Tag: Little Aleppo (Page 12 of 20)

Madame Cazee could tell the future, but not yours. At least, not if you asked her. If someone else came to her for a reading, she might tell them your future. If you went to her, she would tell you someone else’s. For a long time, Little Aleppians believed that the only sure bet in the neighborhood was that whatever Madame Cazee predicted for you couldn’t possibly happen to you. Then one day, she told two clients in a row that they were going to drown in Bell Lake, and they both did within a week. After that, it was universally decided that Madame Cazee’s visions were a math problem that hadn’t been figured out yet, and and that impressed locals even more than the fortune-telling.

Her prognostications were studied by both experts in both Numerology and Number Theory; many chalkboards were filled with equations and the occasional Summoning Sigil. Decades of doctoral theses had been earned analyzing the relationship between the client and the vision. Finally, at an international convention of mathematicians and orthodontists (the convention center had been double-booked), the Math Department of Harper College was ready to reveal the truth behind Madame Cazee.

“We believe that the process is stochastic,” the Math Department of Harper College said.

And all the other colleges’ Math Departments said,

“That’s just a fancy word for random, you asshole!”

And then there was a riot. The orthodontists had no fucking idea what was going on.

Madame Cazee had not paid any of that any mind. School was for scholars, and she was a psychic. She believed in revelation over instruction, the sudden flash over the long grind, and preferred magical books to textbooks. The difference between the two is that if you study a textbook closely enough you will understand it, whereas a close reading of a magical book usually brings about insanity or maybe a runny nose. Her shop was on Sylvester Street next to the Wash-and-Slosh, across from the Wayside Inn; the plate-glass window was opaque from the giant eyeball painted on it. Green like the Verdance in the summer with thick black lashes

There were Tibetan bells attached to the door so that when it was opened it went TINGtingydingBONG, and the magazines in the small waiting room were always about the subject you were least interested in. A teevee in the corner showed Super 8 footage of other families’ vacations. There used to be a rug, but it got dirty too quickly, and now there is not a rug. Checkerboard floor, blue and white. No cat.

The curtains separating the waiting room from Madame Cazee’s sanctuary were batiqued with mandalas, and had stitched-in runes and also an airbrushed portrait of the Christ like you might see on the side of a particularly bitchin’ van. Pentagram, too, and a ≠ marking that denoted Abaddon the Unforgiving. Along the hem were the Shema, which tells O Israel that the Lord is our God and the Lord is One, and the Prophet’s Prayer, which went O inmates of the graves, salaam on you; Allah forgive us and you all; you left first and we will be coming later. The curtain on the left also had a large middle finger rhinestoned into it.

In addition to the curtains, there were hanging beads like in a Chinese restaurant. There was no meaning to them. Madame Cazee enjoyed the clacking noise they made.

And she was there in front of you. Palms on the circular table covered with an embroidered and heavy cloth. Same color eyes as the window. For an extra five bucks, she’d wear her turban with the great big fake ruby pinned to it. Madame Cazee. She was not White. That was obvious, but she was also clearly not Black. Similarly, she was not Asian, and she was the least Mexican-looking woman that Little Aleppo had ever seen. She was some sort of woman from somewhere, and it was no use trying to interrogate her about it, as Madame Cazee enjoyed lying about her past as much as she did telling the truth about the future.

Sometimes she wore saffron robes, and other afternoons she would sit there stark naked. Having psychic powers meant you could make your own dress code. Madame Cazee was wide at the shoulder and full across her hip, and had no wrinkles in her face at all even in places where there should be wrinkles. If you had not paid her the extra five bucks for the turban, then you would see that her hair was long and the same color silver as a freshly-cut key.

Phases. Madame Cazee was like the moon, and she went through phases. Tarot cards for a little while, then she’d dig the crystal ball out of the closet. Fancy stationery and fountain pen for psychography. Chicken bones for augury. She never let the spirit world speak through her, though, as it hurt her throat.

All that bullshit was bullshit, anyway.

Madame Cazee knew. You’d pay her niece Webby in the waiting room and be called from within–DaaaaAAAAAAAAAARRRR-ling! COME!–and you’d pass the batiqued curtains and the Chinese beads into an oval-shaped room with a circular table in the middle, and she would know. Detectives figure shit out, but psychics know.

“Your drug dealer is going to give you twenty dollars worth of dope to set a billboard on fire,” she said to a straight-arrow schoolteacher who had come in asking about his dying mother.

“You’ll save a life that you’ll regret saving,” she told a woman asking about the winning combination for the Mother Mary.

“All positions are still available, even the ones that no longer exist,” Madame Cazee told a father named Heinrich looking to speak to his dead child.

A skull was in a niche in the rounded wall; it had a mauve marble in one eye socket and a spy camera in the other. Tons of mystical crap: Sankara stones, and translucent jewels that would translate text as you peered through them, and a briefcase with a large gentleman’s soul trapped inside. Monkey’s paw throwing up a peace sign. A cup plain enough for a carpenter, and a box with a note on top reading, “Do not open again.”

There was a cat. He was black with white paws, and named Sylvester. Clients thought he was named after the cartoon, but he wasn’t. He was named after the street the shop was on. Places are important in magic.

Madame Cazee had a ring on every finger, two on each index, gaudy and clearly fake. Sometimes, she would deal the tarot deck.

“Fourteen of infidels. This card refers to the insoluble problem of theodicy. Have you recently inquired as to why an all-powerful God would allow evil?”

And the person across the table–who had come in asking whether her husband was cheating–said,

“What now?”

Madame Cazee dealt another card. The Jack of Instance.

“Your mistake is thinking that God is free from time’s fascism. Time and gravity. The Lord made them and is now enslaved by them just as His creations are.”

To which the woman whose husband had been acting suspiciously lately said,

“Seriously: what?”

And Madame Cazee would laugh, she had a low and accusing laugh that sounded like HUHHHhaha. She would laugh because she knew she was right, and also because she had already been paid.

“They’re not as extinct as you’ve been led to believe,” she told Big-Dicked Sheila. Sheila was regular client of Madame Cazee, and Madame Cazee was a regular client of Big-Dicked Sheila’s Hair Salon for Rock Stars and Their Ilk. The two had an arrangement.

Sheila had been beaten by people who should have loved her, and Sheila had seen the universe all at once with total strangers. Her back had been caressed and stabbed. Men had been cruel to her in measures that she could only ascribe to Satan, and she had seen kindness from her fellow man that could only be explained by the Lord. She chose to believe that the extremes of human nature were outside our control, and ruled by spirits and demons and angels and genies. Sheila was in no way the first person to choose to believe this.

“Do you hike?”

“I walk to the bar,” Sheila said.

“The Hills are brimming over with the past. The wilderness is the other, and it is beyond you. Do you understand?”

Sheila had chain-smoked two joints on the walk over to Madame Cazee’s, and so she said,

“Sort of?”

Which was good enough for Madame Cazee, who had been in a slight trance, and now her summer-green eyes focused again on Sheila and she said,

“I love your hair.”

Sheila had dyed her short, spiky hair the color of a summer-blue sky. She reached across the elaborately-illustrated cards on the table to grasp Madame Cazee’s ringed fingers, and she said,

“How good do I look?”

“There are no words.”

“Not to toot my own horn.”

“If you don’t toot, who will?”

It was late in the day, and Sheila’s shop would be getting busy. She kissed one of the gaudy and clearly fake rings on Madame Cazee’s left hand. When she got up from her seat, she put her palms together and bowed, and she backed out of the oval room with a circular table. The Chinese beads made a clacking noise, and then the door out to Sylvester Street made a sound like TINGtingydingBONG. There was a plan, Sheila comforted herself as she fetched a cigarette from her purse and lit it FFT and blew out the smoke PHWOO and thought again: there was a plan. It may be for someone else, someone you’d never meet, but there was plan. Sheila was wearing big, black boots with black laces, too, and she walked west on Sylvester toward the Main Drag, which runs north-south through Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America

The bookworms had recently chewed through Sun Tzu, so they were far more strategic than usual. They were the yellow of sickness, the yellow of the outer edges of a cheap paperback’s pages, and striped through with black like cancerous boogers; segmented, and one end had triangular teeth arranged in an asshole-like mouth that evolution had made perfect to eat paragraphs and devour sentences. Eyeless, because bookworms didn’t need sight-vision is the last sense to be trusted around a book–and they left a trail behind them of dryness like reverse-snails.

If you wanted to own a magical bookstore, then you were going to have to deal with bookworms.

Mr. Venable was in his customary suit; it was black-ish and used to be pinstriped, and bought for him a long time ago by someone who loved him very much. His shirt was oxblood, and he did not wear a tie. His lace-up shoes had never been shined, and he needed a haircut and a shave. Mr. Venable was in his customary spot: leaning back in the green leather chair behind an overflowing desk to the left of the door to the bookstore with no title. His fingers were tented in front of his chest like a Bond villain, and his eyes were not focused somewhere in the middle distance.

“Flamethrowers are out. It’s a bookstore. The building is made of wood, and its contents are made of paper. A flamethrower would provide a Pyrrhic victory at best.”

“Plep.”

There was a tortoiseshell cat on his desk. Black on her belly, and gray-and-black splotches and spots on her back and head. If she were a calico, then she would have some white mixed in, but she was a tortoiseshell and so was just gray and black. Her tail made a question mark to the left, and then to the right. The cat had no name, or at least none that she would tell Mr. Venable. He had asked a million times, but cats are good with secrets. The cat with no name did not belong to him: she belonged to the bookstore with no title.

Of course, he often thought, so did he.

They were equal partners.

“Poison would do the trick. I’ve been blunt so far. Poison is a subtle ally.”

“Mlaaaaarh.”

“Well, yes. So far. But there must be something that kills them. I’ve tried self-help books and the Twilight novels. Nothing. Nothing at all. They just grow fatter.”

“Plep.”

“Oh, I shan’t feed them Norman Mailer. I want to kill them, not torture them.”

The cat rolled onto her back and batted the air several times, then spread her legs far and looked up at Mr. Venable like she wanted her belly rubbed. He smiled.

“I know this trick.”

“Plep.”

She had to give it to him: it was absolutely a trick; she was gonna claw his wrist something fierce. A good office relationship is based on mutual respect.

The door to the bookstore with no title went TINKadink and Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, rushed in and before the door had even closed she said,

“How bad?”

“It’s not good.”

“How not good?”

“They’ve taken the elevator.”

“The elevator is broken,” Gussy said.

“And that’s why it’s not good. If the elevator worked, it would be bad.”

“There’s such a thing as choosing your words too carefully.”

“Balderdash. Language is a scalpel.”

When Mr. Venable said things like that, Gussy ignored him.

The front room of the bookstore with no title had a high ceiling, and there were two overflowing tables labeled Non-Fiction and Non-Non-Fiction. Biographies of Teddy Roosevelt, and books about shooting elephants by Teddy Roosevelt; memoirs from actors who could no longer get work acting; books about wars from long ago, and countries that no longer existed; and cookbooks from famously skinny women. Funny novels that lasted for 300 pages, and space operas that went on for 1400 pages without one joke at all; men writing about their dicks, and women writing about their families; experimental works that waggled their assholes at you and dared you to figure them out.

And Don Quixote. Mr. Venable rotated the stock on the Non-Non-Fiction table often, but there was always a stack of Don Quixote in whichever translation was currently annoying him the least. It was the most perfectly human book ever written, he thought. Messy and repetitive and aware of its own shortcomings. An insane man in a boring world, or a sane man in a lunatic’s paradise: Quixote was up to you to decipher. The novel doubled back on itself, and flagged its own lies, and told the same stories again and again but different and better each time, and memory was equated to madness.

And it didn’t have a plot. Books should be about people, Mr. Venable believed, and people do not have plots. Movies have plots. People? People don’t have plots. Things happen to people, and they react.

The coffee machine was on a small table by the bay window, and Gussy poured herself a cup. Sugar and…where’s the milk? No milk? Oh, what the fuck.

“Powdered creamer?”

“I ran out of milk and haven’t been to the store.”

Gussy sprinkled the foul chemicals in her mug that read HARPER OBSERVATORY: WHERE THE STARS SHINE and stirred with a pencil. The coffee streaked but did not lighten.

“Eww.”

“I’m as unhappy about it as you are.”

“Milk is literally next door.”

There was a bodega with a dairy selection literally next door to the bookstore with no title. Mr. Venable avoided Gussy’s eye and said,

“It’s a long story.”

“Another feud?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

As far as Gussy could tell, Mr. Venable had no friends in Little Aleppo. Just varying antagonisms.

“One of these days, you need to get your shit together,” she said.

He smiled around his coffee and said,

“That’s my favorite translation of the Lord’s Prayer.”

Gussy squinched her eyes in annoyed confusion, and then remembered that she would almost certainly have a conversation just as irritating with her sound system later that day, and she just closed her eyes entirely.

Gussy owns The Tahitian, Little Aleppo’s grand movie theater; she raised it from the dead all by herself. Her father David O. Incandescente-Ponui left her a robbed grave. The container was almost all that remained, and what was still present was torn and shattered and stained with bodily fluids. All the bones were not gone; in the balcony, there were the thumbless skeletons of a fat man and a bald man.

