’s smiling and calling me, “Come on, Frank, come on.” I’m scared because  .  .  . because I’ve got to go to Italy first. I want to go, oh God, I want to go bad.

The end

by

W.R. Marcy

     In 1931, on an overcast day in late December before the first big snow, before the sleigh riders tested their mettle and Flexible Flyers on the steepest hill in South Yonkers and that would be Bruce Avenue an almost vertical plunge that intersects aslant at the bottom with Lawrence Street, intermittent patches of ice gripped the sidewalks with rock hard nails and iron teeth trying to look like something other than the ice monster that it is waiting for a kid to come along to slip on, fall, then sink its ice teeth into the kid’s knee making it hurt and bloody, thus scoring another victory to giggle over with the other ice monsters, nine year old Pincus Zuckerman a lesser example of the slow witted that the ice monsters feed on, in an oversized mackinaw buttoned to the top, collar pulled up to his red ears, and wrapped like a mummy in so many layers of clothing he can’t turn his head, offers himself to his new neighborhood, well maybe not new as he has been living in the apartment building at the northeast corner of Lawrence street and Broadway for the past month, practicing in front of the medicine cabinet mirror, steeling himself for this moment:   

     “Hello, my name is Pincus Zuckerman.” No, no, no!

     “Hi, I’m Pincus, want to play?” Arghhh, no, no, no!     

     “You don’t know me, but . . .” Phfttt, no, no, no!

     “Nice day, isn’t it . . .?” Hmmm, I don’t think so.

     “I just move here and I’m lonely.” Eeeeeeeeeeeekkkkk!

     “So what’s to do around here?” Okay, maybe.

     Upon exiting his building, the sole of one shoe starts to flap up and down, talking in that two beat tongue that shoes talk in like, da-dum, da-dum when a sole breaks free and struggles to pull itself off of the down at the heel uppers which is exactly what he did not want to present to a bunch of new kids who would then be put off by him, as if anyone in that neighborhood would as much as notice or care that one more sole was making a break for it, or in another way of looking at it, if his shoes hadn‘t been in such a sorry state the kid‘s in the new neighborhood would wonder why and assume that his family was rolling in clover.

     Then there is the corduroy knickers from the Benefit Shoppe, the second hand clothing store off of Getty Square, that flare at the belt line giving him the appearance when his mackinaw is off of a diminutive and skinny Red Grange in his football pads, or an ambulatory fluted floral vase with a kid stuck inside, and threadbare knee socks that have holes in the heel and toe he can put a balled fist through and tops that have lost their elasticity, go slack, slide down his corpse blue shins, and gather at the ankles leaving his bony knees bared for the fangs of the ice monsters.         

     It would be another three years until Pincus would be told, the only thing he had to fear was fear itself .  .  .  Horse hockey! There are ice monsters and, “Oh my God, I almost slipped and fell on ice and if that happened I’d of gotten a bloody knee that would have needed an operation, and the doctor would have said, “I’m sorry Missus Zuckerman, we tried to save the leg, but .  .  .” and then I‘d have a wooden leg and termites will gnaw on me and chase after me down the street,“ and there is the new neighborhood with its alleys that go down to silent and menacing places that are out of earshot of people on the street to holler for help, or too far away to run home to your mother, and the bottom of the alleys were terrifying because who knows what awful things happen to kids out of sight there, and the darkness of his room where he lays awake at night afraid to close his eyes for fear a horrible unidentified something will creep up on him and shadows dart about in the gloom and if he holds his breath he hears unfamiliar sounds at night that could be a footfall in his room and then maybe a monstrous hand over his mouth to muffle his scream so his mother wouldn‘t hear him and come to his rescue, and the new school that he now has to go to and that means new kids and new teachers and fractions that are hard since as his uncle Boris says, they’re inexact and of no use to anyone beyond a, “I’ll have a half a pound of this and a quarter of a pound of that.”

     And being friendless and having no one to walk home with from school with, and his father who is the smartest man in the world can find only irregular work, that being the helper of the Junk man, Sammy Pearl which means that while Mister Pearl rides on the high bench seat of the horse drawn cart with the reins in his hands looking down on the junk to be picked up like a man of importance, a master of his own fate, a connoisseur of previously owned merchandise, his father who will do all of the heavy lifting must ride in the open cart with the junk that he has picked up, himself  not unlike a thing somebody has no more use for or is broken and has been thrown out for the man with the horse and cart to take away, and this will take place in front of everyone in the new neighborhood and how long will it take for it to get around that the junk man’s helper is Pincus Zuckerman’s father and so much for a fresh start in a new neighborhood.

     Being the not so new kid on the block, Pincus, who knows nothing about the neighborhood that in addition to a row of stores on the south side of the street, the continued survival of them from day to day is as problematic as the weather, has a range of five story fire traps on the north side easily mistaken for a set of ignitable dominoes waiting to be set ablaze by way of their tinderbox construction with combustible wooden rear porches and staircases front and back and a dumbwaiter shaft cum chimney flue for garbage removal that awaits the lurking arsonist or careless smoker to let fall the lit cigarette.

    Among the neighborhood stores running west to east was Pinsky’s Stationary store owned and operated unsurprisingly by one Missus Dora Pinsky who when she passes will leave it to her old maid daughter, Miss Myrna Pinsky who would prefer the hives than spend five minutes more than she had to in that dark and futile prison, a woman in the last vestiges of middle age without marriage prospects who will look the wrinkled and withered image of her mother in a few short and brutal years, and both women in their black funereal dresses with faces given them by their kin, misfortune writ large upon their brow as a race who have known hardship and misery for more than five thousand years, and left without any real choice are open seven days a week, fifteen hours a day, and offer all manner of shopworn goods but stationary.

     And Pinsky’s is next door to Kowalski’s barber shop, whose haircuts go begging as will Kowalski soon because everyone is saving the quarter by having their hair cut at home or not, as a haircut does nothing for a growling belly or keeping a roof over your head, followed by three empty store fronts, the middle one of which in the spring of 1933 will become the 6 1/2 Club saloon that will be opened by a thirty five year old charmer and illegal immigrant with a wife and five young mouths to feed whose name was Pop Lyttle, who jumped ship in New York harbor six years earlier having arrived unceremoniously from a destitute Ireland, and who made himself a dollar or two running Canadian down to the Bronx.

     And this is the sight that greeted Pincus that first minute on the street, when the next thing he knows, Phil Kaplowitz, a head taller but about the same age spots the new, scared, and confused looking kid for what he is, a member of one of the tribes of Israel, and in two seconds he is walking down the street with him, talking of this and talking of that . . . “and what school do you go to, P.S. 13 maybe, and do you have a hobby? My father says that everyone should have a hobby. I collect stamps and have three of them already . . . someday I hope to have more, and what is your favorite team, the Yankees or the Dodgers? We got enough losers in my family so I‘m a big Yankee fan. I live at number three, where do you live? You do know that the sole of your shoe is coming off, don‘t you?”

     Then he and his new friend who is not knew to the neighborhood but doesn’t go out much because of his health, he said without explanation, stopped halfway down the block and with a great show of foot stamping, ostensibly to warm them, and one might inquire how stamping one’s cold feet on an even colder sidewalk is going to get them toasty warm but in truth what they were doing was stalling as a group of tough looking Irish kids, lit cigarettes dangling from their lips were swaggering toward them like the street gangs from the infamous Hell’s Kitchen where gangsters such as James Cagney and J. Carrol Naish and George Raft grew up and who now live in penthouse apartments in buildings with green awnings and doormen who hold the door open for them so they shouldn’t straining something and all of this high living comes by way of the proceeds from their criminal activities stashed in wall safes behind stunningly awful oil paintings in their swank art deco living rooms that cost a bundle to decorate, the only visible purpose of the posh living room being, for criminals to walk through in their swell looking tuxedos so they can get to their front door to go out to a nightclub for a midnight supper of whisky as they never eat and drive, and that was the answer to the question about the state of Kaplowitz’s health .  .  . so what was so wrong with your health that you never left your apartment? 

     “Irish-itis!”

     And Pincus could feel the first chill of that dread disease creeping up his spine as the twelve horsemen of the apocalypse loomed larger and larger.

     As the gang closed on them, their blue pea coats wide open like they did not feel the cold of this gray wintry day, a tough looking Italian kid leading this band of Gaelic thugs and future bank robbers and prime candidates for a reserved seating in the electric chair in Sing Sing, who absolutely, without a doubt must have had his picture on the wall of the Post Office, and though he was about the same age as Pincus he looked far older and as strong as the man who carried the blocks of ice with his iron tongs up as much as six flights of stairs to fill the ice boxes, or what they supposed an anarchist or a Chicago gangster looked like in case Pincus thought for a second he was going to get out of this goy collision in one piece, and . . . oh, oh, here it comes, Pincus thought, Jew this and Jew that, as the singsong taunt that someone in the midst of the gang had started singing was, for reasons that he could not put his finger on, the most teeth grinding, the most insulting, the most obnoxious of all . . .

Matzos, matzos, Two for Five,

That’s what keeps the Jews alive

. . . and only later, Pincus decided, that it was not the words that angered him but the unvarnished contempt behind the words that hurt. While meant to be offensive and it was that, it was survivable, however the bruising and the lumps he was sure were to follow terrified him. Even imagining the worst was worse than any physical assault he had ever experienced as Pincus had never been struck by anyone. In his old neighborhood, the one he just moved out of because the rent had not been paid in three months and the landlord had to eat too, he had been pushed around a little but everybody under the age of ten was pushed around.

     His father had warned him of confrontations like the one that was about to come down on top of him in a very few seconds, telling him he had two real choices: either stand up for himself and by doing so get beat up and bloodied, thereby earning the respect of the aggressor, advice that Pincus rejected as it fell from his father’s lip’s, since it was not the respect of a bully he wanted but the bully’s leave-taking to a place far away, or pretend that you have a difficulty with the language, as if you had just got off the boat from Estonia, a peculiar place because of how close it was to the north pole and under the full force of the pole’s magnetic attraction caused by the dynamo effect of the spinning of the earth which of course as everybody knows changes the facial features of Estonians as they are growing up just like the gravitational pull of the moon has an effect on the oceans by creating tides, so that all Estonians look like Jews but are in fact practicing Methodists, make that confirmed Presbyterians unless you want to get fancy, then go for Seventh Day Adventists, wait a minute, wait a minute, even better yet, and why didn’t I think of this before, certified Orthodontists! Who in this neighborhood would know anything about an orthodontist?

