The Singing Wire and Other Stories

                              by Frank B. Ford


 This book of 42 short stories is (c) copyright Frank B. Ford. For all
 rights refer to the author. An on-line version of this work, with other
 works by Frank B. Ford, is available on the World Wide Web at:

               http://las.alfred.edu/~combeff








 _____________________________________________________________


                     The Singing Wire and Other Stories

                              by Frank B. Ford


MIAMI AND OTHER VICES

   1. [1]The Purse
   2. [2]The Spoon
   3. [3]Leftys
   4. [4]The Bebop
   5. [5]When Everything Is Funny
   6. [6]The Surprise
   7. [7]The Secret Word

IMAGE AND FLAME

   1. [8]The Present
   2. [9]Little Candles
   3. [10]Word
   4. [11]Avia Morrisey
   5. [12]The Ceremony
   6. [13]Operation Dessert Form
   7. [14]Lips Smooth As Oil
   8. [15]Fish Story
   9. [16]ORANGE, GEORGEOUS ORANGE!
  10. [17]The Chastetree
  11. [18]Urban Dialog
  12. [19]Chapters 1 and 2
  13. [20]Nothing Made of Words
  14. [21]BODILEEWOMPA
  15. [22]The Heights
  16. [23]He Tells Me; I Tell Him

THE GOLD TRADE

   1. [24]The Morning Program
   2. [25]The Men
   3. [26]Standup American Guy
   4. [27]Reprise
   5. [28]Talent
   6. [29]A Decidedly Minor Canyon
   7. [30]The Hamburger
   8. [31]The Last Book
   9. [32]Introduction
  10. [33]Little Things Mean

INSTITUTIONS

   1. [34]Transactions
   2. [35]Two Documents
   3. [36]"No Sexual Intercourse Aloud"
   4. [37]The Three P's
   5. [38]All a Dither
   6. [39]Tug
   7. [40]The Progress of the Breast
   8. [41]The Experiment
   9. [42]The Singing Wire


 _____________________________________________________________
MIAMI AND OTHER VICES

 _____________________________________________________________


                                  The Purse

  Strolling to think, he thought, in Coconut Grove, an arty neighborhood
  in Miami, Skip heard a groundglass "Get him!" from a wide woman
  attempting to exit a Cadillac. A burly man had grabbed her purse
  through the open window and was running.

  Skip planted his feet: "I'm on vacation!" But nobody else chased the
  robber except the victim, she nearly as bulky in a trenchcoat. He
  trailed behind, hoping some of those at sunny breakfasts outside
  Angela's Restaurant would join in. Running almost unconsciously, his
  long strides carried him well past the fat woman. He slowed then, not
  desirous of catching anyone, but sickened to see the robber trapped in
  a blind alley behind the Coconut Grove Theater, jerkily revolving to
  confront Skip amid rocking garbage cans. Skip thudded to a halt just
  before he felt someone leap onto his back.

  "You just hold it, Handsome!" she squealed, as two officers puffed by
  them, one flashing handcuffs.

  "Why hello there, Honeybun!" the other officer shouted to the robber,
  who closed his eyes thrusting out the purse. It was soon tossed back
  with a "Here you go, Gretchen!" and the woman dismounted from the
  amazed Skip to catch it.

  "Wouldn't want to lose the famous departmental pocketbook," she winked
  at Skip as she placed the purse on the asphalt, and removed her
  trenchcoat.

  GRETCHEN WEBBERLY announced the bronze nametag. A muscular, hard-eyed
  woman in her uniform, she asked, "What do they call you?" flipping
  open a notebook. The flash of its aluminum cover made Skip jump, and
  Gretchen smile.

  "Skip," he answered and her smile widened.

  "Skip. Uh huh. Well, since this is for a police report, we tend to be
  a bit more formal--even in Coconut Grove. So let's have a last name
  too, shall we?" Skip moved quite close, almost a reflex when talking
  to a woman. He bestowed a benign grin on Gretchen Webberly, it fading
  as her questions went on. "Patrolperson Webberly calling Planet Skip!"
  she eventually yelled, floating her pen across his gaze like a
  miniature silver spaceship.

  He had forgotten the incident and almost everything else until the the
  next day's phonecall. "Hello hero!" Gretchen began. When he protested
  she defined a hero as one who gets a chance to desist and doesn't.

  "Well I took a pretty long time."--Skip added to this concept by
  shrugging with meditative drama, as if she could see him. "Uh, that is
  I, whatchacallit, desisted. And I was doing some of that when I was
  running too."

  "You're just a thoughtful person then."

  "Nobody ever said that before."

  "Well I'm sure of it." laughed the officer, who asked additional
  questions for her report.

  During the next phonecall, Skip learned that "We have to do more than
  just a regular job 'cause this is part of a big national crime
  survey." Marital status came up.

  "Divorce."

  After a pause Gretchen whispered, "Was it a sex thing? Don't answer!
  How completely unprofessional! The most irrational things bite at me
  sometimes. It's so schoolgirlish!"

  "I don't care," Skip shrugged. "Anyways, couldn't be. Anyways it's
  over. I don't think about it anymore."

  "Then it was!"

  "No! At least I don't think so. I can't see how."

  "Are you uncomfortable with my asking you these things? About sex?"

  "I don't think so." He held the phone with his chin and began combing
  his hair, pondering his image in the gummy glass covering a yachting
  print above his motel bed.

  "Well don't worry..."--a stifled laugh--"there's a cure." Was somebody
  listening at her end? A woman often phoned him with another listening;
  with all the giggling it was frequently hard to decipher the words.
  Often, too, she would call back to apologize...before opening her
  heart for some reason.

  "Say? Why not meet for lunch at Angela's or The Pirate's tomorrow? I
  mean it's mostly social but you have a need to talk about all of
  this," Gretchen erupted.

  "I do? Oh. Well, yes. Of course. You're the expert on that sort of
  thing I guess."

  "Masters in Criminal Science and Psychology. Your ideas could be
  important in my doctoral work at University of Miami."

  "My ex said I didn't have any."

  "Well that wasn't very nice. Sounds like she was making you up for her
  own sick reasons--excuse my saying so."

  "I never thought about it, whether it was or not I mean. Nice I mean.
  But...she did make me up a lot. She did that a lot," Skip frowned,
  petulant over one blond wave, borderline frizzy.

  "Whatever. I'll have to come in drag, my macho cop outfit. The
  department dresses the women as boys but our hips give us away."

  Her hips give her away all right, mused Skip on a bench at the Coconut
  Grove Marina that following day, an hour to kill before meeting
  Gretchen. He suddenly pictured the thin Betsy, his ex, carrying an
  armful of her clothes from the apartment just after repeatedly
  thumping his head while saying "My...Playgirl Bunny! You just stay
  lovely with nothing really gunking up anything in there. And now when
  I go out the waitresses and shopgirls will actually start paying some
  attention to me! Hey, why fight it, Skippy? You make women happy with
  your simple simple presence. Hey it's not your fault! It's the Sexual
  Revolution, and we now have the right and obligation and privilege,
  and especially the burden, to create our own brainless blond
  dollbabies, anatomically correct, with little penises that just poke
  out in their innocence."

  That kind of talk was the trouble and it started after she took a
  course at that community college with some feminist bunch. "They used
  to just have those courses in cooking and shit like that," Skip had
  pouted to male friends while outlasting a one-sided game on Monday
  Night Football.

  She was making him up all right, just like Gretchen had said.

  "In fact they're always making me up!" That's something he resolves to
  think about right then and there on the bench, by reliving a few
  samples of the many arguments with women: forever being accused of
  ideas--often triggered by supposed motives of such intricacy that they
  trapped him, somehow, inside another's overwhelming craziness.

  He stares up to the sailboats; a chop in the water makes them roll,
  their ropes snapping in front of muddy clouds. "I thought I was just
  being Mr. Nice Guy," he declares. A pale young man inside the marina
  office proffers a steaming coffee mug in the dark window. With a curt
  smile Skip mostly ignores him.

  "Yeah, they give her away all right," he whispers. Other hips, with a
  blue and white Igloo cooler, alight from a sailboat. Skip laughs, it
  being so easy to visualize the flesh under the sweaty shorts--the
  first easy thing.

  Dr! Webberly, Gretchen will become with his help. Oh well, it'll just
  end up sex on demand again and again. That part was easy, but for some
  reason they all got restless a few months after, throwing their hair
  around in all kinds of fits. The frame of Skip's mind expands to
  accommodate blonds, brunettes, redheads...a file of young women
  stretching up the marina boardwalk all the way to the Chart House
  Restaurant and flopping around in the overcast light like a thousand
  rag dolls.

  He has risen from the bench to maneuver himself into the light flaring
  through surly clouds, stands in trash from an overflowing barrel,
  pigeon-toed, a hand thrust down into his crotch: Male Venus in a
  seashell of styrofoam and foil, bright hair whipping.

  In front of him, the girl with the cooler is asking "Yes?" He must've
  said something she didn't quite hear.

  "Got a minute?"-- Skip burns his second-best smile on her. The guy in
  the office window renews his offer of coffee, vapor curling up from
  the brilliantly white mug. The girl, reflected, sunny, is pulling up
  her halter with one hand; now she rests the cooler on the bench in
  order to tug down on her shorts with the other.

  Yet another scene visits Skip: He is the robber among battered garbage
  cans, thrusting forth the purse to a crowd of women tossing their
  heads helter skelter. Oh why couldn't they just love him for himself?
  Suddenly the ample Gretchen breasts the wave in the smelly alley.
  "Just my jumping on your back must have been traumatic. You're not a
  horse after all!"

  "Clothes horse, Betsy, my ex, said, and later...sawhorse."

  "That was mean!"--but this from the hazy young woman in front of him.
  What he uttered to an imaginary Gretchen has made sense to her also. A
  little smallish but cute, what with her wearing her cap backwards like
  a baseball catcher, Skip determines...and the type'll believe
  anything.

  Not long after, cardboard gets produced from the cooler. Neither has a
  pen. "But it's okay!" she giggles. "My work phone is on there. Ask for
  Marna. It's from a cookie package! I work for the bakery!"

  "And I bet you're the sweetest thing there!" How his ex would have
  been surprised at that quick one! The young man snaps back from the
  marina office window, a black thread of coffee hanging in the air.

  The clouds have lifted and the light dazzles as Skip walks to his
  lunch date, playing with the nautical cap Marna had placed on his
  head. "It'll end up bad with this Gretchen police chick, but not be so
  bad in between," he pronounces, thoughtfully.

  Drunks from off a shrimp boat are kicking around a shiny ragball in an
  impromptu soccer game: " Whatever you say, Captain!" one yells and the
  others chorus, upsetting Skip's concentration.

  He plays with his shrimp cocktail at the Pirate's. They are hemmed in
  by tables of various laughers. Cars contend in the nearby street,
  throwing back harsh sunlight. "It's a cruel world," he informs
  Gretchen after deeply mulling her remarks concerning this or that
  study proving something or other. A tear fashions itself in his
  squinting.

  "Yeah it's cruel all right, but we got a way of making it nice." She
  looms, the blinding street behind her. Shimmers from the water glasses
  and the cutlery roll upward to her shadowed face, her eyes twin
  pinpoints of ice. A horn blows, Skip shudders.



 _____________________________________________________________


                                  The Spoon

  "Well flip a coin then!" She flung up her hands at his usual caution.

  Huh! That's the way you'd do it! But it's a very important business
  decision, M'am. A subject you flunk most greviously." He shut the
  drapes against the light off the blue water, his back to her.

  As he turned around, she snickered at the drapes, an assortment of
  sunflowers and dragons. "No," she insisted from the sofa, hugging her
  knees when he began fiddling with the television console, "I would
  just, simply, decide."

  His tuning grew agitated. "I have seen you decide! Just grab anything
  out of the chaos!"

  "Nonsense!" she shouted with fiery conviction at his multicolored
  profile, the wild television picture splashing around the small,
  darkened apartment. "Oh it's been that way sometimes," she mused. "But
  at least I don't wait on pins and needles for yet another phonecall."

  "Oh yeah? Well just thinking of you making some half-witted guess
  gives me apoplexy." He was bent over and talking into the TV, where
  electronic confetti bobbed. "You just leap at things!" He suddenly
  chuckled in amazement at her, and at the picture which mysteriously
  snapped in on the huge screen. Squinting, he revolved, basketball
  players flying behind him.

  "You are fifty-five years old!" she informed him, and he stiffened in
  order to stand as straight as possible.

  "Does that mean I have no future?" he pleaded.

  "It keeps getting narrower." She squeezed her knees harder and her
  whole body seemed to diminish on the sofa. "So why flub around when
  time is so precious?"

  He approached in mock fear and flopped beside her, his cream-colored
  slacks and turtleneck softly immaculate next to her jeans and
  sweatshirt. "Why are you here?" he asked.

  "In the short run I was invited to watch the Boston Celtics on your
  ridiculous TV. In the long run..." she trailed off.

  "It's starting to sound serious," he quipped, intently watching the
  screen.

  But she continued with her original thought. "I wouldn't even know if
  Harry Bird was playing with a square basketball."

  LAR-ry Bird," he exhaled, as if that small mistake could ruin the
  game--though the last few moments consisted of players speeding to and
  fro incessantly, and with no points scored.

  "Turn it off and let's go out you damn cheapskate! It's the middle of
  the day. I'm sorry," she told his astonished face, "but I just can't
  stare at it like you do, comatose. And what's left? Those horrible
  drapes that you must have gotten on sale like everything else in this
  suffocating apartment and life."

  He pressed forward beside her--she thought in reaction to her
  comment--but someone had almost scored, the ball spinning round and
  round the hoop before falling into the midst of anxious giants. Even
  in the muted sound level of the television their grunts and squeaky
  sneakers were audible. "What, uh, what about the long run?" he
  inquired absently.

  "Well now what about it?" she slapped her knees in exaggerated
  heartiness.

  "They missed again! Oh well. You, you started to say that in the
  long.... How can you forget things a few seconds past, and yet
  remember some tiny alleged hurt ten years ago? Is that female or
  something?"

  She waved off his comments and looked to him with a face so kind he
  trembled. "In the long run I'm here to bury you."

  His eyes widened and he fell so far back into the cushions that she
  had to twist round to see his face at all. "The few friends and
  relatives you had you've absolutely alienated. I'm the only one left,"
  she sighed.

  "Alienated! For God's sakes," he whispered, "we..."--he brushed lint
  off his sweater--"s-speak--if it's absolutely necessary."

  "They will all flee! Flee when you keel over!"

  "Alienated is a strong word," he kept pouting, buried even more in the
  cushions.

  "They're all strong words when you think about them."

  Her "insights" always annoyed him who thought that no generalization
  could be applied to life with the least degree of certainty, although
  something could prove valuable if it made money. "Listen Miss
  Smart-Ass, I've just been checked by Dr Sam. He took a hundred tests
  and checked my orifices and..."

  "Your precious orifices will last no longer than anybody else's."

  "Everything excellent!" he proclamed while following the parabolic
  three-point shot of Larry, not Harry, Bird.

  She bounded up from the sofa to shut off the console.

  "Just when the action is...!" he began protesting.

  As the picture slowly died behind her she spun round. "Doc gave me the
  results before you got them--at the bar of the sailing club."

  "How wonderful! One's intimate details discussed over light beer." He
  was fingering inside his turtleneck.

  "You know Dr. Sam for goodness...!"

  "Yeah I do. He goes from office to hospital to sailing club. Does he
  even have an apartment? I know he's never been on a boat of any type
  in his life, let alone sailing..." and he fluttered his hand as if it
  were an agitated sail.

  She shrugged. "So he tells everybody everything. So what? People and
  their supposed secrets! What a joke!" She was pulling the drapes open,
  and startling light flooded past her small and somewhat ragged figure.

  "Anything else I should know?" he inquired from the sofa.

  "Yes. A testicle didn't descend or something?"

  "I was a little kid!" he sputtered, closing his eyes against the light
  and against his so-remote past.

  "Yeah? Well they're to keep an eye out for something now...men of your
  age? I think he said something like that anyway--if I didn't read it
  somewhere."

  "What? Look out for? Big C?" he squirmed.

  "So say it" she hissed. "Cancer. Say it. Say things."

  He didn't say it. "Oh my God!" he said.

  "Anyway, not that definite. Besides, that or something has always got
  to get you in the end--or in the crotch even. Oh now don't put on your
  prude face. You weren't always so prudish I recall."

  She formed his too-familiar words with her mouth as he was saying
  them. "Never mind all that!" He looked up and caught her. "Now please
  knock off the clowning and tell me what Dr. Sam said exactly."

  "What I told you. Exactly. Vaguely. Whatever. Phone him. Ask him
  yourself. It's not a confession of weakness to do that. 'Something to
  look out for.' I think he said. That's all. An afterthought! You're
  making too much of it--at least I think you are."

  "Close the drapes! I can't even see you. You look like some low-budget
  Hollywood version of a saintly vision. It hurts my eyes. I fervently
  hope that's not a symptom or something."

  She made a large, sweeping gesture to include the brilliant blue water
  and a few creamy sails just then entering the bay. "That's home. Out
  there. Where we came from, where we're going."

  "God I can't talk to you for ten minutes without the morbid drama
  coming out."

  "How could the truth be morbid?" she snapped. "Truth isn't anything
  but itself."

  "Another of your INsights?" He shifted uncomfortably on the sofa. "Uh,
  how about putting my beloved Celtics back on? I really have no money
  to go out. Do you?" He was raising himself just enough to turn a
  pocket inside out.

  "Aw come on! You must have a dollar or two left over from your trip.
  Come on! We'll get on your beautiful sportcoat--the only thing to my
  knowledge you didn't buy on sale." She raced to the bedroom and came
  out with the coat. "Hah hah! I thought so!" and she plucked out a
  wallet of travelers checks from an inside pocket while waifishly
  dancing though pools of light on the wooden floor.

  "What makes you think they're mine? I have to turn them in to the
  accountants."

  ""Who owns the company?" She stopped dancing to point at him. "I shall
  tell you exactly what to tell the accountants. You needn't improvise.
  And I will take charge of these." She had fingered inside the slim
  wallet, having already peeked at the denomination during her dance:
  five one hundreds she deduced.

  "How much is there?"

  "A couple of hundred or fifty. Don't worry about it. Since your
  funeral'll cost you nothing, we'll take out a little at this end."

  "Funeral? Funeral? Please stop before you spin yet another fantasy!"

  She didn't stop of course. "You'll be alone at one of your selfish
  little lunches at Angela's or The Pirate and then FOOP! your face ends
  up in the crab casserole!"

  "Foop indeed! Why do your fantasies always extract my dignity? And not
  just your fantasies either."

  "They'll call me up. They know me. And I'll tell them oh it's only a
  spell. He's had them a dozen times."

  "I've had no spells. Ever! Zero."

  "Get you across the street. I'm little but wiry," she remarked to his
  incredulous face. "And as to spells I'm talking future tense, five
  years from now--or beginning tomorrow maybe."

  "And then...up to this apartment?"--his question indicating that it
  was a perfectly good place to live but...

  She tried to drag him off the sofa by way of a dress rehearsal. This
  effort, futule, left her winded. "No, uh, not up to here you absolute
  lump! Right to...water. Leave you there a minute. 'Now don't go away,
  y'hear?' Then up here to fetch hideous drapes. Then go get my
  sailboat--I know the winds and tides."

  "Then that's all you know."

  "I'll get you to a spot where you'll travel out to sea for sure."

  "That's enough!" he begged.

  "And then," she nodded, her eyes closed, "a few personal
  words...release dead-you and horror-drapes to God and the wide
  sea-world and eternity! Eternity!"

  "They'll think you murdered me. The authorities will."

  "I'll worry about that then."

  "Oh that's you all right!" he pronounced.

  "So come on! Let's motor! Have some fun. You need a..." and she
  managed to shove and punch him off the sofa and onto the parquet
  floor..."push!"

  There he sat as she draped the coat over his shoulders, resigned to
  the punishment she had, and would, inflict, enjoying the game of it
  too in his ironic way. "It all sounds expensive," he shrugged.

  "Leave that to me. I'll forge."

  And of course he protested all the way from the botique (where she
  bought a simple daytime dress and sensible heels and they stored her
  jeans and ragged sweat shirt in a Wynn-Dixie bag) to the waiting limo
  she had arranged that morning, and especially at the Grand Cafe, where
  she ordered lest he see the menu.

  And onto the pubcrawl all of the bright afternoon.

  She lost track of the spending but smiled in the darkening limo coming
  back, while feeling the irregular ridge,indicating that all the
  traveller's checks had been ripped out. As they both looked straight
  ahead she found herself talking quietly and slowly.

  "We live such deprived lives, you and I. We know all there is to know
  about each other and that's wonderful, as well as deadly at
  times...but a letting-go like this every few months or so... hey I
  need it too! I might go around most of the time looking like Tugboat
  Annie but..."

  He waited for her to finish the thought but she just stared at the
  blue flow of the early evening traffic.

  "I bore you, I know," he whispered. "I bore myself. But I could..."
  The plush upholstery all but swallowed his soft words.

  She took his hand. "Oh it's too late for any changing or promises. I
  love you period. When you bore me or when, like today, and though
  kicking and dragging, you help make life a little more exciting."

  "Before I die, yes?" The violet light deepened the wrinkles in his
  face, the tweed of his sportcoat.

  He figured his question had been humorous but she nodded severely.
  "That's right. Loosen you and your wallet up before it's too late."

  "Well I never thought I'd say it, but I had one hell of a good time!
  That one waiter was so snobby he didn't even want to take the whole
  tip!" he giggled. Wanted to save us from being branded noveau riches
  or something I guess. He pondered the red light they had stopped at.

  The limo ticked away, young people in shorts crossing in one chaotic
  wave. "But that's what I am all right," he continued.

  "Hey! Old rich, new rich, or poor. He got his tip. That was his only
  business with you. Take things a moment at a time."

  "Square basketball!" he laughed softly. "I could never come up with
  anything like that...too batty and too imaginative."

  It was still somewhat light over the bay when they returned. They sat
  separately as they often did, this time to watch a windsurfer outlined
  in weakest fire against the dark.

  He disappeared for a few seconds out in the chill vastness of water.
  Then his sail emerged much further out, looking almost like an
  inverted teaspoon, its bowl holding all of the remaining light.

  After a last glimmer, that, too, folded into blackness, and they could
  not hear the other's breathing in the small apartment, or, later, the
  weeping.



 _____________________________________________________________


                                   Leftys

  Rhonda Crabshaw ranked as the last to confide in, and in the blue
  fluorescence shot off by the Pepsi machine, she looked even more
  threatening. That brow! thought Larkie, it's like a balcony. But he
  had to seize the moment, even to admitting his shyness "...so I just
  wanted to ask your advice, see, because, well the women are forever
  teasing me, and with all the overtime lately, the only ones I meet are
  on the force, but I'm reluctant to ask any of them out in case they
  really do think I'm some kind of nerd."

  Officer Crabshaw picked up a clipboard and seemed to be reading the
  solution to Larkie's dilemma off it, her forehead even more massive
  under the boyish haircut. "If they think you're a nerd, then it's
  their problem. Anyway, just don't bother with them--not enough time.
  You're twenty six or so, right, Larkie? Wasted too much of your life
  being nice. Somehow got to start accelerating. Ac-cel-er-a-TING!" she
  drummed the clipboard with a pencil, and then abruptly ceased,
  shrugging "I'll...give you the course. But no tell!"--drawing a rough
  finger over his lips, she laughed alarmingly. "On second thought, go
  ahead and tell if you want! I don't know what reputation I've got left
  and I simply don't care. What am I here for? To be a police officer,
  right? One of Miami's Finest! My personal life is personal."

  "Well I wouldn't ever," Larkie started reassuring her but leaked steam
  rapidly. "Uh, if...you decided to...uh, ultimately..." Then he became
  convinced that Rhonda was aping the familiar, distressing pattern: "Uh
  huh! You're...kidding me too, Rhonda, am I right?"

  "Nope. Never! Uh uh. No-oh-way. Nein. Nada. And negative in whatever
  language I'll have to take to qualify for my Master's in Criminal
  Justice--if I got that last word right. I don't kid; you'll find that
  out." Her gray eyes held twin, somber Larkies.

  "But I thought you were...locked up with some dentist."

  "And safe therefore? Shut up for now, Larkie!" She began smashing at
  the Pepsi machine with an open palm. "I thought before this that you
  were even too shy to talk, and now you're suddenly Officer Gabby.
  Anyway, that dentist knows gum disease but not how a woman feels." She
  rocked the machine, repeating the sentiment. "Tell me to stop,
  Larkie!" she finally breathed, hoarsely. "It's only a stupid
  device...and not a dentist. For one, it's better looking. And I've
  only lost half a dollar and not a significant portion of my only
  life." She bounced back from the rocking machine with a smile of
  vengeful glee. "Ooooops! Well I guess I'm on the rebound, hey? Do you
  know what that means?"

  "Uh. No."

  "It means, my bashful one, that I'll be twice as good to you and twice
  as intense." In the icy emanations from all the snack machines her
  eyes took on the color of mercury. "Well! Judging by your look you got
  more than you bargained for. Wanted sisterly advice and ended up with
  a real woman instead! Your lucky day!" ...

  Me and the poor dentist, sssss-scarred bodies by the wayside! I gave
  her my heart but she wanted my soul, he mouths the words of a
  country-western song. Actually my body!--I think that's what this is
  called, what's left of it. Larkie, in departmental trousers with
  powder blue Cuban shirt, sits on a bench at Dinner Key, half-watching
  the sailboats tie up.

  A phone rings in the marina office, recalling the one message on the
  machine blinking among scattered, unpacked boxes in his Coconut Grove
  apartment: "Come on back. There are things I can change. I've thought
  extensively about all of this."

  An old boat groans into its berth. "Everything aches," Larkie
  whispers, "body and soul hangover." Out on Biscayne Bay, a sail
  dazzles against humpbacked clouds which are dark and yet brilliantly
  outlined. The sail, too, goes black though its edge remains sunlit.
  Larkie senses fire scouring his very bones.

  Knees stuck straight out, a blond young man careens past him on a
  too-small bicycle. Suddenly he slips off backwards, lifting it above
  his head, wheels spinning. It's a folding model, and a quizzical
  attempt ensues to break it down to carrying size-- which act Larkie
  must tune out, a pitch for attention from this apparent incompetent in
  droopy white shorts. After a few minutes, the sound of the bike being
  thrown into a shrub nearly coincides with the young man thrusting
  himself backwards onto the bench, enormously sighing. "Keep it simple,
  right?"

  "If you can," Larkie shrugs.

  "I can. Believe me."

  "Then you're lucky I suppose."

  "Hope so. Say! You're in blue and I'm completely blue, and so why not
  be that way together?"

  "I wouldn't even know where to start with that kind of deranged
  thinking!" sneers Larkie. "In the first place, I do believe I come
  from another sexual direction."

  "Don't even try to start. With my deranged thinking, I mean. Don't you
  even try! In the meantime, while you're not trying, I'll just sit here
  like a little lamb-y-kin--very short and very funny." The blond young
  man turns his knees and elbows inward, so as to diminish his size.
  "And if I feel any more lost, why then I'll ask you for sexual
  directions."

  "You will huh? Did you get your highschool's award for chutzpa?"

  "Just...shyly...wait. Uh, at your discretion."

  "It's a free bench--unfortunately." Larkie shuts his eyes against the
  intruder.

  "I'm WAIT-ing!" the young man eventually sings.

  "Still here?" asks Larkie. "Then I'm to do something, huh? Is that it?
  Well, not bloody likely! I just came off an episode where I did
  things. Boy did I! May be better off not to even think for awhile."

  "I know what you mean, and I have no trouble at all in that
  pursuit--or lack of pursuit. So...here we sit, and when you sit, you
  can't chase anyone, can you? Or any idea either. I'm not moving. How
  about you?--outside of your shaking on account of those nasty ole
  memories I mean." He wiggles closer to Larkie, smiling broadly, as if
  primed to explode into teasing laughter.

  "Don't you mean it's my move? I get that strong implication. Perhaps
  it was the sly wink--the cheapest trick in this silly seduction game
  you're absolutely wasting on me. And don't crowd!"--Larkie inches
  away.

  "It is and it isn't your move. And, golly gee, if I winked I didn't
  even know it--maybe it's just squinting from that damn sun coming out!
  I like cloudy days--more mysterious. Easier on the wrinkles too. And,
  say, you yourself are not above a little teasing either, are you? In
  your, of course, capital-B, butch heterosexuality?"

  "It is and it isn't," Larkie repeats his benchmate's words. "Like
  everything else, I'd say. And butch, huh? I sometimes wonder if I was
  Butch or Bambi in my last...demolition derby, but why on earth am I
  telling...?"

  "Because I'm open and warm. Mhhhh!" the young man briefly embraces
  himself with enough force to rock the bench.

  "Hadn't noticed. Agressive is more to the point, I think."

  "Excuse me for saying so, but you think too much."

  "I do excuse you because you're right."

  "Oh I wouldn't want to make that a habit! Although a little wouldn't
  hurt in my case. My wrongness index is way way up there. Typical fate
  of the dumb blond with, ah hem, innocent blue eyes."

  "I'll buy the blue part," snaps Larkie.

  "Hmmmmm? I'm not sure that'll be enough. See me wondering? I'm
  WONDER-ing!"--again he breaks into song.

  "Oh? Still in need of guidance?"

  "You could say that. Or direction."

  "Good! Then how about you go that way?" Larkie points brusquely
  towards the Chart House Restaurant. "And pick up some lonely
  businessman on Master Card. You get a lobster and give your all, and I
  get to stay here and continue sulking--without interference, or songs
  and dances with and without bicycles. Listen! If it were another time
  and place--and dimension--and we were two different people of the
  opposite sex...?"

  "Nope. Can't just split like that. For one thing, I've probably been
  sent to be a whatchacallit, medium, to relieve all your tedious
  anxieties, and for another, we've known each other too long, wouldn't
  you say?"

  "No! What else can I say?"

  "Anything you please."

  "Then let me say that I...gave her my heart and she... ate the fuckin
  thing! Then started on my soul for dessert."

  "Past tense!" He smilingly claps his hands as if to dismiss Larkie's
  gloom. "Past tense!"

  "Again, yes and no."

  "Feeling ambivilant then?"

  "Not in your sense I'm not. Sorry."

  "Don't worry. I don't want anyone's soul. My own's enough of a mess.
  Good gosh if I could see it I'd drop dead!" The blond young man sinks
  his head to his chest and pretends to die, twitchingly.

  "Who wouldn't? And snap up! Don't want anyone to think I'm sitting
  here with a cokehead or someone. It's bad enough. But...why...am I
  enjoying myself with the likes of you?--at least somewhat. And telling
  you things too? It's crazy. I never tell anybody anything!--at least I
  won't ever again, not after confiding in...someone, and barely living
  to tell the tale. God just listen to me whine!" Larkie slaps his
  forehead.

  "So whine a little! Who are you not to? Which of these yachts is yours
  by the bye?"

  "No such luck as I know you know--always deflecting the real, aren't
  you? Anyway, I guess I'm just going crazy. I can only hope that I'm
  imagining you! Especially that...eye shadow or whatever it is. Just
  how weird are you, exactly?--not that it's any of my business."

  "I am an all-natural product! You can take me anywhere. And I'm
  sincere!"

  "You fake it well, saying what you think I want to hear: your strong
  suit I'd guess."

  "If you cut me will I not bleed? And did you know a snake has two
  penises?"

  "Oh? How does he throw out a line in Coconut Grove?" muses Larkie.
  "Excuse me Bridget, excuse me Bo."

  "Oh there are all kinds of ways! And I know the places where you see
  them all, believe me!" The young man nods quickly, continues nodding
  in a slower and slower rhythm, his bright hair rising and falling,
  then he stonily stops.

  "Don't you think you give things a tad too much drama?--if that's what
  that is. But, I'm...maybe one tenth of one percent intrigued about
  hearing of these alleged places where one sees everything--at least I
  think that's what this is."

  "Don't worry. Just an emotion, I have them all the time-- you can't
  always name them."

  "I bet you do have them all the time, to the exclusion of everything
  else." Larkie shakes his head while his benchmate shrugs.

  "What else is there? Don't answer. You know, you amuse me more than
  friends I've had for years? Mr Man-All-In-Blue whose answers are
  conventional but whose heart's a bit wilder, I'm guessing." He dons
  his most burnished-looking smile as cloud shadows race over them.

  "Well I'm glad to be good for something," Larkie chuckles, "such a
  wild heart in a square world is me! Give me a break, you...you
  sub-literary fraud!" The quick breeze rills their hair, swirling candy
  wrappers, rocking the sailboats in their berths.

  "It's called Leftys, the place I'd like to show you? No
  apostrophe!--ever hear the radio ad? On South Beach." Gee it's a
  lovely wind now, isn't it? Just...lifting everything, hey?"

  "Nothing. Nada." Larkie shakes his head.

  "Well, that's a start. What's apostrophe?"

  "God but you're a perservering...faggot!"

  "Oh please! I hate that word perservering. Oooops, watch it! Caught
  you really laughing. He's LAUGH-ing!" repeatedly sings the young man,
  ranging from bass to soprano. Hopping off the bench, he's soon down to
  one knee, golden in a shaft of sunlight.

  O De sun shine East
  De sun shine West
  O my dat sun
  He a terrible pest!

  "Not as bad as you! And Al Jolson is long long dead," giggles Larkie.

  We ALLLLLL'S gonna be!
  Dead you see!
  And that there's gotta be
  My only guarantee!

  "You'd try to manipulate God himself!" Larkie bursts.

  The young man rises to hitch up his shorts and studiously brush his
  knees. "As long as we all understand each other."



 _____________________________________________________________


                                  The Bebop

  They were all whores anyway and the younger ones just starting. Thus
  Randy Midden didn't feel all that bad to be without a clinging female
  in the vast, snow-filled parking lot of the shopping center, crunching
  towards the one-week old blue Dodge Aries he had parked far out from
  harm's way, just inside a circle of weak yellow-white light. "It's a
  curious--of the light. Osity. Cure-osity. Curiosity," he explained to
  no one in regards to the narrowness of the car he approached head on,
  experiencing a wave of despair as he imagined trying to explain such a
  phenomenon to the girls he left behind him at the Bebop Cafe. "Bends
  rays, something... forget it." But even in his distrust of women's
  general intelligence, Randy tried another illustration: "See? Looks
  like color of puddles, car does, like puddle stood up."

  It seemed at that freezing moment the most hilarious image ever
  created and Randy hugged himself and giggled, puffs of dark vapor
  surrounding his scarlet face.

  The pickup with the huge knobby wheels and enormous mirror-finish
  bumper was gone from atop the snowbank beside his space. It would have
  been pointed up past the moon, so bright and high now, but too low for
  the young man trying to pose next to that truck earlier, his leather
  jacket ballooning and his white scarf whipping as his boots slid
  sideways--moon rising behind his tremulous underbelly.

  Idiot, recalls Randy, as a snowy wind slams into him. "Idiot!" Randy
  Midden had pronounced earlier as his hand reached for the cold brass
  handle of the door to the Bebop Cafe. Despite his efforts to remain
  stock still, Pepper Stutzman, the now twice-remembered idiot, had slid
  entirely down the snowbank and into the blue Aries as Randy Midden was
  strolling to the Bebop. Pepper Stutzman spat on the car then, and
  pronounced "Wimp Bucket!" And, having nothing else to do, he followed
  the wimp who owned it into the Bebop Cafe where he met Traction,
  another member of the Four-Wheelers. "Stutz-my-man, this place sucks,"
  Traction told him. Traction sported a glass eye from a hot-rodding
  accident and Pepper always stared at that eye as if not to do so was
  rejecting a challenge.

  Traction nodded towards Randy Midden who was already talking down to
  two blonde sisters seated on the floor amid rocking dancers. "Talker,"
  sniffed Pepper Stutzman. "You gotta be talker. Like that asshole.

  "We don't like talkers," affirmed Traction.

  "We don't deal with no lines of shit," Pepper Stutzman informed him
  over the throttling bass of the huge speaker they sunk next to on the
  apron of the empty stage, "'cause what we say we do, and what we want
  we take."

  "Amen, Stutz-Bear." Traction pointed to the S T U D stencilled on his
  own t-shirt.

  For the next two hours the young men sipped Old Milwaukee from
  resonating styrofoam cups, and watched the verbal and dance techniques
  of Randy Midden. Finally Traction suggested "Let's take him out and
  fuck him up the ass," his good eye blinking violently.

  "Not classy enough," came the light, shy, laugh from Pepper Stutzman
  as a record changed with a clunk.

  "Then what? Stutz-My-Man, our leader!"

  "I'm, whatchacallit, thinking."

  While incomprehensible punk spewed forth from the speaker next to
  them, Traction thought a moment about what Pepper had just said.
  Finally he blurted "I can't stand this fuckin place no more. I gotta
  move, Amigo." He stood up and a dancing couple avoided him
  drastically.

  "Go fuckin home then, Traction."

  "No-o-way!"

  "That's an order. I'll call you and the others when I decided."

  "I haven't got all fuckin night and besides, when I get there the ole
  lady'll whine about my never staying home."

  "I gotta piss, man. Man where you piss?" a greenish youth in a pink
  tomahawk haircut inquired of Pepper Stutzman. Pepper threw his arm at
  the hundred dancers just before a wave of them engulfed the youth
  whose pink hair bobbed in their midst. "Anywhere, man.
  Like...anywhere," he shrugged.

  "I aint fuckin kidding!" the youth told someone as Pepper turned back
  to sneer at Traction "We threw out a lot of shit about the regulations
  in our constitution to let married assholes join." Pepper's clear eyes
  drilled into Traction's glass one. "We can change that shit you know.
  Now give her a quick bang and stay by the phone."

  "That an order too, Stuntman?"

  "Engage. And give her one for the club." Engage meant put your vehicle
  in four-wheel drive, and therefore, get with it, or sometimes, in a
  milder tone: okay, right.

  "I have to give her the gift, then. I'm loyal to the club."

  "All there is that's worth it. And don't forget it!

  Brothers before bitches." Pepper punched him on a bare arm in a
  grazing way. "Now get your coat."

  "I don't wear no coat. Hey! I'm a Four-Wheeler!"

  Randy Midden was attempting to grope a fat, drunken girl in the forest
  of coatracks adjoing the wall holding the telephone when Pepper
  Stutzman finally made his call to Traction, who knew to call the
  others.

  "Engage?" Pepper signed off.

  "Engage engage!" Traction indicated that nothing could go wrong.

  It didn't. Under Pepper Stutzman's direction the high knobby-tired
  pickups formed a circle with the blue automobile in the center; then
  after his scarf and Hitler salute shot through his glistening truck's
  open window along with the shrieking "Engage!" the trucks fishtailed
  in furious white smoke. A few seconds later, throwing snow straight
  back they ploughed into that Aries with the simultaneous precision of
  the club's Wimpmobile Mash. After impact they careened off in
  different directions, later to convene near the opposite end of the
  shopping center at SEAR'S AUTOMOTIVE EMPLOYEE PARKING, since Pepper
  knew of a Camaro with a bottle of Mad Dog under the front seat.

