Tag: Little Aleppo (Page 2 of 20)

For many semesters, a debate has been ongoing at Harper College about humanity and its priorities. The first structure we erected was a house–this is self-evident– but what was the second? The History Department backs what is called the Church Hypothesis. Worship comes first with homo sapiens: twas ever thus, the Historians say. (Historians are prone to using phrases like Twas ever thus, which is why they get invited to so few parties.) The Sociologists, who did get invited to shindigs, preferred the Tavern Theory. History is something that happened while people were drinking, the Sociologists often said. The Archaeology Department claimed to know the definitive answer, then tried to barter the information for more shovels and khaki shorts; they were ignored. The Chemists asked if anyone had considered dissolving the problem in acid; they were similarly ignored, but more politely. (Everyone on campus was a bit scared of the Chemistry Department, possibly because the Chemistry Department liked that everyone was a bit scared of them, and so every few years would “accidentally” aerosolize herpes or something.) Little Aleppians ignore academic quarrels until they turn into court cases or riots, and did so here.

The neighborhood had the answer. Bar. Bar won, bar none. Bar was first, second, third, fifth, and sixth, and fourth was not a church, but a hardware store. Little Aleppians got around to God, but they needed a drink first.

There was the Wayside Inn, which was almost verging on classy (except for the sexual slavery). Right down the Main Drag was Shakespeare Phil’s place, which catered to your more degenerated of gamblers and so eschewed whores as distractions; and the Clay Pigeon, where the owner had rigged up a contraption to chill beer–Our Beer Is Cold As Dick! was what the sign out front read–that exploded regularly; and Dale’s Room, where even locals with the temerity not to be white were allowed to drink; and a small but sturdy saloon in Chinatown whose name nobody wrote down before it was torched in a race riot.

La Salon Intempertioux opened in 1885, when far fewer people spoke French; the carpets were from Paris (Texas) and the bartender had a rambunctious mustache. Can-can dancers could, and did. Verna’s opened the same year, and had a dirt floor which patrons would leave their effluences upon. The Büntz brewery had a biergarten attached (as did the high school for a few years in the 1970’s, but that’s a whole different story), and the Parker Bar had a rooftop lounge, which was open for well over an hour before customers started pissing onto pedestrians below. Spooling Antwerp’s was good for a fight, but you might get your hair stolen. The Fantic, which was on Fantic, served tequila and the bartenders spoke Spanish; it was a swell night out except for when the cops would come by and beat people up. Nobody in the neighborhood felt bad in the slightest for drinkers slipped a Mickey Finn at the Choral Hydration.

In 1900, you had the Hotel Bar at the Norwegian. Big-time writers and big-game hunters drank there, and diplomats with briefcases cuffed to their wrists, and men who said they were “businessmen” and left it at that. The lion tamer, when the circus was in town. Women who knew many horses. Actors, but only the right kind, and not too Jewish. Giorgio was at the bar: he was known locally as Gorgeous George, and not ironically. He was black-haired and blue-eyed, which is a combination that short-circuits onlookers’ brains, and tall, and he had an Italian accent that other Italians would have pegged as hickish, but Little Aleppians thought was the height of sophistication. Giorgio went by only his first name because the Norwegian’s owner, Duke Dorleans, was a man of propriety and custom, and so the bartender was called by his first name, the chef went by “Chef,” and everyone else was “Boy.”

Kellerhaus opened in 1902, in the basement of a workshop on the Downside that produced counterfeit glue. The adhesive was less adulterated than the whiskey; no one came to the Kellerhaus for the drinks. They came for the pit. They came for the rats. They came to see King. 100 in six minutes was his best. All present noted the lack of blood on King’s muzzle, and agreed it was the sign of a true athlete. The dog was awarded a beefsteak for his efforts, and the rats were burned in a ditch out back. The crowd was the same as the Norwegian, mostly.

Corner bars. Lukie’s and Smitty’s and the Tuscaloosa. Nickel beers and pickled eggs, and a place to put your foot up; Americans have always demanded the ability. Juke Joints. Spartan’s and Big Lou’s Opry. Piano and a drummer. Sweaty-type places with tin roofs.

Prohibition began in 1920, the same day that the Irving Club started pouring. First nightclub in the neighborhood. Shows nightly, and then the tables would disappear from the dance floor and the Irving Orchestra would play hot jazz for the tipsy-doodles to flap about to. It was the kind of place they wrote about in gossip columns; hell, it was the kind of place in which gossip columns were written: a waiter would bring the telephone to Darcine Fast’s table, and she would get the Cenotaph on the line, dictate her copy. Popper Girls came by the tables, so-called because their cameras had flashbulbs the size of basketballs that went POPzhweeeeee when they would snap you and your wife. (The first skill a Popper Girl needed to learn was how to work the camera, but how to spot a man who was with a woman he’d rather not be photographed next to was a close second.) Around the corner, in a rented corner of a basement, was a makeshift dark room; the girls would, at the end of a roll of film, dash from the club to the darkroom and cook up glossy black-and-white portraits, then dash back to the club and sell them for two dollars a print.

The Irving was owned by Billy McGlory. Every place that served alcohol in Little Aleppo was owned by Billy McGlory, although “owned” is not the precise term. Perhaps something like “possessed a controlling interest” is better, as his name rarely appeared in any paperwork. He was an egalitarian publican; no matter how much money you had in your pocket, Billy had a drink that was exactly that price. Whiskey and tequila that came in via the Salt Wharf for the rich folks, and leppy for the poor. (Leppy was a distilled liquor that got its name because–as the saying went–“the only thing y’know for sure is that it’s made in Little Aleppo.” Was it made from corn? Wheat? Potatoes? A guy named Lou? This information was unknowable, as was how any given bottle would taste or the effects it would have. There was the occasional death, or blinding. But you could buy a pint for a dime, so: leppy.)