“This is your birthright, Gussy.”

Her father had actually said that to her. The Tahitian was teetering on the edge of disrepute at that point: it was not yet a fuck house for lonely masturbators, and criminals hiding from the police, and police hiding from their sergeants, but the theater was no longer the palace it had been. Decades had gone by since the orchestra of live musicians (and one dead trumpet player, but that’s another story entirely) and years since the grand machine of an organ rose and lowered from within the stage in front of the screen.

The Tahitian was showing that space movie. The one with the farm boy and the asthmatic and the guns that went PYEW PYEW. Gussy saw it eleven times, and after one showing her father actually said that to her; he didn’t really mean the theater, he meant the cash flow, but she didn’t know that.

First, David O. Incandescente-Ponui increased the cost of a ticket, and then the snacks. After raising prices, he cut costs. The Coca-Cola fountains were replaced by Arbitrary Cola, which tasted as if it were made by people who had read about soda but never drank one themselves. The bulbs in the projectors were bought second-hand, and so showed weak and pale images. Coin-operated latches were installed in the women’s bathroom. He fired all the ushers.

By the time the sequel to that space movie Gussy saw eleven times came out, The Tahitian was no longer showing first-runs. And by the time the sequel to the sequel came out, The Tahitian was showing porn and kung fu movies. Shortly after that, the theater closed. And shortly after that, the ushers that David O. Incandescente-Ponui had fired stabbed him in broad daylight on the Main Drag.

No charges were ever filed.

Gussy went to the funeral in Foole’s Yard. Had her father been a monster, she would not have, but her father was not a monster, just an asshole, and so she gave a begrudging eulogy that was mostly about herself and shoveled a scoop of dirt onto his casket and never once went back to visit his grave. She was still in high school and hated herself for her gladness. But she was. She could stay home for college. She was going to go the East Coast to get away from him, but he was dead now and so she could stay in Little Aleppo and go to Harper College. She went to therapists to deal with the guilt for years, but stopped after a while. Some things, Gussy realized, were best to just try not to think about. If one couldn’t resist, there was alcohol.

Wills are read in Little Aleppo. The family gathers in the lawyer’s office in their blackest clothing and tries to outmourn each other. Her mother and brothers got the money. She got The Tahitian. Her mother and brothers bolted from the lawyer’s office to meet (respectively) their lover, drug dealer, and bookie. The lawyer was balding, and offered her a drink even though she was still in high school. She turned him down. The lawyer tried to grab her tit. She turned him down, and walked up the Main Drag about a mile to The Tahitian. The marquee jutted out over the sidewalk like a Roman nose and there were still black letters against the dingy white background: DEBBY FUCKS EVERYTHING THAT MOVES. In addition to attempting to molest her, the lawyer had also given Gussy the key.

The coffin was open in the funeral home, backstage. Gussy knew it was not called backstage, but she did not know the proper name of the room so she called it backstage. The director had opened it for the family, and she was the only one in there. Her mother and her brothers professed to love him, but they did not go backstage to see him; she had openly hated him and shoved him once with both hands in his chest. Her father was gray and in a box, and she was in a black dress that went to her mid-calf and covered her arms. Gussy took a twenty out of her purse, and slipped it in the inner pocket of her father’s suit jacket. Tried to remember the Lord’s Prayer but couldn’t. Went back in her purse and pulled out a ten. Put that in his pocket, and took the twenty back.

Walking into The Tahitian, she wanted the ten back, too. The popcorn machine had been sold, and the snack counter stolen: there were discolored indentations in the red-and-yellow carpet where they had been, and the chandelier shaped like an upside-down palm tree was gone, too. Just a chain swinging from the high ceiling in the lobby. The seats had been ripped up, or ripped out entirely, and the screen was sliced through right down the middle. The place smelled like stale cigarettes and dirty dicks.

It was dark in the auditorium, and Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy and was still in high school and had just buried her father, stepped in a mound of human shit.

Her birthright.

She begged and tricked her mother and brothers into ponying up to seal the theater off. Halt the rot, she figured. She could not sell The Tahitian, even though she now owned it. The Broadside Newsstand runs along the southern wall of the building on Gower Avenue, and Omar who runs it has some sort of lien or easement or right-of-way. Some legal bullshit. Several lawyers had explained it to Gussy, some of whom had not tried to grab her tit, but she didn’t quite understand any of it beyond “you can’t sell.” Gussy had been bequeathed shit; even worse, she had been bequeathed shit that she could not unload to a shit purveyor.

But roses grow from shit.

The Tahitian lived again, eventually. It took work and money and maybe a blowjob or two–all good things take work and money and maybe a blowjob or two–but she lived again and so could tell the same stories she used to tell, once more. With feeling. Different and better each time.

“Where are they?”

“The majority are in sub-basement 12,” Mr. Venable said.

“What about the minority?”

“They might be right behind us.”

“Right now?”

“When else is there?”

The cat, who had no name, spread her four legs again and begged someone to stick their hand where she could slice at it.

Gussy did not work for Mr. Venable any more, but still had his back. Sometimes people adopt each other.

“We need swords,” she said.

“We need moving swords,” he answered.

“Chainsaws.”

“Doable,” Mr. Venable said, and stood up. Behind him were bookshelves, and The Revelation of the Intrinsic by Mahdi Zaman was on the fourth shelf. He clicked it back towards him, and the shelf revealed itself as a door. He smiled the smile of someone who was about to chainsaw his enemies straight through, and so did Gussy. Infestations needed to be put down, and there was no law against having fun while doing it. At least there wasn’t in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

“Think of an Indian. An American Indian, not some lady in a sari. And now you’re saying, ‘Frankie Nickels, we call ’em Native Americans now,’ and I’m saying back to you that your pal Frankie knows what she’s doing. Choose my words carefully, I do.

“Think of an Indian.

“You just thought of a Crow. Unless you’re some sorta scholar or weirdo or something, you thought of a Crow. If you ever saw a movie in your life, you thought of a Crow. Big-ass feather bonnet cascading behind a fellow riding bareback and killing buffalo? Crow. Moccasins and teepees and sweat lodges and matrilineal societies? That’s the Crow, cats and kittens.

“They lived close to the Yellowstone River. People settle near water. Except Atlanta and Vegas, people settle near water. Wyoming. Montana. Dakotas. Up where winter is lethal. Hooo-boy, you ever been in Montana in January? Yeah? You have? Bet you did it with central heating. Bet you did it with an automobile that could take you to the supermarket. Bet you did it with police and firemen you could call.

“You ain’t never suffered in your life and you know it, ha ha ha.

“Weren’t no horses at first, not in America. Horses come from the Steppe. Scientists think maybe roundabouts Kazakhstan. Conquistadors brought ’em over. What an honor for those horses, man. Some horses belong to snotty rich girls, but these horses got to belong to conquistadors. I bet those horses bragged about in their Christmas letters. Those rapacious Spaniards dropped the animals off in Haiti, and South America, and Mexico, just let ’em go off into the fields to make new horses. They thought they were serving Christ. You remember the part of the Sermon on the Mount where He said, ‘Go forth, and bring horses to places that don’t have horses.’

“Jesus was an equitable man, right?

“1538, cats and kittens. For all our faults, White people write things down. 1538! First horse in America. Hernando de Soto brought ’em. The horses multiply like rabbits, and 200 years later they’re everywhere. Sea to shining sea, baby. And, you know, there’s people living between those shining seas. Easier to ride than walk.

“Remember those movies? The one that told you Indians was noble, that Indians was savage? Movies are lies, cats and kittens. Just a bunch of pictures, ain’t nothing moving at all. Illusion of velocity. Movies are full of it.

“Indians was smart, cats and kittens. They were just like you and me.

“So I guess they were dumb, too. Ha ha ha.

“Horse lets you cover more ground. Horse can charge down a buffalo, or carry that weight behind it. Trade with more folks. Horse makes your universe bigger. It enlarges your perimeter, you get me?

“And now the Crow transition from subsistence to surplus.

“You can trade your horses, and a man with many horses is a big man indeed, and perhaps you can steal horses from rival tribes.

“Three guesses what this led to?

“War Chiefs, cats and kittens. The same horse that brought abundance and security also expanded all the tribes’ areas to the point where they was all rubbing up against each other. Rubbing induces friction.

“And so you got War Chiefs. They led the raiding parties, they defended the women and children, they were deferred to in terms of violence. They were in charge when it got hairy, and they chilled out when things were copacetic.

“A permanent Cincinnatus, right?

“The Crow fought the Sioux and the Cheyenne. When the Americans came, they joined with them to fight the Sioux and the Cheyenne. The Crow considered themselves equals to the Americans. They signed treaties.

“Ha ha ha.

“Joe Medicine Crow. That’s the guy I’m talking about, but I had to give you a little background before I got started. Human beings and their accomplishments are contextual, cats and kittens.

“This is 1945, and there has not been a War Chief for a long time. The Crow’s been living in a reservation up near Billings for 70 years. The old ways are dying off, but Joe Medicine Crow disagrees. His grandfather was named White Man Runs Him, and he was a scout for Custer. The old men toughened the young man up, and then his uncle sent him to Europe. One last chance to fight the White man.

“The 103rd had broken through the Siegfried Line, and they’re outside of Mulhausen. Joe Medicine Crow’s grandfather had been a scout for the American army, and now so was he. Well ahead of his unit and looking through binoculars. He’s got on warpaint and a helmet, and just one upside-down vee on his sleeve. He’s a private. Remember that as I tell you this story. He’s a private.

“Those lousy Nazis are holed up in a…what’s the German word for château? An inn? Like, a private inn. Big house, outbuildings, stables, lawn, that sort of thing. Rich folks used to live there, but then a bunch of guys with guns showed up and told ’em to get out.

“Nazis are on the retreat. Final days of the war. They got guns but no artillery.

“It’s real dark out.

“Joe Medicine Crow had a War Name, but he wasn’t worthy of it yet. High Bird. He could call himself that when he was a War Chief, but he wasn’t a War Chief. Hadn’t been a War Chief for a real long time.

“Four tasks. Wasn’t any council of elders, no judges or voting. Perform a certain four tasks and you earn yourself the right to call yourself War Chief.

“Gotta lead a war party, so Joe Medicine Crow backtracked a mile or so to where his unit was. Fetched a sergeant and some corporals. Everybody that outranked him did what he said.

“And what he said was, ‘Wait here until the signal.’

“Sergeant asked what the signal was.

“Joe Medicine Crow said that he would know it when it saw it.

“It’s real dark out. No moon. Joe Medicine Crow sneaks down from the ridge overlooking the inn, or château, or whatever. He is downwind, and he can smell horses and Germans. A smoldering fire. Doesn’t crawl, but he crouches real lowdown and every ten steps he stops. He breathes in rhythm with his heart, and listens in between beats just like a sniper.

“You only get a split second of silence at a time, cats and kittens.

“He goes to the stables first. Silently lifts the latch on the door. When he walks in, his toes hit the ground first but he is standing up straight. Some of the horses wake up, and they don’t make a sound. It’s very dark in the stables, and then the German soldier who had been assigned there walks around a corner and he doesn’t make a sound, either, because Joe Medicine Crow has him by the neck.

“They’re on the ground. He’s on top of the Nazi. Squeezing. Little blond boy. His hat has fallen off, and his eyes are tearing up. Joe Medicine Crow is in his warpaint, and there is an eagle feather tucked into his helmet. It is very dark in the stables and now the horses are making noise and so is the German blond boy in the Nazi uniform.

“He wheezed out one word.

“Mutter.

“Joe Medicine Crow didn’t speak German, but got the drift.

“He let up on his neck, right? Just a little, just enough to bash the German’s head into the packed dirt floor. Concussed him something fierce.

“That was number one. Wanna be a War Chief? Four tasks. First was counting coup. Touching your enemy without killing him. The Crow called that ‘counting coup’ and it was one of the four tasks you had to perform to be a War Chief.

“Done.

“Number two was stealing your enemy’s weapon. The German boy had a Mauser rifle, and Joe Medicine Crow slung it over his shoulder as he stood up.

“Done.

“Number three was the big one. Number three separated the cats from the kitten, cats and kittens. Ha ha ha.

“Horses. Those world-changing grass-eaters. The maned bridge between subsistence and surplus. Engines of war and bringers of the Whites.

“Wanna be a War Chief?

“Gotta steal some horses.

“It was dark in the stables, but Joe Medicine Crow’s eyes had long since adapted and he knew the trick to seeing at night was using peripheral vision, so he examined the rows of horse chutes sidelong.

“All he could see in one paddock was eyes. Blackest horse he’d ever not-quite-seen.

“Joe Medicine Crow walked calmly and quietly and quickly up the room and opened all the animals’ pens. The horses wandered out into the center of the space and smelled each other. There was some bickering.

“Then, Joe Medicine Crow got on the back of that black horse. That midnight horse that was not there. That hole in the night.

“Bareback. His grandfather White Man Runs Him had a saddle, and so did his father, but originally the Crows didn’t have any saddles and now Joe Medicine Crow didn’t have a saddle. He had a helmet and a rifle that had been issued to him, and he had a rifle that had been stolen.

