Tag: Little Aleppo (Page 19 of 20)

Every neighborhood needs someone to ignore, and so every year Little Aleppo chooses a Poet Laureate. There’s no shortage of candidates: the Town Fathers roust a random drunk out of the Morning Tavern; it is invariably someone with a chapbook, and several restraining orders from literary magazines. There’s a big ceremony that no one attends, and then the Poet Laureate’s name gets taken away, and critics are assigned. Extending credit to the Poet Laureate is a felony.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning did not get along. Often, at dawn, sleepy churches and sketchy parties would rumble in the street. This might have seemed odd in some places, but Little Aleppians had long since grown accustomed to conceptual battle royales–just ask anyone about the time Truth threw Beauty through a plate-glass window–so they regarded the fights like a farmer did a rooster. Cheaper than an alarm clock.

Those hours between Saturday Night and Sunday Morning are sin’s liminal zone. The body and the flesh, or the Body and the Flesh, and your choice of beverage factors in. The party people put on their fancy clothes, and go to a crowded building to try to make sense of their lives. The church folks put on their fancy clothes, and go to a crowded building to try to make sense of their lives. You can see how conflict between the two groups would be inevitable.

There is a feral cat colony in the Verdance, where everything grows. It is their territory, according to them, and it is not, according to the humans; skirmishes flourish. Not cat vs. person: strictly intramural feuding among residents. The catch-and-release folks have their traps sabotaged by the Feline Free Love association, who in turn have their tires slashed by cat-killing bird-lovers. Meanwhile, the kitties fuck, and kill animals smaller than them, and nap.

The cats avoid the swans. Dogs, too, and so do humans. There are white swans, and also one black swan that came out of nowhere, and no one was expecting. Floating, hateful beauties: the swans attacked anything that moved. If nothing moved, the black swan–who caused way more trouble than anyone could have predicted–would shake some plants with his beak, and then the swans would attack that. Several people in the neighborhood believe that the swans have now begun making prank phone calls.

The Holy Synod is a junkie’s motel run by a religious maniac named Frankie Teakettle; everyone calls it The Nod, and all the occupants started off on the hourly rate. There are never enough towels, but it’s homey. Frankie has been awake since 1986, and though he has won the war against sleep, his eyeballs have lost and they jooble and jimble around in their sockets; very early in the morning, when it’s quiet, you can hear them rattle like counterfeit pennies in a coffee can.

The comforters are dull green, quilted, and thin, with pilled fabric springing out like mushrooms from the countless washings; below that were beige blankets made of scratchy wool with a satin-ish seam along one sides; on the mattress was a see-through white sheet. A chair, a teevee, a desk with a matchbook from the Hotel at Salt Wharf under one leg. And a bathroom and a door with three locks, solid and well-anchored. There was a fire extinguisher in each room, and fucking with the smoke detectors was just about the only thing that would get you 86’ed.

The Poet Laureate has gotten all turned around in the supermarket, and has been stuck in the dairy cul-de-sac  for hours. The stockboys ignore his whines; the cashiers have seen his type before.

Crime Alley is, counter-intuitively, the safest place in the neighborhood: no Little Aleppian would go anywhere near someplace named Crime Alley. Trouble seeped in through the drywall and floorboards on a normal day; why go searching it out? If you show God your dick, children were taught, then He will laugh at it.

The Hotel at Salt Wharf is full of brokenhearted sailors, none of whom ever quite get their land legs back, and so the hallway walls are bruised and cratered where stubbled men bounced. They check in with duffel bags full of fish and knots, and get their pipes re-cobbed. Parrots are available for rental at the desk. The whole building is up by four a.m. and earns an extra buck making wake-up calls to the other hotels.

Little Aleppo loves a show, and if a cage door at the zoo has to be unlocked to get one, then so be it. There’s music in the cafes at night, and the crash of crockery being thrown at cafe musicians from people who live in apartments above. The crossing guards sing Verdi, and the mailmen write poetry on the back of your gas bill, and the sanitation crews groom the landfill into towering trash topiaries. Art for our sake; the circus is the town.

Shrieker’s Corner is in the Verdance, which is oval-shaped, and it is in the most out-of-the-way section. There are two transverse foot path running through the park, and they are bisected by the Thoroughfare–from above, the Verdance looks like a black “‡” in a green egg–and the Corner is backed up almost onto the street away from any of the lanes. Little Aleppians are staunch believers in free speech, but that doesn’t mean they have to put up with it.

You can yell about anything you want at Shrieker’s Corner, and the Parks Department will even provide you with a soapbox. This is not altruistic: before the boxes were standardized, there was a height war. One guy brought a soapbox, and then another guy brought a ladder, and then some lady showed up in the cage of a cherry-picker driven by her cousin, and then the Town Fathers had to step in, and now everyone is issued a regulation-size soapbox.

On the other side of the Verdance, where everything grows, is the cemetery. No one knows it’s a cemetery but the dead people who were buried there without their names. The area has a pico-climate where it is always about to do something: the sun is trying to come out, or the clouds want to open up; the weather is always going to happen five minutes from now, you just wait. Meteorologists and conspiracy theorists have puzzled over this for years. The Poet Laureate could explain it, but Little Aleppo has always ignored the Poet Laureate. That’s why they have one in the first place.

Little Aleppo is dark at night. Streetlights are good targets, and bulbs can be resold. Locals draw the drapes, and the teevee blares against them, blue windows in brick buildings that block the moon and all the stars. When the sun goes down, the knives come out, and the Town Fathers wrap barbed wire around their collars to show they mean business. “Trust your fellow man in the day; trust your mantrap at night,” is a common saying in the neighborhood.

Who was out? Why leave home, warm and safe, and roam the Main Drag with its monsters and blind alleys? Some wanted to; some had to. Some people like to go out dancing; other people, they gotta work. In the Hamlet, there was a loft party that had been going on for twelve years, and the people downstairs were starting to get annoyed; the music did not start until two and then at noon the dance floor would boogie, shirtless, over to the Morning Tavern for last call. But the cops had to be out, and so did the whores, and so the did the stevedores down on Boone’s Docks and the Salt Wharf.

When it was dark, the Midnight Librarians catalogued the neighborhood’s dreams.

Better to stay in. Food can be brought to you, if you can manage not to take the delivery boy hostage. Little Aleppo has several pizza places: Cagliostro’s, which promises your pie in 30 minutes, or it will be late; Vafunculo’s, where you get free napkins with every purchase of over $25; and Santa Maria’s, whose phone number is one digit off from a sex line, and will gladly talk dirty to you if you order extra garlic knots. Better to stay in, maybe watch a little teevee. Folks in Little Aleppo liked their Late Movie, and they had their own Horror Host, who was named Draculette.

“Draculette?” Tiresias Richardson asked. “That’s your idea? Draculette?”

“Cuz you’re a vampire!”

“Kinda.”

“And you’re a girl!” Paul Loomis said. He was genuinely impressed with himself for coming up with the name. Paul was easily impressed, which is why the programming on KSOS was such crap. In another town, Paul may–through failure–have become more discerning, but Little Aleppo had long ago had a falling-out with the ionosphere, and KSOS was the only channel that came in clearly after the sun went down; he had a captive audience, on several levels.

Tiresias thought about mentioning that she was 26 (she was actually 29), but then she looked down and saw her cleavage, and looked in the mirror and saw the rest of herself.

“And what a girl.”