Little Aleppo: Everything We Can Prove notes the dearth of records directly concerning drinking establishments during the Prohibition, but makes a sturdy case via newspaper reports, diary entries, correspondence, and various other sources that the number of bars remained consistent throughout the Volstead Act’s enforcement. The cops weren’t a problem, unless you didn’t pay them. The feds would pull their dicks out every month or so and raid a place, but Billy would always get word and send his guys over to replace the actual stock with bottles full of water. The next day, he’d sell the booze back to the bar owner. It wasn’t the kind of business you kept detailed records about.

The raids stopped after the 21st Amendment passed in ’33, but that was about it. Right after ratification, a few guys told Billy that they would be buying their alcohol from another purveyor. No hard feelings and all, Billy. It’s business. Billy smiled, and shook their hands, and that evening decided which of the group annoyed him the most, and then had his brother Liam kill the guy that very night. No hard feelings. It is in that fashion that Billy McGlory shifted careers from bootlegger to wholesaler.

The Depression hit Little Aleppo in a way that was both fair and not: everybody lost some money, but some money was all the poor people had in the first place. There was talk in the barrooms of Communism, though the bartenders remained stalwart believers in (and enforcers of) Capitalism, and several putsches took place at the Büntz bierhaus, but none of them had historical repercussions. The Irving Club changed its name to the Menefreghista when the man known locally as The Friend became the new non-owner, and when the war started, two choice tables would be occupied every show by uniformed men and their dates. The Friend picked up the tab, and even supplied the dates. Always good for business to be patriotic, he thought.

The Friend also had a stake in the USO Bar during the war, and much preferred that the servicemen stayed there. They didn’t have any money, first of all, and were constantly fighting or breaking into musical numbers. (The USO Bar was not legally–or in any way, really–connected to the United Service Organization, which did not serve alcohol. The Friend thought that was downright un-American. The boys are defending our country; least you could do is offer ’em a drink, so he opened up a new joint right next to the actual USO hall, named it the USO Bar, charged the boys a dime for a cold beer, and then ignored all the letters from the military’s lawyers.

There were experimental places all through the years. Candle’s was children’s birthday-themed, and each drink came gift-wrapped; a sudden spike in ribbon prices drove them to bankruptcy, along with the fact that no one would ever return for a second visit. Sunsplash On Your Goolies was not helping itself with the name, and no one enjoyed the glass-walled toilets. (This is inaccurate: almost no one enjoyed the glass-walled toilets. A small number of people enjoyed them far too enthusiastically.) Fausto’s Den was billed as for swingers, but what that meant was that Fausto would take his pants off when he got liquored up, which happened at around 7 pm. He had a long, skinny dick that he would helicopter around and slap on the back of patrons’ necks; nobody like it, not even folks who were into that sort of thing. Some nights, he’d jack it in one of the booths. Sweet Ellen’s Banjo Fancy was a beer-and-a-shot-and-a-dozen-banjo-players kind of place, and the business’ demise is the single instance in all American case law to feature the phrase “mercy arson.”

The Hula Hula Lounge on Belly Street did better. Still there to this day. On Belly Street, which is just far enough into the Downside to make rich folks feel like they were having an adventure, but not so deep that they would actually get into one. The world’s only ukebox–a Wurlitzer filled with Don Ho singles–and the sign outside advertised the scorpionest bowls in the neighborhood. No one had any clue what the fuck that meant, but all who sampled the communal cocktail were forced to agree that, yes, the bowl was very scorpiony. Similarly featured were the waiters, who were described on a permanent display as being Fresh From Samoa! (Leading observant patrons to marvel at how much Samoan accents sound like Mexican guys saying “brah” a lot.) Guy named Archie Canton owned it. Sat by the door and greeted his guests–Hello, thank you for your hula energy. Hello–and sometimes fell off the stool. Didn’t matter: the bar had become a pilgrimage, twice over. Crime nerds come by to sit at the table where Boss Tummy got it between the eyes, and rock nerds come by to see the bar The Snug sang about in their song Freaky Tiki, which almost made it onto the charts in ’76.

The Pampered Moose is still around, too, and just as unkillable, but not by cultural milestone: the Moose is directly next door to Harper College. It was a segregated facility: undergrads trying to get laid on the ground floor, and faculty (also trying to get laid) on the second. (Grad students were, by tradition, allowed upstairs upon invitation. The professors had–consistently and relentlessly–always abused this tradition by allowing and banishing grad students for petty reasons, political reasons, and no reason at all. By the end of most nights, post-docs and master’s candidates would be crashing into one another on the stairs.) Moose heads jank out of the walls, real ones, massive. Candy shot ’em and Spud stuffed ’em. She was a hunter and he was a taxidermist. Candy and Spud owned the place; they had a good thing going.

(There are, as you might expect from members of an institution that introduced the concept of “Surprise Bolshevism” into the discourse, occasional rousing discussions about the morality of the moose heads. The Philosophy Department has accused everyone of speciesism; the English Department has demanded Philosophy stop using that word. Queer Studies had almost publicly denounced the trophies several times over the years; the lesbians were all for it, but the gay guys loved the moose and sabotaged each attempt. The Chemistry Department noted that the moose were not perfectly aligned, and they were fixed immediately.)