     So as the gang came upon them, the toughest looking of the bunch, the Italian anarchist looking kid who was, Pincus had no doubt, a paid up member in good standing in the Black Hand Society with his dog eared dues card tucked away in his back pocket, whose name was Tullio they would find out later, had the bearing of one with unshakable resolve, and who filled Pincus with such fear he was afraid he would wet himself, slid his eyeballs toward Pincus and Kaplowitz and said matter-of-factly, “Howyadune guys,” and kept walking without slowing in the slightest, dragging all the grinning Irish kids along behind him in his commanding vortex. 

     It was at that moment it occurred to Pincus that there was more to the streets and the confrontations that occur on them in the course of trying to fit in than his father knew of, but even worse, his father did not know everything and that he was subject to error in this as in other things which is the painful truth that every boy comes to and must find a way to erase from his mind if his father is to remain wise in all matters, above reproach, and as immortal as God almighty.     

     And as disquieting as it was for him, he knew his father didn’t know that once you are known as a neighborhood kid of a certain age who lives in a particular apartment building and comes out onto the street regularly to be a part of the life on the street and keeps his mouth shut, then you are an accepted presence into the stream of life on that street, and as for the rest of it, the day to day minutiae, once the kid have been accepted then it is only to be decided if the kid has what it takes to be a member of the Lawrence Street gang meaning, will he stand and fight with the gang against chain, club, and knife wielding gangs from, Brooklyn or the Bronx, or the sorry wannabes in north Yonkers which it is quickly resolved that neither Pincus nor Kaplowitz had that stuff without asking them a lot of questions, but you should not feel too sorry for the boys because not everybody can be so lucky as to have their skull bashed in by a baseball bat to prove how brave or how much of a man they are.

     So the thing to keep in mind is, the rules of the street are not based on foot traffic in the neighborhood but on the day in and day out characters that populate the street meaning, one day you look up and there’s a new guy in the mix who seemed to emerge from nowhere who is an energetic doer type, an interesting and ambitious personality who may have passed all the rigorous tests of street fighting with the scars to prove it, and may even be artistically inclined, with ideas that he expresses in a booming and confident manner, winning everyone over by expressing uncomplicated sounding answers to complicated questions that he promises to be final solutions to problems that have been around since the time of the Egyptians, and has a lot to say about things that other people shrug their shoulders over, and everyone stops to listen to and nod in agreement with him, and as quick as a wink they make him the leader of the gang, and the next day .   .   .  and the very next day, before the sun breaks cover of the trees, bright and early, right on schedule, there is angry shouting in the street and the sound of heavy boots running, and screams of pain and splattered blood on the stoops and stupefying violence just outside your window as he only then reveals the agenda that he had all the time.

     But rules of the street, as necessary as they are for a boy’s acceptance into the prevailing society, deal with an entirely separate set of problems that do not put bread on the table, and do not inform the greenhorn why he should not get into things that are risky, nor when to get out of a false boom in the stock market that he heedlessly got into on a wish and a prayer margin account that is supported and backed up by nothing but hot air and high hopes before it crashes and he loses everything, and he can‘t get a job, and the rent is getting harder and harder to pay, and bread on the table is a thing of the past, and your mother sits at the dining room table with her head in her hands.

     And Pincus learned the first lesson of cowardice. Stand perfectly still. If you have any money in your pocket, keep it there and your mouth shut. Do not ever draw attention to yourself then when everyone else is being butchered around you maybe you won’t.

     A moment later his foot hit the ice and down he went. An instant before something tore at his knee, and among the particular scrambling sounds of garments yanked about under stress, and the gasping a person makes before he hits the sidewalk, he thought he heard the sound of giggling.                           

     Pincus lived at number one Lawrence Street, Kaplowitz at number three. Obliquely across the street from them was Pinsky‘s stationary store where two gum ball machines were chained to the front during the day that were named Buster and King by the kids in the neighborhood as they reminded everyone of a pair of Doberman Pinschers guarding the two women from surprise incursions by cash wielding customers that no one ever bought a gum ball from, and were brought inside by Myrna Pinsky in the evening to perform their guard duties in the store at night. A store that had nothing a self respecting thief might steal and who would, after looking around for something of value, most likely have left a coin in one of the dusty trays of the register to make up for the chocolate they took from the penny candy case or any other disturbance they may have inadvertently caused, and where the boys were hired to deliver the newspapers in the neighborhood in the early morning for a total of a one penny candy that they split in half, the surgically accurate physical splitting of which took longer to accomplish than the delivery of the papers.

     As tribal members are predisposed to congregate within their tribe, they became as close as Damon and Pythias, as close as the Three Musketeers minus one, as close as the four horsemen of the Apocalypse minus . . . well maybe not them but where one was to be found it was certain that the other would not be far away, and in the summer if no stick ball game between the boys on Lawrence Street was in the offing, or on a muggy evening when their apartments were airless and none of the gang was hanging around talking about all kinds of stuff, they would walk the ten minute trek west to the Hudson river and watch in that slightly cooler damp from a grassy hillock that overlooked the multiple sets of New York Central Railroad tracks, boats and ships sailing up and down the river, or during the day when fishermen dragged their nets in the great river, or the jobless worked their lures off of the piers and from time to time caught something to bring home for their families to eat, and it was the rare fisherman who did not voice his thanks directly to the river at the end of a day, or give it a fraternal wave as he left.

     And then there was the Yonkers ferry that went back and forth to Stony Point at the foot of the Palisades where on board worked the luckiest man in the world and he would be the one who jumped off the ferry an instant before it docked to place the looped end of the hawser line over the piling that secured the ferry to the pier then lowered the checkered steel plate so the cars on board could drive off.

     Later that summer his aunt Sarah gave Pincus two dimes for being a good boy, she said, so that they had the money to take the ferry and to go crabbing on the other side at the foot of the Palisades with borrowed crab nets, which was the most exciting thing either of them had ever done, and in what seemed like no time at all they brought back a burlap sack full of crabs for Kaplowitz’s mother to cook in boiling water and feed them fresh crab on newspaper spread out over the expandable black and white metal kitchen table top until they, the three of them could not look at another one, and which they both agreed was a day that was as close to heaven as two boys from Lawrence Street would ever get.

     Or on summer nights when they would sit on the stoop of number three with the gang and talk of interesting things, like the inclinations of certain girls and whether they did it or not, and it seemed to Pincus he was always the one in the dark about what it was that the girl under discussion did or did not do; the girl they were sure did it receiving far more conversational coverage than the girl who they all said didn’t do it, but Pincus felt loath to reveal his ignorance of such matters that educed opinions so strongly held that from time to time fist fights broke out, and in doing so reveal a level of ignorance on his part that was certain to earn him the contempt of the urbane ten year old men about town who were the final word on females of easy virtue.

     Then talk would shift to maybe baseball and how somebody actually went to a Giant game at the Polo Grounds and what a great time they had, then when it got dark maybe they’d look up at the sky and talk about planets and stars and God, but Pincus felt uncomfortable when the talk turned to talk of God since by that the others meant Jesus Christ and in the background of that was the eternal personal guilt of Pincus and Kaplowitz for the murder of Jesus which is enough to make anybody uncomfortable to be accused of even though he and Kaplowitz were nowhere near Golgotha at the time of the crime, and not to make problems for the gang where there were none to begin with, but neither kid had actually existed then, and to anyone with an interest in the facts of their guilt or innocence, they had no motive, opportunity, or means, and if the gang had given a second’s thought to it, how many people nowadays stockpile wood crosses in the basement of their apartment buildings to commit such a crime, and besides, Kaplowitz and Pincus had terrific alibis and lots of witnesses to back them up, but unfortunately all the witnesses were also Jews and their word can be taken for nothing except for Jesus who was accidentally Jewish therefore it didn‘t count, and so the two boys would remain silent through the catechism lesson, seeing as the two of them could not prove their innocence beyond the shadow of a doubt and stood, sat actually, convicted of committing the worst, the most heinous, the most awful, the most unforgivable crime in the history of the world, and since they as well as every other Jew on earth had lost their soul, they would burn in the fires of hell for ever and ever when they died . . . their  mothers, their fathers, all of their blood relatives, and their pet canary too who was Jewish by association, condemned by a loving and compassionate and otherwise forgiving God without hope of pity or forgiveness or salvation, and as there was nothing the two arch villains of the universe that were under the spotlight could do about the sorry state of their soul, they nodded in a conciliatory manner hoping for the conversation to take another, more agreeable turn, which eventually it always did.

     And later that same evening when everyone else had left, Kaplowitz, his brow wrinkled in puzzlement, said, “They’ll get into foul mouthed fist fights and beat each other half to death over whether a girl, a child they don’t even know does it or not, but when passing sentence on two Jews who aren’t old enough to go in the deep end of the pool for the worst crime in the history of the world that was committed two thousand years ago, they’re all of a sudden Talmudic scholars in reasoned debate?”                       

     And then in 1936 when they are fourteen there is a fire in Kaplowitz’s building that burns everyone out, a fire of such intense ferocity occasioned by the incendiary nature of the wood stairways front and back, and the all wood porches in the rear that were so bone dry they’d burst into flame if you rubbed your bare hands together over a splinter of them, and a dumbwaiter shaft that fed a small fire oxygen until it blew like a welder’s torch making a manageable fire to begin with into a major conflagration. And by some miracle nobody gets killed, but everyone has to find a new place to live, which the Kaplowitz’s do in the Bronx.

     Both boys realize that the friendship they had is over. They would make faltering efforts to keep in touch but they are bewildered by the enormity of the day in and day out effort to do so. Then in the blink of an eye the moment comes when they realize they have not spoken with one another for months and that they are no longer Damon and Pythias as the demands made on them and on their time has changed their lives.                        

     It is another blink of the eye and Pincus, who is not over the guilt of, or resigned to the death of his father in 1933, hears news of his uncle Boris being killed in Spain during their civil war, shot to death by an outraged husband actually, having found his wife in flagrante delicto with uncle Boris, the details sanitized for the ears of Pincus, and a loss to Pincus with repercussions that will dog him for the rest of his life.  