  He toasted them all with blood trickling down his hand because he had
  to smash the window when Traction, t-shirt stiff with icy sweat,
  couldn't pick the frozen lock.

  "Better get that hand looked at, Commander," the blue-armed Traction
  shook.

  "Man it's fuckin nothing!" admonished Pepper Stutzman.



 _____________________________________________________________


                          When Everything Is Funny

  On the subway with a playful mind and should he ask? Oh why not? It's
  innocent.

  She goes ballistic, hair spiking, face a twisting horrorshow. He
  couldn't have guessed she was insane; had picked her, in fact, as the
  most normal one, her primness.

  "Sorry, but it's really no big deal!"--moving further away. Rumor
  sweeps; he speeds.

  -grabbed that woman by the tit
  -hadda be worse than that, just look at her!
  -'tween her legs, said filthy, disgusting things!

  What are you doing? What kind of pig are you?--

  pummeller, black, intervening. I'm sick to death of us getting blamed
  for this kind of shit all the time.

  -to death
  -to death
  -to death
  (with each blow)

  Lilla Darra-Rhoden had just an hour ago flung her swarthy male
  instructor all over the mat while shrieking empowerment mottos...but
  then Costanza Wong had hissed

  -Grab and twist my testicles with both hands!
  -Huh, I knew it! Why YOU'RE even afraid to SAY testicles!
  -Might as well society keep giving YOU wall job. (Sneer.)

  Here's the wall job for YOU! And I'M the wall, pervert, she does say
  now, karate chopping. The pummelling black and she nod, acknowledging
  no time for proper introductions.

  Please. There's some mistake. All I really said to her was...

  Reggie the transvestite is prompted to join the dialog (sold Mary Kay
  Cosmetics):

  -Bash a gay and now you pay!

  But it was a lady and I didn't touch her and she misunderstood or
  something. That's all. Stop! Please! All of you. Terrible
  misunderstanding. Now listen! Please just listen to me!

  -bash a gay becomes gash a bay in latter services
  -also ball job
  -seth (sick to death)

  Giddy within such linguistic faults, this three, but blows never
  slacken.

  -Hey. Wait a little minute. Don't kill him.
  ...soft voice impossible to attribute gender to

  WHY NOT? WHY NOT KILL HIM? WHY NOT KEEP HIM FROM HUMILIATING OTHER
  WOMEN?

  OR men even! this new person snaps, squeezing a fist through the fury.
  But do let's hurry. I gotta get off next stop. I'm a rabbi and taking
  grad work.

  -rimless spectacles--kind eyes, gray
  Please. You. Man of God!

  -Hey! and don't I get sick of that old tune!

  That lady was crazy. I said almost nothing!

  -Yeah! Right! (chorus)

  Whereupon, they hammer in silence. (His coverup becoming flaccid.)

  -mufflyness when clothing stuck
  -more melony, flesh
  These sounds prove funny too. Echo. Overlap.

  -a good time
  -for citizens
  -best, solidarity, racial and sexual
  -like the many advertisements around them
  -on the subway, NYC



 _____________________________________________________________


                                The Surprise

  _Man_ What the bleedin' hell!

  _Cyclist_ Oh I'm so sorry!

  _Man_ Minding our own business in a quiet cemetary and over the wall
  some IDIOT throws a bicyle!--I don't believe it.

  _Woman_ That's what we were doing all right.

  _Cyclist_ Boys chasing me. Said they kill me! Said the rock concert
  was cancelled at the school, and for some reason I was going to pay
  for it.

  _Boy_ I can still see the light from that bike, faggot, if you think
  you're hiding or something!...well look at this scene! Like something
  from out of art class or something.

  _Man_ I hope you can run, wiseass. Boy I know YOU can't, fatass!

  _Man_ GRRRRRRRR! ...

  _Cyclist_ Uh, cold?

  _Woman_ No.

  _Cyclist_ My jacket?

  _Woman_ It's okay

  _Cyclist_ Sorry. I mean...my intru...uh, crit- critical moment.

  _Woman_ There are critical moments and there are critical moments.

  _Cyclist_ He he won't run far, I mean, uh, like he is

  _Woman_ Yeah he will. You don't know him.

  _Cyclist_ I'll stay here till he gets back

  _Woman_ No need.

  _Cyclist_ All kinds of weirdos around.

  _Woman_ No argument there.

  _Cyclist_ Are you sure...jacket?

  _Woman_ No. I like the way I look and feel. Breeze on me you know? You
  would too, if you looked at me.

  _Cyclist_ Excuse me?

  _Woman_ We were only having sex. No big deal. Ooops, I do hear him
  coming back. I suggest you get out of here. He can be crazy--you heard
  him growl.

  _Cyclist_ If you think I should.

  _Woman_ Give me a call. Delky. I work at this church here. I know it's
  a funny way to meet, but I like biking too.



 _____________________________________________________________


                               The Secret Word

  Driven by insults to play touch football with them, Buzz hoped Cecily
  would come to the field anyway. "You're too sweet on her! Be with the
  fellows sometimes! Why she's making you into a regular sweetie-boy!"
  elbowed Josker Albright as they walked back to their side of the ball
  after a chaotic play, the other team jeering. The shirtless Buzz
  halted a moment to squint, his face green from the brilliance off the
  grass. He was trying to find her in the bleachers, and those jeers
  intensified now, with his name being hooted by players from both
  sides. Some began squealing Cec-i-LEEEEEEE! When Josker flipped the
  ball to him after another botched play, he added, winking, "Give her
  something to think about, Buzz, old man!"

  The something to think about proved to be the uncoordinated Roger
  Reddington de Graf, who stopped by 16 Songbird Lane with orange mums,
  jerking alongside them in blinding light as the slim Cecily flung open
  the white doors.

  Buzz had to start Lehigh University that next week; Roger stayed in
  Stroudsburg to help his father sell Fords. Unknown to Buzz, he devoted
  the rest of his time to Cecily.

  Unknown to Cecily, Buzz threw himself at beer drinking and those girls
  of Bethlehem who shared that activity--often cleaning him up
  afterwards. On the verge of flunking out two months into the semester,
  he began sending a series of cards to Cecily, usually showing couples
  in fog, either among ancient forests, or on beaches crowded with
  driftwood. The verses of these cards his roommate, nicknamed Drunk,
  labeled muzz-fuzz-haiku-y-looie.

                       moon on the pond
                       and then.....
                       a stone.....
                       and many moons


                               my footprints
                               yours.....
                               two paths.....
                               one,
                               to..........eternity...............



                                 a heartbeat
                               a shudder
                          a silence
                       of flowers


  Buzz chose not just these artistic expressions, but others of more
  pedestrian strain.

                            Thinking of You...
                            Just a note to say
                       You're one who's not forgot.
                      Sorry there's been some delay
                       'cause I care for you a lot!

                          I know I'm not clever.
                         That much I have to say.
                      But a true friend is forever,
                         For this and every day!

  Towards the end of first semester, after a brutally dry period of
  hitting the books, Buzz catapulted back to the local girls. He had
  spent Thanksgiving break at Drunk's parents' house in Scranton, and
  for Christmas vacation had joined his own parents at an aunt's
  retirement village near St Augustine--zero chances to see Cecily.

  No more cards were dispatched until Valentine's Day, when for some
  reason he sent a comic one in the shape of a gold key.

  Hey why not open that trunk?
  AND LET MY HEART OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  A little like a shellshock victim clamping onto an obscure faith, and
  after he and three town girls--an intense week each--had gone through
  each other, Buzz finally got around to writing Cecily his one
  heartfelt, if circuitous, note: somehow begging that she reform him
  while he, presumably, awakened her sexually. It had been immediately,
  too, after religion had swept in, prompted by a revival meeting in
  Bethlehem which Dean of Men Brendenhof had strongly recommended to
  him. Buzz had been saved and afterwards met over hot cider and
  cinnamon donuts the one local girl, Gladys Alderfelder, who knew she
  could tame him.

  "I told my mother about you," she informed Buzz a few days later, "and
  she's says you're oversexed and should see a doctor, that young men
  can ruin themselves and never have a good career. You'll never be a
  good engineer, Buzz, 'cause that's all you think about."

  That one sincere note to Cecily had arrived after her elopement with
  Roger Reddington de Graf, and she sent it back with all the cards and
  a tissuey note saying Dear Dear Buzz, the reasons one marries can't
  just be that one and that one alone. She had written from her new home
  on the lake, full of the antiques Roger's mother had given the couple.

  After college, Buzz worked as a designer and model maker for The
  Foothills Toy Company, owned, strangely enough, by the Pocono Mountain
  area's most flagrant Socialist, Bret Hansen, who became very fond of
  the apolitical Buzz.

  He retained the bundle of cards Cecily had sent back and eventually
  rubber-banded it when the lavender ribbons disintegrated. His upfront
  wife, Evy, whom he had met at a toy industry convention in Harrisburg,
  had already proclaimed, and more than once, "Your past aint my
  business and vice versa--if you're one of them gets jealous notions."
  Buzz kept the cards and Cecily's note in a locked desk drawer, and
  actually did get upset thinking of what Evy may have been hiding,
  making a fruitless search one night when she was at her canasta group.

  After ten years or so, Roger Reddington De Graf and Cecily bought a
  one-third interest in the toy company, on the very day Buzz was
  hospitalized with a hernia after lifting the clay model of
  Monstro-Robot.

  Cecily and Roger, upon reading of his hospital stay in THE POCONO
  MESSENGER, sent him a card of a cartoon man, very bony, swathed in
  bandages and on crutches, surrounded by broken machinery and scrawny
  dogs.

  I might be
  too old to cut the mustard seein'
  all this rout,
  but I'm still full of beans
  and sauerkraut!
  He visualized her at sixteen by the moonlit lake, and repeated quietly
  from his hospital bed, "How many moons? O how many moons?"

  Nurse Lucille Nitti overheard. "Yeah and lots of water under the dam
  too, huh, Honey? You do b.m. yet, Honey?"

  "I will inform you," he pronounce firmly.

  "I like the sound of that, Honey!" she fluffed the pillow around his
  rigid head.

  The years, and the moons, flew and the couples had each a late child,
  Gwen for Buzz and Evy, and Roger Jr. for Roger and Cecily. Both Dads
  were thirty-three. The children went to different schools and
  ultimately attended the University of Pennsylvania, but never met,
  either there or in Stroudsburg.

  On Buzz's fiftieth birthday old man Hansen suffered a fatal heart
  attack, and diehard Socialists from all over the country attended the
  funeral. He made provision in his will for Buzz which the New York
  lawyer had to explain several times: "You must immediately retire, and
  then you receive a generous monthly stipend for the rest of your
  life." As Buzz shook his gray head, the lawyer explained further that
  Hansen felt that his heirs and the other owners might, he quoted him,
  "sell out to sharpies. And the first thing they do in the land of the
  brave is to raid the pension fund."

  "That sure sounds like him," offered the shaking Buzz.

  "Some West Germans did just that to A&P Store employees. We don't have
  enough thieves, we have to import them," the lawyer shrugged, a grim
  young man dressed Wall Street save for a blood- red cravat.

  Had Buzz kept a diary the sole entry for the seventh year after
  retirement might have read: Roger takes over company completely and
  milks it, sells most of the patents to the Japanese. The one for the
  eighth year would read My Evy dies shoveling snow.

  After Evy's death he sold the house and contents at auction and went
  to Florida to live in Coral Gables near his daughter, Gwen, who taught
  ballet at The University of Miami.

  That very year they cut the dancing program, so she's off to Tulane
  with her Latin lover Carlos, who she claims has only been helping her
  with the electric in her Coconut Grove studio. (He did, in fact, show
  wiring plans to Buzz who told him "You don't have to draw me a
  diagram.")

  After they leave, it proves cheaper living in Miami Beach but the
  angry faces of many of the other retired people irritate Buzz.
  Sweetness, the black counterboy at Wolfy's consoles "They're all New
  Yorkers and they grew up snapping at each other about business. Only
  now they got tans. And no business. Don't take it serous. People are
  the same under all the styles."

  Roger dies, and THE POCONO MESSENGER featuring the front page obituary
  touting that civic leader also contains an article about senior
  citizens sharing houses.

  Buzz finally moves back to Stroudsburg to a shared house owned by a
  Mrs Lahr, where he is greatly appreciated, being, among other thing,
  Friday's cook. One of the sharers, Miss Meniffee proclaims "I always
  look forward to Friday!" It's nice for her to say, but for some reason
  things begin slipping--anybody can do Sloppy Joes and Fritos admits
  Buzz to himself. Maybe I'm getting too old to cut the mustard--which
  brings back the silly card Roger and Cecily had sent him so many years
  ago.

  In the back of his mind he has thought of contacting Cecily after a
  decent interval. Such a time has long passed when he sends a birthday
  card on a whim.

  He had walked to the mall and was out of breath reaching The Little
  Card Shoppe, a franchise operation in the throes of a nationwide
  promotion, and therefore full of metallic balloons which moved about
  in the air currents and kept bumping him.

  "May I help you?" inquired a gum-chewing young woman in very elevated,
  sharply clicking heels. Her badge read Merrie, asst mgr.

  "Yeah, stop stocking all these gushy cards. And I'm coming in here
  with a pin next time!" She, amused, led him noisily through the
  balloons to a spin rack labeled TASTEFUL CONTEMPORARIES. He eventually
  chose a card featuring a black and white photo of a blind man with a
  cane who sported, though, huge orange sunglasses. "Hey! Long time no
  see I gotta say..." read the caption snaking from his mouth, and then
  inside the card, a platinum blond in a mink cape and nothing else
  kicked up her orange heels, a bottle dangling from one hand and a
  down-turned champagne glass in the other.

                              but feel free
                 to have yourself one HELL of a birthday!

  She was a kind of pink soft-sculpture of amazingly elastic flesh. The
  day he mails the card one crocus breaks through ice on the tiny lawn
  of the post office. A week later a note comes back signed by
  Jacqueline Naismith, MSW.

  We are honored to say that Cecily is a guest
  here at Bide a Bit now. She asked me to report that
  she'd sure love a visit!!!!!!!!!
  He goes to see her and is confronted by a muttering, prematurely old
  woman in a wheelchair in front of a bright window, wisps of pale hair
  brilliantly vibrating, her flesh pink and purple, hands spasmodic,
  jumpy. Before he can speak she warns of the Pennington boys as he is
  holding her icy hands down. They had been stealing, he gathers,
  riotously digging up bulbs too, and going wild on the garden swing.
  Actually he had walked by that big house on the lake earlier, only to
  see a comic wrought iron sign featuring two doctors over a mound-like
  patient and the legend THE GYNECOLOGISTS SPEISENGLASS.

  Cecily stops talking and stares at Buzz for many moments, her eyes
  bluer, and younger, than he can remember. "Are you Roger?"

  "Roger is, was you husband. I'm your old friend, Buzz." Fat Roger Jr
  enters and Buzz drops her hands. Roger wears a too- tight blazer with
  a FORD logo, open, his shirt beginning to spill out the front like
  laundry from a truck.

  "I'm Buzz." Buzz extends his hand.

  "Isn't everybody?" counters Roger Jr who storms into a monolog about
  not being able to depend on his new service manager. "Now don't let
  her pull that forgetfulness crap on you either," he suddenly shouts
  from nowhere. "These guerilla fighters of the Altzheimers Brigade
  aren't above a little manipulation."

  "She's been just fine," assures Buzz.

  "Say, you worked for the toy company, didn't you? I saw you in some
  old photographs in the mess of my father's estate. That was one lulu
  of a communist used to own it, wasn't he? So you, especially,
  shouldn't be so rough on my Dad. He was fine until..." and Roger Jr
  nods in the direction of silently chewing Cecily. "Huh! She eating air
  again?"

  "I never was rough on your Dad or easy on him or anything else," Buzz
  asserts. "I retired before..." and Roger Jr stares at him as if he's
  the one with Altzheimers. "Anyway, how's the business?" Buzz tries.

  "Which one? Oh, toy company? We sold to Koreans last year and they
  moved it lock stock and barrel to Jamaica would you believe? They just
  make the one thing now, Destructo World you probably seen on TV--that
  flies apart when you say the secret word? Complete junk, I mean
  complete! And they can't make enough of them."

  At that moment the sunlight amplifies frail Cecily and they both look
  at her. She drools but nonetheless quickens enough to pop: "Say the
  secret word and win ten dollars! It's something you hear every day."

  Roger whispers "Now she's getting religious or something!" But Buzz
  tells him she had been alluding to a TV quiz show with Groucho Marx.
  "If you said the secret word a rubber duck dropped down with a Groucho
  moustache and cigar."

  "Yeah, well that's all too intellectual for me. I like sports."

  (And Buzz had thought all along that Groucho was mean until he
  softened with one contestant, a confused man, and was completely
  kind--Oh well that's one on me he remembers telling his wife. In
  fairness to her, Evy was in the depths of her PMS and she snapped
  "Grow up Buzz!")

  But he remains hurt, even now in this sunny room of the convalescent
  hospital. In fantasy Groucho says "Buzz, I would never make fun of
  you."

  "Our toys were creative," he tells Groucho...and the alarmingly real
  Roger Jr.

  "Yeah well, spare me that part of any business. I mean, spare me!
  There's nothing but the bottom line. Forget that and you're ready for
  a place like this. These cunt doctors bought the house? They wanted a
  rakeoff 'cause they would preserve it and all that good shit! Yeah!
  Sure!"

  Buzz staggers a bit, ashamed he had abstracted for so long, and gotten
  a bit dithery himself. Cecily emits a squeal as Roger Jr hammers on,
  his shirt entirely out of the front of his pants: "Bottom line's the
  bottom line the bottom line--didn't somebody say that? Well, it's
  about a rose or daisy or some such shit but it's the same thing."

  Now Cecily tries talking but can't, her head nodding vigorously and
  her hands out of control. Some hairs vibrate on her shiny chin and her
  son blurts "We ought to have Gillete in here sponsoring this show!"

  Finally she grates out secret and starts on word. When she says love,
  Phyllis Heller, blocky LPN, materializes to spin her chair around.
  "She talking dirty again? Are you, Miriam? Ooops. Not Miriam! Sorry
  about that! Miriam got a mouth like a longshoreman!"

  But Roger Jr. waves his hand before she can spin Cecily back around to
  face them again. "It's okay," he tells her. "These Altzheimers pretty
  much all look the same. Like the Japanese cars my competition sells.
  Anyway, we're through. Stick her on the sundeck."

  Back in his room, Buzz, shaking, examines the bundle of cards again.
  The reasons we marry can't just be that one and that one alone the
  faded brown ink still maintains. Two paths he reads from a card, two
  paths, and Buzz sees Cecily, in white, walking by the lake and
  murmuring over and over The reasons we marry can't just be that one
  and that one alone, and he grows sick with remembered moonlight and
  cries softly into the dusk seeping into his room through the
  half-opened door.

  "The secret word...is love" he whispers.

  Mrs Lahr interrupts. "Hey! I'll agree to anything, but let there be
  light! I'm not that cheap that I won't treat you to a little light
  from time to time." She flicks on a switch and spots the bundle of
  cards in his hand: "Getting rid of the evidence, hey? Don't mind me.
  Nosy! I know you kept them all locked up, probably because they were
  so naughty!"

  Buzz suddenly visualizes the inside of his small Sanyo cube
  refrigerator, sees frosting aglint in the dark. He pushes the cards
  aside and rises to fetch the Entemen's Ring Danish. In no time he is
  frisking to the coffee percolator also, dragging a sleeve over his
  face to wipe a remaining tear or two, an action quietly noted by Mrs
  Lahr.

  "Is this the new light kind?" she inquires about the pastry.

  "No calories at all," winks Buzz, "not a one." His hand is trembling
  as he cuts, or rather hacks at it, with a butter knife. "I know you'd
  never lie to me," she laughs.

  He sits in his Lazy Boy recliner and she on a desk chair by the window
  as they eat and drink, a dark magnolia tree looming in back of her
  squat profile.

  After she places her plate and cup and saucer in his small sink he
  ventures, "Why go all the way back to your chair? Plenty of room
  here."

  While bouncing Mrs Lahr on his knee, insofar as he can, a prelude to
  tugging her back further into the recliner, he will intone with a
  straight face, "I bet you've never done this before."

  And her eyes will assume a glee which contrasts to her usual rosy
  calm. "Never!" Pulling off fragments of his remaining Danish to feed
  him, almost singing: "Let's just do the best we can, Buzz. That's all
  we can do."



 _____________________________________________________________
IMAGE AND FLAME

 _____________________________________________________________



                                 The Present

  "Vot a lucky boy! The birthday boy!"

  "You never mind who's a lucky boy or who's not a lucky boy!" his
  grandfather informed the old man. He wondered how this tattered bum
  even knew about his birthday. Then his grandfather announced: "This is
  who Gramps told you about! Your present!" immediately beating the
  other man around the head and shoulders. "You too!" he screamed.
  "Smack him good!"

  The boy whaled away, but only could reach midway up the black
  overcoat, which shredded and unbuttoned as he pounded. He scraped
  across a greenish brass beltbuckle and quit, but the grandfather
  persisted until out of breath, then stuck a ten dollar bill in the
  beaten old man's overcoat pocket.

  With the boy watching from the window, the old man staggered down the
  porch stairs, pausing at the blinding sidewalk to extract the money.
  The pocket came out with it, disintegrating into a purple dust as the
  old man squinted.

  Meanwhile the chortling and puffing Gramps was dancing, reliving in
  exaggerated form some of his punches.

  "Grandfather, will there always be Nazis?"

  "Yes!" he windmilled, scarlet, "and always us here to bop them good!"
  Gramps stopped to place a bony hand on his shoulder. "But look," he
  panted, noticing the few dots of blood on the boy's frail knuckles,
  "let's patch that up--you know your father and mother."



 _____________________________________________________________


                               Little Candles

  "It's simple. It's selfish. You help others and it makes you feel
  good. You do it for yourself really," shrugged Rebecca, a diminutive
  redhead pouring coffee into a mug. "Hey, I don't catapult out of here
  to a bar every Friday now."

  The lanky Gerry bit her lip. "Well I'm afraid to miss my Aerobics.
  It's Jeannette the instructor. She whines if somebody doesn't show up.
  Holy God when I think of it, everybody's a terrorist in my life!" She
  twisted the string around her tea bag to coax a few more drops into
  the styrofoam cup. They dented her reflected face in the middle of
  luxuriant chestnut hair. "I do their will!"--she looked up from the
  tea at Rebecca--"to prevent emotional catastrophe! My...mother comes
  to mind. Her will be done or watch it! So, anyway, at any rate, after
  Aerobics and before Trevor I can give up an hour or two. So I will
  come--but I won't like it. My life is busy enough, cowardly though it
  be." They sat side by side now, atop a cluttered desk. "What's Trevor
  like?" asked Rebecca. "You have thirty seconds before my boss arrives.
  He's young and tries to make sure breaks are precisely timed." Gerry
  couldn't reply at first, but then sputtered "He...owns things. Every
  time I see him he owns some more. Always the best quality and
  something that does...more somehow. I have a little CD player but he
  has one where five or so discs sit on a sort of round thing,
  turntable"--Gerry put down her tea and stirred a hand in the
  overheated air as copy machines shuffle-thumped in the room behind
  them--"and ...this turntable clicks around or something depending on
  how you clap your hands." She clapped her long hands in wonderment.
  "Does that sound right?" "Yeah, but he can't be that much of an
  asshole," answered Rebecca, staring ahead. "Well he's nice from what I
  can tell. I've never been out with him before but he's been in my
  company a few times--double dates or just a gang of the girls meeting
  him and some guys."

  "I don't want any more of that." Rebecca was shaking her head, the
  thin red hair vibrant in harsh florescent light. "I'm running out of
  time."

  "To get married?"

  "To get anything. I can't do any more of those Gulags."

  "That desperate?" laughed Gerry. They had been looking out the window
  at gray rain-blackened trees being shaken for the last of their
  foliage--but turned to each other now.

  "I guess I've read all the wrong magazines and books--self-help,
  new-wave, you name it." Rebecca affected a visionary face. "Hey! If
  they'd said to smear my tits with lard and watch the men pant around,
  I'd do it. Well I wouldn't now. I don't do anything anymore. I don't
  have to. I help people who piss their pants, those far, far
  less-than-zeros to the Trevors of the world. And you know? It's the
  best thing I've ever done: I can be myself and nobody cares what I
  wear." Rebecca smoothed down her miniskirt.

  "You always look nice, so petite." Gerry said. "Whereas I sort of
  lumber."

  "Uh uh. It's okay for you to be yourself in any situation because
  you're tall and pretty. Well...beautiful it pains me to say. Whereas!
  Well let's face it, I'm a halfpint and...well what my mother's
  girlfriends call plain. Oh I do have this natural mole and thoughtful
  dimples which drill in when I'm quizzical and can't fuckin decide
  anything." She pushed a short finger into her cheek. "Then all of life
  goes by, smiling through its asshole and carrying a whole bushel of
  self-help books." Gerry laughed lightly as Rebecca went on to
  demonstrate the dimples. "I fake them really, only piquant factor I
  got going, by sort of s-ucking in my cheeks like this, see? Chipmunk
  style. I can become dangerously cute! Any men around? Hate to waste
  this."

  "Shouldn't I gather some?" Gerry flicked her chestnut hair in the
  direction of the inner offices. "With you here it's a wonder they're
  all not sucking around already," Rebecca said, bending her bare knees
  inward as if to make herself smaller.

  "They...won't get too religious on us and the unfortunates at this
  soup kitchen or whatever it's called, will they?" Gerry inquired,
  sliding forward to the edge of the desk.

  "Don't worry. Hell, I was born Catholic but don't believe a thing they
  say. Anyway, you'll like Sister Lucy. She's the one I promised her I'd
  bring along another warm body tonight--if you can understand the
  alleged English of that. And believe it or not she likes a raunchy
  story if you can get her to sit still and listen. Actually she reminds
  me of my father in that way. He was a church organist who carried a
  portable one around with him--a lay church organist. After he finally
  left, Mom took to watching this show The Christophers, where they said
  it's better to light one candle than to curse the darkness, you know?
  So that's what I do--the darkness is the area without a boyfriend."

  "Well I'm in darkness and a Presbyterian to boot." Gerry drained her
  tea with exaggeration. "It's okay, the bums won't care. Mother became
  a Baptist. They deal with drunks better--she's also a drunk. The
  Baptists got her into a home with bible-beating souses destroying each
  others' ears. Thus have they made of their hell a paradise!"

  Gerry, still perched on the very edge of the desk, pondered that
  comment with a wry smile and crossed her long legs, a balancing trick
  considering her position. Next to her, little Rebecca crossed hers a
  short beat afterwards--as if they formed a kind of show business act.
  When Gerry got to the shelter's dining room that early evening, a
  regal if frail black man appeared in his underwear and as quickly
  exited when Rebecca came out from the kitchen, her red hair frazzled
  in the middle of a cloud of steam. "Hi! That was Mr Chostermill--
  Loony Tunes and Merrie Melodies." She whirled a small hand around her
  head.

  Gerry waved her own trembling arm to indicate the scruffy room full of
  long tables covered in oil cloth. "Not, uh, quite the office."

  "Hey Mr Chostermill is at least interesting, whereas all the people
  around us in that office are vapid bores. Even in my old place, deadly
  though it was, I at least had a hot affair," Rebecca whispered,
  placing a hand on Gerry's shoulder and staring up into her eyes with
  mock gravity.

  "You never told me." Gerry, too, was whispering, but then Rebecca
  spoke out in a quite audible voice as individual men sidled in and sat
  at the tables.

  "Yeah it was with Paper Cups, that's what I called him. Life and death
  struggles about paper cups! He was honcho for that stupid part of the
  entire stupid operation. Married man would you believe?" Rebecca
  attempted to arrange her steamed hair with her hands. "Perhaps I'm
  expiating that part of it with this charity-- so-called." Her
  qualifier cued a bag lady to stagger in from the street and plop
  herself and accessories down in the middle of the floor. "Anyway he
  had to choose finally between the wife and me and paper cups. You know
  what he decided, and we both threw him out therefore. And then the
  company threw him out too. Even paper cups betrayed him. We meet for
  lunch sometimes, wife and me--always in a fancy restaurant where we go
  dutch, appropriately enough, and don't run the risk of any paper
  cups."

  The bag lady snored. "That...was miraculously fast," remarked Gerry,
  her profusion of hair and her slimness noted even by the half-aware
  bums waiting at their tables. "Just Madame. Madame Marta!" Rebecca
  yelled abruptly. Madame's eyelids shot up in a nest of several coat
  sweaters. "Germans took it, Russians took it," she sobbed.

  Mr Chostermill re-entered, still in his underwear. "Her home," he
  explained. "That Europe is the god-awfulest place," he confided to
  Gerry. "Even worse than this."

  Sister Lucy materialized from the kitchen, tiny and darkeyed, wearing
  a sort of army shirt over her habit, wiping her reddened hands on an
  apron. "I don't think we need your help on this one, Mr Chostermill,"
  she informed him, but he didn't hear her, or anything, for he had
  lapsed into a wall-eyed gaze.

  Introductions were made and Sister Lucy asked Rebecca to deal with
  Madame Marta, and Gerry to help Mr Chostermill find some clothes.
  "He...looks dead." Gerry gasped. It was as if a fine gray net had
  descended on ebony Mr Chostermill.

  "Just a few million more brain cells checking out," Rebecca was
  chuckling. "He'll snap to."

  He did and they're soon at his locker in a dank dormitory room. The
  inside of the door holds a pinup of Betty Grable in bathing suit and
  heels, standing by a silvery airplane inclined towards deepest blue
  sky. Her head is twisted round to glance over a pink and creamy
  shoulder, under which her rear resembles a plump inverted heart of
  salmon red. Gerry spies one pair of trousers and one shirt hanging in
  the locker, both crisp and clean in steel-gray light. "Let's
  see-eeeeee now," Mr Chostermill ponders what to wear.

  Choice generally presents itself along a wider front to Trevor
  Tressor. He has of course many more than one pair of trousers and one
  shirt, but just one creamy Alfa Romeo, and, alas, one Macintosh
  Computer sans color. At the restaurant he dwells on this particular
  lack until Gerry worms in her experience with Mr Chostermill, growing
  uncharacteristically excited when speaking too of Rebecca and Sister
  Lucy and Madame Marta and the crushed men who came in to eat.

  "I don't know what I was thinking of when I bought it!" Trevor must
  explain when she stops to breathe. He is tall, nearly cadaverous, and
  the immense sockets holding his dishwater eyes darken in defeat.

  "What's the problem? You want color, you get color!" she very nearly
  shouts at him. He peers at her with melancholy, stung by her
  insensitivity to his misstep in consumption. It seems at this point
  that all eyes in the Turkish restaurant rest on them, but as she lifts
  a sesame cracker dipped in hummus to her mouth she quickly fears that
  the crowded room is attentive only because her hands smell vaguely of
  urine, and she visualizes her last task at the shelter, sorting
  laundry with Sister Lucy. She had rushed to wash them in her own
  bathroom, before the punctual Trevor came, but a perfumed liquid soap
  called SO-OHHH SUBTLE! proved not up to life that particular day. The
  restaurant is a converted gas station and the metal locker in the
  Ladies' Room fortunately proves to be not merely a prop, still
  containing the gritty powdered soap of the mechanic. She likes the
  pain of washing with it while making faces in mirror imitating her
  instructor Jeanette, the aeroic whiner, and Trevor. "PRINcess of
  Sweat!" she announces finally, "you must get to meet the...Hamlet of
  the Consumer Culture!"

  While putting back the box of soap and slamming the metal door she
  sighs "Oh gee Mr Chostermill I want your choices! Marry me, sexy
  Chostermill! I'll get my own shirt and pants and throw everything else
  away! All the shit I've surrounded myself with, so I can keep working
  to buy more of it. SO-OHHH SUBTLE my ass! Made, created especially for
  advertising. No wonder it's lousy--like everything else in this
  country. Insane!" But she's feeling guilty about making fun of Trevor
  since he seems decent enough. "Trev," she whispers, turning away from
  the locker, "there's got to be more to you, but for some reason I'm
  just not seeing it because that sexy, wily old Chostermill is seizing
  my attention with his dying brain! Old, dark hypnotist!"

  Gerry returns to sit opposite an enormously fat, caramel-colored man
  studying the tall menu. She babbles "I know it 's the last thing you
  want to hear, Trev, but I've got to talk more about what I did today.
  It was just a couple of hours or so but..." She looks up a few minutes
  later, breathless, expecting to see Trevor's bored, heavy- lidded
  eyes. Instead the moon-faced man with gold-rimmed glasses explains
  "You must forgive me for letting you go on. I lost my wife recently
  and you're so like her in your fresh loveliness and vitality and
  enthusiasm--I feel uplifted, honest to God! I came here just wanting
  to stuff my face and get a little drunk." She mutters something she
  instantly forgets, and there's suddenly Trevor to escort her back to
  their table, like a patient who had wandered away from the ward.

  He, of course, knows what she needs, and it surely isn't helping
  negroes in slums or restaurants; she, of course, wants to get out of
  there fast, so he stuffs a breadstick in his mouth.

  Something quickens in her during the ride to her apartment, the only
  sound the spin of the wet tires, and her lungs all but burst while
  bolting from his car after she had bit off "Thank you and I'm really
  sorry for the--" Her hair flies back red and black in the faint,
  dappled light of a streetlamp in the midst of lurching, skeletal
  trees.

  Sister Lucy answers on the first ring and Gerry unleashes a ten-minute
  flurry ending with "Do you have to be a Catholic? I must be going
  crazy! But what I do in that office is so awful and so useless. Oh I
  am such a little asskisser! Where is my life? I mean I think it's
  somewhere but I can't find it! Oh I know this all sounds addled and
  schoolgirlish to you! But I just had to, was compelled to--" She goes
  on a few moments more before Sister Lucy yells "Whoa there! I'm sure
  as hell not Mother Teresa and neither are you. Well I shouldn't say
  that about you. We don't know about you yet."

  Gerry begins sobbing and then gasps "Well I better hang up...I'm
  sor--"

  "Hold on, Woman! I didn't say we couldn't talk about other things.
  There are a lot of them, no? Life isn't just the shelter thank the
  Lord! Say anything. You just want to talk is all. Don't worry, I've
  felt that way. We all have."

  Hours later she removes the soaking receiver from her ear, hardly
  remembering anything she had said, only that she had to promise Sister
  Lucy not to come to the shelter until a week elapses. "Wired as you
  are tonight" sighed Sister, "you'd exhaust us all. But most of all,
  Gerry, I sense what we call a honeymoon. That's when people get all
  benign and moony and want to save humankind right after their own
  canonization is instantly declared. Whereas I worry not about my
  future sainthood or bringing humanity up to snuff in the next ten
  minutes, but where my next meal is coming from, or rather where my
  next thousand meals are coming from for the shelter. I'm talking about
  the grit of this business and the grease of politics. And...well, much
  begging in addition--what seems the basest part to most people is
  really the easiest."

  "I wouldn't mind begging!" Gerry had pleaded. "I'd much prefer it to
  shoving away the hands of every sleazebag manager I've every worked
  with."

  When I say anything at all I always say too much, she whispers into a
  dawn filtering through the many front window panes as pinkgray as the
  inside of a seashell. Her eyes burning and her hair matted next to her
  soaking ear, she becomes aghast at how long she had talked to Sister
  Lucy. "Shit no I'm not going to bed!" she exclaims as if a judicious
  person had suggested it. "Wasting my life that way too! Usually to
  sleep away depression. At least tonight'll be different. She ends up
  going through old music albums, sorts them into piles after flicking
  off the lights because of the glare on the album covers. They fell to
  drugs was one category...they fell from fame and strangled in
  middleclass life, another. "But it's normal life," she sobs. "What's
  wrong with it? It's what everybody gets! Whereas I'm ravening around
  my apartment in the middle of the night like a mad woman!" These fell
  from fame and became assholes! It comes to us all. "Yeah? Well not me.
  I'm getting out of this Gulag somehow!"

  She ultimately falls asleep atop the albums, wakes up trembling and
  frightened, and then puts on a heavy, musty sweater. "Am I of any
  use?" she asks, staring up at an airplane, its red and blue running
  lights sliding along the pinkish sky. "Hey, Betty Grable! I've got a
  nice ass too, she giggles, shaped just right if short on substance. I
  try to keep it to myself, although I'd like to use it in my arsenal of
  lovin' tools, Betty Grable, but oh the cost is so so high, to say
  nothing of all the bullshit you have to listen to. Did I tell Sister
  too much, Betty? I'm feeling too ashamed to see her again. And
  honeymoon is such a curious word, Betty, don't you agree? What kind of
  honeymoon could you have with bag ladies and frail, frail tramps?"

  The plane gone, a few stars still shimmer through the dawn sky. She
  goes into the bathroom to note in the lighted mirror her caved-in eyes
  and wild hair: You! So that's what a saint looks like? Shit you're no
  saint! That's for sure!

  "I don't care what I am I'm going to be better!" she exclaims aloud.

  Read that in a selfhelp book did you? Any more little mottos?

  "There could be."

  Gerry, you're just a phoney, going here and there whenever anyone asks
  or yells. You never had a fuckin thought before! What'd you use your
  head for? She is hitting it. The next moment she's slumping onto a
  sofa. "Go away all you thoughts now! I'm no saint and I don't have the
  verve to be a sinner either. Is it written, verily, that there there
  must be a Mr Paper Cups in my future?" she sighs. And she sees one,
  pudgy and benign, leaning back towards a backyard where kids play in
  and out of barbecue smoke, and wife stretches out in a chaise lounge,
  smoking, picking a shred of tobacco from her upper lip. She shakes
  loose that domestic image only to see the women who run around her
  neighborhood Acme Market around dinnertime for something, anything, to
  microwave for the family: their tailored looks and drawn faces...and
  claws of hands.

  "Sister said that happiness is a byproduct. Where's their happiness?
  The byproducts are in the meat they buy in those flat, frosted
  packages."

  She rises from the sofa. "Compulsion be dammed, hey Mr Chostermill and
  Madame Marta and Sister Lucy and Rebecca! We'll hold hands and dance
  in our own crazy circle, the rising smell of piss keeping all the
  respectable people away, all the walking-dead women in their
  drycleaned suits and cellular phones, all the Mr Paper Cups wanting to
  use me to dirty up their pallid lives." Gerry dances in the dim
  apartment.

  Later, she wonders if Sister Lucy will eventually let her stay, and
  how long--and how far to take the religion of the thing. "I'm really
  not anything along that line..." she remembers telling Sister Lucy. "I
  was brought up Presbyterian, sort of. I...just don't know..."