No students to argue about the armadillos on the walls of the Armadillo Room, and also there were no armadillos on the walls. Folks got fucked up in the Armadillo Room. Could be that another patron would do it to you all of a sudden, or maybe you and the bartender would collaborate on it all night, but you were getting fucked up in the Armadillo Room.

Everyone in Little Aleppo had been there once. Maybe twice. Any more than that was suspect. It was where disgraced teachers hung out. Failed actors. Stuttering con artists. Men who sold fictitious real estate; women missing fingers. Child actors now grown, with faces warped yet familiar. The lowest-level criminals you can imagine. Lower than that. Lower. Guys who tackled supermarket cashiers, that sort of thing, the worst kind of miscreant. The Armadillo was a mean drunk.

It was also directly across the street from police headquarters, and so the denizens of the Armadillo would brawl with the LAPD (No, Not That One) semi-annually. Sometimes the cops would start it; they’d saunter in three and four across, and the biggest one would cuss out the bartender around until some drunk dope threw a punch; the rest of the force would come rushing in through all doors at that point. Other years, the patrons would walk across the street, knock on the cops’ door, and say, “Wanna fight?” And usually–just to make sure that the answer is “yes”–somebody would coldcock the officer who answered the door.

It was tough to find a bar in Little Aleppo without a coke dealer, but the Armadillo Room was the only place in the neighborhood with a PCP dealer. Dedicated PCP guy, too. Not “I can make a call.” Had it on him.

God protects fools and drunks, we’re told, and the Armadillo Room was full of foolish drunks and drunken fools and they belched out their treason and plans; this sort of thing seeps into the masonry. Buildings become infected. Rooms redouble upon themselves. And thus the walls did become strong and the loads become bearable, and so in the Quake of 8- received nary a scratch.

You know about the Wayside Inn. The second one, the one without the slavery. (There were many patrons over the years who enjoyed role-playing at a master-slave relationship, but it wasn’t the same.) Manfred Pierce opened up in ’64. Journalists and historians would write articles about him after the fire. Little Aleppo: Everything We Can Prove called him a “radical capitalist.” Manfred would’ve liked that.

And you know about the Morning Tavern. Opens at dawn, closes at nightfall. For the real special drinkers. Bartender had inky-black hair and inked-up arms, She was in a tank top that had a duck on it; it was giving the middle finger, and fraying letters underneath read DUCK YOU.

“At first, we’re in caves. Or just huddling under a tree like an asshole.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said.

The bar was sparse, and the young man was clean-cut. He looked over-educated. No socks.

“Birds and beavers and bees figured out how to build themselves houses, but humans are primates and none of our cousins have managed it. It was a paradigmatic type of idea.”

“Gorillas just sit there in the rain and look miserable,” the bartender said. “I saw it on a documentary. It was a little pathetic.”

“I mean, they pile some leaves on top of each other, but that’s not what we’re talking about. A structure. A permanent, enclosed, space. You gotta manipulate the shit out of your environment to produce such a thing. This isn’t digging a burrow or wriggling into a found shell. Building requires second and third-level thinking. It was where we zagged when the rest of the animal kingdom zigged,”

“Our original sin.”

“Nah. We were fucked since we learned to stand.”

He was drinking Braddock’s. She took his empty glass, brought another, filled it. He raised it to her, smiled, sipped.

“The first building was used for shelter. Shit used to eat us. Remember that: shit used to eat us. And, you know, no one wants to get rained on, so the first one was for shelter. The first ones for were sleeping in. Has to be.”

“Has to be,” the bartender half-agreed.

“But what was the second? What was the first communal structure? The first gathering place? It was either a church or a bar. There’s not too many other options, are they? Wasn’t gonna be a Dairy Queen. Church or a bar. Which came first?”

“You got a cigarette?”

“I quit.”

“Me, too, but I want one.”

“Church or bar?”

“Or. Or, or, or. You clever kids and your taxonomies.”

The bartender walked away from the man, down the el-shaped bar towards a regular who could be counted on for a smoke. No matter how much money you had in your pocket, there was a drink for that price in the Morning Tavern, which is just another bar in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Squid and humans have the same eyeballs, just about, and koalas and humans both got fingerprints. There’s a prehensility to all sorts of creatures’ tails. A scientist could swap out a woodpecker’s tongue for an anteater’s, though that might be illegal or against laboratory rules. Dolphins and bats! Sonar, the both of ’em, even though they’ve nothing else in common except the inability to do jumping jacks. This is called convergent evolution. Cultures display convergent evolution, too. Bushido and chivalry are the same bullshit, and folks on every continent figured out independently how to let fruit rot just enough to turn it into booze.

And then there is the problem of corpses. The ancients of the Canary Islands, the Egyptians, and the Aztecs all came up with the same mummification techniques; the primitives of Europe, Australia, the Levant had easily-turned earth, and so they invented burials; the first inhabitants of the Aegean Sea and the Carpathian Mountains liked to play with matches. In what is now Iran and what is Tibet, the living let the vultures take care of the dead.

So, too, in the valley between the ocean and the hills that would one day be called Little Aleppo.

“That’s me.”

“No. That’s your body.”

“I live in my body,” Cannot Swim said.

The eyeballs, so like a squid’s, were already gone, along with most of the softer bits of the face, and the neck was a mess. Belly. Genitals. Vultures go for the soft meat first.

“You don’t want to be in there right now,” Here And There said.