     Then what with an increased need to pick up the pace of his academic performance, such as that was, his inattentive and aimless drifting in school capturing the notice of no one for his entire school career as the symptoms of whatever was the cause of his academic shortcomings were disguised over the years in the costume of social promotion, a time honored tradition of passing on a kid who can barely read to the next level that satisfied the demands of the system and the family, and led his mother and the three Sarahs to think he had the foundation to take on more difficult school work that he was in no way up to taking on, and get a scholarship to a good college, like Princeton or Harvard that will pay for everything, and the after school and weekend jobs, and having to be the man of the house when it was all he could do to be the boy and not fall on his face from the effort, well the sum of it that may have been manageable for some was crushing for him, and with all the worry and sorrow that his life had taken on came also a yearning to be free of any more responsibility in his suddenly burdened life.

     Time flies even faster and before you could say, without potatoes it ain’t latkes, Phil Kaplowitz is twenty years of age and breaking a glass with his right foot while a young lady with the most beautiful smile Pincus has ever seen is standing beside his happy friend, but who on the other hand is a girl that Pincus does not know from poached pears, and the next day, a Tuesday in February in 1943, Phil and his bride are gone to California, and that‘s the last time that Pincus will ever see his friend, the one and only true friend he will ever have, in the here and now.

     The next weekend Pincus spent an afternoon thinking of the impermanence of family and friendship, and the futility of it all when in the end it is as over as if it never was. He decided right then that he would never again commit to a friendship with someone, as nothing lasts. 

      Eight months later, a week before Halloween, Pincus learns that Sergeant First Class Phil Kaplowitz of the 37^th Infantry Division was killed in the line of duty on July 26^th in New Georgia in the Central Solomon islands.

     His mother who got the call from Phil’s mother, broke the news to Pincus when he came home from work at Rose‘s department store. He stood in front of his mother for thirty seconds, mouth open, blinking, staring over her shoulder at the wall.

     His mother reach out to him, “Pincus?”

     He took a step backward and repeated the same thing again and again, “It is not over as if it never was. It is not over as if it never was .   .   .”
The end

by

W.R. Marcy

     With the paper work to my student loan tucked safely in my desk and my degree framed and hung on the wall of my bedroom, I stare open-mouthed at it. I’m twenty eight years old, living at home, and can‘t get a job. I don’t mean a  career that includes picking up a $200 lunch tab, or taking off with other VP’s in the company jet for a bit of ski time in Aspen, I mean a job.

     Why does one need a four year college degree and a crippling debt load to be a worker ant in the 21^st century when a six month course after the fifth grade will do nicely. One that devotes itself to the fine art of sucking up and responding to one’s betters with, “yes sir” and “very good sir” and “will there be anything else, sir?“ thereby certifying one as qualified to spend a working lifetime with one’s hat in one’s hand being the Second Assistant to the Associate of the Telephonic Communications Supervisor’s Second in command. And if one must ask, how do we know who our betters are? Then the answer is, anyone who is drawing a breath until advised differently.   

     Why is a four year degree necessary to be an accountant, or programmer, or a middle manager? College is a befogging with false import upon the dross and drivel of commerce and its unbearably monotonous activities. And the reason why it is a good thing that the odious bureaucrat has a four year college degree is? And what useful collective purpose does a college degree serve when the majority by an immense measure of those having had a college degree conferred upon them are ill-educated or uneducated or functional illiterates?

     Those pursuing a true profession or a hard science need attend an accredited University for academic proficiency in their field of interest and to demonstrate a level of competence within a set of testable standards .  .  . In the case of a medical doctor, knowing a lung from a liver, or a cosmologist, knowing the last night plane out of Casablanca with Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid on it from alpha centauri, or a licensed attorney, knowing what is billable so that the stray nickel is not left on the table in error, and in every case with the fervent hope that there will be in the syllabus ethics courses to protect the likes of us from the likes of them. None of this includes the pseudo professions that sprout up like crab grass to give thin cover to the intellectually barren, the lazy, and those who are parking themselves until the movie producer skids to a stop at the curb, jumps out, and discovers them.                

     And to those missionaries without portfolio who would pursue a social science, spare us the workings of minds that refer to those paper stapling activities as science, as social science is to the work of real science as the block corner is to an archeological dig, and are but a trifle without merit or challenge and a sanctuary where the ungifted flock to avoid the dreaded pick and shovel.

    Consider the politics of eighty years ago when most voters did not have a college degree. Devastated by the great depression, haggard and hopeless people, if they had a bed to go to, went to it hungry .  .  .   Philosophy? The Greeks? The Romans? Lit 101? Economics? There was nothing left at the end of a day for a stroll through the rooms of those ivory towers, as every ounce of strength and every waking moment was taken up with finding a crust of bread to put into the growling bellies of their rail thin and sickly children. The politics of the depression were the sort that simply promised white men a chicken in every pot.

     Then compare that with the college educated sophisticate of today who cannot be bothered developing a cogent opinion regarding the universe of unintended consequences of the First World War, its impact, and how it changed the lives of everyone on this planet, or if given a world map could not point out Guadalcanal, or the Ardennes, or Colleville-Sur-Mer upon it, or cannot recite a line of poetry from memory, or have never sat down and listened to a rendering of Bach’s Partita III  and Loure, minuets, Gavotte en Rondeau, Bouree, and Gigue by an accomplished violinist because, Barney, that’s not where the big bucks are, and the big bucks is what it‘s all about.

     But those precious youthful years will be gladly wasted fulfilling the requirements of some diluted and worthless graduate school program that qualifies them to buy and sell derivatives, or for a job in government that inadvertently hold the lives of all of us in hands that have never known a callous or a mind that knows nothing but the counting of beans  .  .  .   Day in and day out until they turn grey of face and pass away as if they never were.

     These, the new, the college educated, the informed electorate of today have the moon and the stars promised to them but somehow in spite of their savoir-vivre, wind up in Korea, Vietnam (and for some reason, Laos and Cambodia don‘t count), the island of Granada, Lebanon, Kuwait, Gulf Wars one and two, Afghanistan, Iraq, and whatever that thing in Cuba was called, plus threatening to nuke Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea, and if Russia or China would like a little of that too, why just step right up, there‘s plenty to go around.

     And if our foreign policy falls a little short of sanity, or the credible, or the least bit comprehensible to anyone who was promoted from the sixth to the seventh grade, then there is always the powerhouse American economy that won World War two but disappeared overseas around 1970 and that means we no longer have a heavy industrial capacity, which in turn means the only job left out there in the cruel world is being a rock star .  .  .   a country of three hundred and twenty five million rock stars. Apparently it’s true, God punishes the wicked.

     God also punishes the wicked by having thieves elected to congress who sell their sacred office to the highest bidder which is not to say that an immense amount of money is required to buy him, as his representation isn‘t worth very much to anyone, nor is it to say that the congressman is always, but always, from Louisiana, it just seems that way. Or elect unpleasant little trolls with bad hair and a foul mouthed wife to, for the lack of a word, govern Illinois. Should they ever skim the scum of politics off the pond of Illinois they will be left with a dry ditch.

     It also makes the chicken in every pot pitch sound like statesmanship or Grand Opera, because, Skippy, what more is it we want from government than that? But in the 1930’s only rich white men got the chicken in their pot as there were only so many chickens and, as fate always has it, there were exactly the same number of rich white men as there were chickens.                       

     Today, there is the woman vote, the Black vote, the brown vote, the green vote, the gay, lesbian, and chicken plucker vote, there is the Liberal vote, the conservative vote, abortion, gun control, illegal immigration, the war vote, the peace vote, the death penalty vote, the national Health Insurance vote, and ten thousand other groups as well as the ever omnipresent rich white men vote with their very special important problems that must be attended to without further delay, or ado, today, at once, immediately, now! And to every one of these groups promises sworn to on a stack of bibles are made by sincere sounding politicians who will fix all these problems a week after they’re elected with a wave of their hand .  .  .   especially those truly serious problems of particular annoyance to all the suffering rich white men.

     Are we morons?  

     We are morons!

     That is when we briefly consider  marching up and down Third Avenue in our ratty blue bathrobe with a placard nailed to a wooden slat:

REPENT – THE END IS NEAR

And callow teenagers point their finger and holler insults at us.

The end

by

W.R. Marcy

PASSING THE CIVIL SERVICE TEST

GETS ONE COMPED AT THE DOORWAY TO HELL

       Five years passed and word spread that the protégé of Henri Gasson, the world famous hangman was to unveil the designer execution, one that will imbue the supreme tool of good government with those ironies that give a panache to the triviality of death.     

     It was Gasson who took me from a  place of dark pointlessness and gave me cause to live. Moldering in the bureaucracy of the Civil Service, I was gray of face and slowly slipping away while still in my twenties, submerged in a darkness with the power of obscuring any brightening of the spirit by way of its immeasurable depths, but I get ahead of myself.

     While having lunch in my favorite restaurant, a gentleman in his late forties with a mincing gait, pursed lips, and a chalk white complexion was escorted to the table next to mine. Being seated he placed his walking stick, gloves, and wide brimmed hat on an adjoining chair, opened a tabloid, and immersed himself in the heinous crimes reported therein, penciling notes in a tiny hand in the margins.                                                                                 

     Straight away curious, I blurted out, “Pardon me, but are we at war with yet another Arabic antichrist armed with weapons of mass destruction cleverly disguised as camel flop, or do you always bring such interest to your paper?”  

     Looking up, he said, “Ah, oui, one must stay abreast, non? The precise exactitude with the customer, the attention to the detail .  .  .  Monsieur?”     

     “William Beauchamp,” I said, sticking out a hand.

     “Henri Gasson,” he replied, shaking it with the tips of his tiny breakfast sausage fingers. “Beauchamp? Beauchamp?” He nodded, as if confident he could go on conversing with me as an equal. “We French have the understanding of matters lost on the rest of the world, don’t you think, non?”    

      “The Beauchamps,” I sniffed, “stopped thinking two hundred years ago. It proved an impediment to advancement in the new world.”     

     “Deux hundred? Ah, mon vieux, it is of late I am here.”     

     “Really? You speak the language like a native,” I lied.     

     For ten minutes our conversation proceeded smoothly with but an occasional linguistic speed bump until he said something I was sure I misunderstood.  