“The horses were milling in the middle of the stable, they were milling in the dark, and Joe Medicine Crow dug his heels into his mount’s sides with absolutely no mercy. Cruelly, even. Horse shouted and bucked forward, and he started hitting the other animals, riling them up and starting a stampede out the opened door of the stable.

“By now, the other Germans who were occupying the inn, or château, or whatever were awake and running towards the horses but the horses stepped on their Nazi skulls and stomped on their Nazi lungs and kicked out their Nazi guts.

“The fourth task is leading a war party.

“The 103rd advanced from the ridge. They shot into the darkness and threw grenades and started fires. Joe Medicine Crow ducked down onto the back of his stolen horse and galloped away and as he did he sang songs about himself.

“And in the songs, his name was High Bird.

“Wasn’t an hour before the Americans held the position. Sergeant radioed back a code that meant victory.

“A place that has a stable usually has a wine cellar, and the 103rd got drunk. Not Joe Medicine Crow. He rounded up the horses that had scattered. Watered ’em, fed ’em. What’s the point in stealing a horse you ain’t gonna take care of?

“Dawn came by. Eventually. Dawn always seemed to be late in 1945. The main house had a chair out front that was still in one piece after all the shooting, and Joe Medicine Crow chased a skinny private from Pittsburgh out of it. Sat down and smoked a cigar and watched the sun do whatever it is that the sun does.

“It was the first time the sun rose on a War Chief for a very long time.

“Last time, too.

“Take your swing, cats and kittens. Four tasks. It ain’t blood makes a War Chief! It ain’t money makes one, neither! Four tasks make a War Chief. You get the chance to make your ancestors proud?

“Take it.

“Take it and choke it and pound its head against the packed dirt floor of the stables.

“You’re listening to the Frankie Nickels show on KHAY–Hey!–and I think it’s about time for some sweet soul music.

“Do you like good music?”

Tuesday afternoons are not the longest afternoons–those are Sundays–but they are the sleepiest and most mundane. Sunday afternoons are Texas, but Tuesday afternoons are Nebraska or Kansas or a perhaps a Dakota. If Tuesday afternoon were a dog, it would be a bloodhound napping on a wooden porch; were it a cat, it would be a dead cat. All of life is Saturday night, Sunday morning, and Tuesday afternoon.

But it’s mostly Tuesday afternoon.

The light on the Main Drag was slow and shafty and speckled, and pedestrians walked halfway into stores only to forget what they wanted, walk back out, remember, reverse path, forget again, decide to get coffee, forget where the coffee place was. Anatoly shut the grill down for the day at Anatoly’s American, and the Morning Tavern had slipped into a drunken meditation and was praying to gods with names no one could spell. Congo the elephant, Pax the dog, and all the other animals at Harper Zoo were napping. KSOS was airing reruns of that show where the wife is mean to the husband, and the housekeeper is mean to the both of them; KHAY was playing twenty-minute-long prog tunes because the deejay needed to go to the bathroom. No ships were unloading at the Salt Wharf, and no houseboats were on fire at Boone’s Docks. In fact, nothing at all was on fire. Which was odd, because something was always on fire in Little Aleppo.

At first, just the Segovian Hills, which were not named that at first. The Pulaski name for the mountains translated into something like There are ‘squatch up there; Jesus fucking Christ never, ever go up there, except it was a different god than Jesus and also it sounded a lot prettier. They lived between the hills and the harbor in kotchas made of strips of redwood bark and very rarely burned them down. If they did, it was no big deal: someone kicked the whole deal over and then everyone threw dirt on the smolder and made fun of the jackass who had burned his house down. Then, everyone helped build a new one. People looked forward to it, honestly. Something to do

But mostly the hills burned. It rains every 18 days in Little Aleppo, and by the 16th or 17th day during the summer the chaparral and scrub was dry and crinkly, and though there was not rain, there were clouds which sparked off heat lightning and CRACKAFWOOMP one of the seven peaks would alight. The fire would burn up and down. The Pulaski would bring their beds outside their kotchas and fall asleep watching a mountain eat itself.

The real fires didn’t start until the Whites arrived. They did not believe in a communal hearth, like the Pulaski, but in individual ones and also lanterns fueled with sticky, splattery oil; they smoked tobacco in ashy cigars; they had brought with them something called electricity and shared it with one another in wires that they let lay on unvarnished wood. In the mines of the Turnaway Lode, there were chemicals and gasses, and there was pressure and heat. Flare-ups and conflagrations, there were fires in Little Aleppo.

Once in a while, there were Fires. More than ten died and the word got capitalized and made memorial. The Wayside Fire, which took 38. The Zweitel Footwear Fire, which took 162. 27 died in the St. Florian’s Orphanage Fire and that one hurt the worst of all; nothing has been built on the site to this day, just a sculpture in an empty lot between two buildings on Olivera Street: a painted-shut window made from brass with a small hand against the glass.

At first, the neighborhood would form a bucket brigade from the lake to put out the flames, but very quickly this was not enough. Also, it turned out that the local bucket purveyor, Bucket Barney, was setting most of the fires in an effort to increase business. It was obvious to all that a professional fire department was needed, and no one did anything at all about until the lake was drained by the owners of the Turnaway Lode and they had to do something.

People do things when they have to, and not a second later.

But they don’t do things right, at least not at first. Little Aleppo needed a professional fire department, but what it got was gangs of yahoos in helmets ordered from Back East brawling in front of blazing structures. From the Upside, there were the Inferno Inhibitors; the Downside provided the Fuck Fire B’hoys. There were the Eighth Avenue Hose Monsters, and the Fantic Street Flame-Foulers. Two or more would pull up to every blaze with their horse-or-teenager-drawn water tanks and immediately start punching one another for the right to put out the fire. They rarely got around to putting out said fire, but always remembered to loot whatever was left.

Sustainability was not a concept in 1913. If it were, then the residents of the neighborhood would have called the firefighting situation unsustainable. Instead, the residents of Little Aleppo set an abandoned building on fire to lure in all the renegade fire gangs, beat the living shit out of all of them, stole their water tank wagons, and established an actual fire department. Funds were allocated, then stolen, and then re-allocated to build a firehouse on Alfalfa Street right off the Main Drag. There were interviews, and ten firemen (they were all men) were hired, and there was training. Stairs run up and down, spooling and unspooling. A week after the LAFD was formed, the bell rang in their new headquarters. This was the Zweitel Footwear Fire. Ten of the 162 who died were firemen.

The next day, the Town Fathers wired Back East for some Irishmen.

Dillon Kenny showed up first, and so he got to be the first Fire Chief. Technically, his mustache showed up first: it was as massive and red as the fires he had been hired to fight, and his head was shaved bald. This was not a common look in 1913, and his eyes were the same color blue as a cloudless morning; when he would get sooted up with ash, all you could see was red and blue and also the white of his teeth because the crazy motherfucker would laugh at the fires. Dillon Kenny was chief for a lot of reasons. The LAFD got good, fast.

He was unaged. 25? 55? Dillon Kenny’s face was so crackled and tanned from the heat of the fires he put out that you could not tell wrinkles from creases, and his eyelids were folded and sleepy except when he was working. He was a teetotaler, and an early proponent of exercise: he would force the department through daily calisthenics, and leave the garage doors open and cajole passersby into joining.

“You! Fatty! Come and do jumping jacks with us!”

Naturally, Little Aleppo loved him, and all of his firemen. Dillon’s Dousers, the local wags called them. Bartenders and whores gave them freebies, and none of them could pay for meals. Dillon Kenny preached one thing to his men: their lives are worth more than yours. The rich fuckers and the poor bastards; the junkies and the professors; the children and those that fucked children: it didn’t matter who they were. You didn’t ask. You ran into the building and you saved them. Saints or monsters, it did not matter, and you would never know. The job is to run into the burning building and save whoever was in there. If you had to die in the process: fine. That was the job. If you didn’t like it, then you could so something else. You could do something lesser. You could sell real estate, or socks. You could paint houses. You could be a cop. But, if you wanted to be a fireman–one of Dillon Kenny’s firemen–then you ran into the fucking building and checked every fucking room and every fucking closet, and under every fucking bed. Because that was the job.

Horses at first, great behemoths with shaggy fetlocks and wild eyes chained to giant water tanks and galloping down the Main Drag with a white dog spotted with black sprinting and barking in front. The dog was named Ash, and she was a mean little motherfucker. In 1921, the LAFD bought its first engine-powered firetruck, and Ash ran in front of that, too. The firemen rode on the rails of the truck, and the neighborhood would cheer them as they hit their top speed of 30 mph on their way to the fire. Chief Kenny drove–as fast as he could–and his Dousers hung off the engine clinging on to the ladders and hoses sprocketing the sides.

Ten had to die for a fire to become a Fire, except for the Ambrose Cafe Fire in 1938. The fryer went up–the cook was burned, but he ran out of the restaurant onto 16 Mantid Street with the waitresses and the customers and the manager. A man named Stamp Lovely owned the place with his wife, Berry, and it was their eleventh anniversary and they had taken a very rare night away from the Ambrose Cafe to celebrate. Stamp’s father was watching their two children in the apartment right upstairs. Stamp’s father had emphysema and used oxygen; there was a tank hanging off his wheelchair, and three extra in the front bedroom closet.

One of Dillon’s Dousers scooped up the old man and ran down the flaming stairs. Dillon Kenny was right behind him, but the steps FLAMPED up with red licking death and collapsed, so he ran to the open front window.

Little Aleppo caught the children.

The explosion blew the windows out of houses and cars for half-a-block, and every degree of burn was inflicted on the crowd below from screaming debris, and the building to the right of 16 Mantid Street buckled, and the building to the left caved. A sticky ash settled in the low sky until it rained a week later. The animals at Harper Zoo were completely ripshit for days. Half the neighborhood was half-deafened.

Only one dead, though.

There were no fires the night of Dillon Kenny’s wake. Perhaps out of respect, perhaps out of self-preservation: Dillon’s Dousers were all violently drunk and crying with their fists.

A figure was added to the memorial on Olivera Street. There was the window made of brass, with its joins painted over and sealed shut, and a child’s hand–just the hand–pressed against the glass from the inside. And now there was a man on the other side. Fist raised, about to smash the window open. He was made of copper and tarnished very quickly so that the two parts of the memorial were different colors, and the arm that was raised had a metal cuff of a firefighter’s coat folded about the elbow. His customary firefighter’s helmet was worn far back on his head so that you could see it was shaved bare, and his mustache had not oxidized and was still the color of a brand-new penny. It would always remain so; metallurgists puzzled, but preachers understood.

Flower Childs was not Dillon Kenny in almost every way. She was not dead, for one. She also did not have a mustache. Flower Childs had been the LAFD’s first female recruit, and then the first female fireman (Flower did not give a shit about fighting for titles), and now she was the first female Fire Chief. The neighborhood did not love her like they did Dillon Kenny, either. They respected and feared her, and they thought she was a bitch.

She was 6’1″ and 200 pounds, and had absolutely no sense of humor about her name: Flower had punched a Town Father once for a mild quip about it, and he was giving her a medal at the time. (Her popularity spiked intensely after that episode for a few weeks.) Her father thought he was funny, ha ha ha, and so she was Flower Childs.

The engine whipped down the Main Drag, and she gaped at it. It was the most impressive thing she’d ever seen: loud and fast and spectacularly red and shiny.

“I’m gonna do that when I grow up,” a young Flower Childs said to her father.

“No, sweetie. You’re a girl. Firemen are boys.”

Flower Childs did not die in the line of duty. She passed in a hospital bed in St. Agatha’s at the age of 97, surrounded by her family and her firehouse. And at the point of her dying, she recalled her father’s face when she answered him,

“If I had a dick, I’d tell you to choke on it. I’m gonna be a fucking fireman.”

She was a good fucking fireman, too. Flower Childs was brave and strong, and she volunteered for the dirty jobs and did not complain no matter what. The other firemen gave her shit, and she did not complain no matter what. One grabbed her ass, and she broke his jaw but still did not complain. Flower would ratchet open doors to search bedrooms, and she would descend into gas-filled basements with her air-mask on to cold-weld broken gas pipes shut. She was passed over for Chief twice, both times to idiots who got themselves and others killed, and when she got the job she retrained the force viciously. Flower Childs sent her firemen out of state to train with the best in the world, and accepted nothing but compete effort in her men and in herself, and though she now sat in the shotgun seat of the firetruck alongside a dog named Ash-Nine, she still was the first through the door and the last out of the building. Flower Childs had carried 21 men, women, and children out of fires; they all blended into one. Thirteen men, eight women, and five children had died while she had been with the LAFD; she could recite all their names.

But Flower Childs did not have a mustache, and so the neighborhood respected her, and feared her, and called her a bitch.