  "You don't know much of anything do you?" Her own voice startles her,
  standing close to a window and watching her haggard face in one rosy
  pane.

  Gerry goes to a closet to get the jacket she uses on solo hikes,
  crushes it to her face to smell the woodsmoke and dry leaves. "J. C.
  he said something like you have no mother or something, or let the
  dead bury the dead? Well I have no mother or boss or aerobics witch or
  state-of-the-art gentleman caller." She looks out on the empty street,
  a sheet of newspaper dancing fitfully, and imagines the lonely men
  lining up for breakfast at the shelter, this same newspaper wrapping
  around a straggler's legs as Marta Marta, affrighted out from
  cluttered sleep, keens to them of her lost European home.

  Stepping back, she notes her image repeated in the numerous panes;
  flickering, each, as a draft comes through the apartment. Puts on the
  jacket and massages her taut neck; then, for some reason, she laughs
  uproariously, eyes marvelously cool. "You are little, Sister Lucy. You
  can't hold me out! And don't you die, Mr Chostermill, at least not in
  the next hour or so!" She buttons up the jacket, rips a ski cap from a
  pocket.



 _____________________________________________________________


                                    Word

  Flashes of chrome stab a sullen yellow light, and purple clouds mass
  behind a sudden pair of boys skidding BMX bikes to all but pin another
  boy to the chain-link fence he has rested his own BMX against.

  "Bad machine," compliments the larger one, his face and hands Oriental
  in that odd light, though he's a freckled redhead.

  "Word!" adds the smaller one to underline his companion's appraisal.
  Below, traffic thunders while merging onto the highway, and the lone
  boy suddenly feels the fence vibrating against his back as he engages
  in the compulsory sneaker check with them--identical brands and
  models, dirty hightops with laces undone.

  "You just move in dead Harry's?" Vapor curls from the larger one's
  mouth.

  "I guess."

  "He guesses," spits the small one into ash-gold weeds. "So why don't
  you know?" The two inquisitors straddle their bikes, the smaller one
  leaning far to one side.

  "Anytime, buck each, no shit!" The big one is pointing to the large
  silver bottlecaps laced through both wheels of this new boy's bike. A
  local brewery had attempted to promote a sort of carafe with a flat
  cap but couldn't get the seal to hold.

  "No big deal. My father give em to--"

  "Where you come from?" The big boy interrupts.

  "Parkside."

  "Stupid neighborhood. Why move here? From Parkside to River Edge. Just
  as stupid."

  "Word!"-- again this intensifier from the small one who shifts from
  side to side, his bike frame too tall for him.

  "My parents. My father mostly. He likes to...move."

  "Move? Yuppies and faggots move up to The Heights in Parkside. The
  faggots fix up all the old houses. You move in there and you get
  fuckin AIDS!" gushes this small one. A few drops of rain whip at them
  and darkened Burger King napkins flap around and are sucked into the
  fence as trucks hiss below. "We lived there with my real father before
  all the fags. He was Italian or something. What a slum! We lived there
  with my real father."

  "Shrimp always tells everybody too much."

  "Fuck you!" Shrimp's vehemence shocks the new boy but the other
  laughs, and then abruptly whispers "You ride with us?"

  "I don't know."

  "Come onnnnnn!" this bigger one coaxes, his red hair raised up like a
  fan from the dark wind, the stretching intonation meaning just for
  now, it's no big deal, nothing to lose. "We're gonna go back of Shop
  Rite. It's bad! There's a blueberry pie, I know."

  "Word! You should know," adds Shrimp, delighted. He has leveled his
  bike, his toes barely touching the pavement.

  "He means I smashed it in yesterday with my mother so they'd throw it
  out today. She goes: Will you hurry up? Why are you lingering?
  Rah-AN-dol-uph! She's hollering at me and I'm shoving in that fuckin
  pie box good!"

  "Lingering!" the redhead and Shrimp squeal it together, an old joke,
  and then repeat it several times, both nearly tipping over in their
  mirth, but the new boy doesn't join in.

  Instead, "Randolph?" he smirks, stepping towards them, a quick shaft
  of weakened sunlight skimming the spokes of the bikes and highlighting
  the bottlecaps on his wheels.

  "Rocks! call me."

  "I'm Badger," he invents, having an uncle who helped train some of the
  Wisconsin football team offseason in his health club.

  "My new mother don't 'llow no nicknames!" Shrimp winces as if awaiting
  her punishment. The light darkens abruptly on their faces as the
  luminous rim around the thunderheads narrows.

  "He's Shrimp but near his house, Victor-Emmanuel--that's some emperor
  in whatchacallit, Pizza-Pigout-Land or someplace. The new boy laughs
  and Shrimp reddens instantly, dropping his bike, both hands soon in a
  flurry grazing them: "I'll get you both for that!" The older boys take
  the scant threat in good grace. Below, there's a lull in traffic with
  just the occasional wheeze of airbrakes.

  "Hey Badger, was that lady crying your mother?"

  Shrimp couldn't wait for a reply to his big friend's question. "You'll
  get divorced, we got divorced," he sped.

  "She always cries. We don't take it serious," shrugs Badger.

  "Hey, mom's cry. They all do," affirms Shrimp. "I've had a bunch."

  "Word!" Rocks agrees. "Mine yells a lot more, but she cries too."

  "The same broken tiles like our last house? That's why I left. They
  were just talking and talking and talking about them, these fuckin
  tiles. They wouldn't stop," he shrugs again. "It's crazy! Mom sitting
  in the tub ripping tiles left and..." Badger stops; he is saying too
  much.

  Rocks nods. "Yeah they get off on little shit like that and then they
  go on fuckin-forever!"

  "Word! Yeah, parents. They never know when to fuckin stop talking,"
  Shrimp underscores, vapors rushing from his mouth and hanging in the
  darkening air, "Was that asshole your father, one trying to fix garage
  door? He goes: one more minute and then I rip the fuckin thing off
  its... whatchacallits?" Shrimp is almost dancing, spit flying with his
  breeaths.

  "Hinges," Rocks injects.

  "Word!" Shrimp becomes hysterically emboldened, his real voice hopping
  a wet octave before diving into imitation: "I thought I'd shit! He
  goes!: Had it fuckin right fuckin minute ago!"

  But his basso version of Badger's angry father cracks towards the
  breathless, squeaky last, and now the three boys comprise a kind of
  menacing field within the heavy air as Badger moves ever so slowly
  towards Shrimp, and Rocks dismounts. "What shakes with this `asshole'
  bullshit?" Badger snaps at both of them, knowing that no one can call
  your father that until you do first, that it's a rule everywhere.

  Shrimp drains of color and Rocks steps aside as Badger approaches. The
  light becomes a dirty yellow flicker among them. Below, trucks
  shoulder in a lemony glow.

  Rocks blurts "He don't mean it in a bad way. We all call our fathers
  ass--"

  Shrimp backs away, and then scrambles onto his bike. "Yeah! Honest!
  Word! I got two and they're both...assholes!" Badger yanks him off the
  bike which jumps forward a bit and falls to the ground, its front
  wheel revolving slowly. Shrimp's head is forced down into Badger's
  crotch.

  "Stop you fuckin faggot!" Shrimp screams.

  Badger releases him. "What you so nervous for? Next time I'll let you
  kiss it!"

  "I don't go for no shit like that!"

  "Not yet, huh?" The three boys are scarlet as Randolph steps gingerly
  between the other two.

  "Shit! Badger," he whispers. "We never get that fuckin mad! They must
  all be crazy in Parkside."

  They stare at their sneaks in the amplified highway noise and don't
  know how to part. When the two larger boys finally look up, they see
  tears in Shrimp's eyes, his lip trembling as the sun breaks through
  suddenly.

  "Some..." he starts whispering, "some people take a bath once in a
  while!"

  "He will when he gets his old lady out of the bathtub!" Rocks yells
  and they all laugh, though Badger, his heart beating furiously, joins
  in late. In the brightness, Rocks' greenish teeth unsettle him
  further.

  Behind the dumpster at Shop Rite, they have eaten the smashed
  blueberry pie and flaunt their blue hands, then perform sticky high
  fives.

  "What'll we call ourselves?" pops Shrimp.

  "Three From Hell!" Badger screams, leaping on his bike, leading them
  past the loading docks to careen down the driveway and onto the sunny
  street in shrieking, breathless giggles.

  Buster Ianucci is shocked into flattening the trajectory of a
  blackened cabbage. It thumps the side of the dumpster. "You hear all
  that noise? There are women out there!" he informs Lucy Devaney, meat
  department apprentice. "They want my rotten cucumber!" Swathed in
  rubber rain gear several sizes too big, she is hosing down the
  platform. Deep inside of all that yellow her violet eyes hunger as she
  plays the hose on Buster, forcing him back into the store.



 _____________________________________________________________


                                Avia Morrisey

   1. What the hell's the difference what I do? They froze me out of
      promotion and I'm finished! Where I have the means I'll help you,
      where I don't I won't, so I'm sending you to Colgate. You may have
      wanted to go somewhere else, I don't know, but that's where I'm
      sending you. And don't...oh I can't talk to women since your
      mother died. Well, anyway, don't...well, be careful, if you do, uh
      do, uh what...uh--anyway, be a nurse or something.
   2. Ah, love let us be true to one another!
   3. So she left me to screw some Grease-Bum, my Mother! Can you
      visualize it, them sliding around the greasy sheets?
   4. Gee you're smart in most ways but in that way you're retarded.
   5. Honey they send you right place. If you change, you betta fast! If
      you don't, you bettah bettah stay same! Down here, everythings go
      so down, even sex don't help none down here.
   6. Madonna oda wombah blundada.
   7. NO RECORDS EXIST FOR THE AFORENAMED OFFICER
   8. Wombah blundada automatique!
   9. Madonna ada wombah blundada! Saintah Saintah!
  10. MITZ-IH-IN-KUH!-KUH!-KUH!

    _________________________________________________________________

NOTES

   1. From phone conversation, Captain Brandon Morrisey, United States
      Navy, about to be retired.
   2. Matthew Arnold, and unnamed literature instructor, who,
      allusion-crammed, couldn't erect at critical juncture. For Avia,
      no critical juncture.
   3. Avia couldn't visualize.
   4. Again, Lucy Eccles, roommate.
   5. Mona Many, drunken nurse in Susseluh-land who served The Gentle
      People. Drove a Jawa motorcycle even more battered.
   6. The madonna with the wooden dick. Reference to the crude machine
      of monkeywood Avia cranked up with a galonna-shell handle in order
      to demonstrate The Rubber to Susseluh-land women as blank as she.
   7. Morrisey, his captain's hat cocked, died at halftime in the bar of
      the Naval Officers' Club in San Diego after repetitively shouting
      "Go Army!" Army went on to lose 16-7. Since only the navy knew
      they were related, and it lost him, Avia was never notified of his
      decease. (Small estate ended up at Bide-a-Bit, where he had been
      drying out as she graduated Colgate in Public Health.)
   8. In a moonswept clearing on an achingly gorgeous evening the
      machine very slowly elevated itself as Avia slept. Thereafter an
      entourage moaned after her on her rounds--scattered frequently by
      the careening Mona Many on her rusty Jawa. (The automatique is a
      linguistic remnant from a French occupation from 1884-191
   9. The madonna without the wooden dick! A double saint! What The
      Burning-Patch People screamed as they rushed by her to throw
      themselves into the volcano. Had viciously elbowed aside The
      Gentle People along with their obscenity-spouting nurse, sans
      defunct cycle. Had been forcing Avia up and up the burning slope,
      their charred sores smoking. When it seemed they would hurl her
      in, she flung away the ascension device and huge prophylactic.
      Despite the flare-up of sulphurous fumes, it proved the right
      thing.
  10. Exclaim today's young women after conferring for hours on end in
      her hammock with Saintah Saintah Avia. (A gutteral
      fricative-click- spit: most tortured outcry of Susseluh-landian
      sexual frustration.)



 _____________________________________________________________


                                The Ceremony

  Resembling a crowbar, the purple strip lurks in the low sky. Sharp
  crunching...then heel-strikes as she finds the path. Shortly he sees
  the vapor preceding her, the gloom behind pierced by streetlamps
  around which snow revolves.

  When he can discern her clothes he comments, Well you're certainly
  equipped for the task at hand!

  I couldn't get back to the apartment to change.

  Still the party animal, hey?

  You could say that. Her eyes blank in the dimness.

  Well, at any rate, I'm glad you came, he says, this might have to be
  the last until the Spring thaw.

  Glad? Never heard you use such an odd word. Have you gone crazy? A wet
  flake flops into her hair.

  It must have hurt--I mean for you to leave the party without a
  stranger.

  Oh? Still the jealous male? My my! But let me offer a discrete
  hallelujah: no prying bitty little questions this time--oh so very
  manipulative with their subtle, softest poisons. You're at least over
  that.

  Time, he shrugs in whispering snow, the cure and the kill.

  Oh yeah? Well I'm trying to accept kill, because then hope is dead.
  And yet, here we are once more. Stupid. We're hopeless.

  Absently, he turns a hand up as if to cup the sifting snow. You never
  know. And when you finally do it's too late. Well I hope--modestly,
  not universally--that this is the last,

  the woman sighs.

  He had fetched the tools from a car trunk as frigid as Siberia, keeps
  the shovel and gives her the crowbar. They look for the right place to
  start, the hard ground beginning to whiten.

  Almost as an antidote to their sniping, they dig a half hour without
  speaking, gulping in icy needles of air and panting out dark vapors.

  Soon they have dug--she, though unsteady on her heels, thrusting in
  with the crowbar, and he scraping away the clods with the shovel--
  just enough to reveal the larger outline below them: its hair frost-
  whorls into which individual giant flakes drift.

  A...little more, he encourages--spasmodic puffs from his mouth darkly
  surrounding his head.

  She demurs, leaning on her crowbar. C'mon now, don't be a
  fuss...budget in this too! she gasps.

  But he wins. Listen this once! Just not enough...depth to really
  operate, really know when you're...s-striking home!

  They again dig in the odors of frozen mud and lye, she sobbing with
  each thrust, the snow arriving now in stinging, surging waves.

  I'll change. If you want to change. She blinks away the tears as he
  offers the shovel.

  So they reverse roles, he driving and twisting in with the crowbar,
  more deeply than she could, and she, beyond herself, jerkily scooping
  up after him.

  The depth of the exposed form is right, they silently agree. Much more
  would exhaust the energy needed now, especially as the wind has begun
  raging, slamming icy snow into them and whirling it round the
  declivities of the uncovered thing below.

  The tools are dropped, clattering away along the ground as the couple
  falls down on the form, their beating fists producing a dull, echoing
  hollowness. On they go far past exhaustion into a loathsome nightmare
  of sweat and icy slime.

  As the thumps become less and less audible to them, they are retching.
  Then, the grating draughts after they have, finally, stopped. After
  some moments they clamber up from out of the grave. In the
  fast-ticking hail, she on her knees and he above, hulking: the whole
  scene looking like some Medieval ceremony, swarthy knight and weeping
  maiden. Below, with matted hair aswirl in flowers of blackest ice, the
  horse.



 _____________________________________________________________


                           Operation Dessert Form

  We're best at two things as a nation. One is ultimately reconciling
  our differences between groups; two...well let's deal with the first,
  and let the other reveal itself like a print coming up through the
  developer.

  Our opposition finally agreed to a ceremony of reconciliation--with
  rigid ground rules. We'd both have roughly the same amount of time:
  that required to have a vehicle from each group drive by. Then we'd
  work to prepare the show.

  The drivebys ensued, noisy but effective. There followed an hour of
  feverish activity where displays were built, and immediately evaluated
  by judges with walkie-talkies, broadcasting to senior citizens of both
  sexes operating old manual Remingtons.

  (They insisted on being included--actually threatening suit--and would
  hear nothing of computers.) At any rate, the silver brigade toiled so
  feverishly that the index cards bore several strikeovers, adding, many
  felt. to the charm and authenticity of the event.

  I will refrain from pointing out which group prepared what among the
  exhibits, since that would mar the purpose of the day; besides, prizes
  were awarded on individual merit only.

  The first honorable mention was labeled TRIPLE CHOCOLATE, the
  Afro-American subject being posed with a bowl of chocolate ice cream
  on his chest, and with that set atop a brown mohair scarf diagonally
  thrown. The judge's card read Interesting materials but bowl too small
  and scarf material oversoft.

  Second honorable mention went to JALEPENO! a red pepper sticking up
  through a lemon custard in a soup plate between a Hispanic's
  teenager's legs. Simplicity! With the merest hint of sexuality.

  (Here I include a non-prizewinner. Perhaps for old time's sake. It was
  WASP WITH WASPS, a white male wrapped completely round with wire
  holding fuzzy wasps. Excellent execution though idea is perhaps a bit
  trite--too much visible wire also. Besides, you lost theme of
  show!!!!! To be fair, a petit four had been hastily thrust into the
  nest of wires but the judge apparently missed it.)

  CHEROKEE JUBILEE took third prize, an American Indian clothed in
  buckskin, with cherries intertwining both hands. It however contained,
  the judges said, too much red, literally and figuratively.

  Second went to BAKED ALASKA, an Eskimo peeking from a cardboard oven,
  set, according to a round gauge, at 500.

  # too small on oven therm was the only criticism.

  The display meriting both Best of Show and First Place featured a
  lovely blond in long white silk gown in heart-shaped box lined with a
  red satin dotted with the candy called nonpareils. VERY SWEETLY BLOND
  AND VERY VERY DEAD.

  Beautiful! sang the index card, echoes of Marlyn and of love. Masking
  of blood stains top-notch too! (That it was, and the less said of the
  other displays on that account, the better.)

  I should mention also the one the senators most objected to later,
  WHOM THE GODS DESTROY THEY FIRST MAKE EDIBLE, an oriental baby,
  heavily talced, in the middle of an angel food cake.

  Very tasteful, though baby too large for scale of whole piece. Try
  again.

  The crowd, mostly middle aged, came from all economic strata. They
  appeared to like the show, although Dr Hiram W. Jackman, retired dean
  of the junior college, sniffed, "Worst yet when it comes to gilding
  the lilly, or the flan, or whatever."

  My lasting impression is not a critical but an aesthetic
  one...sounding now a bit like the ghostly pre-echo from a phonograph
  record...blood whipping across the rough-textured wall outside.



 _____________________________________________________________


                             Lips Smooth As Oil

  From the balcony of the church, Ted spied the backs of the women
  seated below, picture hats floating between their shoulder blades.
  Each had flanked herself with a purse and a grayish-white praybook. He
  had gone there, the closest church to his new apartment, to check out
  the ladies.

  Something hit them, they'd splinter, he thought, signing the book
  passed to him by his pewmates, Dr and Mrs Marius Ohgo. After Ted x'd
  newcomer, writing his old address, the cherubic Dr Ohgo placed a beefy
  hand on his arm and whispered during a pause in Pastor Carruther's
  Psalms Never Before or Seldom Quoted, "You're to come with us
  afterwards for cookies. Mrs Ohgo's cookies are closer to heaven than
  even our seats here." Ted blurted acceptance and Ohgo winked, "From
  Erie, huh? Well, did you travel from Erie with any?"

  Judging from Dr Ohgo's ecstatic smile, Ted's Pardon? was just the
  right answer. Was it his hunger and the talk of cookies made him smell
  chocolate?

  They walked to the Ohgos through falling leaves--he puzzling over Dr
  Ohgo's bizarre digs at Carruthers while Ted shook the pastor's hand
  before escaping the church. Now Ohgo, his blowing hair whiter than the
  weak sunlight, was classifying love as Ted studied identical aspects
  of the neighborhood's architecture: "...and I love Mrs Ohgo too and
  her wondrous baking--exemplified by this majestic stomach preceding me
  everywhere--and you'll soon see my other love. And of course, as I
  said, I love the God encompasing all my loves."

  "Well one of your loves is different, Marius--I'll grant you that!"
  rang back Mrs Ohgo from the spinning leaves ahead. She limped, Ted
  noticed.

  At the huge hall closet, Ted witnessed Dr Ohgo as hanger meister,
  separating clusters of hangers meticulously before plucking out three
  for their coats. Mrs Ohgo donned her long-mileage smile which spoke
  forbearance; Ted shifted from footto foot in the vaguely chocolate-
  smelling air. Once free of her coat she brightened as to a "batch just
  ready to pop in!" and limped off.

  Ohgo shepherded him into the den, first having him close his eyes.
  Upon opening them Ted perceived smears, pink ones against thickly
  varnished knotty pine. He guessed they came from a small fire in the
  fireplace, but what sprung to focus proved to be large paintings of
  barebreasted girls in silky boxing shorts and burgundy gloves. One
  resting on the floor, a taunting blond with eyes of indigo flame,
  stood taller than Ted, almost as if he could, with some boldness,
  shake her gloves and wish her luck.

  "Did you travel from Erie with any?" squealed Dr Ohgo, his head an
  immense balloon floating against the knotty-pine, his white hair
  flaring in a sudden draft, his face even more scarlet.

  "Not with any of these I didn't."

  "The brassiere is an example of sound engineering but God, my Erie
  friend, has the touch of an artist," he preached, his eyes intensely
  green. "Can you imagine it says in Proverbs that their lips are smooth
  as oil but their legs go down to hell? Well their legs are rooted
  right here, thank you. And make of this beautiful earth even more of a
  heaven, am I right, Mr Erie? Did you travel here with any? Oh well, if
  you get it here that's fine too! Would you like to name that one you
  seem so enamored of? I'd call her that from now on if you did." Ohgo
  plopped into a director's chair facing the same painting.

  "I uh..."

  "No matter, tell me after Mrs Ohgo plies you with the other loveliness
  of the house." Dr Ohgo closed his eyes, knitted his hands across his
  belly, and sighed periodically until Mrs Ohgo entered some minutes
  later, ushered by puffs of, of course, chocolate. "Tomorrow,
  Theodore!" piped up Ohgo, "you'll remember that her cookies don't melt
  in your mouth, my friend, oh no! They melt your very mouth, Theodore.
  May I call you Theodore?"

  "What did he say, dear?" interrupted Mrs Ohgo.

  "That he's very very lonely."

  "Well I shouldn't wonder. Isn't a shame we couldn't bring these lovely
  lovely girls to life?"

  She put down the tray of huge mugs splotched a cream and violet.
  Misshapen from her ceramic class, and primal to Ted as they fumed,
  they encircled a dish piled with steaming chocolate chip cookies,
  everything wildly aromatic.

  "That'd be something all right, having them all here in the flesh: a
  heaven on earth, my Erie friend! Where it rightly belongs. Seek and ye
  shall find! I don't believe in heaven as much as I believe in here. I
  like them when they are ever so so so slightly burnt--the cookies not
  the girls--the chocolate melts in the air, becomes the air, the
  fragrance linnnn-gering for days. Ahhhhhhh! By the way, Theodore,
  butter, as you're finding out by the look of you, is another of Mrs
  Ohgo's secrets."

  ...

  Sonofabitch is a brick short of a load! is Cliff's conclusion that
  next afternoon during Ted's phonecall to the Gannon College Library.
  Did you ever figure what you traveled from here with?

  Dr Ohgo informed me that there comes a time when we must forget our
  baggage or it locks to us, like in the famous logo for Death of a
  Salesman.

  Yeah his sons left him babbling in the shithouse while they took off
  with whores. Sex can make you less than human.

  Don't say that!

  Hey it was just cookies! We got them here in Erie too! Even the
  priests eat them.

  Hot chocolate too! Double jepardy! Anyway, you never know what can,
  uh, start you off.

  I'll second that--we're at a dangerous age. But, Dr and Mrs Marius
  Ohgo, hey? What's he doctor of? Were the cookies shaped like tits too?
  I can see their coat of arms: a cross of cookies rampant on a field of
  breasts. Actually, he sounds like a lot of gabby, ball- breaking
  priests here, only they're warped by theology--I don't know their
  positions on breasts and women boxers. But they got one on everything
  else, that's for sure. Wait a second! Some horny padre wants to check
  out The Joy of Sex. How you doing, Father? No problem: he's just
  checking me out actually.

  I swear the spoon stood straight up in the whipped cream.

  That was something else.

  Elevate your gutter mind, 'cause I have real problems. Anyway, a nut
  and probably so's the wife and I scarfed in those otherworldly cookies
  for hours too long while Ohgo prattled on, but what the hell, I don't
  know anybody down here in Media. Well, didn't before...

  Ah hah! My hungry patience will be rewarded! After the pigout, the...?

  Well I had catapulted myself to a sugar high, and I figured a lot of
  black coffee'd calm me down?--I had an oat bran muffin too, healthy,
  at Dunkin Donuts. But then things took an even weirder turn.

  ...

  "I've been waiting a whole hour! He's a rotten bastard and you're all
  rot--"

  "Pardon?"

  "And look at this!" It's suppose to be fall, pretty colors in the
  trees and all that shit, you know? And that total asshole on the TV?
  Makes up poems about the weather? He didn't make up one for this, did
  he?" Wet snow clumped against the window of Dunkin Donuts, refracting
  headlights as cars slid into the parking lot.

  ...

  Look, I told her, I can see that you're upset.

  What she say?

  Then I must be the most sensitive male in this whole stupid Media,
  Pennsylvania--or words to that effect.

  Translation: sucker.

  So she asks me for a ride home, but then has to check me out with the
  help, which is a United Nations of giggling. You know, Is this guy all
  right? They don't know of course. Toothless Cambodian woman covered in
  white sugar yells, Hey take chance, Letty! How you can do worse? Look!
  I told them. I just moved here. I come from Erie. Which was a mistake
  because one of them, some sort of Hispanic Negro fat girl screams
  Erie! Snow up the ass, that's Erie! Then, of course, my name became
  Snow-Up-the-Ass until we got out of there.

  And thus t'will be each and every time you go back, the tool of
  ridicule being the only one left to the working poor in this great
  nation--like the gravedigger in Hamlet.

  Spare me the Sociology. And especially the Literature! First thing she
  says getting into the car is No funny business, you understand? and I
  say look I want to get home myself, I've had one hell of a strange
  day! And then she cries and cries for miles and won't tell me how to
  get to where she lives.

  Which is information you'd have to have.

  And asks me to stop, asks me questions as to why this guy would stand
  her up, etc.

  Maybe alien women got him. We can look for his story at the
  supermarket checkout.

  Whatever. Anyway there we were gazing at the woods, which she had
  hated just before in the quote-unquote stupid snow, and now finds
  beautiful because God did it and not people. Uh...the...comforting,
  uh, gets warmer, and man! Everything just turns furious. And at the
  end she cries twice as much and says she's happy because God put us
  together at the lowest moment of her entire life!

  It had been quite a religious day for you. What's she look like?

  A boy.

  I often thought that about you. Are you sure you know the difference?

  Probably hasn't read a book in her life. And everything is immediately
  emotional! Like, boom, right away. You can't think.

  Let me stop you before you get to natural rhythm, you typical little
  suburban snot-nosed snob!--but then we already know that.

  Look, I don't have time for your ten cent analysis! I seem to...have
  her now for some reason, and this is the even weirder part: I smelled
  chocolate at lunchtime from some brat ripping into a Hershey Bar at
  the 7-Eleven and...started getting a hardon.

  Well you can't be allowed on the streets like that--not good for much
  but giving directions.

  That passes for funny in your sealed sewer of a mind, I know, but...

  Food and women! Mmmmmm! What you got to complain about? Smear her with
  chocolate and you can die a happy man. Anyway, all those rosy tits at
  the mysterious and redolent Ohgos, you couldn't reign yourself in. Ah
  shall I compare thee to a slummer's lay?

  It it it it had started as comforting, innocent, uh mostly, and went
  haywire and now I don't know what the hell I'm doing! We had breakfast
  this morning before work, but first I picked her up at her place,
  and...then...before we could get out the door...Wham Bam again! I
  can't think! And she! She doesn't even bother. I never met a woman
  quite like this. No substances or bullshit needed. Out of control.

  I thought such a condition was devoutly to be wished.

  Well it's ripping the shit out of me. I mean this new job, man, with a
  lot of problems, and that's quite enough to make me nervous, thank
  you. I have to get down to work and knock off all this happy
  horseshit. I've got to catch hold and damn soon. I don't know what I'm
  doing. I'm sitting here now in the middle of about a thousand books
  they were supposed to inventory before I took over. And I thought
  Gannon's bookstore was screwed up! Well this is Widener, a university,
  so it's screwed up big time! Try the personal inventory first. You're
  a good guy; you just have no character.

  Get in control you mean, because, like, she's out of it, yes?

  Or is it that she's very much in it, o pale and loitering knight?

  Never mind the fuckin books. It's bad enough I got to peddle them.
  They're all shit.

  ...

  I swear I won't even mention Letty! But the weather here! Like, Erie
  has the reputation for lousy...but here it pisses gray mud out of the
  sky half the week and all of the weekend. It drips clammy gray inside
  your skull. And this is the time my boy-girl starts talking about
  getting serious, quote unquote. I am really not ready to go to the
  movies with her yet--even though we've gone a bit beyond that in the
  few months since...but I promised not to talk about her and I'm
  not...uh...anymore. So! How are all the Literary Lions at Gannon
  College?

  The same pitiful mess, and Nature is without her diadem up here too:
  we're about fifty-fifty mud and snow from a crazy thaw, but now it's
  hardening up as we're just now plummeting through zero as I speak.
  Looks like a grimy abstract out there under the frozen streetlights:
  how I visualize purgatory.

  I'm in it! Shit, I can't love her! Jesus Christ she's just a
  girl--which you can hardly tell by looking.

  Get her a pair of boxing gloves and some flashy shorts. Or better yet,
  you're capable of an even more infantile image.

  Cliff! Holy Jesus! I haven't had a life yet!

  To be serious, Ted, friend, you're having one right now. Who ever said
  it suppose to consist of big ideas? Ever think that maybe you're
  lucky?

  How can I be lucky and this upset? Cliff! What'll I do?

  Who knows? Your candle is lit and you're still cursing.

  Last night I...sat in a chair and cried!

  Yeah we do that sometime.

  You're no fuckin help!

  Trade her even up for Mrs Ohgo. Cookies outlast sex anytime.

  ...

  Ted walks past the Ohgo's, but can't ring the bell. The early
  evening's bluish fog eats dollops of snow atop skeletal bushes
  flanking their front door, a buttery mist shoulders under.

  Is there another young man in there perched in all that rosiness and
  aroma? Did you travel from Trenton with any? From Scranton,
  Philadelphia? Stockholm? Zaire? Do you find our fighting blond as
  overwhelming as did our friend from Erie?

  Speaking of Whom! And Ted sees himself in the den, sputtering "I had
  such a nice time, and I 'm I'm I'm thinking of joining the church and
  had a question or two."

  By then standing under a haloed streelamp, he hears Cliff's voice
  saying Belay the conscious phoniness; enough will filter through your
  depraved personality naturally.

  ...

  Letty is still there in powder-blue fake fur, seated on a milk crate
  clotted with filthy snow and smoking a cigarette, the knives of her
  knees wide apart. "Hey Big Shot! I was just getting ready to quit on
  you! Isn't this where you came in? When I was waiting for another
  so-called man?"

  "I'm sorry. I had to go back to a place."

  "What'd she say?"

  "It wasn't like that. It was something else. Something I don't
  understand."

  "Hmph! That's really overrated, that shit. What's so hot about
  understanding things anyway? It's what you do before you understand
  things that counts, and when you don't understand them. Who can't do
  things when they understand them?"

  "What did you say? I don't under-"

  "You heard me but don't understand." She flipped the cigarette away as
  they got in the car. "Can't. It's okay. You do your best,
  Snow-Up-the-Ass. That's the name for you all right."

  "Well mine for you is ssss-Screwball." He started the balky Datsun.

  "That's an easy one. For anybody. I never met anybody that one didn't
  fit."

  They parked by a playground. The night had become clear, starlit. His
  adam's apple and trousers bulged, with tension in between.

  "Not tonight--nothing--I'm too down," she broke the silence.

  "It's probably because..." he began.

  "Whoa. Shut up! I don't want you fuckin my mind anymore. And I don't
  wanna know why anyways. Right now it's just what is."

  They stared past the swings and sliding boards of the icy, glimmering,
  playground, through the pines and into the housing development beyond,
  the lighted houses like broken grins.

  "Well I guess we better...something..." she eventually sobbed.
  "There's screwing your life away and there's...babies." In the cold
  she tucked her feet under, making herself smaller--he experienced pity
  for an instant.

  "My God! There are so many things we'd have to talk about before...!"

  "Hey! You talk! I'll be too old by then. Old woman--not that you
  wouldn't try to screw me even then. Never saw anybody had to have it
  more. Even that first night I could feel it like nothing in my life
  ever. Now shut up before you begin to apologize or explain!" She
  tugged at him to force herself, "Mmmmm" under his arm. "I can't tell
  you how good you smell! How come you always smell so sweet?"
  "Ch-ch-ch-ocolate seized me one batty day."

  "Yeah! That's what's it's like, a little, chocolate or something."

  "And I don't appreciate your characterisation of me as some sort of
  animal."

  "Lighten up, Snow-Up-the-Ass, I'm teasing. Mostly anyways. Hey, with
  us it was like, instant! Explosion! So? After that? What?"

  By way of answer he thrust her back into her own seat, to deliver,
  with all the rational will he could muster, his farewell speech, laced
  with the highest sentiments he had ever announced. At the end tears
  stood in her eyes like dimes.

  ...

  What an insight! It destroyed me! What I discovered is that what's
  really really crazy is the domestic shit, that's what's crazy. I
  thought the way I used to live, the goddamn ravaging, wracking sexual
  drive and and and the horrible loneliness and the drinking all night
  and running ten miles the next morning and then puking and and...well,
  anyway, that's really not what's crazy, really crazy. Crazy is the
  Ohgos and all the people dying away in their snug little bungalows
  with all the burners and the ovens cooking, and kids pissing in every
  bed! It's good I met the Ohgos, 'cause they represent the so-called
  home in its most insane form. I mean, girls with b-breasts, b-boxing
  while you get fatter and fatter? A domesticated pig? This I want for
  my future?

  And and and and women like Letty, offering everything up with this
  smartass Mona Lisa smile and getting you you you babbling, and then
  instantly purring Just step this way to Domestic Death! Uh uh!

  Man I did it! I ended it and I never felt better! Like I'm burning
  with the feeling! Free, Baby, free! ...

  About a month later Cliff had an early dinner at a German Restaurant
  with a priest who taught philosophy at Gannon, and they argued so long
  afterwards--the waitresses huddling and pointing--that he barely made
  closing time at Toppy's Terrific Tuxes. He cast the plastic-sheathed
  garment into the cancerous Monte Carlo, fistailed out of boulders of
  squalid ice, flooring it all the way to Media.



 _____________________________________________________________


                                 Fish Story

  Like other fish--if, as you said, you really wish to learn-- I do not
  like metaphors. So, as I said, I am a fish. It is a hard thing to
  explain to you: we simply are, and therefore need no figures of
  speech.

  As to the current spate of fish suicides, one must discuss the
  deteriorating mental health of the majority offish since 1982, and
  even before. I have lost too many of my friends, haddocks, tuna...
  dolphins being the latest. Unlike those of men, these labels are not
  meant to prejudice or denigrate. The brotherhood among fish is
  legendary.

  We eat each other you say? We do what is decreed by The Great Fish, no
  more, no less. Oh there are wilful renegades as everywhere in the
  animal...kingdom, so-called.

  And those of us who kill to eat in the natural order of things don't
  write books full of circular rhetoric, or make films rationalizing
  acts of brutality and sexuality--where sometimes the difference
  between the two is hard to tell. No sleaze, academic or
  pseudo-artistic, among fish.

  By the way, I never really found out whether we are included in that
  lofty designation of Animal Kingdom by you and your species--your own
  just fits at a certain place in a certain chart like anything else, no
  better or worse, more complex than some, less so than others--whether
  you and all your professors know it or not.

  We fish have our own ways to classify life but it is both too complex
  and too intuitive for you to, excuse the expression, fathom.

  At any rate, our solidarity all but overwhelms any tiny tiny
  antisocial percentage among the untold trillions of fish in the waters
  of this planet. What if I told you there are as many fish as stars!

  At any rate--back to fish suicides--I have seen it many times, this
  decline in the power to think clearly: you do too many unfish things.
  Then you kill yourself in water full of garbage and medical waste, or
  they get you with some silly lure, rubbery worm of no natural color
  which you would have laughed at, herky-jerking by in your strong and
  healthy and clear-thinking days.

  Hook you! I know you habitually say some such taunting thing, slightly
  different and probably just as sick. Well just think of yourself with
  a hook through your cheek. And yet such horror is not given a second
  thought.

  I told a lobster "You know, they say that when they plunge you into
  boiling water you don't feel much, your nerves being so primitive."
  That's what I told him. He cried and cried. I guess that doesn't take
  much sensitivity. Of course I know that the image of a lobster crying
  is ludicrous beyond ludicrous to you. Not dreamt of in your
  philosophy.

  I won't go on. I ask only that you merely attempt to look at it from
  our side. Just this once.

  Oh if you could only be a fish for one luminous, cutting second!



 _____________________________________________________________


                          ORANGE, GEORGEOUS ORANGE!

  Not the kind of den you'd expect to see a Pumpkinhead in, club-like
  with its leather furniture, cherry paneling, the massive desk bathed
  in lamplight. But a glance from outside at the leaded windows which
  sectioned the huge orange head immediately confirmed the unusual fact
  to any passerby this early evening.

  A Pumpkinhead absolutely! And not surrounded by filth and greasy
  formica. (Thus perhaps the "good one" that many people know or have
  heard of.)

  He laughed, this comfortably ensconced creature with the creamy French
  Telephone so tiny next to his head, for he had solved the math problem
  just before the eminent physicist on the other end of the line could
  blurt the answer. Unfortunately though, before the Pumpkinhead could
  invent a discreet goodbye and place the ornate phone in its cradle,
  Dr. Lyle Anders quipped "Now don't get too giddy. Or I'll start
  thinking you're a Pumpkinhead. Which, of course, would be imposs..."
  Then the immediate, seething intake of breath at the professor's end
  in Ann Arbor when the mechanical operator broke in with "Are you a
  Pumpkinhead?"

  "The Supreme Court has ruled that Pumpkinheads have the same rights
  as..." he cried. It was no use--the question just kept repeating.
  "Yes," he finally whispered. The court, he knew, had also ruled that
  the question alone established the fact in these cases, since no one
  not a Pumpkinhead would claim to be one, and, as Pumpkinheads were
  compulsive liars, ninety-nine percent of them would immediately answer
  no. (The latest study from Johns Hopkins University put the figure at
  ninety-seven percent--"not a significant difference."

  Also, those persons unjustly asked could not sue, for the court
  recently held that questions absurd on their face cannot per se be
  injurious.)

  Now another evasion took care of those guaranteed Pumpkinhead
  "rights": "All outgoing lines are full; all incoming..."