    “You say you’re in the extermination business  .  .  . They check in but they don‘t check out, is that it?”  I snickered.   

     “No, no, Monsieur, I am an Executioner.”     

     There was a faint pause; then I whispered,  “Jesus Christ, you kill people?”     

     “An indelicate turn of phrase, but yes, and by way of the hanging.”     

     My unflappable poise having been flapped, I said, “You are an avalanche of surprise, Mister Gasson.”     

     “Non, Monsieur, I deal in certainty. Surprise is a confounding of certainty, and the one certainty of life is that it ends. I merely keep those at the head of the line moving along briskly without any foot dragging.”     

     “Not before they’ve had their morning coffee, I trust,” standing as I had finished my lunch and had a plausible excuse to escape this madman, “but I have business to attend,” I lied.     

     “Ah, your divertissement is delicious, Monsieur. I should so like to continue our tête-à-tête as my clientele are not disposed to witty repartee. Please, shall we say three weeks from today when I return to New York? Do not say non, Monsieur, I would be inconsolable.”     

     Monday of week three, having put Gasson out of mind, I attacked a lunch of ham hock, red cabbage, boiled potatoes, and my daily drowning in beer, and had only just finished when in he walked.     

     “Monsieur Beauchamp!” He cried from the front door. “You dear boy, you are not taking the disappointment to me.”     

     Joining me at my cozy table, and ridding himself of his fussy belongings, he set his glass of wine before him.     

     “You’ve been busy, Monsieur Gasson?”     

     “Traveling, dear boy. The exigencies of business, you know. And what have you been doing at the, Trade Commission is it?”     

     “Catching up with my work.”  I lied.   

     Gasson weighed me with his eyes. “The spirit needs room to roam and breathe. I imagine that government work does not allow for that.”     

     “It allows for nothing.”     

     “Then is it the matter there are canons of your faith that prohibit your considering another line of work?”     

     “Are you offering me a job?”     

     “A job you have, I offer you the redemption, a chance, perhaps your last chance to be alive. The time has come to train my replacement, Monsieur and I am thinking that you have the right temperament, we are after all from the same blood.”         

     “Assuming I might be interested, having done what I have done for the past eight years, why would you have me?”                                                 

     “Monsieur, like all of us you must find your niche to assist la histoire. All questions you ask must serve that end otherwise your being has no purpose in the service of les grand resolution. But what questions to ask?” Gasson cooed.  “One can think of themselves in terms of history only when one comes to an agreement with the triviality of one’s death, and who among us other than the bureaucrat comes to understand the utter triviality of their death?”     

     “I make it a point, Monsieur, to avoid death. Trivial as the event would be to a preoccupied world, it would prove devilishly difficult to explain on my resume.”     

    “Men live lives without a thought to their mortality not because they are indifferent to death, but because only those that have a rendezvous with it at an hour known to them give the respect due to time.“ With a Gallic shrug, he added, “The mechanics of an execution are a trifle if set about without style or concern for the doomed, mastered in a quarter of an hour. It is what I bring to the condemned at his finale that takes much effort to learn.”     

     “And what besides a length of rope can you bring to the condemned?”     

     “Mon Dieu,” he said, eyeing his watch, “I do prattle on.” He sprang to his feet. “I must be off. Think about what we have been talking of, Monsieur Beauchamp.” And with a salute of his cane he wheeled about and was out the door without answering my question.      

     Two weeks later in the midst of a major angst attack, the need to flee from my cubicle overwhelmed me, and I removed myself at noon to my congenial restaurant.     

     I lit into lunch like a man long on prison rations, and had only finished when Gasson flew in the front door.  “Thousands of pardons, Monsieur. You are thinking I am wishing the avoidance of you, oui? Non, it is having the infernal travel inflicted upon me.”     

     Not to be outdone I fired off a huff. “I have been awash in work also, Monsieur Gasson.”     

     Ignoring my lie, he said, “An exhausting trip in that not one interview went satisfactorily. First, a meeting with a Nazi collaborator in the former Vichy government of my ancestral land, an eminently qualified candidate but for his ninety seven years and the terminal health problems afflicting him. Next I am in Minsk, meeting with a member of the Politburo, a man with impeccable credentials compromised by a fondness for vodka and penchant for bribery that put him beyond the pale.”     

     Feeling waspish for my recent fasting, my reply had to it a sting. “In a world of bureaucrats you cannot find one that is suitable? Perhaps, my dear Gasson, the fault lies not with your bureaucrats but with your lofty standards.”

     Gasson  ignored the rebuke. “Most are women and their preference is to the slow and excruciating torture that for reasons of their gender includes the endless and obsessive cross-examination of the condemned man on amorously compromising matters that are irrelevant to the business at hand as the doomed is a complete stranger to her. But despite that, there are still her baseless accusations and hurt feelings and screaming and finger pointing and insults and sniveling into a hanky and imaginary broken promises to get past before the harried man can find his welcome release in the merciful arms of death, all quite understandable perhaps, given the infidelity of our gender but unsuitable for the work to be done. As for the men, they are too old or without a whit of sophistication, let alone the grandeur of intellect that we French have come to take for granted. There is but one prospect left to pick from the tree of life.” Gasson gazed at me with a steadfastness that suggested the unblinking forms carved upon Mount Rushmore. “You will give it the serious thought, Monsieur Beauchamp, oui?”     

     A week later, having used the time to give it the serious thought and come to the only decision I could make, measuring my decision as best I could against the plodding death by inches existence of the bureaucrat, I discovered the salubrious benefits of the four-hour lunch, near the end of which I felt light as a feather, and not even the appearance of Henri Gasson could put a pall on my party.     

     Presenting himself, his hat and cane clutched to his chest like a supplicant, he said, “Monsieur Beauchamp, I have not slept the wink for a wanting of your answer. Please to keep me not in the suspense.”     

     The pivotal moment had arrived and there being no other way to say it but to say it, I took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and said it. “In a word, Monsieur, qui.”

I PREFER FANTASY TO REALITY

     My training took place in a location within a radius of ten miles of lower Manhattan. If not on the beaten path, it is in plain sight but has been there so long that no one takes note of it. Like most everywhere in Manhattan it is within walking distance of public transport, and if you are in a deranged state of mind and have internal organs made of polyvinyl chloride or cast iron, there is available the full menu of carcinogenic and artery-clogging toxic take-out that you can have delivered, enterprises like, dial a death or death on a roll, and tipping the kid that delivers it reminiscent of the days when the personage of royal blood tipped the executioner before having his noble head lopped off.

     The three story building, complete with towers and spires and widow‘s walk, much like the dwellings of your run-of-the-mill mad scientist who create flat headed monsters that are the target of outraged villagers storming the massive door of the castle in the dead of night armed with burning torches and pitch forks while lightening fills the sky.

     It is an ornate wood structure with slate shingles and gargoyle equipped cast iron down spouts, sitting on a slab of stone. The top floor is taken up by two large bedrooms, each with a walk-in fireplace and full bath. Granted our electrics and plumbing are antiquities, and I would prefer more modern and reliable versions, but the reality of the matter is, one need be very, very rich to dive head first into a full and complete renovation of them, and one does not become rich doing the chore that we do for society.

     The second floor is devoted with the exception of a small laundry room, to a working gallows that serves the same function as a slide rule used to serve engineers, and twelve sand filled dummies of varying sizes, several plain pine coffins standing along one wall like diminished sarcophaguses of Pharaohs fallen on hard times and the storage of hoods and ropes.

     The first floor is the lecture hall. Large enough to have accommodated a dinner party of a hundred in its past, has now but a single wooden folding chair set in front of the dais in the middle of an otherwise bare room.

     It is not a place a woman would call a home. There are no family photographs or curtains or shades, no doilies or knickknacks. There are no lace table coverings or pictures hung on the walls. There are no unessential furnishings, no sofas or rugs or chairs. There are none of the comforts that a woman as matter of course would bring into her home. It is stark, it is Spartan, and after a single evening in it, it echoes with its purpose.

     Nor would I choose to live alone in it for the reason that goes directly to the first thing that I learned when I moved in: a vivid imagination is not the executioner’s best friend or most valued tool.

     But having said that, the drafty relic is also the place to be if you are someone like me who enjoys looking out onto a dark and windy night sort of storm. The drumming of rain against old wood siding while one is warm and dry has a mesmerizing quality to it that will put one to sleep faster than any pharmaceutical created by man, and the floor to ceiling windows that are opened or closed with a varnished pole that has a small brass anvil to fit the window’s keyhole on one end, windows of a size that allow the onlooker to cozily enjoy the spectacle of the tempest without being tossed by it.

     A cold and lashing late November rain, the precursor of approaching winter with the fire place lit and crackling and warm, and settled in one’s bedroom easy chair with your feet stuffed into a pair of wooly slippers after a long but satisfying day, with three fingers of a quality bourbon on the rocks in a respectable glass, one with a heavy bottom to it, and an array of Cole Porter’s offerings rendered by a grown-up voice of someone who has loved and lost, who knows what love is .  .  .   other than the company of a beautiful and tender woman, what more could a man ask?

     My instruction, dealt in large part with questions of art and morality. I sat on the wooden folding chair in the middle of the lecture hall emptied of everything else that could be a distraction, except for the heavy swell of stuporous sunlight that poured warm over me through the immense windows for the want of a shade or a curtain, while Monsieur Gasson stood on the dais and posed such questions as .  .  .  “Does the artist have a moral obligation in the creation of their art? Or an obligation to anything or anyone besides their art? If so, what are those obligations, and when and who decided those questions?” 

     At the end of the second week I began to worry that Gasson did not understand why I was there, so I stood and asked him during one of his windier questions, what in the world he was talking about at great length had to do with my becoming a hangman? His response was wearied and came down to .  .  .   “It would have nothing to do with your becoming a hangman, Monsieur if we were, you and I, thugs for the hiring to commit a murder.” He leaned over the lectern, “We do a job of work that society values and in its collective wisdom feels is necessary. When society feels that it is no longer instructive to impose and execute a sentence of death, then we will do some other job of work, maybe the building of wooden ships for iron men, maybe the digging of ditches, or maybe something far more comprehensible or romantic such as emptying the ripe and odoriferous septic tanks of the middle class. This training is crucial to the development of your perspective, your understanding, your ability to discriminate at every level between the act of a murderer and a judicial execution. And now, Monsieur, with your kind indulgence and permission, may I continue?”