Cannot Swim was a Pulaski, as was she, and so did not have a detailed view of the afterlife. Had he been Christian, he would have expected clouds and sainted doormen, or perhaps flames and torment. Your everyday Ancient Greek would be looking for a guy with a boat. The Pulaski were vaguer. One has a spirit, an essence, an inhabitant, and when one dies, it becomes part of the natural world. They did not care to flesh out the idea more than that, and children who questioned the concept would be told the story of Snakes Flee From Him.

One day, the adults would say, two young men were arguing. The first claimed that, when we die, our spirits are reborn into animals. No, no, no, the second said. When we die, we become one of the trees in the woods.

And though the two young men were good friends, they could not agree and quickly became cross with one another. Their arguments ruined the peace of the village. The elders could not sleep, and the men and women could not work, and the children could not play. Finally, the other Pulaski made the two young men go see Snakes Flee From Him, whom everyone knew was the wisest of them all.

So they did.

Each young man made his case, and Snakes Flee From Him listened carefully. When they finished, he was silent for a long moment, and then drew his knife.

I do not know which of you is right, Snakes Flee From Him said. Only the dead know.

He lay the knife in front of the two young men.

The first young man did not pick it up, and neither did the second young man.

So, Snakes Flee From Him said, I see that you are not as interested in the answer to your question as it seemed. One day, you will find out. We all will. Until then, cut the shit. Catch a fish, write a song. Make yourselves useful.

The tribe excarnated the dead–technically, the vultures did the excarnating–upon a sacred rock a third of the way up the highest of the seven hills that cleaved their home from America. When the prayers were said and the songs finished, the name of the dead was never spoken. The spirit returns to nature, and receives a new name from The Bear Who Is Always Pregnant. To call the dead by their former names would be an insult, and The Bear had told no living soul, so better to not say anything. The Pulaski tried their hardest not to insult nature; there were still monsters in the forest in those times.

So Cannot Swim was in uncharted territory, theologically speaking.

“Am I dead?”

“Apparently not entirely,” Here And There said.

“I feel strange.”

“I would imagine.”

“Does this happen a lot?”

“More than you’d imagine, less than you’d hope for.”

The two were standing–hovering lowishly is more correct–on a smallish plateau that contained a sacred rock about a third of the way up the highest of the seven hills. The condors had arrived, shoved the vultures from the meal. This was 18– and so California was greasy with condors, nine feet across and stinking like only an animal with no sense of smell could. The wind shifted and blew the stench towards the two Pulaski.

“Holy fuck,” Cannot Swim said, recoiled.

“They’re a whiffy bird.”

“This is what death smells like.”

“No, condors shit on their legs to keep ’em cool. This is what condor shit smells like.”

“Oh.”

Neither was see-through, but both were far more translucent than humans usually are.

“I am dead.”

“For a certain definition of the word, sure.”

“I was shot by the White.”

“Right in the face.”

“And that killed me.”

“It didn’t help,” Here And There shrugged. “Let’s say that getting shot in the face was not beneficial to you. That’s a fair statement.”

“You are not helping, either.”

“Cousin, I’ve never helped you.”

Here And There was Cannot Swim’s cousin, but only because there weren’t that many Pulaski; technically, everybody was everybody’s cousin. She had been an only child (this was common to shamans), and her parents had both died when she was young (this was common to shamans’ parents), and the members of the tribe old enough to remember which clan she was from didn’t like talking about her, because sometimes when you talked about her, she just appeared.

“Could you start?”

“Anything could happen.”

Anything could be provided at the Norwegian Hotel. In fact, it had been provided while you weren’t looking, and just the way you liked it, too. Without anything as uncouth as asking. Guests’ preferences were noted, recorded, respected. There were elevators, and not like the other two elevators in Little Aleppo, which were fake and would trap people inside to be beaten and robbed. Real elevators with real elevator operators: two per cab. It was in no way a two-man job, but that was the meaning of luxury. There was no room service at the Norwegian: it was guest service. We are, the hotel said, merely the background for your life. You are the star here. We are scenery; we exist so that you may live.

There were two telephones in the lobby, one at the desk and another in a private sanctum (filigreed, oak, custom) with a clever sliding door available to all guests; the hotel’s operator would get the local operator on the line, and they’d dial out together, and soon thereafter report on your calls to various interested parties.

Electric light. Not the first in the neighborhood when the hotel (re)opened in 1901, but the brightest. The glow blasted from too many windows. That is what the builders told Duke Dorleans during (re)construction.

“This is bishwah,” Duke told them. “Without windows, a soul cripples itself. They are integral.”

One cannot overstate how gloomy the past was, even during the day, and so Monsieur Dorleans knew that he had to (re)build the Norwegian Hotel to be light and airy in the day and . And thus: the windows and the electric lights.

The carpet was plush enough to have political opinions, but elegant enough to keep them to itself. There was more ivory than the waiting room of an elephant dentist. The glass that was supposed to be stained was stained miraculously; the glass that was not supposed to be stained was immaculately clean. The long, low desk in the lobby was made from thustled oak, which only grew in one North Carolina wood, and did so sporadically. The naked ladies in the art had the classiest titties anyone in Little Aleppo had ever laid eyes upon. None of it was the star.

Bathrooms. Each suite had its own private, indoor bathrooms with running hot and cold water, all hygienic-white with gleaming, unchipped porcelain; where the suites were overstuffed and soft and cozy, the bathrooms were stark and pure. They were clean. It was 1900, and this was madness. 92 bathrooms? My God, were there even 92 bathrooms in the entire neighborhood? Local pastors drew analogies between Dorleans’ hotel and the Flight of Icarus. At least one Town Father declared it was Communism, but, it being 1900 and all, no one knew what the hell he was talking about. Many believed it to be faluting of a high nature. Some of the wealthy on the Upside had installed water closets, but everybody else did as humans had been doing for thousands of years, which was pissing out windows and shitting in holes in the backyards.