“Right?  Draculette?”

The station had a tough time keeping Horror Hosts. As you might imagine, they are a squirrelier lot than, say, accountants. Wolfman Zack only showed up once a month;  Mortuary Mindy was not joking about the things everyone thought she was joking about.

The latest casualty was Doctor Mausoleum. A good deal of the Doctor’s charm was that he was tipsy, but over the months glasses became bottles; by the last few broadcasts, he was just taking his dick out and shouting his ex-wife’s name. Admittedly, it was the scariest thing he had ever done, but it wasn’t the right kind of scary, and Paul Loomis needed a new Horror Host.

And Tiresias Richardson needed her big break.

“I’ll do it.”

“I can’t pay you.”

This was not going to be her big break, she thought.

Tiresias had other thoughts, though, and she had them concurrently: she usually had nine or ten bouncing off one another in there at any time. A gig’s a gig, she thought, and also that the most popular of the previous Horror Hosts had scored endorsements with local businesses, and she could put it in her reel, but almost most of all, she thought it sounded like fun.

Most of all, she liked the dress. Not so much the wig and the makeup–although the nails were a hoot to tippity-tap against things to emphasize a point–but Tiresias was feeling the dress.

She had been dating, kinda, sorta, who knows, a cameraman from KSOS who had told her about the upcoming job opening.

“Doctor Mausoleum’s gonna take his dick out.”

“He won’t.”

“Tirry, I’m telling you: he’s gonna take his dick out.”

Tiresias was not a habitual watcher of the Late Movie–she was a morning person–but she stayed up late the next night, and after a rather short amount of time decided that the cameraman was right: that man’s dick was coming out. A gig’s a gig, she thought, and if Doctor Mausoleum doesn’t want the gig, then she would certainly take it.

In the morning, she went to work at Big-Dicked Sheila’s Hair Salon for Rock Stars and Their Ilk. Tiresias wasn’t great at cutting hair, but she wasn’t terrible at it, either; mostly what she was was quick-witted, and she would laugh at her own jokes, and she would laugh at yours, too–AAAAAHhahaha–and she would lower her head down when she did, so she was looking up at you through her eyebrows, like you two had a secret. Tiresias Richardson had the kind of laugh that could never be at you.

“I wanna be the new Horror Host.”

“I wanna be a helicopter pilot,” Sheila said.

“Really?”

“No. It seems like something you should want to be, though.”

“I see what you’re saying.”

“We need a dress.”

Which they did, but what they really needed was to alter the fuck out of a dress. It started as a mass-market Little Black Dress, two sizes too small. Sheila sliced a towering V  down the front, and sewed in an underboob shelf made out of spandex, and horizontal under the armpits were celluloid buttresses. She stood Tiresias up and gathered the material in the back, stretched it until it creaked and pinged, and fastened the fabric bridge up her back.

“Does the skirt need a slit?” Tiresias asked.

“Of course.”

“How high?”

“Ripped to the tits.”

The slit did not go quite that high, but it did make it to several inches below Tiresias’ other specifically female body part. The look was not complete: there was the hair to think about, and makeup yet to go.

“What shoes?”

“No one’s gonna look at your shoes, honey.”

Sheila was right. As she looked in the mirror, all Tiresias could think of was BOUNTEOUS, globular and shimmying with her lungs’ back-and-forth, and tapered down to a restrained and constricted waist–she could not breathe very well–and slamming out to a surprising hip curve, and she laughed–AAAAAHhahaha–and among the nine or ten thoughts she always had bouncing off one another in her head, she had a new one:

“Person who looks like this can get away with saying just about anything.”

“That sounds right,” Sheila said.

“Did I say that out loud?”

“You did.”

Tiresias looked in the mirror some more.

“Wowie zowie.”

“May I?”

“Absofuckinglutely.”

bbbbbbRRRRRUUUUMMMskiiiii

“I saw God, Tirry.”

“Good for God. I can’t breathe in this thing.”

“Beauty requires sacrifice.”

Sheila proved to be right: the wig was heavy and made Tiresias’ scalp sweat and itch, and the makeup was thick–she could feel it on her face like a fresh coat of mulch–and she found that her fake eyelashes weighed so much that she was unable to properly regulate her eyelids. Her high heels looked great when she sitting in her evil throne (just a barber’s chair; she was pretending) but they were less suited for other things, like walking or standing up in.

“Go to the couch in the lounge and do the pose,” Sheila said.

“What pose?”

“The Horror Host pose. Reclining on your side, propped on your elbow, one leg on top of the other, good posture, cleavage.”

Tiresias went to the couch.

“Like this?”

“Spookier.”

…

“How’s that?”

“Much better.”

“Should I show a little leg?”

“What business are you in?”

“Show business.”

“There you are.”

“It is traditional.”

“It’s a man’s world, honey. Fuck ’em.”

“AAAAAHhahaha. But I need a name.”

“Draculette!” Paul Loomis repeated.

“You sound like your mind is made up,” Tiresias said.

“Completely honest?” Paul liked to say that, but not be it. “I already called the paper and placed an ad.”

“Great. Draculette. When do I start?”

“Midnight. When did you think the Midnight Movie started?”

“No, I know when it airs. I meant when do we start shooting?”

“Midnight. It’s live.”

“Midnight tonight?”

“Midnight every night. But you start tonight.”

Tiresias had many thoughts, nine or ten at once: she had to watch the movie, which was called Satan’s Sharpened Scythe, and then figure out how to say the title, and come up with a joke or two, and maybe she should use props, and she should go check the lighting first thing, and she needed to pee, and call her mom, but really she needed to watch that damn movie. All of those ideas, though, were secondary to the math she was doing: is there enough time to get out of this damn dress, and then stuff myself back into it?

There was, barely, and she watched the movie in a robe with a legal pad and a pizza that Sheila had brought, but kept trying to slap from her hand.

“We’re pushing the limits of the dress’ fabric, Tirry.”

“One slice!”

“One slice? I’ll give you one word.”

“Yeah?”

“One word.”

“What?”

“Blowout.”

“AAAAAHhahaha. I won’t eat the crust. God, this movie’s shit.”

Sheila agreed, and ate Tiresias’ crust. Everything that could be wrong with a movie was wrong with Satan’s Sharpened Scythe, plus some things that should not be possible; while the film was playing, the monitor issued a noticeable scent of burning hair. The audio popped and disappeared, the scenes were in no particular order, the actors were clearly local vagrants, and the picture went from color to black-and-white at random and sometimes in the middle of a take.

Tiresias and Sheila also found it peculiar that a film entitled Satan’s Sharpened Scythe would be set on Jupiter and feature  killer gorillas.

Time is a killer gorilla, a man who was awful at metaphors once wrote, and soon they were getting Tiresias back in the dress; she had discovered that she could not put her arms all the way down. She went to the gym and watched what she ate–Tiresias thought she was doing all right, between you and her–but she was still a human-shaped animal, and so she had lumpy parts and floppy bits and things that went wobble; the dress basically martialed all of this available flesh and pushed it towards where it was needed, that deep and towering V that Sheila had tailored, but some of the runoff went under her armpits so she couldn’t put her arms at her side.

And at midnight all the Horror Hosts and the television crew go to work. The set was small and littered with the previous hosts’ detritus: coffins, and candelabra, and a skeleton that Mortuary Mindy had brought in that maybe no one asked enough questions about.