The trucks were out on the driveway of the firehouse on Alfalfa Street right off the Main Drag. The company had two probationary officers called probies, and they were washing the trucks and making them as red as humanly possible. Firetrucks need to be washed constantly. There were three: a ladder truck with its runged proboscis atop, and the pumper bristling with attachments and brass doodads, and the Chief’s car. It was a Ford Mustang SPP painted red with white stripes. The Town Father that Flower Childs had punched bought it for her after he saw the polls. It was a two-door with a 460 cubic inch engine that could do 140 mph, and it had a cherry-colored lightbar on the roof and a siren that screamed loud enough to wake Foole’s Yard. The company used it to run errands and pick up groceries. Flower rode in the truck.

Children dragged their parents by the hand towards them, drawn to the massive machines that sat quiet but could be so loud, and parents followed them, drawn to their own abandoned dreams, and also young and hunky probie firemen wearing wet tee-shirts. Flower Childs kept one eye on them, and read the Cenotaph with the other; she kept her nose in the air sniffing for fire, but could not smell anything wrong. Something would go wrong soon. Something would go horribly wrong soon. But for now it was Tuesday afternoon, and nothing was going down at all in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Manfred Pierce was in the Navy. Served on the USS Dextrous during the Korean War, which was an Auk-class minesweeper that was recommissioned from World War II. Ship took some shelling from the Communist artillery, and Manfred received several medals. He had them framed, and hung them over the bar when he opened the Wayside Inn. New customers would invariably say something about the medals, and Manfred would invariably respond,

“I loved the Navy. Most sex I’ve ever had.”

And then he’d buy them their first drink, and maybe the second if they were cute.

The first Wayside Inn burned down in 1871 with 38 souls inside. Miss Valentine, who owned the place and all the people who worked there, was buried beneath a tombstone imported from Back East; chiselled seraphim and cherubim and an epithet in italics declaring her The Linchpin of Civilization. The courthouse was named after her, too. A dozen whores died in the fire. They were chucked into the mass grave in the southwestern corner of the Verdance, and seven of them were so unimportant that no one wrote down their last names. Piano player named Ace Cooley burned, also, and so did eight miners and four goons and an advance man from a consortium. Four gamblers, and a poker dealer, and two men who owned a hardware concern, and five men who were not identified but were prayed over by the Reverend Busybody Tyndale, and noted in his diary that is the only first-hand source of the Wayside Fire and currently resides in the Special Collection of Spants Library.

The new Wayside Inn was on Sylvester Street, and it did not have a sign at first. It didn’t have running water at first, either, just a cheap plywood bar with soapy buckets behind it and a dance floor you shouldn’t dance on, and mismatched stools and chairs and tables. A jukebox that took dimes when all the other jukeboxes in the neighborhood took nickels. Sometimes, customers wouldn’t work up the nerve to come in, just walk around the block a few times and go home, jerk off, cry.

Little Aleppo is a neighborhood in America, and America is full of mean motherfuckers, and so it was illegal to be a faggot in 1968 and it was illegal to be a dyke, too.

Strangely enough, these laws did not put an end to homosexuality.

Orphic Mystery was going to name herself Eleusinian Mystery, but it was too hard to spell. Her driver’s license said she was a 6’4″, 130 pound man named Thomas Andrew Mold, but a license is a government-issued document and Orphic didn’t trust the government. Shit, they had tried to draft her, send her to Vietnam! How could you trust anyone like that? (The draft board sent Tom Mold the letter, but Orphic Mystery showed up at the recruiting office and was quickly sent home; Tom Mold received no more letters from the draft board.) She wanted to protest the war, and tried to march with the hippies. They called her the same names that the hard-hats beating up the hippies called her. Hippies were for free love, but only for a specific definition of “free.”

The first time she went to the Wayside, she changed in the bathroom of the Victory Diner. Jeans and tee-shirt go in the bag, orange-and-yellow mod dress came out. She painted her nails sitting on the toilet, and then the white high-heels she had rented a P.O box to order. There was no place to buy size-13 women’s shoes in Little Aleppo at the time, and she still lived with her parents so the package couldn’t come to the house. Orphic kept the shoes with her at all times: in her bag or in her locker at Paul Bunyan High. The clothes she hid at home in the drop ceiling in her closet, but those could be explained.

“Girlfriend left them here, Dad. I hid them so you wouldn’t know we were sleeping together.”

Orphic’s father would have loved to hear that lie, would have leapt to believe it.

But size 13 high heels?

Orphic Mystery’s dress had fringes on it like a go-go dancer, and a blonde wig with a flip ‘do. Her makeup was a mess, and she tottered out of the bathroom of the Victory Diner so nervous she couldn’t swallow, and did not make eye contact with anyone. Out the door and south on the Main Drag for two blocks. More tottering. She had practiced in her house when her parents were out, and was vaguely proficient at carpets and hardwood floors, but she had never walked on the crumbly and uneven sidewalk before in heels. She was tall and skinny and wobbly: she looked like a newborn giraffe that had been drinking tequila all morning. Orphic had never drank tequila before; she was sixteen.

East on Sylvester and a half-a-block down. Long half-a-block. Couples on stoops that stared, and a shout from across the street. Orphic wanted to step out of her heels and run, but she didn’t, and finally there was the Wayside Inn on the south side of the street across from the Wash ‘N Slosh.

It was dark out, but it was darker in the Wayside–the jukebox was the only light–and Orphic Mystery went to the bar where Manfred Pierce was working and said,

“Hello.”

And Manfred smiled and said,

“Hello, beautiful.”

When he asked her what she wanted, she didn’t know and so he made her a whiskey sour, because whiskey sours do not taste like alcohol and so people too young to be drinking alcohol like them.

The bar was not busy, so he had time to talk to Orphic for most of the night. It was the first conversation she could remember having where she did not tell one lie or leave anything out. Manfred introduced her around. Kisses and hugs. A woman in a suit named Phillipa Humber shared a joint with her, and she made out with a guy who called himself the Living Hamper. James Brown and Tommy Amici were on the jukebox, and Orphic Mystery was on the dance floor dancing with no one in particular and the entire world; she never wanted to go home, and she didn’t get a chance that night because the LAPD (No, Not That One) stormed in and arrested everyone they saw. The cops tore her wig off, and one swung his foot into hers and broke the heel on her shoe, and one called her freak and two called her faggot, and she was chucked in the back of the wagon with the rest of the Wayside’s customers with whom she had been having such a lovely time only moments before. It was not as much of a party in the paddy wagon. Perhaps it was the lighting.

Her parents picked her up at the jail, and threw her out of the house.

Orphic Mystery went back to the Wayside Inn because she had nowhere else to go, and Manfred Pierce took her in. He had a house on Fantic Street that was never without a runaway or two; Manfred collected stray animals and people. When Orphic moved in, there were two cats, two dogs, and two teenagers. There was also a turtle named Myrtle. She slept on the couch for a while, and thought about cruelty. You’re supposed to learn about cruelty a little at a time, but some people get the crash course.

The Cenotaph had printed the names of all those busted in the Wayside. They always did, because it was news and journalists are nothing if not objective.

To her credit, Orphic tried to go back to school. She made it to third period.

Her neighborhood had told her she was illegal, the cops arrested her, the media fucked her, her school slapped and cursed at her, and her parents disowned her.

Everyone in the Wayside was a peach, though. Finster Tabb was a retired high school teacher, and he helped her get her GED; Steppy Alouette came from money, and she gave her some; Manfred Pierce owned the place, kinda, and he gave her a job.

Sixteen year olds shouldn’t be working at bars, sure, and if it were a legal establishment, she wouldn’t have. But the Wayside Inn did not belong to Manfred Pierce, not really. It was actually owned by several large gentlemen who had never set foot in the place. There was no liquor license–a liquor license would be pulled if the proprietor was allowing wanton homosexuality in the establishment–and all the power came from an extension cord extruding from the barbershop next door. A teenager working there was the least of the Wayside’s problems.

So Orphic Mystery worked at the Wayside for a couple years. She got her own place, and learned how to do her makeup, and ordered shoes directly to her home. It was a big world, though, and she wanted to see it. New York, especially. She had never been to New York

It was 1968, and Barbarella was playing at The Tahitian. Orphic loved it, and Finster Tabb thought it was vulgar. They were on their way to the Wayside for a drink. He was wearing grey slacks and a blue vee-neck sweater; she was wearing a red-and-white baby doll dress, and she walked expertly in her blue high heels. Orphic towered over Finster, and they debated the film.

“Hey, faggot!”

That was from a stoop, from the fattest of three men sitting on the stoop. Orphic didn’t turn around. She had turned around before, and wound up with black eyes and broken fingers. Just keep walking and–besides–we are on the Main Drag and there are many people around and nothing bad could happen in a crowd as long as you stay under the streetlights but this was not true because the fattest one of the three men rushed up behind Orphic Mystery and cracked her skull open with a length of rebar; the other two were laughing and pushed Finster into a mailbox very hard so he broke three ribs.

Orphic Mystery lay on the sidewalk of the Main Drag making a small noise like muuuuh muuuuh, and then her pupils dilated and she didn’t make any more noises. She was 18 years old, and one of her blue high heels had come off and she had pissed and shit herself.

The three men ran off.

Everyone saw them.

Everyone knew their names.

No charges were filed.

The Wayside Inn was full to bursting that night, and the dance floor was crying and there was grief-fucking going on in the bathrooms; Finster Tabb was taped up and being fed drinks in the corner. The jukebox was the only light, and charged a dime while the other jukeboxes in the neighborhood charged a nickel. Sam Cooke was singing. He was telling the operator to put his baby on the phone, and the band was following him, and the door to Sylvester Street was closed shut real tight and no one could come in, this was a sacred place and FUCK YOU how fucking dare you treat us like this just keep the door closed and the jukebox blaring Sam Cooke and things are fine things are fine and boats are not to be rocked and you will be a coward until you’re buried in your grave and you’ll take the fucking you coward and standing up is for giraffes standing up is for giraffes, and we’re just faggots and dykes with a dead child in our arms and we will sit here and take what we are given.

And then the cops raided the place.

This was a tactical error.

All those faggots, all those dykes, all those American men and women did not discuss nor did they plan and nor did they assess the fucking situation: they threw tables and picked up chairs and smacked cops on their heads just like Orphic was hit, but they showed mercy unlike her murderers, and when reinforcements came, they charged out and tackled anyone in a uniform.

The Wayside Riots lasted two nights. On the first, all the homosexuals of the neighborhood came out to fight; on the second, the entire neighborhood came out. The locals were not in favor of gay rights–Little Aleppo was no more progressive than anywhere else in America. in 1968–but they instinctively took the opposing position to the cops. The LAPD (No, Not That One) retreated after a deal was struck: Manfred Pierce would be arrested for something or other, and the charges dropped. His regulars met him at the jailhouse.

The Cenotaph ran a picture of Orphic Mystery dead on the sidewalk of the Main Drag; she looked very young. The photo won several awards. Manfred Pierce sued the Town Fathers, and eventually became one. The Wayside Inn is still there, and there’s a plaque commemorating the riots. Locals stream in and out, and 16-year-olds are no longer allowed in because it is a legitimate establishment that sponsors a Little League team and follows the rules. Over the bar, there is a silhouette box with medals from a forgotten war and a photograph of a tall woman with her friends, and the old man behind the bar will welcome you in, no matter who you are and what you’ve done, and buy you your first drink–and second if you’re cute–in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

The bell on the door to the bookstore with no title went TINK but there was no dink; it was too hot for dink. TINK was all it could muster. The Main Drag was sweating, and half the shops had their doors propped open in vain attempts to steal a breeze. On the Upside, kids swam in their backyard pools; on the Downside, the Poolmobile had arrived.

Earlier that year, the problem of income inequality and the increasing disparity between the classes had been brought up a meeting of the Town Fathers. The issue was discussed at length by several blue ribbon committees and one committee that was just as good as the others, but they had run out of blue ribbons. There was intense debate, and there was passion tempered by realism and compromise, and there was much political wrangling.

Then one morning, Town Father Potts said,

“Why don’t we fill up a garbage truck with water and let the urchins swim in it?”

The other Town Fathers agreed, or at least wanted to stop pretending to care about the poor. The Poolmobile measure was approved by a vote of 5-0, and the Town Fathers went back to the real work of politicians: cadging free meals and vacations from supplicants.

So the Poolmobile went to the Downside in the summer. The cynical residents rolled their eyes at the token gesture; the resigned were just grateful that the truck had been cleaned before being turned into a transitory swimmin’ hole. The kids didn’t give a fuck–it was hot, man–and the driver very rarely opened up the truck’s gate, sending tons of water and children sliding and slamming down the road. Too hot to care much about anything but the heat during the Bake.

Little Aleppo had a temperate climate, and it rarely got above 80 or below 50, except for once a summer for three or four days when the mercury shot out of the top of the thermometer and ranged around town looking for student nurses to murder. Locals called it the Bake; it felt like an oven was slapping you in the face with its cock, and not in a pleasant way. The heat had a sludgy and thick taste to it, and it was an interrupting heat: you’d get halfway through a thought and the sub-thought “Jesus fucking Christ, it’s fucking hot” would slap the first thought out of your head.

The worst part of the Bake was its random appearance: “during the 13 weeks of summer” was as specific as could be predicted. If it were scheduled, then everyone would get out of town, but instead the Bake snuck up on Little Aleppo in the middle of the night; you’d wake up one morning and it would be a million degrees out.

