phrenology101

Los Graveda Grasa

2012-01-29T12:10:00.002-05:00

He sat four feet to the right of the bust of King Olaf, just enough to ensure an unobstructed view of the sleeping prince. The sleeping prince, his eyelids aquiver with torturous dreams, had fallen asleep while awaiting the arrival of the circus. Feet unshod and sockless, his oxcart tethered to the lamppost unsteadily, he fell in and out of sleep like a drunken chump, the sort of sap men of good measure avoid at all cost. Vigo Darzere struck a match against the sleeping prince’s oxcart, and holding the flame jittery over his hatless head intoned ‘always loafing on the job those crazy Jesuits’. Tossing the extinguished match onto the ground Vigo let out a long drawn out yawn, the back of his throat scabbed with nicks from the stick he used to clear his throat. Rapidly he shoed the oxen and hightailed it northward, the oxen’s dung-scabby tails trailing behind them. As tomorrow was the day the Deacon gave his perennial exegesis on the Icon Rasputin, everyone was in a rush to get home before dark, even Vigo Darzere who had no interest in iconography and Russian sexpots.

‘if the sky doesn’t fall tomorrow I’ll take a stroll over to Middletown to see the new jakes… I hear it’s got a sparkling glass seat’. Long before it was unpopular he was reading books about magic and alchemy, folios and scholarly texts on miming and unconscious reasoning; he read until his eyes bled and his nose ran, he read and reread until he couldn’t feel the tips of his fingers, he read upon waking and before retiring for the night, reading in between appointments and school trips. He was well into his thirties before he realized that all that reading had ruined his eyesight, his eyelids twig-brittle from uncontrollable blinking. ‘nonetheless even should the sky fall tomorrow I will still make my way west to Middletown, stopping only to refresh my memory and slake my thirst’. Whenever he recalled these times he couldn’t help but laugh; all those wasted hours counting to one-thousand backwards, measly matters of choice and faulty reasoning. He’d much rather have spent his time eating or spotting turtles with an upturned rake.

(You might ask why so many characters, so many troubles, so much confusion and madness? Because I can and I must and nothing more will do).

Having no legs the legless man had no need for shoes or boots. He wrapped his stump-ends in cheesecloth, applying an oil when the chaffing became unbearable. The alms man suffered with Podiatric Dystopia, both feet pointing in the same direction (to the left) his toes barnacled with corns, some the size of plums. Molaño de Salamanca shoed his oxen and set out for Borgomanero y Lombardia, Castilla the fool close on his heels. Castilla would rather be at the heel of a fish cart eating ox tongue or spotting turtles with an upturned rake, anything but in the service of Molaño de Salamanca. Molaño de Salamanca and his abet Castilla were never seen or heard from again, Borgomanero y Lombardia enveloping them into her ivory bodice.

They whored for a fortnight and a day, backs bent double like lowly sinners. He was feeling blue moldy for a fight, all that bucking and her throwing back her head and the reek of boiled onions and unwashed clothes encouraging his ire. “Restitution of conjugal rights”[1] he said loudly under his breath. ‘I heard that somewhere… on the bally it was, chappy bastard laid the comeuppance on me’. Daisy’s clap prêt near slew her, all her hair and eyelashes falling out. Never can tall wend nor hew. Last time she all muss lust hen eye. …whores its cruel out: coal enough fur kittens and a cat. Pull the ole muffler ova your knows bye Jesus. When he started to think like this, in circles and strays, he knew that the jig was up; it was only a matter of time before the wind would hearse him willy-nilly home, back bent-double staring starry-eyed at his shoes.

He found a letter in a coffee can outside his leaning lean-to. Still feeling blue moldy from the night before he put the letter in his breast pocket and went about his day. On cold days he sniffed sweet ether from a takeout bag, holding in the vitriolic gas until his neck muscles bulged.

The harridan came down with Scrub Typhus, ‘serves you right’ scolded her sister ‘you should be more careful with your mouth’. The apothecary agent dispensed an anti-agonist, cautioning ‘this is a cunt to get rid of… so keep your legs closed and your mouth shut’. Pull the ole muffler ova your knows bye Jesus. She made a poultice with Crum’s bleach and an old washrag. Placing it on her forehead she lay down lengthwise on the floor, her arms folded across her breasts. Daisy’s clap started in her shoes and moved end-to-end into her shinbone. It lay dormant for a fortnight, the chills and fever subsiding, then progressed into her sternum. On the second fortnight it moved from her breastplate into her jawbone, where it stayed for another fortnight and a half. From her jawbone it transmigrated to the crown of her head. And after another fortnight it escaped through a borehole drilled in her fontanel, the yellowy vile substance collected in a kidney-shaped saucepan held aloft her ear by the apothecary agent’s wife. ‘that’ll teach you to keep your mouth to yourself’ scolded her sister.

He glanced through the ‘Anniversaries and Gladtidings’ page of the Weekly, his eye fetched by the wedding announcements: Burchel, John and Driscoll Mary Castletownbere, Costello, Augustine E. O'Driscoll and Kate (or Catherine) Castletownbere, Crowley, John Driscoll (Minihane) and Johanna Castletownbere Driscoll, Jeremiah Harrington (Caobach) and Mary Allihies Finch, Brendan O'Driscoll and Ann Castletownbere, Paddy O'Driscoll and Katie Allihies Gortahig, Joe O'Driscoll and (Abbey Philomena) Kelly, Pad (or Patrick) O'Driscoll (Minihane) and Honora Cahirgarriff Lynch, Tade O'Driscoll and McCarthy, Edmund O'Driscoll and Catherine Adrigole, Patrick O'Driscoll and Patricia Castletownbere (owner and sole proprietor of the Grocery Shop, Fish Tackle, Radio/TV) McCarthy, Johnny and (Murt) O'Driscoll (Minihane), (O'Driscoll), John Houlihan and Mary Eyeries Cummeendeach wed in a group service at the Gorman Filing House just outside the Five-Mile Fence.

He walked from Appenzell Innerrhoden to Appenzell Ausserrhoden stopping only to eat the sandwich he’d packed that morning. After consuming the sandwich roll, delighting in the sharp cheese, he began walking again. ‘what a day’ he said to himself, ‘banal yet satisfying just the same’. Wrapping the crusts in the Gladtidings Weekly, Patrick O'Driscoll tourniquet to Honora Cahirgarriff, he retied his shoe and set out for home.

The Gorman’s Apothecary carry Dead Sea facial scrubs for the woman who needs a leg up in the morning, throat lozenges, ten-penny nails, syphilis tablets, one per customer, and bunghole mallets. The morning he was born his father fell from a great height. He fell into the street below, the draymen catching him in a blanket.

What more can one say when one has said nothing? He fell into the day from a great height, the draymen nowhere to be seen. Unaware that they were being watched, Aarschot and Brabant stood admiring the Admiral’s Duffy. ‘perhaps I could interest you in a lozenge’ said the person watching them, Aarschot staring at him suspiciously.

The morning he was born his da threw himself headfirst out the hospital window. The Seder Grocer, noticing a slumping in his awning called out ‘my God an angle has fallen from the sky!’ ‘sure enough’ said a man picking through a bushel of apples. ‘and straight as an arrow’ said another man, his hands shaking uncontrollable. Rolling himself off the slumping awning his da brushed off his jacket and hurried down the street, the grocer yelling ‘stop thief… you have an apple in your pocket!’

Not one to underestimate stupidity Dejesus threw prudence to the wind and asked for his money back. ‘surely you can’t expect me to accept this?’ It’s practically torn in half?’ ‘muerte blanca. Si hará el truco’ replied the agent. Not having the faintest idea what the agent was saying Dejesus again demanded his money. ‘you, sir, underestimate my fury’. ‘y usted, subestime mi mañosidad’ said the boldfaced agent. His removed his shoes and lay them on the mud-spattered ground in front of him. Breaking a twig from an elm tree, its canopy stretching as far as the eye could see, he dug the mud from the bottoms of his shoes. Clapping his shoes together like castanets, clumps of dirt falling onto the mud-spattered ground, he craned his neck upwards, the sun bathing his face in warmth and bliss. ‘tomorrow’s the 10th’ he mused. ‘the day before Boat Day’. Stretching out under the yawing elm, canopied beneath its chartreuse arbor, he said a prayer ‘God forgive me for I stole an apple from the grocer’s bushel’. Hearing nothing he recused himself, and basking in his ungodliness set out once again.

“Fiume and Abruzzi stole away in the guts of a scow, eating mangos and salted meat and singing as loud as their lungs would permit”[2] was written on a piece of white tunic. Next to the piece of white tunic sat an elfin man, his eyes as black as coal. ‘I say’ said the elfin man, ‘who goes there?’ When no one replied the elfin man with coal-black eyes cleared his throat and said ‘Well whomever it is best keep to the other side of the road! I’ve killed a man for less!’

The sign over the door to the apothecary read ‘Quite Por Favor Sus Cauchos’. The sign over the lavatory ‘y, estaba por favor la esperma de sus manos’. ‘Gracias los caballeros y las señoras’ said the cigar store Indian propped up against the register. Of a sudden a parade of younkers and squibs stole in passed the dispensing counter, the apothecary assistant trying valiantly to oversee the oversight of having left the front door unbolted. Every year without fail the day before Ship’s Day fell on a Sunday. The sign over the cotton candy stand read ‘la esperma de sus manos’, anguishing those who hadn’t bothered to wear gloves and those who suffered from Quinsy’s Chill, known to grieve a man to pots, Dejesus among the unvanquished. ‘have you no mercy?’ cried out a man with a fine-looking cowlick. ‘shut the door and sit down’ quipped a woman, her ears turned out under her bonnet. ‘surely this isn’t happening’ said Dejesus, the cigar store Indian staring at him mockingly. ‘surely we are mistaken. Ship’s Day falls on a Thursday not on a Sunday’.

Marušić carried a picture of his mamma in a blue dress wearing a pair of the Vincennes Co’s. finest gloves holding a twisted nosegay. Alex Degrande and Simon Drogue tend to the animals, feeding the horses and oxen from nosebags. The Antinomianist’s congregate behind the Waymart. Marušić jacked the ball and called in nines, the fattest Antinomianist yowling ‘give it back you scoundrel’. Not one to be batfowled by simpletons Marušić let go with a resounding fart. ‘the library is closed’ announced the head librarian sternly, ‘so do go home please do’. The last time this happened the sky almost fell. The horses and oxen ate from nosebags, the dogs from plastic bowls laid out under the starlit sky. Alex Degrande and Simon Drogue congregate behind the Waymart, the Antinomianist’s having gone home. ‘Ship’s Day falls on a Thursday not on a Sunday’ said elfin man. The day had taken its toll on him.

Blattzinn & Stagniol stood under the Waymart awning counting clouds in the gray sky. Counting they recounted those they saw twice, but in different configurations and places in the sky. They wore tin-foil caps punched out and folded to fit snuggly on the crown of the head.

The Amazonas sisters dress in cockleshell blouses and ruby red shoes. Unlike the Kallisto sisters, Oreias and Erinyes, who sleep under a blanket of stars, the Amazonas sisters sleep underneath scratchy horsehair blankets. Dearest Aunt Alma makes the most delicious raspberry tarts. 25 pea a half-dozen a dozen a half-crown. Aunt Alma dear tucks the edges with the whites of her fingernails, curbing the bottommost crust with a straight razor. Her tarts are know far and wide for their oozing red berry filling. He sat puzzled and wet under the mutton gray sky eating sweet mouthfuls of raspberry tart. ‘tomorrow is Ship’s Day surely’ he quibbled, ‘...or the day after tomorrow or after that or...’. He offered the sisters a bite of red berry tart, the sisters giggling like schoolgirls. ‘--no thank you’ said the sisters, ‘…our stomachs’ are about to burst’. Upon awaking he reached for the last morsel of tart, his lips smacking. ‘bursting stomachs. I best keep my distance surely’.

The night came and went, leaving behind a skeletal trace of darkness. (Los Boyos abhor Los Détentes). Néstor Tolosa and his bride to be Elizabet Fernández live in a one-room walkup over los Partido Justicialista. Los Mambos De Rastreó, a well-received pantomime group, came and went, leaving nothing behind. ‘bursting stomachs. I best keep my distance surely’. ‘Giulia!’ shouted Néstor, ‘your stomach is bursting’. Giulia glared sternly at Néstor Tolosa, betroth of Elizabet Fernández, her eyes red as bloodshot. ‘how dare you sir, my stomach is none of your concern!’ The sisters giggled like schoolgirls jiggling their auburn tresses. Ships Day began, children queuing for funnels of pink cotton floss, the priest, his surplice in a knot, winking at his assistant ‘Mauris condimentum nisi in libertate filiorum captionem Candy’.

‘Ŝi estas ensorĉo graveda grasa’. The Seder Grocer hired a pale skin girl to wipe down the butcher’s counter. Her belly, swollen with new life, sagged below her hips, the grocer’s stomach pinched with beans and lentils, his wife having left the pot on the stovetop to simmer. She slept with her backup against the stars, a nosegay clutched in her hands. ‘my but you have such pale ashen skin’ said the grocer gaping at his new hire. ‘and such beautiful red auburn hair’. ‘ensorĉo graveda grasa’ said the pale auburn new hire. ‘yes I see’ said the grocer, ‘and what a beautiful swollen belly it is’. On her hands she wore goat skin gloves, and on her feet fish shoes. Unsheathed he wielded his epee “which the buckler could not protect against the clownish assault”[3] and slew the monstrous ogre. Chiclana sleeps beneath the moon-filled sky. The Mulhouse sisters sleep with both eyes open. The Celbridge sisters of County Kildare fish for chub behind the Monument Creamery. The Stoutly Buckler sat beneath an apricot yellow moon, his awl sheared down to tin-ash. ‘ensorĉo grasa’ whispered the new hire, ‘estas graveda’. The congregates pelted Los Violadores with stones and broken bottles; expecting Los Graveda Grasa they were itching for a punch up. The Feast of the Redeemer ended with 27½ men downed by pelting and kicking, the ½ felled halfway to his knees and onto his back. A woman in fish shoes cobbled past, her hair pulled back into a straight-pin bun. ‘my my what pale ashen skin you have’ said the Stoutly Buckler. ‘Ŝi estas ensorĉo graveda grasa’ bellowed the Celbridge sisters of County Kildare, the moon-filled night aglow. On the 27th day of the 7th month the Sisters of the Immaculate Deception arrived for the Feast of the Redeemer, the congregates welcoming them with outstretched arms, a child with a nosebleed holding out a nosegay of marigolds and daffodils.

“…whether he was cured of his madness or still suffered from it, and then begged leave to continue his journey; in short, they all separated and went their ways, leaving to themselves the curate and the barber.”[4] The carter yoked Catullus (who suffered with mono-onomastikos) to Cratylus, Dario and Argento bridled to the muleteer’s wagon. Giallo and Mulock swam the Guadix Channel backwards, Yolande Rose and Joséphine Cardinale inflamed over a lost glove, pilfered, so they believed, by Sergio Ferzetti who took off in a gallop on the back of his faithful Rocinante. ‘we have no time for this nonsense’ preached the Witness. ‘in times of strife and pestilence a man must find his cantor, not gallop off like a woebegone ass’. Awaking from his dreams he found a summons pinned to his lean-to flap. ‘The rector’s assistant requests your presence immediately. Please come quickly’. Throwing the summons into the rainspout he lay down and forced himself back to sleep, hoping that he could revisit the dream he had awoken from a few minutes earlier.

[1] Ibid
[2]Abruzzi et Fiume, Tales of Intrigue and Folly, 1889.
[3] Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
[4] Ibid

The Turin Horse - Béla Tarr

2012-01-18T08:10:00.000-05:00

Hospital for the Gravely Injured

2011-12-04T11:35:00.003-05:00

‘Cat got your tongue?’ asked the voice sitting next to him on the park bench. He turned and came face to face with a woman who’s bulbar eyes had escaped his notice when he’d first sat down. The crookedness of her mouth made it look like she was whispering when she was in fact shouting. A man out walking his dog stopped and said ‘I’ll have none of that madam!’

An alms woman sits in the midmorning sun stitching hems with a bone-needle. The story goes that she found the bone-needle in a hatbox box under a pile of soiled clothes. It brought back memories of the things his grandmother kept in a coffee tin on her bedstead vanity: a promise ring given to her by a cheating suitor, a blind tinsmith, a small picture of a horse and rider. She dropped a stitch piercing her thumb, blood mixing with the meatiness of working flesh. ‘Some mornings’ she said to herself, ‘begin better than others.’

Appearing as if out of nowhere Albert Scrim yelled ‘Mrs. Crabstick of Upton eats ribbon-toast with cream cheese!’ Mrs. Crabstick actually preferred headcheese to cream cheese, so his declaration, though boisterous, fell on deaf ears. A purveyor of saltpeter and Plumtree’s arrowroot biscuits, especially the tinned variety, which she doubly liked, Mrs. Crabstick seldom complained about the salt. She liked what she liked. She bought cheese from the Barnstaple Maple Cheese factory situated in a small creamery overlooking the Greenock Inverclyde lochs. Overripe and blue she chose the cheeses she liked most leaving the rest to people with younger tongues and fatter change-purses.

She liked liking things like Plumtree’s biscuits and ribbon-toast. She liked freak shows and jar-lids that tighten round jars. She disliked bad freak shows and weak-kneed tightrope walkers and men who wore britches with link-socks and bowties tied in curlicues and bolos. She herself preferred culottes to Capri’s, red blouses to cable knit sweaters and bobby-socks to hoses. His grandfather liked her but from a distance, not wanting to incur her wraith which she displayed with equal parts anger and rage. He liked to espy her as she made her way along the sideways, her bobby-socks unraveling round her ankles. She liked to watch his grandfather from across the street resting his weary head against Upton Chemists storefront pillars, his chest heaving in and out like a church bellows. Word had it she read Meister Eckhart in the original German, her copy of the Laws found at a flea market just outside Gotha. Claiming the Laws made a muckery of things the Parnell brothers gave their depositions. One of the brothers had a snake-charmer's tan and the other a roustabout’s neck that bulwarked his skull. They wore charms on ropes round their waists to fend off evil and those that do it.

He espied Orofino standing cocksfoot his cap held aloft brim-side out. The first time he espied Orofino was behind Didier’s grocery after a rather ruthless cockfight in 1979. Orofino was holding a hatbox under his arm tied with ribbon. Orofino, Orofino cocksfooted Orofino he whispered to himself. The night of the cockfight he stood behind Orofino watching two cocks fight to the death, fiery cockscombs jumping in circles, talons like penknives. Cockfighting is merciless, he thought, feathers and fat and the Mexican hollering at the top of his lungs ‘kill kill scratch scratch!’ An abattoir he thought. Miserable how a man can get so riled up and red-faced. Pathetic. Shame on you shame on you!

He stared out the oilcloth window at the crescent moon. Cigarette paper. Brown. Yellow. Black lung his grandfather said. Comes from years underground. Decaying tissue; pink to black tarnish.

The beggar woman let out a wail, her hands trembling under the barrows of her go-round. They met at the Piazza del Tornado on a Sunday afternoon in July 1979. She was dressed in a gabardine jumpsuit and he in a cashmere sweater made from sheep’s wool. They spoke in Esperanto and Gaelic, neither understanding the other. Sometimes it’s the voice that doesn’t speak that speaks the loudest, a child’s whisper ‘scratch kill scratch kill!’ She lived in a world of make-believe.

He drank Mescal, the smell of wormwood burning the space between his nose and upper lip. He skirted across the blacktop, his feet, blood-blistered chattel-sticks, anchored to the corset of his ankles. ‘These are small times’ he said out loud. ‘Not a moments rest for the weary’.

He heeled it up the sideways, his black and red chequered shirt flapping unchecked. ‘Lord have mercy!’ he shouted. He took to acts of fearless contrition for the sins he’d committed and those he’d yet to commit. Sins, though inexcusable, were acts of indifference, and neither the sin nor the sinner was held responsible or the act considered praiseworthy or blameworthy. ‘God have Percy on my bowl’ he shouted attracting the attention of a woman walking her dog. ‘What’s that?’ she asked pulling on the leash. Losing his footing he fell, tiny cakes plummeting like bayoneted soldiers onto the asphalt ahead of him. Doffing his cap he sped in the opposite direction, the woman hollering after him. In his haste to make a clean getaway he stepped on the dog’s tail. ‘Look what you’ve done you scoundrel!’ hollered the woman. ‘Have you no humanity?’ ‘Algebra isn’t my forte madam’ he said. ‘Nor am I or have I ever been a member of the Crummiest Party, now shoo’.

Orofino’s great grandparents, peasants by birth, spent evenings with the other sombrero-wearing peasants at the cockfights championing a cock that rarely won. Cockfight enthusiasts with bad teeth and chin-beards pushed and elbowed trying to get a better look at the gladiator cocks. To him cockfighting was all that kept sombrero-wearing cock enthusiasts from turning on one another. With the price of soybean plummeting anything that took their minds off starvation was a welcome distraction. A rasher of bloodied-sausage and a flap of tripe, a breakfast fit for a penurious Queen.

A clochard hocked up a bleb of cows’ stomach, his jaw clenched taut as a screw-wrench. ‘E’s got the aboulia flu’ said his grandmother. ‘We best get him over on his side before he spits up a lung’. They rolled the clochard over on his side, careful not to bang his head against the railing, and loosened his threadbare clothes. ‘Cloppicare-cloppicare-cloppicare’ grunted the clochard, the pus boil on his neck weeping yellowy pus. ‘He’s got a pus boil on his neck’ said his grandmother wiping her hands on her floury apron. He helped his grandmother pull down the clochard’s trousers, which had twisted round his belly, his hipbones as sharp as a swindler’s wit. ‘Is he breathing? his grandmother asked. ‘Careful, that pus boil’s about to burst’ he shouted letting go of the clochard’s shoulders. The clochard opened his mouth and whispered ‘Cloppicare-cloppicare-cloppicare’.

‘Don’t tug at him like that’ said his grandmother, ‘you’ll rip his head off’. The clochard drew in a deep breath, held it for a second and exhaled, a clot of tripe forming a bubble on the tip of his tongue. ‘He’s going into shock by dimity!’ his grandmother said loudly, ‘pull up his head!’ He pounded on the clochard’s chest with both fists and then turned him on his side. A crow spun out from under the Seder’s awning caw cawing, its wings hotchpotch with tar and shingles. ‘Quick before it bursts!’ said his grandmother leaping up and running away, the clochard burbling like a wan calf. The clochard shook violently and then stood up. ‘He’s a wake’ said his grandmother. ‘Wake means dead’ he said to his grandmother. ‘and he’s definitely not that’. A passerby knocked into the clochard, a pocketful of coppers and face-coins tinkling to the ground. The clochard made a fork with his fingers and jabbed at the passerby’s eyes starting a scuffling that ended with both men bloodied and bruised. ‘Now he’s dead, or close to it’ said his grandmother. The clochard slowly raised himself upright and hobbled away mumbling to himself. The next time he saw him he was causing a disturbance out front of the Kingdom Hall.

He sat under a half moon sipping contentedly on a quart bottle of stout, the sky clouded over with crows and blackbirds. ‘That was a near miss’ he said. ‘Life is a gamble’. His grandfather met the harridan at the church bazaar under a generous full moon. She was arranging a table of glass figurines when the Witness, his face tighter than a pugilist’s fist, appeared to the left of her. ‘Life is a gamble’ he said, the corners of his mouth curling like a prepuce. ‘A near miss’.

She had short stumpy legs and long gangly arms. She stopped growing the day she fell down the front steps of the Church of the Perpetual Sinner, severing her spinal cord at the fifth vertebrate. The doctor diagnosed Acromesomelia Malevolencia even though she didn’t had rubella or a history of smallness in the family. Her mother figured it was a curse from God. When she turned eleven her legs bowed out so much they had to put a post between them fastened with screws. She skipped down the street her crutches striking the pavement like dud-matches, her mother hollering at her to be careful. He remembered seeing her sitting on a pillow with a picture of Nolan Falls stitched into the cushiony part.

Her mother wed a man named Brno Slocomb who owned a small hashery near the miles-end. She knew his grandfather but not his father. She spent her honeymoon in Nolan Falls backcombing lice out of her hair, the bed she shared with her husband overrun with bedbugs. She lay swaddled in the sheets like a calf in its mother’s belly, her husband’s cock creeping along the perineum of her ass-bone. They made the beast with two backs her hole moistened with spittle, her husband’s cock bent into her like a Bowie knife. She stared blankly at a wet spot on the ceiling waiting for him to finish. The innkeeper, a bicycle thief and dullard, spied on them through a hole in the wall. ‘I had a bicycle with a sparkly yellow banana seat’ said his father. ‘My granddad greased the gears with machinists’ oil and an old shirt sleeve. It had a sissy-bar’. The innkeeper’s wife made her water in a commode-pot. To the untrained eye it looked like a spittoon not a pisspot sloshing with stale yellowy urine. The innkeeper died at the hands of bare-knuckled men who fisticuffed him to a bloodied pulp.

He loosened a stone and reshoed his shoe. He shooed a quarrel of crows, a quorum of quail and a gaggle of geese. He shimmied his way down the street the loosened stone jangling. A horned fowl flew flapping overhead, its beak formed into a perfect O. He cast his eyes skyward and said ‘Pluribus excelsior’ the stone in his shoe jig jangling.

‘Begin at the begin’ said his grandmother. ‘There’s no beginning’ he said. ‘Then fetch me my umbrella’. The hole that let in sunshine also let in the rain, a wet yolky rain that never seemed to give up. His grandmother always put her ducks in a row, the kitchen windowsill an aviary of wooden teals and mallards. ‘My grandmamma had it right’ he said to himself, ‘line the ducks up and then get on with it’.

He cast his eyes skyward and said ‘ex pluribus abracadabra’ the crows scattering like mice. There were drifters in these parts who carried cudgels in scabbards and wineskins full of calf’s urine slung over their shoulders for good luck. ‘Them they’ll cut off your balls’ warned his grandfather. ‘One at a time’. Then the lights dim, one coulomb at a time, and they’re on you like a snake on an apple . ‘These are strange times’ he thought. ‘One affliction after the other’. He stood in the shadow of the Seder’s clock squinting to make out the littler hand, the one that tells time in affliction. At exactly 27½ seconds past twelve he let out a scream and retched up a stomachful of yellowy bile. ‘They’ll swipe at your belly with their cudgels’ warned his grandfather. ‘Uncoiling your intestines and cutting your bowels to pieces’.

Tonsured O’Malley stood admiring his reflection in the mirror over the sink. Exhausted from all-night vespers, he himself lighting no less than 27 candles, his thoughts were drawn to the Cartesian doubt he’d learned as an innocent years prior. ‘Our Father would not put up with such cockish shenanigans’ he whispered under his grapy breath. ‘Cocksureness has left it’s vile stench everywhere’. He remembered the soft yolks he’d had for breakfast and the holes in the sky left behind after a night of storminess. ‘What a sorry state of affairs’.

The Peacock Haberdashery sold porkpie hats with whistles. His grandfather preferred a rattan boater with an unadorned hatband, his grandmother a going-to-church sunbonnet with marigolds, dahlias and hyssops arranged in a nosegay on the top. On Sundays the pews were filled with women in church bonnets, some garlanded with feathers and others bunched with flowers. So many bonnets with embellishments and prettifications that the altar boys swooned with lightheadedness and dirty thoughts. The milliner’s wife sat in the front pew knitting her husband a winter scarf, the woman next to her fidgeting over a loose thread in her stocking.

Taqiyah panamas and Balmoral bonnets, garrison caps, wedge, rain and kepi, skullcaps and Kufi caps, Nasaq toques and Salakot berets, newsboy caps and nightcap caps, zucchettos and turbans, by the time he was twelve he’d seen them all. He knew the names for all the hats in his grandfather’s collection: fedoras, cowboy, boater, rain, bowler, porkpie and beret.

The legless man awoke to a phantom soreness in his stumps. The aches reminded him that he once had two legs, each with a foot and toes. His handcart needed a new wheel; the back one worn down to the steel rim. A tin shovel at the front added leverage and absorbed the shuddering between him and the asphalt. The legless man carried a three volume set of Russian philosophy on a shelf attached to the backend of his handcart. Embossed on the title page of each volume was an albatross circling an eagle circling a hammer and scythe, the Russian symbol for honor and vodka. He wore a porkpie with a visor to keep the sunlight in abeyance and rain off his face.

He slept on top of a piece of cardboard to keep the dampness out. Many was the night that an icy pox lay in his lower bowel. His guts were rotting from a rusty tin of sardines he found in a dumpster behind the grocers. He drank wine by the quart but the sour metallic taste remained. He remembered the spoonfuls of Castor oil his mother fed him and how it burned his throat and upset his stomach. The label on the tin read 'Cupper’s Finest Sardines, Man’s Other Best Friend'. He tried eating salted bread but the taste lingered in the back of his throat. He slept worryingly under a whorish yellow moon, a ghostly pallor bringing out the paleness in his face.

He grudgingly awoke and fetched the stick he used for fishing out old clothes from the dustbins and bit down hard hoping to assuage the niggardly pain that he awoke to each and every morning. He positioned his handcart to affect a bulwark between him and the outside world and mused on the day ahead. ‘Cupper’s are rot’ he mumbled, ‘rot and feces’. He saw the shamble leg man gambling and shimmying across the street his arms flailing like sailcloth. Empanada Del Amore strode defiantly across the street hissing and horning and making a general spectacle of herself. She tossed a bloodied butcher’s apron into the nearest dustbin and hurried up the downwash the harridan gibbering after her ‘sluttish slut whore’s belly afterbirth!’ The legless man bellied from atop his handcart ‘sluttish whore!’ A coxswains’ shuttle whirled past his head just missing his ear and caromed into the Seder’s storefront window. ‘Cupper’s… putrid fish’ he hollered at the top of his lungs. Empanada Del Amore tippled sideways, her feet marking the pavement like struck matches. ‘Never a moments rest for the incontinent’ she said loud enough to draw attention to herself.

The lamplighter lit the street lamps with a kerosene wick and ladder, his right arm steadying him from falling headlong into the pavement below. As he was a wobbly old fool the lamplighter seldom lit a lamp on the first try. He levelled his left shoulder with the lamppost and drew an imaginary plumb-line on the asphalt, his eyes straining to find the exact spot on the lamp-wick. His greatcoat was grackle with ashes, the tops of his shoes piebald with burns. Chadwick the town imbecile stood in the exact spot where the lamplighter lit his last wick and blew out the flame. ‘That’ll show him’ he grumbled. ‘The night is suppose to be dark not lit up like a Roman candle’.

He was higgledy and liked nothing more than to spend the day sniggling. His uncle Moesha taught him how to bait and shore-land squirming eels. More often than naught they caught dogfish, pulling them up hand-over-hand from the mucky bottom of the river. They cooked a shore lunch over a driftwood fire firming up the dogfish with salt and vinegar. His head was full of collusions and disruptions from exposure to gasoline fumes and an ungentle childhood. Without them he would be lost to thoughts of a less savory character.

‘Right now, this very moment, I am thinking about my own life’ he mused ‘a life spent in search of characters to fill the emptiness, the void, of my life’. All of his great uncles had raffish hair that gave them an oafish unruly appearance. Moving from one point to the other, his uncles great and not so great imagined they were majestic Lords on their way to court. The men on the other side of the family lived with the discomfiture of baldness, donning paper hats copied onto tracing-paper to hide their receding hairlines and smooth shiny crowns.

This squalor behind the bakery was startlingly off-putting. Half empty dustbins and rummaged through dumpsters left one with the feeling that hooligans had recently laid waste to the alleyway. All that thoughtlessness and unneeded disorderliness and upheaval.

‘Did I say he was old? Well I was mistaken’ said his grandfather. ‘He’s ageless and has been for as long as I can remember’. His grandfather cleared his throat and continued ‘Age tells us nothing about a person other than how useless they are. And that, my boy, is a tragedy’. He shouldered his kill-hammer and walked out onto the porch. ‘What we know doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. We’d do better to put our trust in alchemy or prayer. Did I say I was mistaken? Well perhaps I am just too old and decrepit to remember’.

The legless man had a purloined copy of the Venus de Milo hanging on the wall in his motel room. Lingeringly astraddle the sepulcher toilet he fixed his eyes on the missing arms. A Jackdaw, its wings cutting the sky like a Skinner’s knife, flew across the window. The legless man pushed his handcart out from beneath the Seder’s awning and whispered ‘Cupper’s Finest for the feign of liver’. As a farthing child he was forced to wear short-pants with cuffs that cut into his legless legs. His mother bought him short-pants made from Egyptian cloth that belled out at the bottom like flour sifters. They buttoned at the fly and had curlicue stitching on the back pockets.

He awoke to a rustling outside his motel window. He reached for his eyeglasses and walked to the door. Opening it a crack he peeked out and came face-to-face with a man wearing dark sunglasses. ‘is it raining?’ whispered the man. ‘My eyesight, as you can see, is horrible’. Not knowing how to respond he crossed his arms over his chest and took a step back. ‘Were a fire to burn it would burn brightly and were a crow to caw it would caw loudly’ he said offhandedly. ‘Bacliff’s a crone’s throw from the Bay-of-Figs’. Manly legs made from steel that could jump tall buildings in a single bound, not stumps that stank. Not legs that stumbled and made a nuisance of themselves. Fat legs with knees and meniscuses, aches and pains. Legs that curled up in a fetal position when he slept. Bowlegged legs. He would settle for white legs covered in hair like his granddad’s leg.

As it was Sunday she put on her sunbonnet with the paisley hatband. She had a church-hat she wore on Saturdays and days that had an E in them. On Mondays she went hatless. Tuesdays she slept in and preferred her toast unbuttered. Wednesdays and Tuesdays she spent in contemplation of what was to come and what came before. Saturday mornings she ate Monk’s cheese and biscuits and nursed a cup of chamomile tea. Sunbonnets and seafaring boaters and head-scarves made from whiskey-cotton or Egyptian linen. She had a fondness for Sufi scarves and handkerchiefs made of silk. Every second Friday she wore an Estonian Taqiyah securing it to her head with a red silk ribbon.

She volunteered at the Hospital for the Gravely Injured where she saw a man who’s ear had been torn off in a fistfight, a blood soaked rag wrapped round his head like a diaper. Another man had such a horrible cough that the nurse had to put him in a room all by himself. A woman with a swollen belly lay stretched out on two seats cradling her belly like a stone-child. A man with a nervous tick stared at the woman with the swollen belly. A man waiting for his wife sat in a chair by the window. A woman waiting for her husband stood next to the man waiting for his wife. She ran out of the hospital as fast as her feet would take her.

A stray lay basking in the sun, its tongue pulled back like a slingshot. A three-legged dog, its stump wormy with maggots, limped passed the basking stray. ‘Dogs sharpened their dogteeth on bones’ his grandfather told him.

A viral antibiotic, Gramicidin, is obtained from the bacterial species Bacillus Brevis purloined from dirt. Gramicidin is particularly effective against gram-positive bacteria (see Gram's stain). Because the drug is highly toxic it cannot be administered internally and so is used only on the skin as a lotion or ointment. It is used primarily in the treatment of infected surface wounds, and in eye, nose and throat infections. The American microbiologist René Dubos isolated the substance Tyrothricin in 1939 and later showed that it was composed of two substances, Gramicidin and Tyrocidine. These were the first antibiotics to be manufactured commercially. The prophet told his grandfather that in order to protect the flock from infestation and disease he needed to travel out beyond the five-mile and find the antibiotic he’d read about in Popular Mechanics. His grandfather had heard stories about dogmen that lived beyond the five-mile where the sun was so hot it blistered a man’s exposed head. These dogmen were known to kill small children and the sickly, heaving their lifeless bodies over the cliffs into the muddy river below their encampment.

His grandfather read about the American microbiologist René Dubos and his victory over infectious diseases. ‘The drug is highly toxic!’ cautioned the prophet, ‘and should be handled with the utmost care’. As prescribed by law the antibiotics had to be tested before they could be marketed for public consumption. And so they were tested on imbeciles and the homeless, many of whom died from toxic shock and respiratory failure. ‘One must first be at peace with penicillin’ the American microbiologist was heard to say, ‘then we can move forward with the manufacturing of Bacillus Brevis’.

He read about Tyrocidine in a Reader’s Digest he found in the trash behind the Waymart. Behind Stones bakery he found a rolled up copy of Popular Mechanics. He folded the magazines into an origami crane and threw it over the refraining wall between the Sears and the Waymart. His great uncle Maxus told him that the Asians ate uncooked fish with the scales still on. Mac Schreiber scolded his great uncle for badmouthing the Japanese ‘If it were for that Jap’s we’d still be listening to a Herrold’s’ he said gruffly, his bulging pockmarked nose bobbling.

Colin Wooster died in the Hospital for the Gravely Injured from Gram's stain the day after he was admitted complaining of stomach cramps. They found him in the pigeon house holding onto an advertisement for a cardboard submarine. He was wearing his best summer trousers and a paper hat. He also went by the initials W.C. When W.C. was eleven and a half years old he was diagnosed with the whooping and sent away to a sanitarium with no windows. He climbed out the skylight onto the roof where he laid out a three by seven foot patch of Astroturf and built a flowerbox out of old window-frames and straightened nails. He taught himself Japanese in between ECST sessions and learned how to fold crate-paper into origami cranes. He took to wearing woolen trousers and preferred his fish under-cooked. He knew of him from a magazine article he read in the Reader’s Digest. Popular Mechanics ran ads for X-ray glasses and how-to’s on building your own ham radio while Reader’s Digest ran ads for cardboard submarines and recipes on how to cook raw fish in its own gob.