Tiresias took the couch, which was one of those spooky Edwardian fainting couches, the kind with the half-back and pea-green upholstery and not enough padding, and lay on her left side, propped up on her elbow. The cameraman–not the one she was dating, kinda, sorta, who knows–was a hulking teamster, and he swiveled the camera towards her, the teleprompter–which she had typed her script into– jutting an overbite towards her.

“Five, four,” the cameraman said, and then mouthed the next numbers while counting down on his fingers, and then the red light went on, and Tiresias had no thoughts in her head for the first time in a very long time, save one: I’ve never read off a teleprompter before.

And then the teleprompter broke, and she had no thoughts at all.

“I’m. Hi. I’m Tir…Dracula. Etta. Ette. DRACULETTE and…ha…we, um have a movie for you. Tonight. A movie tonight. Satan’s Shaper Shamp. Ha. Santa’s Sample Sample. Ugh.”

Tiresias was suddenly very aware of the weight of the makeup on her face, and the heat of the lights she and Sheila had bobby-pinned colored gel paper to, and the cameraman’s silence, and her fake eyelashes pulled her whole head down, and then she was very aware of her dress, and she looked back up at the camera, right into the camera with one eye raised like she and it had a secret, and she said,

“All this and you want me to speak English, too? AAAAAHhahaha!”

And the cameraman laughed along with her.

“Satan’s Sharpened Scythe. Listen, y’little boogers: this one didn’t win an Oscar. There wasn’t even anyone on the crew named Oscar. It’s a completely Oscar-free film. AAAAAHhahaha!”

The cameraman laughed with her again.

“I hope you enjoy this crap as much as this bruiser is.”

And Tiresias had nine or ten thoughts in her head again, bouncing around and off one another.

“In fact, that’s his name: Bruiser. The most loyal henchman a girl could ask for. Had him for two centuries, and I just got him housebroken. Unfortunately, we live in a dungeon so he keeps peeing on the floor. AAAAAHhahaha!”

Bruiser laughed again, and harder, and Draculette lived. Or unlived, maybe. Tiresias was still not quite sure whether she was a vampire or a witch or an evil goddess or what, but she wasn’t much concerned: it would come to her. Until it did, she was sure she could coast by on tits and jokes. A gig’s a gig.

The phone lines lit up–several of the calls were from Creepy Ernie–and after local ads, and high school plays, and improv troupes, and acting class after acting class, and summer stock, and regional theater, and an uncountable number of unfulfilled auditions, Tiresias Richardson was an overnight success, or at least Draculette was. She was the new Horror Host, and she presented the Late Movie in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Little Aleppo has survived many disasters, even the ones it did not cause. Earthquakes, fires, that time the trees got drunk. In the morning, everyone grabbed brooms and unspooled hoses and shot looters; life went on even when it limped. In ’03, there was a drought, and the land turned silty and fine enough that when the rains came in April there was nothing to hold the ground to the Segovian Hills and an avalanche of earth came crushing into town. The worst wounds were always self-inflicted. Mother Nature can break your back, but only a brother’s actions can break your heart. Sometimes it seemed that the only use Little Aleppo had for hearts was their destruction, like wooden boards at a karate class.

There was every scam known to man, plus several imported from Felicidae IV, Throneworld to the Felis Empire. Several got out of hand and started multiplying exponentially until everyone in town was broke, as Little Aleppians see being scammed not as a loss of money, but as a gain in knowledge, and immediately rush out to pull the newly-learned con on friends and neighbors. The whole town lost their shirts in a Ponzi scheme, and then everyone lost their leather jackets in a Fonzi scheme. There was Three-Card Monty Hall, in which not only did you have to guess where the queen was, but you also had to be wearing a clown suit and have an egg in your purse. Plus, one of the cards might have a goat under it. No one really understood the rules.

In the middle of Little Aleppo is the Verdance, and in the middle of the Verdance is Bell Lake, and both of them have been sold more times than can be counted. At least once a week, the police haul away a rich, dumb foreigner screaming, “Vat you mean ‘park?’ I buy! Is mine!” and the cops try their hardest not to laugh.

Little Aleppo was also given to sabotage its own economy from time to time: the neighborhood has seen more bubbles than the judge at a Beverly Sills impersonator’s contest. Gold, silver, roses, professional wrestler’s trading cards, really tender pot roasts. Everyone would be rich (on paper) for a month, and then some jackass would set his price too high to find a buyer, and everyone would realize at the exact same time that they should have gotten out yesterday. In 1985, a fifth-grader won Lyndon LaRouche Elementary’s science fair by proving, mathematically, how economic bubbles could be avoided. The neighborhood responded by buying up clever fifth-graders, which of course led to an economic bubble.

One financial catastrophe of late can be traced back a hundred years to Gussy Incandescente-Ponui’s drunken dunce of a brother, Todd. As you’ll recall, The Tahitian began as a nickelodeon that charged nine cents for two tickets; generally, the fee was paid with a dime and the change returned was a coin out the ton of counterfeit pennies that Todd had won in a whist game. This made ten percent of Gussy’s income untraceable, but you could certainly find the house she bought with the money.

(Gussy never got a good answer to the question “How much whist do you have to play to win a ton of anything, let alone fake money?” This may be because there is no good answer to that question.)

But a funny thing happened on the way to The Tahitian: the collector’s market. An article in an influential national magazine by an important writer about the theater’s history–and about Gussy’s scam–was read by millions, and that original batch of Todd’s  fake pennies became valuable overnight.

“Guess what happened next,” Mr. Venable said to the teenager standing at his desk. The boy’s hair was close-cropped, and he had a pair of headphones the size of dinner plates around his neck; his sneakers were bulbous.

“What?” His name was Julio Montez and he was scared of adults. Mostly his parents, but all the other grown-ups, too. And he was scared of calculus and driving and being in the apartment by himself and water he couldn’t see the bottom of, and also cows. Just something about their eyes that creeped Julio out.

“Guess. What. Happened. Next.” Mr. Venable enjoyed being mean to teenagers, because Mr. Venable did not like teenagers. They were sticky, and smelled like yearning.

“I dunno.”

“A scholar. So: the collector’s market goes wild for Gussy’s–well, Todd’s–counterfeit pennies, what with their historical significance or whatnot. Within days, half the neighborhood had purchased–well, procured–home smelters and were counterfeiting the counterfeit pennies. Thus began the counterfeit counterfeit penny bubble. Concurrently, there was a home smelter bubble.”

“None of that sounds good.”

“No, no. Especially when word of the scam got out.”

“And that was the end?”

“You’d think. But–and I had no idea, either–there is apparently a large collector’s market for paraphernalia used in con jobs, and the value of the counterfeit counterfeit pennies soared. Now can you guess what happened next, young man?”

“Counterfeit counterfeit counterfeit pennies.”

“Not as dumb as you look. Yes. And, let us remember, the price of home smelting equipment has risen to a price no longer tethered to reality. And on a Tuesday afternoon, some bright-eyed junior analyst at the Bank of Little Aleppo got an idea: why not invest in home smelters using the counterfeit counterfeit counterfeit pennies? The crash occurred ninety minutes later.”

“He was thinking outside the box, I guess.”

“Yes, but the box he was outside of was the one containing all the good ideas. Certain boxes should be rummaged through.”

“How bad was it?” Julio asked.

“Horrendous. The financial underpinnings of society itself shattered, like a mango frozen in nitrogen and thrown at a nurse. The Town Fathers pleaded with Washington for help. Gerald Ford came to town so he could personally tell us to go fuck ourselves.”