The bookstore with no title had an air conditioner sticking out the bay window, a little model from the department store, but since the bookstore with no title is essentially infinite, it did not cool the whole shop. The only effect the machine had was on the area directly under it, which is why Mr. Venable had moved his desk from its customary spot to directly under the air conditioner. He was wearing his customary suit, and said,

“You’re late.”

“Are we even open today?”

“Why would we not be?”

“Fourth of July,” said Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy.

“That would explain why you’re violating the flag code.”

Gussy’s dress was redder, whiter, and bluer than Betsy Ross’ asshole. There were stars and stripes and cleavage. Sweaty cleavage, and so she walked over to Mr. Venable’s desk and sat on it.

“You’re kidding me,” he said.

“Shut up. It’s so fucking hot.”

Gussy picked up a large piece of paper from the desk and began fanning herself. It wasn’t paper, though, and she rubbed it between her fingers.

“Is this parchment?”

“Yes. Those are the Articles of Confederation. Take care not to rest them on your sweat-sodden bosom, please.”

She read the parchment.

“Why do you have the Articles of Confederation?”

“To remind myself of the futility of half-measures.”

“Answer the question like a human,” Gussy said.

“For the same reason we stole the Town Charter. To protect it from people with good intentions.”

Gussy had been working in the bookstore with no title for almost a year. It was better than waiting tables–anything was better than waiting tables–even if the pay was worse. She’d rather be broke and happy than slightly-less-broke and miserable. Gussy liked sitting down, which was frowned upon while waiting tables, and she liked being able to tell people to go fuck themselves, which had been frowned upon at all the waitressing jobs she had been fired from. Mr. Venable believed that there was a point at which it was perfectly acceptable–if not required–to tell customers to go fuck themselves, and he encouraged this philosophy in his employees.

And she liked Mr. Venable. For some reason. Though he was a creature of habit and sloth, and though he was persnickety and passive-aggressive, and though there were clearly things he was not telling her, she liked him. Sometimes, people adopt each other.

She placed the irreplaceable document back on his crowded desk and said,

“Where’s the cat?”

Mr. Venable sipped his cold coffee and said,

“One of the sub-basements. Not a fan of the Bake.”

In the bookstore with no title lived a cat with no name, and Mr. Venable was right: she hated the Bake. Cats love lying in sunbeams, but the Bake was like lying on the sun itself, and so the tortoiseshell retreated every summer to the cool spaces under the bookstore. Mice, too: they could not stand the heat outside, and so they shouldered their way inside. The cat personally greeted every one she could.

“Who is?”

“Iguanas. Satan. If you didn’t know if we were open, then why are you here?”

“I was gonna take you to the parade.”

“You don’t need to take me anywhere. It’s right outside.”

“Right. We’re gonna go together.”

“I’m not going out there. I might alight. Far too hot. I will stay right here under my glorious air conditioner and watch through the window.”

The first Fourth of July parade in Little Aleppo was held in 1875. A guy named Horace walked up the Main Drag with a 37-starred American flag, singing America, the Beautiful. Someone shot Horace in the face, and another parade was not held until World War One broke out. No one shot anyone this time, and so an annual tradition was born.

“You’re coming out. It’s the Fourth of July parade.”

“I’m not,” Mr. Venable said.

“You are.”

“You’re fired.”

“You can’t fire me. It’s too hot.”

“Can’t argue with that.”

Gussy walked off into the bowels of the bookstore with no title; the further in she went, the cooler it was.

The marching band hated Tony Schmaus and he hated them right back, and double. He had been at Paul Bunyan High (Go Blue Oxen!) for as long as anyone could remember: he taught music theory and music appreciation, and conducted the chamber orchestra and led the jazz band. He had a good ear, and so the teenagers sometimes offended him with both their pitch and their taste, but mostly they were all right. Mostly.

One day, though? One day, Mr. Schmaus was going to murder every single member of the marching band. The lazy trombones, who couldn’t keep the horns of their instruments upright and so looked like a bunch of Miles Davises wandering around a football field. The rhythmless flutes, who couldn’t count to fucking four, and so would smack into the clarinet section during a crossover. Left right, left right: what was so fucking difficult? Mr. Schmaus did not know, but the french horns could not figure it out, either. Forget about the drumline. He wanted to shoot most of the band, but the drumline? The drumline, he wanted to beat to death with his hands.

“ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR,” he shouted, and then the snare drummers played RATATAT, and the bass drummers went BOOM, and the snare drummers repeated RATATAT and the bass drummers once again went BOOM, and the band set off down the Main Drag. Black shoes, emerald polyester trousers with no stripe down the side, gold shirt, short emerald jacket. The shako hat was emerald, as well, with a small black vinyl brim and a white plume.

Six members of the marching band collapsed from heat exhaustion along the way, and Mr. Schmaus cackled every time.

The crowd lined the Main Drag two and three deep. Men had their shirts off, and were tanning their round bellies. Women took their shirts off, and then the men with round bellies stared and said, “Nice tits,” and the women put their shirts back on. Right after the marching band came the Mayor in a 1962 Cadillac Eldorado. Epilongues Mustafaro was recent to Little Aleppo; to America, too. He spoke almost no English at all–no one was quite sure what his precise native tongue was–but he was a positive and smiley-type person that engendered warmth. His friends had entered him into the mayoral race, and then taken him around the neighborhood to make speeches. Epilongues didn’t quite understand what was happening, but he was good with social cues; he would give impassioned speeches in his native tongue that no one understood. (He mostly talked about sports and cooking.) People responded to his tone, and elected him Mayor. He was five months into his term and still kinda didn’t know what was happening. He waved nevertheless.

The Mattachine Society had a float, and so did the Jehovah’s Accomplices. Veterans from the neighborhood marched in ragged time wearing uniforms that no longer fit.

Hairdressers cheered, and so did ex-roadies. Preachers and teachers and junkies. Bartenders and drug dealers and mothers and firefighters. Shopkeepers and cops, and buskers and short-order cooks and heiresses.

It was too hot to think, so everyone was patriotic.

“I want to go back inside,” Mr. Venable said.

“Just cheer,” Gussy told him

She had bought them ice cream–strawberry for her, and cookies-and-cream for him–and they were both licking at their cones trying to race the sun.

“Yay.”

“You’re a terrible American,” she said.

“I’m a sweaty American.”

“Not preclusionary states. Americans are sweaty by nature”

“You don’t say?”

“True fact. It’s in the Constitution. Or at least the Articles of Confederation.”

Mr. Venable smiled and stuck his tongue out, rotated the ice cream cone around it, and cheered out loud. Gussy did, too, and the float for the Humane Society want by, a pickup truck full of dogs and cats and veterinarians, and they cheered some more. The Main Drag was sweaty and democratic and free and all the that other bullshit; it was the Fourth of July in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

ONE

I’m gonna get drunk and read this piece of shit and try not to shoot myself. Not owning a gun makes the task easier, but it’s Florida: I could borrow one from a neighbor.

TWO

The main narrative starts with “A Silly Story About the Movies;” the first two chapters are prologue, I suppose. There are other Little Aleppo stories, but they’re jokey throwaways. “The Ballad of Big-Dicked Sheila” isn’t included, and maybe it should be. The Route 77 stories, too.

Christ, I need an editor. What’s Gordon Lish doing nowadays?

THREE

So many mistakes. “A Main in Uniform” was supposed to be “A Man in Uniform,” but I pretended I did it on purpose. The number of Gussy’s brothers changes depending on the joke’s requirements. The beginning of this thing has too many jokes, and the ending doesn’t have enough. Themes bubble up and disappear, only to come back forced.

FOUR

If there were an Olympics for criminals, then Little Aleppo’s team would steal all the medals.

Fuck false modesty: that’s funny.

Will this all be self-pity and self-congratulations?

I’ll try to disguise it, but: yes. Yes, it will.

Least you’re honest.

You and I both know that’s not true.

FIVE

The Pulaski shouldn’t be background players, but they are. They deserve better. The bit where Tall As The Sun is compared to Fancy Delaware? Should’ve done more of that.

SIX

I know what everyone looks like. The Reverend Arcade Jones, and Penny Arrabbiata, and everyone else. Some of them are actors, and others are people I know, and a few folks’ faces just flashed in my mind along with their names. I know exactly what everyone looks like.

And I’m not telling you. Wouldn’t want to ruin it.

SEVEN

Dave Eggers can’t hold my dick.

EIGHT

The best thing about creating a semi-magical world is the amount of hand-waving you can do.

NINE

Waiting for inspiration is like waiting for a pizza you never ordered.

Just begin.

TEN

Everybody knows Tommy Amici is Frank Sinatra, right? I mean: that wasn’t a secret or anything.

Frankie Nickels isn’t Frankie Knuckles, though. I know there was a famous deejay from Detroit named Frankie Knuckles, but that’s not who Frankie Nickels is. She’s Allison Steele, the Nightbird. Steel = Nickels.

ELEVEN

It’s the 90’s, I guess. Little Aleppo exists sans smartphones and apps and the internet in general. Technology bores me and scares me, and I like bars and face-to-face arguments and bookstores, so Little Aleppo doesn’t have any computers.

TWELVE

Either the New Yorker is right and I’m a genius, or I’m a complete idiot. I suspect the latter: there were supposed to be concurrent stories running. Stanton Box’s novels, for one. Sad.

THIRTEEN

Is anyone a literary agent, or a Medici? I would prefer a Medici, if I’m honest.

FOURTEEN

Somewhere between 120 and 150 thousand words. 70 chapters times anywhere from 1,500-6,000 words a chapter. I could go through and count, but I won’t: it’s better this way. I like having achieved something nebulous.

“I did something!”

“Great! What?”

“I’m not precisely sure.”

“Awesome, chief.”

The math makes the book somewhere from five to six hundred pages, which is way too fucking long.

FIFTEEN

My second-grade teacher was Mrs. Solon; third-grade was Mrs. Doyle. Mrs. Stoll was my fourth-grade teacher, and she was my favorite. She was around six feet tall, and broad-shouldered. I learned all the states in Mrs. Stoll’s class, and their capitals, too. Harrisburg, and Jackson, and Sacramento. In third grade, we had learned how to make letters–cursive was still important back then–but in fourth grade, we learned what to do with the letters. Mrs. Stoll taught us how to write. Where to put the commas, and what got capitalized and what didn’t, and the mysteries of the semicolon.

Mrs. Stoll, I’m sorry for how I punctuate.

SIXTEEN

Most of the names mean something, or made me laugh, but Fancy Delaware came to me in a dream. I woke up and walked out to my living room and wrote “Fancy Delaware was covered in blood” on a scrap of paper.

I don’t know what that says about my mental health.

SEVENTEEN

Christ, I make up a lot of words.

EIGHTEEN

Dickens was right. Stories are told over time, a little bit and then a little bit more. Stories are made to be ducked in and out of, like awnings in the rain.

Good for Dickens: how do you monetize the occasional?

And how do you live with yourself after not killing yourself for using the word ‘monetize?”

NINETEEN

“So, what’s it about?”

“America. And drugs and Jesus and dicks. Titties, too.”

TWENTY

When they ask you what it means, smile and say whatever comes to mind.

TWENTY-ONE

Some men get drunk and contemplate their mortality, and other men get drunk and hit their children; I like to get drunk and watch Queen videos on YouTube.

I’m a catch.

TWENTY-TWO

From here, it’s either suicide or show biz.