‘These are dreadful crab cakes’ his grandfather complained. ‘now fix me something else now!’ His grandmother rarely listened to his grandfather’s ranting, turning him off like a Herrold’s. His great aunt Alma owned the first console television on her street. She never once missed her afternoon shows. When the antenna fell off the roof she sat in front of the console squinting like an onion cutter, her favorite movie stars fighting it out on a background of snow. The fishmonger prepared small, medium and large fish, some with worms and others with puff-out yellow bellies. He used a hose and funnel for siphoning fish guts and worked until the tips of his fingers bled and his eyes smarted from staring at fish all day long. He traded the gob and fish semen for butcher’s paper to wrap the fish in. Wives cooked chowder, intestine and guts simmering in a bath of cloudy sperm. The fishmonger worked until the cows came home and the roosters came to roost. He would have prepared mutton had he enough rope to hoist it over the transom. He kept a mongrel dog in a clapboard shack behind the cannery, feeding it fish bellies and lobster antennas. He took the dog for walks, yanking the ox-hair leash if the mongrel drove to the right or the left. He disliked things off-kilter and went to great pains to redress anything that might be perceived as a carom or a veer. As he was blessed with a straight back and equally straight legs, a gift from his mother’s side, he could rein in the dog if it mistook a “heel” for a “hightail” or a “come here” for a “fetch”.

Diospyros Genitalis

2011-11-06T16:57:00.004-05:00

‘Those of you who have read De Animus have a good deal of forgetting to do’ said the prophet. The prophet cleared his gravelly throat and said ‘ex nixie animus’ the congregants looking on in awe. ‘You may begin now, if you have the courage to’.

The prophet sought out a doctor to cure his swollen legs. ‘I can perform a phlebotomy’ said the doctor. The prophet agreed, saying as long as it was done to ensure his prophesy, even bloodletting.

His mother made him wear culottes summer, winter and fall and a scarf that hid his face from chin to brow. He was legless, having fallen drunk into the path of an oncoming train, his legs sheared off below the hips. He moved about on a small board equipped with wheels, punting himself along with two wooden blocks, his stumps sleeved in a garment bag nailed into the back of the board.

Klickitat-klickitat he went his hands feverously paddling the asphalt. He drank from a bottle of oatmeal water balanced between the stumps of his legs, a lesson from another legless man with years of experience. He drank like a Mormon heretic cast asunder into the depths of hell. He took a long slow pull from the bottle, his lips encircling the fibrous glass. He knew the depths a man would go to outcross the cross so didn’t push it too far. He punted his way up the sidewalk not stopping for pedestrians or small children tethered to lampposts by impatient mothers.

He knew of other people but only in passing. He paddled his way across the blacktop pivoting his hips to lessen the imbalance. ‘My life is driving me crazy’ he murmured to himself, for even were there anyone in earshot they wouldn’t have given his protestation a second thought. Shingles and Tarpaper 4 Sale read a sign over a hardware store. ‘Tarpaper’ he thought ‘a man’s castle is his house’. When he was a child the legless man was cared for by an au pair with caramel yellow skin. She pushed him round town in a perambulator with a border on top. She spoke Esperanto and twiddled her fingers when she felt anxious, which she did most of the time. She took Dalasi morphine for pain which she kept in tinctures in her handbag.

A little sniff of dipole will do. His grandfather carried whole tunas slung over his shoulder with a hook. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. Given his lumbago it was a wonder his grandfather could carry his own weight. The men drove Pontiac coupes with automatic windows and bucket seats. The men threw fish guts into the giant smelter, the cistern-belly stretched to five centimeters, his grandfather poking the offal with a stick. He lay in the her belly, biscuits and whey-marrow, his mother cutting the crusts from the edges of his toast. She spread turnip-paste on his breakfast cakes saying it would bring out the vim and vigor in him. A stringy spat-cord, what tethers her to the bubo of his navel.

His mother carried low. She grunted and moaned, her eyes trained on the Douala’s forehead. ‘Stop it’ she demanded. ‘this is most annoying!’ She carried low, the turret of her pelvis pressed against the railing of the bed. ‘Such a shameless hussy’ she moaned. He corseted up the down, his grandmamma’s stern warning ever-present in his thoughts ‘there’ll be hell to pay my boy…more than a soul can cash and carry’.

Everything, the bluest sky and the greenest ocean, appeared in the mirror of her eyes. The eyes are not the mirror of the soul, as she had been told, but the lead backing. She thought of her father’s hands and a child’s thumbprint in a clump of soft mud. She weighed her thoughts taking care not to weigh them too much lest she faint. He mother fainted often, her apron snagging table legs and curtain rods. A child’s thumbprint in a galumph of mud. ‘Such a shameless hussy’ she moaned. The soul is the mirror of the eyes. His mother’s thoughts spun and spun weaving themselves into a latticework of agony. Lambswool blankets and her mother’s bee-bitten lips ‘shameless hussy am I’.

His grandfather made his peace with God. The rector’s assistants crossed himself and stood astride the altar picking a tooth. ‘Alms for the poor’ shouted a beggar-woman. ‘Shut your mouth’ hissed the rector’s assistant. She squatted on the steps of the church wrapped in Salvation Army blankets. ‘I am a person too’. He turned out the pockets of the priest’s surplice feeling for loose change, and finding none hung it in the sacristy closet. ‘My feet are numb’. Hearing the beggar-woman’s plea his grandfather unbowed his knees and exited the church. ‘Cunts!’ yelled the beggar-woman piquantly. ‘May you rot in hell! Every last one of you!’ His grandfather hurried to catch the tram, the sky overhead threatening rain. His granddad used to catch the very same tram every morning at seven o’clock sharp, only once missing it when his grandfather fell ill and he felt duty bound to stay home and care for her. Bendix Schönflies was the name of the trolley driver whom his grandfather said a cheery hello to each morning when he boarded the tram, smiling broadly as he made his way down the aisle to his seat in the middle. Molasses biscuits, his grandmother made them fresh each morning before his granddad’s seven o’clock tram. She wrapped them in wax-paper, folding the edges into envelopes and placed them in his granddad’s lunchbox with an apple. Next to them she placed a bottle of goat’s milk and a linen napkin.

His granddad carried a calculator on his belt that he used to weigh the cost ratio of cod to haddock. Taking into consideration the batter, which weighed less than the fish, he arrived at 27½. He set foot in the church only once, on the occasion of his niece’s christening, a commodious affair attended by his sister, two brothers and the priest.

His grandfather told him that ‘Dogs live outside the world of humans’ and ‘the dog-world is a world of sniffing and scratching’. The Slav butcher had a Florentine recipe for dog meat: a cube of Oyo and 27 ½ cups of warmish milk. The meat was marinated overnight in the milk and Oyo, skillet-fired and then left to simmer overnight a second time. He served it with smoked Gouda on a bed of wild rice. He cleaned his teeth with chicken bones, meniscus’ his grandmother said.

A fat moon sat low in the morning sky, the horizon overburdened with rain clouds and gulls. Some mornings the moon sat so low it resembled a crouching frog, sometimes a yellow disc and sometimes simply a moon. The northernmost star twinkled next to a daystar in the branches of a willow tree. ‘The star that corrupts all the other stars’ his grandmother said. ‘a few tawdry souls too’. (And souls made from morphine and aftershave). His grandmother made Doll pastries with extra icing sugar and almonds. The proof is in the pudding, Plumtree’s extra with lemon sauce and a hint of cinnamon. Before the accidental drowning his grandmother made pudding every Friday without fail; the drowning making the preparation more laborious. Barrel of Bass, owned and operated by the Ansell Brothers, sold Healy inkerasers a dime a half-dozen. His father boasted that he could out-eat anyone and would prove it a the Feast of Our Lady of the Mount. Those in the know knew that Phil Cockerel, known for his commodious appetite, would be in attendance and would most probably out-eat his father by a mackerel and a tongue.

The Westmoreland Brothers, owners of a Daguerreotyping shop and renowned for their own voracious hunger, were nowhere to be seen that day. Later it was learned that all three spent the day sniggling, two of the brothers falling head over heel into the water. His grandmother had bunions that splayed her toes like windblown branches.

When not softening bunions and applying plasters the podiatrist examined whores for bedbugs and headlice. In return for his prophylactic services he was given a girl on the house to do with as he pleased. His grandfather believed in the imbecilization of the masses, which he maintained was being carried out by the commodiously rich and parasitic. ‘Mark my words, the more television you watch the more stupid you’ll become… and imbeciles, my boy, don’t fare well in a machine world’. His grandfather believed that sooner or later the world would break in two, separating the imbecilic from the smart-alecky.

He drank black molasses Porter, his fellow imbibers slapping him amiably on the back, his grandfather replying with a frothy smile. ‘Imbeciles’ laughed his grandfather. ‘Soon they’ll see that all that reading was for naught’. He liked mincemeat pies and porkpie hats. His Brigham billowing his grandfather sat on the front stoop watching the world pass by. Penny seeds he called them, the black hirsute rolls running with them. Saint Albert and the Corrupter Sims, those two liked crab cakes and a nip of Paddy’s Bold. The proofing is in the mincemeat, his grandmother would say.

He dreamt he was dreaming, his eyes inside out, staring at a blanched spot on the ceiling. Dreams are for the restless, his grandmother said, ABEYANCE CULPA. Saint Albert and the Corrupter Sims ate crab cakes until their stomachs burst, Sims leading the way with a comity hiccup. ‘Thinking takes far too much energy’ he thought. ‘and the headaches are merciless’. ‘Give me a strong cup of bitters and one of grandmamma’s poppy seed cakes’. ‘What about piggly-wigglies?’ Dreams are the things that CAKES are made of you fool!

Weakfish in molasses, his granddad verily rarely missed a chance to pilfer a pre-prandial snoot. ‘So little time and so few bowls’.

As he sat eating his boiled meat sandwich waiting for his father he watched men in Fedoras and bowlers, panamas and sou'westers, hats that look like hats but on further inspection were really grapefruits cut in half, enter and leave the off-hour. A roundly thickset man with a melancholic smile disguised under a moustache, his ferry captain’s cap tottering, reached out his hand and rubbed the top of his head, saying as he did ‘that’s a good boy, I’m sure your da’ll be out soon’. Spy’s hats and Belizean cowboy hats, hats made from hemp and spun wool that sat like dishrags on scullery maid’s heads. Corsair commander’s hats with gold piping and chevrons, Bishop’s Miters coopered with frankincense and mums, snake-charmer’s hats and hats fashioned from elephant fronds and Moses reeds. He watched men with little regard for children and wife, Job and God, make their way in and out of the off-hour, some stumbling drunk, others fishing for coins in the bottoms of threadbare pockets, and coming up with nothing sang offensive songs bent on making fun of the less-fortunate and downtrodden. With this many hats to choose from his father always chose a simple boater with a silver thread merge between the brim and hatband. It was not hard to identify his father coming out of the off-hour, as his silver-threaded boater, now crumpled and at a tilt on his head, smelled of spiced rum and other men’s laughter.

He was raised by traveling circus clowns. Jocose and Bovina traveled with the Herschel Liege traveling circus, stopping in small towns and hamlets, cities and conurbations, anywhere where they were permitted to set up their tents and livery the animals. He was conceived after a night of debauchery, Jocose moaning, her clown’s nose splayed across her cheekbones, Bovina going-off inside her like a Roman Candle, her thighs thumping against the cabana walls. The hastily rolled prophylactic burst off the end of his penis hitting the roof with such force that it shook the cabana like a swift boot, the window frame clapping against the door jamb like castanets. He was spit out like a rotten oyster, a boil the size of a grapefruit on the tip of his nose. Having managed to wrench him free with a speculum the doctor noticed that he had two arms, ten fingers, two eyes, one brown one blue, and no legs to speak of. His father, rising from his barstool exclaimed ‘for the love of God what have we done?’

As legs are the stays that keep a body from topple over their son’s body was in constant topple. He caromed and swayed, listing like a broken metronome. What balance he had went to staving off obstacles and impediments which were many. His parents, figuring that a clown’s nose might prevent their son from toppling over, rigged one from ear to ear tying it at the base of his head with a reef-knot. His parents shunted him around the circus grounds in a wheelbarrow, his father pushing, his mother making sure his head didn’t bang up against the sides. He was a queer sight, arms flailing, his nose redder than the reddest tomato. Jocose and Bovina rented a small cabana with a makeshift portico and awning; they owned three lawn-chairs and a tree trunk fashioned into a coffee table.

They ate from the circus garbage, spoiled cottage hams and wieners, some so shriveled they looked like amputated toes, crusts of dry bread and things rotten but not so rotten that they weren’t edible. His grandfather knew of the circus family but only in passing, not giving them a second thought. The second time he saw them they were performing under the big-top across from the Waymart next to the aqueduct. Jocose and Bovina were running in circles, they’re hair combed back into ducktails. They pretended they were two cock’s fighting, backs ridged, they’re feet kicking up clouds of circus dirt. Their son sat astride his wheelbarrow suckling the end of a rubber glove his mother had puckered into a nipple.

His parents never read the Cat in the Hat to him or anything that made animals into humans. He preferred Popular Mechanics and National Geographic. He read folios and book chapters devoted to tightrope walking and circusry, how-to books and anything remotely concerned with weighs and balances. He read articles on scouting and editorials that championed the use of sulfas for trench-foot. He liked orange soda and Black Cat gum. He read for such long stretches that his eyes crossed in on themselves, his vision doubled and redoubled. His sight would reappear but only after he’d force himself to squint 27½ times without stopping. He knew a man whose eyes were so milky with cataracts that he had to wear a cardboard cutout over his face. When he took off the cardboard cutout to wipe the sweat from his brow he saw that his eyes were blanched with white dots, some no bigger than the head of a pin. He used a cane with a silver hogshead cap that he twiddled between his forefinger and thumb. He knew a woman with a stonemason’s jaw that clacked when she ate.

He awakened to a fiery yellow sun, its brilliance obliging him to squint like a Chinaman. Things getter hotter the hotter things get. On miserably hot days he headed for the coolness of the museum where he would stare for hours at a painting of Christ weeping next to a woodcut of the Last Supper. He would bring with him a ploughman’s lunch, two hard boiled eggs, three pickled onions and a persimmon (Diospyros Genitalis). He would sit with his left leg hooked round his right, take a small bite of egg and onion and a mouthful of persimmon. He ate in this manner until his ploughman’s lunch was finished

La Traviata - im Hauptbahnhof Zürich

2011-10-10T11:50:00.000-04:00

Antonio Negri - A Revolt That Never Ends (1 of 5)

2011-09-11T12:44:00.000-04:00

Appalachian Banjo

2011-09-04T11:29:00.003-04:00

His grandfather rolled Zigzag and Chum. He sucked on Popeye cigarettes putting the lit end in his mouth. He met a deaf mute at the church bazaar on a warm June night, the stars glittering like broken crystal. She was dressed in a rose skirt and sandals. She registered sounds through the vibrations they made. Everything was corporeal, a feeling.

The deaf mute had a scullery maid’s aplomb for rearranging sock drawers and linen hampers, which she did quietly and with steadied poise. She scrubbed other people’s floors with her bare hands and a bishopric-lye she kept in a tin underneath her bed. She’d rather they smile or smell the lilac of her neck, a place seldom touched by hands other than her own, than pay her. Her days were divided between scullery-work and stitching frayed pant’s bottoms and wayward coat-sleeves. She used a bone-thimble and a seven-gage sewing needle and thread so thick you could truss a chicken with it.

The florist made beautiful nosegays for the deaf mute carefully choosing each flower and arranging them into exquisite bouquets: Windflowers and Daffodils, Whortleberry and Venus’s Looking-glass, Toad-flax and Teasel, Sweet William and Silver-weed, Persian Candy-tuft and Narcissus, Mandrake and yellow Madder, Larkspur and Ladies’ Bedstraw, Jonquils and Indian cane, Hornbeam and Hawthorn, Goosefoot and Goats-rue, Foxglove and Dodder, Date-plum and Cinquefoil, Chaste-tree and Bugloss, Bladder-senna and Black thorn, Arum and Amaranth. He wove them together with the greatest care never once mislaying a flower. She like fruit flans, peach or currant apricot and anything that tasted like anis.

He was taught how to play checkers by a Quaker with hairy arms and a coughing laugh. The Quaker offered him tiny cupcakes with frosting. He ate anything that was put in front of him not wanting to appear ungrateful. His great grandfather and the Quaker delivered sermons to the lost and forsaken, the Quaker coughing and laughing all the way through. Neither his great grandfather or the laughing coughing Quaker gave a damn about the lost and forsaken; they did as they were told not once questioning their callings.

He met Delaney at the Lutheran crab fry on a sunshiny August day. Delaney sat over a table cracking crab shells with a nutcracker he carried in a scabbard on his belt. He espied him from a distance as he was in no mood for pleasantries. Once Delaney had you in his sights he would chatter on, the insufferable fool, and he did not suffer fools lightly. Most of the crab-eaters were either recumbent or in a state of decumbency, few were there who sat up straight or left their elbows off the table. Two congregants of the Lutheran church sat by themselves cracking crab shells. ‘This is strangely disturbing’ said the one to the other. ‘all these crabs and not a shell insight.’ ‘Don’t you mean in sight?’ said the other.

His grandfather smoked inhaling and exhaling at the same time. He tamped bungholes with a wooden mallet swung from the top of his shoulder, stopping only to readjust the spigot with the heel of his hand. His grandmother rode on a cushion that smelled of oxen sweat, the horses breaking into a gallop. The anvil-man hammered tacks into braided hair just big enough to slip through a bridle. The first time he saw her she was reading the National Geographic. He thought this rather odd, as most people simply read the captions under the photos.

‘The world is all there is’ his grandfather said. ‘vectoring nonsense’. ‘And the smell’ said his grandmother. ‘the bloody smell!’

When he was a boy his grandfather ate honey sandwiches with the crusts removed. He ate delicately taking small bites. His mother made him honey sandwiches with a butter knife she kept in a kitchen drawer next to the refrigerator. She spread the butter first then unspooled the honey with the end of a spoon. Sometimes his mother bought cone honey with bees’ stingers and twigs in it. ‘Dungarvan honey is the worst’ he’d complain to his mother. ‘it’s too sweet’.

‘Out of my way you!’ shouted his grandfather striding up the street on his way to the Kingdom Hall. A parade of people walking in single file made their way past his grandfather, his anger itching like poison ivy. ‘Out of my way I said!’ The single file broke down the middle, some pitching to the east others to the west, his grandfather making his way up the centre. ‘That’s more like it’ he grumbled, ‘show some respect for the old man’.

His grandfather wore his belt round his waist like a coil of intestine. He wouldn’t allow the sun in through the bedroom window until he’d said his morning prayers. He asked his grandmother if they ate Oats for breakfast, his grandmamma replying ‘My child you ask such stupid questions’.

His grandmother cut toast into fingers and pushed them into the porridge with the held end of a spoon. Everything tasted better once his grandmamma had touched it. ‘This is no life for a man’ muttered his grandmother. His grandmother’s cataracts were gray not whitish like most peoples’.

The doctor was concerned that the two halves of his skull might never join. A flap of skin was obstructing the two sides from coming together ‘and if it doesn’t fix itself the boy will have a soft spot on the top of his head’. ‘Can’t you do something?’ pleaded his mother. ‘Your son’s fate is in God’s hands not mine’ said the doctor matter-of-factly. ‘anyhow, madam, we’re not in the business of miracles’.

The doctor’s cure for stuttering was to stuff her mouth with cotton batten and use her tongue as a tiller. The elisions continued, bits of cotton finding their way into her stomach. Cow’s give more milk during a quarter moon his great uncle said. When his great aunt told him that this was as queer as a Quaker nickel his face went as sour as lemon biscuits. She told him many queer things but he never gave them much thought. She felt small when her grandmother looked at her and big when her father smiled. She emptied the commode-pot out the back veranda, tossing the night’s emictions onto the dewy grass. His great aunt’s life was unbending, the bane of being a Quaker’s daughter. Blood sickness and anemia, common to the Mormon calling, were uncommon in a Quaker home. The Mormon’s spurned medical intervention seeing it as a sectarian evil created by man. His great aunt refused to let his mother play with the Mormon children. One of the Mormon children died from blanching anemia, the prophet denying her a blood transfusion.

His grandmother ironed creases into his grandfather’s pants using a vinegar bottle filled with starch and a flatiron she heated on top of the stove. She rubbed goose fat into his trousers to keep the crease from coming out. He never did get the gist of the iron. He thought it a waste of time as his grandfather’s work made everything wrinkly, and besides, his poor grandmother’s back ached afterwards.

His grandmother, her hands covered in flour and half-risen yeast, larded pies with enough butter to choke an ox. She never once stopped to think that her pies might stiffen rickets in her children’s bowed legs. On Sunday evenings her grandfather played music with the men at the lodge, strumming his psaltery like a Appalachian banjo. His mother’s mother made Christmas pudding in a Chockfull of Nuts coffee tin. She pealed the label off with a paring knife and relabeled it CP for Christmas pudding. She boiled the eggs, flour, raisins and currants over low heat, adding the Brandy after it had simmered. His grandfather always stole a bowlful the day before Christmas. He added an extra handful of cloves which his grandmother frowned upon but pretended she hadn’t noticed. The year he was born there was no spectacular meteor shower like the year his brother was born. He remembered his mother’s disenchanted face. He remembered the doctor clearing his throat then the bright lights and the smell of ether. The following year there was a comet so bright and dazzling that it filled the night sky with heavenliness. The doctor told his mother to push, his tiny mucousy head crowning, his mother’s face labored with exhaustion.

Some people believe in a single god others in a multiplicity of gods, each with its own divinity, and some believe in nothing. His grandfather fell somewhere between the god of nothing and the many, and when he worried about death, which he did from time to time, he lifted himself into the first camp, the camp of one god, the god of transcendence and immortality. This god was a fearless god, a god of magic and alchemy, and simply knowing this made him feel less ill at ease and frightened. Sleep is like the devil, said his grandmother, always lurking in the dark. His grandmother said strange things that caused his grandfather no end of discommode. When she spoke in a soft whisper it always came out like a scream.

The day he was born it rained so hard the sky almost vanished. The sky was so blue and deep that you couldn’t see to the bottom. That day his grandmother made Mormon pickles canning them in Mason jars with flimsy rubber stoppers and screw-tops that never quiet screwed tight. The brine was so murky it reminded him of bull’s semen or curdled milk. She used a double-boiler with a tinfoil lid and an oversized wooden spoon that had teeth-marks in it. The smell of cucumbers and his grandmother’s fingers pitching the spoon up against the side of the double-boiler left an indelible impression on him. The day he was born the house smelled like Mormon pickles and the washing solution his grandmother used to sterilize the pickling jars.

When she was fed up with his ne'er-do-welling she would say ‘You’re sure to put me in an early grave’. He poached a handfuls of pickles and slid like a rattle out the back door. ‘You’re mule headed just like your grandfather’ she said.

Molasses, that’s what she like on her toast. Her mother told her that it would make her lips fuller and stop the trembling in her legs. It never did, but she put it on her toast just the same. She thought it funny that wives’ tales are told by silly men not wives. Wives’ tales are like fairy tales, she thought, a troubled beginning and a happy ending. All she saw was the troubled beginning never reading through to the happy ending.

The cobbler fixed old broken-down shoes and boots. He spoke in grunts and seldom wore the same soft-soled shoes twice. He knew of the cobbler but had never made his formal acquaintance. He couldn’t afford his services so had very little cause to. He stuffed crumpled newspaper in the toes of his boots sidestepping the need for professional shoeing.

Not I

2011-08-12T11:06:00.000-04:00

Requeijão

2011-08-12T10:19:00.003-04:00

She knew of two such friars who were excommunicated for their sexual assignations. Both rode bicycles with tassels on the handle grips, their smocks clipping in the spokes. Brother Von Romani worked in the monastery creamery where his job was to separate the curds from whey. He ladled the cheese, a marmalade of fermenting milk and hardened cream, guarantying a good ratio of whey to curd. The friar in charge of the creamery, Brother Ripoll, swaddled the cheese in hemp and sent the rounds by oxcart to market a few miles down the mountain. The friars made old cheddar, staying clear of complex cheeses as the oxcart could only accommodate light cheeses, anything heavier or more complex would have busted the axel caroming the oxcart into a frenzied cartwheel. At the market one could buy a variety of local and foreign cheeses:

Blue, Roquefort, Camembert, Swiss, cheddar, nippy, sharp, Brie, Oka, Gouda (smoked and rawboned, rind and paraffin), Granston Blue (Llangloffan), Landsker Blue, Soft Blue (St. Florence), Gorau Glas (Quirt), Caws Preseli (Pantmawr), Perl Wen (Caws Cenarth), Cheddars and Cheddar type - Aeron Valley, ACC Llandyrnog, Hufenfa De Arfon, Llangloffan, Llanboidy, Cilowen Organic, Lancych (Caws Cenarth), Merlin, Little Acorn, Caws Celtica, Caerffili, Caws Cenarth, Caws Nantybwla, Caerfai, Teifi, Castle Dairies, Celtic Promise (Teifi), Saval (Teifi), Caws Cerwyn (Pantmawr), St. David's (Abergavenny), Dansco Mozzarella, Teifi range, Caws Cenarth, Cheez Whiz, Egyptian Sardo, Testouri, Caravane (camel milk), Bokmakiri, South African Kwaito, Japanese Sakura, Palestinian Ackawi, Basket cheese, Labneh, Jameed, Jibneh Arabieh, Bergkäse, Lüneberg, Tyrolean grey cheese (or Grau Käse), Brusselse Kaas, (Brussels, cow’s milk), Remedou cheese (Belgian cow's milk), Kaškaval or Kashkaval (Bulgarian and Macedonian), Olomoucké (Czech),Bavaria blu, Anthotyros (Greek), Slovak salty Liptauer, Italian Bocconcini, Pljevlja (Serbian Cyrillic: Edam (Edammer), Jarlsberg, Polish Bryndza, Brazilian Requeijão, Romanian, Russian Tvorog, Serbian Caciocavallo, Slovakian Oscypek, Spanish Garrotxa, Swedish Blå Gotland, Swiss Sbrinz, Schabziger, Quebecois Bleu Bénédictin, Nova Scotia Dragons Breath, Le Riopelle de l'Isle, Mexican Añejo, Farmer cheese, Tillamook Cheddar and Venezuelan Queso Palmita.

Dr. O. Pfister oversaw the ward in the Overnight Asylum where his uncle lived. He suggested ECT and diabetic shock claiming that they were scientifically proven to encumber the progression of dementia and foul thinking. Over the door to Ward 7, the ward where his uncle lived out his last days mad as a coot, was a sign that read: “How terrible to become caught up in the great machinery of the world’s expectations, simply because we have not exercised the right to have a personality!” (Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt).

A Druid bore-cart sped past, a monk dressed in a surplice and leather toe-sandals pulling hard on the reins, the horses snorting and faying, toppling over the friar’s oxcart sending wheels of ripe cheese into the air. The Druids produced a low-grade Quebecois Bleu Bénédictin that smelt like boiled rags. They lived in a stone creamery on the other side of the mountain and spoke a Gaelic dialect that was consonant and guttural. The head Druid, a monk by the name of Smith, oversaw the cheese production making sure it had that overripe necrotic saltiness to it. There was talk among the cheese-makers that the Druids used bone-clips and some slippery substance that resembled oil of castor. The friar’s turned their noses up at the Druids, finding they’re alchemy highly suspect; and besides they’re bicycles were rusty, the tires threadbare and worn through to the rims.

His uncle wore a hat with a feathered hatband that he twisted at the front to form a bow and tassel. He’d seen the Druids do the same thing but with a four-cornered hat. The Druids’ hats also bore an insignia that resembled a Papal thumb. His uncle had seen this once before in a movie where a monk bent over a dying man, his four-cornered hat tipping sideways and falling onto the dead man’s chest, the crowd of onlookers wailing, one obese woman with a furriers hat weeping uncontrollable, her face flush with tears. To his eye there appeared to be a society of capped men, some in bowlers and berets, others in fedoras and boaters with numbered cards in the hatbands. The Druids stuck out, as they’re hats were made from a poor quality felt and seldom fit properly. Among the Druids blood boils and an unassailable itching were common complaints, although dandruff, a common affliction among the friars, had yet to affect the Druids, they were hard of hearing and prone to eczema while the friars were not. The Eleatics lived in a small village designed and built on modal logic and mathematics. Unlike the Druids, whom they considered lapsed, they wore shirred robes, the logicians permitted a belt or a length of rope.

A pattering rain soughed his cutout cardboard mat frizzing what little hair he had left on his head. A clap of thunder brokered his thoughts, casting him into a world of elfin ears and crooked smiles. He had vague memories of his brother’s firemen’s wagon and a man who wore a monocle. The rain and thunder called to mind a time when he climbed trees and scaled bridges made from logs and mud. The wicked witch’s stockings and the cowardly lion and his brother’s wagon stowed in the woolshed at the back of the house where the garden that never grew sat in defiance of reason and common sense. Rain brought out memories best left untouched, memories hidden away from consciousness.

The dog slept in the woolshed next to his brother’s firemen’s wagon. It ate bones and rawhide toys and grass. His brother pulled the dog around in his firemen’s wagon saying to anyone who would listen ‘my dog has no fleas.’ Most people simply ignored him, but some, those with small children in tow, hurrying passed, they’re children peeing and snorting like pigs.

When he told his friends about the old man next door they broke out in a chorus of laughter, one of the boys saying ‘Turtles carry diseases… a boy in middle school died after touching one’. ‘And anyhow’ said a second boy ‘Its old news’. ‘Does your dog eat its own feces?’ asked a third boy cleaning his eyeglasses with his shirtsleeve. ‘Yes and others too’ replied the second boy trying not to laugh. ‘We had a Beowulf’ said a fourth boy ‘with such long fur you couldn’t see its eyes’. ‘Our dog was run over by a car’ said a boy standing at the back. ‘it’s body curled up like a fist’. ‘Did you eat it?’ asked the second boy.

Kingdom Hall

2011-07-30T14:19:00.001-04:00

She slept in a daybed, which to the untrained eye could be mistaken for seabed, beneath a photograph of her grandfather. She had not read Neruda who she said was altogether overrated. Her younger brother Rudy died from measles, the middle one, Leopold, from rubella. Left unconcernedly a cigarette smolder into the ashtray. Her grandfather’s devotion to the scriptures made him unbearably faithful. Never did he lay a hand on her other than to exercise the demon that lived in her belly. Sundays and Wednesdays he prayed at the Kingdom Hall, the prophet encouraging him to pledge half his weekly pay packet to Jehovah. Like his father before him her grandfather never wore his hat to the Kingdom Hall. Hats, which the prophet frowned upon, were allowed only when it rained or a man’s baldness made him uneasy around others. Her grandfather had a closetful of hats that he kept for special occasions like funerals and weddings.

Her mother made a starch bottle out of a cream jug. She ironed her grandfather’s shirts and handkerchiefs. She claimed to have met Joseph Brodsky at the church bazaar, the Nobel poet spreading rumors about God and Stalin. He traveled abroad with a paraplegic, the two sharing the same motel room. When Brodsky wasn’t giving a lecture he drank abundantly. Her grandfather made her stand for hours balancing the Quaker Bible on her head. He said it would stop her from wetting the bed.

‘When I was a boy I was tortured by the NKVD’ said Brodsky. ‘My mother beat me within an inch of my life’ said an imbecile who happened by. ‘…with a stick’. ‘They made us eat feces’ said Brodsky. ‘Oh dear’ said the imbecile. ‘My mother was raped by a Stalinist’ added Brodsky. ‘And mine a blind mute’ said the imbecile. ‘…long before she realized he was dead’. ‘Mine dated two dead men, one more dead than the other’. ‘The days of the Katorga are long over’ said the imbecile. ‘…get over it man’.

A jaundice moon hung in the sky like a whore’s belly. The bricklayer Feuerman and the journeyman Culver returning home from a day’s work stopped at the local inn to share a pint of Stout. ‘The moon brings out the wolf in me’ said Feuerman. ‘And I’, said the journeyman Culver, ‘see no end to this’. ‘Nor I’ said the bricklayer Feuerman. ‘The sky is falling’ said the bricklayer Feuerman. ‘So it is’ said the journeyman Culver. ‘So it is’.

Bone on fat her thighs sung, her hipbones trucking the fall of her dress. She never wore skirts that drew attention to her waist. He dreamt of the soft talc of her skin, the womanliness of women. He fantasized about her teeth, incisors and bicuspids, those hard to reach molars.

His father told him that he would amount to nothing and even if he did he still wouldn’t be proud of him. When his father wasn’t at work he drank at an afterhours club. The proprietor, who’s clothes looked like they were rotting off him, charged double the price for a glass of beer or a shot of old rum making money hand-over-fist on the backs of hard working men like his father. For a quarter you could buy a rancid egg or a pigs’ tongue writhing with maggots. He refused chits, saying he didn’t trust anyone, even his own mother, and cut off anyone he thought was above him or didn’t like.

He remembers standing outside the afterhours club waiting for his father, his mother at home giving birth to his soon to be brother. The midget would bring him boiled meat sandwiches wrapped in wax-paper, leftovers from the night before ‘you be a good boy and stay put, you’re daddy’s as fine a gentlemen as I’ve ever seen’. He would chew slowly and think of numbers and calculations and how much things he couldn’t afford cost.

The old man next door who drove a truck for the City kept snapping turtles in a child’s play pool in his backyard. ‘He feeds them creepy-crawlies and June bugs’ said his uncle. 'I caught him swimming in the child’s pool once, one of those old-fashioned men’s bathing suits on. His bathing cap reminds me of the cowboy hat with a whistle I had as a kid when I was no more than your age'. He remembered the cowboy hat and cheap plastic whistle and the perforations that kept the heat in and the coolness out. His uncle was the kid who always got the plastic moustache in the box of Cracker Jacks, the one that pinched your nose and made your eyes water. His father despised his mother’s brother and wouldn’t let him step foot in the house. His mother met her brother after Mass behind the church, the other parishioners loading their children into cars and heading home for lunch. He knew a kid who swallowed the plastic whistle and nearly died. ‘I saw him touching himself while the neighbor’s daughter watched from over the fence. I called the police, swiftly I might add, and that was that.’

A friar on a bicycle whizzed past frightening a cat lazing in the afternoon sun. As it was fish-day the friar took it as a message from His Holiness and bowed his head in strict observance. Then a moment later Brother Von Romani wheeled past, his surplice flapping unkemptly behind him. The Italian monastery sat on the hill overlooking the valley. As a girl she swung on a tractor tire hung from the branch of an elm tree, her summer dress lifting into the warm August air. Her great uncle owned the property next to the Italian monastery where she spent her summers away from the repressive heat of the city.

A harvest moon sat low in the night sky. The monks, all but Brother Von Romani who had been censored for falling asleep in vespers, lined up outside the monastery gates and stared awestruck at the moon. That corn that year was ungenerous, the monks having no other choice than to sell it as silage. Alone in his cell Brother Von Romani dreamed of riding his bicycle, the smell of oven fresh bread and the friar whom he had a crush on.

E. J. Salamander

2011-07-25T10:53:00.005-04:00

The Romanian sisters slept together in the same horsehair bed their mother gave birth to them on, their faces touching on the pillow. Their mother’s grunts were heard far and wide, waking the rector’s assistant who called the constabulary to complain about the awful racket. The midwife who delivered the sisters smelled of cloves. She said she worked naked because placental blood was hard to wash out of good cotton. She remembers her mother’s graceless features and angry stare.

Dejesus stepped onboard a ship destine for the New land. They met three days later under less than auspicious circumstances. He spat up an oyster barely missing his shoe. Dejesus was the first to speak. ‘Where am I?’ He wiped his mouth with his shirt sleeve. From his inside coat pocket he pulled a piece of torn paper and began to read. ‘Ex pluribus menses glorious in excelsior’. Not knowing how to reply he smiled and nodded goodbye. He was the first to eyewitness the stigmata, the vassal squinting to make out who was standing in front of him.

He lost control of thought. ‘I am nothing more than a petty demon, a minor player. I am nothing’. This, you see, is the problem: the words come but the meanings remain hidden. E. J. Salamander, coopers assistant, wears a chin-string to prevent the wicker from flying.

He met E. J. Salamander at the shell bazaar; the church renting space to shell-collectors twice a year. He set up his table next to a fat woman who sold shells of all shapes and sizes. A man, recently retired and living off a meager pension, upended the fat woman’s table sending her shells flying. Seeing what he had done, and the mess he had made, he broke out in a sweat. ‘I had no idea I was so close. Please forgive my clumsiness.’ The fat woman collected her things and sighed.

Every Thursday he ate a hard-boiled egg. When he was little his mother served him soft-boiled eggs in a cup. He allowed himself one cigarette which he smoked like a man facing a firing squad. He exhaled through his nose, a web of smoke issuing from each hole, and inhaled through his mouth. He snubbed the butt out into the pavement like a bug.