  He quickly hung up and then depressed his computer button only to see
  that R.Renfew,Pasco,WA was undertaking the half-completed chess game
  against Dr. Anders. The Pumpkinhead started to say that it didn't take
  Dr. Anders long to get him out of memory, but he remembered that it
  didn't take anyone very long the many times before this one either.
  "Oh well," he breathed into the soft, warm atmosphere of the den, "I
  can at least put my 'Begging Clown Bit' on hold."

  And all of his signs insisting ORANGE POWER, and WE ARE THE LIGHT YOU
  HAVE SEEN! plus all the framed photos of Pumpkinhead surgeons and
  basketball players brought no solace--once again. He shook his huge
  head and whispered "There are more jokes about Pumpkinhead basketball
  players than there are Pumpkinheads, period!"

  It was getting darker outside and the light from his desklamp flowed
  more brightly, brushing the faintest gold over the dark paneling, and
  making each individual pane in the large window reflect bright orange.
  He mused sadly as to what the nervous ticketseller must have seen when
  he led eleven others of his despised ilk to pick up reservations for
  PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. "Aren't you Pumpkinheads?" she sobbed. The
  manager stepped in with "I think we can safely assume they are, and
  that this performance is completely, utterly sold out." He clicked off
  his lamp and wept into the mellow darkness.



 _____________________________________________________________


                               The Chastetree

  Jane. Strolling the tanbark path down into the nature center, half
  wondering why she had ended up there for her "solo"--and a day tardy
  because of Dr Kasman's muddled assignment list. At any rate, she was
  expected to fetch something foggily symbolic of herself for his
  "Seminar In Personal Rediscovery." A leaf? she thought, a twig?
  Dogshit?

  Just before a campus policeman began running towards her, she'd been
  musing that nothing connected in that class--oh to be sure, on
  purpose, as Dr Kasman had assailed them: "Clusters of intuitions and
  images, or sounds, memories. Whatever. Odors even! Let's accept such
  clusters without generalizing about them, or without narrowing them to
  the meaning, and, therefore, to the preconceptions, ah, inherent in
  everything."

  Uh huh. Odors all right. Is that Dr Kasman or Gasman? She very nearly
  said this last aloud. It made no difference because the officer had
  vanished. "Probably steered offcourse by a case of Bud Light empties
  in the Japonica," she laughingly pronounced.

  Patrolman Ridgeway, though, craned from behind an oak, thrusting down
  a photocopied ***ALERT***! describing a Blond Caucasian of yesterday
  who had stepped from Crum Creek, naked, to invite some dawdling coed
  to "experience a dip with me." Ridgeway snatched back the sheet and
  shook it at Jane in the green light. "Never walk in here alone. Never!
  No time is safe."

  "If women can't walk anywhere alone they might as well be men," she
  informed the quizzical Officer Ridgeway. "Take a dip huh? How was his
  dip stick?" she muttered. "Let's get a look at yours--you never know."
  Jane.

  "Ma'm?" the tall officer questioned, the oak looming behind him.

  "Oh nothing," she smiled. "I prefer not to narrow myself to
  meaning...a la Dr Gasman...in case I thereby find out what's wrong
  with me and the entire sick country. As to you and me, I'll just take
  our bizarre rendezvous with its surrounding odors, birdsongs, and
  bawdy titillation back to the strange doctor's class--or is bawdy
  titillation redundant, officer? Was Bawdy Titillation covered in the
  Police Academy? Under Lascivious Behaviours, general? And where does
  it fit in the scheme or non-scheme of existence anyway? Is it...is it
  slime or paradigm?"

  Ridgeway grimaced wryly, being used to fresh students all right...but
  this little muttering one now wheeling around through the dapples...?
  The worst yet. He blinked as she disturbed the light.

  Double-checking survey results with her that last evening in his messy
  office, Dr Kasman had spoken of the pleasure of her company in a voice
  that hardly moved the air, that air where others of his hints had
  breathed softly and died, like decaying notes from a flood-damaged
  piano--actually breathed so softly and died so quickly that she
  couldn't be absolutely certain she heard anything at all. She was so
  shortly out of the convent that she wasn't sure that she could
  recognize, let alone encourage, masculine attention.

  But there really is no one else, small voice or large , she concluded
  when reaching an enclosed space called the Garden of Fragrances. Oh
  they'll arrest the erect Caucausian so he'll not proposition me. She
  sang this last in a Gilbert and Sullivan style, adding "oh no he'll
  not, no no he'll not. And there's the--I say there's the-- there's the
  pity! " She kicked up the lid of a small box holding brochures
  describing the garden, plucked one out.

  Sitting on a bench Jane read the list of plants, skipping the
  introduction while saying "What does anyone mean among these damn
  academics anyway? The ambivilancies come in thickets!" Sweet allyssum
  she misread as sweet asylum, immediately catching her error--and then
  aching in the ripe aromas, too suddenly, for the convent.

  Oh well, I'll pray about it...all the confusion now. But I'll never go
  back: obliged to leave that clarity and simplicity, or cease
  breathing--no matter about my prayers.

  But, no, no, she wouldn't pray now, about that or anything--so turned
  off for the present, and onto nothing else, certainly not academic
  obscurity, and hints and whispers a la Dr Kasman.

  That pussy! God how pukingly sexist that word is! A cowardly man is a
  woman's... Oh they would of course pussy foot in Linguistics and say
  that the slang takes from pussy cat also. At any rate I'm sick to
  death of my pussy and its supposed needs. Stop saying pussy, you
  pussy! Give me a break! Everybody!

  I could, though, urgently love Officer Ridgeway for his straight-ahead
  style--all nuance a stranger to him. "Like women with the rag on," he
  might say in response to the slightest deviation from Victorian female
  behavior. Half the universe with the rag on--now there's a thought.
  "Chastetree" she read aloud from the brochure.

  "I do prefer the vulgar somewhat..." here she used the weeping silver
  linden to stand in for Dr Kasman..."it being blunt where you are
  mincing. If you could say something , well then I trust myself to
  spontaneously and honestly answer. One can say, for instance, coffee?
  movie? dinner? destroy a bed? One can say anything! That's the beauty
  of saying. So say! All tiny talk is impotence, all half-wisecracks
  impotence--of both sexes, much as I'm in a men-blasting mood. So, too,
  is my own watery little bawdiness. Why the very air itself expects
  more of us. God--if there is one--does! But so, she sighed, had her
  former religious life been impotent. What she thought humility, simple
  timidity: afraid. Afraid to live either in or out of the convent. And
  fooling no one who knew her and could easily note her gradual
  coming-apart. Oh why do we all of us choose to spoil our lives in such
  a way? Quiet desperation , Thoreau said. Or do we choose?

  Better an open rebuke than a secret love --isn't that in Psalms
  somewhere, Dr Kasman? Or are you so secularly tight-assholed an
  academic that you'd scorn the Bible too? Maybe the text isn't quite
  accurate enough for you yet, its provinance lost in Providence--at
  Brown University, heh heh.

  All my dreary intellectual shit aside, I really might deal you an open
  rebuke, Dr Kasman. And I might not. What did one of those tough guys
  say in The Killers? It's something you never know at the time. Is
  spontaneity a vain hope in all stifling atmospheres--convents and
  universities and infinities upon wretched infinities of moribund
  businesses in this overwhelming bore of a country?

  What am I doing here on this garden bench? Oh the smells are truly
  truly wonderful, that's for sure! And what was I doing there in the
  woods? Lovely, dark, and deep! I don't even know, really. And why did
  I leave? The woods or the convent? I thought I had reasons at the
  time. Faded. Forgotten. Mother Superior's firm sympathy then; Officer
  Ridgeway's ludicrous "Caucasian" alarm now.

  Jane decided that she'd have to return to the nature center, parry
  this latest cowardice at least. Once again on the tanbark trail all is
  very silent, nearly as sealed as the convent, just the sporadic
  twitter of birds, but soon the officer shadows Jane on the ridge
  above, resembling a spavined dog against the smudges on the sky. He
  hears, or sniffs, something, and instantly straightens up. A wave of
  rain whips through and is gone.

  She improvises, giggling: Now rigid on the ridge is he/ erect to
  possibility./ Say!/Ridgeway!/Bring it down here for a poke/and I'll
  fuck you till your eyes smoke./ Insane!/ Signed, Jane.

  A fragment in Kasman's office swims in against the present damp
  fertility, her telling him what he later designated as her vision! of
  the survey results: "One-third liked what they liked; one-third hated
  what they hated; one-third had little idea of anything."

  "O pray, which third are you, Officer Ridgeway? My father, Sir, was a
  whole man! I loved him in his young photograph, his face the very sun
  itself! Now I just have that reticulated picture, that's all, no
  matter what the fuckin sentimentalists say! He's dead! Period! And
  love for me is stone cold dead! Why mince around the truth? Oh
  there'll be plenty of Dr Kasmans, some shy, some pukingly aggressive.

  But nothing ever to touch me, to really enter."

  Both have been moving, separately though absurdly: Jane sliding on the
  fragrant grass and yelling, Officer Ridgeway Z-ing down the slope in
  response to her apparent alarm. Jane stops, her shoes tilted down into
  mud, but manages to extract, and then run away before the officer can
  catch her.

  Back at the Garden of Fragrances she writes a letter to her father
  along the margins of the brochure with her left, or non-dominant hand,
  as Dr Kasman had, this one blessed time, specifically assigned. She
  interrupts this laborious task, intrigued for a moment with the names
  therein which she recites mantra-like. "California incense cedar
  juniper Himalayan sarcococca fragrant viburnum yellowwood saucer
  magnolia Japanese Snowbell sweetshrub burkwood daphne fothergilla
  roseshell azalea Virginia sweetspire reeves skinnia white Chinese
  wisteria allium snowdrops grape hyacinth Siberian squll sweetbay
  magnolia weeping silver linden glossy avelia buttefflybush harlequin
  glory-bower summersweet clethra waxmrytle bee balm catmint silver
  edged thyme katsura calamintha.

  "Chastetree chastree chastree," she ends, chanting and crying.

  Then in some uncanny atmospheric sorcery, lightning-crossed darkness
  clamps over the courtyard , each leaf and flower instantly black, and
  then splendidly phosphorescent. Jane, all but leaping from her skin in
  the electricity, manages to utter what she had inscribed in her little
  girl's printing as the brochure is gently taken as she rises from the
  bench, revolves in the center of a resonant golden shell where a
  vortex of petals makes the air a delicious cream to the Blond
  Caucasian, his smooth body dazzling, his long hair webbing her face:
  "I'll swim with you Daddy."



 _____________________________________________________________


                                Urban Dialog

  1: We got trouble: Tuk Duk got the award, and Duk Tuk was supposed to.

  2: You sure?

  1: Yeah, and that's not all. Tuk Duk is a real bum. And Duk Tuk, who
  was supposed to get it, went out and got drunk after the banquet and
  pissed off some rookie cop outside of The Blue Door. He's locked up.

  2: Oh fuck it! Who wants to get into their shit? We only gave it to
  them 'cause they said niggers were hogging it all.

  1: You're a nigger.

  2: Watch it!



 _____________________________________________________________


                              Chapters 1 and 2

  The final disgust of the evening: he shows how his head is fastened
  with velcro straps.

  She rips it off his shoulders and locks herself in the bathroom,
  performing indignities.



 _____________________________________________________________


                            Nothing Made of Words

  She found herself gazing out the window at her car under the rocking
  maples, a door left open. Her eyes lifted to the lashing florescence
  along the undersides of the leaves, but then she made herself focus
  the soaked driveway. Leaves plastered there had been fluttering their
  jazzy golds when she shoved off for work that morning. Now the wind
  shoved dark trees, the river shouldered past as rain thumped the roof
  in waves.

  She saw herself leaping from the car some drenching moments before,
  bright hair flying. "I could kick you in the ass!" she told that
  anxious, running, daydream ghost, and she wondered once again if such
  images of her just lingered in the air, the ones remembered most being
  attitudes of defeat--which she nonetheless held overlong, as if
  posing.

  And I thought only little Frenchmen posed!--she mused with a practiced
  bitterness--not romantic masochists. Oh well, I guess we hold the
  poses we get the most from. 'Romantic masochists...' such a lovely
  choice of words--redundant, like me.

  She went to the closet only to see that he had left almost everything,
  each garment evenly spaced and hanging in its own soft light. "Why
  not? Probably a new wardrobe going on my Mastercharge this very
  minute. And why not? It's fitting-- excuse stupid pun."

  "You're excused, again." she replied to herself, "But just look at
  these fairy fashions!--running a hand over the tops of hangers. "In
  the ethereal sense that is. Hmph! that shrimpy-
  Frenchman-just-departed beat klutzy me in all the allegedly feminine
  senses and could balance on an egg. The Michael Jackson thing: a man
  prettier than you are."

  She wandered into the kitchen to get the white wine out of the frig,
  shook the bottle and held it up close to her eye in the mellowing
  light of that small, cidery-smelling room. "Almost full. My God he was
  even fastidious with...sipping with his eyes closed as I gulped it
  down like the wide-eyed slob from the sticks!" she declared, popping
  her eyes at the crookedly dismounted acrobat in the glossy photo
  scotchtaped to the frig door, menace smiling under his handlebar
  moustache. "Smile on, virulent fuckin male! 'Cause you'll never make
  it back to horizontal," she told him. "Can't ever be on the level, can
  you?

  "Impossible!" she pronounced in her highschool French, sitting down at
  that butcherblock table surrounded by small bins of beans and
  artificially yellowed posters of a pretend French circus. "Well,
  here's to...? To Again. That's it! Once again to Again," she toasted
  and giggled and trembled. "Encore encore encore!"

  "YUPPIE HEARTBREAK!...and other phonies"--she became a movie director:
  "Take number seven or eleven, or seven-eleven," she slapped her hands
  together. "Roll em!"

  It was logical that when the wine was gone an hour or so later, she
  would seek more.

  Soon she was dressing somewhat unsteadily in his clothes at the
  bedroom's full-length mirror, the surrounding florescent tube lending
  her image an almost greenish depth. "Hey! What the fuck's goin on,
  man?" she mocked, not him, her so-recent ex, but some archetypal male.
  "Phillies on the tube tonight? Last game in fuckin season aint it?
  What you mean you don't know? How 'bout I break your fuckin head? Then
  you'll know. All the alleged men round here bunch of pussies! You hear
  me?" she punched towards herself in the mirror, and then dropped her
  hands and smiled. "Not too-oooo macho now," she criticized in her own
  voice, though sort of 'pansified'--as if such camp would help make her
  real voice more feminine..."or you'll scare just everybody!"

  She shoved her blond hair under a Phillie's baseball cap and then
  wriggled into his elasticized undershirt. "Not all that much to
  flatten I must admit. An area where we were about equal, little
  Frenchman and me--the only one. Still sniffing the residues of varous
  deoderants, she weaved over the ziggaraut of black and white tiles and
  into the dark hallway, where fuzzy corn brooms decorated the walls.
  "Hmmmm, heap musk, Lone Ranger! Real Brut. Essense of bear crotch for
  sure! Anyway, Real-Man-Shit for sure! Foh-Ah! Shoo-Ah! Poor poor men:
  they can only have perfumes with guts!" she giggled.

  Winds rattled the windows and shook the fuzzy brooms along the
  darkening walls. "Just take a look at this shit! Whole place looks
  like a cunt, man!" she swaggered, and then slid down a wall in that
  hallway, moaning "I know all the words but I just can't ever really
  get to feel vulgar. Like shit a million times I felt, oh yes indeed,
  but not ever lowdown, no-class vulgar. I'll have to work on it."
  "You'll have to work on it. Yes," her schoolmarmy self crisply
  reinterated, she engaging in another dialog, playing with herself and
  her pain, the voices bouncing around the narrow hallway. Still seated,
  she dropped her head in her arms, a stray remnant of light of an
  antique gold highlighting her hair as she spoke. "Oh you are so very
  cute! So so cue-WIT! A tiny and pretentious noise in the precious,
  breathless, artsy-fartsy place! But more's the pity it's too dark to
  see your darlin' dimples! Darlin' little hammered-down apprentice
  whore--and a real American therefore!" she concluded, "And in all the
  poopy-doopy cutesy-wootsy artsy-fartsy! My oh my! Are we going to make
  everything rhyme in our real or affected heartbreak? Or both at once.
  I am Prince Hamlet--or pretend to be!"

  When she got to Chuckie-O's it wasn't that much of a test, a compact
  man beside her seemingly intent on staring through the bottom of his
  scotch to the center of the earth, a melancholy, startlingly
  white-faced redhead sprawling under a TV at the end of the bar. In her
  loose summer dress, her arms looked even whiter than her face.

  Big night! she told herself as the redhead absently twirled her hair.
  Periodic waves outside made their own washing melody of rain--caused,
  she worried, those acrid perfumes to rise from her clothing. Whew!
  Stinks I know, but from whence riseth romance? Armpit? Crotch? Soul?
  Are the three related? If so how so? And do they all have dark nights
  or just the last one?

  She studied the redhead, Pvery nearly beautiful save for coarse and
  hungry lips. Oh you bitch! she scolded herself as he, next to her, was
  in the process of looking up from his scotch, red-eyed. After the
  young bartender poured her white wine, this man, revived, insisted on
  paying.

  "You see that other one leave? When you came in? Sort of tricky little
  mincey brunette?" he blinked and blinked at her, almost as if trying
  to stop tears. She shook her head, carefully since her baseball cap
  floated more than held. "Well, anyway, my good man," he informed her
  quite fraternally, "there went thirty-three bucks!"--he had looked
  away from her to tell himself this last in the mirror over the bar.
  "And what'd I get? Brushed up against--a brush job--tit pressed in my
  back a lousy second while she leans over to watch replay of a Phillies
  error."

  "Could've been fifty, dollars that is, not errors. You're lucky that's
  all. Let's see..." she began musing: "Bill of Fare:

  Knee Touch 12.50
  Two Knees 24.99
  Random Anatomical Light Squeezes 1.07 - 174.66
  Brush Jobs 22
  Blow--!"
  "Whoa! Leave us not go crazy!" he stopped her, his hand lightly on her
  arm, his small stone-like eyes now level with hers. "And don't think
  anything about Red down there under the asshole TV," he advised,
  shaking his head with exaggerated slowness. "She's trouble. Heartbreak
  a week, hers or the chump's." Over the spread-out redhead whose eyes
  looked purple from crying or lack of sleep, a confection of a girl,
  live, in orange froth, jumping up and down after winning a hand mixer;
  another set in the dining room, where the bartender now unsorted a
  spaghetti of cables, played a tape of the same girl packaged pink, and
  jumping up and down after winning a car. "Even at this distance she
  can spread her poison," this small man beside her added. Am I fated to
  be bored and used by little men? she queried herself as he turned back
  to stare anew into his nearly empty glass, perhaps meditating on
  experiences with toxic females.

  Who's poison?" she abruptly asked him, "Double girl in consumer
  ecstacies? And thus a horny patriot, or patriots, of the times..."

  "Nah!...redhead I mean."

  "Why blame her? Is she jumping up and down? Hardly. Me, I blame Japan!
  That's where they make everything we lust for!" She quickly responded
  to the blank face revolving to her by commenting "I, I've been out of
  touch. Problem with a girl." They both pondered the statement for some
  moments, watching a dusty, rocking sign announce BUD LIGHT over the
  cash register. "I almost thought you was one, drinking the white wine
  and all."

  "I hate to think she's one." Referring to the young woman celebrating
  in two time frames.

  "Some people are just winners!" he finally hissed, and his caustic
  tone led the frustrated bartender, all wrapped up in cables and
  controls in the dining room, to take it personally. "You hear any
  sound?" he coyly inquired to show them he was paying some attention,
  though all glasses now stood empty.

  "We don't want to hear no fuckin sound! It's bad enough." It was her
  first macho outburst and no one paid attention but the young
  bartender, who revealed a partial shrug. She, though, was surprised by
  her vehemence: How drunk are you? she thought.

  "That's what she does all right," insisted the guy next to her, "she
  hops up and down on the TV. I buy drinks for little teases-- that's
  what I do."

  "Me..." she whispered turning a book of matches labeled with the name
  of this dank drinking room: SECRETS. "Me I just fuck up relationships,
  one after the other...after the..."

  "Hey that's war! Welcome to the club. You know," he went on sagely,
  his thin eyes brightening as the output of the BUD LIGHT sign lurked
  across them, "I've seen you here, but not for a while. Anyway, you're
  no rookie. Though the white wine still makes me wonder."

  "Yeah...well I, uh, have to take it real easy tonight. Anyway, I've
  been in with"...and she mentioned the self-ordained "Gang of Three"
  females, her own name last.

  "They're a good bunch. The Albino Mouse can be a little fun at times.
  Yeah, she likes to hear the raunchy shit if you know what I mean--but
  just hear. Don't scare her," he winked.

  "I'll try not to." How strange she was pleased to find out she
  represented some standard in his view...but mouse? Albino mouse? She
  checked the mirror to see how pale she really was, noted some light
  hairs spiking out from under her Phillies cap. "I...we all could use
  some more tan but with all this skin cancer scare blasting from the TV
  all the...fuckin time!" She took abrupt notice of the bartender
  suddenly behind the bar, his electronic career on hold. "My turn to
  buy!" she blurted, but her companion would have none of it, shoving
  his pile of money forward.

  "Never mind, I have to spend all this or I'll be even more pissed off.
  If I got no money left you can buy then. 'Cause then I'll know what an
  asshole I really am."

  "I salute your masochism, or it that macho-cism? Myself having
  education in both fields."

  "It's exorcism, like in the fuckin movie."

  She smiled narrowly at his wit, almost immediately regreting the
  encouragement, for there followed a slow and endless monolog where
  she, drainingly bored, repeatedly asked herself how she could have
  gotten trapped into yet another of these conversations--though the
  first time as a "male." This time, some hobby of his, toy trains or
  goat collecting or something. She injected little uh-huhs while
  visualizing what she labelled now as her former little bore, the
  Frenchman, he in a piquant pose while offering that much-rehearsed
  Gallic shrug to some tramp or new sucker, batting his weepy eyes at
  large life in general. Only laugh we ever had was over stupid circus
  poster !

  "WOOOOOOOO you hear that wind?"--even her flesh-and-blood bore at hand
  was giving up in the midst of his own massive detail concerning Lionel
  cabooses. "And they said fuckin light winds! They said no fuckin
  rain!" And he spewed on about the faulty weather forcast as if it were
  yet another personal betrayal. She tuned out again, the chrome tops of
  the bottles ranged behind the bar and repeated in the mirror blurring
  to one molten mass.

  But started listening again when something sick she couldn't have
  heard, but heard, infiltrated his tone, rendering her ill and weak.

  "...and and and she goes out and hangs her little undies you know?
  Just about every night. Panties big as my fist. Must fit
  s-s-skin-tight." She observed, her heart starting to race, that he was
  gritting his teeth, his small eyes darting, which actions he stopped
  in order to sigh "Let's say we help her get out of them tonight. How
  about it? You and me I mean. How about it?" "Not a particular hobby of
  mine."

  "Right on the river up a little hill. I'm going out of my mind, man!
  Every time I go by there, there she is, hanging those bitty panties.
  And this this this one little light behind her you know?" his voice
  had lingered on the image, stretching the words, his eyes turpidly
  peaceful, then quickening with "But you can see enough! Can you!
  Jesus! In the fog and that weird light she's like a goddess in a
  whatchacallit, picture book or something."

  "Shadow and substance, virgin and whore," she managed to whisper.
  "You're drunk."

  "Fuckin ripe! I call it. Her I mean."

  "Uh huh. And asking for it?"

  "She will."

  "Of course."

  "Damn straight!" he struck the bar.

  "Well she won't be hanging them tonight, in the rain--to inject a
  measure of realism."

  "Then we'll give her something better to do. If you're man enough."

  She was beginning to feel seriously sober, and for some reason
  pictured the acrobat back on her frig, forever teetering in his
  practiced stupidity. "Do I...actually hear rape?" she breathed.

  "Hey! Come on! I don't never mean brute force. We'll talk to her first
  and then...? Well, she'll come cocoa..."

  "The old Bananna Royale! " she found herself enthusing, while nearly
  crying. She began rattling hysterically. "Well it is in any case.
  She'll have to get used to those options. Famous fuckin options! 'Take
  up the woman's burden, slut!' as the whatchacalllit, poet says."

  "Fuck the faggot poetry, I'm talking some real shit here, heavy shit."

  "What a stupid fuck you are!" spilled from her, but she quickly
  pointed to herself when he looked hurt. "Me! Me I mean! I was talking
  about..." When he slowly became even more puzzled, she excused herself
  with "Hey! I gotta piss like a wounded moose!" an expression she had
  heard when a child and had used once or twice to gross out the precise
  Frenchman. It had a different effect on the young bartender, who
  looked up quizzically from a VCR manual.

  In the mensroom--For Studs it was named--she went first to the booth
  and then fled to the urinal after she thought she heard floorboards
  creak, indicating he might be joining her. And when she heard the door
  open, she peered up to yet another mirror tilted above, showing her
  hand shaking nothing, her face wild among the sayings written there
  responding to: HOW WD YOU DESCRIBE YRSLF IN FEW WDS?

  quick on the trigger
  stud for sale
  old maid's death dream
  AC DC and bound therefore to please
  was I here in prev life?--it all smelled like piss then too
  hung and tasteless
  How long Lord oh how long?
  Pushy and BAWDY she added with the lipstick suspended from a string,
  then drew a ragged line through and wrote a girl. Behind her, he threw
  a penny into the urinal. She held her breath.

  "Whoa! You must've caught something pretty serious... to piss that
  noisy."

  "Wouldn't be surprised...all the places I've been." She twisted round
  and zipped up as he took her place. With his slack face and blinking
  eyes among all the sayings, he laughed when he came to her entry.

  "A girl! I love it! That'll get their attention all right. Hey! I'll
  tell you! They can make you into one all right, fuckin women can!"

  The sound of that penny echoed in her mind. What was that all about?
  What if he's gay? And what if he takes me home and finds out in a
  typical semi-swarm of passion that I'm not a fellow?

  She waited for him to finish and they walked back to the bar together.
  After a few minutes of silent drinking she asked "Know what I'd like
  to see? You were talking about a replay of Phillie's error you know?
  When I came in I mean? Well I'd like to see them put on the instant
  replay before the play. Like when a guy misses the stupid football for
  the Eagles and they show it again and again from every angle but up
  his asshole? And every time he just keeps missing it? It's just too
  fuckin heartbreaking!"

  "Hey it's just a game!"

  "There's no such thing. There are no games. None. We play at them
  'cause that's all we know to do, but there aren't any. Not really."

  "Shit! and I thought that's all there was," he mocked.

  "Well, anyway, I'd have the replay show him catching the bloody
  ball...and one step further as I said--one leap for man- and
  woman-kind: I'd have the replay before the actual event--like with the
  mystic broad by the mysterious Brandywine we're going to rape or
  somewhat rape...or or or invite to her raping?"

  "RSV fuckin P!"

  "We could see how we did, study our slick moves, decide how much she
  bought in or..."

  "How much we had to lean on her?" he smiled.

  "Right! We could watch it first and then make the actual event come
  out right. Make one fuckin thing come out right!" she cried, "that's
  the beauty of my invention! Oh why didn't I think of it before?""

  "You're weird!" as he was picking up her glass and staring down into
  it. "Whatever he's drinking," he told the studious bartender, "give me
  a fuckin gallon of it."

  Later when he picks up his large bills from the bar, leaving all the
  rest, a smell of coldness comes off his hands, and she notices for the
  first time that his small, hunched shoulders are heavily muscled.

  At that point a fantasy of beating him up seethes in. "That enough?"
  she asks him again and again, hitting him whenever he tries to answer,
  preventing his answer. He drops a heavy tool kit of some kind, and
  with that clunk is transformed into the unbalanced acrobat on her
  frig, begging her to desist in heavily accented English. "Beat you
  back to level!" she is screaming, the redheaded barfly suddenly back
  of her, encouraging her in hissing French--though in plain fact she
  sleeps at the bar, her disheveled head in her white white arms like
  some discarded, rusty thing.

  "Ready?" the real him asks.

  "Way that river's been rising," she answers whistfully, "we should
  wait a bit for her to float by."

  In her car following his, she intends turning off at the first chance.
  "It'll be bye bye asshole!" But she doesn't turn off at the first
  intersection...or the second. "Forget this shit!" she yells against
  the wind rushing through the open windows. "Masquerade worked. That's
  enough! That's the bitter fun of it. I passed the test as a man and it
  was too easy. But how crazy you think I am? You can get real crazy-ass
  whacked-out in rebounding, don't I know that! But you don't destroy
  your sex! Do you? Oh why do I push so far? Why do I always have to
  push so far? Why can't I ever stop? Why can't I stop now?" And her
  eyes fill hotly, then become ripped-back, icy, as the wind flies in
  and she follows the red lights of his Bronco skittering from the wet
  pavement and snaking into the fog. She sees herself in the rearview
  mirror, her ravaged face backgrounded by reddish, smoky fog. "I'm a
  girl, a woman!"

  "Yeah well fuck you!"

  "Yeah fuck me fuck everybody. What the fuck's the difference?" she is
  crying and beating the steering wheel. "I'll I'll I'll tell her I was
  drunk. When she's all the way humiliated I'll talk to her. I'll love
  her. I will love her. I will love away all the pain! Nobody can love
  like me goddammit!" She shakes and the mirror vibrates as she screams.
  "I didn't know...this crazy! I didn't know! Drunk! I must be drunk.
  But it's not enough...say you're drunk. You are guilty. You are still
  guilty! And it's not that 'cause I've never been more sober. More
  alone. And why is it so fuckin cold? Why is it always so fuckin cold?"

  The river is raging when they get there and climb the incline upto the
  woman's house, the bare bulb shining exactly as he had described it,
  fanning weakly through planes of rain and down the muddy slope into
  the brown, rushing water. "Hey!" his whisper pierces "you part
  mountain goat or something?" Then he slips, windmilling furiously.
  "Hey! Help!" She turns to watch him slide slowly down into the river,
  gazes at the speeding water as he is spun away.

  When she turns back the woman is present, the single bulb in back
  flaring her hair, her eyes still discernable in her dark face, firm,
  seizing eyes. "I expected you," she says, her voice small in the
  feathering rain, seeming to quiet the river too. "I wanted you to
  express your hatred, your violence to your sex...will you throw me in
  river too? Then will your ache cease do you suppose?" She stared
  calmly at this sole intruder, the mists between them.

  "I didn't throw him in! Assholes slip it's what assholes do; first
  they set up their stupid asshole world and then it kills them. It's
  always that way." She is screaming.

  Then you're the greater asshole, since it's their world you
  want--worshiping his cold hands or some baby thing! Hard hands. Self
  pity leads to such excesses, such moral stupidity."

  (And he is trapped by seething brush within the hammering water, alive
  enough to see her dancing through planes of misted light.)

  Among puddles she slowly dances, and stops to take a bow, holds it for
  approval. But the other woman snaps "That's dead too, that act, all
  your acts. And moods. Violent one moment, smashed down the next. And
  dimples at your age! Drilled into your face by some kind of infantile
  concentration."

  "Not that conscious," she pants, the vapor obscuring her view of the
  strange, peering woman. "At least not always. Well...do I go or do I
  stay?"

  "Go back. Remain a man. What you really want." She waves, her hand
  trailing remnants of fog.

  "Yeah. That's right, what I want all right," she sobs, "they're less
  afraid and more free, men are! They don't even think about what they
  do. I had to go there. I had to try. See if I could get some of that.
  Oh it wasn't to find love-- that's for sure--whatever love is...male
  or female...like pissing into a spaghetti strainer," she quits sobbing
  to smile wryly, to listen to the subtle wash of air.

  "Don't you smile at me for sympathy! Litle girl with affected trace of
  the vulgar. That Whore Pattern you tried first with Daddy won't work
  here!"

  "What will?" She steps up the incline towards her and into stronger
  light.

  "Nothing made of words," whispers this other woman. At that she
  becomes silent, removing the baseball cap, flinging it into the river
  as the wind lifts up her bright hair and all sound ceases.

  The cap thrusts past him just before a swaying root grips his foot and
  pulls him under. What he sees in that final instant is a terrific
  vibration as the women close, their entangling hair one, leaping fire.



 _____________________________________________________________


                                BODILEEWOMPA

  _He/_ My God is EVERYthing parody?

  _She/_ Yes. That's the idea.

  _He/_ Well then, what am I doing here? For one thing, I'm
  comparatively ancient.

  _She/_ What else? You've been invited because you're our friend!

  _He/_ Don't they know there was a Civil Rights Struggle, let alone
  World Wars, wherein rights have been preserved and won for them. Why
  even in the Reagan years, his going after bureaucratic fat, excising
  some...well, a little... was itself in a great American tradition.

  _She/_ The civil rights thing is King and the Jig-a-Boo-Boo-Boos.
  World War Two is Deucey-Goosey; Reagan is Flick Dude. Hitler is
  Step-and-Fuck-It. Presidents Carter and Clinton are Cornpone One and
  Two. The Woman's Rights Movement...

  _He/_ Let me guess. Skirt Dirt.

  _She/_ Broadway.

  _He/_ So what? It's just a game, like Monopoly or something. Maybe
  more silly, sexist, and racist.

  _She/_ Lot more than that. BODILEEWOMPA has been translated into every
  important language, and Iran and Iraq and Senegal and some others are
  using it exclusively. That is, it comprises their entire policy,
  foreign and domestic.

  _He/_ God help us! But, this too shall pass. And, in the
  meantime...why are they screaming? And what?

  _She/_ SKUMPA! is the word for us to get out of the way.



 _____________________________________________________________


                                 The Heights

  He was running his dog in what the inhabitants of surrounding
  developments called The Heights when his dead wife came drifting past
  in a golden balloon. The dog yapped and yapped, so Dick threw the ball
  as far as he could and off bounded Spud into thickets laced with
  beercans. The balloon had become fixed against a creamy cloud.

  "I...don't know the etiquette for these things," he finally yelled
  over the hot winds, hands thrust down into his Sergio Valente pockets.
  "Or if I'm nuts."

  "You needn't shout," she whispered. The sound of the wind ceased when
  she spoke from radiant gold, the clouds rushing by in back of her.

  "You sure?" he puzzled in a conversational tone. Things had quieted,
  though not as much, for him too, and his voice sounded as if it came
  out of a bottle. "I don't believe this you know." Her hair whipped
  around as gold as the balloon when a blue patch flowered behind. "But
  what if I do? Believe I mean," Dick plodded on. "I mean...you must be
  here to tell me something.

  The gas fired and the balloon shot up thirty feet. "Whoa there!" he
  shouted.

  It was now directly overhead and he had to shift his feet among the
  shadows of clouds, craning his neck to see just a slice of her chin
  hanging over the wicker edge of the basket. Now all noise stopped
  again but she didn't speak. "I...I still don't believe..." he finally
  started to stammer.

  "It makes no difference."

  "Spud has been fine!" The balloon was drifting again, this time to a
  region of sparse clouds. As a result he could better see her, erect as
  usual. Her hair a bright whiskbroom sweeping wisps of clouds, enough
  of the sky flowed sharply past to begin hurting his eyes. "You're
  looking nice," he blinked, "can you tell me anything about what it's
  like?"

  "What?"

  "You know."

  "You can see."

  "Nobody's bible anywhere got balloons in it." Pockets of sunlight and
  shadow chased each other over the windy meadow until she spoke.

  "It makes no difference," she informed him. "What anything says." A
  shadow across the balloon relieved his eyes.

  "Well you haven't changed much, that's for sure. Everything's just
  about as good as anything else." Two gas blasts followed and she was a
  hundred feet to the luminous East. "Still touchy too!"

  Now Dick thought, It's a hallucination because of all the light
  smashing around up here...I'm seeing things...but...what can I lose?
  "Honey? Should I marry Stephanie?"

  The question didn't bring her back but her voice carried as well as it
  had previously. "It makes no difference what you do. And your life
  will change today." But suddenly the balloon was obviously flying
  back, that gold abruptly widening as the sky receded.

  "Hah hah! Look at this, will you? Stephanie's the magic name all
  right." The wind took hold of that name and echoed it, hollow and
  loud. To Dick it vaguely recalled the feeling of coming out from under
  the water when someone had been shouting at him.

  "You liked her!" he insisted, stepping back briefly--as if fearing
  that balloon would swoop down and sock him.

  "You'll do what you must."

  He felt somewhat more confident as it stopped, and then floated
  upwards to a black-edged, orangey cloud. At any rate, talking to the
  dead hadn't really proven all that difficult. "I like the way you try
  to make me think that I'm the same old stupid shit again, like I can't
  make my own decisions or something."

  She said nothing, where in the past she soothed him--and the whole
  business often ended with sex. So he grew puzzled and mused a good
  while, like a man who couldn't remember playing a card.

  In the interim she had very quickly traveled nearer than ever, bearing
  the same placid face she suffered with on earth. This shock of
  closeness unleased a variation of the same objections, and some actual
  kicks, his last one fortunately missing a softball-sized rock. "This
  she comes back to say? Like...I'm a shit again and what I do makes no
  difference and never did?"

  One huge blast of gas...and the bottom of the wicker basket was the
  size of a facecloth.

  "Wow!" he mocked, "Blast off!" Running and dancing through the bright
  grass he added "I'm not impressed. It's only Prun-away ! Imagine! And
  I thought that dying was the last time you left me!" He was gasping
  for breath and running aimlessly.

  "It's no use"--he could hear her just as clearly from that great
  height, and even over his increasing gasps--"nothing is."

  He stopped running and waited to get some air. "Get Merry Sunshine up
  there!" he eventually whispered. "Nothing is no use nowhow nowhere!
  Such bullshit! Ah what the hell is the use? I'm dreaming anyway.
  Heaven couldn't be that stupid."

  Now he screamed upwards, starlings flapping out of bushes in black
  bouquets. "And I will marry Stephanie! I'll show you. Hey! She's deep
  into recycling. So she can recycle me!" But what was intended as a
  joke depressed him, and he sat down on a rock, short of breath still,
  in order to address the dog-- banking that this sudden inattention
  would anger her, even at that distance. "What...think, Spud...ole boy?
  Marry Steph? After all, she drives...like Mario Andretti too. She's
  another dog? Steph? And fat you say? You were always giv- given to
  understatement, Spud little buddy!" Dick laughed and coughed. "Like
  Old Moody way up yonder there in her heavenly balloon, " he ended up
  muttering.

  But he shortly recognized a departure from his usual monolog to the
  dog in that Spud wasn't there, hadn't ever returned with the ball.
  "Come on, buddy, I can't throw that far. Now come off it! C'mon
  Sp-UD!" he called. Here Spud! C'mon little buddy! There's a good boy!"
  he choked.

  It was then, in a sudden, ringing silence, that he heard, just barely,
  the single, hysterical bark as if down a long tube from that balloon,
  and sure enough he could make out a tiny black-and-white tail
  trembling like a bit of string in a gap through the wicker .