“Wow.”

“People didn’t take it well. He was pelted with pennies of varying origin. Couple folks threw home smelters at him; it was an ugly day all around.”

“And then what happened?”

“Life went on. It does that. Blame was assessed. Someone was at fault.”

“Who?”

“The general consensus was ‘someone else.’ And lessons were learned.”

“What?”

“Same lesson Little Aleppo always learns: next time will be different.”

Mr. Venable took a sip of his coffee, which had gone cold. He blamed the boy.

“Why are you here?”

“Oh. Um. Do you have the Cliff No–”

“OUT!”

The bell attached to the door of the bookstore with no title went TINKadink and Julio Montez walked out onto the Main Drag empty-handed and ears ringing, but not so much that he didn’t put his mammoth headphones on, and turn his music up real loud, and make believe that he was the singer. He was in a good mood, and there are few things in this world more unbreakable than the good mood of a teenage boy with a date that evening.

It’s different for girls. Romy Schott was not in a good mood. Unlike Julio, she was not afraid of calculus in the slightest: it was just a bunch of rules. Do this first, and then that second, and then you find the derivative. That was the class they met in–pre-calc, actually–at Paul Bunyan High School (go Blue Oxen!) and though Romy didn’t care much about the subject of math, she did care deeply about her grade in math, and she blamed the 78 she had received on the last test on Julio. More specifically, his nose.

She sat to the right and back of him, her last name coming after his, and though Romy was a conscientious student, and she liked Mrs. Donnnigan, she couldn’t pay any attention because of his damn nose. It had angles and bumps, not one straight line, and it zigged left and then zagged back right, but most of all it was just big like an aircraft carrier. Not a shitty country’s shitty aircraft carrier with the dainty little ramp at the end, either: an American aircraft carrier. With nostrils.

Romy Schott looked at her grade of 78, and then she looked at Julio Montez’s nose, and then she realized that she liked a boy.

The balcony of The Tahitian is an excellent place to take a first date: it’s dark, and you don’t have to talk, and–if the night is going well–you can buy drugs. Neither Romy nor Julio did drugs, so they did not buy any, but Julio did buy the popcorn. Romy insisted on paying for her own ticket, and secretly he was glad: if he had bought her ticket, then he couldn’t have bought the largest popcorn combo. Julio felt it was important to buy the largest amount of food possible for Romy, though he would not be able to explain why if you had asked him.

He was at that particular intersection that is only available to a teenage boy of terrified, cocky, and utterly oblivious. While Julio didn’t usually wear cologne, his muddy little teen mind connected “date” with “smell fancy” and he doused himself with his father’s Hai Karate aftershave, including his balls, which you are not supposed to do, and Julio could hear his little sisters’ hysterical laughter outside the bathroom door as he desperately washed his scrotum. Worse than the burning was the fact that he had to do his hair again.

(Like I told you: Julio had a buzzer cut–number two on the top, one on the sides–but I also told you that Julio was a teenage boy, and so therefore it took him a half-hour to do his hair.)

It only took Romy ten minutes to do her hair, even though it was past her shoulders and blondish-brown, but she did it fourteen times that afternoon. She had a nice routine going: do her hair, yell at herself in the mirror about how he wasn’t even cute and that she didn’t like him, and then do her hair again. It’s different for girls.

The largest bucket of popcorn at The Tahitian is served in a flat-bottomed basket with sides woven from redwood bark and comes with 18 gallons of any soft drink other than Fanta, and the stairs up to the balcony run along either side of the building, just one long set of steps up five stories with a door for the mezzanine and carpet with palm trees on it.

The movie was an old comedy, neither had heard of it, but their parents said it was funny. It was called My Favorite Year. There was a Jewish guy and a drunk English actor, and they were in New York in the Fifties. It was about choosing to believe in silly stories, in needing to believe in them. It was about how bravery and wisdom can be learned from people who don’t actually exist. The kids in the balcony, the teens  on their first date, they didn’t catch a damn word of the flick.

Julio had a buzzing in his head like a fly with worn-out bearings, and Romy was experiencing total awareness of her surroundings: her cilia and antennae were twitching and peering around. His elbow just brushed against me. Did he mean that? Was it intentional? And Julio’s heart was pounding in his shoulders and his stomach and his throat, everywhere except where it was supposed to be, his chest, where there was just an ice cube shouting WHAT THE FUCK at the top of its lungs.

They had sat there, petrified of one another, for an hour. Neither could tell you what was happening on the screen, but then there was a scene where the Jewish guy buys the cute girl Chinese food, and they watch a movie starring the drunk English actor, and watching people watch a movie reminded Romy of a movie she had once watched, and a line it that she had thought very cool when a movie star said it with the right lighting, and she turned to Julio.

“Do you want to see a magic trick?” she said.

Julio said that he did, so she kissed him and the whole world disappeared. It was a good trick.

This is where the movie fades, cuts to the next scene, and ends on a passionate, but close-mouthed kiss, but Romy and Julio were not in a movie, just at one, and after that first kiss they went at it like only teenagers in public can: you could hear them slobbering on one another from three rows away, and there was grabbing and groping and little happy noises. A certain form of humping was performed. Neither noticed when their popcorn was stolen.

Outside on the Main Drag, the Town Cryer dodges parked cars and weeps, accosting mailboxes and accusing streetlights, that lachrymose fucker crying for our sins and demanding our mortality. “We’re all fucked!” he screams through his tears, and all of the grown-ups have long since accepted his presence as incontrovertible.

But the teenagers are too stupid to know they’re going to die, and so they wing counterfeit pennies at the Town Cryer, aiming for his eyes, and chase him laughing into the Verdance. They fall in love instead, using hearts that have never been broken, and never would be if the world had a heart of its own. But it doesn’t, and so they banish it with kisses in a dark balcony. No matter how dark it is, teenagers keep falling in love. They do that. Even in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

The first police force in Little Aleppo was made up of criminals. The Town Fathers, all of whom had mustaches and hats, figured that no one knew crime better; besides, when the Town Fathers asked the criminals, all of them promised–put their hands on the Bible and swore–to take their jobs seriously and fight the scourge of lawlessness that had plagued the neighborhood (that they had caused). The Town Mothers universally thought this was a boneheaded idea, but no one asked them, and–as is so often the case in Little Aleppo–the exact thing everyone thought would happen, happened.

Little Aleppians take a dim view of most authority figures, in that they view most authority figures to be dim. The local slang for cops was “bulls,” and that sobriquet was not borrowed form the British. A bullfighter didn’t actually fight the bull. You can’t fight a bull. What bullfighters do is dodge the bull until it gets tired and quits. This is not to say that census takers sent into the neighborhood were not occasionally eaten, but for the most part the residents of Little Aleppo relied on the the three D’s when interacting with The Man: distraction, discombobulation, and dummying up.

Dummying up was a proud tradition in Little Aleppo, where no one had ever seen anything, unless he was part of an insurance scam, in which case he could describe the entire incident in detail, and possibly draw diagrams if that would help move the case along any faster. A cop had once attempted to play Peek-A-Boo with a baby.

“Peekaboo! I see you!” the officer said, removing his hands from over his eyes.

“Okay, whatever,” the baby replied. “You see what you see. I don’t see nothing.”