That morning while out walking he watched a three-legged dog running like it was a four legged dog. A woman out walking her cat shifted her bag from one shoulder to the other, a black hole between her bicuspid and a loose eyetooth. Having earlier that day lit a votive candle for the Pope, the Papal candles costing 5 cents, the poor 3, he felt an uncommon airiness impassioning his step. He came across a sack of flour behind the church, the makings for deified biscuits or the pancake breakfast the woman’s auxiliary held every Saturday morning. He inhaled a mouthful of organ sough, the odor of forested pump air assailing him. Earlier that morning he had spat up a gob of eel-black spittle. ‘if dogs could fly they wouldn’t need legs’ he said clearing his throat. The woman walking her cat sneered at him, the black hole in her mouth making her look angrier than she was.

Dejesus’ refusal to acknowledge the existence of God angered many. Those he angered said his stubbornness was due to a rotting tooth, others that he believed in nothing, neither reason or intellect. Catholic, Jew and Jehovah alike they all believed that bread and wine were quiescent until blessed by a priest. To Dejesus this seemed silly. He knew a baker who made dinner rolls that looked like the Pope’s hat and baguettes that had an uncanny resemblance to Mother Theresa’s nose. That bread could be made into flesh and wine into blood was scandalous indeed. He accepted nothing, quiescent or enlivened, that he couldn’t see with his own eyes. The New Providence of the Society of Jesus banned Dejesus from all church and secular events, claiming he was a depraved unapologetic atheist. Catechized into a life of unquestioning vassalage the brothers of the New Providence of the Society of Jesus lived as anchorites. With the exception of brother Ignacio, who had a predilection for young boys, few strayed beyond the ivied walls of the monastery.

Ship Day was observed every seven years. Confederate with Ship Day was the Day of the Locust, rivaled only by his grandfather clearing his gravelly throat and spitting. His grandmother, unable to assuage her husband’s coughing, took to plugging her ears with wax; her husband’s coughing and spitting up sounding like a death rail. Junkers arrived one after the other, sailors jumping ship on the hunt for rum and the chance to prove their manliness. Ship of Imbeciles. Sailors stealing from whores and whores stealing from sailors, the docklands run riot with imbeciles and whores. Cecil Siècle, the docklands superintendant, was heard to say ‘Never in all my years of superintending have I been witness to such total disregard for life and limb!’

Seldom did his mother have a sensible thought. Harkening back to the fate of her grandmother who spent the rest of her life in a hospital bed after making a hasty decision, he implored her to stop with her insensibleness. She said that she was his mother and could do as she wished. She spent Ship Day drinking and carousing unabashedly with the sailors, his protestations falling on drunken ears. Defilers he called them, his mother taken advantage of by ship-jumping dogs, her cotton skirt manhandled over her head, a peg-leg whaler with scabies mauling her like a ragdoll. ‘Horace!’ the others yelled, ‘You’ll do better to throw her over your shoulder. That’s it, now flip her on her back!’ An Egyptologists who had booked passage on a whaler exclaimed ‘Let her be man… can’t you see she’s insensible?’ The others, laughing, said he best keep his mouth shut. ‘We’ll do you in old man, then you’ll never see those blasted pyramids you’ve be raging about!’

A barrel-maker by the name of Sims, resisting the urge to bite one of the whores who had robbed him of his dignity, climbed aboard his scow, his uncrowned chemise soiled with rum. ‘I’ll see you under the channel whore’ said Sims angrily. Even though he had a fondness for hairy women he restrained himself. In the past his rebelliousness had gotten him in hot water, a seamstress once accusing him of foul language when he saw her manly feet. ‘For the love of Joseph and Mary’ he exclaimed. ‘…you’re cunt must be cavernous’. A patulous wound between her navel and pelvic bone made her nakedness all the more horrific. He figured the scar was remnant of a caesarian birth, the child’s coning crowning head covered in talc and feces. ‘I’m not untouched’ said Sims. ‘But I fear I’d get lost and never find my way back out’. The hirsute seamstress huffed and threw herself into the river, a buoy dragging her, her manly feet kicking, out to sea.

Watching her disappear, a speck on the ocean, he recalled his father’s passion for flying-machines; a rarity back when a horse drawn carriage was considered a luxury.

His father was known to associate with hoodlums and spent his evenings robbing syphilitics and blind beggars. Begging for mercy the blind and the syphilitic fell prey to his father’s thievery. Mumbling about flying-machines he robbed them blind, warning them that if they spoke a word, even the beggars, he’d cut out their eyes. ‘You there who said you saw a flying-machine. Show me… show me where!’ The blind beggar raised his arm and pointed, his father squinting to make out a tiny speck bobbling on the sea.

He stopped to listen to a boy’s choir sing Wagnerian arias, tiny Gaullist helmets on their tiny heads. He stopped to buy a nosegay of flowers, the Groceteria crawling with mothers and squealing children, the proprietor ringing the cash register like a funereal bell.

She poisoned the rats that lived in the walls with potassium hydroxide. She’d had enough, the gnawing turning her stomach like a Ferris Wheel. She smoked a cigarette held nimbly but firmly between her thumb and index finger. She overheard the woman in the flat next to her tell her friend about the tenant across the hall with the disfigured face that kept her housebound and that at night she could hear her weeping through the crack under the door.

Plagiary

2011-07-24T10:26:00.016-04:00

She wrapped herself in a woolen blanket she found in the trash, a Christmas gift thrown away like an unwanted child. She pulled her knees tight into her chest and dreamt of magic gardens, of what could have been, of a past that she couldn’t forget. She slept in the murder of her thoughts and waited for morning. The yellow sickness. The wind tore through his head. Men gutted from pyloric to sternum. Perhaps the sky will fall.

He found the glove behind the Jewish grocer’s. He put it in his greatcoat pocket and thought nothing of it. He met a man who claimed to have found the matching glove. He offered to barter for the left one as he had the right. He was a secretive person and seldom did he let on that he knew anything for fear of knowing something he shouldn’t. And as he had a metal plate in his head he had trouble differentiate between what was real and phantasm.

When they found him his head was split down the middle, the team of doctors deciding that a metal plate was in order. After the surgery he claimed he could hear radio frequencies under his right eye. He pinned tinfoil to the underside of his cap to keep out the frequencies. One day he forgot his tinfoil cap at home putting himself in absinthial risk of frequencies. Without his fouler he was weakened by life’s intoxicants. He awoke relieved that he hadn’t died in his sleep.

They first met at the soup kitchen. They sat across from one another knocking knees. He rubbed his pyrrhic gums with clove oil. He smelled curial and peppermint. The soup kitchen was abuzz with men, some with scarves knotted round their necks like woolen garrotes. Hats were for men with small heads. These he referred to as the small men. Some heads don’t suit a hat either because they’re too large or the hat sits awkwardly.

He stopped to look at a display of hats in a hatter’s window. Sunbonnets with ribbon chinstraps, overly-ornate pillbox hats, hats for all occasions and hats he couldn’t identify but knew were hats just the same. He suspected that the glove belonged to someone’s mother, though couldn’t prove it. He sat the glove on the bedpost and stared at it for hours. He imagined it covering the tiny hand of a magician’s assistant.

He remembered his mother dressing him in knee-britches and long socks. These were memories he’d rather not have. He remembered sleeping with a gypsy who’s breath smelled like onions. She spoke Romanian with a Russian accent. She had fine black hair on her stomach and arms. Her eyes were black, the whites egg yolk yellow. She had loose skin under her arms and chin. She hooked her legs round his neck and screamed in his face. A plagiary of callused skin covered her feet and the back of her hands. He tried pushing her off but she refused to declutch. He fell asleep with her laying spent on top of him. ‘INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI’ he whispered in her sleeping ear, 'DEI ALTARE AD INTROIBO'.

His father ate blood sausage for breakfast. He once ate a cow’s head, ears like prepuces, a dead fly in the snout. He told him that gypsies ate calf’s testicles and boiled the scrota in the same pot with the cabbage. 'GOD BE WITH YOU' he whispered, ‘DIEUS EX PLURIBUS IN HASIDIA’. His own mother pushed him out like an unwanted organ.

A man on stilts stepped over the curb and onto the street. An elderly woman lost her balance and faltered to the sidewalk, her handbag clutched to her chest. The stilted man shinnied over her clacking his stilts like castanets.

The elderly woman pulled herself up and continued on to the market. He watched her disappear round the corner and up the street. His grandmother made applesauce, the meat falling off the core like flayed skin. His mother fed him castor oil, pressing the spoon against the roof of his mouth. She said if he wasn’t careful he’d end up bedridden. His grandmother read aloud from the King James Bible every night before bed. She hid it under the bed, safe from his grandpapa who used it for roll-your-owns. He walked through the house with Bible pages sticking out of his shirt pocket, smiling, his dentures black with ink. When he wasn’t sleeping his grandfather wore boots with metal catches. At work he wore leather gloves with nickel coins sewn into the palms, making it easier to swing the kill hammer over his shoulder ensuring a clean decapitation.

He spent the day knee-deep in offal, his waders splashed with cattle blood. Never did he feel shameful. He preferred old steers because they lost breath quicker. He wore a woolen cap with earflaps to keep the bone from getting into his ears. He pulled the rope through the tackle and fastened it to the block with his free hand then swung the kill hammer over his shoulder and across his chest, oftentimes snagging his shirt pocket with the blunt end. He hankered down and swung, hobbling the old steer to the cement floor, its head split clear down the middle. Grandpapa never made any excuses when he missed the mark and sheared off the side of a cow’s head or when it took two swings to bring it down. He remembered his grandfather bailing wet hide and the smell of hurried death and fear.

He used catgut to shore up the weight-bags, skin and muscle settling to the bottom. He sold the innards to a pig farmer who ground them up with wet millet, heaping bucket-loads of it over the hopper and into the sty. He preferred the lower guts as they stiffened the blend making it easier to hoist over. His grandfather used the money from the weigh-bags to buy whisky and rock candy for the children that came round to watch him fell cattle. The pig farmer traded his manure for credit at the grocer’s where his wife bought winter blankets and lantern oil. Never once saw did he smile or unlock his jaw.

She sat with her tongue out in the rain wishing. Her thoughts crowed. She remembered her uncle Jim pressing her against his chest, his porcelain eye half out of the socket. Her uncle Jim lost his thumb cross-sharpening a grass scythe. He had no mind for common sense. He preferred things a man could do without having to think too hard or pretend he could read.

Night fell. He felt the pressure building pressing in on his eardrum. There was much in the world he didn’t want to hear, like bawling children and the old complaining. He cared little for opera and detested the trombone. An elm grew behind the Waymart and a hedge alongside the aqueduct. A blue spruce flourished in front of the post office. He counted the change in his pocket, three dimes and the fifty cent piece his grandfather gave him when he was twelve.

The year his grandfather gave him the fifty cent piece he found a tortoise shell in the sewer behind the aqueduct. It was green and brittle where it had run up against the wire fencing. He kicked it with his boot releasing a hatchling of flies that have tunneled into the soft yellow underbelly. He kicked it again and the flies scattered, a coil of pink intestine spilling out onto his boots. These are the days that go unnoticed. When he told him about the tortoise shell he said ‘I’ve seen my fair share’ and left it at that. I didn’t matter.

The midday sun cut just below his hairline. He stropped his razor, and holding his face in the palm of his left hand ran it across his beard. When he was a boy a Jehovah’s Witness told him that shaving would make his beard thicker. The Jehovah’s Witness stayed in town for a fortnight waiting for the shoemaker to remove a nail from his shoe. He wore calfskin wingtips. He had to shift his pamphleteer’s bag from one hip to the other. If there was a heaven he’d find it on his own. His uncle said the Bible blackmailed sinners and was full of consonant names. ‘I witness nothing’ said his uncle. ‘and even if I did it wouldn’t change a damn thing’. The Witness left behind traces of himself that would not become evident until the tertiary stage. Those who had been touched by the Witness fell ill, the disease progressing painfully. In the pamphlets he left behind there were prohibitions against self-pleasuring and sex with beasts. He was accused of having sex with beasts. ‘Have you no respect for the Sabbath!’ ‘We are Christian not Jews. The Sabbath means nothing to us’.

When he was five he had a steel rod fastened between his legs to keep them from bowing. The metal rod was attached to a plaster cast that went from his waist to his ankles. He was found with twelve cents stitched to the inside of his coat pocket.

There was a rumor circulating that syphilis was found in the stomach of a dead woman. The hospital where the corpse was taken was burned to the ground as a precaution. He carried a trenching tool with him tied to his back. If need be he could use it to excavate things or as protection against vagrants. Her mother told her never to trust her father.

She fell madly in love with a butcher with rotten teeth and a hooked nose. She kissed him with her eyes closed. The butcher’s uncle Ignatius worked as a snake-handler for a traveling Episcopalian mission. The butcher’s father, a Presbyterian, had no patience for Episcopalians. The butcher was known to slice through a bull’s scrotum without blinking an eye, blood splatter collecting in the folds of his apron.

His grandfather celebrated the bicentenary of Parnell’s birth with a fist-fight with a Presbyterian minister.

Her great grandfather, a phrenologist, measured people’s heads to establish whether they were dullard’ll or stupid. He set up in cafes and soda shops, laying out his measuring kit on a table at the back next to the commode. He was well disciplined in the sciences, having learned phrenology at time when it was still being practiced in asylums and mental hospitals. They came to see her great grandfather hoping that he could cure them of headaches and craniofacial abnormalities. Fed up with their child’s simple-mindedness parents allowed her great grandfather to bore a hole in their child’s skull, the child leaving worse off than when it came.

The two Romanian sisters lived in a cottage with their crippled half-sister. The half-sister had lost all sense of balance needing both half-sisters to help her get around, each taking hold of an arm and steadying her one step at a time until she reached her destination. She fell down often. He was acquainted with the sisters and the half-sister, having met them at the church bazaar the year previous. Unlike the bow legged man who avoided the sisters at all cost, he saw no harm in greeting them whenever their paths crossed. The half-sister sister had yet to figure out a way to sleep on her back without falling to the floor. He met the sisters lamping for night-crawlers in the park behind the aqueduct. They exchanged un-pleasantries, the sisters saying ex pluribus minatory. He had a pocketful of IOU’s he had no intention of honoring.

Lucian Freud - 1922-2011

2011-07-22T22:41:00.006-04:00

Dead on Absinthe

2011-07-17T11:25:00.005-04:00

He awoke to a dismal gray sky. I will meet the morning headlong, he thought. I will catapult myself into the day like a trebuchet. His father would never have approved. His father’s father wore a panama and smoked cigars that smelled of clove and allspice. Fish smell and his father’s arm slung out the window like a weather sock, ash boot blackening the stubble on his unshaven face.

Why is it that Beckett has all these crazy people riding bicycles? They sit on benches thumbing through discarded newspapers and other people’s hastily eaten lunch. Why do they never get where they’re going? Do they go anywhere, anywhere at all? Where do they go when their gone? Do they go anywhere but away from where they are? Where do they go, with those garish elastic bands and weakly legs? Beckett must have been mad, quite mad. Finding the heat offensive he sat on a bench and unwrapped his lunch. He ate unhurriedly.

He awoke, or so he thought. He felt a crick in his neck where the vagrant had cracked him when he refused to share his soup. He coddled himself from bed and lit a half-smoked cigarette. The plastic tarpaulin was flapping, a windsock in a hurricane. The linoleum curling up from the floor a fetus left to shrivel outside the womb. He felt an anger swell up in him. He had felt this way before but not with such urgency. Life is corrupt. I am the symptom. He lit a second cigarette with the one still in his mouth. Today I will see what I can do. The tarpaulin flapped madly. He snubbed the cigarette butt into the linoleum and went back to sleep.

He awoke from a deep sleep and shook his leg free from the covers. He slept like the dead. He drank tilting his head, the ulcers eating away at his guts like rats. Some say that sleep is the thief of wakefulness; I say it is the penitence we pay for consciousness. He remembered hearing about men drinking themselves to death on absinthe. The shamble leg man trundled on two legs, one hidden beneath the tail of his great coat. His leg weighed heavily on him. He came across a beggar sitting on the sidewalk. ‘Those yours?’ he asked.

The sky opens up like a malignancy, his grandfather commandeering the Mercury Fish truck, pedestrians clutching windblown hats screeching. The clochard smiled toothlessly. ‘Good bye, and may God be with you.’

He passed a woman dragged a dog behind her wearing a sunbonnet. He had a hankering to snatch the hat from her head and throw it into the gutter like a stray animal. But he had better things to do, principled things. His was a conscientious life, not one of opprobrium. Life is short. He met a woman. He approached and stood to one side of her. He knew from past experience not to push beyond reasonable limits. ‘Might I have a minute?’ ‘Why not?’ ‘This might sound insincere.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Could I buy you some teeth?’ The woman smiled a black hole. He reached into his greatcoat pocket and took out a card with the name of a dentist on it. ‘I’ll make an appointment for you. ’a checkup?’ ‘an appointment for you to get teeth.’ He slid the card back into the pocket of his greatcoat. The woman smiled blankly.

We never are but are always coming into being. These are the words of a madman. The thoughts of a lunatic. He met her at a rally. He knew she kept a knife under her skirts where the skin was leathery. She had memories of beatings and humiliations. When not laboring over ledger entries her father beat her unconscious.

As it was raining he chose an umbrella that fit firmly in his hand. He overstepping a puddle. The sky shouted rain. He met a man wearing a crown and asked why. ‘Because I am a fief’. This saddened him. Perhaps my judgments are for nothing. Walking is less enjoyable when the umbrella, a coleus of spokes, vexing encumbrance, has to be manhandled.

There is a natural regress from birth. If this is true, we are regression.

The woman lifted her skirts and peed. When she was a girl her mother slapped her for urinating in the park. The sky is a leprosarium and each cloud a fallen off nose. He fixed himself supper and forked it into his mouth. He rolled a cigarette and sucked on the bitter root.

She cocked her head and stared into the sun. When she was a child she stood for hours in the hot sun staring. She thought of her father’s cigarette threading a blue line of sky. She slapped her with the back of her hand leaving a red line on her cheek. She called her a little cunt and made her stand in the corner. He awoke to a half-spent cigarette smoldering in the ashcan. He smoked in defiance of common sense. She opened her legs, a boar of pubic hair caught in the elastic of her underpants.

These are the days of wreckage. When he was a boy his father denied him toys so he made his own out of wood and paper. He remembered his father’s vacant stare, lost in his own sadness. When he grew taller than the pencil marks on the doorframe he would leave home.

He knew a man who spoke in tongues. A man must take a stand and make the best of it. He remembered chewing tobacco that was nothing but shredded coconut. ‘You have a thief’s heart’ he said to the owner of the store. The store owner threw him out the door. ‘Molester!’ he shouted. ‘Molester!’ He awoke ambivalently. He lit a cigarette. His father smoked shag tobacco he swept off the lunchroom floor.

When he was a small boy he had wanted be a ventriloquist. His mother forbade him saying it was imbecilic. He strung a rope from the porch banister to the elm in the furthest corner of the backyard. He learned how to walk the rope using a rake to balance himself. He read in the back of a comic book, where advertisements for spyglasses and submarines caught his eye, that tightrope walkers were considered champions among ordinary men. He practiced holding his breath. He checked his pant’s for the washers and he’d put in his pockets for balance. He calculated that the rope could accommodate eighty-five pounds. He shook his head and lit a half-smoked cigarette that looked like a peg. A grey sky hung in his thoughts like a dumbwaiter.

A bruit wind trumpeted in his ears. He had awakened to intrusive thoughts. The sky above the his lean-to threatened rain. He remembered a time when it never rained and the sky was always blue. He prayed that he wouldn’t catch his death of cold or die by drowning. His mother made pies from recipes copied out of the pages of women’s magazines, her face a battlement of confusion. He remembered sitting on the cold linoleum floor watching his mother trouble herself with motherly things. A ketchup bottle with holes, his father’s shirts stained with sweat and aftershave, the cuffs split where his wrists strafed the desktop.

She was baptized at the Church of the Perpetual Sinner, the steeple visible from the highest branch of the willow tree. Her mother thought it would stop her stuttering. The rector stank of whiskey and smoke. He connived her into the sacristy closet, removed his surplice and forced his hand up between her thighs, the floorboards cricketing under the weight of his desecration. From that moment on she knew that her life would never be her own.

Over River

2011-07-12T10:28:00.003-04:00

The cremator Over River arrived Thursday to prepare the corpse for a Friday burning. The grievers, on foot and by wagon, two days later. The Wake was held the following afternoon. The corpse was laid out in an oatmeal gray overcoat and flannel trousers, a white linen shirt and black necktie. The missing leg made draining the corpse easier, the cremator able to get at the stomach cavity without having to straddle the table, his back crippled from years of heavy lifting. This freed up the rest of the day for digging a wood splinter out of his thumb. An enormously fat woman pressed next to him on the bench in the foyer, her fatness making him sick with disgust. The splinter disinterred the cremator left through the side door, the melancholic woman distributing her obesity cater-diagonally across the bench. The cremator Over River felt there must be a hierarchy of humanness, the incurables at the bottom, the miserable in the middle and the half-witted near the top. There were days he felt that he was somewhere between the miserable and the incurable. When it rained he fastened a kerchief to his hat; a provision against pus boils. Never wearying he trudged on, his galoshes wetly sloshing. He knew a woman with a nervous tick and a legless man who punted himself round in a pushcart, his coattails dragging in tatters behind him. When out walking one day he saw a three-legged dog. He let it be. Some dogs are just not worth the bother. Life is a random series of reoccurring events. Life is unnecessary. (I assure you I am not making this up but simply recollecting for someone who prefers to remain anonymous).

While out taking his daily walk he noticed that things, the world of facts as he understood them, were green. As long as greenness contains itself to trees and bushes, grasses and flowers, I will be as content as a discontented man can hope to be. Not gangrenous, the augury of rotting and death, or purulent with ulcers but a natural green, a green that invites wonder and joy.

He watched a cripple polder down the street like a staggered calf. Caudal tails and miserly legs, wee stumps. He remembers a little girl from his childhood who had a hearing box strapped to her chest, an armamentarium of wires held in place with a leather halter. A droning staccato like bees hitting a windshield emanating from her chest, a cybernetic ritornelle she controlled with toggle attached to the front of the box. The girl with the hearing box heard no birds warbling, no children squealing with delight, tiny feet carrying them across paddocks shimmering with summer rain. She didn’t hear the cars whizzing past, tires fluting gravel onto the neighbor’s front lawns, lawnmowers spitting out stones. All she heard was a low murmur, vibrations bouncing off her chest, straps caught in clothing too big for someone so small and inelegant. Perhaps he could share his lunch with her, cut it into pieces small enough to clutch in her tiny nail-bitten hands.

She lived with her mamma in a walkup over the market. Her mamma cold stored perishables on the ledge outside the bedroom window and cooked stew on a hotplate she’d found in someone else’s rubbish. When she hadn’t any money for food they ate at the homeless shelter. They ate alone, bent over their plates, her mamma’s feet jerking fretfully beneath the table. She dreamt of pastries, buttery crusts spilling over with mincemeat. Her mamma carved up picnic hams in her sleep. She drank avariciously, her tiny nail-bitten fingers clutching the bottleneck. She dreamt of crackers barbed with sesame seeds and chilies. One time a man sitting across from them, his nose splayed diagonally across the tomb of his face, spat up a mouthful of creamed corn, his dentures receding into the catacomb of his mouth. Another with a pear-shaped head spun a tale of abuse and maltreatment at the hands of the police. Paranoiac gibberish. Men wearing hats pilfered from other men’s heads while they slept. Globs of dry sputum, nightsticks batting in feeble skulls, faces pockmarked with yesterdays throw up. What were these men being sheltered from, certainly not themselves.

One morning he awoke abruptly, his heart racing. He clutched the bedpost and waited for it to stop. It didn’t, it never stopped. He longed to see the beauty in things, not ugliness and want. He yearned for joyful smiling faces. But all he saw was poverty and disfigurement. He heard bawling children and saw mothers with more ink on their arms than words in the Bible. The antagonism and bitterness of savages.

He was losing his mind. He saw spiders. Everything is accidental. Nothing happens for a reason.

‘You want your soup?’ ‘No, Jell-O'. You are welcome to the Jell-O but not the soup’. ‘Not the soup?’ ‘Not the soup’. ‘Jell-O’s better… the soups anyways too hot’. He swung his left leg over his right and pushed his plate across the tabletop. ‘I see’. ‘You want?’ ‘Jell-O’. He swung his right leg over is left leg and sighed.

The sun, he thought, is holed up in the barrows of a whore’s skirts. The clouds are the sky’s pimps, feathered hats, pigskin eyes, hogsheads. The rain and brusque wind oblige him to skim across the top of the pavement like mercury. He moves like graffiti, curlicues and haloes of colour. There is nothing more inveigling, he though, than the truth. The truth being what one is accustom to. Hogshead soups, brothel gumbo, bouillabaisse, mutton ladled into outstretched bowls.

A soup bone gray day, his thoughts on veal chops and chicken legs, figs. The haberdasher was of a pale brown complexion. He wore a fez and seldom spoke unless spoken to. He made extraordinary suits, serge and gabardine, double-breasted and single, fob pocketed. His wife had one eye, the missing one gouged out. She smoked long slender cigarettes pinched between her thumb and forefinger. The haberdasher tailored suits from hemp, smoothing out the wrinkles with a steam iron that hung from the ceiling. ‘May I ask what side you dress on?’ ‘Either side, it doesn’t matter’. ‘Might I suggest to the left? The haberdasher reached for his chalk, closed one eye and drew a curved line along the inseam. ‘You are too kind’.

He recalled a woman whose father forced her to eat blood pudding stirred with a fork for breakfast. Her children sat in squalor reading takeout menus and other people’s mail. Eaton’s sells blood pudding casing, twenty-five to the dollar.

His good eye flittered like a tiger moth. The bad eye he lost in a sawmill accident, a wood splinter piercing the cornea. His great Uncle slurped his soup.

She boiled burlap sacks in yeast and vinegar, sewing the sacs together with a bone needle she kept in a box on her dresser. She called them chattel dresses. His mother wore sac-cloth dresses with uneven hems. She took thalidomide and spat out her son like a rotten oyster. She died from blackness.

Out for a walk he came across a beggar. ‘why are your hands crossed over your chest?’ ‘so my heart doesn’t jump out’. ‘a fast heart?’ ‘diabetes.’ He looked down at the beggar. ‘Might you have a spare plastic bag for my head?’ ‘You need some string for that?’ ‘good idea’.’ ‘You can use it to tie it round your chin that ways it won’t blow off.’ He had a fear of old people.

I will organize an old person’s fair, he thought, where they could show off their infirmaries. There would be dancing and jumping and a table reserved for confectioners and podiatrists. And a potluck dinner with beans and salt-cruet and sappy meats, like boiled pork shoulder and picnic ham, wafer-thin after-eights and crème de menthe. Should his bad leg permit he would ride a unicycle to disprove the theory that all things seek they’re fatigue, they’re entropic fatality. Like a Nietzschian tightrope walker on one wheel. A codpiece, yes, cupping the foppery of his trousers, bunghole tamped. The monocycle, yes, the tires worn down to the rims, burrs of steal clacking the pavement.

He awoke one morning and thought, what if I am dead but don’t know it? What if I awakened dead, how would I know the difference? What if what I took to be living was death? Could one live with that, having it backwards? Maybe I’m dead and waiting to wake up, to begin living. If I have this all backwards, back to front, what then? Where to begin, so much turmoil and puzzlement.

His pineal gland had taken refuge in his hypothalamus. He had heard about this eavesdropping. The one busy picking a scab from her finger said to the other ‘you know the pineal gland is wont to travel’. The other, nitpicking at her finger said ‘no.’ He extrapolated from what he overheard to how he felt, how he should feel but didn’t. When he felt like this, which he did though infrequently, he would apply a mustard poultice to the back of his head. He would eat asparagus with vinegar. By smacking his lips together he could alleviate the sting and canker in his mouth. His great aunt Alma showed him how to edge a pie crust with a fork, his eyes trained on the copse of her forehead, a curl of gray hair tucked behind her ear. The sky through the kitchen window was always blue, mallard blue.

Graves are deeper around the edges. His grandfather drove for the Mercury Fish Company. Having one leg he double-clutched with a dowel attached to the pedal, shifting gears with his right hand, the left one grappling with the steering wheel. His father rode along with his father on a crate screwed into the floorboards next to the driver’s seat, his father pushing the knobs of his knees hard into the dashboard, loose screws and bolts leaving divots in his kneecaps. Cods’ tongues and Haddock, blue airbladders. The fish truck swerved and coddled through the city streets, his father holding on for dear life, knees buckling, the smell of fish salt burning his nose. He never took his eyes off the road, fearing that if he did his father would careen into a lamppost or up over the sidewalk, taking out a shop window or passerby. He never did like fish. He hated driving round with his father.

Kurva Merchant

2011-06-27T00:24:00.004-04:00

Adrift in a world of his own making he wanders the nighttime streets taking out his impatience on whomever gets in his way. Gauntly they hunker, corpselike, wasted flesh giving way to bone. He takes what he wants, leaving the rest to rot in the mouldering August heat like poor-quality hogs left to putrefy, eyes bloated, the meat defiled and maggoty. Under one of the hogs a herd of cowflies lay an army of larva in a pocket of fat; the writhing of the wormy guts making the belly seem alive, squirming and expanding with violent self-possession. This was not an uncommon sight; disgruntled with the low price of pork, some offered a pittance of what they paid out in feed and livery costs, swineherders left their herds to perish at the hands of Nature, the market-route littered with rotting, poor-quality hogs. Leopold Holofernes swept through the city riding on the back of a braying mule. Holding his aching head between his hands, the mule rearing and kicking, the harness attached to its ringed nose reining in the untamed brute from meandering off course, Leopold Holofernes made his way down the cobbled streets, the tarmacadam crumbling under hoof and wheel, the tooth he had been favouring since the night before ripping into his jaw like a sawyer’s axe.

Poldy watched from his perch above the barricades, his eyes straining to make out the person sitting on the buckboard next to the muleteer. It was Rudolf Szombathely; a cloth merchant from Virág. The last time he saw the cloth merchant from Virág he had an aching tooth; the pain and tenderness keeping him up all night and well into the morning. This time he could well make out the man sitting next to the muleteer, his portly face, flecked with pimples and sores, a reminder of a crashing rag market that left many a haberdasher reeling in debt and drowning in bolts of moth-eaten cloth. That day Leopold Holofernes, kesztyu aficionada and kurva merchant, was to meet with Rudolf Szombathely to finalize the purchase of a cartload of red calfskin, Rudolf Szombathely willing to include a bolt of silk if he, Leopold Holofernes, could meet under him, Rudolf Szombathely, under the Waymart clocktower no later than half passed seven. ‘Merchant of Venice!’ he exclaimed, the braying mule kicking wildly. ‘The man has no class. Anyone worth his salt knows that deals are better made in hiding, not out in the open where scroungers and thieves have full reign over who gets scrounged and who gets robbed. I will not. I dare say I won’t. Not today or any other day. Never!’.

Bareheaded, the hat he normally wore at home with his collection of cobs and aromatic tobaccos, each brand and cut, some whole leaf, others shredded and steep-dried in Cognac or Sherry, hermetically sealed in its own pouch, he reached across the braying asses’ back and pulled hard on the reins, the mule coming to a sudden braking stop. ‘Damn ass!’ he bellowed. ‘...I’d be better off with a glue horse... least they know enough to stop when ye yank on the bit’. He yanked on the reins a second time, the mule foaming at the bit, its hind flanks red with flea bites and bee stings. ‘That’ll show it’ he said bumptiously, his nose disappearing into folds of lardy fat, the mule snorting and whinnying. As there was no time to waste he kicked the mule in the tenderloins, the mule responding with a loud hissing fart, a woman walking her poodle pinching the dog’s snout with her thumb and forefinger. ‘the nerve of some people’ she said haughtily, the poodle sniffing the air like a bloodhound, mount and kurva merchant clopping up the tarmacadam proudly.

Werckmeister Harmonies by Bela Tarr

2011-06-23T10:41:00.000-04:00

Ó Conadilly

2011-06-23T10:15:00.005-04:00

The School For Uncombed Boys was, and remains today, though under different Deaconship, affiliated with the Church of the Perpetual Sinner, both organizations founded on the principles of Sycophantry and Self-Loathing. Dónal Ó Conadilly, known for his indifference to Catholic and Protestant alike, headmaster of the school, arrived each morning by oxen cart, his wife packing him a light lunch before retiring to bed each night, the muleteer pulling on the reins like a man denied life’s simple pleasures.

Ó Conadilly’s father had been summoned by the Deaconship to bring an end to an outbreak of smallpox that had killed half the boys in the School For Uncombed Boys. Like his son he arrived by oxen cart, his doctor’s bag pottering between his flannel pants legs. He ordered the head tutor, who was always complaining about this or that ailment, his barking cough leaving some with the suspicion that he was suffering from the whooping, to evacuate the school and assemble the boys on the front lawn where he would inspect them for boils, abscesses and recently acquired bumps and red splotches. ‘and make sure you get them all’ he ordered, ‘the cripples too!’ The crippled boys were known to hide out in the cellar when it was time for calisthenics, the leaking sewage pipes and rat droppings weakening their already feeble lungs and timorous hearts. ‘especially them’ added the assistant to the headmaster scratching the dome of his bald head. ‘last week I found seven of them hiding in the basement; naked as they day they were born, five of them covered in boils and cankers, the other two with weeping abscesses!’ ‘roll them out; all of them!’ demanded Ó Conadilly. ‘crippled or not they’re no more special than the other boys’. Making haste, his balding dome glistening with sweat, the assistant to the headmaster conveyed the order to the tutor, both men angling their way passed the hedgerows and manicured bushes and into the school. ‘and make certain you get that Deasey character. I want a word with him’. Deasey, the son of an Anglican priest known to give communion to heathens, averring that no matter who or what you believe in you are entitled to God’s blessing, was the boy voted most likely to amount to nothing. He wiled away his time at the School For Uncombed Boys playing jacks and bullying the crippled boys, threatening to strangle the life out of a boy with rickets if he told the headmaster that he smoked in the confessional during vespers.

He recalled with disgust the years spent as a boy at the School For Uncombed Boys; morning prayers and geometry, forced confessions and the itch of the hair-shirt each boy was expected to wear, shorn and loomed from the friar cook’s legs and mortified back (his hirsuteness making him an ideal candidate for volunteering hair to the saintly coffers), and the nightly beatings at the hands of the senior boys and Numerary celibates. It was at the School For Uncombed Boys that he first met Dejesus; who years earlier, upon arriving on the shores of the city, took a part-time position as the cellar man responsible for the potency of the communion wine before its transubstantiation.

School For Uncombed Boys

2011-06-21T10:18:00.002-04:00

He was going to live a life of vagrancy. ‘seed the unsown and sow the seedless’. ‘only a fool lives a fool’s life...’ said the rector bunching his cob. Bodes well, ‘specially if you’re an atheist. Watched him eat an entire sautéed liver, skin and all. With fried shallots. Told who he was: out on a limb and needing a leg-up. Got all-over sores. MacOrmick’s handlotion. O’Malley’s sells it over-the-counter, sixpence on the layaway, seven on credit. Easy on the skin, and at half the cost. His me•cum’s on the soak. Quiffed the shelf. Can’t keep enough in stock. Mind you a hankie ‘ell do just fine; long and short of it. The way out is the way back; just make certain you close the door behind you. MacOrmick O’Malley. Good for making things lay flat. Otherwise they’ll lay crooked. Nothing nonetheless came true.

People grinding the grist. Hordes of them, single-file and in twos, waiting for the doors to open. The seed unsown is the seed left to rot. Life. Is. Sinful. Go forth and prosper ye! Can’t keep the shelves stocked. Everyone needs a leg-up. Mind ye some don’t deserve it. This was the seventeenth time he'd fallen off the waggon, his head bouncing like a melon off the dog yellow pavement. The sixteenth time he fell backwards squarely, his ears ringing for weeks afterwards. He stuffed his ears with rags and knotted the ends, the buzzing in his head worsening until he couldn’t stand it any longer. He tried changing the rags but couldn’t get his finger in passed the knotted end. Not uncommon in a common’s way. Seen half a dozen bent over the handrailing puking up gobs of it; yellowy and down soft. Tar-feather used to keep them from falling over overboard. Mind ye some don’t deserve it. You can pick ‘em out from the look on their face. Scrunched up like a discarded manuscript. This brought to mind something he’d read years early while a grammar student at the School For Uncombed Boys, “Captain MacWhirr wiped his eyes. The sea that had nearly taken him overboard had, to his great annoyance, washed his sou’wester hat off his bald head. The fluffy, fair hair, soaked and darkened, resembled a mean skein of cotton threads festooned round his bare skull.” (Typhoon, Joseph Conrad).

The Dean of the School For Uncombed Boys, a self-pitying crumb with uneven teeth and a piercing stare, his left eye, the colour of a throwing marble made of glass, his right, making up for the left, able to pinpoint ill-disciplined boys and truants, abjuring from the peak of his lectern that God does not take kindly to skivers and badly behaved boys, and could smite them dead if He so chose.