There was to be no yard-shitting in the Norwegian Hotel, not once Duke Dorleans (re)built it.

The original owner’s name is unknown, but his place of origin is to be assumed; the first Norwegian opened in 18– as a tent with canvas-partitioned rooms and cots with rotten mattresses. It burned down immediately, killing three, one of whom was the very first mime to ever visit the neighborhood. Within days, construction had begun on a simple plank-and-beam structure, two stories, with a dining room and a kitchen. You could have your meals brought to your room, but you still had to shit in the backyard. Whitey Tonch ran the place; it would have been segregated had Little Aleppo been large enough. Burned down again in the Wayside Fire of 1871. Once more during reconstruction in 1872. Small fire in 1889, nothing too scary. The one in 1899 took half the block and twenty people, including most of the bucket brigade.

So it was 1900 and the Norwegian Hotel was (re)built again, with private bathrooms. Brick and iron this time, and the floorboards treated to make them incapable of sustaining flames, and the walls and crawlspaces stuffed with asbestos.

“The fuckers try burning my hotel, they get burned. I BURN THE FUCKERS!”

That was Duke Dorleans. He said it to a foreman who suggested a wood roof instead of the demanded tin with asphalt shingles. He was from Europe, that much was certain. He spoke French with a German accent, English with a French accent, and Spanish with a Portuguese accent. His suits were from London, his shoes were from Rome, and his haircut had been the inspiration for several cocktails and a light opera. No one knew whether “Duke” was his name or title: his guests never asked as it seemed rude, and his staff never asked because he was liable to start yelling about burning fuckers if you got him worked up.

There was also the dining room to attend to. Prior to the (re)build, tables were jammed together and food was served buffet-style. A local simpleton named Fuckface Archie did the cooking; Whitey didn’t buy the choicest cuts of meat, so Fuckface Archie made chili most of the time, and diners sat around farting their asses off. In their defense, it was the 19th century and there was very little to do. This was not what Duke Dorleans wanted for his hotel. Glamour. He would have glamour. There would be sexy and secretive assignations. Maybe a band in the corner. It was to be the first restaurant in Little Aleppo with tablecloths. Respectable women could enter by themselves, but prostitutes required escorts. (If you let unaccompanied hookers in, they start hooking.) And because Duke Dorleans had Monsieur Tarare, he would have the finest food in Little Aleppo.

(This was, in 1900, an eminently achievable goal. Besides eating at home, which was what most did, there were few options and certainly nothing for a gourmand. There was Yung Man’s, of course, but that was Chinese food and so therefore did not count in any rankings. The Chophouse, near the newly-built Valentine Courthouse, served chops. They would be no more specific. Customers would indicate with their hands how much meat they wanted, and then the meat would arrive at the table. Cigars were enjoyed concurrently. A fellow once asked for some creamed spinach; he was beaten.  Women were not permitted in the Chophouse; women were completely fine with that. Over by the harbor, unnamed fish fries occupied rickety shacks and served various perches and smelts, all of which tasted like shit with bones in it. It was best to eat at home.)

“Looks just like a deer.”

“We’re all the same guts on the inside,” Here And There said.

Cannot Swim’s body was opened up, raggedly, and the condors shoved their heads into his belly; one of the birds had a rib in its beak and worried it back and forth. It made a sound like wet wood breaking.

“This is upsetting me. Why am I watching this?”

“Not many get to view their own funeral, cousin. You’re lucky.”

Cannot Swim (all the parts of him that were not his body and standing/hovering about a dozen feet from the sacred rock) turned to the short woman (who was also sort of hovering) and waved an aghast arm towards the scavengers’ feast.

“How is this lucky!?”

Here And There said nothing. A vulture hopped over to them. Pecked Cannot Swim on the calf, hard. Hopped back to the rock. Here And There said,

“Don’t yell at me.”

“I’m sorry. I’m watching vultures eat my dick. I’m a bit overwhelmed.”

“You’re having a lot of new experiences today. First time talking to a White.”

“No. I spoke with one once. When I accompanied Talks To Whites on his last visit.”

“How did it go?”

“Poorly.”

It was not his fault. The Pulaski had avoided most contact with the Whites. They had let that raggedy little preacher idiot stay with them, but he had learned precisely none of the Pulaski language in his time with the tribe, so he was treated more like a pet than a person. As for goods, the Pulaski did not trade with the Whites for anything except guns and ammo, Also, knives. These objects were the only machined metal Cannot Swim had ever seen in his life. The Pulaski did not mine, nor did they smith, and so had no finished steel; this meant no axes to fell trees, nor saws to plank the wood, so he had also never seen a framed house before. He had never smelled tobacco. He had no concept of glass. It was unfair of his cousin to shove him right onto the thoroughfare of the settlement they were calling C—– City.

“I would not doubt it,” Here And There said. When she smiled, her eyes disappeared behind her freckles. They spread from her nose like bat wings. She was the only Pulaski with freckles. “What happened?”

“Their village is stressful. I didn’t know what anything was called. Like, I didn’t recognize anything. And the sunlight was strange. It bounced all over.”

“Like off the lake?”

“Yes. Just like that. But from everywhere. And the hats.”

“You have mentioned the hats.”

“Some made sense. Some had large brims that provided shade. They were like the hoods we wear when working the crops. I understood those hats. But most of ’em were useless. A lot of their clothes looked useless, honestly. They wore tunics over their tunics. Talks To Whites told me the words, but I forgot.”