People were so impressed by that baby that she was elected mayor the next year

Discombobulation was fun, but it was like spinning plates in the air: tiring, and you only had to fuck up once to ruin the whole act. Some people enjoyed denying that they spoke in English, in English. “Pretending not to know English” is the number one reason for taking the Urdu classes offered by the Learning Belfry. A few weirdos carried around ventriloquist’s dummies just so they could harangue cops from two directions, but that never caught on, as it was collectively understood that the only thing less dignified than running from the cops was walking around all day with your hand up a puppet’s ass.

Sometimes, though, you just had to run from the cops, and for that you needed a head start, and that requires a distraction. A popular method in the fifties was pointing while yelling “Look! Communism!” and then hightailing it, but that rarely worked nowadays. Luckily for the miscreants, Little Allepians looked out for each other (when they weren’t scamming one another or having block wars), and someone would notice your plight and toss a garbage can through a window, or fire a couple rounds into the sidewalk.

(Shooting a gun into the air in Little Aleppo was one of the few things guaranteed to get your ass kicked, and swiftly. Bullets come down. When locals felt the need to squeeze off a round or two in public–and they regularly did–they aimed at the ground. I cannot lie: foot injuries were common.)

If things got hot, if someone was up against the wall and the cuffs were about to go on, then you’d hear a whistle go up the street, starting down low and ending three ocatves above, woooooPHWEEEEEEE, and then Spider-Pooper would save the day. A cop could have Jack The Ripper in his grasp, but if a naked guy in a Spider-Man mask takes a shit in the middle of the street, then the cop is going to redirect his attention. Most of the time, Spider-Pooper was a guy named Leslie Westerbrook who owned the sock rental shop, but when he heard the call–even if he was in the middle of a fitting–then he would pitch in. Leslie loved his neighborhood, and figured that sometimes you had to take a shit for the team.

There was very little actual violence between the cops and the residents. Little Aleppians play dumb, but they’re not stupid; no one’s ever won a fight with a cop. You might take a round, but not the match, and the decision would always go to the judges. If you made it to a judge. In the old days, you wouldn’t.

For some reason, Mr. Venable had the original charters for the LAPD, No, Not That One. (That was the office name of the force, due to a lawsuit from the far more well-funded Los Angeles Police Department. A bearded and charismatic young vice cop once asked why not just change the name to PDLA, and that young vice cop was named Officer Serpico, and things got very dramatic for him.) Mr. Venable wondered why there were important legal documents in a box in his basement, and thought about bringing them to Town Hall, but quickly decided that the government was not to be trusted with legal documents.

The first station, he noted, was on Peel Street, and the first batch of police officers, as mentioned before, was drawn entirely from the criminal underclass of Little Aleppo, and that was–and is–a robustly Darwinian group. If there were an Olympics for criminals, then Little Aleppo’s team would steal all the medals. Crime is simply more difficult there, as Little Aleppians are terrible victims: they see you coming, and they have several knives, and almost everyone has installed at least one mantrap in their apartments. More intellectual villains do no better: a good half of all scams initiated in the neighborhood end with the con-man getting fleeced.

Mr. Venable played a favorite game of his, and closed his eyes and guessed at what would happen next, and the next yellowing copies of The Cenotaph he pulled from the box proved him right. Initially, locals were thrilled, as crime had decreased by 100%. Almost immediately, of course, everyone realized that only the reported crime had decreased 100%, and that what the Town Fathers had done was arm the criminals and buy them a clubhouse. The firemen came to the rescue, however, by not existing and therefore not responding when the neighborhood burned down the station with all the crooked cops inside.

After everyone told the insurance adjusters what happened (in oddly similar words), the station was rebuilt and new cops hired. These new recruits were stalwarts in the law and dedicated to justice and believers in fair play and only kidding they were just as rotten as the last batch, but they weren’t as blatant about it. Those were the days of graft and extortion: you were allowed to do almost whatever you want, but the cops had to get their ten percent. Sometimes you could negotiate the fee, but other times the cops would hit you with a stick and demand twenty percent, so most folks stood pat at ten.

(Graft was far more prevalent in Little Aleppo than in more respectable places. The traditional payers of graft are illegal businesses, but every business in the neighborhood was at least a little bit illegal. The only thing Little Aleppians are better at than not reporting things to the cops is not reporting things to the IRS. No one much minded: cops are paid with taxes, and since paying those was out of the question, you might as well just pay the cops directly. Gotta pay someone.)

Nothing lasts forever, Mr. Venable thought, except perhaps Tolstoy, and by and by it became unacceptable for the police to send a rookie up and down the street with a slowly-filling sack. Professionalism, he noted; from the Latin: the death of fun. And militarization, which is also from the Latin: the death of the guy over there.

The cops seemed very young lately; the ones Mr. Venable knew well had retired, or gone rogue. Flanagan, O’Sullivan, Kelly, McPotato: no longer on the beat. They were earnest and looked like they could not grow beards, and almost all of them had the audacity to not be Irish.

“To the traditionalist, the dawn is an insult,” Mr. Venable said to the young man with the shaved head and the gun who had just entered the bookstore with no title.

“What now?” said Officer Romeo Rodriguez, who was walking his very first beat in Little Aleppo. He was tall and skinny and God help us all he was still wearing the massive square eyeglasses he had been issued on Parris Island. For a second, Mr. Venable considered stealing his wallet himself, just to save the kid from an actual thief.

Officer Rodriguez was popular in grade school, partially because he would always be the cop when the kids played Cops & Robbers. Plastic badges and cap guns and matchbox cruisers: he was easy to buy Christmas presents for. He had good grades, and an exemplary service record, and C——–a City hired him off his first application.

What he didn’t have, unfortunately, were any connections. A captain’s kid could get assigned to Taker Heights or Gated Gates or Smooth Harbour, but if you didn’t know anybody, then you went where you got sent. Little Aleppo was not the worst posting in the force–someone had to sit in the Dunk A Cop tank at the carnival every summer–but it was not glamorous and it was more than a little weird: no other assignment required sitting through a training video called What To Do When The Turtlemonsters Come Back. Officer Rodriguez did not think it was a good sign that the title contained the word “when” instead of “if.”

For two weeks before his first shift, Officer Rodriguez had walked Little Aleppo, from the Salt Wharf to Boone’s Docks, and down to Paul Bunyan High School (Go Blue Oxen!) which was built on the site of the first police station where all those criminals in uniform burned; due to this fact, the school is haunted as fuck: the volleyball team had three possessions this season alone. He went to Valley Point, and was very confused as to what his view might be from there. All of the ignored geniuses and problem children in the Morning Tavern made him for a cop the second he walked in, but they were nice about it. Everybody’s got something wrong with them, they all figured. Creepy Ernie measured his inseam. He got to know the neighborhood.

When Officer Rodriguez smiled, he only did it with the left side of his mouth, but he simultaneously displayed a deep dimple in his right cheek, and all the whores down on Eighth Avenue found that appealing, and when they learned his first name was Romeo, then the deal was done; he was offered many freebies, which he refused politely, and even blushed a little bit.

The LAPD, No, Not That One had many specialties–the specialest, as a matter of fact–but first you walked the street. There was no undercover department any more: Little Aleppo just wasn’t that big a place, and everyone knew what all the cops looked like. The police have their pride, too, and you only get psyched up for a deep cover operation so many times to have it end in ten seconds when the the suspect says, “Stan, we all know it’s you.” The criminals were laughing at them. No more undercover work.