  "Bitch!" he shrieked, leaping to his feet. "I should have known. Oh
  yeah even in heaven you're a goddamn liar!" He was shaking a fist,
  squinting grotesquely as the bottom of the basket folded into a cream
  and cobalt glare.

  He couldn't, of course, see Spud's ball dropping from that great,
  glaring height. In fact, he had turned away and was already striding
  off and cursing in that vast green meadow when the missile struck him
  atop the head and drilled him to his knees.

  Somehow he ended up babbling and crawling his way to The Heights Swim
  Club where Raoul Pellitier phoned long-time member Stephanie at the
  recycling center, then dropped Dick into a broken chaise lounge pushed
  against the wall at poolside, the shredded plastic webbing, burnt
  orange, waving round his ears, his bulging eyes like robin's eggs in
  the light shimmering off the chlorinated water.



  Stephanie careens her white BMW into the parking lot, nearly
  sideswiping the arriving ambulance. In a few moments she will hold his
  hand in that ambulance, her green and knowing eyes.

  The attendants are forced to work around her, their arms seemingly
  coming out of her banana-cream dress--with the whole picture
  resembling a lurching circus routine when the ambulance shoots down
  hill after hill.

  Raoul extracts the keys from her car and soon fondles them like
  jewelry in his olive hand. And all the while turning them away from
  the pool to capture the right soft-lit angle, he phones Letty Ronks,
  recently back from Bard College. "Just picked up my new car!" he
  snorts, and then instantly purrs "C'mon, take a ride for an hour or
  so."



 _____________________________________________________________


                           He Tells Me; I Told Him

  Now just listen to me a minute. I was in Exton at the library there
  and they had this display there, old letters and documents, you know?
  This one's in brown ink on brown paper if you can picture it, and
  pretty fuckin impossible to read but I stick at it. Now listen up, I
  don't care how many fuckin degrees you got. This poor bastard is
  asking for a pedlar's license 'cause his gun "bursted" and blew his
  arm to shit. Can you imagine the horrible pain of that?

  But it fuckin destroyed me. His gun bursted! I love it. Then this
  historical society lady goes "It may have been proper grammar at the
  time."

  I says "You just missed another boat, lady." I mean like who gives a
  fuck, right? She ices away into the stacks which is what she could use
  more of in the whatchacallit, singular, and anyway there's another
  chance for adultery in the cultural suburbs lost, like more's the
  shitty, flat-chested pity.

  So anyway fuck her my fuckin mind is seized! I see the little
  ungrammatical old-timey prick, the one arm hanging down. And
  he's...coming up this lane with all this shit to sell...to a farm...

  I'm getting to the fuckin point you fuckin snob! I learn by talking
  but you don't learn! Ideas not images? That's your fuckin
  problem--just one.

  So there he was, and is, coming down that lane with all the lurching
  and rattling of the wagon. And like exPLOsions of dust!"

  And here's the farmer's wife like the bottom of a V coming at him with
  the kids trailing down both arms of it in all of that dust like a
  brilliant cloud, and they're crying and fussy and falling--every
  fuckin thing.

  And what's she see? She sees this copper pot glimmering there and it's
  sturdy and'll last fuckin forever, but then she sees this real light
  fabric for a dress and it sort of drifts there. And then the more she
  runs the more it kinda...flows at her, you know? Flowers.

  Shit, she thinks, I know I should buy the pot. And the brats paddling
  and paddling behind and pissing the blues so how's she even gonna
  think in all of that?

  Yeah, that's all. If you got any fuckin brains you know when a story
  should end. They give refunds?...all these colleges you went to?

  You figure it out. It aint a fuckin AEsop's fable. I'm not gonna say
  another word.

  ...

  Well now I gotta. I didn't want to but I gotta. You better not get
  married I'll tell you that. You won't know if you're getting the real
  thing or a wrinkle.

  It's only that only those who have been really really crazed should
  sell to the rest of us...and with us being dinged enough to know what
  it's all about. Hey! Buying and Selling it's human activity! I mean
  it's as deep as any fuckin thing you can think of, man! It's not like
  most of the shit you see around here, people fuckin sleep-walking with
  credit cards and not even knowing what the fuck they'e buying or what
  for. It's deep shit I tell you.

  Like like like in Japan once, with the pines sort of lean-y, like they
  been at it forever. And behind them, the sea. There's light here and
  there and it's, like making parts of the water look thinner. I'm
  twenty so what the fuck do I know?...sand and patchy grass
  under...trees, and it's hard to even call them trees 'cause each one
  just got a branch or two sort of...floating there.

  I tell you I still fuckin remember it. The point? Oh yeah the fuckin
  point! Shit! I couldn't forget that!

  This'll destroy you: It was a Japanese print before I ever saw one in
  my life!

  Yeah well I'm gonna go on. It's not screwing some little airhead that
  makes a man out of you, and laying on your phony college shit--for all
  of which you ought to be ashamed of and I should tell your mother
  about it too--it's drinking in every fuckin thing you can and thinking
  about it so you can't go to sleep cause your mind's burning up! With
  everything, with this scene in Japan and everything else in the whole
  fuckin world.

  I know it's probably bullshit, but like with Newton and the apple? I
  mean how many people had been conked on the head with apples. But he
  puts it together. You gotta get it in here , the head, every fuckin
  thing in here you can, so you can put something together. No, not put
  together the apple, sarcastic wimp, though Wallace Steven wrote about
  putting a pineapple together. Yeah well you should be impressed 'cause
  I devour everything I can get my hands on. Yeah? Well fuck this "you
  don't digest it." I'll do that ten years from now. Right now it's
  Read, Baby, Read! Hey it's a TV nation with shit-for-brains couch
  potatos! And that's who'll be calling the shots--if you haven't had
  your ball-chill for today.

  Well it aint, and it aint a sermon neither, and you'd be fuckin wiser
  if you went to church once in awhile anyways. They hook back a couple
  of thousand years almost. That says something. Shit no, even longer
  when you think that religion is a continuum back to the fuckin
  caveman!

  What does the painter do? He makes a picture. Is it there before he
  does? 'Cause he doesn't make the same picture that's there. He makes
  another one. But he makes the same picture too. It fuckin destroys me.

  I pick up this Galway record, Sam Goody's. Two bucks 'cause the punk
  kids with the orange and blue hair, and the polyester assholes from
  Kodak and DuPont don't want it. They're like you: they know everything
  already. Anyway, it aint fuckin "career enhancing" or some such shit.
  Like the garbage in Daltons: HOW TO FUCK YOUR NEIGHBOR OUT OF
  EVERYTHING HE HAS AND GET RICH IN THE PROCESS. Hey I go to B. Daltons
  when they got a tableful of Penguins or something, something nobody
  wants--aint career fuckin enhancing or something. I got this British
  thing by Laurie Lee about walking out some evening or something like
  that. Blake, is that? What do I know? Like he leaves home a kid and
  plays the fiddle for pennies and gets to London and works in
  construction, the greasy bottom rung of that class system that's so
  admired here, and he gets a hardon for all the shop girls and at his
  age who can blame him? And then he goes "I went to Spain 'cause I knew
  how to say please give me a drink of water" and that's the kind of
  balls you need!

  Yeah it's a sentence. I talk in sentences. I talk in prose. I tell you
  I'm really something.

  Anyway this record's called Turn of the Century Japanese Folk Melodies
  and I put it on in my room of clutter and filth and I gotta quart of
  Yinglings in my fat fist and I listen, and I'm back in that grove in
  front of that hotel used to be for Royal Japanese Navy and all the
  maids are giggling and then I'm thinking. I mean then back in my room
  in West Chester 'cause when I was twenty back there in Japan I didn't
  think at all 'cause my brain flowed down into my cock.

  Anyways, I see this farmer walking through there, through that grove,
  long long before anything like hotels or world wars or anything like
  that and he's humming one of those tunes that Galway plays on his
  flute, you know?

  And I mean he's playing back then and he's playing when I was twenty,
  Galway is, and he's playing back in my room and he's fuckin playing
  right now! Digest that, faggot! 'Cause it's art and art is then and
  now and fuckin forever!

  And now, right this second as you sit there scratching your nuts I got
  this painter going there in my mind, and there's no more war or
  anything, and he's finished his coffee so he can just think about
  painting the sea and trees in front of that hotel, you know?

  I tell you, Frank, you're gonna die if you don't just let your mind
  blow up! Just let it fuckin explode I tell you! Education frosts your
  balls! All these PhDs--capons! Parasites! Para-fuckin-sites!

  So this painter, what's he gonna paint? He's gonna paint light. That's
  what he works in. And it's gonna be light like it's there and light
  like it aint, and and and and all together. I mean I'm talking about
  art, man!

  And it don't make any difference anymore about all the freakin pain
  and the war and the horrible goddamn heartbreak. Not with him. Not
  there. 'Cause there's something fuckin spiritual with that artist
  there in that grove...and in the whole world if you can only get your
  fuckin hands down into it!

  ...

  I'm writing him a note: DEAR LOU, TELL THE COMPOSER AT AUSCHWITZ AND
  THE DANCER AT HIROSHIMA ALL YOUR FINE IDEAS.



 _____________________________________________________________
THE GOLD TRADE

 _____________________________________________________________


                             The Morning Program

  Burko-E-O zapped in that tape cartridge and Zongo's favorite word all
  but blew apart the smaller boomboxes flashing along the shores of the
  fetid bayfront city: "Zongo-O-O-O!" reverberated and overlapped,
  finally ending in a screeching crescendo followed by maniacal
  drumming.

  Then Zongo, the dj, screamed his second favorite word "UnEARTHly!" and
  Burko-E-O, his only engineer ever, collapsed back into his office
  chair and wheeled around the control room bumping into everything
  until he reached his coffee mug, half a hollowed-out softball lined
  with a ceramic something and secured by a handle made from driftwood
  and macrame. The mug was a gift from a fan of Morning Lunacy
  celebrating the station's last place finish in the Radio-TV league--as
  did Burko-E-O's t-shirt, which featured him leaning back at an
  impossible angle in the springless chair while holding up the Morning
  Lunacy pennant.

  Over frosted mugs of Pabst Blue-Ribbon of a blinding afternoon at the
  palm-roofed, screenless Beachbum Cafe dwarfed by the pastel stucco
  hotels--

  Zongo: We cause the craziness or just follow along with it? Burko-E-O:
  I admire your dee-eeep thoughts.

  Zongo: (blinking one full minute at the tar shimmering along the
  beach) Well I guess.

  One late morning after the thirtieth playing of the Zongo-O-O-O! tape,
  Burko-E-O died in the springless chair, spilling coffee all over his
  t-shirt image of himself leaning ever backwards in that same, famous
  chair. All his fans were shattered and Zongo tried to take the
  following day off in his grief, but the youngest vice-president wrote
  a tribute to Burko-E-O and insisted only Zongo could read it. So Zongo
  read it the following morning while another vice-president substituted
  in the control room.

  Of course he could never get the timing right as to when to slap in
  the "Zongo-O-O-O!" tape and Zongo told him to forget it.

  When the new engineer came aboard, he was forever a beat behind and
  seemed put-upon and angry behind his polished glasses whenever Zongo
  fed him the cue: "I'm starting to feel a teensy teensy teensy little
  bit unearthly." More than once Zongo saw only kneecaps when
  Burko-E-O's chair proved difficult for the flustered engineer.

  Zongo, depressed, took to trying to mouth the Zongo-O-O-O! effect
  himself but letters poured in protesting, and the three youngest
  vice-presidents had a meeting with Zongo and the engineer, Mr. Claude
  Snarrel, wherein Snarrel promised to try to be more attentive in
  exchange for a new chair. The vice- presidents pronounced
  TRIPLE-LOVELY, especially since the ad agency wanted to reshoot a tape
  of Zongo in earphones turning and turning to twist the chord around
  his body, and then corkscrewing back to unwind it, with his
  transported face satanic at the end--the very famous bit he had done
  only once since Snarrel's debut. The final upshot of the meeting was
  that the engineer promised to slap the tape in with more alacrity.

  Which he did. But with a quicker malice behind his polished eyeglasses
  which ruined the timing of Zongo's other jokes and routines, and,
  worse, knocked his delivery of commercials for Mad Jack's Furniture
  Outlets off. Mad Jack himself called a vice-president: "I want,
  whatchacallit, energy!"

  Whereupon the vice-presidents clowned "Whatchacallit energy!
  Whatchacallit energy! Whatchacallit energy!" actually doing a sort of
  tribal dance, but in the cafeteria this time since Claude Snarrel,
  unlike the lamented Burko-E-O, locked the control room door.

  The vice-presidents were usually buttoned-up, pinched-in, and
  polished, but experienced a mood swing after the mid-morning delivery
  of small packages by a one-eyed Mexican.

  But what Zongo could mouth whenever Claude Snarrel missed the cue was
  what the vice-presidents repeatedly sneered at the locked control room
  door: "The Engineer!" Soon that expression permeated the humid town,
  and when Billy Lauler decided to take more than the alloted time to
  really tune up a battered Escort at BAYFRONT FORD-MAZDA, his
  colleagues chorused "The Engineer! The Engineer! The Engineer!"

  The effect was that Snarrel became almost as famous as had been
  Burko-E-O, and the art department began designing a mean-faced
  t-shirt, but Snarrel caught wind and threatened suit, whereupon Zongo
  went to the cowardly, forty-ish vice-president to get permission to
  fire him. "You don't sue your family!" finally won the argument.

  So the next morning after his final high-C "Uh-uh-uh-uh- UNEARTHLY!"
  signoff, Zongo pounded on the control room door for five minutes while
  staring up through a filthy skylight at patches of mercury sky, and
  hearing muffled sounds of tortured metal from the not quite soundproof
  interior. When Zongo finally was admitted by the engineer, shiny
  glasses slipping down from his pale forehead, a large round spring
  rolled into the center of the room. Snarrel had been trying to load
  the spring into Burko-E-O's chair.

  "How you making it, man? I been, like whatchacallit, fuckin knocking?
  You're fired. Hey but you're a tall mother you know that? I mean we
  can't work together you know what I mean? Like no... chemistry? It's
  fuckin UN-unearthly! You know what I mean?" Claude Snarrel reddened
  and stared at the lying-down chair. "Life's a bitch and then you die"
  Zongo informed him. "C'est la"...and here he wheeled and started
  skipping away..."shit!"

  But the instant he turned his head back to note the effect of his
  farewell smirk on the engineer, he glimpsed instead the last of the
  scarlet rush of Snarrel, the chair descending from a snowy travel
  poster.

  The next thing Zongo knew was nothing, although two vice- presidents
  would later dance around the body making levitating motions while
  projecting mantras out through the open door.

  Inside the studio, meanwhile, earphones askew, Claude Snarrel slowly
  revolved, twisting the chord around himself and snapping his fingers
  more rapidly than anybody could have believed.



 _____________________________________________________________


                                   The Men

  As a purple seeps into dirty snow in the courtyard below, Gloria up in
  4B Ogglestone shoves down the front of a balloonish party dress with
  both hands: it flares in the rear. "Italian Pumpkin look's okay but
  this Bo Peep shit is ridiculous!" she sneers to her image in the black
  window overlooking the courtyard. In back of her the console TV looms.
  The Great Gatsby is giving off, yellowishly, Gatsby's whites looking
  Chlorox-stained. Indeed much of the production of this original cable
  musical has been tending towards brownish.

  She turns round in a swish and squeak of orange to see Daisy
  stretching her arms upward, the undermanned orchestra straining for
  background ecstasy, and she can almost feel her own cellulite
  crunching--even though Dr Denslow Barrington on the health channel had
  pronounced "Cellulite my foot! Just plain fat!"

  "Oh yeah! Proof of the crummy pudding!" challenges Gloria, his heresy
  in mind, pointing to the dented marbling below her armpit.

  Gatsby, a blond soprano, appears terrified of the large-boned Daisy as
  he begins a tremulous song about "old sports" and money.

  Trent's Calvin Klein's Obsession For Men is charged from the heat of
  his Miata. Soon he's dodging hunks of muddy ice while ridiculing the
  barracks-type apartments. "Such Class! `And how long have you lived in
  Moscow, comrade Gloria?' inquired the scented INFERNO of masculinity!"

  The outside door to Ogglestone is locked or jammed and Trent seeks
  another. At the rear courtyard a few people peer down from lighted
  windows to skewed trashbarrels and a defunct basketball court,
  backboards rusty where the hoops had been. "And pray what means this
  icy dishevelment?" exclaims Trent, picking his way through rocks of
  frozen slush. "And whatever happened to...?"-- here he assumes a radio
  announcer's resonance: "HEY YOU CASH-STRESSED BOYS AND GIRLS LISTENING
  TO FM-WHAM-O-O-O-O-O, THE INTELLIGENT ECHO ECHO ECHO OF CONTEMPORARY
  SOUNDS FOR THE YOUNG AND YOUNG AT HEART! SAY, WHY VACATION WHEN YOU
  CAN LIVE AT RESKER GARDENS?...CABLE'S FREE, AND EVEN A BASKETBALL
  COURT FOR ALL YOU WEEKEND LARRY BIRDS!"

  "An-ddddddd when you finish the awwwwwwful, oh so s-WEATY game you can
  splash on Calvin Klein's Obsession For Men"--Trent almost
  sings--"thereby defining yourself as The Total Asshole Yuppie
  Aspirant. Whoa, young Trent! Does that not mean thou also?"

  "Don't worry," he assures himself, "I'm not that good." He skirts the
  pool, its covering tarp caved in where trash has drifted into the
  middle. As his calfskin shoes punch through the sooty crust on the
  snow, Trent worries, again in his little dialog. "OOOOO! Puncturing
  your precious pumps, pretty boy? Be a man! I am! Well at least it's in
  there somewhere.

  "Hmph! Too clever for your own good. Maybe you ARE gay, as they seem
  to suspect high up on the corporate alp of Dressler- Maximillian
  Industries!

  "Ah yes, that airy echelon of unquestioned Touchy-Feely Butch! Do they
  DRUM up there, BRAVE-ly sitting hip to naked hip while speaking of
  women and me, cupping each other's genitals against the possibility of
  feminist guerrilla raids?

  "The Corporate Sweat Lodge! Give me a break! But listen, and answer
  this, you dreary cynic, what exactly does turn them on except the
  impotence of power? And gay they say? They say gay, do they, these
  selfconsciously masculine men secretly desiring to be queer rough
  trade and yet all aflutter at the bottom line? Well let me just tell
  the whole bent bunch of you that I will definitely prove the contrary
  to Gloria, master Xeroxer of the Engineering Department, this very
  evening!" Here he dances with an imaginary Gloria among McDonald
  wrappers and styrofoam fragments, eventually kicking a Diet Coke can
  at the end of an unintended slide over blackened snow.

  "Uh, given half the chance that is. And believe me she looks like the
  half-a-chance type." Trent giggles and trembles in the darkening cold.
  Most of the lights are out in the building in front of him, though
  some TVs flicker. "Am I having fun yet? You silly ass, dancing with
  the filthy air--but I'll grant that you definitely are having a good
  time!" He exhales vast puffs towards the red-purple sky, a frosty
  elongation on the horizon like a glowing crowbar. When he finally
  catches his breath he states "My God I'm happy. Wonder why that is
  sometimes. It comes from nowhere: a gift--every reason not to be and
  yet I am!"

  Trent finally discovers an entrance, the door held open by a brick,
  and walks up three flights of stairs covered with liver- colored
  carpeting, plywood creaking underneath. As he rings 4B, garbled voices
  rise behind the door. "Gloria?" Trent questions.

  A shirtless man with black hair epaulets flings it open. "Gloria, yeah
  sure!" he screams, eyes bulging a filmy yellow. "Gloria! Sure you
  don't mean Lucy? But Gloria's that's a nice name, hey? But Gloria's a
  nice name, hey? But Gloria's a nice name, hey?" And with each hey this
  hairy man strikes him increasingly hard about the head and shoulders,
  next spitting "Thought I was gone hey? Uh uhhhhhhh, young fella, I
  waited for you to show up! That's what I did you little-squirt-faggot-
  honeybun!" He stops hitting a moment as Trent's knees buckle when he
  flings his arms up for balance and protection.

  "The baits back in there and here's the hook!" By that time midway
  into the hall, the hairy man, smiling, boxes Trent's ears, breaking
  through quavering explanations as Trent staggers ever more backwards
  and then down a stair: "Gloria! I...came... I...
  mistake...I...please...! I...I'm NOT who...!"

  "Yeah Gloria, sure Gloria! Uh huh! You got the wrong whore is all,
  right?"

  Trent manages to turn around and run down the stairs to the outside.
  This time his ankles are ripped as he punches through the snow, blood
  instantly soaking his socks.

  He hides behind the rolled up tennis net, his fingers thrust into its
  frozenness. Try...stop...shaking! he finally counsels himself. A
  filthy cake of snow drops from the sign bolted to the building:
  HUMPHREY. Crazy guy in 4B Humphrey tried to kill me! I got wrong
  building! Trent hears himself phoning 9-1-1 from Gloria's apartment;
  behind him, though, the hairy man crawls over the pool tarp.

  Trent has the Humphrey entrance clearly in view. I've got the cards,
  the visibility, he assures himself. Make my move out of here when I'm
  absolutely positive; the man continues to crawl, stopping periodically
  when wind churns the debris in the center of the tarp, causing rattles
  and pings. Soon the man sinks down into that center, emerging after a
  moment with a length of pipe which assumes a luminous outline in the
  duskiness floating down from the scattering of lit windows.

  For some reason Trent acutely, almost microscopically, pictures his
  gloves on the liverish rug before 4B Humphrey; the grinning oaf, about
  twenty feet in back of him, stops in hammocky sway; Trent hears, calms
  himself: It's the wind.

  Gloria shakes her wrist to see if her watch has busted or something.
  Goes into the bedroom to check herself in the fulllength
  mirror--again, and again the orange dress flies up in front, and then
  in back. "Wizard of Oz," she now concludes, "alls I need is the magic
  wand and ruby-red slippers. No, that little girl had them, the
  slippers. Judy Garland. Or did they both have them, the nice witch
  too?" She asks this question standing at the window. Urinous light
  spills down to Trent as panic issues from the TV: "Somebody's been hit
  with a car, struck down!" a pebbly bass voice rumbles, proclaiming,
  ceaselessly, the same dire thought.

  She will say later on Action-Force News! in quizzical response, that
  no, she didn't know she had been looking down to her date--according
  to co-anchor (and award-winning news editor) Mark Moran's
  question--"in fetal profile on the quilt of snow and frozen mud, blood
  spread out from his mouth like a speech- balloon from a cartoon
  character?" This conceit is later echoed by the strident Leeah Baron,
  a still of Gloria's pumpkin dress and puzzled face fading at the
  telecast's end. (She had phoned Mr Deedham on that unusual evening,
  the manager of the complex. "There's a drunk down there in the
  courtyard or something." "Oh Good-yyyyy," exhaling very
  slowly..."brings us up to quota this month.")

  To Bertram Oldham, Esq., client opines that "He was one of these shy
  assholes didn't talk up."

  "I see. Well, D. A. insists you didn't give him much of a chance."

  Client circles lit cigarette stub inside paper cup, meditatively
  hunching in prescribed dark suit. He resembles a large smudge on the
  heavy air--the room itself weighing in with squat, leathery furniture.
  He shrugs, then hoists bright eyes. "I...just didn't get right guy.
  Accident. Happen to anybody."

  "I see. We've gone over this sufficiently."

  "Yeah! Right! Nobody's fuckin fault."

  "Well, you demonstrate no remorse and prosecutors'll make a lot of
  that in-nnnnn..." consulting his watch, "ten minutes or so."

  "So? So what? What I pay you for? Come up with some bullshit or
  other."

  "Quite right. Of course, it's, uh, against the law for me to coach
  you, so..."

  "So you wouldn't do that. I know. There's a whole lot of fuckin things
  you wouldn't do on your own time."

  "Whatever. Anyway, let's practice some. Uh, genuine remorse that is:
  th-ROWING our hands to our face like-a-SO!"

  Attorney demonstrates...tiny, popping slap, simultaneous half-sob
  catching in his throat. "I'll show you when."

  "When?" laughs attentive client, leaning forward.

  "I'll touch my earlobe."

  "You mean your ear?"

  "This part of it, called the lobe," points attorney.

  "Lobe-shmobe, never heard of it," shrugs massive client.

  "Trust me."



 _____________________________________________________________


                            Standup American Guy

  ...BLUE material, yeah, but more tasteful than most. And that kid with
  his FINGER in it? Ever see the expression on his FACE? See? Dirty
  mind! THAT's the dike I'm talking about, in fuckin Holland. Holland,
  asshole!

  Hey looka me smelling my finger!

  WOMEN! Hey I give em my best, like, at dinner, pretending to listen
  with great probity, uh huh! And then give 'em the great probe
  afterwards! Ask not what you can do for your country...

  Hey, remember the Flower Children with all that LOVE and principle?...
  Hey I like to fuck too.

  Hey but there's AIDS now, right? You know the history? Started by some
  fag going up a monkey's ass, and then, much much later, some traitor
  to the class diddled a genuine woman! So now we ALL got a chance.
  Rotsa ruck! Now aint THAT something to be thankful for at
  Thanksgiving? Anyway, that's the boring history of fuckin
  AIDS--written by some Jew PhD or other.

  Hey! I say things people THINK! Not politically correct. Well
  somewhat. I mean I won't ever say nigger, or spick, or queers or
  pansies. And I won't allow that Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in
  the house...well maybe in the bathroom.

  Hey I'd pull it out now but I don't wanna hit nobody in the FRONT ROW!
  Maybe I'll step back later. Promise. Look who's laughing, Chrome Dome
  out there, Melon Head. Hey! In Italian it's head of a prick, you know
  that? Hey, how you say that in English, huh? I know that you'd blow
  anybody for hair, but what the fuck do you really really desire? Like,
  SECRETLY? FEATHERS, yes? Like fuckin Indian?

  Hey I'm, like, doing a war dance, notice? If I had my little hatchet
  I'd go after a snatch, er, scalp. This mouth of mine! Always fuckin
  up! Thank YOU for laughing, Chubs! Like, it's a huge EF-fort, yes? TOO
  FAT TO FUCK! Right, Lady? Wouldn't know if you were hitting the real
  thing or a wrinkle!

  All right! Hey, you know what the POPE is doing...? Hey there's more
  to the question! So don't say yes so damn fast! ...is doing when he
  gives his blessing like-a so? He's saying get those dirty GHINNIES
  of-fa duh grass!

  Okay, so it's time for a story. A story is told of a Jew, a faggot
  priest, a lesbian, some dollar whore, a Bishop of Canterbury who
  fucked corpses, a greaseball ghinny, a drunken Irishman, a stupid,
  completely thick Polack, a lazy mushmouth nigger etcetera etcetera
  etcetera etcetera. Well, you know the rest. At any rate they all
  decide to asassinate Kennedy! TRUE STORY!

  Hey like you don't HAFTA like this! The language has been debased by
  so many scumbags fucking it up the ass, that...oh what the hell! Why
  lecture souses? Hey! Momento! Don't turn away! Keeeeeep looking! I've
  given up on WOMEN except for MARY FIST here. VOILA! That's French for
  HOLY SHIT!

  And here it IS! Finally! LADIES and GEN-der-benders, in a zip..or
  unzip! And almost as advertised, right? Hey I hit a little smut in the
  show 'cause it all in fun, but I'm an erect man. Usually.

  So whattayahsay, now, I pull this big boy off, and the ladies fake
  groaning? Stick old glory up my ass and the men can cry too.



 _____________________________________________________________


                                   Reprise

  When he was peeling the banana with trademark slowness, the lone woman
  couldn't contain. "I drove almost a hundred miles to see you, hoping
  that you'd be the same, not hardened or cynical like everything else,
  or just an actor. Had to abandon my car after a flat and tell the AAA
  just fix it! Then I walked here on the median, over the mufflers and
  blownout tires and the usual filth of beercans and worse."

  She inhaled to admire the makeup, flour white face, huge cherry red
  lips, royal blue blotches on his cheeks. Even the slight gray at his
  temples had been meticulously layered, and matched the cheeks.

  In front of him the teachers relented and followed the children to
  Bascom-Robbins for ice cream. Behind him at the mall's entrance, three
  striding teenage girls abruptly shrieked at a joke they had carried
  from the parking lot. One yelled above the laughter "Oh yeah? Well
  I'll tell you one thing I think! I don't care what he thinks! And you
  just see how I...! Anyways, if he likes me he should..."

  Now it is just the woman and the performer, who finishes peeling the
  banana and carefully eats it while folding the skin over and over in
  his other bright glove. This finished, he stares at her a long moment,
  eyes glassing. "I AM Skippy Diddles!" he finally announces.



 _____________________________________________________________


                                   Talent

  _Director:_ Let's have the talent!

  _Actor:_ Love the word, hate the wry intonation.

  _Director:_ Jussssst count to four as you're allegedly watching couple
  sit down. Uh huh. Good! Now be a waiter.

  _Actor:_ And what will the gentleman and his gorgeous lady have?

  _Director:_ Cut. Lovely lady.

  _Actor:_ Sorry. But georgeous sounds bet-

  _Director:_ They took surveys. Surveys said lovely.

  _Actor:_ I guess I'm talking about writing.

  _Director:_ Oh? Well don't. That's not what it used to be and never
  was. And be an oily sucker this next take-- this here's upscale
  saloon. Roll 'em!

  _Actor:_ And what will the gentleman and his lovely lady have? Such
  meditation! Then let me suggest--!

  _Director:_ Cut! Print it!

  _Actor:_ That's it? Just what am I sugges--? What's the product for
  heaven's sake?

  _Director:_ I don't know. Some booze-bottle snaps in the size of
  Rushmore, and then we finally get to see our phantom couple worshiping
  the fuckin thing. That's writing too. At any rate, another crew is
  doing that trash. ...

  _Actor:_ Traffic's wicked! Thank you for coming.

  _Wife:_ Nothing.

  _Actor:_ Your...tone out-corrodes my director's.

  _Wife: _English your native language?

  _Actor:_ Uhhh... Well! And what will they have me be next time?

  _Wife:_ A man. That'd be a good one.



 _____________________________________________________________


                          A Decidedly Minor Canyon

  _He/_ I see that you got snookered too.

  _She/_ It's...interesting. Wild at least--a little anyway.

  _He/_ The signs promised so much more.

  _She/_ That's what signs do. Why would that surprise? It is, at any
  rate, a decidedly minor canyon.

  _He/_ Do you have a name? First name?

  _She/_ That's a question, uh, well...though not exactly stupid, is...

  _He/_ Awkward. I know. Embarrassing. To both of us. I'm trying to
  break the ice, of course. You'd have to help.

  _She/_ Not necessarily.

  _He/_ It's a way to nudge things, be a trifle more than strangers. In
  the few minutes we'll have here. You can send ice back to me. I can't
  control that.

  _She/_ They might miss us in the group, Stranger.

  _He/_ No danger of that. He's just saying the same things anyway, the
  things he splotched all over those promissary signs up and down the
  highway.

  _She/_ Crude but effective--we both drove in. Boredom creates more
  assholes than anything else, I suppose. I am well brought-up, and thus
  shouldn't say asshole to you.

  _He/_ Crude, huh? Is that what you prefer?

  _She/_ I guess I couldn't talk at all without striking some note you
  thirsted for. Has the really silly probing started? What's the
  difference what I prefer. In what for example? In books?

  _He/_ In what you think I mean. Or are you afraid?

  _She/_ No. I can see too too clearly what you're driving at. And I'm
  not about to discuss present tense, or you. But, since you have asked:
  I'd prefer a man! Not some pitiful creature who has learned behavior
  from television and movies, and therefore resonates the vomit of the
  mass culture--thinking it, as well as he, profound--and who is either
  sleazily hinting or bluntly disgusting! What infantile mind he once
  had corroded by sexual fantasy. And one, too, who nurtures and loves
  and respects both the woman and the man inside him. A real man.
  Neither an empty macho poseur nor a pallid wimp--if you really want to
  know-- though I do admire the way you play both roles simultaneously.
  And I'm definitely definitely not interested in what you prefer, so
  don't even start. Nor in you. It goes without saying. Or should.

  _He/_ That was a lot to say to a stranger. I appreciate the hateful
  investment. I prefer you.

  _She/_ Oh yeah! Of course you do. I guess that if you've given up on
  all pride in yourself, you'll say anything.

  _He/_ Listen! uh...

  _She/_ Don't even go on! I've listened! too much in the past. I
  neither want to have coffee with you, and listen! nor attempt to
  dissect your obvious wound--after listening!

  _He/_ It isn't what I was going to suggest.

  _She/_ Oh well, some clone of it. All of it double underlined by false
  and phoney d-RAMA!

  _He/_ You're tough. Or impatient.

  _She/_ That little red Escort is mine. If you want to see my dust,
  then...

  _He/_ Please. I...really...I...

  _She/_ Ooooo! Oooo-woooo-woooo! Time to squeeze out a little boy tear,
  is it? How about the watch, the wy-utch your mommy-wommy done give you
  on her death bed. Time to give that to me is it? And what else can you
  pluck out of your little baby blue boy's magic kit?--I mean to appeal
  to the maternal in me.

  _He/_ Don't think much of men.

  _She/_ You've noticed! Funny how you at first think someone is grossly
  insensitive, and then they just...why golly gee whiz they just...

  _He/_ And you expect me to say how I'm different. I'm not. I've tried
  to love, sacrifice even, and I've been a pig too. So I guess I'm the
  man you hated.

  _She/_ Hate. How honest! You're...

  _He/_ Trying to be.

  _She/_ Yeah, well once you can fake that you've got everything,
  haven't you?

  _He/_ Our, uh, pal over there can surely drone: Indians who lived
  here...animals they worshipped.

  _She/_ With our ten holy bucks in his pocket he should shoot up to
  another octave.

  _He/_ At any rate, I do believe in opportunity, seizing the moment.
  Working out your fear. Even cherishing the moment for what it might
  offer.

  _She/_ I'll bet you do.

  _He/_ Especially when it's the only thing. With puke all around. Here
  with this silly mini canyon, back there in life.

  _She/_ I don't read you. Don't wish to. The book's too old and the
  plot too shittily familiar.

  _He/_ That little red barn...?

  _She/_ Grandly named the Reception Center!

  _He/_ The grass is soft and sunny on the other side.

  _She/_ A fact like any other.

  _He/_ Breeze from off the river..smells delicious, just del....

  _She/_ Facts. Again. The nature trip is another old hat.

  _He/_ Please walk over there with me, away from their eyes and ears.

  _She/_ But not your baloney.

  _He/_ And we'll make love. Create it. Have our few moments to soothe
  the pain. And walk away.

  _She/_ Just? Like? That?

  _He/_ Do our very very best to wring out whatever is left of sweetness
  in each of us. Bathe that raw spot in our...souls.

  _She/_ I'm sailing an empty vessel, kid. Why don't you go just pant
  elsewhere? And let me stop you before you affect hurt eyes! The
  pseudo-romantic is the complete psychopath! Well, none of the seedy
  little manipulative tricks work with me. Even you should notice that.

  _He/_ What will?

  _She/_ Hmmm. I like the question. Why do I like that question? I like
  questions full of hope. By their very nature, they're not answerable.
  Oh? Pretty silent, huh? I'm genuinely surprised. No more arrows in
  your skinny quiver? How 'bout one or two of your LISTENS? Tell me
  again about w-Ringing-g-g-g out all the sweet-tee-ness.... Or is that
  winging it? Or, the least likely, I know, slinging it? And that raw
  spot of soul, little little man, is what makes me me. I want it!

  _He/_ Just...what I've said already, and with no names and numbers
  exchanged and no false promises to keep in touch.

  _She/_ Too bad. Hallmark will lose out. So! Boom! And it's over! Wow,
  Mr Rogers! Merely grinding up the heart and soul, again for nothing.
  Watching Life sneer, and spit me out again. And then to...drive away
  blankly...dead...watch my dead eyes in the jiggling mirror, my face
  soaked with tears for miles and miles and miles and miles.

  _He/_ I hope not because...

  _She/_ And you will drive away very nearly feeling that dull space
  where your heart used to be. Maybe even wondering about what authentic
  people could actually be like. Sorry, but our existence simply cannot
  be that stupid and useless. Whooops! Please excuse the laughter. It
  comes from out of life. From absurdity. From doing absurd things. From
  missing the vital train and then finding myself immersed in shit,
  surrounded by shit. And shits!

  _He/_ There's a something left inside of you that isn't funny...and
  I'll say ouch later for that last...detonation.

  _She/_ Could be, some sort of something left. But I'm not the subject.
  It! is the subject. It! Or, in other words, you just want to fuck,
  yes? Want me to be the bum you are?

  _He/_ Ouch! You finally may have gotten there.

  _She/_ And not wring out any precious sweetness, nor pour your
  shattered little life into mine, thereby saving and restoring both of
  us as the angels sing a mighty chord! Just. Fuck. And I'm the
  convenient hole. Barnyard.

  _He/_ There's a better part of me, or was I guess, but, right.

  _She/_ Well, you've should've said so.

  _He/_ I get it: I've waited too long, is that it? Uh huh.

  _She/_ A little.

  _He/_ Oh well then...uh...

  _She/_ Not enough to worry about.



 _____________________________________________________________


                                The Hamburger

  Diane is returning to the buzzing car when a trailer truck roars and
  shimmers. She halts because she can no longer hear her clogs on the
  gravel of the parking lot, then raises binoculars to see the driver
  hunched behind the sun-smeared glass...huge blue letters of the
  trailer shaking by.

  "It's like a desert," she announces, squinting as the binoculars fall
  on their swinging strap when she whirls round to look through the
  windows of Harry's shop. Everything there seems jumping and coated
  with mercury, and Diane jams her eyes shut in order to think about her
  teacher.

  What if he made that face if she said that things shook in the heat
  like things on a desert? Well then she would just tell him, once
  again, "I'm only in Seeing 'cause Yoga is closed!" If he didn't like
  it, someone else could take The Long World and go around looking
  through binoculars at everything. Of course Diane couldn't drop out if
  Olla didn't. Olla had The Short World but didn't come. Diane and a few
  hippies met with Liege that first night to hear Liege discuss what
  seeing wasn't. He informed the class, too, that he had chosen his name
  just for this course, and that he used different names in everything
  he did. He asked Diane what she thought of this idea. Diane didn't
  think anything.

  Now she decides to let Harry fix the buzzing of the car, and walks
  towards the shop again. There the open door frames a cold greenish
  light which floats like a balloon.

  She stumbles in her clogs, remembering how mad Harry got when a door
  was left open by his partner Dirk, or Olla whenever she brought Dirk's
  yogurt.

  Two visions flash as she clunks onto the concrete and past the
  blinding dayglo motors, one red, one blue, flanking the doorway:
  Harry's head is caught in a machine; he's hanging from a tree out
  back.