“Maybe they were cold.”

“It was a warm day. My cousin brought me into the building where he buys the rifles and ammo.”

“Also, knives.”

“The room gleamed at me. I could hear mountains running in fear. What could make a mountain flee? I did not know. I could barely keep breathing. My lungs were full of tree sap. There was a man on the wall of the store, and he was watching me.”

Here And There was barefoot, but left no prints in the grass. She looked up at Cannot Swim. He looked over at the birds, the rock, his corpse.

“The man was leaning against the wall?”

“No. He was hanging there. He was carved from wood. He was not a real man, but I felt a presence coming from him.”

“Then perhaps he was real. The Whites have magick of their own, just as we do.”

“Do you think they would keep their magick in a gun store?”

“I have no idea what those people are capable of,” Here And There said.

“The man who was in charge refused to sell the guns to Talks To Whites unless I was…I forgot the word. He’s taught it to me a hundred times, but I forget. He poured water on my head while yelling some stuff.”

“Why?”

“Because the man on the wall loved me.”

They were both wearing their tunics, which came down to right below the knee, and Here And There had her satchel, which she reached into and pulled a handful of leaves from the peregrina maria tree. Shared, rolled, chewed. Both the taste and the effect were refreshing.

“What else do you remember about him?”

“The man on the wall?”

“Keep up, cousin.”

“He was wearing only his breechcloth and he was nailed to a tree.”

“Most people would have put the thing about the tree first.”

“Talks To Whites is the person you want to ask about this. He knows all about it.”

And, for a moment, there was silence on the side of the mountain, except for the sound of a two vultures fighting over a spleen.

“Is he okay? How is my cousin?”

“He is physically unharmed. As is Black Eyes. Look.”

She grabbed his elbow and they were 50, 100, 200 feet up so that the whole northwestern slope of the hill, the tallest of the seven that separated the Pulaski village from the rest of the world, lay beneath them. She pointed. Young man, short woman, big dog. The path was more of a trail, and so the three were picking their way through the scrub.

Cannot Swim peered in a little bit more.

“Is that you?”

“Down there?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” she answered.

“But you’re here.”

“And there. Get it?”

The wind was strong and blew around Cannot Swim, and also through, and he had never been here before. He had never been anywhere near here before, and he did not know the names of anything in the world, but he was feeling a bit chilly and sort of nauseous ; the air currents were waves and he was in the lake, the harbor, the open sea and all the stars had fucked off for the evening, so he had no compass at all in the valley which would one day be a neighborhood in America called Little Aleppo,

Lunch is day’s disputed territory. Is it the climax to the morning or the introduction to the afternoon? No one could agree on it, especially not in Little Aleppo. Lunch was factionalized in the neighborhood. Hard chargers forswore the meal as a waste of time, and for the weak, and they held to this belief right up to, and during, their first heart attacks at age 43. Drug dealers loved lunch, and often took it for five or six hours at a time. The Spanish gorged, then napped; the French nibbled, then argued; the Nepalese diaspora sucked down a coffee, then scampered up the side of a building.

It was sacred, though, lunch; all Little Aleppians knew that. (Except for those hard chargers, but fuck them.) Lunch had been won! Carved from the flanks of the bosses! Goons and Pinkertons had split open the heads of those who asked for lunch, never mind weekends. To not exercise your lunch franchise…that was akin to scabbery, and Little Aleppians liked scabs even less than they liked narcs. Snitches get stitches, but a scab gets the slab was how the local saying went. No, residents believed, lunch must never be ignored, lest our Wobbly ancestors be disrespected.

There was one thing Little Aleppians liked more than slacking off, and it was slacking off while being self-righteous about it.

“This is where deforestation comes from.”

“It’s eight napkins. Nine, ten. Ten napkins.”

“Entire woods. Gone,” Rabbi Levy said.

“If I have to choose between a tree and my suit, it’s always gonna be my suit,” the Reverend Arcade Jones answered, tucking another napkin into the waistband of his ketchup-red pants. There were four, overlapped and forming a Shakespearean ruff, flowing from his collar; another half-dozen decorating his shirtfront; his lap was double-ply defended. His jacket–the same red as the pants–was hanging off the back of the unused chair to his left. The Reverend never slung his coat behind him: first off, the lapels would wrinkle; second, Arcade had impeccable table manners, but an enthusiasm to his meal-taking that occasionally loosed flecks of this sauce or that gravy.

The Rabbi had, many Victory Diner meals ago, advised the Reverend to avail himself of the coat rack at the front of the restaurant by the toothpick dispenser and old-fashioned CHUNK KIH-CHACK credit card machine.

“They even got hangers,” he said. “Just like civilization.”

“Mm-hmm. Take my eyes off it for a minute and it disappears.”

“Disappear? It’s a stop-sign red 64 long. Can’t disappear.”

“Size doesn’t come into it,” the Reverend said. “Cars get stolen.”

“Sure, yeah, but cars have a general utility. Anyone can drive any car. Whereas, there’s a dozen guys in the neighborhood who your jacket would fit. And none of them could pull it off.”

“Style is 90% confidence.”

“The other ten?”

“Your pants gotta have a crease in ’em so sharp they could slice tomatoes.”

So Reverend Jones did not use the coat rack at the front of the Victory Diner, by the front door with the bell and the upright display case that dizzied cakes, and Rabbi Levy did not bring it up again.