     Later that evening over supper, he took up the matter again that I had interrupted him with. “When your training is finished you will be sent out to do the work you have been trained to do, so you will pay close attention, oui? There will be no honing your skills on the necks of  the blameless, or rehearsal executions of the innocent, nor will there be easy ones to begin with, since every execution, as it should be will be as debilitating to you as your first you must be expert from the start. As for me when your training is finished, it is my intention to proceed south as soon and as far as possible, for I loathe cold weather and its handmaidens, ice and snow. But monsieur, I want to be able to lay my head on my pillow at night and know that the man who has taken my place is one who shares my sensibilities, my panache, my savoir-faire, who knows not simply how to end a man‘s life but understands the uniqueness of every life, who appreciates the enormity of possibilities that all of us represent by simply being alive or by having been given a life to live, what that reality suggests, of comprehending the authority of life, a man who values the miracle of existence that others do not give a moment’s thought to until it is threatened, and also to understand the nature of death that we must all come to terms with and respect.” 

     The next morning without prelude, he began again, while I sat with my hands in my lap and my feet and knees drawn close together like a school boy duly chided .  .  .   “Is art to serve the will of God as interpreted by a privileged elite in continuous communication with the Almighty?” And on this subject he spent three days.     

     As fascinating as these lectures were I was more interested in getting to the hanging part of my training. I do not mean hanging the first star-crossed individual whose wife sent him out into the dew of the early morning for a quart of milk and who, stumbling upon me came to bad end, but all that is involved leading up to that, and what my duties were after the doomed was dead and still dangling from the rope like a grisly plumb line, because like it or not something must be done with him before he goes ripe, and even more important, to take the horrific out of the realm of my imagination and into the cold of reality, if only to see if I could handle it, but Gasson was not to be rushed and proceeded with his queries .  .  .   “When did they pass the law requiring art to confirm fidelity to God, country, family, and friends? When was it decreed that art is to be created by only nice people in the service of nice causes?” Then Gasson would provide the answers. “To be beloved or righteous is not the purpose of the artist or the hangman.”

I PREFER FANTASY TO REALITY

FOR GOOD REASON

     Then before I knew it there were the trips that would account for at least a third of our time where I would join him in the airport limo and flights to foreign lands on the business of the hangman, which was a welcome break from the lectures, that is until I had witnessed my first execution. A young man, a boy actually, who was as nervous as any performer before the curtain goes up but who tried to be helpful, to be a good sport about it, a team player, an equal partner in the enterprise so to speak, someone who professed to be a devotee of Gasson’s work, an assertion that was intended to ease the task of the hangman .  .  .   and maybe if he played his cards right, he went on to say, stayed in school, did his homework, was respectful to his elders, might come to be a hangman one day himself. Who gave not the least bit of trouble and wanted to make it as easy on us as possible and who thanked Gasson for his comforting words at the end, and a moment before the hood was slipped over his head and the knot properly affixed the young man looked up into the slate gray sky, and with a sad smile, said, “I wonder what the weather will be tomorrow?” To which Gasson replied, “For us left behind it will be a day like all days, but for you, Monsieur, it will be a glorious day like no others before.”

     I was horrified when the trap door dropped open, and the hard facts of an execution brought an end to illusion and curiosity.

     This was followed by my second hanging a week later where the star of the show intended a Patrick Henry on the gallows, but got to blubbering so badly he couldn’t speak and the only thing that stopped his bawling was the snap of his neck.

     In the case of my first execution, once the boy fell to the end of the rope and went still there was the sudden gush of urine and feces as the sphincter muscles went into a state of relaxation caused by a deprivation of oxygen. The same thing happened in the second execution, except this was caused by the rush of adrenaline that is common in extreme fear.

     Contrary to my expectations, both human beings, instead of being cut down and carted off, hung by their broken necks for a full twenty five minutes or so before their brain became starved of oxygen and then could be legally pronounced dead.

     I was sick both times.

     I had gotten to it, the stark reality part of hanging a man, and the aphorism, be careful what you wish for sprung to mind. The day after my first hanging, the likeable boy who wondered what the weather would be like the next day, it rained.

     Year one finished, Gasson then provided the lectures that would occupy my mind for the next two years .  .  .   “The patron of an artist or a hangman may be evil or divine, a distinction that is of interest to ecclesiastics or the immediate neighbors on the border of the patron, but not to the artist or to the hangman, as the bread of the one is much the same as the other. Do the ends of art justify the means? Absolutely and always.”

AN EXPLORATION OF

THE IDIOCY OF DEATH

     At the close of one unexceptional day he came down from the dais and stood in front of me, staring intently. He then began to pace back and forth, three small steps one way, three small steps the other. Back and forth. Back and forth.

     “There is,” he finally said, “a cemetery in France near the beach where your young soldiers came ashore, the American Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville-Sur-mer in Normandy. In that cemetery there are the remains of nine thousand three hundred and eighty seven men. Most of them killed in June and July of nineteen forty four. Those men, all of them, everyone of the nine thousand three hundred and eighty seven never again saw the face of the woman they loved, or felt her warm body press up hard against him, nor did they hear their child’s laughter, or enjoyed another meal with friends and family. All of them were brave, all of them died gloriously,” then suddenly his tone shifted to a darker hue, “and with every dwindling commemoration, those of worldly importance invoke the name of God and pronounce the same benediction, they shall never be forgotten.”

     He sighed. “Monsieur Beauchamp, please be so kind as to give me the name of one of the valiant nine thousand three hundred and eighty seven dead in your Normandy cemetery.“

     I stared at him in silence, then he nodded, and said, “Exactly.” He walked a few paces, then called to me, “Come, it’s time for supper.”

     After a supper of roast chicken and rice and fresh string beans with garlic, we were having coffee when he got around, as I knew he would, to finishing his thought on the American military cemetery in France. “Their deaths were of course tragic for their youth and their never having lived. We remember those of us who bother, not them the young and terrified soldiers, but a place where to most and soon all of us lay the forgotten and obscure dead, the dead that in time everyone will have forgot as it is the way of things that another evil has replaced the one that they died resisting, and they, the newly dead will also have died in vain. That everyone will have forgotten but for the finely tuned politician is a certainty, and who with a stirring slogan create the necessary groundswell for their, the politician’s glorious war lest he too be forgotten.”                                               

     Then he did something that startled me. He lifted his spoon and began conducting himself in song:    

“THEY’RE CARELESS WITH THEIR KILLING

THEY WHO LEAD US INTO WAR

THEY’RE KILLING, KILLING, KILLING

IRON CANNONS BELCH AND ROAR”

     I hoped that was all of it as he was making me uneasy with his strange performance. But then in the space of a nod, he said, “Your glorious dead are what questions of morality must lead to, they are what the questions are all about.”

     I started to rise to clear the table. “One more trifling thing,” he said, “there is another military cemetery.” He stopped and smiled a bitter and mocking smile. “Isn’t there always?” Gasson stared me down into my seat again, when he continued, “A German military cemetery in Ysselteyn, Holland that contains almost thirty two thousand men or pieces of men, a forest of flat white crosses, a monotony of heartbreak, a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth, the going price for honor and duty, this dreadful place, in this instance of Second World War dead, and it is a wonder that there is any empty space left for we the living to walk the earth. These sons, husbands, fathers, lovers, these creations of God are also venerated once a year and solemn words spoken over their cared for graves, since a twenty year old Private in the German army is as dead as his opposite number buried in Colleville-Sur-mer. The German private, whatever he died for did not die for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, no more than a private in the American army died for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the democrats. It still remains to be more exactly determined what they did die for. What is certain is, if the young are called upon again they will answer that call and march off obediently to their destruction. If it fell to me to speak the words of commemoration, I would speak the same to friend or foe, to the men, to the dead who are beyond the stirrings of the crafted slogan, or caring if they are remembered or not: was it worth it?”

OKAY, WHEN DOES SOMETHING

GOOD HAPPEN

     The final year was spent smoothing my rough edges. This required my immersion into an intellectual cauldron to forge the novice hangman into a trained artist, and so the lectures continued. “To fetter the artist with a menu of prohibitions: what subject an artist may or may not deal with, the manner in which the artist may render the subject, who the artist may have as a patron, who an artist may have tea with, whether the artist is from an unsanctioned tribe, a disapproved of group, an unpopular clan, a gang of political pariah’s, all of that, all of it, serving someone else’s

purpose, is death to the creative spirit. If no art can see the light of day unless it or the artist pass the moral muster of those whose only interest is to condemn the artist to oblivion, then no art will be created.”

     At the end of my five year apprenticeship I looked at things differently, as if five continuous years of lectures would not change the way anyone looks at what he is told day in and day out is moral and just, or as in my case change his thinking to be more in tune with those of a hangman, or I assume turn a man with strong convictions to begin with into a suicide bomber.

     IT WAS MY TURN TO SHOW THE WORLD

THE BRIGHT LIGHT I WAS

     It is Thursday and my first hanging is scheduled for Monday. Before Gasson left for Miami Beach he contacted a P.R. firm and my debut has taken on all the circus hullabaloo of a hyped Rock star performance.

     I find myself this evening seated at a round table with the host of the television talk show, Charlie Aster Presiding. His other guest, the writer whose novels capture the banality of criminal violence, Theodore Capute, a short, plump, bespectacled sort with a high pitched lisp, an extravagant hand waving flamboyance and thinning hair, wearing a lavender suit with a cherry red ascot, who is going on at some length about the quirks of Henri Gasson as if it were he and not I who had shared his company for five years.

     “He is as fastidious and ceremonial with his morning routine as he is with his selection of hemp to hang a man Surely, hemp from North America or some other pissant and God forsaken place would be as equally deadly as an execution a la Gasson with the crème de la crème of hemp imported from an indistinguishable dot in Kashmir?”  

     “Why stop there.” I said in defense of the most obsessive personality I had ever met. “Why not creep up on the condemned with an iron bar and stove in his skull with a single blow?”                     

     “Yes indeed, why not?” The lisping creature simpered. “Or are we too squeamish to do our killing with our hands?”