1. The Bookstore With No Title
2. A People’s History Of Little Aleppo
3. A Silly Story About The Movies
4. A Main In Uniform
5. The Gospel Of Saint Francis Of Hoboken
6. The Popular Steadies
7. Let’s All Go to the Lobby And Get Ourselves A Treat
8. Do You Like Scary Movies?
9. Box Office Blues
10. A Walk Through Little Aleppo
11. There Are Flowers In The Church Garden
12. Unfulfilled Moon
13. Homeward, Bound
14. Wond’ring How Celebrities Ever Mend
15. A Dance Against Time
16. Catechism
17. A Preacher’s History Of Little Aleppo
18. It Is Christmas On Rose Street; It Is Christmas On The Main Drag
19. Foreign Entanglement, And The Proper Avoidance Thereof
20. A New Year In Little Aleppo
21. Nighttime, And Its Assumed Properties
22. The Activist Archivist
23. One Morning In Little Aleppo, Iterated
24. A Temporary Occupation Of The Main Drag
25. High Atop The Segovian Hills
26. Give And Take In Little Aleppo
27. When Little Aleppo Takes You By The Hand
28. Nighttime Negotiations
29. Lost And Found In Little Aleppo
30. First The Sun, And Then The Stars
31. Hunting In Little Aleppo
32. The Freedom Of Information In Little Aleppo
33. Preparations And Perspectives
34. Held To A Promise In Little Aleppo
35. Little Aleppo, Crowd-Sourced
36. A Decision And A Vision
37. A Musical Interlude
38. The Rain And The Desert
39. Plotting And Planning In Little Aleppo
40. Form And Function In Little Aleppo
41. Getting Schooled In Little Aleppo
42. Little Aleppo Has Friday On Its Mind
43. Keeping Your Eyes On The Prize
44. A Clean, Well-Lighted Place In Little Aleppo
45. Dinner And A Show
46. Affordable Care In Little Aleppo
47. Radical Transparency
48. Do You Know The Way To Little Aleppo?
49. Sidewalks Of Little Aleppo
50. All Roads Lead From  Little Aleppo
51. Slings And Arrows
52. Four Fried Chickens And An RC Cola
53. A Word From Our Sponsors
54. Road Tripping
55. Freedom Of The Press In Little Aleppo
56. The Map To The Stars
57. A Moment In The Verdance, Where Everything Grows
58. Know When To Walk Away, Know When To Run
59. Presently Panoptical
60. The Nature Of Travel
61. Stories Of Little Aleppo
62. Diagnosis And Complication
63. Next Round’s On Little Aleppo
64. Sometimes Wrong, But Never In Doubt
65. Father’s Day In Little Aleppo
66. Death Makes Debtors Of Us All
67. An Elephant And Her Dog
68. The End Of An Argument
69. A Night At The Absalom
70. A Counterfeit Penny On A Tombstone

Little Aleppo had a Trial of the Century every decade or so. The neighborhood thought of Trials of the Century like it thought of water or waste disposal: something it was entitled to. There was once a 17-year span between Trials of the Century, and there were riots. The LAPD (No, Not That One) responded by framing a the owner of an art gallery in a murder-for-hire scheme involving a young and buxom secretary, a cache of gold coins, and a small goat named Peppy. Something for everyone, the cops figured: swanky people getting their comeuppance, and sex, and money, and goats. Unfortunately, the cops were so terrible at the frame-job that even Little Aleppo’s DA at the time–a man named James Paisley who was so crooked he was known as Pay Me Jamie–could not ignore it, and so the cops were all arrested and tried. Ironically, this became the Trial of the Century.

The judge at the time was Earnest Makhtesh, and he opened the proceedings by addressing the cops.

“Never read any Greek tragedies, huh?”

The jury found the cops not guilty after the cops visited the jury members at their homes, and that was that until the owner of the art gallery they had tried to frame–a man named Scotch Drucks–shot two of the cops who had tried to frame him. Terrible idea to let your pride around pistols. Scotch made it to the jail, and then he made it to the courtroom–which was unprecedented for someone who had shot a cop in Little Aleppo–and his trial became the second Trial of the Century in a year. Locals were very entertained, and the Cenotaph printed an evening edition with updates. In Scotch’s mugshot, it looks like he is shrugging and there were tee-shirts available for purchase outside the courthouse with his picture and DRUCKS SAYS “SHUCKS” in a bold font.

This was a proud history, too, not just some recent fad. Not too much history–this is America, and it hasn’t been around long enough for serious history–but a decent amount. The Pulaski, who lived in the area before it was Little Aleppo, had neither trials nor the concept of centuries. (They had years, obviously, but didn’t feel the need to partition them into ten-and-hundred-year chunks.) The Whites who killed the Pulaski and named the area Little Aleppo had both trials and centuries, but the former was different back then. First off, there weren’t that many trials; mostly, folks just got shot. Second, the ones that did occur lasted ten minutes and took place in the Wayside Inn with the Honorable Miss Valentine presiding, and all she wanted to do was declare the fucker guilty so she could let the dumdums back in to buy drinks and pussy. The best defense in a case heard in Little Aleppo was a fast horse.

The neighborhood grew more civilized. They do that. By the 20th century, locals had stopped murdering lawyers out of principle and there was a courthouse where they all argued with each other during billable hours and chatted with each other during non-billable hours. The Pamantha Valentine Courthouse was across the Main Drag from Town Hall. (Miss Valentine’s father wanted to name her Pamela, and her mother preferred Samantha; they compromised.) There were steep steps made of alabaster with smoky veins running through them, and Doric columns, and a triangular arch over the whole thing that cast the entrance into permanent gloom: the building was the most imposing Western Civilization got.

In 1912, residents crowded around the courthouse to hear the latest machinations in the Brixton Papp case. He owned the Davidian Theatre on the Downside. The shittier the location, the greater the chance that “theater” is spelled “theatre.” Brixton was an impresario, which meant he ripped off magicians and got blowjobs from acrobats, and the Davidian presented vaudeville. There were dancers and comics in blackface and jugglers, too. Tenors who sung arias. And comedy teams, with their comedy routines, like O’Brian and Scaramucci.

“I love the president, Has Noname.”

“The president has no name?”

“Right, President Has Noname.”

“How can the president have no name?”

“Has Noname.”

“Don’t you correct my grammar, you wop bastard.”

“Fuck you, you freckled Fenian fuck.”

And then they would punch one another. It was a great act.

Frannie Caro was a dancer in the chorus, a blonde one; they would come out between acts that needed time to set up, and then again at the end of the show. They would high-kick, and they would sashay. They would give a glimpse of a stocking; they could can and can. She was 19, and Brixton was 52, and she was so much smarter than he was right up until the second he shot her.

Frannie had him wrapped around her finger, and she did this by wrapping herself around a part of Brixton that was not his finger. She had blonde curls and long legs, and Brixton would do whatever she said. Right up until he shot her. Brixton was 52, and Frannie was 19, and his cock was floppy and sporadically useless, and he lost his breath easily, and Frannie was 19 and wanted to be fucked properly. Stu Pendis was a sword swallower who worked the Davidian Theatre. They kept their relationship a secret, right up until he shot her.

Had he waited until she was offstage, there would have been fewer witnesses.

The prosecution had mountains of evidence. Brixton Papp had money. It was an even match. This was the first big case for the newly-formed law firm of Holly, Wood, and Vine; Lawrence Holly bribed the courtroom sketch artists to give him more hair. There was maneuvering, and objecting, and reversals of fortune. Crowds gathered outside the Valentine Courthouse in their hats and dresses; a clerk leaned halfway out of a second-floor window and shouted down updates. There was cheering, booing, pickpocketing.

The jury retired, and they took two days to deliberate. On the third morning, the crowds and the lawyers and the judges waited for Brixton Papp. No one saw him, so they waited some more, and they still did not see him. Had they been on a steamer bound for Taipan, they would have seen him, but not standing on the grass alongside the walk to the Valentine Courthouse. Papp was found guilty in absentia, which is Latin for doesn’t count.

The air went out of the neighborhood. A story needs an ending. Can’t have your main characters wiggling off into the who-cares-where. In absentia? What the fuck was that? Being convicted in absentia is like getting an honorary degree, but the opposite: getting an honorary degree doesn’t matter, but it’s lovely; in absentia doesn’t matter and it sucked. No satisfaction in it, and the neighborhood learned their lesson. From then on, defendants in Trials of the Century were not granted bail no matter how rich they were.

(There was a statute in the Town Charter that allowed a judge to declare a case the Trial of the Century. It was like the franchise tag in the NFL.)

The Harper Five were not granted bail.

The Honorable R.J. Fulsome was presiding. He was trim–a marathon runner–and had a thin, crooked nose. Rectangular skull. Dark hair that was thinning but not going gray, and he did not need glasses even for when he read. He looked as though he’d been born in his robe. Judge Fulsome was considered, and thorough; he had complex thoughts that he distilled into nuanced opinions backed up by concrete facts and bedrock precedents. His findings were argued in the Morning Tavern, and the Cenotaph alternately praised him and cursed him. R.J. Fulsome was a reasonable and careful man.

He immediately lost control of the trial.

“May I speak to Ms. Atherton, please?”

…

“Wonderful. Hello. I am Mr. Venable. I hope you’re well. Delightful. Anyhooooo, I move on to my topic of interest. Are you conversant with the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species compact?”

…

“Delightful. You are competent. You work for the EPA and the neighborhood within C—–A City  known as Little Aleppo is within your purview?”

…

“Exceptional. Ms. Atherton, have you ever heard of the Peregrina maria tree?

…

“Yes. I believed it fictional as well. But there is a stand of them atop a mountain not a mile or so from where I sit.”

…

“I understand that you wish to dismiss me as a lunatic. Were I you, I would dismiss me as a lunatic as well. No one can fault you for your skepticism.”

…

“No, I have nothing to report about ‘squatch. Never seen one.”

…

“Nor have I been abducted by aliens.”

…

“Just let me ask you one question, Ms. Atherton. Are you a reader?”

…

“The question is directly stated. Are you a reader? Do you compulsively devour any sentence that comes within your reach, and then ask for more? If I were to ask you ‘How many books does one need to own?’ would you answer ‘Just one more?’ Are you a reader, Ms. Atherton?”

…

“I am, too.”

…

“I haven’t. Spell the author’s name.”

…

“I shall.”

…

“Ms. Atherton, I understand you must think me a nutter. I would. The Peregrina maria is akin to the Loch Ness Monster. I realize this, and your skepticism is valid and correct. It’s not an endangered tree, it’s one that never existed in the first place. This is the common-sense opinion. It is the odds play. I do not ask you believe me. I just ask that you visit the site.”

…

“I am aware that you are busy. Thank you for the work you do. I am not particularly busy. Owning a bookstore is not as labor-intensive as it would seem. Would you like free books?”

…

“I meant just what I said. For you, every book in my shop is free. Forever. Just take a look at the trees I mentioned. I ask not for an outcome, but for a viewing. Just look at them.”

…

“As many books as you want. Forever.”

…

“And two hundred dollars, fine.”

Stewart Brand. Anacostia Hymen. Joseph “Joey the Spaz the Third” Seraph III, Molly McGlory, Melisandre Boone, AKA Violet Violence AKA Amber Lance. The Harper Five.

They were folk heroes. Folk heroes are always criminals. There were tee-shirts and pins, and local folk musicians wrote songs about them; they got the righteousness right, but got the facts wrong. The Harper Five was standing up for the neighborhood. Sure, an eyeball or two was loosed from its socket, but something something omelettes something something breaking eggs. There was right and there was righteous. Right?

Sexy chicks and hunky dudes played guitar and sang under the Harper Five’s jail cell windows. Men and women exposed themselves so the Five could masturbate. They didn’t do anything, and if they did, they didn’t mean it.

They were villains. Villains are usually criminals. Tommy Amici’s songs blared from Caligliostro’s, and from the open windows of Lincoln Continentals driving past the courthouse slowly. There were laws, and there was property, and each needed to be respected. Nothing–nothing at all–could justify plucking out a local legend’s eyeballs. There was right and there was wrong.

Large gentlemen and ancient, tiny women in black dresses waded into the hippies and college students with bats, socks full of quarters, and weaponized purses. They fired flares into the windows of the Five’s cells. They did it, and they were gonna get it.

Teevees across the neighborhood flickered and shizzed, and then a semi-crooked title card reading SPECIAL REPORT came on the screen. The Victory Diner got quiet and even Louis Bucca behind the grill paid attention. The Morning Tavern did not usually have a teevee, but several had been stolen specifically for the occasion and perched on stacked chairs so they were high enough for all to see.

“Good morning, Little Aleppo! I’m Cakey Frankel from KSOS reporting live from the Valentine Courthouse where the Trial of the Century is about to begin. On trial for the kidnapping and blinding of music legend Tommy Amici are five local college students known as the Harper Five. We’ll be bringing you updates and analysis around the clock, or at least until the battery on the camera dies.”

“Ma’am.”

“The courtroom is full with family and spectators. All the pews are filled. I don’t think they’re called pews in a court, but they’re pews. I know a pew when I see one.”

“Ma’am!”

“The bailiff is a hunk.”

“Cakey!”

Cakey turned around to see Judge Fulsome standing behind the bench with his gavel in his hand.

“Oh, hello, Your Honor.”

“You can’t broadcast from inside the courtroom.”

“Freedom of the press, Your Honor.”

Cakey looked around for support, but everyone was deliberately not making eye contact.

“Get out.”

“What if I whispered?”

“Get out or I’m arresting you.”

“Now this is good teevee,” Big-Dicked Sheila said.

“Can’t believe they preempted Mister Hamburger for this,” answered Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy.

They were sitting up in Gussy’s enormous bed, pillows wadded behind their naked backs, and they were drinking coffee and smoking a joint. Sheila ran her foot up and down Gussy’s shin under the yellow blanket; it was prickly, and Sheila liked the sensation on her sole. Gussy’s nipples were large and dark brown, and Sheila’s were tiny and pointed. She leaned her head against Gussy’s shoulder.

“He’s been on a Celebrationism kick lately.”

“I have no idea what that is,” Sheila said, and sipped her very sweet coffee.

“As far as I can piece it together, it’s about taking joy in horror. I think it’s an Albanian philosophy.”

“I seriously don’t understand what children see in that guy. Or adults. Anyone.”

“I forget you didn’t grow up here sometimes,” Gussy said, and kissed Sheila half on her cheek and half on her eye. “You kinda gotta be indoctrinated into Mister Hamburger.”

“Apparently.”

“The Reverend doesn’t get him, either.”

“Let’s go see him today. We’ll take him out for a walk and air him out.”