Mccleman

2011-06-18T13:18:00.004-04:00

The rector stood askew the pulpit counting the Sunday take: 27½ ducats, thirty-seven coppers, a commode washer and a timber dime. Cockerel’s go for one and seven-pence a half-dozen, Sartell’s are cheaper but don’t soap nearly near. Pulling at her stay-pins trying to reset her corset, the crinkly side, nonetheless. More whalebone than linen. His da said ladies like her play the heroine, pretend they’re in distress over a loose thread. Mulligatawny goes good with buttery rich rolls, pinched from the rollmaker’s freehand when he’s on the terlet. Commoding; comes by it naturally, makes mincemeat out of shingle-toast. Once saw him peamealing a kidney, damn well near eviscerated. Iron-rich-blood flypapering the sideboard spots. Say a man’s measure is his kindler, bottom side ‘ell come faceup if you slack it hard enough. Sets a hearth place aglow with one strike. Kips the homefires burning long into the night. Warm a hand or a cold heart on the kettle leash, bridled with joy and happy smiles. Say the wife’s the one to make the most of it, lays a flatiron on the cod under the embers. Good for making a hem stiff and lay flat. Otherwise the stitching unravels. Makes a thigh look ruined. Mccleman, heckler, sat on his yob making flyby night comments nearby of others, saying he had a right to as he’s spitshined, and has his ma’s pension to prove it. Mark my words backcombing keeps it from unravelling. Bodes well with the lady. Buoyancy makes the man. Annuity goes only so far. Keeps a heckler afloat. On the lam. Otherwise.

JJ. McDowell

2011-06-17T10:01:00.005-04:00

Poldy loosened his chin-string, the knot, tied that morning when he was barely awake, his fingers fumbling like dim-witted schoolchildren, lunchboxes stuffed full with jelly-rolls and pun pudding, garrotting the loose flesh around his neck, and removed his hat. He had overheard two fat men discussing a Shamuses named Shemuwel who was known to corral crumbs and whores into a specially made pen, strip them naked then unleash a pack of wild mutinous dogs, the dogs biting through bone and cartilage, uncoiled lengths of intestine and bowel, flaps of gnawed through flesh making a muddle of man and crumb. Vying for each other’s attention, the fatter of the two raising his voice, the less fatter trying to get a word in edgewise, the story they had to tell so important that he who told it would change the course of history, the two fat men discussed the likelihood of the sky falling. As this was long before the sky fell for the first time, long before the barricade was erected between the five-mile and the city, talk of skies falling and barricades being erected was as ridiculous as a missing glove wrecking havoc among man and haberdasher alike.

He arose unhurriedly, the clatter in his head bewailing a night of untold vagaries. The night before before falling asleep he had eaten a fat man’s portion of cake, his insides a broil with indigestions and foul humours. As he had two stomachs, one for food and one for ale and stout, when the two were combined, as was the case the night before, the ale and stout one took primacy over the food one. He drew his hand across his stung face feeling out the bumps and contusions he’d incurred the night before. He remembered forgoing the usual larder of chips and egg, a safeguard against getting drunk too quickly, and ordering a pint, the publican giving him an aggrieving stare, the rag he was wiping the top of the bar with coming wretchedly close to his face. ‘you you’re stinking up my establishment’ said the publican loud enough to query the curiosity of the yob seated at the end of the bar. ‘you, you make a mockery of men like him’ said the publican pointing at the yob, the fly that had early been dive-bombing his pint of stouten stout, a Drosophila Melanogaster, from the shape of its antenna and compound ommatidial eyes, buzzing round his head annoyingly.

The previous night’s antics releasing a breezy gas into his lower gut, a gurgling epistle signalling the beginning of unkindly eructation’s, the leftover stout kedging his bowels to ungainly extremes, he reached across the bedstead, upending the salt tin he used as an ashtray and a photo of the recently deceased JJ. McDowell, cadger, whose mother on her deathbed dying begged him to assuage the guilt she kept concerning an adulterous cuckold she had with a captain of the Mabbot Bridge constabulary, said cuckolding diminishing the captain’s rank and file, and grabbing firm the bottle of Kep’s diuretic poured himself a thimbleful. He imbibed the elixir, slopping and gulping like a Scopes monkey, an envisagement of the Crucified aping him unsympathetically. You see for as of yester eve he had traded church for free-wheeling gambol, demanding severance for years of untold gloom and spurious prayer.

James Joyces Ulysses (1967)

2011-06-16T10:46:00.000-04:00

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy)

2011-06-15T10:20:00.000-04:00

The Levirate McCollum

2011-06-14T10:07:00.006-04:00

His great grandmother Sybille performed great feats of extispicium reading gore-entrails with Wahrsagerin élan and a vivisectionist’s sang-froid. His great grandmother learned the practice from a Hittite soothsayer from Akkad who himself had been tutored by a Seleucid oracle from Uruk. ‘I can shrink heads and cure warts too’ she was heard to say wimbling her fingers in preparation for a head-shrinking. She tried her hand at haruspicy but found the process too divining; her teacher, an emetic Canaanite who’s hammertoes kept him from standing upright for long periods of time admonishing her for unraveling a coil of intestines too quickly, the coil collapsing like pie-filling leaving an offal unassailable stink that brought tears to his eyes. Alectryomancy, Augury, Bibliomancy, Cartomancy, Palmistry, Chronomancy, Crystallomancy, Gastromancy, Spheromancy and Lithomancy she found passé, their outcomes divined with trickery, deception and slight-of-hand.

Creusot Le Puissant La Bourgogne, known far and wide for his ingenious acts of unlevered Spheromancy had a torrid affair with his great grandmother, the two, comingling their necromantic skills, summoning up spirits and presences the likes of which had never been seen before or again. Concluding that she was a gyp artist and her teacher a mountebank, practitioners of magnetism and hocus-pocus, he took no heed of her divinations. Instead, with equanimity and unstilted composure he set about looking for the whereabouts of a missing whore’s glove, the one he’d heard spoken about in hushed voices and whispers. Legend had it that the eloigned glove, if found, would alter the course of history.

The Levirate McCollum, forsook and forsaken, the ocean spume wetting his trouser bottoms, the bells ringing like soigné chimes, stood astride the Mabbot Lane bridge, his immense shadow casting a pall on the evening tide. His cousins had left him to his druthers, demanding that he choose one of them, be she the prettiest or the ugliest, the happiest or the most reserved, and give away the others to a second cousin twice removed. Shemuwel worked as a Shamuses for the Mabbot Lane constabulary, his beat the high side of the aqueduct, the very selfsame side where the dogmen had their encampment. The city enlisted the help of Shemuwel, Shamuses for the Mabbot Lane constabulary, to rid the city of beggars, crumbs and whores, his employ to chase the mitigates out from under bridges, alleyways and doorstops, ridding the conurbation of the stink and dereliction of squatters and drifters, renewing its reputation as a place of tranquil asylum and wholesome splendour.

Sooty Tern

2011-06-11T17:07:00.006-04:00

In the end no one will remember a thing. He came down with and suffered from the following aliments and abnormalities: Sebaceum, Mental Insufficiency, Photophobia, and Gastrula Distress. The insufficiencies he could managed; the ailments, he learned to live with, seeing them as a stain from Above, the acceptance of which made his suffering all the more heroic. His great grandfather left the family fold and took up with a band of Anarcho-primitivism living in a Stone Age village in the mountains overlooking the city. Anarcho-primitivists were expected to abandon the ways of the Modern World, forsaking the comforts and extravagancies of an Industrial Society.

Accustom to the mammon afforded a person of Bourgeoisies’ upbringing, his wet-nurse suckling him like a baby goat, the downstairs maid drawing his nightly bath and scrubbing him pink, the upstairs one pulling the covers back and fluffing his pillows, his great grandfather found it difficult to give up the comforts and privileges he had all but taken for granted since childhood. Long before his great grandfather severed all familial ties, taking up with the Anarcho-primitivists where he remained until his death of Mental Insufficiency and Gastrula Distress, hastened, the coroner said, from a diet of mealworms and alfalfa, before the family opened its first fishmongery, long before the Dogmen took over the Greek Deli, before the rector stole his first gobbet of transubstantiated wine, an unknown seamstress working for an anonymous haberdashery made a pair of red whore’s gloves, the only pair in the entire world.

Manly astride the Gatestown bridge Phibs Glasnevin bowls bread crumbs across the surface of the roiling green water. His eye on a Sooty Tern he aims and bowls, pegging it in the head, the bird disappearing into the roiling. Phibs Glasnevin lives with his ailing mamma in a walkup bedsit in a decrepit tenement overlooking the Waymart, his mamma stone-deaf from the chiming bells and unruly children who play in the streets below. His great grandfather, upon hearing about the poor woman’s imposition, sent her a Get Well card with a picture of him mounting a Bradlees mare, the mare bucking like a drunken whore, the Anarcho-primitivists cheering him on encouragingly. Penned in sterling ink Over the portal door to the Gatestown Repository, was:

But the strangest thing happened. Backscuttling for the hop
off with the odds altogether in favour of his tumbling into the
river, Jaun just then I saw to collect from the gentlest weaner
among the weiners, (who by this were in half droopleaflong
mourning for the passing of the last post) the familiar yellow
label into which he let fall a drop, smothered a curse, choked a
guffaw, spat expectoratiously and blew his own trumpet...
(Finnegans Wake, 470.22-28)

‘surely as I’m standing that’s the first time I ever seen a trumpeting droopleaflong... makes a man want to pull out!’ droned Phibs Glasnevin, a knot of spit collimating his throat. Repocketing his comb, bits of broken loose hair speckling the front of his shirt, he nudged his mamma in the ribs, her breath expelling damply from the shrunken bellows of her chest. ‘the Church of the Eternal Scoundrel is having a dinner this Wednesday evening. Shall we attend? You and I mamma? Shall we?’ Gasping for a air, her lips turning eggplant blue, his mamma rebuked her son. ‘you’re such a scoundrel’ she said crushingly.

Hades

2011-06-08T10:44:00.001-04:00

The Ferret brothers, called so because they resembled ferrets, the middle brother more so than his brothers, both of whom, though ferret-like didn’t have the stripe that singled out their middle brother, moved outside the five-mile to raise free-range chickens and pigs, the pigs corralled to keep them separated from the chickens who, featherless, wouldn’t have a chance in Hades against free-range swine. Of they the brothers we will talk no more as they are of the author’s imagination, made-up, compiled and culled together, and rarely does imagination come close to the world of reality and things.

Lela, her fingers worrying the hem of her skirts, sat under a waning blue sky beneath the Seder grocer’s awing, the threat of rain and children splashing in puddles making her feel morose and gloomy. Having lived for three years outside the five-mile she knew that a rainy day on that side was decidedly worse than one on this side. Either way the moroseness and gloominess continued, eating away at her like a gonorrhoeal sore, the itch between her legs widening her posture. She remembered how her mother would fan her face on those hot fuggy afternoons in July, the coffee tin next to her overflowing with still smouldering cigarette ends, her lipstick leaving a perfect O on the filter tip. Trussing the analogous foot to the opposing ankle and tying off with a sheepshank her mamma primped herself to leave for the evening, her date a podgy barber who owned a hair salon and pedicure shop, the latter a tax shelter for the former. Her mother spent most evenings out with the barber, his assistant, a wan pale boy with a discouraging overbite, discouraging to her mamma who preferred cunnilingus to intercourse, and whomever was willing and eager to frolic with a middle-age housewife, leaving her daughter alone to fend for herself, her daughter’s feistiness encouraging a rather unorthodox reaction to loneliness and isolation from the outside world. By the age of five her daughter had learned how to thread a needle, turn on and off the flatiron, fasten and unfasten her mother’s lockbox and live in a fantasy world she shared with dolls and a boxful of sand.

Pigeon House Road Constabulary

2011-06-07T00:08:00.002-04:00

The hospital sent his grandmother a threatening letter saying that if she didn’t pay her husband’s hospital bill in full they would be forced take legal actions. His grandmother responded by burning the letter and tossing the still smouldering ashes in the hospital executive’s face. The following day his grandmother received a letter with the added caveat that the hospital executive was seeking damages for the second degree burns he had received due to his grandmother’s uncalled for reaction to the first letter. The following day his grandfather started drinking quart bottles of Stout like the fish he delivered for the Mercury Fish Co., the hawsehole in his stump weeping sebaceous green puss. The following day his grandfather fired the disagreeable whore for reneging on her promise to let him stick his hawsehole up her twat. Jenkin's Rule allowed for at least one post-surgical sodomy, his grandfather demanding that provenance to the rule be recognized. Solomon Whorl, barrister and craps enthusiast, took on his grandmother’s case, preparing a counterattack claiming that the litigant, under coercion and grieving the loss of her husband’s leg, had had her rights levied and therefore was in no way responsible for anything, payment of her husband’s bill included. His grandmother lost the case, Solomon Whorl nowhere to be found on the day of the litigation. Some say he was seen down at the docks throwing craps, others that he wasn’t a lawyer at all but a simpleton, his mother, her breasts sagging like two hanged men, suckling him well into his teens. His grandfather stopped talking after they sawed off his gangrenous leg leaving him with one leg and a stump, respite from the spectral throbbing coming in quart bottles and hook-tooth whores.

Armed with wooden truncheons the Pigeon House Road constabulary charged the mob head on, taking out whomever got in their way, the tallest keeping watch over the heads of his brothers, the shortest cutting his way through the mob on his hands and knees. Poldy watched the mêlée from behind a mountain of rotting oranges, the mob dispersing like cattle-prodded sheep, the shortest constabulary, caught between the legs of a fat woman with a bleating child, struggling to free himself. That day everything, children bound in plaster, poles separating unformed legs, hips swivelling on ball bearing hinges, feet skipping over every crack in the sidewalk, hands clutching at mothers’ apron strings, things barely alive, fell apart, all the dreams and happy times to come falling with it. By force of habit Poldy scratched his ear, a whaler’s needle of cartilage causing him no end of itchiness and discomfit. Expecting the worst, and with the mob making its way towards the front of the Seder grocers and the mountain of rotting oranges, he recited a line from a book he had read as a flog-toughened boy, “Besides, being very young, he had found the occupation of keeping his heart completely steeled against the worst so engrossing that he had come to feel an overpowering dislike towards any other form of activity whatever”.(Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, Typhoon). As luck would have it the mob passed him by and continued up the street, a few stragglers, hooligans by nature, looting whatever they could get their hands on, the Pigeon House Road constabulary lowering their truncheons and wiping their brows with satisfaction.

Awakening from a night of stormy weather, his lean-to leaking like a washerwoman’s hopes, her fingers worked to the bone cleaning other people’s filth, he felt a rat-tat-tat-rat-tat-tat in his head, long-forgotten memories ricocheting around in his skull, his thoughts firing like an autocannon, sleep-numb legs dancing in the wake of night’s expulsion. He was reminded of the funeral of a friend, a man with an oblong face and claw-hammer jaw, his teeth chiselled and honed on hock bones and pig’s knuckle, a man who when he put his mind to eating, which he did with great relish, could finish off an entire picnic ham or an pot roast without loosening a notch, a man of such great stature and pride that when a call to arms was proclaimed he dropped whatever he was doing and took the oath of allegiance, leaving behind a fine-looking wife and a dozen cherub-face children.

Polyphonic Spree - Lithium

2011-06-05T13:37:00.000-04:00

il miglior fabbro

2011-06-04T14:08:00.003-04:00

Lela stood in front of the Dogman deli staring at the reflection of a woman feeding her dog table scraps of picnic ham, the dog eating with ravenous indecency. An encephalitic making a trumpet of his ass, a dissonant heckling issuing from between his legs, stood watching Lela stare at the reflection of the woman feeding her dog, the dog eating with a gluttonous debauchery. Across the street a Chinese whore, her skirts wrestled around her hips, passed by, the encephalitic giving her the once over, his trumpeting ass lowering a pitch. The inviolacies of a monotonous world, where the unchanged changes in the wink of an eye, the doff of a cap, what was once there is now gone, what was gone reappears, grinning, reminding you that what ends begins again only to end again. Lela watched the woman and the dog until she couldn’t watch any longer, her jaw locked like a cobbler’s vice, blood spooling from the corners of her mouth and into the cleft of her chin.

He awoke only to fall back asleep, ferried back to the stygian nightmare that had waked him. Overcome with tenebrific wonting, the bed linen coiled round his legs, he struggled to stay calm, the storm that was brewing outside gnawing at the gunwales of his skull. He pulled himself from sleep, aiming for nine o’clock when the grocer’s opened for business. It was a slow process, taking all the unbridled strength he could muster, his arms and legs unresponsive, his eyes crusted over with sleep, the smell of yesterday’s misadventures clinging to his clothes like a syphilitic itch. He remembered leaving the tavern, rounding the corner and heading for home, his hat covering the bald spot that had encouraged such derisive heckling. A pug-nosed braggart, his shirttails hanging out his unbuckled trousers, wagging a drunken finger at him slurring ‘No man is a lion’ the treacly scent of wormwood and Absinthe prickling his face. ‘Not even God!’ This happened more often than not, resulting in a bloodied nose, his, not the heckler’s, who in his drunkenness didn’t feel the instigating blow, countering with a roundhouse and splaying his nose like a ripe tomato.

After they sawed off his gangrenous leg leaving him with one leg and one stump, his grandfather took to easing the phantom pain with quart bottles of Stout and disagreeable whores. Dr. Henri les Fauves amputated his grandfather’s necrotic leg with a circular saw, cauterizing the stump with a flatiron (etched on the handle was the following: Derain’s & Sons, Makers of Wound Sealers and Electric Car Jacks, ‘il miglior fabbro’) and trussing the hob with hospital greens and surgical string, the corner-stitch giving his stump the appearance of a chainless hawsehole. They were later to find out that the surgeon had substituted Jenkin's Rule for a loosely tied mattress stitch, claiming it would hold better and help drain the wound, his grandmother refusing on principle to pay for such shoddy workmanship.

alle Gott sind tot

2011-06-01T10:43:00.005-04:00

As summer neared so did his encroaching madness. The fenland blossomed into an abundant garden full of beautiful flowers, each with its own pollinating bee. His thoughts deepened until all he could think were sordid awful things, thoughts out of sync with the rest of the outside world. The bees, each to its own, barbed legs carrying sun-rich pollen, Nature’s nascent blood, hurried buzzing from one flower to another, dropping their motherly load into waiting mouths. Nectary to anther, stigma to ovule, they brought lifeblood to Nature’s garden. His thoughts whirled round and round, the fruit of his nature thrown into the streets like an upended cart where they were crushed under foot and wagon.

Tattooed on his forearm, just above his broken wrist, was La Morte Accidentale di un Anarchico, and above that, where the bicep meets with the shoulder, alle Gott sind tot. Each told a story: La Morte Accidentale di un Anarchico about the time he was arrested under suspicion of being a terrorist, tortured, then let loose, his torturers claiming that he was the spitting image of someone on their rendition list and thinking they had nabbed the right man, and proceeding with no little enthusiasm, acted in an overzealous manner; the other announcing his mistrust of polytheism. When he was a boy his father cautioned him against taking a stand on anything; saying that a boy who believes in gods is as foolish as a boy he believes in ghosts. And ghosts, he said, are just as likely to grant you a wish as a god would. Anybody can wear a sheet and make booing sounds, he said, but only a man can wear a sheet and denounce others. His father and his father’s father, going back as far as his father’s father’s father, all wore bed sheets with cone-shaped hoods, set fires in front of people’s houses and danced round a maypole made to look like a cross. The god they believed in wore an iridescent white sheet with an over-elaborate cylindrical hood and spoke in tongues with a syllabant lisp. They drank themselves’ blind, their god stuffing his mouth with entrails and viands, his teeth clacking like castanets, the others, using their heads as piñatas and brass-knuckled fists as weapons, splitting each others’ skulls into cordwood, flays of scalp flesh, some cut in tonsures, others bristle thin, quartered and dressed with an anatomist’s eye for precision.

Long before he knew about his da’s Chinese whore, before his great grandfather’s love for bare-knuckle fighting and quart bottles of Stout sent him to an early grave, his great grandmother spending all their savings on insulin and linseed oil, his great grandfather always griping about his wooden leg and the jabbing pain it caused him, long before he learned how to ride his second-hand bicycle with no hands and smoked his first cigarette behind the locker-room with a boy who ended up hanging himself for no reason other than he felt like it, long before any of this, before the sky fell for the first time, only to fall every year, like clockwork, leaving people without roofs over their heads and frustration in their voices, he had no idea why anyone would want to listen to anything a boy like him had to say. Ro Gallegos Cruz, an encephalitic, stands in front of the Seder Grocer’s admiring his reflection in the window, his goutweed jaw working a stick of peppermint chewing gum. His booted feet kicking clumps of earth Jesús Juventud stood staring at his reflection in the window, the grocer swiping at him with a broom. ‘shoo or I will smite you with my broom!’ cried the grocer. ‘malcontent!’ A man in a feathered cap with a goutweed jaw, staring idly at the hole in the roof over his head, exclaims ‘”So, even when persons are in excellent health, and know the facts of the case perfectly well, the sun, nevertheless, appears to them to be only a foot wide”’*. Long before the Dogmen set up camp behind the aqueduct and took to sniggling and dancing round a blazing bonfire, his father took up with a Chinese whore with raven black hair and tiny delicate feet.

Dr. Strangelove

2011-06-01T02:27:00.000-04:00

el Viajero Pobres - Bogotá

2011-05-30T11:06:00.008-04:00

-Bogota May 5, 2011-

The kind young lady at the United check-in counter at the Ottawa airport offered to tag my luggage “High Priority” (which may not have been a good idea considering where I was going) after last summer’s debacle in Buenos Aires. Flight to Washington was uneventful; no peanuts or salted pretzels, a choice of bottled water, juice, coffee or soft drink and an annoyed-looking flight attendant who when not pushing her cart up and down the centre aisle, which she did with bland indifference, lay crosswise half asleep in the seats next the lavatory. She did however saved me the embarrassment of busting in on someone au-commode by pointing out to me that the lavatory was indeed occupied. Huston airport is wonderful: clean, well laid out and impeccably maintained. Flying over the suburban DC I couldn’t help but notice how many trees (all of one green canopied type) there are in this State; a veritable green space bespackled with tan/ecru mansions all with swimming pool, winding laneway and manicured lawns. Whomever won the contract for developing must have walked away a billionaire. I was fortunate to have all three seats on my side of the aisle on the flight from Huston to Bogota. With the exception of a cranky baby and the seat in front cranked as far back as it would crank, the 5 hours was as comfortable as a Continental flight is or could be. Finding and keeping an internet connection in Bogota is a challenge; ergo the tardiness of my first email.

Deplaned, we were corralled into two queues and quickly processed through Colombian customs; me twice, the second customs agent referring to me by name, which was either rather friendly or a sign that they knew I was coming. Rolling my luggage through the mechanical doors I was met by what appeared to be the paparazzi. In actually fact they were taxi people; some taxi agents, the inveiglers, dressed in suits with little paddles with the name of a hotel who pressure you into their taxi, armed police, sniffer dogs, Golden Labs, and the general hustle and bustle of a big city airport. My first mistake was to accept the false generosity of the inveigler. He took note of where I was going and quickly, before I came to my senses, which I suppose given my 11 hours of travel was unlikely, ushered me to a black non-descript taxi. I was quoted 40 thousand pesos, about $22 Cdn. After a harrowing drive lurching and caroming through heavy traffic we arrived at my hotel. The driver then took my 50 Mille peso note and claimed he had no change; which of course he did. Thankfully Leo, the owner if the B&B’s son, came to my rescue and dealt with the inveigler. I was told this is not uncommon and that unmarked, or private taxis are to be avoided at all costs.

I was taken to my room, a double bed, wide screen TV mounted on the wall, lots of closet space, a second smaller room with a settee and table and a private bathroom with a shower that resembles a walk-in closet with a skylight, the shower nozzle attached to wiring attached to a device that is suppose to, and I say suppose to, change cold water into tepid. The windows are barred, as is the door. Its actually quite a nice room; and for what I paid incredible! The hot water… well I am in South America after all.

Bogota is situated in the high plains of Cundinamarca and Boyacá in the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes, 2,640 m. above sea level. Needless to say I was hit with altitude sickness as soon as I walked off the plane and onto the plain. The symptoms are a headache, joint aches, difficulty catching one’s breath and a general malaise that dissipates within a day or two. I’m fine, just a bit rough around the edges; not something to be overly concerned with. I’m told that once my system aligns itself with Bogota’s I’ll be hale and hearty.

-May 6, 2011-

I met up with Leslie yesterday; my contact here in Bogota. Leslie grew up around the corner from me in Pointe Claire, attended the same high school and Cegep, knows about laviolettes and late-night drinking in Valois Park and has been living here and working as a journalist and translator for the past 22 years. She lives with her two sons, 14 and 16, in a residential part of the city where she owns a condominium. Well aware of my aches and pains Leslie suggesting coca tea, yes coca, which I graciously declines (its suppose to remedy altitude sickness and is non-toxic when not mulched with diesel fuel, Janitor in a Drum, bathroom solvents and or lye). Leslie invited me for lunch after which we took for a short walk to a park near her home; and for those of you who are hell-bent on a complete smoking ban in all public spaces, which in many ways I do agree with, albeit grudgingly, the park is designated non-smoking; which I discovered when the guards motioned at me when I lit up. Next a solo jaunt around the neighborhood, Leslie’s boys were due home from school, where every building complex has its own guard-post and Eastern European style boarder crossing fence thingamajig, rising and lower when an ID carrying resident arrives and leaves by car.

My first attempt at buying cigarettes went well, the woman behind the counter getting help from a woman on my side of the counter who successfully translated my all but non-existent Spanish. For those of you who smoke cigarettes range from $2 to 3 depending on where you purchase them. Unlike Canada where a single package of cigarettes is taxed upwards of $7, the taxes levied in Bogota are middling to nil. Mind you with the altitude here in Bogota, and the respiratory heaviness it encourages, one smoked cigarette goes a long, long way; a puff more like a pant or a railing gasp. Leslie invited me for supper so I had the opportunity to meet her boys; two wonderful, well educated polite young gentlemen.

After dinner we taxied it to an Irish Pub for quiz night, the taxi ride taking well over an hour… even at 7-8 pm the traffic merciless, as was our driver who had no compunctions about laying on the horn whenever he felt like it or felt he had been slighted by another taxi driver, which from what I’ve witnessed is all too common. Its sort of like automobile jousting but with 3 thousand pounds under you rather than a dappled roan mare. Perhaps Cervantes lives on in the minds and tempers of cabbies and their fares (as I too felt like screaming out the window at a slow moving car or a hopscotching J-walking! But with armed military everywhere one is best to keep one’s moribund thoughts to oneself)

Arriving late we joined a team of Brit expats, one of whom is married to a Colombian who runs a private school and the other in the British military stationed in Bogota. One of the answers was ‘face-off’, referring to how certain sporting events begin. They were happy to have a stick-swinging, elbow crunching Kanuk on their side. The pub is in an older colonial part of Bogota, once a city in itself, now part of greater Bogota. I noticed a tableful of young people across from the pub drinking shots of alcohol from Mickey’s, which I was to discover are sold in the local bodegas and permitted on the outdoor porticos. The line between the wealthy and the poor is like a Chinese Wall; the rich driving sporty European cars, lots of BMW’s and Mercedes, and the poor using horse and cart or cheap one-stroke motorcycles. Not an un-mufflered Harley in sight, much to my delight. And of course public transit: a mishmash of privately owned and operated buses that stop upon request and carry people hanging off the doors, literally. Then there is the city-run Transmilenio: a network of articulated buses with dozens of stations on its six main lines. There are also packs of minibuses and vans. And of course the ubiquitous yellow radio taxis that work like drones in a beehive running people around Bogota like so many lemons with wheels. They drivers tend to be fair, but it is best to arrange a fare before setting off; that way you dispense with haggling with someone who will invariably always have the upper hand and come out on top.

-May 7, 2011-

When I arrived there was a vase of flowers in my room; long stems with big white trumpet shaped flowers. I'm not sure what they are, but they are beautiful. Yesterday I ventured out and did some shopping: fruit, oranges and apples, some raw almonds, bread, honey, yogurt, peanuts and potato chips, two bottles of con gas water, a liter of mandarin juice all for under $10 Canadian. Thus far I've been able to order dos empanadas with cheese and dos with a mixture of beef, lentils, potato and spices. I'm working on expanding on my food ordering and will hopefully be able to order a full Colombian meal soon. Leslie is going to take me around the centre of Bogota tomorrow; once I get my bearings I should be able to move around on my own with more confidence. The weather is a mixture of hot and muggy with rain and bright hot and sunny; you get a mixture of each throughout the day and evening.

I saw someone right out of my novel, a character who lives, subsists, in the fictional world I have created. A legless man punting up the sidewalk using wooden blocks. His pants legs, coiled like braided rope, trailed behind him tied in a knot; a look of determination offset with despair on his sun-reddened face; people moving aside as he trundled passed, one arm occasionally stretched out begging for alms. He brought me back to my own fictional world, a world inhabited with half-people and people living half-lives. People struggling to make it through another day, living on the edge of humanity, the forgotten, the marginalized and humiliated, hanging on with all their might.

The poverty here is staggering; the area where I am staying considered one of the richest in Bogota, a level 5, meaning well-guarded and safe. As there is no such thing as unemployment benefits or social assistance if you don’t work you don’t eat, which creates a subculture of beggars who’s very existence depends on the kindness and humanity of others. One hour of my hourly wage would feed a family of 5 for 2 days. If I can I try to buy from street vendors, their canopied pushcarts lining the main streets and thoroughfares; the city landscape dotted with colourful umbrellas and ramshackle horse-drawn farm carts. I saw a horse grazing in the median and the owners, a man and woman, sprawled out in the grass; the woman picking lice from the man’s head. The horse appeared healthier and better cared for than the couple; its belly sagging below its haunches as it ate its fill of free grass.

Took a taxi to the neighborhood where the Irish pub is where I was lauded for my knowledge of ice hockey; $5 Cnd. There is a small park with stone benches surrounding the centre and wooden benches lining the perimeter. Sunday is outdoor market day; vendors selling everything from jewelry to Colombian artwork, scarves and handbags to cakes and empanadas, the general ware one finds at an outdoor market. Much like the one Julie and I went to in Buenos Aires, except with armed police standing around trying not to look menacing. As I was much in need of coffee with cream, a rarity in Bogota, I stopped in at the Irish Pub and took a seat in the outdoor courtyard at the back of the pub; a rustic garden with flowers and other unidentifiable flora hanging in suspended baskets. I ordered a coffee con leche (with cream) and opened my book, which I was told by two foreign teachers, who moments later asked me to join them, indentified me as a gringo. I was invited to join them and drilled for 10 minutes: where are you from, what do you think of the weather, why Bogota of all place… Jessica is from Texas and has dual citizenship as her father is Colombian; Joanne is from Michigan I think; both are teachers at a private school here in Bogota. It started to rain, which it does intermittently, very intermittently, then as quick as it started it stopped, the clouds opening up a crack, letting a single ray of sunlight through.

Jessica and Joanne were drinking a mixture of mulched mint leaves, two types of rum and fresh lemon; a Bogotá concoction one wouldn’t find at your local Ottawa pub; nor, I imagine, would one want to as it looks like the grass clippings you scrap from the bottom of your lawnmower. I ordered a second café con leche, much to my headaches delight. A British/American music producer/manager/roadie joined us (Joanne, I was soon to discover, is a pro at engaging people in conversation, inviting a third English speaking person to join our quadrate; making a roundtable pentangle).The British/American music producer/manager/roadie regaled us with Jason Bourne-like stories of customs intrigue and full-cavity searches, telling us that he had three passports, UK, US and some other make-believe country, and was working on getting a fourth… making the Jason Bourne reference rather fitting. Before flagging a taxi back to the B&B I gave Jessica the phone number where I’m staying; Jessica suggested we get together this week and do some sightseeing and pub hopping. The Colombians are welcome to all the grass clippings and rum they can stomach. I’ll stick with café con leche or Ginger Ale and lime.

-May 8, 2011-

I’m loathe to admit, but yes I am watching the News; CNN in English. My perspective on ‘things’ is different; Colombia existing outside the social and political pomposity of North America. However, with the presence, a ubiquity that seldom escapes your attention, a simulacrum, French theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) would say, of the police and military around every corner and on every street, under underpasses, too, one gets the feeling that ones’ movements are being carefully monitored. But as in most South American country, 20,000 Pesos folded into a neat pentagon and stealthily offered in a handshake generally makes most problems disappear. At the airport the DAS, the Colombian secret police, regularly pull people out of line to either 1) ask you more in-depth questions or B) ask you to follow them to one of the many interrogation rooms, this after you’ve already been processed through customs. As long as you have everything written down and ready to hand over, where you were staying while in Bogota, the hotel address, any friends you might have living in Colombia, how much money you have with you, etc., you don’t really get hassled; unless of course you draw undue attention to yourself like wearing your sunglasses in the airport, acting shifty, perspiring profusely (the airport is air-conditioned), staring at the Das, which in itself is beyond imbecilic, or have a sleeve or two of tattoos, the ones that make you stand out whether you intend to or not. (They like Ozzie Osborne here, cable carries his reality show, but remember you are in a very Catholic country. Any impious shenanigans can come back to hit you like a headless chicken in the forehead!)

One takes ones’ chances when one tales a taxi in Bogota. The traffic here is beyond congested, more like an arterial blood clot that stretches North, South, East and West. A trip in a taxi is like a rollercoaster ride without the loop-to-loops and curvy tracks. The horn is a necessity, not an automobile “apt”, and is to be used without fear of reprisal or a punch in the eye, everyone lays into them, even old ladies, the blind and the Sisters of Mercy, a gaggle of whom I saw walking together this evening their white habits in glaring contrast to the generally morose attire of evening-goers. Taxi drivers swerve carom around the city streets like they have to get home because they just got a text-messaging telling them that their wife is about to sell the house and move out with her new boyfriend. In all my travels, both abroad and at home, I have never in my life been witness to such crazy driving, and no Montreal doesn’t even come close, congested roads, traffic jams and all around insane operation of a motor vehicle. Add to this motorcycles veering in and out of traffic, cutting off cars and bumping in, the every-present highway vendor, selling everything from bottled water, roasted something or the other, nuts I think, candy and of course dashboard ornaments; the Virgin Mary by far the most popular. It’s a wonder the emergency wards aren’t overflowing with half-amputated Virgin Mary salesmen, small children, as they too flag sown speeding cars too, actually stopped, the traffic, remember, and bottled water hawkers. Perhaps that’s why Catholicism is so prevalent here in Bogota.

I met Leslie this afternoon at the Juan Valdez coffee shop abutting the Botero Museum. There’s nothing quite like a Cappuccino with raw unrefined sugar after a harrowing taxi ride up a mountain. Of course the taxi driver grossly overcharged me, almost double from what Leslie told me. I knew something was up when he put in a CD with all those one hit wonders from the eighties; the Bee Gees blaring out the window as we swerved in and around traffic, a symphony of horns cutting into a heartfelt Bee Gee’s harmony that had me thinking of that French girl I dated with the friend who had one blue and one brown and Nicole who’s bust out measured anything I’d ever seen in National Geographic. Leslie showed me around the centre of Bogota, stopping every so often to wonder at the confectionaries and sweets displayed like soldiers in the pastry and bakery windows. Thank goodness I saw a sign announcing “Cheap liposuction” on my way in by taxi. We stopped in at one of the many churches, dating back to the early 16th century, and I gawked at the religious paintings and artifacts that adorned the inside of the sanctuary, a few feet away two people deep in prayer as I rubbed my hand against 16th century wood and stone. The Botero Museum, though small, is wonderful! Some of the rooms display works by Picasso, Dali, a bust, which I had no idea Dali dabbled in, Monet to name a few. I plan to visit a second time before I leave. The Gold Museum and National Museum I will save for later in the week, as they, I am sure, will occupy a great deal of my aesthetic time.

-May 9, 2011-

This is what I wrote (for my novel) after seeing the legless beggar: “He saw him again; his legs dragging behind him like coils of rope, feet crippled with polio, hands clutching wooden blocks tied to his wrists with old clothesline. He pulled himself across the blacktop stopping every few feet to reposition his weight, then pushing down hard on his elbows aligned his shoulders with the cracks in the sidewalk, loose stones and gravel leaving their imprint on his forearms and hands, then bowing his back, his ribcage snapping, continued on his way, those around him making no effort to hide the fear and repulsion on their faces. Lela saw him; his faint image; the Sisters of Charity cajoling him to give his worthless life over to God; the Witness, shoving a pamphlet into his face saying ‘--God recognizes only those who recognize Him… and you… God doesn’t see… doesn’t recognize Himself in you… you have yet to be born… dead, that’s what you are… the dead among the living’.”

Much like Buenos Aires Bogota is a city of pastries and sweets. The side streets are lined with sweet shops offering such saccharine treats as caramel filled trumpets, custard filled tubas, cheese rolls and something that resembles a bagel covered in icing, coconut cookies and tamarind filled squares, delicate handmade confectionaries that would stop an elephant in its tracks, a sweet tooth heaven that is sure to change a sourpuss into a doughy optimist.