  Smoke from that truck still drifts in the glassy brilliance as Diane
  enters the shop. Nothing seems wrong at first--a belt flaps sililantly
  and pools of oil-colored light repose on the concrete floor. But...a
  sound like someone beating a rug in the housing project behind the
  shop. A dot bounces across the green screen of an oscilloscope upon
  the bench but Harry isn't there to watch it, small tools between the
  fingers of his right hand as he delicately turns something with his
  left.

  He would often snap up from his concentration to find out who stood in
  the doorway, his brow fiercely wrinkled under the ceiling's florescent
  rods. (Seeing? A course in Seeing! Everybody sees except maybe fruity
  instructors with one name.)

  Why had he been so angry? thought Diane, plucking a five-dollar bill
  from her hair; carbon paper and money swirl around her as that beating
  from the outside takes on an insistence. She places the bill under a
  glowing wrench on the shredded workbench, her binoculars atop the
  wrench.

  It's blinding in the shop, both open doorways swollen with sunlight,
  windows floating, reflections dashing everywhere as the wind snaps the
  greasy tags on the motors awaiting repair, and paper money whirls.

  The entire shop becomes a loudspeaker amplifying those muffled,
  beating sounds from out back. Now there's stillness; after a bit,
  shaking leaves and...panting. And then the thumping anew.

  Diane goes to the sound, blinking when she gets outside. What she can
  make out is a vertical string of blotches pushing at a larger blotch.
  After a while she realizes that her Harry comprises most of the
  vertical string, and that he is smashing a motor against a tree. The
  motor low in his big hands, he swings upwards into the trunk, staggers
  when the motor bounces back. In the brightness everything looks green
  except for the multicolored wires vibrating from the motor, and the
  brownish dust around his glistening head.

  "Is it brushes?" she asks, whereupon he smashes up into the tree with
  greater force, and hunks of bark shoot into the bushes. The trouble
  often was brushes and Diane had visualized them as little
  plastic-handled potato brushes. Each head like Napoleon's hat, they
  whirred in the oil-smelling darkness inside the motor, keeping
  everything clean.

  "They're made of carbon but never mind," he had told her--or is he
  saying it now? Diane's not sure as she strolls over. The motor hanging
  low in his arms, he pants and gurgles. She lights a cigarette and
  puffs out into the dust around his head. "Picked up the new car!" she
  laughs, and the motor leaves his down-fanned hands to land on his foot
  and roll away into poison ivy. Diane blows smoke straight out as Harry
  stares down at his foot, a bright drop of green sweat pendant from his
  nose. A hotrodder screeches by in front and they both close their eyes
  in the mad shaking of leaves.

  He looks like a man who has been dug up when she leads him over rusty
  beercans. "Everything's all right!" she maintains, stiffening him
  further.

  At the buzzing car Diane scolds "All work and no play!" as Harry jerks
  his arm away, walks into the front end, bending half onto the hood.
  She leaves him there, saying "You find out what's making that awful
  noise." He drops his fingers on the glossy hood, pulls them back to
  watch his prints disappear. Diane is passing between the dayglo motors
  when Harry says "Nice machine..." but so slowly he can study each
  syllable forming a vapor on the hood.

  Once inside the shop she closes both doors and the money and carbon
  paper and receipts float down everywhere. After stuffing it all into
  her handbag, along with the requisite binoculars, she sits down to
  write.

  DIRK.......HOW IS OLLA AND MALCOLM....TOOK ALL THE
  MONEY....DID YOU ENJOY YOUR VACA.....LOVE DIANE.

  She phones the auto club before her PS....TOOK HARRY SICK

  TRIP PA DUTCH.

  The sun has been cut off as she gets back to the car, and Harry stares
  behind the cloudy black windshield, looking like the truckdriver she
  had seen through her binoculars. The car buzzes flatly on but now
  Diane can see that the parking lights are lit. Once in the car she
  punches all the knobs until the buzz stops. "It's their fault," she
  announces as he tries to shudder. "Why don't they tell you about these
  buzzers and everything?" Harry gazes quizzically back to the shop.
  "Now don't you worry--I locked the doors." He starts to nod but
  forgets before the middle, sits there half erect and deeply puzzled.

  "All work and no..." the car comes throatily to life, drowning her
  words, surprising her so much that she forgets to let go of the key
  and the starter grinds.

  Searching for the brake release: "Dirk'll just have to take over.
  Olla's all right again and she's got The Short World in Seeing Class
  and so her life'll mean more. Dirk wouldn't let Malcolm go back to
  Rutgers, he's going to Glassboro State--but I'm sure they got drugs
  there, too, don't you think? Poor old Dirk! Can't keep Olla from
  trying to kill herself, least pretending to, so he's always got to
  have time off and you got to do it all. And Olla even thinks she's in
  Yoga and it's closed, and imagine her and Malcolm smoking marijuana in
  that new kitchen! Mercy me it cost Dirk almost ten thousand to do it
  over and they're smoking marijuana in it. Oh why don't they tell you
  how to let go of the stupid brake? I got this pants suit half off at
  Leaders for the new car--Pink Fire's name of the color-- and the clogs
  everybody's wearing. Pretty nice, hey?" She punches his arm and he
  falls instantly asleep. The sun returns to flare his few hairs
  brushing the soft ceiling.

  She finds the lever to release the brake, and the car jackrabbits out
  of the parking lot, forcing a motorcyclist onto the shoulder. Behind
  his full black visor he seems to have no face. Harry grinds his teeth
  and snores; Diane drives fast.

  After about ten minutes she wonders "Where can you pass? Lines I
  mean?"

  "Nice machine," whispers Harry, his eyes like small eggs. A throb
  works around his temple, reminding her of the dot hopping across the
  green oscilloscope back in his shop.

  "Just over the bridge and get on the expressway. That's what the man
  at the AAA told me. That goes right to the turnpike. You'll like it
  Harry. They still have horses but no electricity. They have beards too
  but that's not important with all the damn hippies."

  The throb slides down from his forehead and into his cheek. When she
  spies it fluttering near his mouth she digs into the accelerator. "Is
  eighty all right? Goes way past a hundred-- eighty don't seem much."

  The trees click by faster and faster. Harry's jaw hangs in the
  whipping green, the wind whistling through his teeth and resonating in
  his mouth.

  "Did you say something, Honey?" She is all but embracing the wheel
  when passing four thundering trucks, nips in to miss a skidding
  sportscar. "They're not safe I don't care what anybody says!"

  Harry stiffly rocks to change the sound of the wind in his mouth. "Now
  you just relax," she counsels, remembering those little potato brushs
  swooshing around inside one of his motors, in the oil-fragrant
  darkness where everything's just perfect. Diane can even smell it in
  there.

  Harry had folded his arms and closed his mouth, precisely when the
  speedometer needle split 9 and 0. Blood vessels pump around his
  jammed-shut eyes now. He tips his head like a swimmer trying to drain
  water from an ear, then moans as his eyes flick open. Showing more
  terror than pain, they glaze as if to allow the green and white day to
  speed up over them.

  "Now now...a second is all it'll take to get you okay. Okay?" And she
  shakes out her handbag onto his lap in order to find the aspirin, but
  has to stop when the car catapults into a picnic area, eventually
  ramming an overflowing barrel. "They should tell you!" Diane insists
  when they finally lurch leftward to a stop. "It's no fair just to have
  the road come in here like that." Near the entrance an extended
  Hispanic family hurredly clears two tables and throws everything into
  the trunk of an old Buick. They're launched before Diane can find a
  cigarette.

  She wrenches her new sedan back onto the highway after a few
  thoughtful puffs. Harry snores, but mumbles when the springs bottom
  "...all workkkkkk... Jack."

  "I know what you're saying! My father said all of this was coming and
  we laughed at him." Harry sinks down as if shot. He can't know that
  Diane is summarizing Olla and Malcolm smoking dope in the new kitchen,
  Harry, himself, smashing a motor up into a tree, all the damn hippies
  on television, a car that persists in buzzing at you, and a road that
  becomes a picnic area hosting mobs of foreigners. "And we laughed at
  him. Imagine!"

  Harry brightens "Nice machine."

  You always did like my father," she encourages. "Now sit up and see
  how pretty everything is."

  He tries but collapses against the door when she screeches up to a
  toll booth. She shifts among the money between them on the seat. "Just
  fifty cents, lady," the swarthy, heavy-set collector says, and she
  dreams about marrying him on TV--Dirk, squirming and cursing in a
  tight tux, would give her away, and Olla and Malcolm would be there
  too, coked up among the flowers. There would be a short memorial
  service in the middle for Harry, his love for motors etc.

  Later on the Pennsylvania Turnpike she chooses her first flower girl,
  cracking jokes with Merv Griffin as the speedometer reads 100, and she
  looks fondly to Harry, almost as if he could see her TV fantasy too.
  But her turning to him makes all the colors bleed off her television
  and race across the windshield like multi-dyed water. "You had a
  shock! Little, whatchacallit, stroke or something." Harry sits up
  until his sparse hair hangs straight back in the tremendous wind.

  "Oh my doesn't it go by just lovely when it's there? A hundred. It all
  goes by like water, everything like ziggley blurs." His jaw swings
  open and the wind pops repeatedly in his mouth. Then his eyes close
  for a long while; they crack slightly as she propels the car past a
  rattling shipment of Volkswagon Beetles--then the light streams across
  his eyes like a green liquid. This sight catches Diane's breath and
  she slows to ninety to look for aspirin again. "Get...couple in you.
  All work and no play...makes Harry..." But she forgets the aspirin to
  speed up again. Soon she's well past 100 and musing "Malcolm'd say
  uptight, but Dirk made him transfer to Glassboro. Marijuana in the
  kitchen! There's no perfect crime you know, Harry. That stink on the
  cabinets?"

  He is gripping the upholstery as if riding a sled, his yellowgreen
  face expressing waves of near-comprehension from time to time. Just
  before the Morgantown exit he jerks around, trying to remove his
  terrorized image from the windshield.

  "Well well well! We have a tail wind or something?" The tall man leans
  from his booth into the car after taking the toll ticket.

  "It's a mistake!" She tries to get the card back.

  "Uh uh," he's shakes it. "This is a new record from your entrance, and
  time's punched right here! Plus, state police says I'm supposed to--"

  This man was the minister when she married the previous toll taker on
  TV. She often put in personal appearances with people before she met
  them. "Aw c'mon now!" Diane pouts," noting in the mirror that the
  cream station wagon behind bounces up and down with kids, the driver
  resting his head and arms on the steering wheel. The toll collector
  momentarily turns his long head towards them to scowl, then looks back
  to Harry as Diane bursts "Getting my husband...doctor!"

  "Gee Harry," as they turn onto 23, "maybe you should be going to a
  hospital like he yelled about. But I thought a Holiday Inn? Oh you'll
  be all right. Forget all those lousy brushes screwing up your stinking
  motors, and Dirk and his crazy wife. Oh she'll screw up The Short
  World and I'll have to do it. Honestly, what a pair!" He nods stiffly,
  getting more of what she says now and thinly smiling his triumph.

  Under a fan-shaped tree of orange, a doctor in whitest white proclaims
  "You'll have to go on with your own life now, make your own plans."

  "Harry is my life and I don't have any plans. Oh I am taking a course
  in the night school. Seeing it's called for some reason."

  "Hold on to anything you can because the world's going by a hundred
  miles an hour. Now what's this seeing people before you see them? Can
  we talk about that?"

  But before Diane can fully answer, this doctor launches up through the
  orange, feathery tree.

  "I know!" Diane tells his white, disappearing shoes, and her
  reflection in the windshield. "Everything's changing and the hippies
  want it all. They don't want to work."

  Farms with quilted fields soon give way to billboards. They pass one
  billboard featuring a huge red W surrounded by coils of little w's.
  The next billboard, just before the car plunges into a valley orders
  STOP! AT THE WWW AND ASK FOR THE WORLD FAMOUS TOOFER-ONE!!!!!! So
  Diane stops there.

  Bending Harry out of the car is difficult but they must travel only a
  few feet to a table next to the hamburger fountain. This device is
  about twenty feet across and made of early plastic. A rusty pipe
  sticks up in the middle and water slides down its outside to wash over
  the rounded surface of the bun, wrinkling at the pocked meat,
  branching into dirty tributaries just before it arrives at the skirts
  of gray lettuce. Diane slaps the plastic hamburger and it pongs.
  "Isn't this cute, Harry?"

  "Half...a horse," he answers as she releases him to fall into a metal
  chair which springs down to touch the ground, rises slowly up with
  Harry regal throughout.

  She knows, as his wife, that he is referring to the size of the motor.
  "Is that a big one? Like the ones in front of the shop?" He rounds his
  mouth but can't push the word out just then; instead he leans over in
  the springy chair and drums a finger on the plastic hamburger like a
  doctor at a body. Diane stands aside to look through her binoculars.
  She discovers that three highways descend through mazes of wires to
  this home of the Dutch Wonderburger, and she studies each in turn.
  They're almost the same: gas stations and diners, all with blinking
  and revolving signs, but one has a Dutch Pretzel-teria, above which an
  immense Dutchman leans over the valley holding a glowing pretzel with
  salt grains nearly as big as Harleys; further on down the hill she
  finds that Lil-Al's Ceramics features the world's largest ashtray.
  Diane focuses in a sign leaning against a farmhouse off another
  highway. It promises FAMOUS MURDER ENACTED DAILY.

  She puts the glasses down and licks her lips and staggers. "It's all
  coming down on you! It's all tumbling down on you! I can't breathe!"
  Then she feels that all the sun-slicked wires are going to spark and
  explode, and therefore turns to Harry for solace and breath.

  He is presently crawling over the slippery hamburger, trying to peer
  inside, near the rusty pipe but slipping gradually back down the murky
  orange plastic. Diane pleads with him to come back, but he has now
  scrabbled up to catch hold of the pipe. Water coats his hand. She
  crawls after him, her binoculars clunking and her clogs producing
  drum-like sounds. He can sense her reaching for him and furiously
  swings his free arm back in an attempt to knock her away.

  They eventually land together at the feet of a boy who seems to have
  steel wool pasted on his pink face. "Vill you eat?" he inquires. "Our
  cooking is vunderful good and kissing vears out but our cooking
  don't." The steel wool proves to be pasted on a flesh-colored mask
  which covers all but his cheekbones. The antenna of his walkie talkie
  whips in the mellowing sun, the back of that instrument covered with
  an order pad above which he is holding a pencil. But Diane drags on
  that arm to pull herself up. She smoothes her hot pink slacks and
  directs a begging look at Harry to get him to assemble himself. After
  a minute she manages to get him back to his chair, while the waiter
  stares blue-eyed above his patchy steel wool beard. "Whole horse!"
  insists Harry, riding his chair up and down.

  "Sir?" the boy jerks the pencil back.

  "He means under the hamburger. Motor. It's his business." Chair still
  plunging and rising, Harry winds his arm as if mixing a stiff batter.
  The waiter crunches up his face, causing some steel wool to detach and
  float away in wind flung off a passing tour bus.

  "Oh really Honey! Well can you beat that?" she asks the waiter, who
  Ma'm?s her just before her revelation: "That hamburger turns!"

  "I don't know. Never turned since I been here."

  "Must've been pretty. Well leave it to Harry." Diane is implored to
  order and finally does, the waiter writing fast. Harry's a bit smug
  now, his arms crossed and his chair calmed down. She orders two Dutch
  Wow-Burgers with french fries and two vanilla milkshakes. "And that's
  a Toofer One!" the boy crows into his mouthpiece. "On a Toofer One you
  only pay a half!" This last word echos from a circle of loudspeaker
  horns above the florescent cube of a kitchen under the WWW--ONLY HOME
  OF THE DUTCH WONDERBURGER sign. An enormous snap, then, as the waiter
  still broadcasts, "Vunderful good!" blasting the horns, causing the
  salt and pepper shakers to dance on the couple's table. "Wow whirl
  wiggle!" the waiter continues.

  Now the speakers snap and snap machine-gun fashion as the waiter
  experiences trouble with a switch on the walkie-talkie. "Wuh wuh wuh!"
  completes the extraordinarily magnified message.

  "Well isn't that a lot of fuss for hamburgers?" Diane inquires of a
  brooding Harry. "For mercy's sake I wish my father could be here
  'cause he saw it coming!--now don't you worry Honey 'cause I'll get
  you back to all your lovely motors again. But you gotta play too, you
  know. Don't wanna be one of those dull old boys now, do you?" Some
  hunters amble by, their weapons pointed down, smiling at the waiter's
  shaking of the walkie- talkie.

  The chef's hat bobs vigorously in the kitchen, obscuring for a moment
  the lights running green and blue and red on the steel wall behind
  him. At any rate, all is understood in the bright sealed cube--despite
  technical difficulties.

  Still puffing the steel wool from his mouth, the waiter notes that the
  hunters are settling in at a table on the opposite side of the
  hamburger from Harry and Diane, next to a fence against which they can
  lean their rifles.

  Diane dips a napkin in a puddle in the middle of the off-white table,
  wipes in a growing spiral as a boy in a porkpie hat and a fat, bearded
  man belly-flop onto the hamburger and start slapping each other in a
  game to to force the opponent off.

  A standoff as both slide off together into a giggling heap resembling
  a pile of rags. When they finally extract from each other and go to
  sit to the left of the hunters, the boy in the porkpie hat raises it
  with both hands and sticks out his tongue at Diane and Harry. Diane
  stares frozenly and goes back to her table-cleaning; Harry begins a
  shrug.

  Leaning back against the fence now, their feet up on a table, the boy
  and the man make faces at Harry and Diane. The bearded man squeezes
  his belly through a tie-dyed sweatshirt with the head of Che Guevara
  inside a peace sign. At this point the hunters are circling the waiter
  and the antenna of the walkie-talkie whips around in their midst.
  Orange patches appear to migrate from their clothing into an afternoon
  of strangely diminished light. Their orders are transmitted to the
  loudspeakers after a screeching "Wonder wonder wonder whirl whirl
  whirl...wuh wuh wuh!" introduction.

  "Honestly!" Diane exclaims as Harry claps his hands over his ears and
  the fat man, who still rubs his belly, laughs. Diane decides to look
  past them all with her binoculars in order to study a sign in an
  ajoining lot poking up above the fence. She closes one eye since the
  glasses have become misaligned from the thumping they got when she
  crawled after Harry over the plastic hamburger. The sign proves to be
  a big fish and Diane notes layers of wood in its mouth. "L-laminated
  wood sculpture!" she pronounces, using her Art Around You course from
  last semester.

  "No-O!-shit?" the fat man hisses. Diane lowers her field of vision
  towards him...but first some fluttering cardboard signs intercede:
  WATCH FOR ANOTHER FISHFACE RESTAURANT OPENING HERE. Now she has him in
  view, by aiming just over the hamburger, and he, in turn, is pointing
  back at her. "What did it do for you?" this fat man shouts. "I mean
  for us it was only a ride on a slippery hamburger." Purple bubbles in
  his mouth obscure these words and she leans forward, letting the
  binoculars drop on their strap. His companion in the porkpie is
  punching him on the arm. "I mean no soul experience and we didn't make
  love to it." Diane ignores them to rewipe the table, this time from
  the outside in. Who can understand hippies anyway? But the new motions
  of the boy distract her. He is performing an antic dance on the
  gravel, windmilling his arms and shrieking like a jungle bird, the
  bearded man trying to seize him by his t-shirt. "I try to keep him off
  the grass," he pants, his mouth a golden purple in disintegrating,
  lavender-tinged darkness, "but he won't fuckin listen!" He manages to
  stop the boy and then lift him onto a chair. Harry's head falls to the
  table and Diane wipes absently around it.

  Though the bearded man talks to the boy, whose hat has slipped
  completely over his eyes, he intends that Harry and Diane hear. "Don't
  let it shake you! They're just America. No use going into a shit fit
  about it. Anyway, the only way, my tyro, my amorous hick, to
  appreciate real art, I mean real American vomit-inducing art is to
  crawl over it." Very flushed he pumps up and down in his chair, his
  extraordinarily hairy head periodically blocking out most of the
  Fishface sculpture behind. "Don't you know, Arthur?" he continues,
  "Iron Mac and The Dutchess over there are true Americana. Let's bring
  them back to the college and seal them in plastic. Better yet let's
  bring the plastic here and seal them in with their beloved hamburger.
  We'll even throw in some itchy-kitchy koo Pennsylvania Dutch
  souvenirs. Wuh wuh wuh! Dutch Wonderburger! So eat a little and die in
  tourist heaven! Right, Iron Mac? Right, Dutchess?" Harry has awakened
  and attempts to rise, vibrating. "Ho ho! Iron Mac is c-RANKING up!"
  The fat man spits on the hamburger, then hoists his eyes to survey the
  upper rim of the valley. "Hey its gets a little gloomy up dere--hope
  it's not anything I said. Chust vait a bit ve get some BIG light real
  soon! And-ddddddd! not a little heat, incidentally. More heat than
  light--if that isn't unAmerican. And if you chust vait a little, Iron
  Mac, you can cut out a cube of air and take it home to poison the
  dog."

  When the bearded man screams "This is Tourist Heaven! Die in Tourist
  Heaven!" Harry's elbow slips off the table in an attempt to propel
  himself over the hamburger to get at the tormentors. The boy, fully
  recovered from his dance spasm, lifts up his hat again, revolves it
  over his head while wiggling his ears. "Look at that Arthur! Look at
  that!" stresses the fat man as Diane attempts to lift Harry's elbow
  back onto the table, "It's the Silent Majority in peace and war."

  "Big deal. Big-IG deal!" Arthur comments, flicking his hat into Che
  Guevera on the fat man's sweatshirt. "Anyway this anthro- and -pology
  is your bag, Professor."

  "It 's everybody's bag Arthur. Now listen! I used to laugh at fools,
  tolerate them--little like I tolerate you as a matter of fact."
  Slapping the boy's hat away: "But now I know that they have to go! The
  quicker they're...VAPOR, the better for the rest of us." Harry starts
  banging the table. "Well Iron Mac doesn't want to hear, hey? But I
  will make you hear, Iron Mac! MAKE you, you middle-America cretin!"

  On their left, the hunters shoot disgusted looks to the professor and
  Porkpie. "Poof! and it's all over. Poof poof poof!" continues the
  professor at Diane and Harry's expense. "I mean Arthur! Hey, can't
  explain a revolution to them! Right? They worry too much about the new
  car, and crawl over vomit-inducing art whenever that particular lust
  seizes them. In fact they're vomit-inducing art themselves. Ugh!"

  "May be right, Doctor," Arthur spins his hat on a finger, "but what's
  this tolerating Arthur jazz? Wouldn't call it that myself--don't know
  what the Dean'd call it."

  "Not another threat of blackmail? Lover?" On the opposite side of the
  hamburger Diane leans forward. She has made Harry put his hands into
  his pockets.

  The boy stares inside his hat. "My only blackmail would be...go away."

  "Then go away or don't go away--it's the same thing. It's all play.
  All we do is play. Really! All I ever do is play!" He has shouted this
  last to Diane, adding "Better than Truly Truly Screen Romances, right
  Dutchess?"

  "...could tell Dean," mutters Porkpie.

  "Oh Arthur Arthur Arthur! Not again! You're so corrupt you reach a
  form of beauty, like Iron Mac and the Dutchess tight up to their
  beloved hamburger over there--like our own beloved college down the
  road, like our wonderful America herself. The professor sings "From
  the MOUN-tains, to the PRIV-leged, to the O-cean red with blood, God
  bless..."

  "Wonder if they hear everything," Arthur snorts from the ground. He
  has thrown his hat onto the gravel, and has slid down to roll back and
  forth over it.

  "They hear and don't hear and it's all the same to them. Typical
  Americans I tell you."

  "They don't play I suppose."

  "No," and the professor gazes upwards into the odd darkening as if for
  inspiration, "they work! Until they go crazy like Iron Mac, or
  hysterical in menopause like the Dutchess. Then they become tourists."

  "Hoo hah! Hoo hah!" Porkpie rolls around more actively on the gravel,
  the approving professor smiling wetly, his beard purpling in the
  quicker-falling light.

  "Play? Play?" squirms Harry in his flexible chair. Hands fluttering in
  his pockets, his face shows hatred in comprehending the word.

  Arthur sits up and points over the hamburger. "Hey Iron Mac is really,
  like, whatchacallit, stirring. But why play pocket pool when the
  whosit, Dutchess, can do it for him?" Harry leaps up and flails his
  arms in their direction.

  "Don't pay no attention, Harry!" Diane pleads, embracing him. "The
  young one's gonna tell the whochacallit, dean."

  They seem to be performing a scruffing, shuffling dance--to the
  professor's and Arthur's hoots. While she is wrestling him back into
  his chair she cries "Where's those hamburgers?"

  "In HEAVEN!" the professor squeals. "Where they droppeth as a gentle
  rain upon the great shopping mall of Middle America beneath!" A hunter
  next to him along the fence shakes his head, and the professor shakes
  his head in imitation, working up to a furious pitch. When he stops,
  bug eyed, he steps up onto the flimsy, rocking table and proclaims
  "For the nonce Iron Mac has been quieted, but soon he'll join these
  hunter-gatherers and kill us for truth and beauty, right wing
  version--as visibly represented by this egregious hamburger fountain.
  Aesthetic embodiment of American Capitalism. And it doesn't work!
  Beautiful! Iron Mac doesn't quite work either, except to shake all
  over every seven minutes. He's programmed by the Dutchess." Harry
  flicks his head from side to side trying to understand the professor's
  speech, looks of vague comprehension, anger, blankness, waving over
  his scarlet face.

  Porkpie tugs the professor off the table by a leg, and the fat man
  escapes to spreadeagle onto the hamburger and bounce loudly off. He
  sits on the gravel now, Porkpie standing over him. "Come off of it
  Professor! Leave the guy alone. There's something wrong with him."

  "Precisely what I've been saying, brilliant one." The professor
  springs up as efficiently as his bulk permits.

  "Oh you been saying all kinds of things, all of them fuckin mixed up!"

  The professor sits on his chair and brushes himself off. "Mixed up?
  Yes and no," he whispers. A dark breeze carries his words over the
  hamburger. "I am sort of a smorgasbord--Buddah and Machiavelli,
  Eastern religion and Western Logic, love and..."

  "Yeah yeah sure!"

  Diane suddenly pipes "And the farmer took another load away. My father
  knew about you! And why don't they turn the lights on?" While Harry
  applauds methodically, the professor smiles on the opposite side of
  the hamburger, nodding at them in a benign, paternal manner, his hands
  over his belly, looking really quite peaceful now, as if the
  confrontation he and Porkpie had provoked had run its course.

  The waiter finally serves the married couple, his false beard looking
  more purple than black, the antenna on his walkie-talkie like a
  corposant in the strange heaviness of light.

  "Arthur," the professor continues in this over-early, strangely
  falling dusk, "you do have a kind of commmon sense. I'm impressed with
  your logic."

  "You're tutoring me math--least that's why Mom's paying."

  "Tutoring me math? You're illiterate, thinking skewed and syntax
  screwed."

  "Anything you say."

  "A provincial. In ten years or so you'll likely acquire enough polish
  and taste to admire this horrid Fishface sign behind me." In the
  darkening his surprising tone seems almost prayerful.

  "Do say?" Porkpie weakly kicks pebbles against the fence.

  "But keep watching old Fishface, Arthur. I wanted to give you a nice
  surprise for so long. It's going to be rather an historical point."

  "Can't wait."

  "Won't be long. I envy the Dutches with her powerful
  binoculars...singe her eyeballs."

  They both must attend the hamburger, where a something has plopped,
  grayish, and now slides down the enormous bun. Diane is dabbing her
  blouse with a napkin.

  "Milkshake Honey, milkshake. You get two for just paying for one. I
  know you don't like milkshakes but you don't have to throw..."

  "No-o!" his fist comes down on the table and a few glowing french
  fries fly up against purple light.

  "She that?" the professor asks the shrugging Porkpie. "It's a horror
  movie. I tell you they're surrealistic. Must be alumni of that
  institution down the road to which I've dedicated my life!--well the
  last few months anyway. Dedicated!" he screams at Harry, who begins
  ingesting handfuls of the incadescent french fries.

  The hunters sneer at all of them. "Slobbo professor and the
  nut-cases," one whispers.

  "Dedicated! You don't scare me, Iron Mac. People like me are beginning
  to stand up to people like you. Dedicated!" and he leaps up and
  wrenches his arm at Harry as if throwing a ball.

  "Well good for you!" Diane all but sobs.

  Porkpie is pulling at the professor. "Sit down you fat freak! Will you
  sit down?" He pushes him into his chair which scrapes the fence behind
  him. "You won't last out the semester if you keep this crip-crap up."

  "So?" The whites of the professor's eyes glisten in the nearly dead
  light. "Look around you. This is hell! The apotheosis of kitchy witchy
  koo in the bitsy-precious bark canoe. And here are the tourists! Iron
  Mac and the Dutchess--America's lowlife on the move. Watch the murder!
  Watch the murder, Iron Mac! Buy a replica of the knife with blood
  that's guaranteed not to come off! Oh and here's a naughty doll, two
  really. A TOOOFER ONE! Dutchman and his wife screwing--made in Japan."
  He is sobbing now, the bubbles in his mouth black. "And here I tried
  to bring music, here I tried to light up mean lives."

  "With pot I suppose!"

  "A one-time thing!" the professor recovers, "I'm high on culture!"
  Behind him the merest orange-y sliver of exhausted sunlight brightens
  the glue between the layers of wood in the dark mouth of the Fishface
  sign. Harry and Diane eat mechanically; Porkpie pings stones off the
  plastic hamburger while saying "My Pop, he don't want me hanging
  around with you no more."

  The professor covers his face with his hands, rubs his beard, and then
  finally whispers "I'm your passport from the Dutch Wonderburger you're
  hitting with those rocks. World's largest ashtray, ugh! If it weren't
  all so tragically awful it'd be funny."

  "You two disgraces!" Diane rejoins, "are the funny ones."

  The professor is too far into his description to take notice. "That
  plastic grinning idiot standing up there and blessing us with his
  monster pretzel like the Pope! And ALL the winking, blinking,
  turning...ugh, and the WIRES! STRANGling you!" He has put his hands
  around his throat. Knuckles phosphorescent he gasps "This is the
  bottom of hell and I'm the devil trapped in ice!" grasping his throat
  and choking himself at the end, his sweatshirt darkening under the
  arms.

  "Never thought devil be so fat," Porkpie sneers as the professor's
  eyeballs bulge, the whites appearing to float. "He thinks he's
  kidding, but he may be killing himself," Diane informs the sudden
  policeman, a young, husky man who laughs "He's at the college."

  "Well they're hippies or something--and awful mean." Harry slowly nods
  in assent, french fries in his mouth like cigarettes.

  "That's not breaking the law, Ma'm."

  "Law and Order, Law and Order, lock up your daughters!" comes the
  professor's cracked and husky voice over the hamburger. Porkpie
  shuffles away when this young policeman points a finger, but the
  professor responds "I know...that's enough. Everybody's always telling
  me that but..." he glimpses at his watch, turning it to see in the
  marginal glow, "last laugh's due in three. Synchronize
  your...consciences!" He tilts his chair back to lean against the
  fence, stares up into the nearly black sky. "Going to rain. See it up
  there? Local rain...no water. Hope it doesn't spoil anybody's parade."

  "My husband's sick and we're on vacation--that's why I went fast,"
  Diane tells the chubby policeman who has been shrugging at the
  professor's act--which continues to merit the locked-on stare of Harry
  and of the hunters.

  "I'm just suppose to check everyone's i-dents," the policeman laughs.
  "Driver's license or something?"

  "Is is anything about Olla," she inquires.

  He rubs the protruding stomach of his uniform shirt and wrinkles his
  forehead as she searches the pocketbook, money fluttering darkly out
  at her wrists. "How you spell this here...?" consulting his notebook.
  "No this one is E-u-l-l-i-a...can't read the rest."

  "Olla's O-l. Her husband's Harry's partner."

  The waiter comes by, appearing moulted now. "Wonder whirl wiggle not
  once but twice! It's a double Toofer-One!" squawk the loudspeakers out
  into the gloom.

  "Is such a MIRACLE possible?" The policeman jumps since the
  professor's question is keyed high-C or thereabouts. Diane drops her
  purse and she and the policeman, and even Harry, dive under the table
  after it.

  "I bet it's going to be a demonstration!" enthuses Diane in the new
  intimacy on the gravel. Any warmth is dispelled by a purple hatchet of
  a man who joins them under the table. "What in hell are you all doing?
  You got these people's idents?" The young policeman begins
  straightening up as the chief plucks Diane's license, shakes the
  gravel off and squintingly reads it, tosses it back into her purse.
  The rest rise--Harry banging his head on the table--a beat after the
  young policeman does. " KILL IT! KILL THAT WONDERBURGER!" the
  loudspeakers command.

  Ashes are falling out of a liverish sky, Harry tasting one and
  convulsing. "All's I need," the chief retreats as he says it, the
  policeman following. "Who these people?" Chief demands while brushing
  ashes from his uniform. "They Quakers or something?" He looks to the
  young, fat officer as if no answer from him would be possible.
  "Anyways I gotta go grab that idiot Chinaman or Turk or whatever the
  hell he is, make him stop burning that shit right now! Said he
  wouldn't do it on weekends too. Council's gonna have to do something
  about him and I mean yesterday. Can't have tourists coming through
  this pukey crap." Diane is brushing off the dancing Harry as the
  professor almost sings "Quickly! Quick-uh-LEE! Cover the plastic
  hamburger! It's an historical treasure!"

  "Who the hell's that foolish hippy with the kid?" The chief has been
  truly startled.

  "Bearded one's at the college."

  "Well who's the girl?"

  "Boy. High school boy."

  "Well I'm not sure of anything in this gluk but I'm damn sure you aint
  getting around to get those idents. Now hop to it--and get weapons
  from those stupid hunters and put 'em in trunk of your patrol car.
  They can come by later and explain to yours truly why they're hunting
  around here--another thing I'm taking up with that lazy council.
  Everything's changing around here and they're sitting on their fat
  ass." It's almost black now and the wind is comprised of swirling
  ashes. The chief holds his nose against the sulphur smell.

  "You're just nervous is all. I got it here."--as the policeman waves a
  loosely-muscled arm to indicate the whole establishment.

  "You just be careful. Hippies'll say you hit them when you don't."
  Then the purplish chief peers up through the gloom. "Upwards of twenty
  men on this, State Police sending. We knew about it last week. Where
  were they then, hey?" He blows out a nostril towards the gravel. "That
  there college trained ministers...that's all they fuckin did years
  ago! Well I gotta get back and pour the mayor out of some gin mill or
  other."

  "Goodness!" and Diane prods Harry's ribs. "It's just like on TV."
  Harry thrusts a fist as if looking for someone to fight, but stops
  abrubtly to stare profoundly close into a luminous cut on his hand.

  Inside the kitchen cube within the wide, strange, gloaming, the chef
  throws a switch and arc lights flicker all around them, but can only
  radiate a few feet with any authority. Everyone is weakly brushed by a
  sick bluishness. The policeman is approaching the group of hunters
  next to the professor and Porkpie along the fence separating the Dutch
  Wonderburger from the soon-to-be-built Fishface. In a second he seems
  swallowed by them, mystical red blotches from their clothing agitating
  in the sickly light. They all possess their rifles and are evidently
  arguing with the policeman. One hunter leaves the group to rest his
  against the fence, squat there to guard it.

  Now the waiter is among them, the silvery antenna snapping madly and
  making transient, chrome-colored fans as he is pushed and pushed. Soon
  another hunter abstracts himself to pull sticky steel wool from his
  fingers, but the professor shoves him back into their roiling midst
  where he actually gets punched in the face by one of his fellow
  hunters when the professor appears in their midst yapping "They're
  going to seize the hamburger! The cops are! It's World War Three and
  this is the Hamburger Sarajevo, the Hamburger Sarajevo!" The young,
  sweating policeman shoulders his way through the hunters to get at
  him, but a slim state trooper has grasped the wild-eyed professor
  round the chest and is backing away from the group, dragging him. This
  new officer whirls him round; another has a spacey Porkpie by the
  elbow. More troopers are pouring in on both sides of the hamburger and
  now the hunters are anxiously surrendering their weapons.

  "Pretty dilated," the slim trooper says of the professor's eyes.

  "The light's bad, not to say corrupt, and I got the virus."

  "That's what it is, hey?"

  A lurching car, its tires spitting gravel announces the return of the
  local chief. "Let's everybody finish up their food," he shouts from
  the open window. And getting out as the car still slowly moves: "Gotta
  clear this place and I mean now!" Diane is thinking that all the new
  policemen look thin and kind, and so she asks one when the
  demonstration will begin, but he leaves to go over to the fence where
  she notes that several policemen have the professor and Porkpie
  leaning, and are patting their behinds.

  Though the ashes no longer fall, the sky is still liver-colored,
  pulsing red from the spinning lights atop the police cars. Diane lifts
  her binouculars to see even more of these red lights sliding down all
  three roads and into the valley. Because the bincoculars are
  misaligned, the dim policemen seem flat and doubled, as if four sit in
  each car's front seat. These twin cars fatten past doubled gas
  stations and diners to sort of elbow down through the matrix of wires.

  The chief flies back to Diane and Harry, knocks the binoculars from
  her eyes, and goes on. His back turned, the scarlet chief can't see
  Harry trying to butt him with his head. He whips around puzzled after
  Harry has missed and fallen. "No time to play with you two this time!
  Move it! And I do mean now! And you just better watch it!" he bellows
  at Harry, teeth chattering in his small face. Harry, seated on the
  gravel, bursts into tears.

  Every few seconds another police car wheels into the parking lot. Most
  of the state troopers have on what looks like motorcycle helmets with
  black visors hiding their faces, but the officer with the bushy
  moustache who directs traffic wears a downy Smokey the Bear style hat.
  "Don't let them get behind me so I can't get out," instructs Diane. "I
  wanna go see the demonstration on TV."

  "Taking care of that, lady. but you vamoose right now." Studying Harry
  he adds "'cause we don't know what-all's gonna happen."

  He has pointed to the brim of his hat in some kind of a salute, and
  now his hand seems coated with a kind of phosphor dust as it drops so
  slowly at the general shriek. Everything seeems to hop a little, the
  air washing up against everybody with a fufffffff, pushing all the
  policemen and diners back. There is immediate silence now, but the
  loudspeakers continue shrieking because the waiter has thrown the
  walkie talkie against the fence and it lays there buzzing and
  squawking and whistling.

  "Oh my God too late!" whispers the trooper who had grabbed the
  professor. He says it as if he himself is to blame. Diane is walking
  towards the fence and is jostled by the boy in the porkpie hat who
  tears past her emitting a kind of humming sound. He bounces off the
  hood of a late-arriving police car, sits down and drools. His hat
  rests up near the windshield when the car stops. Inside the restaurant
  the chef's face pours down the glass, the lights running red blue and
  green behind him. Harry folds into the car like the good boy Diane had
  a moment before described in her request.