But there was the Airborne unit, which had a hot-air balloon and could only respond to crimes occurring in the direction of the wind. One of the prize assignments was Bell Lake, in the middle of the Verdance; it was both easy and relaxing to keep a lake free of crime, plus there was a guy with a cart full of Italian ices right there, the kind in the paper cup with the paddle-shaped wooden spoon. If you wanted action, you could join the S.W.A.T team. (Strategic Weaponry Against Turtlemonsters.) That was for the veterans. Rookies walked the beat for a couple of years.

Before stopping in the bookstore with no title to meet Mr. Venable, Officer Rodriguez had walked up and back Main Drag showing his face, with its warped smile and incorrectly-placed dimple and regrettable glasses. He had met a lot of people so far, but not in his uniform, and he wanted to present himself officially. Many of the shopkeepers acted as if they had never met him before, which he credited to the change in clothes, but can also be ascribed to the reflexive lying that Little Aleppians do when they talk to cops.

Everyone was very nice to him, though. Had Officer Rodriguez been a bit more scruffed up by the world, he might have attached “suspiciously” to the beginning of the word “nice,” but he tried to assume the best of people. He got a free coffee at Java’s, and a smoothie on the house from Guava’s, and he tossed the latter cup in the trash before he opened the door to the bookstore, which made a little bell go TINKadink.

“To the traditionalist, the dawn is an insult.”

“What?” he said to the uncombed lump behind the book-conquered desk on a raised platform on the left side of the store.  He said his name was Mr. Venable, and when Officer Rodriguez asked if he had a first name, Mr. Venable said, “Of course I do,” and then started talking about something else. They talked about cop books–Ed McBain and Joseph Wambuagh and Moses Wendler–and then he asked Mr. Venable if was aware that several of the volumes on the shelf were glowing, to which he replied, “Of course I am,” and then said that the store was closing and to get out.

Two more stores and then an Italian ice, he thought, and went into the sock rental place run by a guy named Leslie Westerbrook, where there was a young man with a shaved head and a gun, who was so surprised to see a cop walk into the store he was robbing that he shot Officer Rodriguez in the head.

That night, the Main Drag swelled and the Salt Wharf emptied, no freight accepted. Leslie Westerboork knew that Officer Rodriguez’ glasses were evidence, but they had slid under the counter and the cops investigating the scene had not found them; the right arm had broken off. Leslie put them in the window of the sock rental and it was not long before all of Little Aleppo turned up. People would walk through the crowd, everyone was polite and quiet, and put a token on the sidewalk–flowers, a few counterfeit pennies–and then they’d fade back into the crowd and though the Main Drag was wide and there was room, people stood so that their shoulders touched, to a friend or a stranger. We are at our most human when we are together; we are most savage alone.

Later that night, when he saw that the crowd had thinned, Mr. Venable opened the bottom drawer of his desk, where he kept the black tie he wore to funerals. It was still knotted, and he slipped it over his head, and tried to comb his hair with his hands. As he walked around his desk, he picked up a paperback copy of Let’s Hear it for the Deaf Man by Ed McBain. Officer Rodriguez had named that one as his favorite of the 87th Precinct books, and Mr. Venable noted that it was an odd choice. The bad guy gets away.

Mr. Venable slipped the book into the waist pocket of his black jacket and fidgeted with his tie, and then he cursed God, and then he tried to comb his hair with his hands again. The door went TINKadink as he left, and he thought that maybe if he got a stronger lock, then he could cage all the unhappy endings, shut them up in the bookstore with no title, and then he could burn it down with all them inside.

He caught a glimpse of himself in the windowpane, but pretended that he didn’t, and then he turned up his collar against the chill and walked the beat on the Main Drag in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America

There has always been a movie theater in Little Aleppo, but very few customers showed up before the invention of electricity. A community is made up of people, but a neighborhood is built out of bodegas and pizzerias and friendly crossing guards. A neighborhood has a soapbox preacher on the corner wailing at the top of his lungs about Hell, whom everyone at least pretends to respect, and a drunk next to him who isn’t bothering anyone, whom everyone looks down on. A neighborhood has a storefront that churns through businesses three, four, five a year, and a bar that’s too loud at night, and a school that’s too loud in the morning. A neighborhood has a barbershop and a bookstore, and it also has a movie theater, which has been run by the Incandescente family for a hundred years. It is called The Tahitian.

(This was not the first choice for the name. Gussy Incandescente was like many Americans in that she did not speak a word of French, but believed it to be the fanciest of all the languages. Luckily, one of her projectionists had been raised in Montreal and helped her pick the most exotic and high-toned name for her cinema. Unluckily, that projectionist secretly despised Gussy and the name he helped her come up with was “The Merde” and had it not been for the intervention of a passing Tahitian named Pomore Ponui, that would have been on the marquee. The projectionist was fired and in tribute to Pomore, the place was named The Tahitian. Also, Gussy’s idiot brother had recently bought several hundred slightly-fire-damaged tiki torches, and everything just kinda came together.)

The Tahitian was a palace. It sat a thousand customers, two thousand if they were all Siamese twins, and the seats were made of blood-red velour so thick that you could write your name with your finger, and then erase it with your palm. The orchestra pit was half-under the stage, which was under the 100-foot screen, which was behind a curtain that was drawn and opened before the main feature. Families and respectable types sat in the floor seats, single men and the quietly disreputable were confined to the mezzanine, which was split in half by the projectionist’s booth, and there was also a balcony. We’ll get back to the balcony.

It was a nickelodeon at first, but there were several others within a streetcar’s ride, so Gussy concocted a plan, which Pomore –whom she had married–talked her out of because the plan was to set fire to all the streetcars. Instead, The Tahitian would charge four-and-a-half cents for a ticket, but only sell two at a time. The strength of this plan was bolstered by the fact that Gussy’s idiot brother had recently bought several tons of counterfeit pennies that they could give out as change. Gussy and Pomore bought several pieces of lakefront property with the proceeds from that idea, and the fake coins still pop up in Little Aleppo cash registers to this day.

Shorts at first just like Vaudeville, one after the other, men robbing banks and men robbing trains and men robbing stagecoaches; some of the reels would have a lady in them, and others would have a dog. These were silent films, of course, but the theater was anything but: Little Aleppo audiences have always believed that the movies were a form of living theater. There were vendors bellowing in the aisles about their old-timey food–eels and meat pies and pickled measles–and the crowd sang like South American soccer fans along with the popular songs of the day, as played by the 5-14 piece orchestra.

(The precise number of musicians that might turn up on any given night was dependent on an almost-infinite permutation of factors: too drunk, too sober, not able to cop, pissed off a cop, pawned their instrument, pawned someone else’s instrument and got his ass kicked, or just plum forgot. One summer, the orchestra went on strike after they discovered Gussy’s checks were just as good as her pennies. The work stoppage lasted several weeks until a very large man from the Musician’s Union visited and informed Gussy that, unless the musicians were paid, he would set the building on fire. She paid them. The large man then turned to the musicians and informed them that, unless the union was paid, he would set them on fire. And that’s the story of how The Tahitian became a union shop.)

Gussy and Pomore saw the talkies arrive, which were very popular, and then the screamies, which were not. By the time color saturated the screen, they were fading out, and the two of them moved to Palm Springs and lived in a house shaped like a flying saucer that they called Penny Lane. Their son, Irving Incandescente-Ponui, took over The Tahitian on the morning of Friday, October 29th, 1929. That afternoon, the Depression started. Irving tried calling his parents several times, but they would not pick up the phone.