Leslie invited me for lunch today: a traditional Colombian soup with potatoes and chicken; very hearty and belly warming… a real treat for someone whose ordering range consists of cheese empanadas and cigarettes. I used an ABM for the first time today, and must say it came off without a hitch… of course Leslie pointed out the right buttons to push. Thank goodness Green is the international colour of GO! Or gangrene! Which I’m sure an inexpensive lipo vacuuming would remedy (see “Cheap Liposuction”). I am very fortunate to have a friend, a new friend in fact, here to show me the proverbial ropes. It sure “do” make things easier. There seems to be a common bond a, wherewithal if you may, between people who were born, schooled and raised in Montreal. Perhaps it’s the way we were brought up, Pointe Claire is, or at least was when I was growing up, a predominately English suburb and traveling outside of the relative safety of English speaking Montreal into the predominately Francophone world of Montreal taught us how to be aware of our surrounds, people, the divide between the two cultures was just beginning to be politicized, the 1979 provincial election that saw Rene Levesque take office, and not to look too naïve or Anglais cocky. This schooling, I suppose, stead’s we English Montrealers well abroad, preparing us to accept our minority status wherever, okay almost wherever, we go. Humility speaks louder than cultural superiority.

Much to my good fortune, which has been sullied by shyster taxi drivers (actually both of today’s trips were wonderful; I paid the Bogota fare) I was invited to dinner at Leslie’s. I had the all to rare opportunity to sit down to supper with Leslie and her two sons, two exceptionally talent and engaging young men. I was also privy to mother and sons building, yes building, blackberry jam in the middle building, a cake for their father’s birthday. Leslie’s most recent email said that the cake, indeed, had risen to the occasion! I’m planning a daytrip back into the city-centre for tomorrow: back to the Botero Museum, the Gold Museum, the Archeology Museum and window shopping for sweets and caramel filled trumpets. Remember, cosmetic surgery in Bogota is cheaper than a well-tailored suit… no matter what side you dress on!

-May 10, 2011-

I was told by a guest from the Netherlands staying here that helicopters fly over neighborhoods looking for suspected drug dealers, the ear-deafening whippoorwill-whippoorwill of the rotary blades filling the air with fear and suspicion; and once the suspect’s house is identified, sometimes incorrectly, a brigade of soldiers will come rappelling down ropes into the suspected drug dealers garden, apprehend said drug dealer and helicopter he or she off to jail. Every time I hear a helicopter flying overhead I can’t help but think that I’ll be hit in the head with the knotted end of a rope. The other explanation, of course, is traffic helicopters; but its not nearly as exciting as soldiers in your garden carrying assault weapons. I, however, have no need to be fearful; I’m safely ensconced in a level 5 neighborhood, the highest being a 6.

Urine and Forest Gump, these are the two things that best describe this afternoon’s misadventure. Let me start at the beginning: I left the hotel at approximately 1;30, caught the H4 Transmilenio bus, then thinking I was at the right transfer station, which I wasn’t, got off the H4, then after a 10 minute wait got back on the next H4, got off at the right station and transferred to the J24, which took me up the mountain, past the Jimenez (see famous poet) station, further up the mountain, the bus seeming to hit every crater in the loose pavement, and to my final destination, the Museo del Oro. I got off the bus and waded into a veritable sea of lunchtime people. An ocean; a vast endless sea; into the Bogota deep. Not having a clue where the museum was, which I was later told was a half block down, down the mountain, and few yards to my right, or left, I figured this would be a good time to call Leslie for redirections (in all fairness to Leslie, she had already given me right directions). I paid 2000 pesos to use a cell phone. (Vendors selling chips, cigarettes lollipops etc., also rent minutes on cell phones, which are attached to their stands with curly, and often colourful wire). Leslie re-gave me the directions she had already given me and off I went; passed the Museo del Oro, past Jimenez station, further down the mountain until I found myself some 3-4 Kilometers from where I started.

I again called Leslie, thankfully she is patient and sympathetic, and asked her where I was; which was an idiotic question as I was there, or here, wherever here or there was, and she wasn’t. I handed the cell phone over to the vendor so Leslie could ask him where I was. The vendor, having no idea why I was handing him back the cell phone, except perhaps to indicate I was finished, hung up. Through some sort of savant-like pantomime I managed to indicate to the vendor that the person he had just disconnected would like to talk with him. He hit redial, which seemed cool considering the cell phone looked like a 1990’s model, and again, through pantomime and hand waving, I managed to indicate to him that the person on the other end of the call, Leslie, would like to asked him where I was. At this point a thought went through my head: I could pretend that I’m a deaf mute, the deafness, after all, is partially true, and garner some sympathy for my inability to communicate in Spanish, or at all, really.

Tiring of hand-puppetry and mime, my skull beginning to implode in on my brain, I decided to try and make a go of getting myself back to the hotel on my own. A mistake, of course. I walked some more and then some more, and then finding myself wandering further in the wrong direction, or so I thought, I decided to find a bench, sit myself down, and smoke a cigarette. After 5 taxi’s refused my fare, I think it had to do with the time of the day, rush hour, and how far north I had to go, and three failed attempts at getting back on the Transmilenio, and yes I paid all three times, and finding the transit map more confusing than communicating in waves and pantomime, left the platform, three times, and began walking; this time back in the direction from whence I came, some 3-4 kilometers.

The walk backwards back up the mountain, I think, brought me through an area of Bogota most Bogotá-ians don’t walk through. I was stopped twice and asked for change, or so I thought, once by a woman with three teeth and a snarling smile, and once by a two-toothed man who got quite irritated with my persistent no’s and eye-to-eye stare. The I walked under an overpass, over would have been better, and was assailed by the heavy horsey, albeit human stench of urine and unwashed clothing. Then passed an alleyway where a bonfire was being stoked with busted up pallets and bags of garbage, for the homeless I surmised, the heavy stench of urine overpowering my ability to navigate. Then, after responding to an unshaven fellow whom I gathered was a schizophrenic out for a walk (see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus) in French, he kept referring to me, and his imaginary friends, from what I could understand, as being Californian, I finally managed to convince a taxi driver to take me to Leslie’s neighborhood, a much closer fare.

So where does Forest Gump figure in all this you ask? When I got up this morning I had no inclination to walk 7-8 kilometers, 2-3 maybe, but certainly not 7-8. But once I started to walk, in the wrong direction sadly enough, I just kept going, with no regard for where I would end up or who I would run into. Thus the Forest Gump reference, or as I refer to it, a Gumpism. I met Leslie and her boys outside a bodega, by chance actually, and Leslie made sure I got the rest of the way back to the hotel safely. Tomorrow Leslie has graciously offered to take me around Bogota. This time I will get to visit the Museo del Oro; and maybe run into a few old toothless acquaintances along the way.

-May 11, 2011-

I swear, by all that’s holy and impious, that I saw an elephant frond nibbled into a likeness of Christ in the garden outside my hotel window. Carpenter ants, maybe an indigenous herbivore with razor-sharp mandibles and pincher-like hands, (no that sounds too anthropomorphic, too unlikely), or some species of bird who’s sole Darwinian raison d’être is to fill the world with likenesses of our Lord Savior. Or I have imagined the whole thing. The Andean high altitude does strange things to one’s sense of reality and perception.

The night before garbage pickup the streets are a trash-land of paper, fruit, peals, rinds, skins, half-eaten empanadas, anything disposable, which appears to be everything, and people culling through the trash heaps looking for things to recycle and sell. The smell is overpowering; as is the sadness of watching the poor and destitute rummaging through puddles of decomposing garbage looking for their next meal. I saw this in Buenos Aires, and suppose it goes on in other South American countries. Yesterday while trying to flag a taxi outside a Health Centre I watched as a legless man, amputated at the pelvis, was loaded into a miniature ambulance, his wife or daughter, watching on anxiously. The ambulance was no bigger than an El Camino with a hardtop; just enough space to fit an amputee or a two-legged person with their feet hanging out the back window.

I have seen more one-legged and no-legged people In Bogota than I have seen anywhere else I have traveled to or lived in. Its quite tragic, as I was to find out, as many people have lost legs to landmines left behind after the notorious drug cartel wars that have held Colombia hostage over the years, leaving people in constant fear and suspicious of unmarked motorcycles (all motorcycle riders must wear a yellow vest with their license plate number boldly printed on it. In the past cartel hit-men and assassins were known to drive through the city on motorcycles taking out people with submachine guns and Uzi’s). You can still sense that fear when a motorcycle speeds by and you can’t quite make out the license number on the rider’s vest, which are often obscured by a haversack or rain jacket. I did, however, notice that many motorcyclist wear their vest over their haversacks, giving one an image of Quasimodo cutting in and around traffic in a rush to get to the cathedral on time.

I asked Leslie why all the roadside curbs are so high, or deep depending on where you’re looking at them. She said it was the city’s attempt at discouraging people from parking on the sidewalks. In the past people would take a sledgehammer to the bollards erected every few yards to keep people from blocking the pedestrian sidewalks. I’d say it’s a good extra step off the sidewalk and down onto the street.

Leslie took me on a city bus today, all owned and operated by private individuals who pay a yearly licensing fee and a percentage of the fare to the proprietor of the bus company The owner/operators take their buses home each night and can often be seen with their wife or one of their children sitting in the passenger seat. The buses hold 18 people and are about the size of a short bus, the kind used to transport special needs children to school. You pay through a hole in a Plexiglas window separating you from the driver. Our trip to downtown Bogota cost 1.400 pesos each, or about $0.70 Canadian. The driver will let you off anywhere you want; all you have to do ask. Its amazing how the driver operates the bus without stopping to collect fares; he simply reaches backwards through the Plexiglas window, collects the money, and if need be make change. It can be a bumpy lurching ride, but much cheaper than a taxi. Bogota, by the way, doesn’t have potholes… it has craters, some big enough and deep enough to swallow up a bus!

I made it to the Gold Museum today, thanks to Leslie. If I’d been left to my own devices I would have ended up at the Museum of Hapless Travelers, eating cheese empanadas for the forth time or dancing flatfootedly round a homeless persons’ bonfire. The Museum is bright; gold gleaming bright. The collection dates back to well before Christ, the oldest I saw between 27-30 BC. The pieces range from earrings and necklaces, full body dress, with gold penis sheath, to ceremony and ritual thingamajigs made to look like shamanistic animals, the jaguar and crocodile, for example, and jewelry that would tear septum from cartilage and put a permanent crook in your neck. Its well worth the visit, if a bit too glittery on the eyes. We lunched at restaurant on a hilly street, the menu offering a choice of barely or fish soup, red beans or chickpeas, two small boiled potatoes, rice, a small salad of shredded greens and carrots and a choice of fish, beef, chicken or pork. Leslie and I both went for the barely soup, a thick chowder-like gumbo that is a meal in itself. For the main course Leslie chose river fish, which came intact, head,, tail and dorsal fins, the eyes crusted over from deep frying, and red beans, potato comes with every main course, and I flayed chicken breast and chickpeas. I chose a Colombian soft drink that tasted like cream soda and Leslie a barely drink, a cross between Quaker Oates and cloudy water with a hint of sweetness.

As I sit listening to the rain dancing a jitterbug on the courtyard tiles outside my window I can’t help but wonder: what is it about Bogota that makes it such an intriguing city? Is it the people, a combination of born and bred city-dwellers and those from the mountainous regions and border communities looking for work, the merger of the poor and wealthy, the legless beggar in the street and the well-dressed businessman enjoying a midday lunch protected from the mayhem and recklessness of the streets, the guard at the door to the restaurant or café smiling as the outside disappears and the quiet hassle-free inside encourages a haughty arrogance, or is it the city itself, the winding streets and open green spaces, a National Park in the centre of the city, or the people dodging in and out of traffic, idling cars overheating as they wait patiently for the intersection to open up, the diesel belching buses and horse drawn carts, the amputees in WW2 issue wheelchairs and the legless man stuck in the middle of the street oblivious to the cacophony of honking horns ruing the day of his birth, or is it the childlike fear that we secretly harbor, some more secretly than others, that the Incan calendar is coming to an end and the terrifying realization that we will all die, some sooner than later? I really can’t say… its all too overwhelming, this life we live, these childish fears we fear, the thought that this thought could be my last. I think it best to stop harping on hypothetical’s, except death of course, and continue experiencing what life, this place Bogota, has to offer; the experiences I have yet experienced, the moments I have yet to pass through, the new faces I have yet to meet, the love yet to be loved, and let the Incans worry about tomorrow.

Tomorrow, if all goes as planned, I will be taking a three hour bus ride to Villa de Leyva where I am to meet up with Angela, a friend from Ottawa originally from Colombia. I hear tell its a beautiful colonial town relatively unchanged from when it was first settled eons ago! A tranquil relaxing place to end my trip.

-May 12, 2011-

I was rousted from sleep this morning by the clapping of thunder, the courtyard outside my window a splashing tympana of rain. The road to Villa de Leyva will no doubt be overrun with flood waters. As this year’s rainfall in Colombia has left 1,000’s upon 1,000 of people homeless, entire sides of mountains collapsing, mudslides and floods washing out roads and villages, I dare say a bus trip outside of Bogota would be unadvisable.

When I returned to the hotel yesterday I was pleased to find a vase of freshly-plucked white lilies on the bedstead table. To me they resemble a trumpeting hand reaching out to some botanical fairyland; or a gateway into an unsullied landscape where love resides uncorrupted in a white invaginated flower. Or I suppose they’re just flowers… a nice additional to a rather austere minimalist environment. I now have immitigable scientific proof: the hard thing I stepped on and crushed like a walnut, pulverizing it to smithereens, was in fact a snail. Along with the rain come snails out of the garden, bazillions of them. Black with yellow, or it could be red stripes, foolscap antenna, sluggish, as is to their mien, and slower than a Euripidean tortoise. The rains have made my decision for me: I will not chance the trip to Villa de Leyva. With the flooding and collapsing mountainsides that have wrecked havoc on Colombia this year (see 1,000’s left homeless) a bus trip through the mountains could spell disaster. In lieu of something different, this evening Leslie and l are going to Andre Carne de Res, one of the best restaurants and dance clubs in Bogota, to dine on pork loin and watch Colombians do the salsa. Dare I say, dare I, I will watch from the wings as salsa is not one of my dancing strong suits; nor is tango, ballroom, folk, Hip-Hop, square, rave or belly, for that matter.

There is something existential about being in a county where one doesn’t speak the language. Its like living in a deaf-mute world, shutout and silenced, and forever trying to communicate in whatever manner possible. Pointing and smiling seem to work, as does grunting and speaking quickly like you know what you’re saying but your interlocutor isn’t savvy and quick enough to keep up with you. I feel like I am the only non-Spanish speaking foreigner in Bogota, the only one trying to ask for directions or order a cheese empanada; which of course is not true, but it does feel that way. For reasons I have yet to completely understand, perhaps it has to do with the not too-distant legacy of the drug cartels and indiscriminate killings, or the often suspicious nature of Colombians, for good reason I might add, I felt much more comfortable, less shut-out and silenced, in Buenos Aires; but then again Buenos Aires is a much more European-inspired cosmopolitan city. When all the cheese empanadas and cigarettes have been ordered (in pigeon Spanish) and the Transmilenio braved, arriving at the hotel relatively unscathed except for an unshakeable sense of claustrophobia, I will remembered Bogota most for its people, a people who’s determination and courage to survive, to grow and thrive under insurmountable odds far over shines any day lost in a ‘bad neighborhood’, struggling to order a meal other than cheese empanadas or living in a deaf-mute world of my own making.

-May 13, 2011-

Awoke to another day of rain. It has rained, with breaks of sunshine, everyday since I arrived in Bogota. Before coming to Bogota I had thought Dublin was the rainiest city I’ve ever visited! I was wrong; the two tie for the most predictably unpredictable rainy cities I’ve traveled to, Bogota taking first place for the most persistent, and for a city that thrives on dashboard Virgin Mary’s, unrepentant fog that enshrouds the city and surrounding mountains. Its no wonder the coca crops thrive in the lowlands and hills; Colombia has the ideal climate for green growing things. The taxi I took home tonight had the usual Christian iconography, a Virgin Mary hanging from the dash, a reenactment of the Stations of the Cross with each station outlined in mosaic pebbles, a faded snapshot of Christ and an Iron Maiden sticker on the rearview mirror. Now surely that deserves a round of Hale Mary’s, agnostic or not!

Allow me to backtrack a little. Leslie and I dined at a restaurant qua salsa emporium amusement park of all things Colombian chic. One of the most popular restaurants in Bogota, catering to the young, middle-age and old, foreigner and Bogotán alike, Andres Carne de Res is a funhouse of food, drink and entertainment. Shortly after being seated a trio of traveling musicians, drummer, clarinetist and cantante, arrived at our table to welcome us to Colombia. I was wreathed with a red, yellow and blue sash, or sashed with a wreathe, that read HONORES DE LA CAS (a sort of Cub Scout sash; the kind your mother sewed your cloth badges onto until you got your sewing badge and could sew on your own) and Leslie crowned with a silver tiara. Then the singing and drumming and clarineting began, welcoming us to Andres Carne de Res and, from what I gleaned, Columbia. This went on for well over 4 minutes, perhaps in keeping with the levels, or stations, of the restaurant, we were seated above the Inferno and below Paradisio, and ended with a festoon of yellow paper butterflies in homage to Gabriel García Márquez and the curing of cholera. Our meal consisted of a sizzling platter of grilled viands: pork, beef, three types of sausage, Chouriço, Chorizo and blood, and chicken, a small ciborium of mountain potatoes the size of throwing marbles, dipping sauces, hot, medium and mild, and toasted cornmeal pita triangles. It was devilishly delicious! Query: does travel-insurance cover a colonoscopy? Oh yes, lest I forget, and this ones for you Paul, I purchased a copy of James Joyce’s Ulises in Spanish.

Thus far, and nearing the end of my stay in Bogota, I have most enjoyed the simple Colombian traditions; the people and customs, the food and cheap cigarettes (even though smoking is bad, and I am in complete agreement with most of the smoking ban laws, a $7 tax on a package of cigarettes in Canada is pure piratery and the government that levies the taxes no better than the smugglers in their Go Fast Boats!), the mountains, stunningly beautiful when not obscured by fog, the flora and fauna, tricolored birds and snails the size of Volkswagens, and having made a new friend in Leslie.

-May 14, 2011-

My last day in Bogota; a day of both sadness and rejoicing; rejoicing in the anticipation of the first hot shower in twelve days, lower altitude, although I have acclimated myself to the Andean elevation, a Gauloises, my desktop computer where all my ‘stuff’ is saved and being able to communicate in language, not hand-gestures, mime and brutish grunting. Sadness in leaving behind the people I met: Leo, who manages the hotel and was very helpful speaks impeccable English for a Colombian, his assistant, a beautiful, always cheerful woman with the singing voice of an angel, and the young every-hurrying woman who makes sure all the rooms are spic and span, and of course my guide and newfound friend Leslie; who as chance has it will be in Ottawa later this summer.

Traveling is like being born; everything is new, the only language you have mastery over is reptilian (grunts, wails and squirming) and painfully difficult to decipher in others, and if you have a name you don’t know what it means or how to pronounce it. All of which reminds me of Lacan’s ‘Mirror Stage’, that moment in infant development when we become a differentiated “I”. As a traveler, might I conjecture, one goes through the ‘Mirror Stage’ over and over again, indefinitely, each time we set foot in a foreign country; every new metropolis, conurbation, civilization and culture placing a mirror in front of our face. If I have learned anything in the 12 years I have been in university, other than how to conjugate and annotate, its that I still have a lifetime’s worth of things to learn.

Joseph K just scurried past me, his back stickled with rotten apples and broom hay. I have had a guest with me for the past 12 days: a bug. What species of bug I haven’ the faintest, but bug it is. This morning I discovered a snail climbing the ramparts of my hotel wall, making it almost through the open window and onto my laptop. If I’m correct it is still there, paralytic, gagging on my secondhand cigarette smoke, poor dumb creature.

My flight leaves Bogota for Newark at 9 am. I have been cautioned to be at the airport a minimum of three hours before liftoff. The DAS, immigration/secret police, known for their thorough full-body pat-downs, X-rays an unequaled security procedures, sometimes carrying them out three times just to be sure, make departing a long and drawn out process. Once through the DAS gauntlet I will be free to browse the Duty Free Shop, have dos more empanadas, watch shifty, wet under the arms gringos try and look inconspicuous, and say once last fond despedida to Bogota in hand gestures, mime and syllabant grunts.

-May 18, 2011: Postscript-

I arrived at Eldorado airport at 5;50 am sharp, the taxi driver as honest as the day is long. After a few calculations, time, altitude and cabin pressure, I surmised that I would be smoke free for the next 15 hours, cinnamon Nicorettes and spearmint chewing gum may only saviors, I hurriedly, and with no little haste, smoked two cigarettes, snubbing them out on the carport sidewalk, and skated in through the sliding doors. Once inside I took heed of what Leslie told me, itinerating all I needed to do to ensure a swift, stress-free debarking, and went directly to the Tax Exemption wicket. I queued for 4 minutes, presented my passport to the agent, smiled, the agent smiling in kind, and had my passport stamped, exempting me of all and any taxes and proceeded to the next queue. I joined the line at the Continental gate, where my luggage was weighed and tagged, then on to the first of four security checks. Once passed security I was sent on to the ticket wicket (slides off the tongue like a half-swallowed oyster) and given my boarding pass. I took the escalator up to the second floor, my luggage safely in the hands of trained professionals, or so I hoped, and on to the second security check.

At the second security check I was instructed to remove my belt, boots and jacket, empty my pocket change and place it in the plastic container provided, take my laptop out of its carrying case, open laptop and place it, keyboard side up, in the plastic container provided, remove anything metal or metallic from my person, my Titanium shoulder exempted, and place carryon’s on conveyor belt, where they were given a good X-raying, the usual walk through the magnetic doorframe, greeted by a wand-waving agent upon successful magnetic resonation, and on to the next security check yanking up my trousers as I went, my belt lassoed round my hand. Once admitted into the lounge/duty-free mezzanine I sniffed out a coffee wicket and bought myself a café late. Slaked and no worse for wear I made my way to the departure lounge, queued up, watched a pageant of breast-enhanced, sway-bottomed Bogotán women parade by, long raven black hair reaching the cleft of their buttocks, and waited for the final, and hopefully last security check. Before being admitted into the departure lounge I was again instructed to remove my belt, boots and jacket, place pocket change in plastic container provided, take my laptop out of its carry case, place laptop, keyboard facing up, in the plastic container provided, walk through magnetic doorframe, smile at agent, who smiled back, then, having been admitted into the departure lounge, found a bench and sat down, my trousers hanging round the sharp bones of my hips, my belt halfway through the loops.

The flight from Bogotá to Newark was uneventful, except for a 65 year-old stewardess who kept promising me free things and extra helpings for bumping into me every time she went up and down the aisle. I graciously declined her remittances and set about figuring out how to get the woman in front of me to stop jamming the back of her seat into my knees (her top-heavy breast-enhancements causing an imbalance between hips, buttocks and scapula; the result: a distaff areolation). We landed in a rainy, gray Newark, deplaned and processed through Homeland Security, proffering card claiming I am not bringing any dirt, fruit, embryos, bacteria, viruses or laundered drug money into the country, then let loose on Newark. I had a five hour wait for Flight 210-something, Newark to Ottawa. Two hours in, my nicotine levels dropping, it was announced that Flight 210-something, Newark to Ottawa, would be delayed another two hours; my layover wait now extended to seven cigaretteless hours. After weighing the pros and cons, which weighed heavily on the side of me leaving the security zone for a smoke, which would require me being reprocessed through security a second time, I exited the departure lounge. I arrived in Ottawa at 1 45 am, was processed through Canadian Customs, where I was reminded by an understanding Customs agent that I was over the allowable tax exemption, but she would let it go ‘this time’, I was ushered into a taxi; arriving at my door 20 hours after leaving Eldorado for Norman street.

Bogotá is a breathtaking city, literally, where for a few hundred thousand pesos you can choose between a number of plastic surgeries, drink mountain coffee, observe interesting people go about their day, and night, if you’re brave enough, prepare for the next Olympics (some countries send their athletes to Bogotá to train in a high-altitude arena), eat interesting, albeit unpronounceable food, cheese empanadas the easiest to order, so I discovered, you pronounce the ‘Q’ like in ‘quay’, otherwise they mistakenly give you chicken with potato and or plantain, and explore and discover the wonders and beauty of a country working diligently to change how the rest of the world views them; a place of drug cartels, murders, systemic government corruption, poverty and political instability. Never once did I feel unsafe, recall my foray into ‘the other Bogotá’, in harm’s way or unwelcome. Colombia and Colombians are magnificent, I would not hesitate to visit a second or third time, but not without first learning the rudiments of the Spanish language, having a city map on hand (see the ‘Other Bogotá) and preparing my lungs for the high Andean altitude.

Lethe’s Icy Fen

2011-05-30T01:54:00.004-04:00

“All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and danger from which a philosophical mind should be free. . . .” (Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, A Personal Record). He read it a second, third and fourth time, emphasising the ‘ousness’ in righteousness on each successive occasion. Wiping his brow with his shirt sleeve he read on, exacting a style that ensured he didn’t misread or mispronounce a single word. “I have never been very well acquainted with the art of conversation--that art which, I understand, is supposed to be lost now. My young days, the days when one’s habits and character are formed, have been rather familiar with long silences. Such voices as broke into them were anything but conversational. No. I haven’t got the habit.” (Ibid). Whisking crumbs off the front of his shirt, his breast pocket serving as a silage trap, bits and bobs of what he’d eaten that week collecting in folds and crevasses, he laid the book on the bedstead table next to his eyeglasses and closed his eyes, the sun trickling in through a crack in the oilcloth. He reached for his copy of William Percivall’s, Hippopathology: A Treatise on the Disorders and Lameness’s of the Horse, a gift from his father on completion of his A-Levels, and began reading indiscriminately. “...time--supposing the foot to be in a state to admit it--enables the horse to perform more or less work. For canker-footed horses, especially of the heavy or agricultural class, are much better kept at work than remaining at rest: they maintain better health, and from this cause, as well as from the motion and pressure given to the foot by exercise, it is found that their cure proceeds with more rapidity and certainty: added to which, the shoe enables the practitioner to confine his dressings to the foot, and make the requisite compression with very little comparative trouble. Sometimes a plain shoe, sometimes a three-quartered shoe, sometimes a bar-shoe, is the one best suited for the case. But a shoe which possesses peculiar advantages in canker is what is called the box-shoe; since it not only serves for protection, but is a great defence against injury and dirt and wet, during the time the horse is at work. And of box-shoes, I know of no better description that those recommended by Mr. Wells, V.S., of Norwich, woodcuts of which are subjoined*”.

With all that had happened, the madness and mayhem, the carious irreverence for Master and Slave, it was a wonder that he’d made it through the day unscathed. Scrawled in an unsteady hand on the box top he used as a bookmark, torn from a box of soup or sachet of Beans & Gravy, was a poem; where it came from or why he had kept it he had no idea.

Brothers, let us glorify freedom’s twilight –
the great, darkening year.
Into the seething waters of the night
heavy forests of nets disappear.
O Sun, judge, people, your light
is rising over sombre years

Let us glorify the deadly weight
the people’s leader lifts with tears.
Let us glorify the dark burden of fate,
power’s unbearable yoke of fears.
How your ship is sinking, straight,
he who has a heart, Time, hears.

We have bound swallows
into battle legions - and we,
we cannot see the sun: nature’s boughs
are living, twittering, moving, totally:
through the nets –the thick twilight - now
we cannot see the sun, and Earth floats free.

Let’s try: a huge, clumsy, turn then
of the creaking helm, and, see -
Earth floats free. Take heart, O men.
Slicing like a plough through the sea,
Earth, to us, we know, even in Lethe’s icy fen,
has been worth a dozen heavens’ eternity.
(Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam, Brothers, let us glorify freedom’s twilight)

He could hear the dogmen howling pretending to be wolves, the littlest playing his ribcage like a xylophone, the others, their necks stretched like hanged men trying to reach that perfect wolfish pitch. Though decisively odd, given that he was lead to believe that the bottommost stratum of Dante’s was a fiery Inferno, he couldn’t get “Lethe’s icy fen” out of his thoughts; it dogged him like a caribous hound, goring him with its antlers and stomping him into the brown leafy earth.

Freddy Jesus Sanchez

2011-05-28T13:32:00.002-04:00

This is getting us nowhere. I dare say nowhere is better than somewhere, especially if somewhere is simply over there or nowhere in particular. Nowhere or somewhere, does it really matter? When all is said and done, which it never is, what we’ll most remember is the time it took to get from nowhere to somewhere then back again. Anywhere you go you end up nowhere. Remember that and you’ll never forget.

Stonewalling his way past braggarts and beggars, blowhards and bullies he made his way up the street, a wayward lock of hair setting his eyelashes aflutter, the sun rising ever so slowly at his back. This was not the first time, nor would it be the last that he found himself caught up in the senseless brutality, the madness and insanity, bare-knuckles and axe-heads at the ready, that turned the lunchtime streets into an unruly donnybrook. The world was changing, and try as he might there was nothing he could do about it.

A little girl, her eyes bloated with tears, came running down the steps of the church, the rector in hot pursuit. ‘stop my child… the Lord has a gift for you!’ Freddy Jesus Sanchez, waving an axe-handle above his head stood between the little girl and the rector ’leave the girl be!’ Taken by surprise, the sun glistening off his tonsure, the rector turned and walked back into the church. Wiping the tears from her face Freddy Jesus Sanchez whispered ‘you’re safe now my dear... we will never let them take you away, I promise’. This was not the first time, nor would it be the last that the rector had tried to steal a young girl; an old hand at abducting pubescent parishioners and young children, he was ordained by the church to snatch as many children as he could, hiding them in the basement with the Eucharist, hermetically sealed in bags of 27, each with an expirery date stamped on it, and kegs of unsanctified wine. The rector left the business of attending to the purloined children to his assistant, whose employ it was to feed and clothe them, dressing the girls in white diaphanous ball gowns, the boys in purple surplices with knotted rope belt, and ensure their cleanliness, scrubbing them down, on-mass, with a garden hose and lemony scented friar’s soap.

Woeful and woebegone the last of the marauders made their way home, the streets returning to their usual night-time calm. Fearing for his well-being and livelihood, the lamplighter, having watched riot unfold from behind the cabman’s shelter, collected his kit and himself headed for home, the last lamp lit just as the sun was beginning rise over the Waymart clocktower. ‘no-goods will learn their lesson... even if I have to teach it to them myself’ the lamplighter mumbled to himself, the smell of burnt wick and kerosene filling the air with a fireworks’ odour. Up the street a hand’s-length from the Seder grocers and three from the Dogman deli the rector was busy locking up the church doors, his tonsure glistening with sweat. Hervé Salamanca Henrique Boyacá packed up his boot and started his Vauxhall with matching drivers’-side ashtrays and a luminescent foxfire roof, the engine sputtering like a drowning cat and left; never to be seen or heard of again. People come and go, some never to be seen or heard from again, others returning ever ready to do what they had come to do the first time. Others, the lowly and broken, the fearful and cowardly, never coming or going anywhere at all, their deportment too sloth-like to get them past the doorframe and out the door.

The Pontefract constabulary wear cockscomb helmets with silver chinstraps. The York Black Guard wear Beefeaters with ear-holes for picking up on double-talk and shamelessness. Upon his coronation King Olaf decreed that anyone found slandering or badmouthing the throne would be subjected to the most horrendous torture and exiled from the fiefdom, left to fend for themselves among the disenchanted and murderous living on the other side of the five-mile.

Gonorréico Maldición Deseos

2011-05-25T01:05:00.003-04:00

"usted mayo, el Señor Nuestro Fader, mantenga estas damas de la naturaleza gentil salvo de maleantes, malhechores y cascarrabias la ... y puede que los bendiga a todos, en nombre de la Fader, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo ... Amén." Dios no ve ... no se reconoce en usted ... usted tiene todavía que nacer ... muerto, que es lo que eres ... entre los muertos vivientes 'de vida.

Over the doorframe to the Hall of Sinners, painted in wide brushstrokes, was ‘Gonorréico Maldición Deseos’ and underneath, scrawled in a child’s messy hand, a drawing of two dogs stuck tail to loin. The Sisters of Clemency hold a rummage and grope every Tuesday afternoon, the proceeds going to inoculate whores and sinners, those who have been in close proximity to sinners and whores and anyone who had defrauded the offering. It was common knowledge that many of the congregation, from the most faithful to the most dishonest, were known to dupe the Sunday endowment, exchanging wooden nickels for silver; others pinging the bottom of the plate pretending to drop a coin into the alms tin. One congregant, a moustachioed banker who wore a rainproof hairpiece under his hat hoping to find the missing whore’s glove, saved all his money for bribing haberdashers and clothes merchants. The priest gave him a God fearsome stare every time he arrived late, which was almost always, motioning with his head for him to sit in the back pews away from the other congregants and altar boys. The Deasey quintuplets sat at the front of the church taking up an entire pew, the eldest reading from a Book of Teutonic verse called ‘Eines Morgens ein knabenhafter Mann bei einem Buchhändler’ while his three younger brothers listened on. ‘No man is incorruptible’ said the priest to the half-dozing congregation. ‘and what of the woman?’ shouted one of the congregants, the anger in his voice showing signs of past cuckoldries. ‘they too’ said the priest wiping his nose with the sleeve of his vestment. ‘and children and cripples’ yelled another congregant’. ‘and the mad and insane’ shouted a third. ‘yes they too’ said the priest sternly not wanting to encourage anyone else to speak up. ‘we’re all going to hell’ whispered the youngest quintuplet to his three older brothers. ‘so why all the bellyaching?’ The last time Poldy attended Sunday Mass he tore the arm of his jacket on a loose nail ruining his one and only suit.

All proceeds go to immunizing whores and sinners; any monies left over will be used to procure machines for shocking the incurably insane. Hervé Salamanca Henrique Boyacá, a middleweight from Ponce de León, sold women’s haberdasheries from the boot of his car; a nineteen-seventies Vauxhall with matching drivers’-side ashtrays and a luminescent foxfire roof. Henry Poincaré, middling shoe salesman vends women’s footwear from the back of a eighteen-eighties handcart, left to him in his great grandfather’s living will. ‘When angels cry so do the devil’s children’ his da told him drunk on spiced rum and pentene. ‘it’s just the way it goes’. Not once all the years he lived under his roof did he argue with his da, as incurring his anger would invite a lengthily beating followed by a father son dress down, neither of which he found appealing. Don Juan Teoria Tirofijo, known to his friends simply as don Tirofijo, sells bullets from the boot of his 4-Wheeler, 27 for 10,000 Pesos or 54 for 17,250. The rebels who hide out in the lowlands and mountains that makeup the five-mile buy their bullets by the half-bushel, Don Juan Teoria Tirofijo giving them a discount on tobacco and spiced rum. Sainte-Blandine lives with her ailing mother in a bedsit over a tinning factory overlooking the stadium where the Herschel Liege pantomime troop performed their first recital of Goethe’s 'Faust' using only hand-puppets and gelding straps.

Sisters of Clemency

2011-05-22T02:45:00.005-04:00

For the umpteenth time that day it rained cats and dogs. Poldy stood under the Seder’s awning, the shoulders of his jacket soaked through to the lining, a mephitic tail of rainwater running down his back and onto the hump of his arse, a tarn of brackish water swirling and eddying at his feet, and thought about the day ahead. Bathos gave them fair warning: the Sisters of Clemency would never allow a scoundrel to cross the doorsill of the Antechamber of Malefactors. Garzón Hernando stepped across the doorjamb and into the Hall of Lowlifes. Overstepping a sleeping sister and a cat playing with a headless mouse he proceeded into the outer chamber where he said a prayer to the Mabbot Lane Whores. ‘May you, the Lord Our Fader, keep these ladies of gentile nature safe from buggery, the Lot of sodomites, dear Fader, who should be burned at the stake, pedophiles and kisses on the mouth, Amen’. Unbending his knee he lit three candles: one for Our Father, one for the poor and one for everlasting life. He stepped over the sleeping nun, the cat playing with the headless mouse, passed a bust of King Olaf in full Calvary uniform and a dwarf playing jack the ball and back out into the day, his spirits soaring ever higher.

The denturist made a mistake and gave her men’s dentures. Her mannish incisors cutting into her upper lip, her eyeteeth barricading her tongue, guarding it against lolling in the grotto of her mouth and her front teeth hooking anything that got too close to her face. Her watch fit her like an escape artist’s handcuffs, loose around the wrists but firm enough to give the appearance of tightness. A eyebrow-thin moustache grew between her nose and upper lip, making her facial features seem more masculine and hirsute. God bless the bald and tonsured for they will corner the market on hats, sou’westers and panamas, boaters and bonnets, caps in all colours and sizes. ‘May you, the Lord Our Fader, keep these ladies of gentile nature safe from lowlifes, malefactors and the cantankerous... and may you bless them all, in the name of the Fader, the Son and the Holy Ghost... Amen’. Overstepping the steps, lest he misstep one and fall crashing to his death, he stepped out into the day, his favourite hat set at an angle on his stooped bowing head. Safe from buggery and ill-will, two malfeasances he could verily do without, he set out for the Seder deli, his hopes high and soaring. He recalled the first time he felt the unappeasable titillation, the wanton desire that drew him to collect hats. He was with his mother, his da having taken the day off to drink quart glasses of mahogany brown stout with the men from the slaughterhouse. Yanking on his shirtsleeve, which she did when she was in a hurry or didn’t know what time it was, his mother handed him a pair of beige corduroy slacks and pushed him into a changing room. Threatening to take his bicycle away, which she did when she felt she had lost control, his mother finally coaxed him out of the cubicle. Walking like a man to the gallows, his thighs whistling, his mother grabbed hold of him by the arm and turned him around so that he was now facing a fat kid who’s mother was rewarding him with an O’Henry bar for not fidgeting, the even fatter kid struggling to loosen his feet from the overflowing hems of his new slacks, and sticking two finger down the back of his trousers, his mother made certain there was enough room should he eat too much ice cream and fatten up like the fatter boys in the Husky Boys Section. Sighing like a woman agreeing to an abortion, her face creased with exhaustion, his mother took him by the arm, and yanking, pulled him home.