  Before Diane arrives at the fence she can see that the Fishface is
  spitting fire, a sooty liquid rolling from its mouth. Then she's close
  enough to see a few tongues of flame scattered along the vacant lot, a
  heap of blankets vibrating in fire under the Fishface.

  The center of all the fire and shaking is a sitting form of a girl,
  stiff yet shiriveling, that finally settles down inside itself like an
  ancient doll which has been dropped. In all the fuff-fuff sound once
  can almost hear a sigh; then a cloudy woosh as a policeman plays an
  extinguisher, and white powder falls upon the blackened mass.

  Diane spins around to check that Harry is safe and he grins back from
  the car. Her hair has become hot, and she puts her hand to it and
  shivers. She turns back with a sigh to see smoke rising the same color
  as the black air as The Fishface spits liquid and flame. Most of the
  cops are clambering over the fence now, chalky handkerchiefs held
  under their visors.

  "But I didn't know it was going to be like this," a girl's small voice
  floats in monotone as she is led with others to sit against the fence
  with the professor. She says it again and again as she flops down into
  her army clothes and chokes. A small black youth in an immaculately
  white t-shirt jumps up. "Oh my God did you ever?" he croaks.
  "Wuuuuffffff! and that was it! She went right up!"

  The professor seizes his hand and pulls him down. "Cool it, just cool
  it, Hasan. Eullulla made the sacrifice concomitant to her
  revolutionary aims and objectives." Now a fat girl in a sari retches
  and the professor hisses something like not being stong enough to make
  a revolution. As these revolutionaries draw in tighter from the
  surrounding policemen, the professor asks to read something when the
  TV crew arrives.

  Diane is backing up when they do, so they leave their van on the
  highway and rush in. "You blew it! I gave you the right time and you
  blew it!" the professor spits. "Dumb fucks everywhere! But," he waves
  a paper, "I still got something here for you." Suddenly laminations
  pop apart in the Fishface's mouth and white grains puff out. The
  professor's group laughs in the tension but he scowls. "Okay then, one
  second," he directs the cameraman already sitting on the gravel with a
  bulky camera on his shoulder. The professor slides an Afro comb
  through his beard for a musing interval, then gravely smiles.

  Diane hears a little of his statement because her car has stalled and
  the key refuses to turn for some moments. "Our sister, Eullulla in her
  pyroconsumation...rare courage...horror hypocrisy..killing
  Asian-Indian-Blacks...Vietnam...pseudo-moral
  constructs...revolutionary..."

  "All dull and work play," Harry states as they fishtail in departure,
  benign, both, in the dim light from the dash. Diane grinds a fist into
  his crotch.



 _____________________________________________________________


                                The Last Book

  This late word from Bridgeport, Connecticut where the last known book
  in the Eastern United States has been bought at auction by Keshio
  Hirwarati, whose Galaxy-Osaka Enterprises includes the worlds's
  largest chain of All-Universe Dimensional Video Stores. The book,
  PAwakening the Real You , by Dr Randall Eccles, evidently one of the
  masters of the period, originally accompanied an old-fashioned audio
  cassette.

  We have some Holofilm! We...don't have some Holofilm. We...? Oh I see
  it's live, but Flat Format for some mysterious reason, so don't touch
  your depth controls. Repeat: do not! And...too!..instead of
  Infinite-Angle Immersion Sound we seem to have none at all.

  What good is the latest...if it doesn't work, you may ask?

  Well at any rate, we see Dr Hirwatari paging though, showing us, I
  think, that each page has a number.

  And I can, our tech-wizards inform me, reach Dr Hirawatari on
  Reverbaphone. Thank the OVERAROUNDALL! First, congratulations.

  "Thank you. You see page, number. Is real book, even though little
  audio cartridge with it one time. Funny little cartridge... real
  antique!--if you can buy." Yes indeed. Tell us, Dr Hirwatari, to what
  do you attribute the near extinction of the book. One hears--quaint
  sounding notion today--of the nearly total diminished need for lineal
  literacy, and of course we know that the creaking technology of
  book-making had to prove prohibitively expensive.

  "None of reason. Was this."

  You're holding up a remote control? Excuse, Dr H., but my picture's
  breaking up.

  "Primitive..they have when you have still, the many books. Could
  access not much--audio, video,and tapes-have-both- of-them...
  computers, other things. We laugh old equipment today but never mind.
  But no book you access! Impossible access book with old-old-
  generation remote, and so...?"

  But you could actually go then, at that dim time, that is physically
  transport yourself, to repositories called... libraries?

  "No, no such thing. Li--how you say?--berr...? No suchhhh..."

  We've lost Dr Hirwatari once again, both the Flat Format picture which
  we should have apologized for--and do now--and the Reverbaphone link.
  But I can tell you he promises that the new acquisition will go on
  display next month in the Madison Avenue store. Repeat: next month!
  Mad Av.! And now we Tele-Satellite- Zoom into the typhoon in progress
  in East Borneo. That...person has just this instant been, uh, rendered
  dead.

  These are scenes of Natural Violence so we deem no warning to children
  to be necessary--those of you with life-sized screenbowls just might
  want to exercise some judgement with the little ones nonetheless.



 _____________________________________________________________


                                Introduction

  I'm writing a short story. Fine, written a hundred or so, but having
  just read a critical work on deconstructionism, I need to change
  something, although my feeling is that I 've always
  deconstructed--smashed up the calcified bourgeous everything, or tried
  to. And must continue. 1995 and never more necessary.

  Is what kind of short story valid? Question sounds academic, icy
  breezes through a skeleton. Hear 'em?--how can you not? Old people
  wheeze, and young people craving A's.

  New Yorker type, long on soft-pedal suggestion? Let's say a guy stares
  at his crotch while things happen peripherally for thirty pages or
  years--like neon reflections in rainy blacktop being processed by a
  drunk. Hero's future, as they used to pronounce, is assured.
  Determined. Character is farts.

  Something modelled on TV or movies? Perhaps a clownish dude who
  ultimately charms an independent lass with her independent ass. The
  touting of the screw as they fight, fuck, fight, fuck, and marry.
  Marry!

  Staying with the inspiration of film, something happens at the end of
  the black 'n white archetype akin to the crescendo termination of a
  pop singer's most depraved single, elevating the banal to the
  insufferable. There's a corollary in fiction of course. The O'Henry
  ending had a certain flapdoodle charm, but this modern dodge resembles
  a literate grope towards your privates.

  And ending a more recent pastel-color movie-y version: steam a-gurgle
  and carrying acceptable flotsam--no rubbers--as indeed we are all
  artily carried etc on the etc of LIFE etc. (Or willows wave as they
  are wont to do...rustling-sound up BIG. Oh wouldn't Adolph gravely nod
  assent?)

  Not relevant, either one, unless we want PHILOSOPHY in our story.

  So accept a tale most acutely modern wherein a woman, don't call her
  girl, gets the crap kicked out of her by abusers she has prudently
  chosen to do the job right, then snaps to, sick of being a
  "cunt!"--whereafter a sweet hello from accountant Clarence will
  provoke a reply threatening to cut his balls off.

  In another version of this horseradish, a gross macho-mouth actually
  beCOMES Clarence! after INsights burn through the insanely driven
  everyday brute-fantasy of Capitalism.

  Of course you can't sustain any of this stuff, even to the modest
  lengths of the form. Well I can't. Actually, can't stand it.

  The strength of the greatest practioners of most art in our time is
  that they can keep performing their schtick without puking. They
  deserve everything they get.

  (When you know your work is truly vomit-inducing, then I guess you
  keep heaping it up. What else, in our time, can you do?)

  There is padding, telling detail to stab some cretin's heart; there is
  repetition in every mode--somewhat cloaked if one pretends to craft.
  Also, most writers hint around, except Jack London and religious
  types. (Well...must be SOMEthing here, reader puzzles.)

  Let's see. Other types of stories? Of course, but why survey? We're
  both lazy enough.

  If the short story were a turkey and it is, and is full of shit,
  however drizzly-inclined upon occasion, then it surely has been raised
  for Christmas.

  How many times was Eugene O'Neill's father the Count of Monte Crisco?
  THE COUNT OF FUCKIN MONTE CRISCO!

  And yet the most abjectly disgusting ploy is: I'm writing a short
  story. Oh if only I could kiss my own selfconscious ass!
  Mount-fuckin-Olympus. Well, then, I'm a crud? You? Both? Why do we
  have to ruin everything? And why not?



 _____________________________________________________________


                             Little Things Mean

  _Host_ I agree. Sometimes the little things can make us human. And, by
  the way...I always wanted to see YOUR little thing.

  _Sidekick_ I've heard him say that.

  _Guest_ Oh come on now!

  _Host_ This instant? Hey! Let me tell you: I am READY!

  _Sidekick_ He's all ready!

  _Host_ And able.

  _Sidekick_ Well, that's open to debate--in this quarter,anyway.

  _Host_ Hey the Christmas Party! I was bombed.

  _Sidekick_ Do you have any hobbies, dear?

  _Host_ Okay, okay. We want the vast radio audience to find out more
  about our lovely guest--as you clunkily remind me. Say? Who's running
  this show anyway? By the way, Doll, this is radio you know--nobody
  sees. I'd give anything to peek under that lovely blouse. Filmy,
  didn't they used to call that?

  _Guest_ I'll bet you would.

  _Sidekick_ Don't.

  _Guest_ It is a trifle sheer, m'dear.

  _Sidekick_ Just a bit. Sensational, I'd say.

  _Host_ Lucky we don't have a bra sponsor but never mind. Listen!

  _Guest_ We will!

  _Sidekick_ Not!

  _Host_ Whattayuhsay? It's not like it's NOTHING in return--I mean like
  you'd get from MOST sleazeball dates in this town. Let me tell you, I
  don't pray, but if I prayed, I'd thank God I didn't have a daughter
  because of them.

  _Sidekick_ You'd LOVE a daughter and you know it! Your heart would
  rise!

  _Host_ Yeah I would! But like I was saying to our GORGEOUS guest
  here...and just pronouncing that word makes something else rise.

  _Sidekick_ Oh oh!

  _Host_ Which begins with p.

  _Sidekick_ I'll take a chance and say penis.

  _Host_ I know you gals got some infantile something like it, but,
  like, there AINT no substiTUTE for!

  _Sidekick_ We don't buy that!

  _Guest_ No way.

  _Host_ Look! Honey! I know it's ART and everything. I know that! But
  you're getting a halfhour of national time here! What do I get?

  _Guest_ Well, let's finish the halfhour, and then we'll see.

  _Host_ You hear that? Sounds like a promise to me! So, how about,
  first, that peek: see what I'll be getting into, either in the balcony
  or d-OWN! in that s-WEEEEEEET basement?

  _Sidekick_ Alas! All hanky-panky must wait as the excruciatingly
  beautiful...

  _Host_ Excruciating all right! I got another word for it.

  _Sidekick_ ...holds up a tasteful T-Shirt which says-uh? LUST AND
  FORGIVENESS.

  _Guest_ Luigi Barstoli did the design.

  _Host_ A knockout! Okay, so let's get into the, excuse the expression,
  MEAT here. Title of your novel, right?

  _Guest_ Not a novel, autobiography.

  _Sidekick_ That's when you do it yourself.

  _Host_ Yeah? Well let me tell both of you that I've had too much of
  that! That's one of the things our guest is here to cure.

  _Guest_ I'm not a doctor. I'm a whore.

  _Host_ You hear that? You hear that REFRESHING candor?

  _Sidekick_ Don't I?

  _Host_ Honest to God that's great. That's great! I can't tell you the
  number of whores I had on this show who...

  _Sidekick_ never came out of their sluts' closets.

  _Host_ You got it! And of BOTH sexes! I'm no sexist!

  _Sidekick_ Of course you're not! That's one thing we both know about
  you.

  _Host_ Of which I am damn proud!

  _Guest_ Thanks, both of you. At any rate, my book is being finished,
  and just is waiting for one, uh, ingredient.

  _Sidekick_ Which would BE? Fanfare please!

  _Host_ Like, don't bother with any cues. They're playing with each
  other in the control room--as usual. Maury! Don't let us disturb you,
  now--faggot! I didn't SAY that! Slipped out. Please, no cards and
  letters and phone calls. Like, believe me, I'm a supporter of
  everybody's rights. I mean, I gotta be.

  _Sidekick_ But...?

  _Host_ He's still a faggot. But I mean like a faggot'd say the word
  for God's sake! I'm truly sorry, Darling, the so-called staff around
  here sidetracked us.

  _Guest_ We got the t-shirt, the album, the miniseries, the tabloid
  installments. All ready to go.

  _Host_ So? Like? Whatsaproblem?

  _Guest_ I just haven't chosen the bigtime pig.

  _Sidekick_ Haven't bedded him yet, you mean?

  _Host_ Note how women get to the point. WE'RE the romantics. Men!

  _Guest_ Right! Bedded! That's the shorthand for what I do--like saying
  Mickey Mantle was a baseball player.

  _Host_ You mean you've got the t-shirt, the album, the miniseries, the
  tabloid installments, all lined up and ready to go? You just haven't
  nabbed Mr. Bigtime Pig yet?

  _Guest_ Book's really all written, just left blanks for his name.

  _Sidekick_ And it's all gonna be true!

  _Guest_ The only way I'd have it.

  _Host_ You mean you're just gonna manoeuver ole Mr Bigtime Pig
  into...?

  _Guest_ I have a feeling I just might be able to.

  _Host_ Blows (excuse the expression) me away! But let me get this
  straight now. You mean you've got the t-shirt, album, the the
  miniseries...

  _Sidekick_ Anybody hear echo around here?

  _Host_ SHUSH A MINUTE! The tabloid installments, too, all ready to go.
  And you REALLY haven't just picked the bigtime pig, excuse me, MR
  Bigtime Pig! As of this moment?

  _Sidekick_ Better look out!

  _Host_ Holy God, Honey, I love it! I just love it! And you don't have
  to do ANYthing to me! Either during the show or after. I'm giving you,
  like, absolution!

  _Sidekick_ He's MOVED!

  _Host_ And everybody's saying where are the ideas anymore in radio?
  These numbnuts! Or anywhere for that matter.

  _Sidekick_ Amen!

  _Host_ Hey, next time I wanna bring a lesbo on with you. Think of it!
  Triple-header!

  _Sidekick_ Let me say "excuse the expression" for you. That last could
  be misintrepreted too.

  _Host_ Hey! Eye of the beholder, am I right?

  _Guest_ Certainly, and thank you. Both of you. I don't mind telling
  you I was scared to come on here, but this has been perfectly lovely.

  _Host_ Hey! Believe me! You can COME...ooops we gotta go to
  commercial, always when you're getting into something fascinating!



 _____________________________________________________________
INSTITUTIONS

 _____________________________________________________________


                                Transactions

         ************3/21/95*************PLEASE LOGON WITH YOUR CODE WORD
         **************************//caesar

         GO AHEAD CAESAR

         //my goodness its ten years to the day you started putting up
         with me,,,,,,,,or so my computer blinks

         WHAT IM HERE FOR SIR

         //well im all bolloxed up again

         ALL RIGHT     IRA I DONT HAVE TO LOOK UP     I REM THAT AS
         TEN THOUSAND GIVE OR TAKE FEW CENTS     CHECKING AS OF YESTERDAY
         CONTAINED FOUR HUNDRED TEN

         //oh thats good

         REM OUR DISCUSIONS ABOUT OUTSTANDING CHECKS

         //oh yeah god   i think there may be one or two

         SAVINGS ELEVEN HUNDRED ON THE BUTTON    RT ON THE BUTTON
         UNUSUAL

         //youre not kidding,,,,well after all these years god youve been
         so helpful,,,,wish there was something I could do

         NOT AT ALL

         //are you there,,,,i mean right there in that building where
         bank is     hope you can open window,,,,springs exploding all
         over

         SECOND FLOOR

         //i can almost hear your voice even though we just type i can
         hear your voice

         AND I YOURS I CAN ASSURE YOU CAESAR

         //and i can hear you laughing now

         I WOULDNT

         //no i dont mean sarcastic laughing

         WELL YOURE RIGHT

         //for once    in the ten years   well as I said if theres
         anything anything at all

         ************THIS PART OF TRANSMISSION ENDED;;;TYPE MORE! FOR
         ADDITIONAL,IMPORTANT INFORMATION****************************

         //more

         RESPONSE INCOMPLETE RECHECK ADVICE MESSAGE,,,CAESAR

         //more!

         WHY DONT YOU JUST COME DOWN HERE AND SCREW MY SOCKS OFF

         //



 _____________________________________________________________


                                Two Documents

  Well, Diary, these are the human problems.

  H. became very nervous about her daughter's Holy Communion dress, it
  not being white enough, dressmaker passing off more of a kind of cream
  color, she felt. (Naughty dressmaker!) So she snapped at L. over a bit
  of bookkeeping, something L. had always done that way. L. cried, and
  then I, Uncle Peacemaker, entered the woeful! scene.

  But now, my door open a few inches, I'm viewing them in the outer
  office, backlit and looking ethereal and altogether lovely in the soft
  light of this Spring afternoon. Ah now! H. is opening the box and
  showing the dress, and L. assures her that it is quite quite white
  indeed!--while pouring another cup of tea for both.

  The steam, green and glowing, wreathes them round and makes me think
  that life itself is beautiful--however troublesome, at times, our
  duty. Well, once a romantic...

  At any rate, diary, business! I'll let the ladies talk all the more,
  writing my letter by hand instead of dictating to H.




                             Dear Dr. G.,

                             Perhaps you would honor us with
                             another visit.  With all
                             respect, I believe the gas to
                             be too slow--I'm not a chemist
                             but suspect the concentration
                             too minimal--or just a faulty
                             batch(?)  Please phone to make
                             an appointment.  (I write you
                             by hand because my ladies are
                             healing a tiff, and I choose
                             not to interrupt.)  Ah the
                             human aspects of our work!



 _____________________________________________________________


                        "No Sexual Intercourse Aloud"

  It's a curious guilt, this being amused while knowing better.

  At first, I was part of the humoring process, concurred at least. I'll
  back up. For two or so hours a day I sit in a sunny alcove at a
  magnificent state library, all marble and aromatic oak, and full of
  musty, pleasant tradition (the library that is). There I commit
  research, the subject of which is interesting only to some one hundred
  experts, so-called, in the world.

  We actually meet sometimes and, as human nature would have it, develop
  solemn friendships and dark hatreds over immense
  trivialities--frequently in some sin-bucket city where we manage
  looking bemused while terrified. New Orleans was the last place for
  this hyper-stressed voyeurism.

  At any rate the particular citizen I laughed at in our coolly moral
  library was meticulous, richly dressed, aglow in health, and unable to
  put the simplest thought directly.

  A typical verbal dance of his, and there were many...well let him wend
  his torturous way as he speaks to the chief librarian, a man of some
  presence, not to say girth. "I need, uh, when a person who has the
  knowledge and facilities, uh? Is...asked?"

  "That would be help, information. Why I'm here." The chief librarian
  is a florid fellow and one, not surprisingly, of great appetite, who
  often was eating something or enjoying the memory of it--in any case
  he had looked the latter way that particular afternoon just before the
  approach by the fidgety, inarticulate one.

  And there they remain in memory, surrounded by rosy marble and
  comprising what the TV boys call a two-shot. But I should stick to the
  subject: "Of course. Where's my...uh, mind?"--he asks our librarian
  while fairly tapdancing along the marble floor, black shoes flashing.
  (Well I don't have it, thank the Lord! I think, seesawing on my own
  feet in front of the card index.) "Anyway, the one fellow... and the
  other?" he dances on, "Instrument involved. He. The first. Wooden.
  Though they're metal, uh, aluminum now...some. Not relevant to my...?"

  Finally standing still, he begins sweating, his profile a blue shimmer
  against the rosy marble. "Your question?" smiles the chief librarian,
  hands on ample hips, and lifting an eyebrow at me as if we two formed
  a compact of mild toleration against this vague and silly man. It's an
  idea I don't like--didn't like then. A good person, one with courage,
  will let no one assume he is uncritically going along.

  "But not at all levels," this uncertain man plods. "The
  highest...forbidden. Aluminum, that is."

  "Uh huh," nods the benign librarian, seeming to increase in girth in
  his rootedness as this flibbity-gidget again begins circling through
  the dusty slants of sunlight, and firing his asinine comments and
  questions from all angles. Aluminum indeed! Well, getting the actual
  question from him was like digging aluminum from out of that marble
  floor.

  "I see," says the librarian, his British tweeds deepening in afternoon
  light--perhaps his beginning to "see" in the midst of the other's
  verbal and physical dance being a mellow function of his few luncheon
  Heinikins rather than patient erudition.

  Still the doltish wanderer hasn't found his precise ground: "After the
  striking of one, why then another, uh, of an opposite, uh, faction,
  has the obligation to to to to to..?"

  "To catch...a ball! It's baseball!" the fat librarian affirms.

  I'll spare you the five, scraping minutes, with the minor librarians,
  female all, going in and out of the stacks while shaking their gray
  heads, until their hearty chief extracts the final question: the
  career fielding average compiled by Babe Ruth.

  Halleleulah--a rare something the fat and florid librarian didn't know
  outright. He told the dancing bumbler to look in The Baseball Fact
  Book. Of course.

  The other performance I remember most, of a rainy, swirling afternoon
  when autumn leaves plastered the windows: "Structure... people living
  in...he'd been Princeton president too...but but but a side...kick,
  SIDEKICK!...political... IMPORTANT!" he finally blurted-- well most of
  his utterances could be classified as blurts but this was, in the
  words of archival TV's Ed Sulllivan, a really big one. "Rank! Army!"

  At any rate the question (?) eventually proved to be in reference to
  Colonel House, paramount advisor to Woodrow Wilson. I'll bet you came
  close to guessing that. (Strange such a game can prove addictive. Way
  of showing off? How smart we are in decoding confusions? I suppose,
  but what do I know?)

  "Well...we got there! Goodness!"--the first time I had heard the chief
  display any impatience, but for some reason strange young people had
  begun hiving around, dressed in the latest fashions of sexuality and
  rankly wet from the rain.

  At that time, I still held the memory of his knowing glance at me
  during the Babe Ruth episode, and felt my guilt both renewed and
  amplified, for I sincerely desired the approval of this large,
  gregarious man ever since I had witnessed the impromptu party at the
  Ole New England Inne (actually an Italian restaurant, mostly). As I
  shaved a hunk of Vermont cheddar and sipped white zindfandel at the
  bar, he bestowed small gifts brought back from England after his
  yearly trip to buy clothes. To be truthful, I profoundly envied the
  warmth the waitresses and the bartender revealed towards him.

  Never unfortunately one of the boys, I nonetheless shared the
  raucousness at the immense vulgarity of a blownup rubber woman he
  fetched from his sportscar at the last, and which held a tray for
  drinks atop giant breasts. This prize went to Shorty the delivery boy,
  a man of sixty. I laughed, as the expression goes, until I cried.

  But then wondered at my tears, as construction equipment gouged and
  roared nearby and my white wine vibrated in the glass, wondered what
  more there was to them. A loneliness wider and deeper than I had
  suspected. It had to be faced, of course.

  As you can see I know no reason to spare myself: in the pursuit of
  degrees and minor honors, I should have become a better human being.
  No excuses.

  At any rate I often marveled as to how he could be so educated and
  cultured and yet so daringly vulgar? And so so warmly open! I had
  observed him many times around the restaurant, huggy-kissy around the
  women, and like a ruddy locker room comrade around the men who, at
  least the ones rougher-edged, called him all sorts of whoremongers and
  faggots. (The restaurant attracted a wide clientele.) Anyway, the
  whole Italian-Colonial place brightened when he set a chubby foot
  inside. In his English shoes, of course.

  And yet he remained a learned and cultured colleague in the sacrosanct
  confines of our library. Truly A Man For All Seasons.

  I am a stick, as I said, inward, shy nerd who, given the chance, is
  liable to say the wrong thing in mixed company, or the right thing at
  the wrong time. Or to say nothing when all look to me.

  Or, even worse yet, most often attempt to say nothing somewhat
  eloquently. Oh well. You know me I dare say. My name is legion, that
  lame, educated, legion of the perpetually half-fearful.

  I therefore could never be like my librarian in the scene I often
  picture: large red-checked napkin tied round his neck to shield his
  tweeds from the lasagna and from the oversized goblet of ferocious
  Cianti he gestures with, he's laughing with everyone. A little wine
  flings off the rim and hangs in vibrant air. (For some reason, too,
  those red drops reappear to me from time to time, by themselves,
  abstracted from the convivial scene.)

  But...I'm happy enough. What life offers most of, I have had. Now much
  of it is over, with my wife ill. It comes to us all at some point, the
  hand impossible to play.

  Anyway, the librarian had a perfectly lovely life, taking as it did
  from scholarship and epicurianism and warm friends.

  Okay, you ask, where's the dark cloud?

  In a shipment of television tapes. As far as I knew, not a modern
  electron ran about any instrument in the marble library--old books and
  index cards, and banker's lamps radiating dust down from cracked green
  shades. (Even the phones were those black prewar thumpers which could
  withstand a direct bomb hit.)

  Therefore had you popped in a few weeks ago after fifty years absence,
  you'd be pretty comfortable in the fact that nothing had changed,
  inhaling, ah, that venerable oaken fragrance. (But don't we need some
  such place in the fury and slash of our instant world?)

  "There's a mistake." My heroic librarian kept smiling at the wiry
  trucker who was methodically piling the boxes of television tapes
  between them on the floor.

  "Nope. And I leave it all here whether you sign or not. It's no skin
  off my nose. I do what they say. It's easier like that, believe me."

  The shame of it, and that's exactly the right word, is that this
  driver would never bring his son here, which I as small-d democrat
  lament--and yet the place is a treasurehouse for all the world, let
  alone this city. I guess I'd have to fault the chief librarian there.
  Oh there had been the occasional grammar school group herded in, but
  every citizen could have found something of value--even latent
  criminals anent the exhaustive law holdings.

  At any rate if you're excluded from something, or feel you are-- the
  same thing, no?--it's virtually the same as being a criminal anyway.
  But there I go being hyper-critical again--trump card of the impotent.

  The cartons stayed unopened while he tried to get the library board to
  remove them, visiting each member at his and her place of business.
  But, no go, since the governor himself had decided. It seems that the
  silvery-sleaze media center of the capital had burned down--fast. (It
  had been named The Grafton Reece Center and was popularly known as
  Graft n' Grease). At any rate something called the MY MOTHER THE CAR
  FESTIVAL was rescheduled, instead, at our holy library! I felt the
  entire project had been conceived as a joke since I vaguely remembered
  the TV show as a weak one, but intense young careerists with
  bottle-bottom glasses had mobilized behind it. And they found little
  that was funny.

  My last gastronomical view of the librarian was his snapping something
  to his favorite waitress, whom he called Beatrice, as to the quality
  of his veal parmigian: "Metallic cheese!" he sneered--so unlike him.
  Yet...he was right. The standards at our favorite restaurant were
  slipping, as soggy crackers in front of me on the bar testified.

  Around this time, too, Cross Punks appeared with their hair, their
  walkmans and loose muscles. As you know--and know--from tabloid
  television, the boys dress as girls and vice versa--as if anyone could
  tell. I believe they did all of the setting up of the VCRS that the
  state, in the person of an earnestly demanding young woman, had
  delivered in a jumble of machines and cables. The grayheaded
  librarians would have nothing to do with her--technology and those
  connected to it smacking of sin.

  Presumably the Cross Punks checked out the tapes from the old show and
  watched them--such activity comprising the "festival"-- actually they
  watched pornographic ones they had carried in.

  I had no trouble with their playing with sexuality. After all, we had
  already gotten better acquainted in recent nights, my watching them on
  latenight talk shows after my wife had lapsed into fitful sleep.
  Kids...that's all. They'd assume the role society expected of them
  sooner or later. Right now they could flaunt their hatred for the
  uptight rest of us. To tell the truth, the violence associated with
  their "movement" bothered me more. It always does, but it's always
  manifesting itself, and in all eras. Why in Sam Johnson's London, as
  an example, delinquents calling themselves Mohawks would thump the
  bejesus out of any stragglers between taverns.

  The chief librarian had done his best to give some class to the My
  Mother the Car Festival, flanking the circulation desk with posters
  executed by a leading Japanese graphic artist, and showing a ghostly
  black-and-white collage of mothers of all races, along with foreground
  autos, mostly Ferraris of a walloping red. The kids giggled at the
  posters the same way they giggled at the confused questioner when he
  went into one of his vague dances. As a matter of fact, it was they
  who witnessed the one concerning Woodrow Wilson's Colonel House their
  very first day on board.

  Oh well--fools of the old and new orders.

  The vague man took to lodging in an empty alcove and muttering out the
  window at construction materials being unloaded across the narrow
  street. I joined him to see where a hole in the ground attested to the
  departure of THE INSTITUTE FOR THE NEW...whatever. Only a portion of
  the old sign stuck up from the dumpster. When they uncrated a greenish
  gold statue of Delihah cutting Samson's hair, I deduced we were in for
  another S & D Healthclub. This great leap forward in reasoning was
  followed by the huffing up of the chief librarian and the whole tribe
  of acned crossdressers carrying VCRS and monitors. "They have to come
  in here now!" he all but screamed. We didn't inquire as to why,
  hearing the sobs of an assistant librarian retching out somewhere in
  the middle bowels of the building.

  We settled ourselves at a desk across from the kids and they ran a
  tape which popped up on the largest monitor. It showed what I took to
  be a French sailor. He wore a top of horizontal red stripes and bell
  bottom pants, and everything about him was sunken, his chest, the
  hollows of his cheeks and eyes. Was he ill, addict, what? Then a
  Brunhilde rushed in and tore down the velcro front of those trousers
  and, of course, the extraordinary sprung forth, explaining the
  spavined look: all the energy had drained down into the thing.

  IT MADE HIM AN INTERNATIONAL STAR! crowed the whiskey voice of former
  blond leading man Ty Merrick. Thousands went in the training of that
  voice, ravaged but still resonant even in that marble with its
  horrible acoustics where you couldn't hear the person beside you at
  times--a fortunate case now, since my vague desk partner launched into
  a Panglossian movie review, decrying the poor lighting would you
  believe? Ty's voice kept repeating, as did the whole fantastic
  vignette--the kids had spliced the business into a loop. (Shouldn't
  our own stupid acts be depicted thus?--the repetition'd help us truly
  see ourselves.)

  Suddenly all the construction guys across the street shrieked and
  cheered at once, somehow catching a ghost image reflected back off the
  glass of a dusty print of Robert Fulton's steamboat on the wall above
  our heads.

  The kids turned the monitor around for them while putting hands into
  each other's blouses and pants for our benefit, one young person
  staring and staring at me. The only look I've ever seen absolutely
  empty of emotion. Blank is too woefully inadequate an adjective. The
  construction boys continued leaping up and down like loose electrons
  and I began encountering a monster headache.

  This is when I, shy as I am, complained, and the entire "festival" was
  again moved, this time to the basement, and therefore I and the other
  resident bookworms didn't have to bear the ambivalent young anymore,
  nor hear the cheers of the construction workers.

  We didn't miss either; we worked on, our own small nonsense a
  barricade against the world I suppose.

  Meanwhile the staff lurched into a public relations mode. This policy
  was instituted one bright afternoon by the chief librarian upon the
  advice of a local politician who promised to intercede with the
  governor--insinuating that the librarian could perhaps do something
  for him someday. He also advised him there'd be more clout if the
  library became more visible, and that he'd therefore have to train his
  staff to greet the bound-to-widen public with some warmth.

  My first intimation of profound change was a circle of the gray
  librarians surrounding what looked like a huge, florescent lime. This
  latter proved to be the sartorial version of the politician's advice
  in the person of the chief librarian in a green leisure suit which
  looked like it had been cut with a machete. His pep talk lifted the
  other librarians off reserve and they positively radiated towards any
  request, later that afternoon hedging in the vague man who more
  brightly danced in their collective regard. His subject...well they
  never found out since smoke flew up the semi-circular stairwells,
  packing the angled sunbeams, and we all observed the chief streak
  greenly past.

  Upon return he burst "Practically a marijuana bonfire down there! But
  that's not the worst of it. Oh no!" Spastically fetching a piece of
  poster board and a black magic marker from beneath the main
  circulation desk, he made a sign reading NO SEXUAL INTERCOURSE ALOUD

  When he was taping it up over one of the now-straggly My Mother the
  Car posters, I had to approach him. I knew he meant allowed and not
  aloud, and puzzled how such a literate man, however distraught, could
  make this mistake. The worst thing was that try as I might I could not
  make him understand, and thus the sign remained. I did hastily
  persuade him--it was thank goodness closing time--to join me for a
  drink at our restaurant.

  Which...was gone. We picked our way atop a steaming heap to a
  bulldozer parked with its nose up. A whipping banner attached to it
  boasted S & D WEST WILL SOON JOIN S & D EAST! "No one told me. Why
  would no one tell me?" he repeatedly asked, stumbling through the
  autumnal vapors of his own voice, the leisure suit taking on a bronze
  patina in the smoky light.

  "A hellish circle this," I sighed, knowing his love for Dante.

  I stayed away from the library for a couple of days and then one late
  morning while I was serving my wife her herbal tea laced with a little
  cognac, in bounded my friend on her little TV. He still hadn't
  jettisoned the leisure suit which took on an unearthly green glow, or
  rather pulse, fitting the angry ambient of CONFRONT!.

  Gary Withers, in that most damning of phrases a local broadcast
  celebrity, began by taunting him, "I understand you're trying to throw
  young people out of that fancy library of yours."

  "We are open to all persons, all subjects, all research, all
  knowledge, but I don't have enough room for the material I--"

  Gary Withers interrupted him. "So many shows from that whole dumb era
  and you choose Car Mother! Why not Peter Gunn? At least there'd be
  decent music!"

  But my friend could not be turned from his sterling selling job
  "...happy to see many more people, every man woman and child of the
  community...the library is our collective pride. International
  reputation!" (What the appeal realized the following week was a trio
  of old maid retired schoolteachers, all blue hair and bounce: We
  didn't know this place exISTed!)

  Gary Wither's other guest was a newly self-ordained "Activist of
  Disgust": "What you doin' down there, man? We gonna open it to the
  people! Go down there and piss on the floors. Wake yo' ass up!" I
  could feel the chief librarian's heart seizing under that stupid suit.
  "Can't say piss and ass over the airwaves!" smirked Gary Withers.

  In the only lucky break I can remember from this whole degrading time,
  that following week a chartered bus took the activist's group to the
  wrong institution, and they made their odoriferous statement at The
  Transportation Hall of Fame.

  In the ensuing weeks the vague man took to hiding in the stacks. I
  think it was because the youngsters had taken a perverse interest in
  him, often performing little comedic scenarios imitating him and the
  chief librarian--both of whom they depicted as surrealistically hyper
  and hopelessly confused.

  The appearance of Buster Nevers, though, brought him out from the
  stacks. It all but overwhelmed me too. Buster, a few years past his
  retirement from the National Football League, established a massive
  presence in the lobby of the library, his own color and his beige
  Italian suit blending so magnificently with the rosy marble as to make
  the rest of us uncomfortable. But he too became quickly agitated when
  the vague man commenced asking him his oddly slanted questions,
  beginning "He kicked it and caught it! Another sport. Not football--"
  and on and on...

  "I don't have the least idea what you're saying! No clue, man!" Buster
  ultimately roared, and our old dithery friend turned on his heel and
  walked out the door forever, sucked into blinding, mercury noon.

  "Welcome to Blitz Day!" announced Buster Nevers when he had gotten
  himself back together. The librarians huddled around, the chief still
  in the green leisure suit, alas much looser, the right breast
  featuring the sheen of a tomato-y stain that had probably come from a
  gobbled meatball sandwich after the television show.

  Buster had a dual charge from the governor, to move kids and equipment
  to a new library opening in a shopping center, and to introduce a bar
  code system into the circulation process.

  "Hello. How are you?" he observed the niceties several times as each
  kid departed, holding equipment under one arm and squeezing genitals
  with the other. "Now would your mother approve of that?" scolded
  Buster finally, which led to greater excesses and some hyperbolic
  grunts.

  "Well thank God that's over," sighed Buster as the last girl (?)
  turned round darkly from the brilliant doorway to give us the finger.
  "If a kid of mine...!" and he slammed an enormous fist into his
  looseleaf notebook. "But back to business..."

  I couldn't help thinking that the knot of them resembled the scene
  when these same gray librarians surrounded the chief as he introduced
  his now-rusting green leisure suit to the literate public. But this
  time the confidence from the richly brown center of the group was
  fairly stinging the air: "Tomorrow we bring in the machines; today we
  learn three key words! That's all." I can't remember the words now,
  and they couldn't learn them then.

  After a half hour, Buster turned to me as I pretended to browse
  through a drawer randomly extracted from the card index. "Am I a bad
  guy? Do I look like a bad guy to you?" I shook my head as the
  assembled librarians glazed. "Walls! I got walls here! Wellllll...
  we'll write it down!" He yanked a pencil from an inside pocket but it
  snapped in his hammy hand. All the librarians shrieked at once,
  bouncing echos about the marble lobby. "Whoa! I got another! Save the
  upsets for the big things. Please!" He handed another pencil to the
  oldest librarian, a lady as crushed and sunken as had been the French
  sailor, but with no latent potency of any kind.

  He instructed her to write the number one on the reverse side of a
  Mother the Car poster, but she looked back with such fright that he
  gently transferred the pencil to the chief librarian. "Sir! Don't let
  us down in this! Unnnnnnn-LESS it's some sort of joke? Did Lukey
  Maxwell out of the Cultural Affairs Office...?"

  Our chief librarian held the pencil fiercely posed. "Well, never mind
  then. Do you suppose that you could make the number, the Roman
  numeral, one?" The chief librarian emitted a sort of high-pitched
  mewing sound and attacked the poster with the pencil but...I don't
  know quite how to say this...couldn't bring the point in contact with
  it in order to write, instead slapped the pencil sideways again and
  again, the flat of the instrument that is, against the cardboard. It
  sickened me, has ever since, and even as brusque as he was, Buster
  Nevers found tears in his eyes.

  Chief turned to me, his face as loose as his green suit, and thrust
  the pencil towards his baggy throat. "Inside...press up! Up! Jam!
  Hard! Mur--murder! What?"

  "You're angry. Hurt. It's been...too much." I softly took the pencil.

  "Yeah?" shouted the alarmingly reassertive Buster Nevers. "Well it's
  all too much for me!"

  As he stomped out I found the chief librarian practically in my
  armpit. "Crap TV," he began, "bar code shit...horror kids!"

  "Yes."

  "Where friends? Restaurant? Why? Presents. England! England!"--his
  face ashen.

  "That was grave. How they could sell out to developers with nary a
  word to you, I..."