     “We, sir .  .  .   are not killing anyone. It is the state that is killing, and does so with a warrant of death, supplicium capitis, a judicial execution, and frankly, yes I am too squeamish to kill a man with my hands. I am also, I pray to God too civilized.” I began to swell with righteous confidence.

     “Pity,” the literary insect informed theatrically. “I would think there is something regal in killing a man with your hands that you have condemned to death with your lips, don’t you think? Something noble, something of the cleansing, and for the record, my dear boy, the supplicium capitis that you threw up to me, when carried out was done so by strangulation with the hands when it was not done by beating the condemned to death with rods.”  Then he sat back and smirking at me sweetly, left me tongue tied, and emptied of confidence.    

     In all fairness the host tried to protect me from the polemics of the other guest, but at the end of our half hour segment I was suffering a severe case of oratorical whiplash. Odd, he didn’t look that formidable.

     When the show was over and the lights had dimmed to the wattage of the real world, and Capute was chatting and gesticulating excitedly with Aster about how well his performance went, he turned to me as I was leaving, and gushed, “I’m so sorry my sweet for doing that to you, but I cannot help it, I get carried away. You know, the roar of the greasepaint and all.” 

     “Have you ever been to Colleville-Sur-mer in Normandy or Ysselteyn

In Holland?“ Making a last stab at a winning point.   

     “No, my darling, but I’ve been to Elaine’s and I’ve been to the Hamptons. Do they count?” he giggled.

     I had been in over my head. Whatever made me think taking an execution into the realm of entertainment placed me on the moral high ground? I can only pray I am never afflicted by such an impulse again.  And as for my invoking the glorious war dead of the opposing armies, even I as I did it realized I was contributing, if only microscopically to the barbarous myth of the politician.   

     On the way home I acknowledged Capute had cleaned my clock. I may have disliked him. He may have been a glib lightweight, but I had no business being at that table with him as I was out of my element.

      There was, however, something I had not been conscious of before I went on the show, and that Theodore Capute made me aware of. The darkness of the place that I had been in with the Trade Commission had not brightened. The blackness of it, if anything, had become blacker, and my fear of the depths my soul may have fallen even greater.

The end

by

W.R. Marcy

SLEEP

PERCHANCE TO DREAM

      I have been sleeping fitfully of late, and awoke this morning with an inner ear infection affecting my balance that had me staggering, a fever of 102, and an unquenchable thirst. I took aspirin and drank lots of water, I put a cold compress on my brow, I fixed myself a bowl of canned chicken soup, but nothing I did helped. I had to get better as I had thoughts in the middle of the night that were still coming at me pell-mell and I had to get them on paper. Thoughts such as, wisdom and maturation are not to be confused with one another. Although related like second cousins, they are as different as lynxes and lions. They may look alike when first out of the womb but as every wildebeest comes to know, lynxes and lions are as dissimilar as life and death. Ordinary men must not strive for wisdom for that is the domain of the philosopher and they take offense when ordinary men pretend to their realm. Is it not enough that a man ripen and come full into his own, in the bosom of family, in the full strength of his powers, with laurels he has earned. Is that not enough?

     I went downstairs to the room with the southern exposure and dining room table that I now call the lecture hall  and sat in my chair in the middle of what had become my universe with the intent of listening to a long ago lecture that I particularly enjoyed inside my head.

     My temperature was now 103.4

     The early morning sun, its protective rays press over me, comforting and warm like a blanket pulled up to my chin when as a child I did not feel well. My years of study have borne fruit and given me the strength to concentrate, resisting all distraction; I am become the welcome release from the venality of man. I am become he who those without purpose take by the hand.

MY NIGHT VISITORS ARE NOT NEW FRIENDS EXACTLY

MORE LIKE OLD DISAVOWED ACQUAINTANCES

     The sunlight envelopes me in a stuporous cloak and I slip from the thick fog of ordinary awareness to another and highly illuminated consciousness.  There are people in my closet who are spying on me. They come at night to watch me undress. They laugh and remark to one another about me when I am naked, remarks they think are clever, are amusing, are at my expense. They know I can hear them; they do not care. They steal my wooden hanger, the one I carefully vacuum before hanging my pants on. Then they try to put it back before I know it is gone, but I can tell they took it because of the alien dust that is on it that is only found inside of mirrors. They also make fun of my reproduction organ, how pathetically small it is they say .  .  .          

     My temperature was now 103.8. 

    They do not speak of my awing manhood as my organ of reproduction, they call it my hand organ, and tell me that if I, the grinder do not leave the monkey alone I will go blind. They think I cannot recognize them when they follow me down the street. Hah! But I can; their red fez and open toe high heels gives them away. On the other hand, the women among them are more difficult to identify .  .  .   

     Now 104.1.

     They also think because they wear a red fez they are more brilliant than me. How do I know all this one might ask? Because I now have special powers that permit me to look deep into the affairs of those with low appetites .  .  .      

     104.3.

     They have begun to steal small pieces of my Scotch Tape. But I am on to them. I am planning complicated traps for them to fall into. Then we will see who is brilliant and who is not  .  .  . Did I not already vanquish them once by hiding my number 2 pencil shavings?

     I have also learned to play, Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag and Smile, Smile, Smile on my monkey, as I am informed by anonymous sources that those wearing a red fez cannot bear to hear that tune. That it is guaranteed to keep those in my closet, in the closet, and they will no longer laugh at my organ of reproduction. Then we will see who is brilliant and whose is not. Now as for a green fez, well that is a different matter altogether, and fraught with uncertainty  .  .  .  

     104.5.

     All I had to make certain of is to avoid their destruct-O-atomic death

lasers and the occasional planet destroying asteroid that they control the passage of by mind waves, and yes, their most clever method of tricking the unwary, picturesque restaurants with screen doors that close with such a force that it will amputate a limb if one lets one’s guard down.      

TRAVEL BROADENS THE MIND, DON’T YOU THINK

     My fever suddenly vanishes. I am lucid. I am lighter. I can think clearer than I have ever thought before. I had been crazy. Now I am sane. My mind is scrubbed of everything one could find fault with, anything not perfect that had to it the sin of Eden, the stain of lust, the frivolous waste of golden time, illusory time. Time, the mystifying corporeal singularity in that it does not exist outside the realm of the magical we. There is of course the space time continuum of the creator, but His work though of interest to those in arcane fields of study is without the sense of the tactile we have learned to enjoy with our spinning revolutions about the sun, but give the creator his due, He doth tryeth. 

     In the deep reaches of space there is no time, events unfold autonomously as they will without the coercive or creative sway of the miraculous we. Time is a concept of our making for our divine convenience to measure the miracle of us, and of our majesty and of our grandeur, as well as the trivial of this life that is an amusement to us, the makers, the authors, the architects, the creators of time. And as nature abhors a vacuum, my emptied mind quite naturally filled itself with the cosmos, as a  mind is a terrible thing to waste.

    Hundreds of billions of galaxies, all of them racing inside an expanding plasmatic spherical geometry that will turn out to be in the blink of an eye a many faceted equation of impossible complexity or a single representation of stunning simplicity.

     The earth like a spinning dreidel orbiting the sun at 67,000 MPH, the sun and its coterie of planets as if pursued by tireless and predatory paparazzi racing through the Milky Way and dangerous tunnels of time at 450,000 MPH, galaxies in billions plunging through the universe at a speed of 130 million MPH, and it’s all anyone can do just to hang on, and some of us can‘t and we are left behind .  .  .  Behind what? Behind door number one, to spend eternity in a stygian hell? Behind door number two to become the dust and stuff of stars? How about good old reliable door number three where deathless and wearied angels go to end it all and come to something like peace?

     Nine billion trillion stars, a number otherwise expressed as 9×10²¹, and one day soon we will realize this number is but a fraction of it all, and a constantly diminishing fraction at that, and on a day sometime after that, after it is determined once and for all that the universe is infinite, we will realize that there is no useful purpose served in counting stars any longer.

     And a million years after we‘re gone, beings in another corner of the universe will reveal to a stunned audience of their intellectual peers that their planet is not the center of the world but orbits around the sacred star, the one that shines the brightest in their heavens and transports the souls of the dead to paradise. And after the cries of “heresy, heresy” recede, an even more startling, a more heretical revelation than the diminution of the sacred star is forthcoming .  .  .  the subsequent discovery that there are more than a thousand stars in the sky! More than a thousand! How many more is yet to be determined. They are at present building something called a telescope that can see something a mile off and make it appear up close that will assist in that endeavor.

     But until then, we can wonder at a cosmos where each star is a roaring nuclear furnace inside each of what will become in an infinite cosmos, the individual galaxies that we will also cease to keep track of for their number, but surrender ourselves to the breathtaking splendor of it all.

     Super novas, nebulae, red shift, blue shift, dark Matter, dark energy. Ultra super giant red stars, their hydrogen bodies swelling to a diameter of two billion miles or more in their death throes, and the light from the old watchman’s torch needs a terrestrial week to cover its breadth. What is it that we need, that we want that would keep us busier, more occupied, more hopeful, more in touch with ourselves, with reality?          

     Andromeda, Triangulum, the Milky Way. Where are they all going in such a rush? Black holes. White holes. It has always been and will always be. All of it unimaginable. The cosmic cycle: birth, life, death, rebirth. Billions of eons mean nothing. Before or after means nothing. A world appears with a bang. The world born, lives a life, dies its silent death in the dark and at absolute zero, unobserved for billions of eons to the Nth power, or an infinitesimal fraction of a picosecond, it is all the same. What does it mean outside the mind of the creator. How does one be outside the mind of the creator? To be inside or outside is to be one with the creator.

     At the end of the world all that remains of the creation with deific efficacy are packets of quanta, the DNA of God, so small the sum of it all that fills the emptiness of space can only be hypothesized. Gravity pulling it all into one irresistible self, plasma, dot, until another bang. Big, little, it is all the same when there are no eyes to see it, or ears to hear it, or hands to applaud, or no one to give the Maker two ears and a tail. The act of creation changes nothing. Changes everything. No longer does seven times seven equal forty nine, it equals pi. Everything in the universe equals pi. At last, a breakthrough in the goddam multiplication tables. 5^th graders all over the universe cheer, celebrate, get drunk, chase whores, set fires, cut concert deals, move to France, get into fist fights with gendarmes, get married, get a mortgage, get a girlfriend, get divorced, get a court order to pay child support, get out of town, get lost .  .  .  