Green Gretna, named for her gangrenous pallor, set out with Matilda Beerbohm for Marloes Road; the untimely passing of Corny Kelleher, bon vivant, taking them far afar from home. Sidestepping a fleering vagrant and a skittish woman the two made their way along Marloes Road, the overhead sky ahead threatening to rain on Corny Kelleher’s burial. A butcher and his polio crippled son who walked with a sidling limp from Mons-en-Baroeul, a baker from Nord-Pas-de-Calais, a trio of vestal whores from Parana Curitiba, two showing signs of tertiary syphilis, a locksmith from Santarem Benavente and the most humble man in the world, a soothsayer from Zwolle Overijssel, came from afar to attend the earthly committal of the bon vivant Corny Kelleher. ‘I had no idea he had so many friends’ whispered Green Gretna clutching her purse-strings close. ‘nor I’ whispered Matilda Beerbohm, her voice quavering with grief. Pointing out the baker Green Gretna whispered ‘that man there, the one with the crippled son... I recognize him; perhaps I once cooked for him or cleaned his son’s diaper’. ‘and that one, there...’ whispered Matilda Beerbohm pointing at the locksmith ‘I swear by all that is holy that he held my head under water until I almost drowned’. ‘--and to think they have the nerve, those two, to spread their vileness outside the five-mile’ said Green Gretna raising her voice above a whisper. ‘yes the nerve’ said Matilda Beerbohm, her eyes dimming like morning stars. After the last shovelful of dirt was thrown upon Corny Kelleher’s grave-box, the gravediggers standing their spades against a burgeoning elm, Green Gretna and Matilda Beerbohm set back out for home, their thoughts on vile men and their vile ungrateful dispositions.

There’s no time for misgivings, you’ll only end up worse off; down deeper into a fenland of your own devices. Once its capture your imagination, and it will I assure you, there’s nothing more you can do. Bon vivant, crablouse or Might Pym, you’re life is over, taken from you by a force mightier and less forgiving than you could ever imagine. So beware my brethren beware, lest it steal into the labyrinth where you sleep dreaming your lustful dreams, your childish fantasies, reaping the benefits of your gonorrhoeal desires. Cinching his chin-string taut Poldy stepped out the door and into the bright morning air, nigh time fading into daylight.

Hermanas de la Misericordia

2011-05-16T05:27:00.002-04:00

Try as he might Poldy couldn’t thread the needle of his life. The thread he’d been given was too frayed, coming apart like a reed basket, incapable of tying together the loose ends, the missed opportunities and false-starts of his mediocre existence, his lie of life. He remembered playing cat’s cradle and never learning how to pass off the string or get his thumb to respond; the cradle collapsing, his partner scolding him for being clumsy. He saw him again; his legs dragging behind him like coils of rope, feet crippled with polio, hands clutching wooden blocks tied to his wrists with old clothesline. He pulled himself across the blacktop stopping every few feet to reposition his weight, then pushing down hard on his elbows aligned his shoulders with the cracks in the sidewalk, loose stones and gravel leaving their imprint on his forearms and hands, then bowing his back, his ribcage and sternum snapping, continued on his way, those around him making no effort to hide the fear and repulsion on their faces. Lela saw him; his faint image; the Sisters of Charity cajoling him to give his worthless life over to God; the Witness, shoving a pamphlet into his face saying ‘God recognizes only those who recognize Him… and you… God doesn’t see… doesn’t recognize Himself in you… you have yet to be born… dead, that’s what you are… living dead among the living’.

Baying like barkers at a circus sideshow the sisters ate until their skirts ballooned like spinnaker cloth. Sister Magdalene and sister Mary, stuffing custard trumpets into their mouths, throwing their arms over their heads over their heads crying ‘living among the dead… living among the dead… He doesn’t see you because you’re living among the dead’. Juan Alvarado, Juan Miguel Padilla, don Juan Teoria, Juan Bautista, Juan McQueen, Juan Carlos Salazar and Abuja Juan Rodriquez ate their fill and left, Juan Miguel Padilla griping over the pasty consistency of the gravy. Bathos gave them fair warning that the Sisters of Mercy would never allow a foreigner to enter the Hall of Sinners. This has gone beyond insane, its insanely! Impeccably madly insane! Who’s to know? Know who is whom is who. Are these the things that occupy a madly insane mind? Insane yes, madly insane, who’s to tell. Skirts ballooning like jib cloth.

Poldy stood scowling at his reflection in the grocer’s window, the sun just barely just above the Waymart clocktower. Taking it all in, the sky and the ground and the buildings stretched like cattle along the horizon, he knew that the day had something different, unusual in store for him. He’d come a long way since the last time; farther than he’d ever come or gone before. Living among the dead was nothing more than an inconvenience, a passing that could be remedied with salt and strong prayer.

Humphrey Champed

2011-04-30T17:08:00.004-04:00

He ponied up to the bar and ordered a shot of Cutter’s Finest, the barkeep, the rag in his hand sopping with cigar ash and walnut shells, giving him the once over. ‘no skimping’ he said drawing in his neck like a tortoise. ‘a good one... or I swear I’ll have your heart for breakfast!’ Leaning backwards, his shoulders colliding with the shelf behind him, the barkeep reaches for the bottle of Cutter’s Finest and pours a generous shot, Humphrey Champed eying him from the other side of the bar. ‘now top it off!’ said Humphrey smacking his lips together like a slavering dog. ‘now place it in front of me... like this’ he said motioning with his hand to rest it on the wood next to his right hand, the one with three fingers and a half-shorn-off thumb. ‘now mind your business and get back to work! If I want another I’ll invite you over...’ he said pointing to the empty space in front of him, the barkeep having moved to the other end of the bar away from the hulking figure who would as soon eat your liver than shake your hand ‘then you can pour me another... and no skimping or I’ll have your kidneys for lunch!’

Her face, from jaw to ear, is covered in an albino white hair, filmily invisible yet obvious from the side or flank on. ‘Never underestimate a woman’s itch’ his granddad would say waggling his chin, ‘they’ll sooner eat you for breakfast than give an inch’. ‘they’ll?’ he asked making a face. ‘remember that!’ ...you’ll need it when you get older my boy’. Wheezing the sun rose over Sweny’s. The chemist, late as usual, cranked the toggle pryingly releasing the awning from its fusty hammock. He loathed the sun, claiming it made peach-skinned woman look haggardly, giving them a currish unwomanly appearance. Handkissing was forbidden; handshakes, one handed, two were considered unmanly, were permitted but within reason; the further one pushed the limits the further one found oneself flying on the skin of your teeth out the door. Every time Albert Scrim shakes hands with the devil the devil squeezes the blood out of his fingers. Some say he’s in cahoots with the devil; others that he just likes to hobnob with evildoers and cutthroats; and some think he pretends to be in cahoots when he just wants the attention that cavorting with the devil inspires. ‘He lives the life of Reilly’ his granddad would say wiggling his chin. (Brecht Gin: settles an aching stomach and shoe-blackens albino white hair).

His great granddad played checkers with Argyll Robertson, a brooding man with poor eyesight and crablousy hair. They slaked their thirst with coniine soda, his grandfather gulping and Argyll Robertson eructating, both men savouring the fizzy effervescence. ‘no Handkissing... makes a man look like a sissy’. ‘or two-handed handshakes... one will suffice’. ‘backcomb if you will... no need to make a rankle of the board’. ‘first infestation I got in Nolan Falls... sheets were crabby with the little buggers’. ‘bedevilled! ... crablousy they call it’. They talked like this for hours on end, the gaslight casting glove-puppet shadows on the walls and across the ceiling. His great grandfather never once cast a ballot or vote, saying democracy was a farce and them that got caught up in the hoopla dumber than the dumbest dumb animal. His da assassinated the baby rabbits and left the squirming gray pupa in a shoebox at the foot of the driveway for the garbage man and his helper who hung off the helper side door with one arm. Painted in bold black letters on the cab-side door was the following:

Be always drunken. Everything lies in this:
(Charles Baudelaire, Drunkenness)

Everything he did either turned out bad or didn’t end up the way he’d expected it would; all the tragedy and misfortune, the crushing hardship leaving him brooding and thinking of ways to assuage the niggling in his gut. His great grandfather warned him as much; saying that a man who doesn’t have the courage to drive a nail through his hand is destined to live a life of failure and sorrow, and is not to be shown any sympathy or pity. It lies in this he said: drunkenness and tragedy. Stay drunk my boy and life will be less tragic. Stay sober and it will eat you alive. His great grandfather wore the same shirt to work every day, the gray one with the gravy stain on the front missing the second to last button. The Sisters of Charity taught his great grandfather how to write cursively and take a thrashing bent over a habited knee, the ruler-toting sisters encouraging the head matron with catcalls and hoots. Had he known what he knows now, that a drunken stupor assuages a good switching, he’d never have put up with the beatings and Holier Than Thous’, or his father’s deep-knee-bends, taken from a leaflet that came in the post addressed to the occupant, done to Beethoven’s 5th, 6th & 7th, if he made it that far. The Sisters of Charity taught him how to steal wine before the priest blessed it and tell lies when he could just as easily tell the truth. Under the Mabbot Lane bridge lined up like flower-lasses at a pimp’s wedding, all that Handkissing and Mary has a little Ivy Divvy dose. Got it from the first mate, down on all three’s pulling his Mahout out through his fly-hole. Get the lockjaw when he won’t pull out; rake his fly-hole with your hangnails. He’ll jump higher than the mainsail crow he will.

Fernando Botero - Abu Ghraib

2011-04-24T18:45:00.008-04:00

Sack Street

2011-04-24T13:24:00.004-04:00

Yellow means you like butter, nothing you like margarine. His grandmother made raisin tarts, primping the edges with a tea fork. His uncle Jim threw up at the supper table, leaving a path of spoil and desiccation spattered all over the dollied tablecloth. His grandmother had to use a wet rag to clean up the gravid smelly vomit.

Féile Scannán stood astride the Mabbot Lane bridge throwing scabs of bread onto the choppy black water, a gaggle of ducks nipping at one another trying to get a mouthful. The bumboats ferried in and around the mouth of the harbour, scouting for a quayside berth or shallow enough water to weigh anchor. His great great-great-granddaddy liked peach cobbler with fresh creamery cream and nutmeg. He worked as a coxswain on the Ivory Divvy, a whaler out of Mountjoy Prison. Oliver St John and Joseph Gogarty, skinflint and petty thief, worked the rigging and yardarm respectively; Gogarty known for his great round-biceps and St John for his thin chicken-lean neck. A man’s a man only when he can drive a plank spike through his hand without flinching. He had no idea why these men with hula girls on their forearms, salty dog men, didn’t just stay onboard their bumboats, play cards or trade tall-tales, fight over crumpled pictures of their sweethearts back home or get drunk on spiced rum. The sails were stitched from baleen and pytlovina and starched with Slivovice, Kontušovka if the menfolk at the Ceské Koruny Public House had drunk the Slivovice dry. Poldy never met his great great-great-great granddaddy or his great-great granddaddy, or for that matter his great grandfather, his father’s father’s father. The one, his father’s father, with the one leg, he met him; when he was twelve and angry that he had to sit in the back of the car all the way to the swimming hole under the bridge under the overpass behind the petrol station where his father’s father wiped the windshield clean of spattered bugs and grime. The other one, the one who sailed on the Ivory Divvy with Joseph Gogarty and Oliver St John, petty thief and skinflint, who liked peach cobbler with fresh creamery cream and nutmeg, he he never met; he only heard tall-tales about him from his father’s father, the one with the one leg and mean disposition. He tried driving the nail through the tight skinned palm of his hand but the nail slipped off and fell to the ground. He remembered his granddaddy saying ‘it’ll slip off if you’re hand is too sweaty... so wipe it clean before you drive it home’.

The sun broke through the clouds like a schoolyard bully pushing its way into the blue morning sky. He stood facing the back of his head; the Seder grocer’s window reflecting his image back to front. He noticed a whorl on the backmost crown of his head, a tonsure-like wreath that unravelled like a circle, leaving the impression that further tonsuring was inevitable. With this in mind he set out to purchase a new hat; one with a wider more generous top, a helmet or a brigade cap, something that would cover up the wreathing, allowing him to walk about at ease in the knowledge that his tonsured renunciation was his and his alone, not something to be stared at or made fun of. He knew a hatter who sold big, oversize hats, ones made for men with big heads and wide brows. If he could only remember where his shop was and how to get there. These past few months his judgment had been overrun with dower, useless thoughts, things that never made it beyond assumptions or simple conjecture. A new hat, perhaps that would levy his thoughts he thought, allow him to think more seriously, rid him of the uninspiring nonsense that tormented his thoughts day and night, night and day.

He was born in 1882, June 16th to be accurate. Then again in 1887 and 1901. In 1887 he was born and then died three days later; in 1901 he lived for 7½ days, three of which he spent smothered in the bosom of an aunt, a giantess with enormous russet brown areolas that squirted rather than trickled. (You may have Juan the race my boy, but your Carlos Onetti too many times). His grandfather spoke in ciphers; neutering phrases and severing sentences; deleting words he felt didn’t reflect his demeanour and adding those he felt did. When he spoke, which he did with bravura bravado, the tip of his gin blossomy nose twitching like a metronome, everyone within commonplace earshot stood up and paid attention, his great booming voice filling a field or park with an ear-splitting roar. He remembered listening to him reminisce about his experience at the fish company; regaling him with stories of walleyed catfish and rotten milkfish, neither fish he dare allow on his supper plate. As he was going down Sack Street, which he did Mondays and every second Tuesday, he stopped to look at a woman admiring her reflection in Sweny’s fanlight. What an odd woman he thought to himself tucking his shirttail into his trousers. Everyone knows you can’t buy pear soap at Sweny’s. They stopped stocking it after the Great Fire; razed half the block to the towpath. Funny how an old thought becomes commonplace once it’s thought about again. Suppose the day is full of them; just have to dot the t’is’ and cross the if’s. Like old hat like; but without the brim and chin-whistle. Mine was grass green and stuck to the top of my hair like a fly net; left bits of straw in my hair. Mom said it looked better with the chin-whistle done-up; made my face look less pudgy. Real cowboys wear theirs at a tilt; makes their heads look bigger; mutton chops and all. My granddad wore his straight-on; never ever taking it off unless he was sleeping or taking a soak. Same for my great uncle; ‘cept he kept his on when he slept, easier to make a get-away he said; husband can’t identify you if you’re wearing a hat. His great grandfather soaked his button-down jacket in saltwater and lye; gets rid of the fish guts and makes an old rag look brand new.

They drank their fill, the alewife bringing them four second rounds, at La Candelaria, spitting Whiskey and spiced rum at whoever got in their way. A plump fat woman wearing a flowered hat skips like a boulder across the dance floor, her cumbersomeness sending her caroming over tables and into unsuspecting laps. ‘her chin whistle... yank on!’ yells an colossus bellied man chewing on his thumbnail. ‘get out of the way, Lord Jesus... she’ll flatten you like a griddlecake!’ shrieks a woman eating a hunk of pulled mutton. Lela sat squared away in her booth, the tips of her toes touching the second and fourth table legs, her eyes squinting to make out the person leaning against the bar. Lord Murphy its him she said pulling her toes into her knees then clubbing them into doughy plugs. Leaning sideways against the bar, his head tilted slightly was Albert Scrim, rounder; a man with an iron heart and the morals of a defrocked priest. She held her breath and pulled herself deeper into the booth; hoping beyond wish that he wouldn’t see her, make her out. He ordered a third spiced rum, angling the glass to his mouth, a mouth beaten into a gory hole, and stared into the diamond-shaped mirror over the bar.

The last time she saw Albert Scrim he was forcing a boy wearing a propeller cap to kneel and lick the mud off his boots. The boy, his face torn between anger and fear was crying like a lost lamb, his propeller cap spinning round and round in circles. She pulled her knees into her chest to make herself seem smaller, invisible, the fan above her head wheezing like an asthmatic. Humphrey Champed, known for his crossed-eyes and wicker ear, stood admiring his phizog in the diamond-shaped mirror over the bar. Crossing his hairy ape-like arms and using them as a cowcatcher Humphrey Champed elbows his way to the back of the taverna. ‘you there!’ he says pointing a hairy finger at Lela, ‘what is your name?’

Leopold J Dillon

2011-04-17T19:51:00.008-04:00

Sallying he went, the sky over his head bickering with storm clouds. Overhead ahead he saw a gull, its wings riotously flapping, the turbulent twilight coil whitewashing the heavens bone-pale. It had been days since he’d last seen the harridan or her sister; or the alms man, who rarely if ever took a break from his lamming. ‘Must be something in the air’ he thought, ‘or I’m losing my eyesight; either way something strange is afoot, strange indeed’. He couldn’t recall the last time he looked under a big fat lady’s skirts, or the last time he got anyone’s attention other than his own. You could scream and roar but no one ever paid attention or turned an ear. You could get on all-fours or lay flat on your back, no skirt was there to look under or ear to turn. Legion of Christ! Magdalena Mary and Eve! His grandfather wore the same gum-soled galoshes to work every day, drying them upside down, the toe-box facing up. The other men made fun of him, cajoling him whenever he passed by. The head hand threw gut coils and trotter at him, laughing until his own belly fell open, his insides turning out onto the slaughterhouse floor. And for a pound Sterling more, She’ll stick her tongue in your ear. He threw himself into the day like a dog hit by a truck, his head skipping along the pavement like a wooden block. His da told him to stay clear of the bumboats ‘full of whores, stockpiled to the gunnels... and scalp lice bigger than your head‘. They got down on all-fours, Leopold J Dillon kneeling on top of the Witness’ father; the fat lady hiking her skirt round her hips, PK Purcell cracking a barrel, his hair combed and parted down the middle. ‘It’ll be a cold day in hell before I lay down two-quid Sterling on a two-bit whore’. The bumboats unload then set back out to sea, keel-hulls weighed heavy with spiced rum and ham trotter. He was mistaken for a whore’s pimp and beaten to a bloodthirsty pulp.

The quays were run by brigands of hard-nosed thugs, lowlife muggers and pickpockets, each meting out their own form of justice. His great uncle Jim refused to eat anything green, saying green was made from blue and yellow and not a real colour like red or black. The bastard never gave me a damn red penny. No one liked him, not even his own mother. The old cunt. Up and down the cellar seeing to her spice garden, prickly pair they were, my granddad and her. Said a man’s a man only when he can drive a nail through his hand without flinching. A nail for Christ’s sake. Mary and Joseph! Leopold J Dillon, chewer of prepuces drew the brim of his hat over his shady eyes and exclaimed ‘Mary and Joseph! Down on all-fours without a care in the world... a miserable sorry sight indeed! The nerve of her... flapping all out like a common whore’. Stockpiled to the gunnels the Legions of Christ set sail, a Mabbot Lane whore hanging lifeless off the portside gibbet, the first-mate saluting the gunny-side mortar.

He kept his personables’ in a pouncet-box: three shirts, two pairs of trousers, five hats, three panamas, two trilbies and a sou'wester, a canvas belt, buckleless, and a tin of Muskoxen plug. For the love of Leopold and Mary a nail for God’s sake! His great uncle bought his plug from a pug-nosed shopkeeper with a blind one-eye dog and a tailless cat. Up and down the cellar he went fetching tins of half-peaches and sweetmeat rolls, his coattails wagging airlessly behind him. This was not the first time he’d mistaken a half-peach for a sweetmeat, selling a half-tin of sweet-peaches to a lady who wanted a half-pint of sweetmeat filling. He dragged the pouncet-box scrappily across the deck, leaving a trail of nicks in the dark wood. He bit off a quid of Muskoxen plug, pinching it against his cheek with the tip of his tongue. Using his back teeth as a gristmill (his molars grinding the plug into oily shreds) he chewed and chewed, a thread of tar-black juice drooling down his chin. He remembered the farmers’ trucks, the drivers’-side doors latticed with black chaw spit, arms out the window, shirt sleeves rustling like corn husks in the late August breeze that came off the mustard fields like an Egyptian sirocco.

Mabbot Lane

2011-04-13T09:35:00.005-04:00

We start out dismembered only to die a whole corpse. Death and dying, the trick is to know which to do first. The Witness told him that we die the moment we surrender to God, then are born again and die again and are born again until we can’t die or be born anymore. The trick is in not dying the first time. Stay a corpse, that way dying is nothing more than dismembering until there’s nothing left but pieces. Once a corpse always a corpse he said laying his ink-stained hands on another feebleminded child’s forehead. Long live the weak-willed for they shall inherit this filth. The Witnesses’ father had been summoned by the standing council to bring an end to an outbreak of feeblemindedness that had enfeebled ½ the townspeople. ...said shut up; stop that! I said stop what? ...said pointing a finger; that. I coaly said never. Never. Once a corpse always a corpse. Now sit down and mind your manners. His da wore the same gumshoed boots to work every day, drying them upside down over the hot water ditch. The other fin-splitters made fun of his big round ears, spitting on his shirt when he walked by. ...fin-splitter they said! Get out of here! His father beat his father with a cow whip until he said uncle.

They drank their fill of brown Porter, Dreros and Tartarus did, the proprietress of the Cocytus taverna, eager to relieve them of quid and franc, offering them a third second round. On the mantelpiece above the coaly stove, the slipcase tattered from corner to crook, sat a well-thumbed copy of De Vulgari Eloquentia, a mock-up bust of Frank Duff anchoring the bookends. Bello Monto stood astride his jam jar chest unlocking her whalebone corset, Legion of Mary the paedo priests will have you sent to the laundry, that starchy bastard has a keyhole view. Leopold J Dillon and the not-so Dr. PK Purcell got off Scots free, knifed Annie Mack under the O’Connell bust, his granddad singing,

Leaves an oily taste in the back of your craw, pinch-bleached in boil-remover. His granddad said not to go down to Railway Street. And stay clear of Mabbot Lane, my boyo. Montgomery whores gather under the Burlo sticking out their livery tongues at passersby. Custom House fatties ‘ill beat the living tar out of you, gang up with the Montgomery’s, no shame at all. None! Legion of Mary, seen J. Dillon and that corker PK Purcell on all-fours, can’t get a good soap-down, not on a stub-man’s salary they say. He sallied forth into the night, arms sternly at his side.

No Man is a Violin

2011-04-10T11:07:00.003-04:00

His great grandfather hopped around on the leg that wasn’t sawn off and thrown in the alley behind the hospital. The straps, buffalo hide and pigskin, and the buckles, brass and plated silver, kept the wooden one from coming loose and cracking in half. He was a brutal sadistic man. A man who’s nose bled when he got angry. He bullied his way through life taking out anyone who got in his way. He wished he could forget the screaming, his mamma pleading with his grandfather ‘for the love of God stop...you’ll kill the boy’, and the fear that kept him awake, a reminder that he was just another boy with a bleeding nose and a black eye, but he couldn’t; he wouldn’t let go.

Poldy walked out in the day, his airman’s cap pulled over the flimsy cartilage of his ears. You’ll never have ears like other people, normal ordinary ears. Yours will always stand out, my boy, like a car coming at you with both doors wide open. His grandfather had round fleshy ears that set him apart from other men. Some of the fin-splitters on the slaughterhouse floor made fun of his grandfather, calling him droopy and mule headed. His grandfather never stood them down, saying that a man who takes a beating when he could have run away is no man at all. He’d rather he took a good thrashing, get his face smashed in, that way he could have at least one memory of him getting what he deserved. Time and better evidence might tell a different story. 'No man is a violin' his grandfather would say, the tips of his moustache coming together and forming a perfect circle under his nose. Or an isthmus. Remember that my boy, remember that I said it. All he remembered was the screaming, then screaming and the pleading, and the look on his face when he swung the belt over his shoulder like a cow whip, his father flinching like a beaten dog.

Campana Orbis

2011-04-05T18:36:00.006-04:00

Casnewydd, professional trenchman, shoved his way past the rector’s assistant and into the sanctuary, Poldy eying him from the front pew. ‘smug cunts’ he hissed to himself, ‘offer ‘em a virgin and they take a whore’. Having heard tales of unspeakable cartelism, some so terrifying they made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, Poldy hid his face in his hands and held his breath. There were cartels for tanners and shoemakers, cobblers and mongers, glovers and sackers; cartelism, the way of the future, so they say, those so saying the very ones who chartered and ran the cartels. None of this, trenching or cartelism, shoemaking or cobbling, which for many were the same thing, had anything to do with Casnewydd, but it did make an otherwise boring day exciting and worth the bother. ‘leave way!’ hollered Casnewydd pushing his way to the front of the church, his coattails flapping wildly, a boy in the front pew frightened out of his skin. Kindly leave your galoches in the sangkchoo-erree foyer; there is a wet mat provided for your convenience. The man’s hell-bent on making out lives’ a miserable mess!

Zeeman Landé stood admiring the dog’s reflection in the grocer’s window, his jaw a pockmark of syphilitic abscesses and scabbed over scars. Landé knew his da and his da’s da and everyone else that ever worked for the Mercury Fish Co. He used to be the night foreman in charge of the fishmongers and gutters, drinking himself to an early retirement and a whorishly large belly. His da’s da remembers slipping him Mickey’s of spiced rum to ensure he got the top slot on the gutting floor, the one next to the toilet where the men took their smoke break and shat stools pale with creosote and fish guts. The creosote was used to ease out the conveyor belt, which was forever getting choked with scales and fish guts, making the pulleys and rollers run awkward and off kilter. He was a lean lavender pale man with apelike arms and feet two sizes too big for his gumboots. This before the spiced rum and clap swelled his belly to the size of an sugarcane orchard. He thought it funny how when he remembered one thing he recalled another and another until he had an entire past present in his head. He hadn’t thought about Casnewydd or Zeeman Landé or the fact his da’s da was a real bastard and beat his da with his cowboy belt, not since the last time, and then he’d remembered things differently, not the way he remembered it now. This was not unusual; remembering things differently. It occurred after he’d spent the night carousing with the fat whores down by the railroad go-round, sharing flasks of oily dark beer and shoddily tamped cigarettes, the fat whores pressing their scarred bellies up against his scrawny chest and tickling him under his buttercup chin. He tried to remember things differently, like he thought they happened before he remembered them. He ended up thinking he remembered things when he had no evidence for remembering or thinking that he had, making him think he hadn’t experienced or remembered a thing at all in his life. His father wore the same flannel shirt to work every day, the one with the snap buttons and asbestos bib. That he remembered.

The sun fell over the rooftops like a gigantic yellow fireball. The ogress, tethering the corresponding foot to the analogous ankle stood admiring the sun’s reflection in the grocer’s window; a radiant ethereal feeling undertaking her just above the knee and below the hipbones. Some days begin quickly, others like an army under siege. Determining which is which, 'qui quae que quod quam', is best left to the Carmelites campana orbis. He generally found bell-ringers annoying; avoiding them at all cost. The Carmelites, they were a different matter; if you chose to shun them they retaliated, leaving you deaf and bleeding from the nose and ears. ‘puerperal’ he said bellowing, the insides of his eyelids fatty with yellowy grease. ‘can’t say as I ever heard of that. Must be some kind of disease: Lyme, Rickets maybe. Never can tell these days… always something new and horrible in the herd. Awful stuff Rickets… hard on the legs, go all bent and crooked. Come up with a cure… a salve or one of them magic potions. Sell it for an arm and a leg… straightened ‘em out by God it would’.

Jim Jones Revue - Rock'n'Roll Psychosis

2011-04-02T12:01:00.000-04:00

Švejk

2011-03-31T09:45:00.001-04:00

The sun broke through the clouds like a schoolyard bully. The canopy above his head was abuzz with the scything whirr of cicadas, legs and carapaces rubbing anxiously together. Looking skyward he half expected to see a Focke-Wulf or a Hellcat. Instead he saw a Bockscar of crows dive-bombing sunbather’s, a sunburnt child holding onto her little pail and shovel with all her might. He remembered the grimace on his da’s face when he told him that he had no intention of following in the family business. He was going to learn ventriloquism and make a living as a cheat and a scoundrel. Or maybe he would join the circus and live the life of a juggler or Big Top stagehand. Either way he had no desire to gut fish or fell cattle with a hammer. Jašek Komuna, a one-man show who could swindle a gyp artist and clap thunder with his hands; the real thing, a rogue extraordinaire, he could learn the art of the scoundrel from him. He worked as a money-handler for the Švejk Bros., Ikarus and Ram, two of the most dangerous sharks in the business. The man could do wonders with his voice, never once moving his lips or gasping for air. He could throw his voice by simply breathing in deeply from the diaphragm, pausing, then letting it out like a pipe organ bellows, sending it ricocheting off rooftops and belfries, over heads and bell towers. He played his ribcage like a pedalboard, his neck like a Voix céleste and his belly like a wind chest, his tongue he used as flue reed, his teeth as the fipple, a diapasons timbre beginning in his throat and escaping through his mouth; a chirruping-chirruping-twitter. Men like Jašek Komuna are a rarity; dangerous and piffled as they are. His da warned him about men like Jašek Komuna; lowlife cons, debauchers, men with low morals. The sort of man who gives little and takes much. He listened to the cicadas sawing in the branches above his head; a piercing, rolling staccato, like the sound a corpse makes as the last breath leaves the body. His da would not understand; chiding him for his ignorance, which he inherited from his mother’s side, his small boy’s pitiful attitude. Too early he awoke, his mind racing like a man condensed by mere thinking. The last thing he remembered before awakening, too early and without warning, was a sentences: "Even in the depths of sleep, in which he had to satisfy his need for protection and love by curling himself up into a trembling ball, he could not rid himself of the feeling of loneliness and homelessness." (Bruno Schulz, Sklepy Cynamonowe). For the death of him he couldn’t recall where he’d read the line; thinking that it could have been in a magazine or book of short stories, perhaps a novella, though he couldn’t recall ever having read one, perhaps mistaking it for a long short story or a short novel if he had, which again he couldn’t be certain of, not now, with his thoughts condensed and racing. ‘you’re such a pitiful boy’ his da would say, hell-bent on ruining his life with spitefulness and malice. Too early too late, it really made no difference; loneliness and homelessness dogged him whether he was awake or asleep, condensed or enlarged, drunk or sober.

Slowcoach

2011-03-26T17:19:00.003-04:00

Up righted the child stopped wailing, its red pinched cheeks settling into the bones of its pudgy face. Watching the woman cradling the now quiet baby in her arms he felt a rush of sympathy coursing through him, his legs, useless scrawny sticks made of fat and ligament giving way under him. It’s not often that on gets the chance to watch a woman holding a child in her arms; insufferable morose creatures. Just when you think you’re in like Flynn they burn your house down and think nothing of it. Whores! Cackling hens! ‘Get him; the bastard!’ they screamed, some with such boldness you’d think their throats would burst. Miscreant! El putero! He wed a taxi-girl with mouldy teeth. His great-grandfather pinched the cheeks of her arse until they blushed, a red tide moving along her tailbone and the down back of her thighs. He was the first to cackle and curse at him like an Irish schoolboy, inciting the others, some spitting and hurling mud, others making the sign of the cross and hissing like alley cats. If only he could get him to see the waywardness of his ways he would stop his whoring. Both fish and whores, these he made do with, never chipping in for gravy or napkins. They say he was shallow, like a pebbly riverbed, someone not to be trusted or put faith in. His father said little about his great-grandfather claiming ignorance and a failing memory. He’s not the kind of man you’d want to know he’d say grinding his molars. He watched the woman and child until the child, now fast asleep in its mother’s arms, showed little sign of life, then like a man who’d experienced a miracle he scarcely understood walked away.

Lela stood at the back of the queue counting how many people were wearing hats; thirty-seven, eight wearing more than one hat, seven wearing three or more, twenty-five wearing toques and a handful in bonnets. A woman in a sunbonnet was crocheting a muffler, a skein of multicoloured wool unreeling at her sandaled feet. A man wearing a telepathist’s vest was eating a pie, apples and cinnamon crumbing the front of his jacket. A puny boy missing an ear sat astride a sawhorse, his sister tugging dejectedly on his shirtsleeve. ‘Miscreant! El putero!’ shouted a fat man with a fat lip. ‘that’s not him...’ countered a skinny man with a pencil-thin moustache. ‘Oh yes it is’ said the fat lipped fat man. ‘I’m telling you it’s not him...’ said the pencil-thin moustached skinny man. Pointing like a fat-lipped birddog the fat fat lipped man said ‘Over there, behind the statue’. ‘that’s a woman with a baby, imbecile! ‘ said the skinny man twirling the tips of his pencil-thin moustache.

Mouth open Lela waited to accept the Host, a group of slowcoaches trying to push their way past the rector’s assistant and into the church. ‘damn you!’ scowled the rector’s assistant, a man wearing a leveret hair picot jacket trying to sneak between his legs. ‘damn you all!’ The priest instructed the congregation to pray, a freckle-faced boy sitting at the front yawning. ‘stop that’ whispered the rector, his eyebrow twitching like a squashed caterpillar. ‘and sit up straight’. The congregation said ‘Amen’, the rector giving the freckle-faced boy a stern look, two slowcoaches having made their way past the rector’s assistant standing like headless chickens in front of the altar.

Lela stopped in front of the Seder grocers to gaze at her reflection in the window, the glass distorting her gentle, child-like features. Out of the corner of her eye Lela saw the alms man rounding the corner, his head flinching on the gibbet of his skinny neck. Not wanting to speak with him she hid behind a stand of rotten cabbage hoping that he would pass her by unnoticed, an unpleasant vinegary niff buttering her nose. The last time she ran into him he told her about having to sleep propped up standing against a lamppost, his cap the only thing keeping him from freezing to death. Never underestimate a man’s competence for failure her father would say. A headless chicken has a better chance of making something of itself. A man’s failure can be measure by the size of his head: little head big failure, big head little failure, follow the bumps. She never did care much for what her father had to say, his mouldy, rotting teeth making everything that came out of his mouth sound muddled and spit out.

el putero

2011-03-19T13:16:00.002-04:00

He watched from where the road curved and met up with the fairgrounds, standing off to the side so as not to be seen by the men sharing the wretched ugly girl. The fat one pulled at her skirts, the skinny one held her arms, and the third one, not sure what to do laughed nervously. The first time he went to see the Herschel Liege troop his father drove the sedan into the ditch outside the fairgrounds. His father bought the sedan from a locksmith named Sorrow Příbor; a slight man with uneven teeth and a faint wisp of salt-and-pepper hair that grew from the centre of his head and lay flat against his cheek. The sedan was missing the back fender, the passenger-side door and the front grill; the locksmith offering to throw in a kissing pig if his father accepted the car as is. ‘what, dear sir would I want with a kissing pig?’

‘why you could rent her out; she stays put if you tie her hind legs and stroke her head every once and a while’. ‘enough!’ shouted his father. ‘I’ll take it as is’. His father never forgave him for letting him buy the sedan, saying it was his fault for not stopping him make a fool of himself. ‘a kissing pig; what in the name of God are we going to do with a kissing pig?’ The wretched ugly girl kicked the fat one squarely in the groin, his knees buckling, his testicles swelling into his pants’ pockets. The skinny one she poked in the eye, his nose dribbling snot and blood. As for the laughing one she saved him for last; taunting and calling him a midget and a coward. ‘maybe next time you’ll pick on someone your own size; now run home to your mamma coward, run!’ They pushed the sedan halfway, the front grill crosshatched with twigs and tall grass, until his father gave up and called for a tow.

He stared at a fat woman trying to untangle her child from one of the circus tent ropes. My goodness me (he said mutely to himself) but isn’t that a fine mess. Next she’ll have the poor creature kissing a pig. He double-clutched, his foot going through the floor. ‘kissing pig my arse!’ His father never did get the sedan to run properly or understand why anyone would want to kiss a kissing pig. ‘fucking rodent!’ he wallowed, the kissing pig asleep snoring in the mud behind the woolshed. Keep your head up young fellow lest you fall anyhow into the soaking wet mud. His father eventually sold the sedan to a corker who served as the town mortician after his license to practice medicine was revoked. ‘here it’s yours’ said his father angrily. ‘the pig too’. This was long after the Mercury Fish Co. and his great-grandfather’s gangrene amputation and the maggots they used to eat the rotten flesh and his great-grandmother rubbing salve on the stump-end so his great-grandfather could attach the wobbly wooden leg to the chucked one. ‘now run home to your mamma coward run!’ His father never forgave his father for being so bitter and giving his mother the evil eye when she asked him how his day went.