  "Scum politics, ugh!" he shuddered.

  "Not a place for you or me. Not that we're pure--but relatively we
  certainly are! Naive for sure. We can't sense the greasy wheels within
  wheels--don't have a clue."

  "My beautiful library and then then then smoking g-g-grass."

  "Terrible."

  "Fucking!" The other librarians left.

  "I...don't know," I touched him. "You get comfortable and then the
  bills come in, and the dues must always be paid eventually. Anybody
  happy can't be left that way I suppose. Not for long anyway."

  "Books?"

  "Yes? Books?"

  "No more," he sobbed, grabbing my arm, his eyes skidding beyond
  terror, the two of us fronting the ancient wooden cabinet. "No more
  books. There'll be no! Nowhere!"

  His face went fish-belly white and seemed to be melting downward.

  "Oh there'll be one or two left," I encouraged.



 _____________________________________________________________


                                The Three P's

  "Well! Then! Who do we have here?" Turning a corner onto the sunporch,
  he played the upbeat young doctor but the "patient" proved to be a
  cauliflower sunk into the canvas seat of a wheelchair. C. Flower noted
  the chart hanging from a chrome arm.

  "Is this the joke on the new hand?" he sniffed to the head nurse as
  they stood in her airless downstairs cubby . "Not exactly," she
  reached slightly into his jacket. "This belt buckle is so unusual.
  Difficult to undo?"--an old-fashioned nurse featuring starch noises
  when she moved.

  Marched he to the hospital administrator, a person roundly comfortable
  without him. "Ah yes, you've gone and discovered C. Flower then? She
  has been a model patient." He managed it all in a sigh.

  "She?"

  "We've gotten used to referring to her as a she. One thinks of
  cauliflowers as feminine, don't you think?" He had never thought about
  it and didn't now, the memory of nurse's noisy moves still fuzzing
  him. "Well now!" the administrator brightened, "You'd like an
  explanation!" In an immediate slash of dusty sunlight, his granny
  glasses opaqued on a pink face.

  "I insist!"

  "Of course, since she's your patient. Your others will be much more
  nettlesome, believe me."

  "I'm not trained to treat..."

  "Of course not. But, then again, we're not trained to do much that the
  world requires, are we?--the newer things especially. There's
  a...personal world, a professional world, and a political world. The
  three P's you might say."

  His own personal world revealed itself in color photos of three little
  girls--the doctor could see the administrator's soft facial features
  in each. One black and white picture presented a woman--wife, the
  doctor deduced--with something like the administrator's blurry face
  too, plus strain, greeting a robed African

  "My wife is also a physician. We are physicians. Like you." Behind the
  blank glasses no eyes were evident; the young doctor did not answer.
  "At any rate, C. Flower, was born in response to the political. As a
  kind of joke at first. You see we have the minimal number of patients
  under state regulations. If we lose one, another must come in. Last
  month we lost one, and had no one to admit. They would close us down!"
  He waved a fat arm expansively, as if to include his wife and
  daughters among employees.

  So, we admitted C. Flower. She's temporary-- 'll be chucked into the
  dumpster at the appropriate moment. At that point in time, I'll put
  her down as transferred to a private convalescent home," he sagely
  nodded to himself, his glasses only somewhat gummy in the office's
  quick darkening--slumbery gray eyes now visible. "Will it rain or
  what?"

  "No. Not supposed!" the younger doctor snapped, sulked, recovered.
  "She's my...patient! How can I partake in such an an an immor...a
  crooked game?"

  "Do be careful, Doctor. Many have lost professional standing by being
  pigheaded in these or similar circumstances. I'm asking you to be a
  mensch ! All life isn't diagnosis, treatment, and lab tests on stool
  samples."

  "ComPLETELY absurd! I don't beLIEVE this!"

  "My young friend, every institution forces one to perform absurd
  tricks," he stared over prayful hands. "A kind of power dance. That
  is, the higher-ups conduct us with the most benign of smiles," he
  smiled, "and we dance. I guess it's how you use your baton in this
  world that counts, yes?...sort of joke." His wink stuck.

  "Well not ME dancing! I'm going to HAVE to write a report before..."

  "Don't bother. The inspector will be here in an hour or so, and want
  to talk to you as the new physician. Ah if done 'twere best done
  quickly! Everyone in the hospital, including you, out on the street!
  Including me--with three in college. And, God, the poor people in the
  kitchen! They don't just send resumes out like you can. Carlos is so
  proud of that cancerous Thunderbird!"

  "No alternative! Such corruption defies everything!"

  "Well, many things, I'll grant you that. Uh, well, more than a few
  anyway." The administrator, in ritual weariness, took off his glasses
  and rubbed his eyes as the young doctor bolted.

  That afternoon, the agrieved physician saw his clear duty as simply
  pointing things out to the skinny inspector--wanting to feel not
  responsible after that point. So on their walk to the state car, he
  merely stated "Before you leave I want you to meet C. Flower ."

  "No thanks, I've seen enough."

  "But, this is quite important."

  "Hey! You're here to treat the Altzheimer's Brigade. More power to
  you, but I don't have to look at it and think of myself with the drool
  running down. No way!" The inspector would not be moved into the
  contrived scenario.

  "But this particular patient is a cauliflower!"

  "Hey! So you got a few vegetables here; I didn't know you
  differentiated."

  "I really must insist!"

  "Hey, Doctor! I'm really Finance." And, leaning over it like a mincing
  question mark, he opened his laptop computer and punched in a formula
  which blinked on the screen. "See that? This'll show them! My
  invention, and the whole system's gonna eventually use it if it kills
  me!"

  After his shift (his relief, Dr Kong, giggled yes to all his
  complaints) and with his head abuzz with newer strategies, he headed
  to nurse's cubbyhole again, beginning to consider thinking about
  seeing her as his sole potential ally. At the least, he hoped she'd
  take a few moments to listen to reason.

  Oh she'd try her discrete SEXY business--he wasn't naive--it still
  wrinkling his mind with alarming starch: as had the inspector
  defensively crunched his beloved NUMBERS, and before him, the
  adminstrator dispensed SCHMALTZ.

  Personal, professional, and political indeed! A whole world of
  corruption.

  He was fathoming, descending into her atmosphere, how he'd set up once
  again his moral heart.



 _____________________________________________________________


                                All a Dither

  We all started avoiding him because he made us nervous. I had never
  thought of how to label his actions until my secretary says "This new
  printer dithers; I mean it's supposed to, fills out each little
  individual letter better that way."

  "It cost enough! Dithers, hey? Like Dagwood's Mr Dithers in Blondie,
  hey?"

  "Yeah," she winks, "or somebody else."

  Well that somebody else was our Mr Dithers, so as his supervisor, I
  finally sweettalked him into early retirement. Well, I mean, you
  couldn't see him! He'd make you blink and blink.

  On his last day we took him out to the best of the city's second tier
  of restaurants and our waitress squealed at him "Well look at you!
  Wow, you're the best one yet!"

  "He sort of...dithers," I whispered.

  "Yeah, right. Whatever. Everybody does, really. I see everybody's.
  Everything."

  "No kidding. Mine too? I do? I have one?"

  "Sure! You should see a rose! Experience it! Awesome!"

  "Make sure Cookie doesn't overcook my steak." I wanted to make sure.



 _____________________________________________________________


                                     Tug

  Sees her in a construction bucket being hoisted up against the sun to
  a traffic light outside the dental school. Her darkly yellow helmet.
  Flees to Houston Hall where friends discover him shrunk into a
  triangularity of Expresso Cart, Arby's Roast Beef, and Philly
  Cheesesteak.

  "She's here! My mother! Red light!" They convice him it's impossible,
  to lighten up.

  Back to his room to fetch books for Political Science, he departs the
  dorm through a crew raking leaves. Checked flannel shirts, shafts of
  dusty sunlight. Her. Quite round and singularly benign, looking a bit
  like the pope about to bless with a glowing rake.

  Jettisons books and papers, all, into the crunching leaves. Past his
  friends catapults he--who try to intersect Hey! Runs to exhaustion,
  then staggers onto the Philadelphia Art Museum's steps, collapses--at
  the top of which she's doing a Rocky imitation in capacious bra above
  boxing trunks of snaking irridescence.

  His second wind cuts in and he bolts to the campus.

  That evening the university opens a new folk center, and he, chosen by
  a student committee to give the address of welcome, introduces
  afterwards a troupe of mummers, designated a "Cowboy Comic Brigade." A
  sequened twenty surround him, twirling ropes while performing the
  famous mummer's strut, a kind of zig-zagging stompabout as if wearing
  snowshoes.

  Lassoo slaps his shoulder, flops round his head. Down to his waist. He
  doesn't look up.



 _____________________________________________________________


                         THE PROGRESS OF THE BREAST

  "You're welcome, but it's Jerry. Mr Blenheim is my father." He had
  been thanked by Jill Ann Ilg for retreving a rolling lipstick from
  under his computer table; its gold, he noted, matched the highlights
  in her chestnut hair.

  "What with you being a vice president 'n all, well..." Miss Ilg was
  going on.

  "Well here I'm the class dummy," he interrupted.

  "Not while I'm around," Dr Monogham stagewhispered off to Jerry's
  right, his own computer screen rolling off calculations with wildly
  increasing decimal places. "I don't even know how I got into this
  stuff!" he laughed. "My business is words."

  "I'm told it's all really numbers there, even when they turn it into
  words. Or the machine does...or something," shrugged Jerry, the
  vice-president, to Dr Monogham, this silvery, puzzled Irishman.

  Dr Alfred, the Instructor, minced behind Dr Monogham to push the
  button to the frenzied monitor. "We shall let it work in the dark for
  the nonce, yes?" Jerry thought Dr Alfred's small hands were suitable
  to the work.

  "Oh...nice! The dark!" Jill Ann teased them, that generic teasing
  appropriate to her age and station. Nonetheless, Jerry wondered if he
  blushed. Dr. Alfred slid back of the silver Dr Monogham to him, class
  dummy, self-proclaimed.

  "Well, you've done it all right, Mr Blenheim. And in what? Twenty
  eight lines? Example of what we call Brute Force!" (The name too of a
  men's cologne Jerry recalled from some massive billboards.) "That is,
  you instruct the computer to do every bitty-witty thing, step by step,
  without taking advantage of the shortcuts of some minimal math.
  Therefore, Brute Force! But we need a bit of cunning in life, yes? Oh
  your program'd run as it's so laboriously set up, but why bother? I
  mean we all would've gone stark raving mad if your way is the only way
  we could program computers, hey, Mr Blenheim?" Jerry managed to
  conceal only part of his disappointment as this too-emphatic and
  pursed-mouth teacher moved--step by tiny step--from the downcast vice
  president to most fashionably slim Jill Anne Ilg, who had littered the
  top of her console with makeup-stained tissues, the gold lipstick case
  standing up among them. She was using the screen as a mirror to neaten
  her blush. (Had he stressed Mr because the other two men in the room
  were PhDs? pondered Jerry.)

  Dr Alfred whistled. "Beautiful! Well, from Gattling Gun to poetry!
  Three-line program! Like a little poem, Miss Ilg! Wow! Run it! I think
  we have a computer natural here, gentlemen!"

  How could she, she who wincing Jerry had seen exfoliating tissues and
  gum wrappers around the hallways and in the employees' cafeteria,
  brushing on her makeup while studying herself in her down-twisted
  rearview mirror when his company sedan crawled behind her weaving
  Subaru of a gray, dripping morning in the long line into the plant...
  how could she...?...with her high school education...when he...?

  The class not insufferable enough, Dr Alfred proved to be one of these
  New Age instructors, for at the break he asked the three pupils to
  bring back anything from outside the training center which symbolized
  them in some way. Jerry went immediately to a shivering maple and
  picked up a fallen leaf. He would decide what to say about it when Dr
  Alfred asked, never having forgotten the words of his curt old mentor
  Pick Hallen, newly retired to Duck Key: "Throw the dart and then draw
  the bullseye around it."

  "Whattayagot?" It was Miss Ilg, he knew from the one-word quality of
  the question.

  "A mystery not ready to be revealed." And, palming the leaf, he turned
  round to fall in beside her, he in his bluegray suit, she her denim
  miniskirt, unsteady on her heels in the mid-morning thaw of the frosty
  grass. When they came to a stream, she insisted on trying to inch down
  the steep embankment to fetch a smooth red rock for the appraisal of
  the diminutive computer guru. She started falling, and reached back to
  Jerry who seemed abstracted, thrusting out his hand late.

  Jill Ann in zigzag pellmell stumble finally slapped into the water and
  hit her head on a much larger rock than the one she had desired. Her
  dress flowed as best it could for its short length and blood trickled
  thinly into the current from her splayed-out chestnut hair. Jerry
  yelled and the nearby Dr Monogham, who had been digging up something
  with his toe, came running. Together they got her up onto the windy
  meadow, her head bleeding profusely by now, and Monogham ran to phone
  the company ambulance.

  "I saw you." Monogham sighed later at his machine. "You reached out
  for her but, alas, a second too late." He nodded to her computer, atop
  which artifacts remained, his white hair still aflare from wind and
  excitement.

  Jerry felt his palms sweat, seeing that image of her small hand
  reaching to his own, and he nearly knew he had decided not to help
  her. Oh it was petty and cruel to punish her for outshining him in
  class, immature too--but he felt, if true, no one would ever know.

  He glanced to Monogham in fear of being observed, of giving something
  away with his face. What he saw was a message blinking LOVE YOUR
  CROOKED NEIGHBOR WITH YOUR CROOKED HEART.

  "That's not the program I'm working on," Jerry recovered.

  "Shhh. Oh god I forgot you were a vice president. You caught me." But
  Monogham said it as if he had done the catching. "I'm working on the
  poetry of Auden. Certain lines I mean." His blue eyes were blinking in
  rhythm to the green line on the screen. "It's a kind of hobby of mine,
  something to carry into retirement. This is the second time I've taken
  the course and I know all the solutions to the programming problems.
  So I sock them out in a minute or two and bring up Auden from another
  disc I've been working on."

  "How about that mess of numbers earlier?"

  "Little red herring," Monogham smiled thinly. "He doesn't know I took
  the course before, Dr. Alfred--nor much of anything else. Why, I bet
  he even forgot where he parked his butterfly."

  "I see," Jerry saw in his way. "But, whatever, he does know something
  about comput..."

  "Company money wasted? Is that what you're thinking?" Monogham's eyes
  became a stiller, icier blue.

  "Not necessarily. My management style, so-called, allows a little
  elbow room. Auden's poetry might just help the company somehow in some
  obscure way, that is you become a broad...and and happier employee and
  thus...if I'm not stretching it too..."

  "Broad?" winked Monogham. "That word on your mind is it? Or on mine?"

  They both became momentarily embarrassed. Looking down to notebooks on
  his desk, his forehead shading beyond its baby pink, Dr Monogham
  yelled "She's in Mercy hospital but she's all right." The comment was
  directed too at Dr Alfred who shrieked over the phone.

  "But her purse is here I tell you!" The voice on the other end of the
  phone was loud enough for the two men at their computers to hear a
  verbal shrug.

  "Oh I'm so glad that she's okay," Jerry whispered. "If I wasn't so
  damn slow...even at this." He waved an arm at his computer. "Both
  symptoms of age I guess."

  "You get it faster than anybody else I've seen take this course."

  "Oh? Miss Ilg wrote a three-line program that accomplished what took
  me twenty eight!"

  "Her bodyfriend's in Systems!" Monogham slammed his notebook closed,
  not in anger for he smiled merrily. "He wrote the program out on a
  notecard. That's what all the crap is on top of her monitor. She had
  to find it. Dug it out from all the noxious crap in that Black Hole of
  Calcutta purse of hers."

  "She cheated? Why? It's...not the purpose of the program... and there
  are no grades or anything like that. I don't get..." Jerry was slowly,
  genuinely, shaking his head.

  "No stakes at all. Not really. Some time off from the routine and
  maybe the exposure to personal computers and dummy-programming'll help
  you down the line."

  "So why cheat?" Jerry repeated the question as if it embodied a
  profanely tragic mystery.

  "Habit. That's the difference between the generations I think. They
  cheat habitually." Monogham lent his voice a scraping resonance: "We
  always had a dark, darrrrrrk reason for doing so."

  "We're better, not worse. You make it sound..."

  "Initially we're all of us just scared I guess, but after a few dozen
  times its just a way we've learned to behave. Programmed, if you
  will." Monogham typed ROMANTIC US!!!!!!!!!!! NIHILISTIC
  THEM!!!!!!!!!!! "Wouldn't Jill Ann Ilg be just astounded to know she
  was nihilistic?"

  "Are you...from Personnel?"

  "Guilty. But you don't have to be afraid. I can't haul you in for any
  tests or evaluations, only the secretaries and low level engineers and
  other clerks of such subterranean ilk."

  "I'm not afraid." Then Jerry laughed. "Actually I was for a ridiculous
  moment." After he gushed this last it surprised him that he could be
  so intimate with a stranger; Monogham somehow brought him out, and not
  solely because of his vague guilt over Jill Ann Ilg. (How hurt,
  really, could she be? he had been asking himself.) "I forget I'm an
  exalted vice president sometimes. I feel that's healthy for me, to
  forget that is. Thus I didn't mind being the class dummy--even in
  dummy- programming!--a kind of double indemnity." Jerry found his own
  humility disarming, warming.

  "Ah but you did mind. You didn't want to. That's not quite the same"
  winked Monogham. "And the recently battered Miss Ilg was, of course,
  really the class dummy--unless you think it bright of her to get the
  quick routes from her boyfriend."

  "But how do I handle it administratively?" Dr Alfred squealed, hopping
  a little, her absence assuming near federal proportions.

  "Old Brute Force there," nodded Monogham, "can't get the message and
  can't handle it when he does." The voice on the other end of the phone
  attempted to reassure Dr Alfred. These two at their monitors remained
  content to be without their teacher, both manfully on station even
  though somewhat wet from the rescue of the academically fickle Jill
  Ann.

  "You may have a point there, uh, my partially not wanting to mind
  being class dummy," Jerry allowed, a bit more archly than he intended.
  "Any, uh, more secrets about me?"

  "Just that I thought I saw you hesitate...that you had a chance to
  grab her?"

  "No way! Just too damn slow I told you!"

  "Well maybe you're not that sure. Maybe a...more of a mixed picture in
  your head than that. Our motives can bufuddle us at times. And at so
  many times we only have an instant to..."

  "I can assure you that I...!"

  "Well, chalk it up to my usual distrust, nothing personal. I guess
  it's that I should love my crooked neighbor with my crooked heart. Uh,
  well, you're my honest neighbor so nothing applies to you." Monogham
  pressed a key combination and his screen blanked.

  "God look at my hair! That wind was a mixmaster out there during the
  emotional mission of transporting the maiden ever upwards from the
  water, the white-haired elder and the heroic chieftain. Sounds like a
  myth."

  "I'm not Goody Twoshoes, believe me," Jerry was fretting, a sort of
  chemical smell coming off Miss Ilg's spent tissues. It annoyed Jerry
  almost as much as Monogham's wild hair and pseudo-literary nonsense.

  "All right then, I'll believe you, Jerry--if I may truly call you
  that--when you can't believe yourself. At any rate she's not the angel
  who couldn't quite fly down the embankment, and you're not quite the
  devil who programmed the chaotic results from his graybeard
  experience. And I am not the assured professional since I was afraid
  that you as a vice president'd report my fudging the computer course
  with my work on Auden's poetry. A kid's feeling, isn't it? Afraid of
  being told on.

  "Thus and so we are our calculating selves and we are our driven
  selves and we are our unknowing and confused selves trying to do
  something right as we see it and not seeing it for vast stretches at a
  time...." To Jerry, Monogham could have staunched this breathless
  collation of "insights" at any time.

  And Dr Alfred should take hold and resume the class! Monogham sucked
  up a quick breath, going on to "...and often figuring something out
  much too late after all the hurt...and always always always capable of
  doing something petty and cruel, not planning it or anything but when
  the situation arises...?" The effort cost him a scarlet face.

  "Guilty--at least in some of that...rush I would guess, but not in the
  situation of the lately unfortunate Miss Jill Ann Ilg--or should I say
  Ms Jill Ann Ilg? Say, are you a psychologist?" Jerry wondered
  too--resting an elbow on the keyboard, his screen thereby sporting a
  repetitive garbage--if Monogham was a drinker.

  "Yes."

  "That why the line about...or rather lines about..."

  "I know I run on. Anyway...what I perceived. I don't maintain it's
  right. I talk to get a fix on things. What counts for you is your
  view."

  "No, no, I...was just slow in grabbing her. That's tragic enough. I'm
  at the point where I might have to move fast soon. Make the right
  decision or it'll be made for me. I might have to leave...choose to
  leave the company." He was giving Monogham too much; Dr. Brute Force
  still babbled over the phone.

  "My! Worried is it? That's as close as you'll ever come to a
  revelation I do believe! Oh good! I made you laugh! By the bye, in the
  office presidential sweepstakes pool, odds on you are dead even."

  "Hmph. No kidding? Better than I deserve." That's an odd word to
  choose--I deserve to be president."

  "That's the spirit!--for you."

  Late that afternoon they met by chance in the hospital gift shop, and
  then proceeded to the elevator. The same plastic package of carnations
  in each right hand, they ascended.

  "I was so stupid and awkward," Jerry began in her unlit room as Jill
  Ann sat upright in the bed while smoothing down the powder blue shorty
  nightgown on her slim thighs.

  "You were nice. And you're nice now so that proves it!" She tossed her
  head slightly, the blond highlights now dim strawberry. He was stopped
  by her comment, standing by the widow and observing the glossy traffic
  in the blue light outside while puzzling over how such a sweet logic
  could square with her cheating in the course.

  "What they had left. Why we both got the same." Dr Monogham, jerking
  as if sexually possessed, his voice climbing an octave, shoved his
  flowers right atop Jerry's on the bedside table, next to the tissue
  box. Jerry saw a lovely, very young girl with thin, almost boyish
  legs.

  Strangely, the blue light from outside intensified, blooming. This is
  where she laughed, throwing herself back on the bed, and when he
  experienced a moment which would come back, standing at the window and
  hearing the laughter and seeing the light in that room, sniffing the
  slight aroma of past-fresh carnations from the sealed boxes...her
  starting to turn towards him, the sheer nightgown of an almost-white
  blue, and under it a breast shadowy and yet faintly creamy, the dark
  dark nipple the color of a black cherry.

  The next month the board in a surprise move selected him as president,
  and the laughter and much else abruptly ceased, though the image of
  that breast persisted. Whether studying blueprints on the plant
  expansion he was shoving through, or walking Clancy, their Springer
  Spaniel, through the snow and soot park near the condo, the breast
  would hove into view, creamy white and lovely.

  Once it superimposed on one of his wife's as she awaited his tennis
  serve during a stolen short weekend in Florida. She rocked side to
  side; the breast followed. "What are you waiting for?" Carla snapped,
  puffing her black hair from out of one eye, "Inspiration?"

  Both of them panted under the lid of one dark, humid cloud, his ears
  hammering, his eyes diffuse and hers darkly fierce, the top of the net
  assuming an unearthly white glow. At his further delay she announced
  "And you'll never beat me again!"

  A year into the obsession he reasoned it would help to see Jill Ann,
  but was too hedged in by flunkies when he dropped by Maintenance, and
  he couldn't get to the Dispatch Section with any grace.

  Once some whimsey entered in at the wedding of Treasurer Peter
  Lapides' daughter: the breast swathed in a Virgin Blue playing
  peek-a-boo behind the brocaded chief priest--no hint of flesh
  revealed, though, not even in pinpoints.

  Some vague time after that, Carla rented Citizen Kane in order to
  disprove its claim as the greatest American film. Jerry was busy with
  papers in his home office and the only fragment he overheard was an
  old character musing on a youthful sighting of a girl in white on the
  Staten Island Ferry, saying that never a day went by that he didn't
  think of her. He slid the Treasurer's preliminary report towards the
  green-glowing desklamp and softly moaned.

  On his next walk with Clancy while fleeing a condominium dispute, one
  faction of which was spearheaded by his wife, the dog's eyes pleaded
  as Jerry addressed the beautiful image lurking in the bluegreen
  gloaming above the first snowdrops to break bud that sopping spring.

  The breast was this time a peach-and-cream confection, stock still as
  the wind began throwing itself around the sky.

  But no amount of warning or of fierce concentration would free him, so
  he concluded "Your gumcracking Venus! Just...work harder! You're
  lazy!"

  "Damn Fraud!" he excoriated himself while yanking the leash as he spun
  round. Clancy whimpered back to him, the wind slamming both their
  voices together.

  "Love your crooked neighbor, hey Clance?" he queried the dog while
  removing his leash, the sound of the acrimonious meeting penetrating
  his walls from the nextdoor apartment of the eminent gynecologists
  Spirungold. "Actually she was built like a boy! Pipecleaner! Can you
  imagine? Me with my taste for the bulbous in that strangely opposite
  sex! That that little breast that haunts this middle-aged ass was
  hardly bigger than a boy's! would you believe? I'll...have to give in
  soon and see a shrink." Clancy scrabbled away to his bowl of
  gaseous-smelling dogfood; the resigned Jerry, still bent over with
  leash in hand, noted Carla's whining intonation from next door.
  "Oooops...she's beginning to smell blood," he whispered.

  Nearly a year later at Personnel's sedate, candlelit retirement dinner
  for Dr Monagam and three others, held on a wintry, stinging- white
  night when most events were cancelled, the two men joked about
  computers while standing under a homemade banner attesting THE
  PIONEERS.

  "I didn't know they'd get to run my whole life! How've you been doing
  with...Frost was it?" Jerry asked, knowing it was a mistake, that Dr
  Monagham would know he remembered the poet had been Auden.

  "Remember whatsherface, Joanne? Practically naked in that hospital!"
  Monogham elbowed, his face firing up with Scotch, his eyes like blue
  water. By this point in Jerry's mental life, the breast had, of
  course, almost completely abstracted itself from that late afternoon
  in Jill Ann's hospital room, but the whole cream and blue scene began
  assembling, even to the odors of the carnations.

  "No, can't say I remember."--but why should the president play? Let
  the others play he chided himself. This bold thought propelled him to
  want to tell of the haunting breast, since he couldn't, finally,
  submerge it the way he always had everything thing else internally
  disquieting. Besides, Monogham had already gotten to resemble, in The
  Town and Country's flickering isle of candle glow against what had
  become an outside blackness, windswept and thrillingly cold, a benign
  priest behind the confessional grill.

  But he could not so confide, especially as president: Discretion
  always had to be the other side of that coin. "Auden! I remember it
  was, something about all of our crooked hearts. Well I've met a few of
  them in the ensuing years. And Jill! uh, Jill Ann was the girl's
  name."

  In his mind he heard Monogham saying "Give us this day our daily
  breast, hey?" and he held his breath in the waxy smell, then released
  it in self-congratulation as candle flames bent horizonally when the
  draft carried the funereal smell of bouquets paid for by the various
  departments.

  He hadn't seen a psychiatrist--too risky as he calmed the many palace
  disturbances, forcing early retirements in the process. "I'm getting
  the young people ready. They must take responsibility earlier," he
  reported to the board. "They simply make too much money just to stand
  around and watch. This passivity becomes habitual, and when we do let
  them step forth they're all but infantile. The chief leadership
  problem in this country is the prolonged wetnursing of its youth! And
  there also must be some, uh, more women," he weighed in with an
  afterthought.

  But he finally did get his chance to tell someone. At a special
  seminar for the board and a few shareholders and an officer or two
  with facts and figures, at Blackwater Falls in West Virginia. He had
  trudged back to the lodge with a group after again witnessing the
  breast, this time adrift ghostly white through brownish fog in back of
  the dark, falling water.

  Intoned the guide back then, a fuller-figured woman, "This whole
  valley was covered over, bridged actually, with thick thick
  rhododendrum. The Indians walked on top, and panthers...in the
  darkness black as a cave underneath...what? What do panthers do?
  Slither? Moved with no sound anybody could hear on top I would guess."

  "Don't fall in, that's all," quipped Rissley of Accounting. "In the
  primal, eeeeevil dark the panther's eyes are fires of desire!" added
  'Belly' Lauder of Publications.

  Even though his shoulders mysteriously pained him terribly once back
  at the lodge, Jerry fetched his mini computer from his attache case
  and punched out a little piece of adding machine tape which he then
  left for conference coordinator Maureen Persky at the desk: WHATS
  BELLY DOING HERE?

  Turning round to resume his sunken way to dinner, he encountered his
  old mentor arriving and they left Pick's bags to go for a walk.

  The obsession burst from him on a white oak bridge fairly swimming in
  moonlight. He walked to and fro through the vapors his frantic words
  had left.

  "Nearly two years. That long?" the seated Pick asked softly from a
  shadowy nest of worn-smooth clothes. "Well, now you've given it to me
  you can forget it. It's mild stuff, Mr President. Everybody has more
  demons than that. Things, uh, visit me...uh, even at my age. Anyway,
  you can really get on to the job now. Without this...you can really
  get on with it. Get rid of even more deadwood at the plant! You got
  the guts for it. I can tell how wearing it's been--even without this
  floating...thing. Hey, I don't know..." and here Jerry winced--people
  who sought to help him always managed to say too much-- "there's a
  pain in what we do, much of it, a cost. We get married, we...work.
  Nobody gets off scot free. You seemed crazy to yourself but it's just
  life." Pick lit a cigar just when clouds started past the moon. As the
  far sound of the falls washed into shuddering breezes astringent with
  pine, Jerry sat down next to him. The men remained some buffeted
  moments in warm silence.

  The moon reasserted itself brighter and larger and Jerry felt love for
  Pick, who immediately rose and started walking back to the lodge, his
  body looking bent and all but crushed by moonlight. The glow of the
  receding cigar tip reminded Jerry of some vague something but he never
  saw the breast again.



 _____________________________________________________________


                               The Experiment

  She is given an entire life in four hours though programing with
  accelerated hormones, will die of lung cancer at equivilant
  thirty-one.

  I arrive, late, missing the birth and more, but get to observe her
  gangly first kiss. Sweet. The boy too.

  When she proved a whiz at math I applauded, the roboteacher waving
  clawfuls of A-papers, but then in college she wrote politically
  correct poetry, wretched by any standard, usually beginning something
  like

                       The pigs decline
                       to sniff the slime


  and ending in the wimpiest pseudo-intellectual "romance."

                               Your own aroma
                       redolent of these
                               thesis-innocent lovers

                       intertwined like leaves
                               of ancient,neglected vines.


  I wanted to scream: Stop wasting precious time on this blather! There
  are always modes. Think! Forget what all the asshole careerists say!
  Embrace yourself and your ideas!

  I guess she was a bit sexually slow, quarter hour or so anyway, and I
  couldn't watch at first, uh...well I'm shy at any rate, and the
  knowledge she would die in ten years...well, a couple of hours
  actually.

  I could sense he was a nice young man, though a bit macho-mouthy, and
  I started crying. I didn't need that.

  My section leader laughed to the other ones about me and the lovers.
  "Such an old-fashioned display all round! Let me tell you I wouldn't
  trade our drop-of-the-hat fucking for anything! Drop of the PANTS
  anyway!"--she always topped herself.

  I wasn't required to watch our young woman die--though the muddy
  X-rays remain in my consciousness, slapped up for viewing too fast to
  really discern. The section leaders had ordered in beer and wanted to
  get to it; me, I couldn't wait to dive back into my TV-Bowl.

  "You've seen pure science!" my section leader crowed as I left.

  Why is it always so unsatisfactory?



 _____________________________________________________________


                              The Singing Wire

  Jerry found the toy in the old bureau just as the phone rang in the
  frozen attic, a Boy Bombardier Set with cross-haired scope, and wooden
  bomb the size of a penlight battery.

  "How nice to hear from you!" he told Ben. I hope you and Renata are
  cozy on this ferociously white evening. I'm up in the attic and it
  looks like a Christmas card down there on the street. Am I breaking up
  by the way?--little portable phone." The Boy Bombardier toy in one
  hand, he held the phone in the other, its vibrating antenna forming
  and reforming a ghostly fan among the large wet flakes pasted on the
  window.

  "I can hear you fine," Ben answered, "It's a shame you can hear me."
  Instead of following up his puzzling remark, Ben shouted "Alone with
  all the memories in the attic, huh? I don't know if that's good or
  bad! Sorting out things, what to throw away what to...?"

  "You got it! I only started moving in my stuff a few hours ago but
  already I find I can't live with the clutter Mom did. But, you were
  about to say something else...?" Silence from the other end as snow
  hissed through a cracked pane, topping a little pyramid on the sill.

  Jerry wondered about the phone, shook it. "Ben?" he questioned. Red
  air darkened in the attic.

  "Whoa! Don't shout. I'm here! Just had to find a way... tell you
  Jerry...uh, sit down on a stair or something and, yes, let's do cease
  the small talk."

  Jerry put the phone and the toy on a dusty cardboard box and then
  dropped a hand down a few inches behind him, bent at the knees to
  lower himself into a sitting postion on the threadbare oriental. He
  took his time: what could it be that he had not already heard in a
  lifetime of work?

  Ben waited for the exertion to stop, and then said "Sorry to be bearer
  of these tidings, especially since your mother has so recently...
  Anyway, Jerry, the short and dirty of it is you're out. It's just a
  question of when. Hirwatari Industries has taken over." Jerry's racing
  heart made the reddish snowlight bloom colder.

  "Hirwa...never heard of..." he managed to whisper, his white shirt
  ballooning in a draft, floating in the inclined mirror atop the
  knobby-legged Victorian dresser--the drawer still thrusting out which
  had held the toy.

  "Yeah, Charlie Garrity sits on both boards, in Boston and in Kyoto--a
  real frequent flier. He tipped me. They're mostly in Brazil and
  Argentina is why you never heard of them, and of course Japan. Chief
  lawyer, believe it or not, was one Hector Gozales from Rio. Anyway,
  Charlie said you should start bargaining now for pension. They
  promised to give you golden handshake but the amount of gold depends
  on you." Outside, more snow wheeled from out of a purpling sky, almost
  obscuring the streetlight. Sleet ticked against the old house. "Expect
  it to take a good long time the way the Japs bargain." Ben's voice,
  quieter, seemed itself to tick. "They know we're mostly in a hurry and
  they exploit that."

  Jerry stared at his hand, scored from the rug. He managed to gather
  himself. "Well I, I don't have to squeeze the last cent. My Jookie is
  well launched into his own career now and my ex is

  remarried. So I'm the old bachelor...middle-class-rich-- almost." "I
  should be so fortunate," laughed Ben, "still a few mouths to feed, and
  two in college you don't hear from except for money! Hey I've been
  trying to extract from my own company for good and proper reasons.
  Golden handshake? I'll take a brass one, anything! But, never mind me!
  Hey, you'll do all right, but it's still awful. Hell you only gave
  that company a life! That's all. Is Jookie still the baseball player?"

  "I don't think so. Can't do that forever."

  "Too bad. But anyway, Jerry..." Ben was trailing off at the other end
  until a stronger tone suddenly asserted "Hell in my company we're only
  a quarter or so Japanese owned! And don't believe these stories about
  these extraordinary Japanese managers. The firm runs on in the same
  incompentent way. The only difference is that we were actively
  incompetent under Harley Olchuff and now under the simplistic Ryo, so
  lately rammed into place, we are passively so." Jerry was
  half-listening, trying to clamp the pain. A door banged somewhere in
  the drafty interior of the house. "Listen to this, Jerry! I tried to
  sell Pecky Warren of Rich industries in Buffalo, and he told me to
  come back in three months 'cause they were way over inventory? Well
  let me tell you about the soft way my Japanese supervisor treats what
  he regards as failure by repeating it: Way over inventory, ah yes. Way
  over inventory, ah yes. Then the last time he says it, for that
  particular day I mean, he laughs like it's the greatest joke ever, you
  know?"

  Jerry hadn't heard it all but offered "Inscrutable"-- his voice
  resonating with the raking sleet.

  "Inscrutable my ass! Just another way of grinding your balls. I'll
  take old spastic Harley's hopping and yelling and screaming anytime.
  Besides, everything is business is scrutable really. Too much so."

  And later that odd form, scrutable, rasps Jerry's mind amid the
  shuddering waves of sleet and hail and snow. The little toy with its
  tiny wooden bomb still rests on the cardboard box, and Jerry can't
  reconstruct, eyes jammed shut, whether the Japanese ships were
  depicted flatly on a sheet of cardboard or had been small wooden
  models. But when he opens his eyes, a tiny ship flickers, made
  three-dimensional by the threads of the old rug. It vanishes but has
  delighted him in his sadness, his childhood imagination returning
  somehow. He clicks on the brute of a floorlamp, and the sudden yellow
  light makes the attic look more ancient and mellow, more deep along
  its shadows, and smell more sharply cold.

  When he looks through the bombsight at the lamp, the lenses are gummy,
  the crosshairs inside fuzzy. He breathes on the lenses and pulls out
  his his shirttail to wipe them . Snow splotching blue-black against
  the window, his shadow becomes an agitated monster when the tiny bomb
  suddenly falls to the floor. Jerry looks up to see the figure of a boy
  crossing the drifted street. He can hear faint crying, and holds his
  breath to listen, willing his huge shadow to stop vibrating.

  The snow under the streetlamp swings to became a vector connecting
  their pain, traveling each to each as if along a singing wire.

  Jerry turns the scope around, trying to see the diminutive figure
  against the snowrush. What looks back, haloed by fuzz, dotted by
  frozen tears, is his own young, gold face. He fumbles and drops the
  scope, and the boy is gone. Jerry's heart seizes and then fairly
  bursts. Soon he's punching numbers on the phone, his fingers speckled
  by sweat. Outside the plow rumbles by.

  "Be home!" Jerry shouts. No rings are audible at the other end.

  But Jookie has heard his voice. "Dad? I...I thought you were really
  tied up by Grandmom's estate."

  "Jookie!" he cries in that old masters' glow of the attic, the bureaus
  and tables and boxes suffused by dusty lamplight and appearing to swim
  inside their shadows, the sound of the snowplow receding to a whisper.
  "I don't know how even to ask: but what can I do for you? Is there
  anything, Son? Is there anything?"



 _____________________________________________________________
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 _____________________________________________________________

  _Frank B. Ford_ is a poet, playright, and fiction writer residing in
  Philadelphia, PA. His poems and stories have appeared in various
  magazines, and his plays have been performed at, among others, Guthrie
  2 in Minneapolis, and New York Stageworks. This is his first volume of
  poetry.

  Other works by the same author:

  WATERMAN appears in _Guthrie New Theater (Vol. 1)_

  Mr. Ford welcomes email at [email protected], or via postal mail at:
  Frank B. Ford
  c/o The Greene Street Artists
  5225 Greene Street
  Philadelphia, PA 19144-2927

  phone: 215.848.7385


 ______________________________________________________________
 ___________________________________________________________end

You are viewing proxied material from infinitelyremote.com. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.