Irving needed a plan, but if there’s one thing guys named Irving are good at, it’s coming up with a plan; his was the Good Life. Little Aleppo had always been broke, but now it was poor: the former is the low ebb between windfalls; the latter is adrift in the doldrums. Men did not have the money to afford barrels, and so stood nude but for the suspenders draped pointlessly over their shoulders. Women sold their children, and then themselves, which produced more children, which they then sold. Many soup kitchens opened, and Soup’s Kitchen opened, which was a taco truck that Soup was living in, and I don’t know why he has the Time Sheath, but rest assured that I am going to speak to him about that.

So Irving gussied the place up, with no help from Gussy, who was still avoiding his calls. He bought a cadre of orphans and trained them in posture, and smiling, and using flashlights to point at things, and then he bought them all uniforms with epaulets the size of snow tires, and dinky round hats with chinstraps, and made them ushers. The orchestra was long gone, but Irving spent some real money and bought an organ. It rose from beneath the stage, pipes emerging first, and then the glorious machine: it had four keyboards, and buttons you pushed, and levers you pulled, and the organist had his back to audience, but his bench was hollow and you could see his skinny legs search for the right foot pedal, completely independent of his arms. Only rarely did the mechanism that raised and lowered the organ fail.

During the Second World War Two, no man was admitted to The Tahitian unless he was wearing a military uniform and smoking. A woman had to wear a floral print dress and have drawn lines up the back of her legs with a pencil because she did not have enough ration tickets for nylons.

Irving had a good run. He considered himself an impresario, and if you define that word as “someone who can put on a good show with a bad act,” then he was. He would try anything, especially after teevee came around, to bring in a crowd: he wired the seats to zap the patrons during a truly execrable horror movie called Satan’s Lightning, and everyone was having a great time until that poor woman spilled her soda on the wires. To Irving’s credit, he reupholstered that seat in black.

In 1958, The Tahitian was converted into a drive-in movie theater, but not on purpose. Irving took this a sign, because how could he not? The Tahitian went to his son, David O. Incandescente-Ponui, who was a complete asshole in every way. He was cheap and lazy and didn’t know anyone’s name. (Irving hadn’t known anyone’s name, either, but Irving was known to get lost in his own office, so people didn’t mind; David O. didn’t know anyone’s name because he didn’t give a shit.)

The old palace collapsed in on itself slowly. The ushers, who were in their fifties and had–most of them–never even been outside the walls of The Tahitian, were expelled like eunuchs from the Forbidden City. The organ was lowered for the last time, and the keyboardist sold for parts, and the curtains stolen by a semi-defunct choogly-type band to use as a backdrop. David O. wouldn’t pay for the big films, so the program got progressively skankier: action flicks, and chop-socky, and finally it was just a fuck theater full of pud-pullers, the insolvent, and locals who had come in specifically to vomit on the carpet.

The Tahitian screened Debbie Fucks Everything That Moves on September 15th, 1983, and then it closed. David O. was found stabbed to death in the middle of Little Aleppo, and all the eyewitnesses agreed that–while none of them had seen anything–it definitely wasn’t a group of elderly men in tattered uniforms with epaulets the size of snow tires, and dinky round hats with chinstraps. The crime remains unsolved.

But just like a rose grows from shit, David O. had a daughter, and she was a good egg; naturally, he hated her. Her idiot brother got the money (what there was of it) and Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, got The Tahitian. She figured the old girl just needed a new coat of paint, and also a new everything else. She did not have the money to fix it up, but she was smart and articulate and driven and good with people. None of those qualities will cover the cost of renovating a theater, though, and she could see her ruined birthright through the window of the bookstore with no title, where she worked for Mr. Venable, who liked Gussy very much, and showed it by speaking to her sarcastically and firing her at least once a week.

“You think you own a theater, and you think this because you are dumb. I think you own a Historical Landmark, and I think this because I am smart. Did you notice how I capitalized those words? You’re fired,” Mr. Venable mumbled into his chest without taking his eyes off a copy of Pride or Prejudice, which he enjoyed hate-reading. Gussy had never known anyone else who heckled books.

When the projector first snaps on, that sudden burst of photons from the lens nailing dust mites like they were escaped convicts against the prison wall, and the film pops and whirs green scars microscopic on the stock but twenty feet across on the screen and time stops and the movie starts: that’s what Gussy’s head did, and back among the shelves there was a book that was glowing.

“Didn’t I tell you to throw out those bioluminescent books? They creep out the customers! And didn’t I fire you?”

So Gussy grabbed the glowing hardcover and pretended to throw it out but really put it on another shelf just to annoy Mr. Venable, which is where she found a book entitled Starting a Non-Profit Corporation and Raising Money from Rich Fuckers to Save a Historical Landmark for Dummies, and had she not grown up in Little Aleppo, she would not have believed the coincidence.

It turns out that she was good at raising money from rich fuckers: Gussy could schmooze and finagle, and wheedle and cajole; all kind of fun verbs. Soon the renovation was underway full steam and she had to quit working at the bookstore with no title, but she still stops in once a week so Mr. Venable can fire her. Gussy shored up The Tahitian’s bones, and restored all the sconces and hangings and carvings that her great-grandmother had insisted on, and–just like her great-grandmother–refused to learn what any of it was actually called, referring to it collectively as “all the fancy shit on the walls.”

The raccoons that had established a semi-advanced society under the stage were captured and later sold to a drummer, and after many hours of being cursed at by men with dirty hands, the organ, that glorious machine, rose from the shit and let out a blast that would have sent the walls of Jericho tumbling down and did, in fact, collapse a small portion of the theater. Soon there was a screen behind the organ, and a curtain right in front the same blood-red as the thick velour on all of the seats except for one, which was black.

Everyone in Little Aleppo came for the Grand Reopening, which was so anticipated that general consensus had capitalized it. General Consensus, a former English teacher who went insane and now walks around in an army helmet with his dick out, argued that you weren’t allowed to just go around capitalizing things willy-nilly, but no one listened to him. Gussy had arranged for spotlights outside, the giant ones on the truck that swivel like mambo dancers, and she saved some money by hiring Precarious Lee to arrange the lights, but Precarious may have overestimated the number of lumens required for the job, and it is entirely within the realm of possibility that several nearby structures were set ablaze, and also maybe a couple planes were downed, but that’s not the point of this story and mistakes were made and lessons were learned and life goes on.

Though there was a new ticket machine, run by computers all modern-like, Gussy had printed old-fashioned tickets for the Grand Reopening that zipped out of a little slot, and then you walked into the lobby with all the wonderfully, cheerfully, joyfully fake Tiki bullshit and a ceiling so high that the sky was jealous. While you were in the lobby, you could get yourself a snack, and as you entered the auditorium, you handed your ticket to a tiny, ancient man in a brand-new uniform with epaulets the size of snow tires, and a dinky round hat with a chinstrap.

Precarious sat with Big-Dicked Sheila up in the balcony, which had resisted all attempts at gentrification. You could order tapas to your couch in the mezzanine, and there were cupholders everywhere you looked, but the balcony stayed weird. Reprobates, snorers, the criminally smelly: these were the balcony patrons. Knife fights were rarer than they used to be, but the number of stabbings remained troublingly high. Folks fell off a lot, and it was good forty feet down, but these victims of gravity were invariably so fucked up that they were loose as rag dolls when they hit the ground, and walked away unharmed. It was a balcony half-full/half-empty situation.