Rafael López, named after his great great-grandfather Rafael ‘el putero’ López, a womanizer and scoundrel, from Hammermill, a trifling place with a church, a post office and three whorehouses where the reek of sulfur and cod creel emanating from the back door of the second whorehouse made him ill, arrived on the back of a mule waggon with three ears of brown corn, a shovel and a pack of playing cards. When they found his great-grandfather skulking out the back door of the first whorehouse, where he spent his evenings drinking Málaga and smoking fusswood tobacco, he was the first to pelt him with rocks and bits of broken glass. He wed a taxi-girl with rotten teeth and an arse so big he could sleep lying on it like a suckling child. ‘el putero!’ yelled a woman carrying a weakly deformed child, the child’s head bobbling from side to side, the woman trying frantically to hold it upright.

Bobalicón

2011-03-14T02:37:00.002-04:00

One is better served when one serves one’s elf. When his father said this he cringed, seeing no reason why a man of such corporeal standing should substitute oneself with one’s elf. Or was it a mistake, an error in judgment? Perhaps he was making a mockery of him, seeing if he would pick up on the error, charge him with not knowing himself from a small hairless man. He expected this from an imbecile or an idiot, someone with little education, not from his own father. His father pointed to the headboard, das Wort Idiot whittled into the soft grainy wood; an admonishment of his lack of common sense. He called him my little Bobalicón, pushing him here and there like a broken wagon, scolding, rebuking his stupidity. You my boy were born with a dullard’s intellect; stupidity comes to you like God to a praying man. Never forget that. Your life will be much easier. Straddling the devil’s reredorter he grunts out an epistle of coppery yellow piss; smiling like a man who knows that God, to whom he has devoted his entire being, has rewarded him with a pass to the next life. Never mistake mans’ stupidity for cleverness his da would say; or his talent for making foolish things seem sharp. Dolores Enrique gives blowjobs to imbeciles. Wishing he was an imbecile he hides in the shoemaker’s cabin behind the Pig’s Head waiting for her to arrive, his legs trembling, the night sky cowling his fat piggish head.

Long after the sun, scuttled by night, had fallen, after the last straggler had made his way home, Poldy set out to find the missing whore’s glove, a jaundice yellow moon guiding his way. As today was Busman’s holiday he walked the distance to the fairgrounds behind the aqueduct where the Herschel Liege pantomime troop was in the process of setting up their tents. A mulish doggishness fallowed him like a stray, his dawdler’s pace more fitted to a sad sack than a man of proud bearing. Drawing closer to the fairgrounds he could hear the high-pitched hum of the riveters, the metallic clang of shovels, the tinny clink of soft metal against wood and burlap, a cacophony of workaday commotion.

The day his father left for good he slammed the front door with such force and cumulous rage that the hinges flew off the doorframe. Looking out from the upstairs window, her hair still wet, Epsom salts and bath soap stiffening her squared jaw, his mamma cried like a baby. He was glad he was gone; glad he wouldn’t have to put up with his repulsive helplessness, which had worsened since losing his job with the fish company, the hapless look on his face when he dropped something or tripped on the landing stairway; glad that he would have his mother to himself; the warm fruity smell of her skin after she stepped out of her bath, the tangled nest of viper black that she combed a hundred times every night before bed. He would have her. She would be his. His and his alone. No more nights cowering under the blankets waiting for his father to return home from the Pig’s Head, his breath rotten with pickled eggs and Stout, the door smashed to bits like a balsa kite.

The Carnival of Animals

2011-03-10T01:41:00.002-05:00

He hasn’t eaten a dog in years. Not since an outbreak of rabies culled the strays to a few runt lapdogs domesticated to fulfill the needs of lonely spinsters and friendless children. “…one sees every day priests and monks who, leaving an incestuous bed and without so much as washing their hands soiled with impurities, manufacture gods by the hundred, eat and drink their god, shit and piss their god”. (Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary) was written in a swirly calligraphic hand over the doors to the Pig’s Head. The chalkboard menu read: ‘Tartar lamb (Agnus Scythicus) with mint jelly and sprig marjoram’, and under that ‘if the meat doesn’t flake off the bone your supper is free’. Please shit and piss in the restrooms. Disobeyers will be sodomized.

He shook a dash of Lot salt on his leg of Tartar lamb, ‘brings out the flavor and juices’ he said ‘and softens the gristly bits’. He remembers his da hogtying him with his mama’s clothesline, leaving a crease round his reddened belly, his arms weigh-laid to the corner post. Gets easier the older you get; the red marks fuse with the lashing welts, the soreness with satisfaction, the bitterness with acceptance. Sodomizer’s will be stopcocked and left to rot from the inside out. Many was the time he felt the world creeping up on him, his feet nailed to the Melamine terrazzo, an oily smeary odor picricketing his nose. It’ll make a man out of you his da would say slapping him hard upside the head. Then you can call yourself something other than a boy. His da made him listen to Saint-Saëns’ ‘The Carnival of Animals’ over and over again, slapping him hard upside the head if he flinched or winced.

The restroom was a place of inexorable filth and squalor, a dispatch of grunting disobedience. Unbuckling his trousers he straddles the devil’s bowl, a beard of shit tarring the porcelain, the smell of other men’s dirt brachiating his nostrils. Grabbing hold of the cistern chain he flushes, speckles of indissoluble shit floating rebelliously to the top, a swirling eddy of foul effluence circling the dunny trap. The rector’s assistant unbuttoned his surplice and stood astride the reredorter, the trough spilling over with yellow coopery piss. That night the friar cook boiled up a pot of tripe and oxtail stew, the brothers eating until their bellies ached.

Puny Soul

2011-03-07T00:52:00.002-05:00

After several attempts he managed to dismount from the stool, his left leg cobbled in the wicker backing. Laughing, the coffin builder wiped the perspiration from his tremulous brow, a stogy of soot darkening the back of his neck. Mouthing his words like a harp he said ‘I’s the only one in this place that’s daring enough to wear a lasso shirt with a fluted collar’. ‘shit down!’ grumbled a codger crossly. ‘or up’ said the coffin builder wringing the sweat out of his handkerchief. ‘or off!’ barked a fat woman in a sunhat. ‘enough!’ scowled the aleman’s wife flapping her skirts, a creel odor piling the besotted night air. He threw himself onto the floor like a dog hit by a truck, everyone except the aleman’s wife watching on with unpleasant bewilderment. ‘look his eye’s bleeding’ shouted the aleman’s wife. ‘must’ve burst a vessel’. ‘damn fool’ cussed the codger crossly. ‘man’s a menace’ whispered the coffin builder thumbing his nose. ‘probably has some kind of mental defect. Standing round with their heads in their hands. Seen this before when I was making deliveries to the Overnight Asylum. Not much they can do for them’. A chappy with a harelip ambled up to the bar and ordered a Pig’s Stout, his nose bobbling like an unmanned fire hose.

His da wore the same checked shirt to work every day, the buttons thumbed with engine oil, the chest pocket stuffed with his work credentials and passed due chits. He stood his boots upside down next to the boiler room fan, the day’s grease and sludge blackening the ankles and toes. He placed his sweat stained work cap on the hook next to his coveralls and left for the day, the sun rising above the Texaco sign yellowing the walk home. His da had watched as an outbreak of smallpox killed half the townspeople. Not knowing what to do he hid under the Seder’s awning carving boxwood talisman’s and money-foot--key-chains. The key chains he gave away for free, the boxwood talisman’s he sold for a dollar a piece.

No man’s an island his da would say falling into a drunken stupor, the front of his shirt covered in slobber. He never did recover after seeing the dwarf hung upside down from the rafters, the head nurse poking him with a curtain rod. His credentials said that he was a day laborer, the picture on his ID taken the year he had his leg amputated and cauterized with a copper welder. Long before he was told of the death and resurrection of Christ he watched his da tease his mamma about the size of her corset; laying claim to her sex and the bodice that hid it from his prying eyes. The priest read aloud from the Versio Vulgata, his lips moving along each verse like a cat stalking a canary. Saint Jerome of Vulgate, hiding his bruised knees under a surplice woven from newly ginned cotton, stood facing the sanctuary altar, the blossoms on his nose frightening the wee children seated at the front of the church. He remembered everything that happened that year; even those things it was not in his interest to remember; beatings and thrashings, hogtied and left to whimper like a puling calf in the crawlspace under the summer kitchen; the scalding pressure of his da’s hand as it lay welts into his backside, his brother sniggering as he lay claim to his puny soul.

Graham Coxon - Freakin' Out

2011-03-05T15:32:00.000-05:00

Ultisols Guimarães

2011-03-03T12:25:00.003-05:00

He stood at the back of the church staring at the priest’s gown, the purplish one with extravagant embroidery that draped his stout sloppiness like a cinema curtain. Lined up like Russian dolls, the children looking for something to wile away their time with, they waited on the priest’s first words. Speculating that it would have something to do with immoderation or indulgence, both of which he had partaken in in the last week, he relaxed and let his feet sink effortlessly into the floorboards. ‘God is watching’ said the priest starting the homily. ‘then He must need a telescope’ whispered a fair-haired boy. ‘He watches over you when you are awake and when you are sleeping…’ ‘and when you’re shitting’ said the fair-haired boy squeezing himself lest he break out in laughter. His da fed the pigeons that congregated in the parking lot behind the church; throwing fistful’s of a seed at them like a soldier attacking his enemy. João Ultisols Guimarães shits in a commode pot handed down to him from his great uncle Gaudi Ultisols Guimarães, a whoremonger’s son with a noticeable limp. He lives on both sides of the five-mile depending on his appetite for whores and black tea. The black tea he could easily do without. Having been brought up by a father who tutored him in the indelicate art of whoremongering and the sophistication of tea and scalding water a week never passed without him indulging in both. The Ultisols Guimarães’, from child to great grandparent, had little respect for things or people; taking what they wanted regardless of title or propriety.

“It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its God” (Ulysses, J. A.U. Joyce) Mór Matthew and U. A. Shakespeare, doctor of pediatric medicine, share a quart bottle of Pig’s Stout, the awning over their heads flaccidly flapping flipping. ‘I say Mór t’is a sad day now that Paddy’s gone under’. ‘Pushing dirt off the coffintop’. ‘All wormy’. Nether Stout dear man…and snap! Haven’t all day you know. People have little respect these days. Take what they want regardless of marker or politesse. Sad days. Indeed. The youth these days need a good thrashing. I’d say! It’s exhausting just trying to keep one step ahead of them. Catch up with you and, blam! Knock you arse over teapot. Godless hobbledehoy! Not an ounce of propriety. Poldy watched from his stool next to the fiddle hearth Mór Matthew belittling a boy fetching his da’s pail, U. A. Shakespeare, doctor of pediatric medicine, splitting a gut over a ball of rarebit and egg, his face a jubilant lactation. Indulge in both. Not a word of a lie. Serpent’s tail coiled round stool leg. Children begging the da to come home and light the gas. Blitzing carries a hefty cork. Pop the capper and down she goes. Frothy beards stubble with gin sores. The da laying claim to Pig Stout and wife cheating. Not a yard of decency. Shaves over the commode bowl with strop and straight. Lays the razor wetly in the jam jar beside the gleam paste. Da says man’s rights outweigh the ma’s. Keep an even keel. Bend her over the boxwood like a common whore. Bleeding hearts! Should stave their bellyaching. No amount of moaning will vary a man’s cheating. Take what they want regardless of proper etiquette. Tits over tea kettle. Bent over moaning like a gin whore. Cod cave reeks of toad roe. Poldy watched from his stool next to the fiddle hearth, quart bottle stacked and kneed, U. A. Shakespeare boasting about a whoredom where a man’s freedom is his canon. Toast all the sad buggers who think wife cheating’s a sin against God and spouse. Crack the spigot and down she goes. ‘All wormy’. ‘Pushing dirt off the coffintop’. Age of whoredom and groping.

Toad in the hole. Softens stool from the inside. Fetch a pail for the ailing da. Ma blistering over the organ pot. Likes his entrails skilletted. Gullet bribe. The ma adds the organs to the boil. The da hoisting a yard. Pig Stout and fried lamb’s tongue. Salt worsted. A smidgen’s worth. Pottage pillage. Lips smeared with the bottom of the pot. He remembers the day his da drank the Pig, his eyes flaming up like a Skankhill bomb fire. Fire in the belly. Shin fan the oven with the hems of her skirts. Otherwise the pot boils over. Keeps the smoke from quisling. Eyes go all red blurry. Keeps things on an even keel.

His great grandfather was buried in a wooded coffin with brass handles; the insides plush with coffin cloth and silk pillows. He watched as the pallbearers lowered the box into the dirt, his ma pulling her skirts straight, the da fiddling with a piece of ivory, a gift from his da when he was eight and close to dying from gangrene in his belly. His insides swelled up with bile gravy, the doctors saying he had a small chance if he stopped fidgeting and keep still. His ma said she’d only pay for what they took out of him; everything else she’d have to pay on credit.

Mother of Swine

2011-02-26T18:40:00.001-05:00

Never did Poldy think that one day he would raise a Bible threateningly over his head or find himself standing toe to toe like common pugilist with Slocum Connolly. Life sometimes holds things in store for us that we never dare to imagine could ever come true; like living one’s life in the belief that this one is but a staging ground for the one to come, ever mindful that this one, or the next, could be the last. He tosses down a goblet, a tail of maenads’ milk whale whitening his chin, ever cautious that one wrong suckle could give him diarrhea, or worse another clubfoot.

He remembered the mossy stench of the cod cave where his grandpappa took him on an outing to find his grandmamma’s missing earring, the one made from pearls of swine and the brownest shiniest garnet. He worked as a buyer for the swine and poultry division. ‘cocks and pigs’ his da said. ‘pigs and cocks. It doesn’t really matter’. ‘who?’ he asked. ‘why your great great grandfather my boy, the one with one leg’. Volutes and spalls, archivolts and dolmens, an intricate façade of architecture and trigonometry, the world unfolding like a Gaudi superstructure, his da standing in the middle paring the grimy half moons of his fingernails with a pocketknife. ‘why your great great grandfather my boy, the one with the peg leg’.

Thinking back over his life he realized that he was living it over and over but each time with smaller and smaller changes, each making an impact on what he had already lived more than once. Mother of swine his gargantuan granddad would hiss, his grandmamma, gargantuan in her own right, throwing pebbles off the rain shutters. Mosfellsbær Ólafsdóttir, known far and wide as the man mostly likely to die from chronic whooping, and his diminuire friend Sólrún, known to only a few squinting cross-eyed freaks with dreams of working the circus circuit, sold pearl of swine cameos and bracelets out of the back of a 1938 suburban sedan with bucket seats and a lay-around dash. ‘cocks and pigs’ said Mosfellsbær Ólafsdóttir grumbling, his jug ears redder than Ultisols clay. ‘next they’ll be asking for a layaway…then what? We’ll have to pawn everything and go back to working the concession stand’.

Gigantes y Cabezudos

2011-02-23T09:15:00.002-05:00

Boys at the O’Athy School were expected to attend daily vespers; even Ackley who was born with a gimpy leg and had trouble making it up the steps to chapel. The other boys would help him navigate his way up the steps and sit him in the back pew, Demne Máel making sure he didn’t topple over and crack his head into the pew in front of him. Fader Muldoon gave the sermon, warning them that any boy found playing with himself would be denied entry in heaven and given a good thrashing by brother Ignatius, the boys seated in the front pews cowering lest fader poke one of them in the eye with his roving finger.

Fader Muldoon drank black Porter and Irish Whiskey in the back booth of the Sibín tavern, sister Hélène tugging on his defrocked cock under the table. The aleman’s wife said the two were blasphemers, ‘fader should know better...and with a Carmelite by God, she’s not yet made her solemn vows...a noviciate she is!’ ‘His errors are volitional’ says O’Hanlon. ‘fader never makes mistakes!’ Cursing under her breath the aleman’s wife returns to spit-shining the glassware. ‘fader even celebrates Gigantes y cabezudos and has the biggest head of the lot’ adds O’Hanlon. ‘and La Mercè de San Juan and the Carnival of Santa Cruz de Tenerife’. ‘but he’s still a blasphemer’ adds the aleman’s wife spitting. ‘and Moros y Cristianos and the Fiestas del Pilar’. ‘blasphemer!’ ‘and el toro embolado and the feast of Hogueras’. The boys at the O’Athy School dressed in wool trousers and flax shirts, the youngest in goatskin diapers and doily booties.

Her skirts hung from the gallows of her hips, darts and overlapping pleats forming a tam and tartan hem. Slocum Connolly, giving her the once over, the sun dappling his forehead, exclaimed ‘the woman’s an angel...by God yes’. Brother Slocum had arrived early for vespers, the boys staring weakly at him, the rector’s assistant cursing him under his breath. ‘man’s a charlatan… never once seen him bend a knee or say a Hail Mary’. Snorting and snickering the boys looked at one another with disbelief, Natty Roche whispering ‘next he’ll be fining him for not praying for rain’. ‘I hearsay the Dutch make a fine cigar’ said Demne Máel his knees knocking against the back of the pew in front of him. ‘hand rolled’ said Sliab Bladma playing with his prayer book. ‘leaf by leave’. ‘they spit on them’ said Ackley trying desperately to fit in, the other boys ignoring him. ‘and some of them have bleeding gums’. ‘you fool…there’s no way they’d let ‘em anywhere near a cigar’ said Natty Roche reprovingly. ‘it’s unsanitary’. Raising the Bible over his head, the pages fluttering like cigar leafs, Brother Slocum announced the day’s routine: 8 o’clock: prayer; 9 o’clock: vespers; 9:30: confession; 10 o’clock: vaulting and pommel horse; 11 o’clock: lunch; 12 o’clock…his words falling on deaf ears as the boys were more interested in the wine stains on Brother Slocum’s surplice than in what the day had in store for them.

Los Ejército de Putas

2011-02-21T10:27:00.004-05:00

He lay the Curioso Castigos de Antaño on the table next to his teeth. Having spent 27 minutes reading the first line “i helots hanno nascosto il whore' guanto di s sotto la base vicino ad un pacchetto delle patatine fritte del riso” he couldn’t bring himself to read any further; the glue holding the spine to the boards giving him a headache. His left foot went numb when he stood for too long in one position; the blood and gases sinking to his lowermost extremities explained away as bloodguilt, a pathological condition passed on to him from his great-grandfather who fought in the Great War of Independence. His great-granddad’s side lost to Los Ejército de Putas, General Orotava Canarias’ pince-nez awakening in him memories of his grade seven trigonometry teacher Mr. Keegan who had one glass eye and one that could only make out fuzzy lines and shadows. Pathogens make the man is what his great-grandfather used to say; turns a shrinking violet into a Snapping Dragoon.

His great-grandfather told stories of footslogging marches carrying eight pound haversacks, never once admitting that he rode in a tank and never lost a leg or an eye. His great-uncle Jim lost one; a pine splinter slivering the retina in half. He never knew if you were looking at his bad eye; the one threaded with guck and dried blood. His great-uncle bought his cigars from the Windsor and Maidenhead Tobacconist, ¼ Perivale Council, a stone’s throw from Wheatears’ Apothecary. They sold creams and salves for getting rid of blotches and ugly spots. His great-aunt bought an unguent for keeping her clean down where things lived in pockets of loose flesh and folds of old fat. It made her feel womanly and kept her husband from turning yellow when they went to bed early on Saturday nights.

This was all long before his da’s nightlong visits to the local whore and the not so soothing whirr of the rubber fan that agitated the foul air over his tiny wooden bed. Long before he learned about bloodguilt and first saw the little girl with the hearing-box strapped to her chest and the foul stink of his grandmother’s breath when she smoked too much. Lots happened before he could see over the railing and his ma stuffed crumpled newsprint in the toes of his shoes so he wouldn’t fuss when she pushed too hard and left welts on his ankles. Long before they arrived on the back of a mule-cart carrying their earthly possessions and his da hit the driver for smiling at his misfortune. “...nascosto il whore' guanto di ad un patatine fritte del riso”.

Dejesus met Natty Roche when the two were freshman boys at the O’Athy School, Natty Roche, steeling a look under the sister’s skirts and Dejesus, unable to contain himself, spitting up splodges of pea soup with biscuits, the sister sending them both to see the Mother Superior. Sliab Bladma, a weakly boy with a persistent cough, Demne Máel, know at the school as the boy most likely to meet his end through bludgeoning and Finn Mac Cumhaill, a mucousy boy with a wiry frame, all lived in the same dorm with Dejesus and Natty Roche. The Mother Superior loathed the boys, referring to them as the God’s little ants, the boys taking this as a sign of Mother Superior’s habit of using God in every sentence and her affection for entomology.

Jarvis Cocker - Running the World

2011-02-21T00:05:00.000-05:00

Helotage

2011-02-17T11:11:00.004-05:00

He struck a matchstick and lit the tapered end of a cigarette, the yellowy sulphur stinging his eyes. He smoked the cigarette down to ash, snubbing it out with his right foot. Dropping in a coin he sat over the pay-as-you-go bidet, a fountain of lukewarm water finishing off what paper and hand couldn’t. A runny yare of egger rum trickled down his leg pooling at his unshod feet. He squished the yellowy cordial between his hammertoes and smiled with leviratic ecstasy. He reached into his breast pocket, for you see he he’d fallen to sleep in his suit of clothes after a night of drinking and poaching kisses from the aleman’s wife, and retrieved the poem he was to recite at the Order of the Helotage later that day.

children play
in the burins
kicking the ashes
for stomped tins
God lives in the
razor wire

Not sure how they would introduce him, as poet or sot, he read the poem in front of the hoary mirror hanging over the washing table. ‘children kicking in the burins’. Realizing he’d placed children before God he repeated the poem a second time. ‘God kicking children kicking ashes’. Feeling that he was making a mockery of God, which given his strict Presbyterian upbringing he was loathe to do, he recited it a third and fourth time. He threw the poem onto the floor and sat down on the edge of the cot, his foot aching like a hoof.

Blackwater Mainistir

2011-02-14T00:18:00.004-05:00

Francisco Morazán Tegucigalpa wears knee-pants with darted cuffs and double-stitched hems. The better for jumping portside into the tumult sea. His da’s da met the crowdie bugger on a salt run from Petersburg to Saint Mahout, Francisco Morazán Tegucigalpa leaping portside as soon as the ship reached shore, his Ditty Bag stuffed with trinkets: wares to keep whores from flinching and showing up his meagre cockmanship. The sisters of Blackwater Mainistir at Fhear Maí took care of his da’s da when he fell ill from a congestion of the upper bowel; plying him with ointments and salves and swaddling him in cotton gin.

Giving into his infelicities, daily rations of egg rum and soft palate biscuits, what few teeth he had requiring an ease of chewing lest he swallow a wad or spit up a whole crumb, the sisters tended to his every desire. Crowdie bastard living like a lieutenant: daily rasher of Cèilidh brose n’ oatcakes, dancing a jig with the Stichelton Clan; rummy bastards cut the lamb’s gut to high, stuffed it full of Parker’s oats and Yarg gelatin; runny end slopping all over his trousers. Stopcocked the coke oven, black ashy steam escaping like corpsegas. Navy captain dressed him down to his buff, stood admiring his manhood in the brass yellow waters.

Heard say he’s now living abroad in a half-room walkup with a pay-as-you-go bidet. Pissed away on whore’s trinkets and egger rum. Keeps the moths from alighting on the lamphead. Wick-end burns the bone down to knuckle. Seen a man light his self ablaze. Leapt over portside into the brassy yellow sea. Keeps the whores from flinching and making a nuisance. Christ-less heathens. Give into their infelicities. Keeps the sisters busy. Tend to their every wont and desire. His da set out to sea aboard the Mary of Bullockships. Lightening quick and easy as she goes. Left his molars under the ambry. Had to mash his oatcakes with a spoon.

Fhear Maí

2011-02-12T13:58:00.005-05:00

He arrived dockside aboard the Mary of Bullockships, the buoys out past the breakwater rushing the keel hurriedly, the captain spitting up gob in the deck below, the first coxswain manning the wheelhouse. Hauling in the bollard, the untied end lashing the sheeting, the second coxswain crawled under the deck with a monkey-wrench, his job to loosen the starboard rudder. ‘give it some slack!’ he shouted, the ship keeled to the right, the Hex bolt stripping his knuckles raw. His da, a galley cook on the Mary of Bullockships, sat under the captain’s poop shucking peas, the ocean salt liming his face. His da came from a long line of whaling Breen’s; his great-great grandfather a stoker on the Queen of Bullockships, his great grandfather a second mate on the Queen of Scots of Bullockships and his da’s da a coxswain on the Queenlier Queen Marie Henriette of Bullockships. Mackey Lacy, pining for his beloved ashore, recited a love poem evening, morn and night:

Tis youth and folly
Makes young men marry,
So here, my love, I'll
No longer stay,
What can't be cured, sure
Must be injured, sure
So'll go to
Amerikay.

My love she's handsome,
My love she's bony:
She's like good whisky
When it is new;
But when 'tis old
And growing cold
It fades and dies like
The mountain dew.

(James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, A Portrait of an Artist)

Mackey Lacy kept Ditty Bag full of books stowed under his hammock, each volume to be read according to the reading on the Schöner star-taker: botany when the wind blew leeward, poetry when it blew portside and philology when it blew over the starboard bowsprit. His da never did feel much for Mackey, considering him a man of uneven temper and low moral principles. He kept his distance, staying below when Lacy was topside and hiding in the galley when he was below, ever-mindful that Lacy was easily angered and could knock a man out cold with one punch. Mary of Bullockships set sail for the Blackwater Mainistir at Fhear Maí, the second mate doubled over with brontophobia, the foresail gagging on saltwater and rum. ‘release the bilge trap’ yelled the first mate, the sea head lashing the starboard elm.

Stephen Breen

2011-02-10T10:32:00.001-05:00

Waking from a night of sorrowful countenance he fell upon itemizing his thoughts. Arranged according to consonance, and taking into consideration sibilance and vocal quality, he made a list of things that occupied his thoughts upon waking. Having dawned on him that his waking thoughts were occupied with such things as how big ones head would grow if one watered it or why cows have two stomachs and goats didn’t, variables he seldom gave much thought to, he determined that upon-waking thoughts were much smaller than the ones he had during the remainder of the day. Taking this into consideration he itemized his thoughts according to what thoughts he could and would have upon waking should he remain abed with his eyes closed. Comparing the two he came up with a list that took into consideration what thoughts he would or could have were he to stay abed with one eye closed waking a full two hours earlier. As neither consideration appeared to alter what thoughts he had or would have, he rearranged his hat collection safe in knowledge that any thought he would or could have, both eyes open or one closed, changed very little about how he went about his day. Other than adding a sibilant lisp to his consonant tenor, which he could dispense of verily with an Epsom gargle, whether he awoke earlier or later mattered very little. Is it all a suicide of reason? A pittance to pay for safe passage into the otherworld?

He met Stephen Breen at the Bleeding of the Lamb, both men admiring the low cut of the harridan’s sister’s skirts. Apostolidès the flâner, a courthouse jester, was at that very moment prying a sliver from his thumb, a spurt of blood corkscrewing into the still bazaar air. Turning to Stephen Breen he said ‘the man’s a menace; always bleeding when he should be greening’. Realizing that a pun was being made against his name Stephen Breen turned a red cheek and said ‘green or red it’s all the same to me’. ‘anyone can bleed red, but only a giant of a man can make it green’ said Apostolidès the flâner pinching off his thumb. ‘and with such élan’ said the harridan’s sister tugging at her skirts. ‘yes élan’ said Stephen Breen. ‘green or red, with flair indeed’. Sitting on the highest branch in the biggest tree in the courthouse yard the littlest dogman played his chest like a Domitius lyre, Stephen Breen, pricking up his ears, trying to follow the tempo.

There was a rumour spreading that Stephen Breen, fellow of the Brethren of Philistines, having been in attendance at the last assemble of the Brethren of Heretics knew the whereabouts of the missing whore’s glove. They ferried him across the Libby, the punter thrashing passers-by with his elbow, the paddy waggon caroming from paling to balustrade. Cunts always think a dead man deserves the right-of-way. Hobnail ‘em. That’ll show ‘em. Never take the right-of-way for granted. The dead are dead. The living get the right-of-way. Philistines!

Heretic’s Hospital

2011-02-07T01:05:00.006-05:00

They came from Botulfsson and Savonarola, from Pistorius and Wendelmoet, by oxcart and mule waggon, in groups of twos and threes, some lagging behind like lame dogs, others charging ahead grasping at imaginary straws; they came and they came until the streets were swarming with heretics. Casement wore a Congolese Headdress festooned with partridge feathers and a fiery red cockscomb, making him the first full-fledged heretic to refuse to wear a Sattler Mitznefet. ‘pillory me if you like but I will never wear a miter. Never I swear!’ I swear I never laid a hand on him! Must have fell over backwards over the breakwater wall, little peeps cooing and going out of him. Save my own life by a hair. Leave it to God or the devil. Heretics Fork brings the best out in a man. Keeps the chin from getting flabby. Yank ‘em up by the throat. Reserved for regicides. Makes a man out of a Brazen Bull. Semi heretics aren’t worth the bother. Lead sprinkler is usually enough. Has ‘em begging for you to pull the stopcock. Which we won’t. Never! Split knee easier on the pulling arm. Makes boiling seem like a trip to the ferries. Blindfolded. Can’t tell who’s who. Buggerer’s get off Scott free. In his left-hand pocket he carried a poem penned by Ramihrdus of Cambrai:

the embalmer’s hands
weigh the body in ounces
employing an age-old science
that separates the body
from the heavenly

On his last visit to the Heretic’s Hospital the etherist pumped him full of aryl halide, his chest ballooning out like a sow’s belly. ‘No need to worry my boy it’ll escape out your anus and through the pores in your neck. Give it a few days, you’ll see’. The orderly wheeled him out in a Chèz Woulant, Eusebius, brother of Caleb and Sophronius working the stopcock like a Black Friar. He was prescribed a mild epagogic and told not to remove the bandage until the wound had scabbed over; then he could scissor it off and throw it into the trash bin behind the Waymart where a man would retrieve it and dispose of it properly; burning it to ashes then dispersing them into the aqueduct. He was to discover years later that the man who retrieved the soiled bandages was none other than Čerenkov the dwarf, then in the employ of Stephen Breen who paid him in heretical names and aryl halide.

Botulf Botulfsson

2011-02-06T11:01:00.004-05:00

Hold her head so she doesn’t fall four words: Bi i dho husht. Easier when she’s clamping. Always on the bend performing the Noble Provision. Lay a fiver she’ll get a mouthful. Like spoiled cream. Bite down hard; like shredding kip sausage. Jaw gets all stiff and mangled, barely open it a peep. Should have known better. All mangled. Turn him off for good. Poses a problem with sitting. Have to crap standing. Comes out in pips. Mangled from the inside out. Easier when she’s ajar. Slows down the provision. Ladle the boil. Good for the simmer.

He lay abed until his neck ached, his head full of hornets. Rising, slowly, his feet scarcely touching the dirt floor, he assembled his things, three pairs of socks, a scarf, his favourite boater, a reissue of Popular Mechanics, the June 27th issue with an article on Rolfing, and nimbly wade his way out into the glowing sunlit afternoon. He had a meeting with Dejesus to discuss the likelihood of the sky falling Thursday next; the last time before the next full moon. The last time the sky fell before the full moon the Semiheretics put on a knees-up on the front steps of the church, a thousand or more semi and full heretics taking over the grounds of the sacristy. Ramihrdus of Cambrai, Peter of Bruys, Gherardino Segarelli, Marguerite Porete, Botulf Botulfsson, Antonio Bevilacqua, William Sawtrey, John Badby, Jan Hus, Jeroným Pražský, Thomas Bagley, Pavel Kravař, Girolamo Savonarola, Jean Vallière, Johannes Pistorius Woerdensis, Wendelmoet Claesdochter, Michael Sattler, Patrick Hamilton, Balthasar Hubmaier, Jörg vom Haus Jacob, Richard Bayfield, James Bainham, William Tyndale, Anneke Esaiasdochter, Maria van Beckum, Patrick Pakenham, Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, Thomas Cranmer, Dirk Willems, Diego López, Kimpa Vita, Maria Barbara Carillo and Saint Joan of Arc in attendance either in person or by proxy.

Stephen Breen kept the docket listing all the full and semi heretics in attendance that day; itemizing each according to means of torture and execution: full heretics: lead sprinkler, hanging, flaying, burning at the stake, boiling, flaying then boiling, hanging and flaying, flaying, boiling and hanging and set ablaze inside a Brazen Bull with a stopcock to release the built-up steam; semi heretics: crocodile shears, reserved for regicides, the Spanish Tickler, flagellation, sawing, Judas Cradle, the Pear of Anguish, foot roasting, the Heretics Fork, knee splitting, pillory, toe wedging and branking.

Bi i dho

2011-02-05T13:08:00.001-05:00

‘Unfortunate wretched woman, trotting like a poodle. Bi i dho husht, says he. That bloody old fool!’ Astride he stood, the cuffs of his tan trousers bagging round his leg stumps, buckled and held aloft with a Yeomen’s garter. ‘Husht ye gamy bastard! A leg up is all he’s after’. Unfortunate wretch brings tears to my eyes. Seen her dog lapping up pools of it; tongue swelled up like a cirrhotic liver, all irony and bluish. Has a pawn owing on an engraved headstone, wagering she’ll live well into her hundreds. Shriner’s’ll pay the balance on monies owing if she breaks a leg or catches her death from a cold. Carry her across over in one of those miniature cars; easier if she sets sails and doesn’t look back. Price of petrol has tripled in two weeks! Diesel cost twice as much as regular petrol even though it makes the engine crank clank and sputter. Someone’s making a profit and that someone isn’t me. Cost less to embalm a corpse. Can get by with a smaller miniature car too. Don’t have to rely on coasting. Hills are a rarity, most people want to go up not down. Less time-consuming. Barely raises a hair on your neck. Hot mock chicken steam cooked with newly baked jam puffs; brings out the pepperiness. Can get by on a smaller pot if you can keep the steam from escaping. Bathe your face in steam bath steam, brings out the shine and does away with the blackest blackheads. Red as Mandrill’s ass. Good for courting and praying on the weakly. Seen him holding her chin aloft, leg stumps buckling, swiping flies with the knob-end of her cane. Costs less than a chèz woulant’s. Don’t have to add to someone’s profit. Save up monies owing. Carry the balance over without penalty or hedging. Interest only in making a dime on your sorrow. End up pawning the pawn. He awoke to a gallfly buzzing like a hornet’s nest above his head, its tiny crude wings flailing madly. I’d suggest a mustard poultice to ease the stinging. Grandmamma’s recipe: cloves, castor oil and molasses boiled in a coffee tin.

Luceafărul the Middling

2011-02-04T08:34:00.001-05:00

Every night before turning in the legless man soaks his stump-ends in rosewater, wrapping the pruned stubs with a castoff handkerchief or shirt sleeve. Tucking the bed linen under his hipbones he falls to sleep thinking of ways to make his pushcart go faster. When he was a boy his mamma scrubbed him all over with a wire brush, the smell of cropped skin filling his thoughts with foot roasting and persecution by flaying. She fed him boiled prunes to soften his stool and spruce-beer to settle his stomach. The Street Sweeper's Daughter danced in the streets like a mad maiden, her feet barely touching the pavement. The Street Sweeper's Daughter salaamed up the street like Avshalom’s concubine, her maidenhead flapping like a washerwoman’s rag. On Saturday afternoon Glostrup played Nardshir with the Street Sweeper's Daughter’s uncle, a frightfully timid man with a nervous tic that made him look like an encephalitic on the brink of fainting. The Street Sweeper's Daughter fell plummeting to her death from Quim’s Span, Jerome Ahasuerus, middle brother of Caleb, Eusebius and Sophronius, catching a glimpse of her undressed maidenhead before she was swallowed up by the outgoing tide. ‘surely she’ll be eaten by pilot fish’ whispered Ómaigh Sizars, fearing that he too might lose his footing and fall plunging into the aqueduct.

James Aloysius Augustine of Clongowes, born 2 February 1958, stood admiring his reflection in the Seder Grocer’s window, the sun glistening off his tonsured head. Augusta, now there’s a snivelling cunt if I ever saw one; plays the feint-hearted victim when the chips are down; never once seen him levy a round, ‘I’m skint’ he says, or ‘the Misses won’t allow it’. Soddy bastard lives off the charity of others. Cunt’s soaking me blind, and on His Clongowes’ birthday! Throw ‘em to the sharks; pilot fish chewing the fat off his gums. The last time Poldy saw James Aloysius Augustine of Clongowes he was dancing a jig with the Street Sweeper's Daughter and turning a blind eye to the fiver he’d levied off McTaggart on the second to last furlough. Never trust a gambolling man; there only in it for themselves. Sweet Jesus but its hotter than the Blazes in here; never know when the cunts going pull one over on poor ole Paddy. Seen him crossing over the Libby in a straw handsome with McGibbon, Clive and Ollie. Wife’s got a fine pair, ‘cept for the sores and panting blisters. Seen her snap crystal; her under-drawers losing their elasticity. But he of course turns a blind eye; rather pull the commode chain than come face-to-face with the cuckolding bastard. Seen him Thursday last buying a bar of McCabe’s Finest, lemony scented and sure to raise an eye or two. Says its easy on the complexion, razes away all the blackheads and raised spots; known to bring a shine out on a cuckold’s face. On a whim Luceafărul the Middling ate an entire bar, could blow bubbles out of his arse like a Shriner. Some say he could sink a frigate with one clench.