     Nothing is recognizable. Multiple dimensions, two hundred, ten thousand, more .  .  .  Should M-theory of physicists who subscribe to it be correct, and there is anything near 10⁵⁰⁰ worlds, each of which is discrete with its own laws physics and its own construct of time that if it does not preclude conventional past, present, and future, will open up more than the human mind can manage with its rearrangements, additions, and subtractions of those conventional components, or a system of time constructed in a manner that dispenses with those components in its entirety.

BUT THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME

     And what about time in our universe? In the beginning there was no past, but only a present and a future, and as the pathway to the future is through the present and the present being the past to the future so the ground work has been done to compose a system of time where past, present, and future are all one, or something entirely different, perhaps like a forest of many branched sequoias. 

     And again, M-theory and the accuracy caveat, death as we know it is a state that exists only in this universe. But at the instant of death the brio of the dead shifts to another dimension in another world with another time construct and adopts another reality altogether, or is brought to perfection, without sin, without flesh, a state of non existence that cannot be understood any more than our former state of existence could be understood, than the person of flesh was understood. I do not want to be perfected, I do not want to be a glob of light or dot of reason, or spark, or an aura of perfection, I want to be me until I understand me. I do not want to surrender my flesh until I come to understand it, until I understand myself, until I understand others. I do not wish to live forever without seeing or touching the flesh and forms and warmth of the ones I love. The flesh I was is me, anything else is not. Are you listening God? Are you paying the smallest bit of attention to what I’m saying? This is big. This changes everything. God, I think we ought to talk this over in the presence of my lawyer, you know, so there‘s no misunderstandings.

     The dead living in a parallel two dimension world or pane of reality, grieving for their dead who have moved on to yet another dimensional construct, to another reality that opens onto different worlds. There are no names for anything. All phenomena and creatures of the new creation made differently. An experiment without end. Different laws of physics, different basic forces. No up or down, no gravity, no electromagnetic force, no strong force, no weak force, no anything.

     Reality is an illusion. Life is an illusion. Love is an illusion. All save pain is an illusion. Pain is real. It is the stuff that composes all the quanta in the universe. Pain is a color so acute it cannot be seen, a pitch so high it cannot be heard, it is a hurt too deep to endure that at the end of love’s illusion it need be parceled out in quenching tears lest the hell-fire of a piercing and relentless grief claim yet another being, another love for the quanta of a new cycle of stars and planets. In another dimension? That is real. That is all that is real. An experiment forever ongoing until that force that propels creation has exhausted all the possibilities. No ending. No beginning .  .  .  

     Wrong!       

     It does not change. The creation does not change. Nothing changes. It is exactly as it was and will continue to be so until we get it right, until the force of creation gets it right. We cannot imagine what an unimaginable power wants of us. We will never get it right. We are angered by our limitations like an animal in a cage. Because we cannot imagine the unimaginable we accrue an appetite for anger and death. We enjoy it. We need it. It is the release from the frustrations of our limitations and the imagined demands of the unimaginable power, and our enigmatic existence in an unimaginable equation. We invent a God, a God of flesh and blood and human frailty and of contradictions, an immortal God who is mortal, a God we can finally speak with, a god who is like you and me, a regular guy we can hang out with, have long talks with, a god who we can have supper with, drink wine and eat bread with, watch football with, go to the beach with, girl watch with, a God we can sing, “Speak to us, oh Master,” to  .  .  .

“Speak to us, oh master

as if you were a seer

ain’t nothing in this time construct

that you have need to fear

no painful nails or crosses

or spears stuck in your side

but only pizza worshippers

from whom you need not hide

we believe in you with all our hearts

‘cause you’re our kind of fiction

but if you could when ere you speak

enunciate with diction

it’s parables we want to hear

to multiply confusion

of afterlife and paradise

with mounting self delusion

  and when you’re dead we promise

to eat your flesh at rails

and drink your blood like it was Bud

in frosted pint-sized grails

.  .  .   a god we can betray and crucify because he insists on speaking in parables .  .  .   say what you mean, goddamit, and mean what you say. A small God that is an impedimenta to the adoration of the God of creation whose touch spans beyond the reaches of the cosmos. The exact same creation will go on forever. The same stars, the same planets the same everything, until the God that created us changes the recipe, the formula, the plan, the script, the equation. We will continue to make the same mistakes forever. We will feel the same agonies forever.

I DON’T KNOW HOW, IT JUST CAME TO ME

     I have nose bleeds. I have visions. I hear voices. I have nightmares. I have twigs I shove up my nose to pierce the sacs of pure oxygen that feed the fire of my conceptions, one of which I am proud to announce is: I have discovered the flaw that has existed in our creation from the beginning, and was under our nose all the time. I must contact all the newspapers and radio and television people the world over. I have discovered the meaning of it all. The why and wherefore of it all. It has been revealed to me. It is within the message of the classified ad in last months Popular Mechanics for the E-Z Drain and Fill ‘Er Up Embalming School, and their radio and TV jingles that once you hear them you can’t get them out of your head because of the wonder and beauty of it all .  .  .  Take the radio jingle for example  .  .  .

“Fat ladies don’t sing when their under clover

It’s the E-Z Drain man that says when it’s over”

     .  .  .   Or the singing muskrat jingle that they have on TV .  .  . 

“What’s that smell, my pretty, Betty?

That’s no smell, that’s uncle Freddy.

Smells to me like he is dead,

and puffed-up like a loaf of bread.

So before they go to ambient cool

Matriculate at embalming school

For even mom whose turning blue

Won’t smell so sweet in a week or two.

     The sunlight is hurting my eyes. It’s 9 A.M. and I am very tired. There are people on my lawn that I know, but I cannot remember their names. They are dancing with each other. They call out a request to me for music to dance to.

     I open my front door, take off all my clothes, and begin  .   .    . 

Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag

And smile, smile, smile

While you’ve a Lucifer to light your fag

Smile boys that’s the style  .   .   .  

     The picture on the lawn changes. It is now my father seated at a picnic table. Today is his birthday; he is 111 years old. He looks young for his age. His right elbow rests on the table, pinching his cheek with his thumb and forefinger, consumed by the position on the board. He is playing chess with a little boy. I do not know who the little boy is. I look to my left and my mother is standing at the far edge of the lawn. She raises her hand and wiggles her fingers at me; I wiggle my fingers back at her. The scene freezes as if painted on glass and it shifts. I am at a large table playing Parcheesi with my mother and father and a little girl. I do not know who the girl is. My father keeps changing the rules and making up new ones as the game proceeds. Rules that prevent me from ever winning. I begin to cry in frustration, No one sympathizes with me. It is only that little boy that cries all the time.

I TAKE A STROLL DOWN MEMORY LANE

     I do not think of women or a particular woman as often as I used to as it is too painful to dwell on that part of my life that is over and done with. But on those occasions when I do think of them I am pleased with the thoughts that run through my head, thoughts free of  lust and the physical. Thoughts that must have entered my mind when I was unaware and stayed to grow sheltered in the dark on their own like truffles. And it is yet another mystery that thoughts such as these can find room to take root alongside the inelegance that that I brought to my lovemaking as a young man. Like most men, I needed sex at least once a decade or so.  It relieved the tension, worked wonders on my post nasal drip, and asserted my proper place in the cosmos.

     But those fated to live the monastic life like myself are more inclined to rants than sex. Rants are good. Rants last longer than it takes a man to have sex. Most anything you can think of short of a subatomic particle in a gas chamber lasts longer than it takes a man to have sex. But with rants you can feel good about yourself when you’re done, and you don’t have to ask, was it good for you? It was good for me. And if you have to ask it probably wasn’t, labels the man a blackguard for inquiring, is insulting to the femme fatale, naively indiscreet, and a boorish compromise of the lady’s charms, that after the six seconds of untethered passion a young man’s inept and selfish love-making mustered, to then turn around and create an altogether unforgivable contretemps requiring a level of ego salvaging prevarication on the part of the lady known only in the offices of those holding high public office or as the case may be, of devotees of creepy carnal preferences that surface in the up scale precincts of southern California that require the active participation of a traveling troupe of masseuses, morticians, proctologists,  hairdressers,        albinos, castrati, and dwarfs that are from time to time asked into m’lady’s bedchamber. Also one doesn’t have to remember to call or to send a rant a note or to buy a rant flowers.                            

AT TIMES LIKE THIS, YOU’D BEST COWBOY UP

     I am so tired. The last middle of the night thought I can remember is: death, the great paradox, comes to us from that place beyond the edge of creation. The place of nothingness, the unreachable place forever outside our world that came to be by the force of creation, a force of such enormity that for a single instant the newly made universe expanded at a rate beyond the speed of light raised this one time to an unimaginable power that gave shape to the cosmos and created that place, the place before time and space, a place where nothing will ever live, a void of such immensity that the known universe would disappear inside of it as a single grain of sand on a desert, a solitary essence conforming to its own construct of time and to its own space and to its needs and to its purpose, and death, its sole purpose, taking on the dominion of eternity in its instant passage, gathering unto itself a sovereignty reserved only to it for that singular moment, and by its lonely work, bringing life and love to an end with its kiss, with its touch, with the great darkness it holds in its outstretched hand, for who would impose the terror of never ending life on the one he loves? One need be brave to love, and braver to let go, for is it not God the creator of death who loves our love beyond mortal comprehension? And is it not death that by a final act reveals that love to us? And all the Sturm and Drang, when it is all that there is, is anything but for naught.

I remember .  .  .   I remember . . I was not feeling well and I think I sat in

sunlight. Now I’m feeling better.

The end

Bullet Billy Beauchamp

by

W.R. Marcy

The Sheriff’s deputy, Earl Krum, dumb as a bag of rocks and the lesser half of the dynamic duo known to the teenagers in Witson, Kansas as, Dim and Dopey, and someone who my aunt Ethel said, and not one person ever felt the need to revise or amend her observation, succeed in this life beyond their level of competence, told me when I was ten or so that Doc Kunzmann who dragged me kicking and screaming into the world, looked me in the face, and said, “Child, I know one when I see one and you kid, are a red and wrinkled, dog poop ugly, born loser.”