“This is a good idea,” Gussy said and she inhaled from the joint, sucked the smoke way down into her lungs, and she leaned forward slightly and Sheila met her with her lips; they joined just barely touching and PHWOO Gussy blew the smoke into Sheila’s mouth and Sheila thanked her by pressing her lips against hers and sticking her tongue halfway down her throat. That was how Gussy liked to be kissed, and Sheila was good at knowing how people liked to be kissed.

The teevee was atop a white dresser on the other side of the bedroom. Behind it was a movie poster, framed. BOGART BERGMAN HENREID up top in big letters, and a torn and stylized newspaper page under the names with the name of a city and a man holding a gun. Gussy’s grandfather, Irving Incandescente-Ponui was a collector; he kept every poster ever displayed out in the lightboxes that ran the length of The Tahitian’s facade. He stored the flat, too, and out of the light in the basement of the theater. Gussy had not told anyone about this, but had made inquiries with several auction houses.

But she brought Casablanca home and hung it where it was the first thing she saw in the morning and the last thing she saw at night. Gussy wanted children, she’d have them one day, and she figured that poster from 1942 was their birthright. And the theater, obviously. The rest of the posters and standees and ads and memorabilia would pay for their college. But you can’t sell Casablanca. Some things are so valuable they’re worthless.

“Your Honor, members of the jury who are so good-looking and strong, esteemed onlookers, I thank you for allowing me to make my opening statement. I would also like to thank the Lord, if I may, for providing us with health and America. And I will also thank America for being so American. And the Lord. Also, I would like to state that the prosecution’s case is made up of lies, and that the District Attorney is a heathen and a pervert. Thank you, Your Honor. God bless America.”

The Harper Five were being tried together, despite all of the defendants’ lawyers’ arguments. A brief provided to the court from Stewart Brand’s attorney read, simply, “This isn’t how this works.” Judge Fulsome rejected all of their objections under the doctrine of Trial of the Century, and in his opinion stated, “It’s simply more entertaining this way.” Melisandre Boone’s family, having the most money, demanded to be in charge and hired the law firm of Holly, Wood, and Vine. The rumor on the Main Drag was that the retainer was a million. Whatever they paid, Strohman Bach was worth.

Strohman Bach was a get-out-of-jail-free card, except not free in the slightest. He had represented large gentleman, including The Friend for many years; women caught by the cops with the blood of their newly-dead husbands all over them; an arsonist who showed up to court with a hard-on and smelling of gasoline: not guilty, every one. Or a mistrial, or a hung jury, whatever; just not that slamming wooden hammer and then the slamming metal doors. If you went to court with Strohman Bach, then you were going home that night to sleep in your own bed.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my clients are innocent. Ms. Boone is more innocent than the other four, but they are all innocent. There is no–NO–forensic evidence linking any of my clients–ANY–to the crime scene.”

“I object, Your Honor!”

Vanessa Plushrot was the District Attorney of Little Aleppo, and this was the case that was going to let her stop being the DA of this bullshit fuckpalace of a neighborhood and run for Congress. She stood up at her table as she said,

“There are boxes and boxes of forensic evidence linking each and every defendant to the crime scene.”

Both the lawyers were standing, and wearing pinstriped navy blue. Bach’s suit was more expensive than Plushrot’s by several factors.

“Your Honor, there’s no objecting during opening statements,” Bach said.

“Trial of the Century rules, Your Honor,” Plushrot countered.

Judge Fulsome pointed his gavel at her and said,

“She’s right.”

“This is scandalous and prejudicial, sir. I call for a mistrial.”

TACK TACK TACK went the judge’s gavel, and he said,

“Nope.”

“I call for an immediate guilty verdict,” Plushrot said.

TACK TACK TACK

“Nope.”

Judge R.J. Fulsome did not need glasses for when he read, but he must have needed them for see farther away than that because the cameraman from KSOS was leaning halfway inside the courtroom doors. Cakey Frankel had her microphone shoved in, too.

“This is much better than the sketch artists,” Gussy said.

“I liked the last one.”

“The one who was into cubism?”

“Yeah,” Sheila said, rubbing Gussy’s neck. “She captured the context of the situation.”

Gussy leaned into her hand, and then she pulled away and opened the drawer of he nightstand. Purple vibrator the size of a deodorant can. She came back to Sheila and took her cock in hand.

Gussy said,

“I’m gonna stick this up your ass and suck your dick.”

And Sheila said,

“Okay.”

“Guys? Guys? I need you to pay attention. I need you to watch this. It’s important. This is the legal system, guys. This is how America works. This is how the courts work. Mr. Ramp, what are three branches of government?”

“Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria.”

Branson Ramp looked around for support, but everyone was deliberately not making eye contact.

Paul Bunyan High did not really wake up until around lunch, and least not 95% of the building’s occupants. Teenagers need more sleep than infants, or sloths, or people in comas. You do most of your important growing when you’re a teenager, and your body only grows when you’re asleep. This not opinion, but scientific fact. Educators and parents throughout the centuries have responded to this scientific fact by making teenagers do trigonometry at 7:15 am. This is because, secretly and not-so-secretly, educators and parents hate teenagers and enjoy seeing them suffer.

And yawn. Mr. Bannigan’s first period Civics class was composed primarily of yawns, great flashing metal mouths and occasionally a rubber band would go shooting out of a student’s gob and hit a sleeping kid halfway across the room.

“No, Mr, Ramp. Guys? Guys?”

Every one of Mr. Bannigan’s students could do an impression of him. The teevee was strapped down to a double-decker cart that was prone to tipping over, and he stood next to it. The football team had a game that night; there were boys in green-and-yellow jerseys, and girls in cheerleader outfits with the same scheme. The school’s colors were technically emerald and gold, but you couldn’t fool a Little Aleppian: that was just fancy-talk for green and yellow.

“Executive, judicial, and legislative.”

“Thank you, Miss Schott.”

Julio Montez was sitting next to Romy Schott, and he reached his hand out and squeezed hers. She appreciated his touch, but didn’t think she needed congratulations for naming the three branches of government. Paul Bunyan High was a very progressive high school, and it recognized well over 70 forms of intelligence–linguistic, spatial, artistic, ambulatory–but Romy was weirdly old-fashioned about some things, and still believed in the concept of the dumbass. And frankly, she thought, if you couldn’t remember the very basis of the government you lived under, then you were a dumbass.

She still squeezed Julio’s hand back, though. His nose was big and crooked, and his eyes were brown, and he was wearing the sneakers she told him to wear; Romy loved him as hard as she could.

Harper Observatory is high atop Pulaski Peak, which is the tallest of the seven Segovian Hills. It is the exact shape of the White House, but bigger and with a telescope sticking out of it. The parking lot is to the north, and there is manicured grass stripped with walkways and pocked with benches to the east. Opposite the Observatory, there is a crescent-shaped stand of trees with knotty bark and waxy leaves the size of a child’s fist.

Pulaski Peak is steep, and there is only one route for vehicles. It is called Skyway Drive and it has been anomalous recently. Anomalous as shit, if you don’t mind the language.

Tommy Amici had left the hospital AMA. He had also kicked a number of nurses and thrown piss at a surgeon. Melisandre Boone, AKA Amber Lance, had ground his eyeballs into the warehouse’s concrete floor after removing them. The doctors at St. Agatha’s prevented infection, but that was all they could do. No more eyes for Tommy, not as green as the Verdance in the summer, and he was not taking it well. He ordered the Observatory destroyed the first day he returned home to Jeremiad Springs.

The lawyers had to go up the hill first. Order to Vacate. There were two of them, two chubby white men, in a cocoa-brown Mercedes 300d. Not a quarter of the way up Skyway Drive, the engine died. Damnedest thing. Tow truck came, removed the car. Flossy’s Garage overcharged the lawyers with a smile, and sent them back out. Same exact place. Same fucking place! Check the battery. Why are you looking in the trunk? The fucking battery, jackass! Tow truck came, removed the car.

This series of actions repeated itself nine times.

The two chubby lawyers were recalled to the law offices of Holly, Wood, and Vine (who were very busy lately) and an athletic paralegal was given the Order and told to put on her hiking boots. Wendy Wilkins walked all the way up and taped the Order to Vacate on the door of Harper Observatory; as she walked away, she did not see the Order ripped off the door by no one visible at all.

The bulldozers came next. They made it precisely as far up the mountain as the Mercedes had, and then were towed back down by Flossy. He was having a great week. The lawyers perched on the ‘dozers and yelled at the cars driving around them,

“You can’t go there anymore! It doesn’t exist, and it’s ours!”

And everyone gave the lawyers the finger, and some flicked their cigarettes. Flicking cigarettes at lawyers isn’t right, but it is understandable. Harper Observatory still rotated in sync with night sky, so smooth that you could not see anything was happening unless you looked away.

“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

“Yup.”

“Can you state your name for the record?”

“Yup.”

There was quiet in the courtroom.

“Will you do so, please?”

“Precarious Lee.”

“Thank you,” Vanessa Plushrot said. She had an ambitious haircut and a cream-colored blouse. “Mr. Lee–”

“Precarious is fine.”

“–Mr. Lee, can you describe the events that led up to Mr. Amici’s kidnapping?”

“Yes.”

There was quiet again.

“Will you do so?”

“Don’t need your tone. You told me to answer the question that was asked.”

Strohman Bach leapt to his feet, and the sound of his chair scraping against the floor echoed.

“Your Honor, there’s clearly collusion going on here.”

“Collusion? Speaking to witnesses is not collusion, the DA said.

“I move for a mistrial.”

TACK TACK TACK

“Denied.”

“I move for an immediate guilty verdict.”

TACK TACK TACK

Outside the Pamantha Valentine Courthouse, there were protestors and lookyloos. Tee-shirts promoting a number of different narratives could be purchased. There was cosplay. Several of the lunatics from Shrieker’s Corner had brought their soapboxes out of the Verdance for a chance to bother a much larger audience. Several food trucks, and Beer-Cooler Ethel. The LAPD (No, Not That One) had sent undercover men into the crowd.

“Hey, Stan. Undercover?”

“Shh!”

The pretzel guy, the one who sold giant pretzels with flecks of salt the size of a rich woman’s diamonds, he was there too and strapped to his pushcart was a blue-and-white striped umbrella and a transistor radio.

“You ain’t listening, are you? There isn’t one single person out there, is there?

“You have left your Frankie Nickels high, and you have left her dry. Fickle, all of you. Ha ha ha.

“Can’t blame you: I got one eye on the teevee. Cakey looks good. Hi, Cakey. Cakey’s a good egg.

“Maybe that’s the purest art that is, huh? Something even the creator didn’t care about. Maybe! Art born without human interference! Virgin birth, cats and kittens, and then that art shall surely be the Christ. You know what I’m talking about here on KHAY–Hey!–early in the morning.

“Best kinda art. Best kinda anything. No forethought, no test screenings. Just hang your ass out there. Can’t assume an audience, but you still gotta try.

“The most beautiful things are made while no one’s paying attention.”

Gussy’s mouth tasted like Sheila’s cum, and she didn’t want to drink her coffee yet, just roll the seawater taste around her tongue and then roll her tongue around in Sheila’s mouth. The ceiling fan had two chain-link switches dangling from it, and was rotating quickly and shimmying slightly. Gussy kissed her again, again, again, and then she got out of bed and walked out of the room. She came back with a record and set it on the turntable on her dresser, dropped the needle. There was a CRACKLE and a SHPIFF and then FFT because Sheila had lit two cigarettes and when Gussy crawled into bed, she handed her one.

“Very debonair.”

“Saw it in a movie once.”

It was American music, messy and full of its own ancestors, and it was made from wood and beards and boots, and verged on collapse. It lived right over the collapse, this music, and waggled around the beat like it was seasick. It failed with forward momentum. Old songs, seemed like, from Out West and Back East: railroad songs, minstrel songs, gospel songs, cowboy songs, and forgotten melodies from the tenements’ ethnic theaters. Music from the America that had burned down a long time ago. Singer long gone, the song remained.

It sounded damn good.

Weirdly good. Sheila had not noticed the speakers bracketing the record player before: they were plain wood, and clearly hand-made. She squinted her eyes. Were they even sanded? And the stickers. Ah.

“Precarious make those for you?”

“Technically, I guess. They were part of Wally.”

The bedroom was quiet, and the ceiling fan wobbled slightly.

“He’s not here,” Gussy said.

“You sure?”

The bedroom was quiet again, and Gussy took the joint PHWOO and said,

“No. Not totally.”

Attaching a wrecking ball to a helicopter is not specifically against the law, mostly because lawmakers have poor imaginations. Admittedly, it’s not easy; the trick is finding the right pilot, but there are drunkards and degenerate gamblers in every profession, and if you hang around the bar by the heliport long enough you can find the right man for the job.

The chopper flew in from the east, over the crescent-shaped stand of trees, and then the engine died. Damnedest thing. When a helicopter’s power cuts, the rotors do not stop and the pilot can glide the craft down to the ground. The wrecking ball landed first, and took a divot out of the grass like God at a driving range. The ‘copter settled down in front of Harper Observatory, and the pilot got out. Penny Arrabbiata hit him with a cattle prod. The chopper was stripped for parts within hours.