Gussy had chosen the movie for opening night, and she had picked a seemingly odd one, but she had her reasons. It was Sullivan’s Travels by Preston Sturges, and it was made a long time ago, back when men were named things like Preston Sturges. The movie was about a director who made comedies, successful ones. Like all funny people, the director was a self-pitying and pretentious little shit, and so he quits making comedies and strikes out across America to meet the common man, so he could tell the story of their suffering. The common man hates when fancy fuckers pull that kind of bullshit, and they beat him half to death and steal his money, and he winds up in a labor camp.

And the guards screen one of his movies. The prisoners–the wretched of the earth, missing teeth and without a dollar to their names–laugh. And keep laughing, despite the armed guards glowering and the uncomfortable seats that most certainly are not made of blood-red velour so thick you could write your name with your finger. The director remembered something from a book he’d read once: the poor will always be with us. Least you can do is tell ’em a fucking joke.

Precarious was bored–there were no car chases–but Sheila liked it, and they smiled at Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, on the way out. Creepy Ernie had fallen out of the balcony, but he was fine. Mr. Venable did not fire her. The Tahitian lived again, a palace in the middle of the weird side of town, and there were movies every night again in Little Aleppo, which is just another neighborhood in America.

There were no powers attached to the title of Mayor of Little Aleppo, which may be why people fought so viciously for the job. The residents accepted as true Spider-Man’s maxim that with great power came great responsibility, but they innately understood the obverse: with no power comes no responsibility. Little Aleppians saw the mayoralty as a consequence-free nickname, plus you became steward of the Penguin of Leadership.

(Letting the penguin die was the only offense guaranteed to get you impeached: former mayors have been caught making love to rental cars in public, re-introducing potato blight to Ireland, and secretly selling off the community center to businessmen. Luckily, a group of diverse children led by a hot white lady danced their asses off in the talent show, distracting the businessmen enough for another group of diverse children to go to their houses and hold their families hostage until they called off the deal.)

Mr. Venable, who owned the bookstore with no title, had been working on a history of the neighborhood for years: there was too much history, that was the problem. When a place has been a place for a long time, it sheds skin. Leaves hair, and fingerprints, and the imprint of a boot in the mud, and you can piece it together just like the detectives on the teevee if you look carefully. There were diaries from the sailors that lived in the Hotel at Chalk Wharf; and back copies of The Cenotaph, the old daily broadsheet, on both microfiche and microfinch, which is an inherently flawed storage medium in that it tends to fly away or die; and quotidian flyers, saved for reasons no one could ever tell you: lost cat, found dog, whose fucking ostrich is this?

First-person sources, a historian’s dream, voluminous but strangely patchy, and though he did not tell anyone this, Mr. Venable was quite convinced that Little Aleppo had simply not existed during certain time periods. He was also sure–he would testify to this in court–that the entire neighborhood had spent July of 1982 in the Holy Roman Empire. Mr. Venable had lived and worked in the area long enough to no longer be surprised by neither magical realism nor realistic magic, but that one was a new one by him, and he had a theory that it was intentional.

As far as he could tell, elections began somewhen in the 1850’s, right after white folks settled the area. People had been living on the land since the Clovis, but had never felt the need to make campaign speeches to each other before America showed up. There was a lot still left from those days, and Mr. Venable catalogued it all. He read letters from candidates to associates back East requesting troops be sent to aid in their campaigns, quite a few of them as a matter of fact; he noted that a man named Archimedes Cole had run in 1867 on a platform of “I promise I will not send for troops,” and then further noted that his opponent had responded by sending for troops.

(It should be mentioned that women had the vote since the neighborhood’s beginnings, though not due to an anachronistically-progressive nature of the residents, but because there were at least a half-dozen witches in the area who thought they should be allowed to vote, and the men were all so scared of them that they agreed.)

Little Aleppo got civilized over time, and electioneering via cannon became frowned upon. The dawn of the 20th century saw the neighborhood follow the country’s lead and reject open violence for open corruption. At first there was chaos: Mr. Venable read that vote trading and outright sale was so common that, in 1908, a commodities market dealing strictly in votes was founded, and he closed his eyes and predicted that this led to bubble and devastating crash, and then he turned the page and read that there was a bubble and devastating crash.

This begat the rise of the Little Aleppo political machines, massive steam-powered robots that rampaged through the neighborhood on Election Day herding people into polling places; these proved cost-prohibitive and were soon abandoned in favor of organized groups of people trading favors for votes for patronage for bribes. The most powerful was led by Boss Paisley, who had millions of votes backing his plays, and he ruled Little Aleppo for decades, until everyone realized that only ten thousand people lived there and he had been printing ballots in his basement. Unsurprisingly, he was elected mayor the next year, as everyone was rather impressed he had kept the scam going for so long.

Mr. Venable did his research after he had closed the bookstore with no title: the shop would be dark except for the bioluminescent books, which he does not recall ordering, but nevertheless were all over the place, and his old-fashioned green reader’s lamp on the desk. He would clear a space in the jumble with a forceful sweep of his arm, and set the boxes from the Historical Society in the clearing. (Mr Venable called his basement the Historical Society, but he did not tell anyone this.) Muffled metal clinked in cardboard, and he exhumed all the dead people’s stuff from the box and laid it on his blotter, which was the same shade of green as his lamp.

Buttons and pins, the occasional t-shirt or half-rotted straw boater with a tattered and yellowing paper band around the crown advising you to vote for Fuzzy, who was a tabby cat and won handily before being quickly impeached. (Fuzzy killed and devoured the Penguin of Leadership at his swearing-in ceremony.) If you set the campaign swag in order, Mr. Venable noticed with a smile, then you could see larger stories: moral decency was the theme of the slogans and ads for a few years, and then all of a sudden everything had rainbows all over it, and you didn’t need to check the census figures to see what happened, but he did anyway.

There were plenty of vicious campaigns over the years–the debate in 1938 ended with the candidates setting one another on fire–and just as many ludicrous ones: both a bowl of cereal and a stuffed yak ran and served successful terms. And then, as it was Little Aleppo, there was the weird bullshit, such as the Schism of 1897 that saw nine Aleppians declare themselves Mayor and accuse each other of being Anti-Mayors; turmoil raged until someone had the clever idea of setting them all on fire.

But for all his information, Mr. Venable didn’t have a story yet. Where was the greater theme, the overarching narrative, the ligamentuary fiber? Rascals, prophets, lunatics, megalomaniacs, peabrains, and a stuffed yak. Mr. Venable poured another cup of coffee and thought that his fellow Aleppians might have been addicted to electing the wrong person, and then he knew what his story was.

It was the voters’ fault, Mr. Venable realized as he began scratching out notes on a white legal pad. Little Aleppo thought politics was a sideshow, Mr. Venable thought, and Little Aleppo loved nothing more than a good sideshow. The problem was the people.

“Someone should do something about those fuckers,” Mr. Venable said out loud in the darkness.

“You’re just realizing this?” a voice answered him from the aforementioned darkness.

“Hey! Who’s that?”

…

“No one. Just us books.”

“Pipe down.”

He packed the pins and buttons that were on the desk back into the box, and set the box on the floor to his left, and began to write a book that–had he known where to look–was already on a shelf in the bookstore with no title.