Doc Kunzmann, the faculty and administration of Samuel F. Crumshot Middle School, the entire sixth grade, the entire previous sixth grade, our school bus driver, our building super, merchants, neighbors, the volunteer fire department, Sheriff Oaks and dopey deputy Krum. Could everyone be wrong?

Math was beyond me; the multiplication table undecipherable beyond  seven times seven level. I thought Brazil was a vegetable, the Antarctic, a place where bugs who like it cold went. Congress, the name of a big eel, and a dangling participle another name the boys in school had for their Woodrow Wilson.

But I could run. I was the fastest kid in my neighborhood, maybe the fastest kid that ever was. My friends called me Bullet Billy Beauchamp, the kid who was going to win a gold medal in the Olympics. Emily Egan, the girl who sat next to me on the school bus and shared her Good and Plenty with me said I would be her hero if I won the gold in the Olympics. The pressure was on; I had to win.

I was so sure I was going to win I would stand on the plastic foot stool in my bedroom that mom used to reach stuff down with, practicing the medal ceremony,  getting it right so I didn‘t make any mistakes, being ready for the big day, looking into my mirror, and singing, “Oh-oh say can you see by the dawn‘s early light“, bending over to have the medal draped around my neck by an important looking official in a blue jacket with a special I.D. badge and gray slacks, then looking at myself again in the mirror to make sure I had a winner’s look on my face suitable for the occasion, and not that dorky look I get when I don’t know the answer to a question which is every time and everyone is snickering.

Then waving at the crowd in the jam packed stadium that I see in my mind’s eye who had come that day just to see me, the kid who never wins at anything ever, win big, and cheer for the world‘s newest fastest human, Bullet Billy Beauchamp.

I also practice humble but proud, humble being as important as fast to everyone too old to run, and thanking everyone I was supposed to thank for my terrific success, and a lot that made fun of me that didn‘t deserve my thanks but I thanked them anyway because I was also practicing turning the other cheek for the day when I won, turning the other cheek also being as important as running fast to old people  .  .  . No wonder old people don’t run.

Everyone in my neighborhood must have stopped to watch me run, but I was practicing being modest and pretended I didn‘t notice. I felt sorry for those who had poor vision as they could only hear the loud swooooshh as I ran by and couldn’t see a thing but a blur since I was going so fast.

After a while the ones in the know, the ones who had heard of me or had seen me run before must have worn protective eyewear while everyone else, the first timers must have surely gotten wind burned eyeballs from standing too close as I ran by, which would be a lot like looking at an eclipse of the sun without eye protection, but completely different. I was only surprised that Witson didn’t have an eye patch store on Main Street; would have made a fortune.

I went out for the track team, what else? The others trying out for the team were a couple of fat guys and a bunch of skinny kids, and not one of them looked as fast as me .  .  .  little did they know, but it was just as well  they didn’t know what was in store for them as what’s the point of telling a kid the cold realities of life that lead to their radical disappointment before you absolutely have to, because like I have always said, being the fastest human being in the world is not about stepping on somebody else’s dreams, it’s about being better than the other guy.

My practice was paying off as I was getting the humble thing down real good .  .  .   It didn‘t show yet, as I didn’t have that many occasions to be humble, but someday it would, and besides, that part of it wasn’t really all that interesting or important to me, not like Emily Egan depending on me to be her hero.

They bussed us down route 7 to Bauman’s supermarket parking lot, lined us up, coach fired his starter’s pistol, and in a blazing flash of pumping arms and legs the tryouts were over. Twenty kids went out for the team, the two fat kids for the shot put who were so big around their middle they couldn’t see their sneakers, one kid for the assistant trainer’s job who had a cast on his leg from his knee to his ankle that everyone signed and who could barely walk without falling down, so I didn’t expect a lot of  trouble from him, and the seventeen others of us, and every goddam one of them were faster than me. I mean, there were girls faster than me. Girls! One of which was Eunice Hobbs, a freckled faced nine year old with pig tails who wasn’t even trying out for the team, which was especially crushing as she was just waiting for her mom to come out of the store where Bauman‘s was running a sale on chopped chuck and got into the race just for the fun of it. An arthritic old lady in a walker inching her way to the Senior Citizen’s bus was faster than me. The guy with no legs who sold pencils outside of Bauman’s and who got around on a dolly, that’s right, him, he was faster than me.

Having had an Atlantic ocean size pot of cold water thrown on my Olympic gold medal dream, I tried to figure out how it was possible and what went wrong, I mean I had always beat the kids who lived under the bed in my bedroom, and it was never even a contest. Sometimes I’d give all three of them a humungous head start and I’d still nip them at the finish   line .  .  . Bullet Billy Beauchamp just does not lose. I held onto that thought for half a second, then I faced it. What else wasn’t I any good at that I had talked myself into believing I was great at because I wanted to be someone’s hero? What was I going to tell Emily Egan?

Sixty five years later, Billy Beauchamp, roughed up by life, lay in his charity coffin, his dreams of glory long gone, his days of failure at an end, and old folks like Maude and Edgar Eggers who barely knew him brought in off the street at a dollar apiece to say something nice over him, but he is still being mocked, even at his wake.

“What the hell happened to his upper lip, Maude? Looks like he went and got hisself a Humphrey Bogart upper lip surgery. You think that’s Biewald the mortician’s doing? Billy B. was never what you would call handsome, but this, Jesus H. Christ!”

“Shhh, keep your voice down, Edgar. I was told that it comes from being a bungler at everything you try to do but keeping a stiff upper lip anyway.”

“Well if the guy in the box is the Beauchamp I knew, the guy who ran like he had a load in his pants, that’s the only thing he could keep stiff.”

“Oh, Edgar, you are a rascal.”

“Rascal, my ass. I got it from an unimpeachable source, Al Dell, the snow plow driver who got it from Miss Elsie, you remember her, she ran the one woman whorehouse outside of town? And those wreaths, Jesus, that’s the worst looking vegetation I seen since the drought of ‘67. Looks like they’re on about their third funeral.”

“You’re right, Edgar, they do look like something off somebody else’s grave. Poor Beauchamp, always the loser.“

Edgar, giving me the quick glance, not sure it was good form to mock the biggest loser in Witson before the corpse cools off, says, “Then there’s the time when Billy B. was in High School and Eunice Hobbs beat him in the tryouts for the track team in Bauman‘s parking lot. There he is straining like he’s trying to pass a golf ball size stone and for all his effort might as well be standing stock still while nine year old Eunice, the second fastest girl in the fifth grade, her pigtail flying straight out behind her, waving to the crowd, running backward for a stretch, pulling further and further ahead and doing a cartwheel at the end to cross the finish line.

Then he says she beat him ‘cause he got a cramp, and  old Billy B. is going on about how he could only run at quarter speed as his leg was hurting real bad. Then in the middle of this embarrassing bushwa, up she comes and stands in front of him, head hanging, one sneakered foot on top of the other, her whole body contrite as hell and says in the tiniest voice you ever heard, ‘I‘m sorry I can run faster than you, Mister Beauchamp. I won’t ever do it again .  .  .   I promise.’ Ha, ha, what a joke. Any sonofabitch whose feet weren’t nailed to the floor with railroad spikes could run faster than him. Gets me to laughing so my sides hurt .  .  .  ‘sorry I can run faster than you Mister Beauchamp.’ Can’t beat it with a stick.”

“You’re a caution, Edgar.”

“Did you get your dollar from them?”

“Got it here in my purse.”

“Let’s go out and come back in, get another dollar.”

A few minutes later the two of them as bold as brass stroll into the Funeral home and the boy at the door gives each of them a dollar. They then mosey into the viewing room giggling like two kids who just pulled a fast one on the grown ups, and walk up to the casket.

Maude’s brow wrinkles as she looks down at Billy. In his folded hands is a red rose and a small box of Good and Plenty candy that wasn’t there a few minutes ago and a card that says:

You are my hero

Fast is good but slow is nice

E.

The end

The new idea on child rearing is the acceptance of an old idea that is, there is such a thing as a bad seed  .  .  .  a child who will be a vile adult and capable of dark and contemptible acts traceable to a mind in full concordant with evil.

Some people are simply wired wrong in the womb, infected with whatever it is that afflicts them, and enter this already troubled world as psychopathic personalities who when they get older can mimic caring and friendship well, but are pleasured most when causing pain or humiliation in another.

The Germans were the ones to put a name to it, schadenfreude. I don’t know why, but the very sound of the word seems to fit its definition; a case  of tintinnabulation in German? No gain is involved in this sort of loathsome behavior, no money or sexual coercion, only the gratification of inflicting a hurt on another human being.

Ordinarily, treachery is a crime or sin against a prevailing code, but lower case treachery is different in that there is no quid pro quo of any sort and thus there is no recourse in the courts. It is craven, it is cowardly, it is an act that often uses a dupe, someone to take the brunt of the victim’s anger thereby increasing the pleasure of the creature that put the hurtful event in motion to begin with.

Lower case treachery is the sin from whence other sin springs, the sin that is the thrust between the shoulder blades of God and man. This sort of treachery is perpetrated against those who have given the purveyor of such treachery their trust, the sin against those who had no reason to believe they would be betrayed by a friend, a cold and covert evil act, a spineless act of malice by one who can never be trusted to be on either side of a confidence, or to ever do the right thing.

Lower case treachery is more often than not the specialty of the insecure, one who resents his lack of abilities, disregarded by his peers, relegated to the outer fringes when in the company of his betters, one who strives to pass off the fiction that he is a formidable power behind the throne of whatever mindless melodrama he thinks someone of importance has made him a part of, one who uses his obscurity as a shield against the discovery of his less appetizing activities. Someone who works diligently to be above reproach. Abjures foul language. An active member of the PTA and political party of his choice. Someone never out of step with the popular and conventional flow of the moment.  A Boy Scout on the surface who makes all the right mouth noise, particularly if there are important ears to take in his fatuous sentiments that should a finger ever be pointed at him accusingly the very idea of his involvement in any scurrilous matter would be dismissed without the slightest probative examination, someone who swears oaths to God, country, and individuals he would betray at the drop of a hat.

What kind of man will with premeditation and malevolence set out to bring pain or humiliation to another simply because he can? A bad seed, a man who is wired wrong,  a psychopath, and there is no legal remedy for his victim. The only hope for the victim is a providential tragic accident for such a person that will have a permanent remedial affect. Do not send flowers. Make a hallelujah donation