After Torah, Torah, Torah burned, the Jews wandered briefly. They did not complain any more than they usually complained, which is to say there was an almost impossible amount of complaining. Taken in, moving on. The ancient rhythms of Jewish life. Of course, their two-month journey was entirely confined to Rose Street, which was better than 40 years in the desert, and also there were no pogroms. On the contrary, there were several interfaith dances thrown for the youth groups. It was almost certainly the chillest expulsion from a home the Jews had ever weathered, and soon they had a semi-permanent home at the First Church of the Infinite Christ when the Reverend Arcade Jones, while giving a sermon to the combined congregations, talked himself into Holy Ghost Mode and opened his doors to the Jews.

(The doors in question were not entirely his; the First Church has deacons and a lay board and an icon of Saint Michael with full voting rights.)

Mitzvah and sin. Just like yin and yang, but without the bitchin’ logo to doodle on your denim jacket. And they were, Rabbi Levy always recalled, presuppositionary. He had heard the terms referred to as such in rabbinical school by a student named Amos Varon, who was one of those types who would always choose a grad-school word over a factory-floor word. Couldn’t have secular mitzvah; no sin without the Lord. It was not the act that the words referred to, but God’s reaction to the act. Package deal sort of thing.

And there were levels. Shoving your slobbery leftovers into a bum’s hands on the way home from Nero’s? This was a mitzvah, but only in the way that plucking a quarter from behind a child’s ear is a magic trick. Buying the guy a whole meal was a higher mitzvah, but teaching him to fish was even better, and all mitzvot were improved by anonymity because to not sign your name is to credit God. Let Him take the bow. This is what Torah teaches.

Rabbi Levy didn’t know about that, though. Seemed complicated, and the human soul is not as complicated as holy books would have one believe. You need a place to stay? That right there, that simple question with so many side effects: that was the kindest one man could be to another.

So, if someone were to treat you and yours with such munificence, the least you could do was buy him an enormous lunch once a week.

“Rabbi, I’ve been thinking about the nature of intent.”

“Oh, it’s gonna be one of those lunches.”

“Would you rather we gossip?”

“Sew my lips shut before we do that.”

“Or we could talk about sports,” the Reverend said.

“You could.”

“I don’t just follow football, y’know. We could talk baseball.”

“What do I know about baseball?”

“You’re Jewish.”

“And?”

“Jews love baseball.”

“This belief you have is too silly to be offended by, but still: not true.”

Rabbi Levy did not take milk or sugar in his coffee at home or work, because he splurged on the fancy grounds. The Victory Diner bought their coffee in bulk from a guy named Rudy who never showed up in the same van twice, so the Rabbi took milk and sugar.

“I mean…it’s not entirely wrong.”

“There you go,” the Reverend said.

“What about intent?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Course it does,” the Rabbi answered quickly. “What you just said, the thing about Jews and baseball. Your intent mattered in my interpretation of the statement. You could have meant harm by it.”

“How can saying that Jews like baseball be harmful?”

The Reverend had a quarter-slice of club sandwich left. Half of a cheeseburger. Several remaining bites of a Spanish omelette with extra cheese, hold the mushrooms. He was 80% of the way to ordering a milkshake.

“In this neighborhood, someone would figure it out,” Rabbi Levy said. “I’ll tell you a story. This is maybe ten, fifteen years ago. No, I was still at Harper, so it was 15. Many years before you would grace us with your presence.”

“The Lord was toughening me up.”

“I have no doubt. So there’s these two Town Fathers. Billows and Hoy. Can’t tell ’em apart. Big dumb schmucks. Naturally, they hate each other.”

“As is tradition.”

“And at first, it’s funny. Whole neighborhood got in on it. Tee-shirts: Team Billows and Team Hoy. And none of this is political. Identical voting records. One was a developer, and the other owned construction firms. Their agendas were in complete lockstep. It was 100% personal.”

“I have a question that I am already quite sure of the answer to.”

“Yes?”

“Was the origin of these men’s feud ever discovered?”

“You’re really starting to get the hang of Little Aleppo.”

“Thank you,” Reverend Jones said. “Thank you? Is that a compliment?”

“Kind of. Anyway: no, of course no one ever found out why they hated each other. There were stories. I heard something about a parking spot or a parrot. Maybe it was a parking spot and a parrot.”

“A parrot?”

“Or a mynah. Cockatiel? A talking bird. I remember that it was important to the story that the bird could talk. Beyond that, I do not recall. It was most likely nonsense, anyhow. No one knew why Billlows and Hoy hated each other except Billows and Hoy, and neither of them ever gave it up.”

“Gotta admire their commitment, at least.”

“Sure. So, like I said: it’s funny at first. They’d be vulgar to each other at open meetings, and leak lies to the Cenotaph. And then the public fist-fights. started.”

“These are grown-ass men?”

“As grown-ass as you can get. In their 50’s, I would imagine.”

“That’s not all right,” the Reverend said.

“No. Especially when they became regular. You know Booty Palace?”

Booty Palace was Little Aleppo’s all-you-can-eat buffet, and it is named that because when Yahya Muqsaf opened it in the 70’s, he was in that slippery zone between fluent and idiomatic in his English acquisition, and he was into pirates. Row upon row of steamy chafing pans disappearing off in the distance, and enough sneeze-guards for a million cold-and-flu seasons. Sushi of a quality matching, but not exceeding, a supermarket. Piles of ripped-apart crabs, as though the crabs had been the occupants of a city which had displeased the Khan. Lamb done three ways (broasted, broiled, jerkied). Soup du jour, soup du semaine, and soup du mois. (Pass on the soup du mois after the 18th or so.) The mashed potatoes came pre-portioned into bowls; Little Aleppians could not resist the siren call of a serving tray full of creamy whipped taters, and they would plunge their faces SPLAP into the starchy side, or satisfy their buttholes’ curiosity with a deep squat into the tray.