Awaking, his clammy bedclothes weighing him to the cot, Poldy felt a rumbling in the smithy of his soul. He dreamt that he was closing in on the scent of the missing whore’s glove and that if he could only pull himself free of his daily routine, see things more clearly, with more perspicuity, he would find it there, right under his nose, waiting to be found. But as this was not to happen, his bedclothes discouraging him from rising upright out of his cot, he fell back to sleep with a resounding thud. Word had it the Luceafărul the Middling had arrived in town Thursday last, bringing with him an oxcart full of leather goods, sow bellies and tripe. Luceafărul the Middling set up a table of sows’ bellies, leather goods and stomach linings in the empty lot across from the Church of the Perpetual Sinner and waited, the rector eying him from the balcony. Vrije Bielefeld stood admiring a cockroach floundering in a puddle of dog piss. ‘and what a drowned little boy you are’ said Vrije Bielefeld unzipping his trousers and pissing on the cockroach. ‘I hear say he can drowned a frigate and blow bubbles out his arse like a Shriner. Says it’s good for the complexion; razes all the raised spots and blackheads’. Awaking a second time he fell back to sleep with a resounding thwack, his bedclothes clammy with piss. Barely able to raise his head from the pillow he fell back into saturnalia bliss, his bedclothes chilly with dog piss and sweat.

Breithlá Sona Duit, James Augustine

2011-02-02T10:06:00.016-05:00

Čerenkov

2011-01-30T12:49:00.006-05:00

Laying under a fichus swatting midges with his hat O’Rourke reads the Organon, the sun hardly climbing above the treetops. “So much at least is plain on all these points, viz. that the faculty by which, in waking hours, we are subject to illusion when affected by disease, is identical with that which produces illusory effects in sleep. So, even when persons are in excellent health, and know the facts of the case perfectly well, the sun, nevertheless, appears to them to be only a foot wide”*. Swatting a midge, his hat flopping side to top, O’Rourke reads on. “Now, whether the presentative faculty of the soul be identical with, or different from, the faculty of sense-perception, in either case the illusion does not occur without our actually seeing or [otherwise] perceiving something. Even to see wrongly or to hear wrongly can happen only to one who sees or hears something real, though not exactly what he supposes. But we have assumed that in sleep one neither sees, nor hears, nor exercises any sense whatever”. *(Aristotle, On Dreams 350 BC, translated by J. I. Beare) ‘I dreamt the dream I was dreaming was dreaming me. Greeks, always mixing up one thing for the other’. Standing, his legs buckling inwards then out, O’Rourke threw the book into the bushes behind the fichus, the sun scaling the sky like Japanese ivy.

Poldy first met O’Rourke at the Bleeding of the Lamb, both men standing to the right of the altar. O’Rourke, engaged with a transubstantiated crack in the ciborium was watching dewdrops of Divine Water drip onto his unshod foot, the rector eying him with disgust. Čerenkov the dwarf, great-nephew of Čerenkov the Giant, pulled down his trousers and let go with a trumpeting fart; a fat woman midway through lighting a votive candle fainting like a malarial missionary. ‘the woman has no sense-perception’ whispered O’Rourke. ‘everything appears to her as if it were only a foot wide’.

Chiming like a tinsmith’s anvil the church bells clanged throughout the night and into the morn. The mob disbanded, some southwesterly some northeasterly and some down the middle of the street like cows to the slaughterhouse hammer. Her head bobbing from side to side like a ragdoll Glostrup marched up the sideways, her defiance matched only by her heartless reproach for anyone or thing that got in her way. Earlier that day, well before the mob arrived in the streets, Ms. Glostrup, toting a pike festooned with nails shouted ‘Be there any man, big or small, who thinks he is stronger than I may he stand forth now!’ A freckle-face boy holding a top raised his hand and shouted ‘I will’. A Hetaerist, his Midrashim’s cape flapping, pushed past the boy and stood eye to eye with the almighty Glostrup. ‘Stand aside; there’s no need for a boy to do a man’s job. I will thrash this despicable whore!’ Looking on with a mixture of terror and enthusiasm, as they were well-acquainted with the Hetaerist’s ruthless demeanor, having witnessed him tear a man limb-to-limb for calling him an encephalitic, which he was, his head three times the size of a man of matching deportment, Cinecittá João, Ubaldo, Ribeiro, João and Guimarães Rosa took cover under the Seder Grocer’s awning, Ubaldo cowering like a frightened child. With one blow the Hetaerist brought Glostrup to her knees, Ubaldo yelling ‘stupid cow…that’ll show you!’ Straightening the hem of her skirts the harridan’s sister let out a sigh, safe in the knowledge that today she would not have to fight off the vagrants and Nair-do-wells that followed Glostrup like pilot fish or worry about the sky falling, plummeting onto her head.

Church of Thélème’s

2011-01-23T11:40:00.005-05:00

His booted feet kicking clumps of earth Jesús Juventud stood staring at his reflection in the window, the grocer swiping at him with a broom. ‘shoo or I will smite you with my broom!’ cried the grocer. ‘malcontent!’ Jerome Ahasuerus, middle brother of Caleb, Eusebius and Sophronius, sat behind the Church of Thélème’s chewing and reading a pamphlet he’d found under a shrub, the sun burning a tonsure into the top of his head. ‘brother, hand me your eyeglasses, this print is awfully small’. ‘are you getting a headache?’ asked Jesús Juventud fiddling with a handful of green twigs. ‘not yet…it’s the print; it’s putting a strain on my eyes’. ‘perhaps it’s the poor quality of the ink...the kind they use for sheet music and poor people’s bibles’ said Jesús Juventud squinting. ‘perhaps…but I’m more inclined to think it’s the poor quality of the paper…the kind they use for wrapping meat and poultry’. ‘I could see that’ said Jesús Juventud squinting one eye then the other. ‘what’s that? asked Jerome drawing the pamphlet closer, the print dissolving into an inky black splotch. ‘I could see is what I said’ said Jesús. ‘see what?’ asked Jerome his hands shaking from the pressure he was applying to the corners of the pamphlet. ‘never mind’ said Jesús, a hint of hurt in his voice. ‘either way you can’t make heads nor tails out of it can you?’ ‘but I will! I surely will!’ said Jerome Ahasuerus defiantly, the pamphlet pressed tight against his nose. ‘yes surely you will’ said Jesús Juventud. Leaving behind a stack of twigs arranged like tiny logs hued for an infinitesimal miniscule cottage, Jesús Juventud went his way, the sun splotching everything under its glare.

This is not how it was suppose to be; things got out of hand, the sane went mad and the mad sane, what was inside turned outward, the centre no longer in the middle but cast asunder floundering in no-man’s-land. Deasey, now there’s a swimmer: can make two lengths of the aqueduct on one lungful of weedy air. Saw him do it twice: once for taking the Lord’s Name in vain and once for swearing during morning prayers. Eyjafjardarsysla from on Tyne but now living in Glossop, attempting to swim the aqueduct drowned midway under the Quim’s Span, those cheering him on watching on horrified as he sunk to the bottom like a stone. Ómaigh Sizars wears a top hat summer, winter and fall, reserving his rattan sou'wester for those gray drizzly days between deice and blossom. That day the day of the drowning he stood astride Quim’s Span recouping his trouser, which having dropped below his ankles, exposing his Mongrel pale legs, debarred his ability to cross across to the other side. Looking down below the frayed hems of his trousers, beyond the sprained tendons in his ankle, he exclaimed with unusual alacrity ‘my God, someone throw the poor man a rope!’ not a sole moving an inch. ‘Can’t you see the man’s drowning?’ he cried out. Raising his voice above the din, his face a bad apple rotten to the core, a boy replied ‘Yes, and we don’t give a damn’. ‘Let the bastard drowned’ shouted a second boy hoping to impress the first boy with his brave uncowardly tenor. ‘Have you no mercy!’ shouted Ómaigh Sizars, the first boy watching the second boy poking a dead worm with the lit end of a cigarette.

Juan Tenorio

2011-01-18T10:54:00.005-05:00

Ro Gallegos Cruz, an encephalitic, stands in front of the Seder Grocer’s admiring his reflection in the window, his goutweed jaw working a stick of peppermint chewing gum. Taking hold of his arm and yanking don Juan Tenorio puts an end to Ro Gallegos Cruz’s dullard’s engrossment, a loud crack issuing from his head, his ears dripping spools of brackish water. ‘Hurry!’ he yells yanking harder. ‘before the mob overtakes us!’ The mob, cheek to jowl, close in rounding the corner, the head nurse wailing. Off in the distance a siren blares. Then the bells in the church tower begin to chime, a tinny ear surrendering to a cold medieval chorus. Ro Gallegos Cruz, breaking free of don Juan Tenorio yells ‘to hell with you! On her face!’ The head nurse yelling ‘How dare you, and without my permission!’ don Juan Tenorio charging past her screaming ‘to hell with it, I’m going home!’

From his perch high above the mob, the bell tower cricketing under the weight of its colossal chimes, Poldy waves his hat like a cowboy, the mob yipping and hollering him on. To his left the Witness, a splinter-group of mobsters kicking at him like a piñata, struggling to stay upright, to his right the littlest dogman, his chest puffed out like a courting pheasant, pelting the mob with rotten cabbages and directly below, his pushcart upturned, the legless man, a galley of halfwits and imbeciles clubbing him over the head with makeshift cudgels and bats. ‘yip yip yippee!’ howls the mob, the legless man, his head swollen like a melon begging them to stop.

Chèz Woulant

2011-01-16T12:15:00.004-05:00

Poldy put on his favorite hat, laced his best pair of shoes and strode out into the glaring sunlit day. It was hours before the Feast of Tierra de Nadie and everywhere he looked there were people scampering about getting ready for the first gorging of the New Year. Heerlen stood about-face, his feet unbuckled from his shoes, a sea of people hissing and churning like an unruly crew. Swaging like a Rabelaisque Gargantua the mob moved down the street, stopping in front of the Church of Thélème’s, the harridan’s sister, her hair done-up in a hag’s knot trying to sweet-talking them into to buy a placemat or a Pop-icicle boat, past the Dogman Deli, the littlest dogman crouching behind a stall of oyster hams playing his breastplate like a xylophone, to the front of the Church of the Perpetual Sinner where the rector, his face three shades of red was airing out his surplice, the mob coming to a full stop. Suddenly, unexpectedly a second mob appeared around the corner, an army of halfwits and imbeciles, the lame and ambulatory, some on stretchers others wheeling themselves in chèz woulant’s, led by the head nurse from the Overnight Asylum. ‘Heathens!’ yelled the rector. ‘sit on my face!’ yelled the head nurse. ‘on her face!’ yelled the mob. ‘to hell with you all!’ scowled the rector.

Juan Miguel Padilla

2011-01-13T11:25:00.005-05:00

The ogress retted her feet, tethering the corresponding foot to the analogous ankle. ‘Una tumba sin nombre, beneath my feet’ said the ogress pointing at a mound of fly-thick manure. Digging with her fingernails the ogress scraped shovelfuls of fly-thick manure hoping to find the missing whore’s glove. ‘he assured me it was buried here, in this very spot’. The ogress tilted her head and crowed like a rooster in a cockfight. ‘god’s awful god-awful hole! It’ll take all night!’ A burdel of whores sashayed into the streets, each wearing identical red supper gloves. The lamplighter, wick-lighter in hand, jumped from atop his ladder, the clang-clank of steel and knuckles filling the night with a tinny pitch. ‘look out’ shouted the alms man. ‘they’ll run you over’. The lamplighter threw himself like a dog hit by a truck into the Seder grocer’s window, the glass mizzling into a thousand pieces. ‘what next; the sky falling?’ said the alms man raising himself up on the heels of his hands like a sideshow contortionist. Neck boils. Get all roughed up in shirt collars. Hurst like the devil.

The following Juan’s are known to have been in possession, at one time or the other, of a red whore’s glove: Juan Alvarado, Juan Miguel Padilla, don Juan Tenorio, Juan Bautista, Juan McQueen, Juan Carlos Salazar and Aguja Juan Rodriquez. Like a dog hit by a truck the lamplighter rolled along the cobbles hollering. ‘for the love of Jehovah what next; the sky falling? The moons of her fingernails eclipsed by manure, the ogress continued to dig, the smell of salt-rub reddening her cheeks. Poldy, his shoelace, the aglet crumbed like a sawed-off stump, threaded through the wrong eyelet, watched from his perch above the overlord’s banquet, all of the fat people cramped under a small disc-shaped tent, the fattest pushing his way forward hoping to be the first to be fed. Under the disc-shaped tent, surrounded by fat people gnawing and chomping, a cockfight was going on; guts and quills flying everywhere. A potpie chicken fought a barnyard rooster. The crowd jeering and hooting, the barnyard rooster pinning the potpie chicken to the sawdust floor.

Maribor

2011-01-05T02:02:00.005-05:00

He met Maribor Brezovica in a cattle car heading north into the grasslands. As the cattle car rattled headlong into the night, doors clanging, the floor shifting beneath their feet, the two men stared at one another. Suddenly, as if awaking from a yawning slumber Maribor Brezovica said ‘rattling ride’. ‘what?’ said the Witnesses’ father. ‘rattling’ said Maribor Brezovica. Wendell L. Espuma sat next to the Witnesses’ father picking at a scab on the heel of his right foot, his left foot taken by gangrene years previous. ‘death’s door’ said Maribor Brezovica pointing at Wendell L. Espuma. ‘pick pick pick, soon he’ll have no foot at all’. An abattoir of viscera (entrails, bowel and tripe) lay festering stacked like cord wood in the corner, a disease that needed slaughtering. ‘it stinks in here’ said Maribor Brezovica holding his sleeve against his mouth. ‘it’ll get worse’ said Wendell L. Espuma rolling a crumb of dead skin between his thumb and forefinger. ‘the death of us all, you’ll see’.

The Witnesses’ father had been summoned by the standing council to bring an end to an outbreak of smallpox that had killed half the townspeople. Long before he devoted his life to the Church the Witnesses’ father was known far and wide as a conjurer. Long before the birth of his son the Witnesses’ father lived the life of Reilly, concocting harebrained schemes about how the world could and would be if people only paid heed to his outlandish ideas and notions, some of which verged on the abyss of outright madness. He fell in and out then in again with an unsavory mob of hooligans, many of whom wore stockings on their heads and went about shoeless; all the better for kicking the crap out of anyone who mistook them for snivelers or creamery workers. This was long before he found God, leaving behind the life of Reilly for a life of faith, fidelity and sacrosanct devotion.

Jugglers and Hagglers

2011-01-03T01:21:00.005-05:00

‘Liar!’ yelled a woman in a purple skirt with matching runaround lace. ‘He’s the devil his self!’ shouted a man holding a walking-stick. ‘His mother has the crazy disease!’ shouted the woman in the purple skirt. ‘Let’s Kill him!’ shouted a boy throwing a tantrum. ‘and send him back to where he came from!’ added a second boy with a mane of fiery red hair. ‘Stop!’ shouted Poldy. ‘leave the poor man alone! He’s done no wrong!’ ‘let’s kill him!’ shouted a boy pointing at Poldy. ‘no, this one!’ said the other boy. ‘like we planned’. ‘kill every last one of them!’ said a colossal man with a dwarf on his back. ‘then burn them’ said the Witness addressing the mob. ‘in Hell Fire’ screeched the boy at the top of his lungs. Off in distance the legless man could be heard yelling ‘With my own two hands! Now get out of my way or I’ll run you over! I swear I will!’

He stole his way past jugglers and hagglers, past the post-digger and his assistant, past a man advertising pork bellies, a gory display of entrails and viscera, bowel and tripe, he stole his way past everyone and everything, a twinkling in his eye. I will I swear I will I swear! Lela watched as the man collected his things, placed them in a satchel and walked away, the sun shining like a roaring lion, his steps ferrying him across the wet glistening streets like a broken metronome. I will see him again, sometime, I know I will she said to herself. I may pass him in the street or see him placing his things in neat rows on the ground, the sun barely risen, stars holding the night at bay. I will I will, I will see him again, of that I am sure.

Onion Cloth

2011-01-01T11:47:00.005-05:00

Tubbercurry Creamery mark every jug of cream with an X, signifying the resurrection of the cross. The cooper’s assistant bungs every jug with bees’ wax and onion cloth, guaranteeing a taut indissoluble joint and deterring lice and ants from laying eggs in the cream. Lela overheard a boy with a freckled face ask a man with a weary face why he looked so sad, the man answering ‘because my house burned down last night and I have nowhere to sleep’. ‘you can stay with my mamma and me’ said the freckle faced boy. ‘thank you but no’ said the weary face man. ‘why?’ asked the boy, ‘why won’t you come live with me?’ ‘because I have a disease that makes me crazy’ said the man. ‘so does my mamma… and she shakes worse than you’ said the boy. ‘so it won’t matter, not a bit’. Lela felt a shiver corset down her spine. Her mamma too had the crazy disease. The weary face man turned and walked away, the freckled face boy shouting ‘she’ll do whatever you want… anything… I promise!’

It takes an hour to walk from one end of the city to the other; a day if you have no legs to speak of. The legless man punts the streets like a crazy devil, his pushcart jumping curbs and medians. Get out of my way! Can’t you see I have no legs to speak of? They fell off! I had no say in the matter! They just fell off! I could care less! I have this machine to get me where I have to go! A good sturdy machine! I made it myself! With my own two hands! These! Now get out of my way or I’ll run you over! I swear I will!

Tubbercurry Creamery

2010-12-29T09:00:00.006-05:00

The Unificationists pelted the crowd with crabapples and unripe pears; one of them, an odious-looking boy with a fat face and matching nose grinning from ear-to-ear. ‘God save the King!’ hollered a boy in knee-britches and a candy-striped nightcap, ‘and the Queen too!’ hollered a second boy, his sickly yellow face riddled with pockmarks. Lela made her way along the icy balustrade that ran like a Chinese Wall from one end of the town to the other, the thump of the drums vibrating in her ears. She walked past Monument Creameries, the heavy oak doors creaking on their hinges, an ashen face cooper sliding the quarter hoop into place then tamping the head hoop round the chime, cherry wood barrels of fresh cream saddled onto the back of ox-driven wagons destine for house and home, then past a stray dog pissing on a dead dog, the pissing dog leaning into it furtively, Lela pulling her muffler over her mouth, the dead dog grinning from ear to snout. She passed by a woman and a wailing child, the woman’s face red with fury, the wailing child sucking its thumb like an icicle candy.

She walked and walked, stopping only to redress her skirts, which owing to the clamminess in the air wouldn’t stay flat against her thighs and buttocks. She walked past the bust of King Olaf, his figure looming over the commons like a regal courtesan, his feminine side, something he was disparaged for as a young man, fief and serf alike mocking him for his womanly manner, outstripping his masculine side, past a sandbox where a boy and a girl were building a sandcastle, the boy throwing handfuls of sand in the girl’s tear-stained face. She walked and walked, her legs aching like whittled sticks, her feet as tender as milk pudding. ‘wait up!’ yelled a man in a overcoat beguilingly. ‘I have something for you’. ‘shove off I’ll call a cop’ said Lela firmly, her eyes fixed on the man’s face. ‘that’s certainly no way to talk to your great uncle, now is it?’ ‘my great uncle is dead’. The man smiled and went his way, his overcoat billeting in the wind, a crow riding the thermals like an acrobat signaling the end of days. ‘damn scoundrel pigeons…Call it domestication…keep them in rooftop hutches…skin and boil them with radishes and field greens, saw a peddler griddle cook a dozen on a sidewalk grill, juices spitting all over his boots…sold them two abreast, slat-rubbed and quartered, pick your teeth with the leftover quills’. Her great uncle died from overexertion, collapsed on the street like a whipped horse, flies laying eggs in the whites of his eyes. She past a man making the sign of the cross, an X marked with ash rubbed into his forehead.

Óglaigh na hÉireann

2010-12-26T23:16:00.005-05:00

Poldy Magyar set out into the snowy streets, his toque pulled tight around his ears. On the other side of the snow-white street, the collar of his overcoat cinched up around his ears, stood Dejesus admiring his reflection in the Seder grocer’s window. Further up, beyond the snowy hedge that had formed alongside the taffy-pullers shack, beyond the Waymart, beyond where the sun fell like a golden shadow upon the earth, he saw the legless man punting across the wet uneven cement, the sleeves of his coat dragging behind him. ‘make way!’ piped a man clad in full Óglaigh na hÉireann military dress. ‘make way, damn it!’ Plowing through the snow-white snowy streets, past Dejesus admiring himself in the Seder grocer’s window, past the taffy-pullers shack, past the legless man punting across the wet uneven cement, marched the Sligo Armory, the Cork Constabulary hot on their heels.

He saw the world as if it were upside down; everything floating on a snowy white plateau, the sky a great troubling sea, waves crashing, the sun, yellower than any buttercup, sitting on the ocean floor, his senses replicating, doubling, until he imagined his head would fracture into a million worlds, each world rupturing into yet another and another until there was nothing; only a white glowing light: the godhead, the beginning, nothingness. Advancing, flags flapping in the midday wind, a band of troubadours moved up the sidewalk, the lead singer, a diminutive cantor with a headscarf entwined round his thickheaded skull, for indeed he was in possession of a un-gauntly large head, shouting out the count: one, two, three, four ‘stay in line, damn you!’ five… ‘left, to the left by God!’

Cork Constabulary

2010-12-24T01:02:00.005-05:00

The Wren Boy Procession made its way up the street, drums pounding. Tam tam tam tam went the pecking wrens. With Christmas eve on the quick the Wren Boy Procession came out of Kilmainham Jail and marched down Inchicore Road, a small group of onlookers giving them the once-over. ‘here they come’ said a woman in a Kerry scarf, ‘and in such a neat orderly line’. Alongside the barricades dressed in full regalia the Kerry Women’s Auxiliary tossed nosegays of daffodils and carnations and bluebells and marigolds and frothy half-pints of chocolaty brown Guinness into the streets, the onlookers roaring with enthusiasm.

Peeping slyly from behind the bust of King Olaf, his chest puffed out like a Spring pheasant, the littlest dogman watched the procession march by. A woman holding a sign that read “A godless person is like a public woman to whom everyone has access” (Witold Gombrowicz, Bacacay) charged to the front of the procession, her face a medley of consternation and bliss. ‘mark my words!’ bawled the Witness, a waif, his tongue stuck out like a red Pop-sickle, tugging on his coattails. ‘out of my way!’ bellowed a tugboat of a man, the prow of his belly cutting the crowd in half. ‘make way for the Óglaigh na hÉireann!’ piped a man clad in full military dress.

Standing in the middle of a lottery of broken plates and dishes, the aftermath of an all-out brawl between the Cork Constabulary the Sligo Armory, the man in the hat watched the Wren Boy Procession make its way through the icy streets, the blue sky above his behatted head turning centenarian gray. Tomorrow is another day, he thought, and then another and another, until the one is indistinguishable from the other. A week, a month, a year, the days following one after the other, like sheep to the slaughter, dancing like dervishes under a whorish yellow moon, his father smiling, counting the day’s take: tomorrow will be a good day, a fine day indeed.

Nollaig Shona Duit

2010-12-22T13:00:00.001-05:00

They came by what they come by dishonestly. Salty bastards! Ben Nachtaí and James Nollag live the life of O’Reilly. No more dishonest two, thither or thon, are there to be found. Upon their backs haversacks they carry, pleasing cur and hag with nosegay and candy, Nachtaí and Nollag wander a tithe to a hither. Her da told her the tale of Nachtaí and Nollag one Christmas eve, the shutters clapping and the wind howling like a sanitaria dog.

Her great great uncle, deceased and exhumed by worms and wood tics, lived the life of O’Reilly, pillaging and raiding and spending the evenings in compotation with his marauding brethren. Sad but true: sadly so sadly. Astride the cattlements he heads for home on the backside of a bull. Never delimit the cosmos, he would say, his chaps hipswaddled round his legs. The morrows another day, believe you me. So mount up; the suns lowing and the winds blowing and the sky is red as hickory. The insurance man said he’d have the tuque in the mail by Friday; Saturday at the latest. Can’t trust those cunts, always got something up their sleeve. Puffed up notions of righteousness and high merit. Impressive: I dare say nay! Cat-o-nine-tails across the back makes a man into a lowly crumb. Her da made candle-wax heads, spiking the tops with spent matches and that damn sulfur smell. No matter what she did she couldn’t get the paraffin stink out of the sofa cushions. Had to sleep with her head at the bottom of the daybed, her new hairdo lousy with grave worms. A sight for soar ewes. All that bah-bahing and jumping one over the another. Her da said things could only get better, when what he really meant to say was needs some more butter. Can’t stand a dry flapjack on a midwinter morn. Sticks to the eaves of your mouth, he’d say, his eyes trained on the brown sugar bowl. Cows all lined up like toy soldiers waiting to be shipped out; never can tell which is which: the cows or the toy soldiers. Saturday last Thelma cashed in her diner’s card, got more than she bargained for. Two free entrees and a side-plate of mash. Never did ask why she didn’t ask for the butter. Might have got it mixed up with salad. Mixed greens; smell worse than spent match heads. All that sulfur and burnt wick smell. Do better with a plate of griddle-cakes. Tastes like mamma’s homemade cooking, except for the gassy smell coming from the oven. Can hear the clapboards cricketing. Lives under the hydro electric towers, the buzzing in his ears a constant consonant hissing. Like burnt wick and sulfur but louder. Can’t stand wet things on a dry summer’s day.

Sniveling like a scolded child the Witness threw pamphlets into the gathering mob. ‘there will be hell to pay, I assure you that!’ ‘fuck you!’ yelled a man from the back of the mob. ‘go back to where you came from!’ yelled a second. ‘sack of shit!’ yelled a third, and a fourth ‘eat shit pamphlet man!’ Puffing out his chest like a windsock in a hurricane the Witness bawled ‘mark my words; the wrath is near!’

Junkhouse - Shine

2010-12-22T01:38:00.000-05:00

$27½

2010-12-20T10:23:00.006-05:00

When her great uncle wasn’t beheading cows he bowled for the Boondocks’ Brachycephals. Every Sunday they played 27 wickets, 27½, weather permitting. Her great uncle was known for his overhand bowl; launching the cork orb like a meteorite, the batsman stepping out of the wicket like a man fearing for his life. His mother watched seated on a blanket in the stands, her eyes too weakly to see beyond the end of her nose. Oskar Lynch Kokoschka edging closer slops potato pot pie gravy onto her blanket, his great uncle bellowing ‘perro cuerpo, fucker!’ the cork orb ricocheting off his head. Of course none of this is true. Her great uncle was a tinker’s assistant, not a slaughterer. He never once held a cricket bat or bowled a cork ball. He was a fearsome man with uneven eyes, one a half a centimeter higher, a port-stain birthmark and a three-fingered hand; two fingers having been mistakenly severed by a knife-wielding maniac who mistook him for another man. Oskar Lynch Kokoschka I made up to amuse myself. Which he/it did. (Authorial note: it’s what I do, make things up, so please please don’t harangue me unduly; it’s in my Nature).

He fell from such a substantial height his arms and leg looked like corkscrews, the missing one aching like mad. His great great uncle suggested he use a cricket bat, jimmying it to his stump-end with leather straps and baling wire. Seeing this as a sign of his uncle’s misfortune, a mule waggon accident rendering him uncollectable and rivetingly small, he thought he’d give it a try, tamping the metal snip in place with a soft-wood mallet. Of course this reminded him of his great grandfather who’s missing leg was mistaken for his gamy leg, the bad one rankled with sores and pustules, and severed at the joint by an overconfident intern with thick horn-rimmed spectacles and globules of salty sweat on his forehead which the nurse swabbed off with a green and yellow surgical napkin. The litigation ended with his great grandmother receiving a cash disbursement of $27½, payable to her from the conceited bespectacled surgeons insurance company. Give her a Hogansberry soda; with a straw, by God, a straw. Astride the battlement he strode, his funereal clothes tarred and fathered. He was a sloppy fellow prone to fits of nervous tics. A tic tick here and a tick tic there. He likes België waffles with Maple syrup for breakfast and for supper.

Bullwhip Black Porter

2010-12-16T22:51:00.003-05:00

That morning the sky broke like an egg, the sun filling the horizon with a yolky glaze. Lela walked the battlement that crossed the aqueduct and met up with the path behind the Waymart, her eyes fixed on the yolky yellow sun. She heard that the dogmen slept three to a bed, four if they shared with the littlest dogman who slept at the foot curled up in an eel-basket. She dug in her heels, the straps and buckles of her shoes creasing the skin around her ankles, and watched a clamshell of gray clouds move across the blue sky. A swan swam across the surface of the aqueduct, its neck twisted into a Midshipman's Hitch. You can see the funnels from here... there, out beyond the breakwater she said pointing. A man kicking a hedgehog, the hedgehog curling up in a ball, the man kicking it again and again, crossed in front of her, the man hollering ‘that’ll show you! Never underrate me! Never!’

Lela felt sad for the lowly hedgehog, the man forcing it, underfoot, to walk a faster straighter line. She thought of her great uncle, his ham-fisted grip on the sledgehammer, swinging it over his shoulder and across the head of the cow; felling it as it stood, a mass of cowhide and hamburger spreading out on all-fours on the switch-room floor. Her mother said it was man’s right over Nature: to kill or be killed; to eat or to starve; to go around coatless or to be dressed in the finest leather garments. Her great uncle was doing us a great service; maintaining the lifestyle we had all become accustom to. But what of the disservice to the cow? Was it not deserving of life and limb, a trough full of hay and leather coat? If it was her great uncle was doing the cow a grave disservice; treating it as a means to an end, not an end in itself. But really, she could care less; cows were ugly bovine brutes, and as her mamma said, open season for well-dressed fat people. As for her great uncle, well he had other things in mind; things so ugly and ghastly he never spoke a word about them, in polite or impolite company.

Meisce’s tavern drafts Bullwhip Black Porter, the aleman’s wife, Euryclea, scurrying from table to table, her apron, on back to front, revealing a bony white shank of knee. Her great uncle drank tankards of molasses thick Black Porter, the space between the tip of his nose and his upper lip frothy with head. The well-dressed cad at the next table, next to the commode, a two-seater with an onionskin seat, drank his cups like a man once denied a good hearty slake, his beard birdied with biscuit crumbs and salt, his nose up to the hilt of his tankard. ‘by Jove yes!’ exclaimed the well-dressed man. ‘you’re that fellow who likes sweet nutmeat biscuits’. Lela’s great uncle swabbed a moustache of frothy head from the space between the tip of his nose and his upper lip and said ‘you must have me confused with someone else, for you see sir I despise biscuits’. An angry-looking man with a broken arm got up from his stool, and turning to walk away said ‘perro cuerpo, hond se liggaam’ huis voice follón bejina hiñe lique a bar ámel. ‘by Jove what an uncouth fellow!’ said the well-dressed cad. ‘comes here every night to use the pisser. Always has something nasty to say on his way out’.

O’Casey’s Whore

2010-12-14T08:54:00.002-05:00

His fader came across on a famine boat, captain Gorta Mór standing the helm of the Clachans’ like a man incorruptible of mind and spirit. His da was the first settler to set up a hiding and tanning shop, working the hides into high-grade leathers fit for a Lords Lieutenant or a Waterford fop. He ate his ploughman’s lunch astride the O’Connell bridge, a rusted out bicycle fender gasping for air in the bottle-green Liffey, a chiliadal waif throw crusts of black bread into the swales, a lone duck, the waves pushing it into the chalk-marked battlements, wings slapping like a shingle, treading the surge. ‘shove off!’ bellowed a tart, her heavy-weighed hips anchored to the Speyside balustrade. His fader came across on a famine boat, captain Gorta Mór standing the helm of the Clachans’ like a man incorruptible of mind and spirit. His da was the first settler to set up a hiding and tanning shop, working the hides into high-grade leathers fit for a Lords Lieutenant or a Waterford fop.

Cunts like him always want a free-one, don’t want to wear galoshes neither, the cunt. Like boots make the man. Rather have his cock in my mouth than up my skirt. Never know if the packers got the crabs; crawl all over you like the British fucking army. Lords Lieutenant gave me a dose, squeezed it out like toothpaste, saying he’d never been with a lady before. Said his da came across on the Clachans’, took the helm when the captain went starker’s. Had to lock the mad cunt in his cabin, tried on his graveclothes to see if they still fit. Found a fiver in his pant’s pocket.

Leftover from the last time he was ashore; probably got the whiplash from that fat tart on O’Casey, hear say she practically gives it away, waiting on the famine boats like an expectant mother. Got a mouth bigger than a man’s head; good for swallowing and spitting back up. Saw her with the gimp, practically sucked it off, poor bastard. Almost fell head over into the drink, held on with one thumb it was. Famine boats coming and going; some never making it past the breakwater, others crashing into the breakers by the funnels. See the little ones cutting their milk-teeth on runt potatoes, a cup of bilge water to wash it down. Sad sight for sad eyes.

She was twelve when her da first told the story, his face screwing up like a tight-knuckled fist when he got to the part about runt potatoes. He said he remembered swimming out as far as the breakwater, the funnels belching plumes of gray brown smoke, the engine master wrenching the bilge gate open, the tanks filling up with seawater. It’s all a lie; her da never learned how to swim. He couldn’t hold his breath or make flippers with his hands. Anyhow the funnels are chimneys, not breakwaters. Any other man would know the difference. Anyhow the British fucking army would put a stop to that; cutting them off at the docklands, guns emblazing. Stead’s bad for a so-and-so with a wiggly tooth. Bilge water up the arse I’d say. Makes a mockery out of an otherwise charming fellow. Her da held hold of the gimp’s arm, pulling him furlong into the drink, O’Casey’s whore splitting a gut. Serves ya right she bellowed, maybe next time you’ll come by it honestly!

Dolman Coats

2010-12-12T13:02:00.001-05:00

Flanking the curbside a timid man with a stock-stiff leg stumbled. Lela knew this man; not so very long ago he stumbled into her as she strolled idly along the sideways, her favorite dress frilling and dancing in the midmorning breeze. Could it be him? Could it? No not him. The man she was thinking of lived beyond the five-mile and wore fishstockings, so no it couldn’t be. Anyways she hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him, nor had she given him much thought, really. He was a ghoul that lay quiescent in her thoughts; pushed back into that place where she kept memories that had frightened her when she was a formless child; a tot, her grandmamma used to say, her brow as tight as the hatband in her father’s cap. The Mormons kept a monkey in a cage hidden from sight behind the Kingdom Hall; its leper spotted coat infested with lice and wood tics. Bug-ridden and half-crazed the poor monkey scurried round and round the cage, its flea-bitten tail trailing behind it like a masochist’s whip. Lela recalled the day she first saw the monkey, one of the Mormon’s feeding it mashed up grapes, the monkey flinging itself round the cage like a furry acrobat, its eyes daring to be met. The Mormon, a cubbish man with a child’s chubby face and yellow-brown teeth, was talking to the monkey, warning it if it ever tried to run away he would wring its neck and throw its half-dead body into the aqueduct, where it would lay rotting until the Spring thaw. Then, if anybody gave a good damn, they’d scrap what remained of it from the oily green muddy bottom and throw it into the nearest trash heap, where it would unthaw and start rotting all over again. As monkeys don’t understand Mormons’, and even if they could they certainly wouldn’t care, the bug-ridden infested animal stared blankly at the stupid man crouching outside the cage, its eyes daring to be met. As this happened a long long time ago, before Lela knew the difference between a monkey and a dogman, she had mostly forgotten about the monkey; only now, standing in front of the grocer’s swatting flies off the picnic hams having an inkling of what she’d saw.

Above the screen door to the grocer’s was a sign that read: “If all my life and my being were judged by a few incidents it would rightly be determined that I was a complete imbecile”. (Felisberto Hernández) The owner, a cheat with caterpillar eyebrows and a sneak’s grin, sat on a wooden stool behind the counter counting the day’s take: $27 plus the two he stole from the old woman’s handbag when she wasn’t looking. ‘Not a bad day’s take’ he thought to himself stuffing the pilfered two dollar bill in his apron pocket, ‘the old biddy shouldn’t have nodded off… stupid cow. What’s a hardworking man to do?’ Turning, his brown teeth sticking out and upwards like walrus tusks, he locked the strongbox and placed it under the counter. ‘anyhow serves her right. Maybe next time she’ll be more careful, feeble cow’. He placed a crate of iced cowfish on the top shelf behind the counter with the hope that by the time he arrived in the morning it would be unthawed and ready to be sold. ‘cowfish for a cow’ he said to himself, his front teeth touching the end of his nose, and slamming shut the screen door hurried down the street like a burglar.

The West Ham Newham Glove Co., owned and operated by John J.J. Newham, manufacture Dolman coats, a one-piece garment with led pellets in the hems to keep the coat from riding up on the wearer. Above the cutting table, written in gargantuan block letters, by the hand of a behemoth, perhaps, or a hippopotamus, even though one hadn’t been seen in the vicinity in years, nay eons, was the following epitaph: "Everything is possible, everything, even the most sordid and undignified things." (Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten) His father, J.J. the elder, beat his mamma with the wooden skeins the coat cloth came wrapped in, his mamma shrieking and moaning like a wounded animal.