“State your name for the record, please.”

“Tiresias Richardson.”

“Miss Richardson, were you present on the afternoon of the –th when Mr. Amici was kidnapped?”

Strohman Bach leapt from his chair.

“Objection, Your Honor. Leading.”

“How is that leading?” the DA asked.

“‘Kidnapping’ is such an ugly word.”

Tiresias had one eye on the lawyers and the other on the camera thrust through the courtroom doors and broadcasting live. It occurred to her that this was the first time she’d been on KSOS as Tiresias and not Draculette, and then it occurred to her to turn to her good side. She was wearing gold earrings shaped like seashells, and the same wide-legged slacks she wore to the meeting at Tommy’s.

“Overruled,” Judge Fulsome said.

Vanessa Plushrot asked,

“Can you describe the day for the court, please?”

“Yes.”

There was quiet in the courtroom, and Vanessa Plushrot muttered to herself,

“I hate this fucking neighborhood.”

And then she said out loud,

“Please describe the day for the court.”

Tiresias had been waiting for her big break since the age of six, and she turned into a spotlight that only existed in her mind and said,

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, are you familiar with the Pioneer Chicken Stand?”

And Vanessa Plushrot muttered again,

“I really hate this fucking neighborhood.”

“Understandable, understandable. Little Aleppo is not so much an acquired taste as it is an inherent taste. Perhaps even congenital. It’s the geographical equivalent of cilantro. Or rolling one’s tongue.”

…

“Also true. But such a lovely view from up here.”

…

“Yes, of course. You’ll notice the leaves. 13-points, and waxy.”

…

“The bark, mottled and knotty. And the branches.”

…

“Double-helix, Ms Atherton, yes.”

…

You’ll note the description in A Guide to North American Arboreuticals.”

…

“Yes, I’ve heard the supposed effect of the leaves, as well.”

…

“Proof of the pudding is in the eating, isn’t it?”

The Reverend Busybody Tyndale and Peter, who was not a Pulaski, emerged from the wood and saw their home. A few dozen kotchas around a communal hearth and store-building. The lake was beyond that. Men and women did their work, and children played. The wind was blowing in from the south, they could smell Tall As The Sun’s potions and medicines. Busybody slid off the horse, and Peter dismounted; he led the paint to the lake, and it drank.

They had been to the desert, where they swam, and traveled through a forest full of every growing thing, where they killed a horse out of kindness, and now they were home, which was not where they were born. Home does not have to be where you’re from in America.

The Pulaski ate together every week, a stew for the entire tribe, cooking on pots all day over a low fire and everything thrown in it: venison and radishes and biscayne root and carrots and raccoon. Busybody and Peter washed in the lake, and then they sat down and ate.

No one asked them where they had been.

Gussy and Sheila hurried up the Main Drag–Sheila’s shop opened in an hour–but still stopped at the Broadside Newsstand to hug Omar and nuzzle Argus.

“Is this my Gussy?”

“Hello, Omar.”

“Your father was an asshole.”

“You keep telling me.”

And then they were on their way with the latest copies of several magazines devoted to sports. (Neither of them had any clue; Argus pointed his nose at the ones they wanted.) They passed Rose Street just as the Calling Judge in the belfry of the First Church of the Infinite Christ struck eleven, and then the other churches joined in: St Clement’s, and St. Martin’s, and St. Mary’s. The two turned west on Fantic Street, bumped into each other, laughed, kissed, and then they were at Deacon Blue’s house.

The Reverend Arcade Jones was on the couch watching the Trial of the Century and trying not to laugh. There was a puppy the color of rusty gold napping on his massive thigh.

“Please state your name for the record.”

“You know who the fuck I am.”

Judge Fulsom banged his gavel and said,

“Mr. Amici! You are in a court of law.”

To which Tommy replied,

“Suck my nuts! I got no eyes, you motherfucker!”

The Morning Tavern was split in its support, but everyone liked when a judge got told to suck nuts; a cheer went up among the drinkers and poets and the desolate and the dissolute. No one was playing pool, and the cocaine dealers in the bathrooms were doing brisk business: legalities were best understood after a snort. The teevees were close-captioned, and the jukebox was playing an old song about blood. All the best rock and roll songs were about bodily fluids. Wagering was present.

Bets were flowing, and opinions, and likewise bullshit–oh so much bullshit–up and down the Main Drag and filtering through KSOS and KHAY up to the antenna on Mt. Fortitude and back down through zippy-zap beams to the teevees and radios of the neighborhood and back again and echo. And back again and echo. An orange Porsche went east, and up Christy Canyon. Turnoff to Skyway Drive. Up up up, and Officer Romeo Rodriguez did not pay it any mind because it was a Porsche and not a bulldozer. The sports car gained altitude and crested, and the driver could see the sky; her medical license had finally been revoked–her drinking had done it–and so she was drunk and had a pistol and was going to kill herself by the Observatory, but Porsches have the engines all the way in the back and are tough to steer at high speed, and so the former doctor lost control of the orange car and spun through the parking lot in circles–at least five–and came to rest almost against a tree. Almost. There was an astronomer in between the car and tree.

Foole’s Yard is always cool. There is fog in the mornings, too. The graveside was not packed. There was a eulogy, and then there was the sound of dirt on oak.

Mr. Venable and Gussy walked south along the Main Drag.

“See the Cenotaph?”

“This morning’s? Yes.”

“Whole mountaintop declared protected.”

“Mm.”

They walked some more.

“Story was on page seven.”

“Another buried lede,” he said.

Gussy took his hand, and Mr. Venable did not know how to respond, so he didn’t.

“How did you know Penny?”

“She bought me some suits once.”

Gussy did not let his hand go, and Mr. Venable did not try to take it back. They passed The Tahitian and she said,

“Who won here?”

He did not answer, and she did not press the question as they walked south down the Main Drag in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

 

The end

Are you kids ready for some rock and roll?

I can’t hear you; you’ll have to do better than that.

I said: are you kids ready for some rock and roll?

That’s what I thought.

Boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together and take your tits out for Little Aleppo’s own: The Snug! and before the roadie’s growl faded from the speakers there was a KAPAF of small-time pyro and SHWAM of flash paper going up on either side of the stage; they were already rocking, do you understand? Before you could see the band, you could hear the band and they were already rocking: that was how hard they rocked, kid – shit, they were probably rocking in the dressing room, and in the tour bus on the way over, and in the hotel. You know they fucked that hotel up, right? Maybe they hot-glued the mattress to the ceiling, or threw a teevee out the window, or stole a maid’s kidney. Some shit like that, Rock Star shit like that, who knows and who cares: it’s The motherfuggin’ Snug, man!

Memphis can’t compare
And we’re better than blue
We have got the biggest dicks
And they are straight and true
We’re The mooooooootherfuggin’ Snug!

And there they were. The rocking had not lied. There was The Snug–RIGHT THERE, MAN–and they had brought every amplifier in the world to the Absalom Ballroom. The music was so loud that you couldn’t hear the music: it precluded itself. Just this FRAAAAASH sound, but rhythmic, in your ears and a pressure wave around your ribs. Or maybe that wasn’t the music; the audience had surged forward when the band took the stage, and the promoter was a thief who oversold the place as usual, so there was a heaving a great heaving to and all the kids became one crowd one mass one voice kept in the dark and dazzled.

The Snug, man!

They were eight feet tall. At least. And wearing garments that were technically clothes, but no one in the crowd had ever seen before. Fringed white leather pants? Flared sleeves? Dave Ronn, the bass player, was wearing eight or nine scarves in various unorthodox configurations. That was the most exciting thing about Dave Ronn. Bass players are like prostates: you only notice them when they make trouble.

Holiday Rhodes, man! No one could scream like him, or throw tantrums like him; he was nonpareil. An artist, a poet, a showman (when he showed up), a shaman, a poet (Holiday really liked to be called a poet), and an artist (that, too): Holiday fucking Rhodes! Kim and Rodney had seen pictures of Holiday in shirts, so they knew he owned several, but he was otherwise shirtless; he was slightly muscular, but mostly lean and defined, and his abs narrowed into his Adonis belt which is shaped like a V, and he wore his bumblebee-yellow trousers incredibly low, dangerously low, and there was a bit of pubic hair frothing above the laces.

Kim and Rodney did not know that pants could have laces. They did not know that was an option.

Don’t talk about the Space Race
You know we won that shit
Cardinal numbers can suck our dicks
And gin can eat our tits
We’re The mooooooootherfuggin’ Snug!

The whole crowd: they raised their hands above their head even though they did not know why. It was not a planned gesture. It was not strategic. Instinctual, because they were a crowd now and crowds are the dumbest form of human. The very smartest a person can be is when he’s sitting in a room by himself with no distractions. Second is when she’s talking to someone of equal or higher intelligence. Third is when he’s among morons. Dumbest of all is when she’s joined a crowd.

Kim and Rodney were holding onto each other by the belt in the scrum of the crowd. Kim had Buzzy Verno’s arm in his hand, and Buzzy had a joint in his. The motherfuggin’ Snug, man! They were stage left, and Johnny Mister was above them like an angel with an ankle bracelet. That guitar, that guitar, that magical guitar, shaped like the mathematical symbol for infinity and squealing–SQUEALING–like a rock and roll pig getting its rock and roll throat slit. The 8-Ball. Magical guitars get names, and Johnny Mister had a magical guitar and so it was named 8-Ball. It was a teenage talisman, and all the crowd yelled for it just as they did the members of the band. The guitar was as important as any of them. B.B. King had Lucille, and Clapton had Blackie, and Johnny Mister had 8-Ball.

There was a poster of Johnny. He was leaping in the air, and 8-Ball was where his crotch should be, and he was smirking. Smirking aloft! He knew he would come down right, land gently: that’s what Rock Stars did. Kim had it in his bedroom. The photo had been taken at the end of a show, and Johnny was sweaty and half-naked. Rodney did not have the poster, but he had slept over Kim’s house many times.

No room to dance except for on the stage, so the kids hopped up and down in place; some of them were crying.

Summer is lesser than
Circuses just don’t compare
Punctuality sucks
And so does Langston Hughes
We’re The mooooooootherfuggin’ Snug!

O, God, we are all together here, here in this crowd, here before our heroes and it does not matter if they are fighting and traveling on separate tour buses: they are A BAND just like we are A CROWD and we are coming together tonight in the Absalom Ballroom on the Upside of Little Aleppo; something is happening; something is happening here and if the whole world could be here–be with us right now in this glorious power chord moment–then there would be peace, there would be peace, there would be peace.

The lights were red and yellow and blue, and they combined and melded as that rock and roll music blasted all the dust off your heart.

Drums are for hitting; Jay Biscayne hit drums hard. They barely needed to be miked, he hit them so hard: he had drumsticks thick as a child’s wrist and he flipped them around and whacked the heads with the rounded butt of the ‘stick instead of the tip. He had two bass drums colored pumpkin-orange, and a million cymbals; he hit them all at once sometimes. Jay Biscayne had won many reader’s polls, and awards made up by journalists.

The crowd bopped and bobbed, and they were one, and Kim took Rodney’s hand. He did not mean to, but he did and now it had been done and that was all there was to it: Rodney looked past Kim to Buzzy Verno, but he was involved with his joint and not paying attention, and so Rodney did not pull his hand away. Rodney was taller than Kim, and when he did not pull his hand away, Kim’s whole body started pounding like he was nothing but his heart. His cock got hard, too.

Fossil fuels are weak
And gestures are so vagrant
We’re the fucking best
We’re sorry we’re so blatant
We’re The mooooooootherfuggin’ Snug!

Gimme rock, gimme roll, and the crowd went WOOO for no reason whatsoever, and The Snug did their Rock Moves. They had practiced. Chased each other around the stage, and then they kicked so high. They shook their heads LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT LEFT and then they shook their heads RIGHT-LEFT-RIGHT RIGHT and the kids said YEAH; the kids said FUCK, YEAH and reached towards the band with outstretched hands, and the girls threw their underwear, and some of the boys, too.

No one was paying attention, so Kim kissed Rodney. Just a peck, a little buss half on the lips and half on the cheek, and then Kim stood back and waited to be called a faggot–he did not know what he had just done–but Rodney had wide eyes and then he kissed him back, full on the lips this time, and Kim put his hand on Rodney’s hairy forearm and stood on his toes; both of them were the happiest they had ever been in their short lives, and then tongues became involved.

They were The motherfuggin’ Snug, and they played rock and roll music. They played it so loud and well that you could forget who you were and all the things you had been taught, and just shout YEAH and stick your tongue in the mouth next to you. Holy shit, could they play that rock and roll music, and Rodney had his long arms wrapped around Kim while the guitar and drums wrapped each other up, too, and the crowd hopped and hoped up and down. It was fantastic, and Kim put his hand on Rodney’s hip and kissed him back. Oh, God, I will kiss you back for all I’m worth as long as this music plays, Kim thought, and Rodney thought the same while the light show plastered spectacular colors on the walls, and there was nowhere better for a first kiss than a rock and roll show in Little Aleppo, which was a neighborhood in America.