“I know Booty Palace each and every Wednesday night; yes, I do.”

“Half-price night, right. Well they did it back then, too, and Billows and Hoy were both cheap bastards, and neither of ’em would stop going. They’d throw pudding cups at each other, it was embarrassing. The other Town Fathers go to Yahya to see if he’ll make an exception, charge one of the two idiots half-price some other night.”

“Yahya said no.”

“Of course he did. The fights were drawing a crowd. It was the best thing to happen to him since the health inspector died. But, you know, it’s like I said: first, it was funny; then, it was embarrassing. Next step no one expected. It got dangerous and sad. Billows, this putz, he starts holding rallies.”

“Campaign rallies?”

“Like them. Very much like them,” the Rabbi said.

“Town Fathers don’t run for office.”

“No. That’s why I said they were like campaign rallies. Had all the mishegos–stage and flags and podiums and all that–but Billows wasn’t running for anything. He just wanted to–pardon my French–talk shit about Hoy in front of a crowd. He’d buy donuts and coffee, too, so people would show up.”

“That’s how we get folks into AA meetings.”

“It’s good bait.”

“This man’s setting up all kinds of whatnot just to–pardon your French–talk shit about this other dummy? Who’s paying for this?”

The Rabbi lifted his coffee cup, smiled. The Reverend picked up his Coke, tapped it against the mug.

“The very learned Hillel said that the two most important questions were If I am not for myself, then who will be? and If not now, then when? He did not grow up in Little Aleppo, or he would have realized there were two other vital questions: Where did all the money come from, and where did all the money go? Turns out Billows owned the production company that set up the stages, and paid himself out of the treasury.”

“This is my shocked face,” the Reverend said, and did not change his facial expression.

“So he’s having this dumb rallies and he calls Hoy all sorts of things. Communist, socialist, fascist, anarchist. And, you know, some of those terms are mutually exclusive. Accused him of engaging in pedagogy and practicing bilaterality, but that didn’t work. Little Aleppians have weirdly large vocabularies.”

“One can’t help but notice.”

“Finally, Billows finds something that the crowds go for. Hoy’s got manners like you wouldn’t believe. Old school. Please and Pardon me from morning til midnight. Stands up when women enter the room, pushes in their chairs. Handwritten thank-you notes. The man’s elbows had never touched a table!”

“I get it.”

“Not once!”

“I get it.”

The last quarter of the club sandwich disappeared into the Reverend’s mouth; he chased it with a handful of fries.

Tommy at the counter spoke Greek, but gestured in Italian, and cursed in Spanish; the man expressed himself expressively. Louie Bucca behind the grill had been sweating for nine years straight. No urination whatsoever. Louie had mentioned the fact to a nurse friend once, and she freaked out, so he didn’t tell anyone any more. Lunch rush, best rush according to the waitresses. Customers were cranky at breakfast, and there were too many of ’em at dinner, and the late-night crowd was full of hooch and sass. Lunch rush, though? Polite and predictable. Busy enough to fatten your pockets, but not so packed as to be frantic. Never had a table been thrown across the dining room during the lunch rush, which could not be said for the other rushes; the waitresses believed that fact to speak to a larger truth.

“So, Billows starts in on Hoy about the manners thing. Just hammering him. This guy, he tells the crowds. This guy thinks he’s better than you. He’s judging your fork use. That kind of shtick. Crowd goes wild. Billows even works up a whole impression. Does a silly voice, everything.”

“That’s just cruel.”

“And this is my point about intention. Billows intended to be cruel, so therefore the statement This man has wonderful manners became a weapon.”

The Reverend Arcade Jones took a second to think about that, but accidentally started thinking about the milkshake he wanted and just asked,

“How did it end?”

“How could it possibly end?”

“Murder/suicide?”

“What else?”

The Rabbi sipped his going-tepid coffee and said,

“But he left the loveliest note.”

The two men, both professionally holy, looked around for a waitress. Order 10 up! came the cry from inside the kitchen, and then a spatula rings a bell DING! and another lunch has been summoned in the Victory Diner on the Main Drag in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

“My father was a small surge of electricity. Not enough to kill you, but he could singe your fingers. He lived in an outlet in the dining room. We ate in the kitchen.”

“And I’d like a root beer float.”

Neither Big-Dicked Sheila nor Tiresias Richardson had expected the acid to come on as quite as fast and strong as it had, which was foolish on their part because it was Precarious Lee’s acid, and they were now having difficulty ordering drinks. LSD tends to make conversations with, say, the Archangel Michael much easier, but conversations with, say, the cashier at Burger King much tougher.

“I don’t understand whatever that was,” the bartender said to Sheila. He was a bantamweight ginger named Roscoe–just Roscoe–who was trying to break into the stunt performers’ union and writing a screenplay about Lewis & Clark’s expedition. He was having a rough go of finding the arc of the story. He had the three acts–Let’s Keep Going This Way; Oh, Here’s The Ocean; Welp, Better Head Home–but the beats were eluding him. Until its sale, or his entrenchment into the ranks of working stuntmen, he worked for a catering company to pay the rent. To pay the bills, he let weird men take pictures of his feet. It’s a rough business, the show business industry.

Roscoe looked up at Tiresias and said, “And I don’t have the ingredients for that.”

“We’re friends of the Buttermilks,” she answered.

“Okay, great.”

“So…it’s cool.”

“What?”

“It’s cool. Root beer float, sailor.”

“I can’t make you–”

“I told you: it’s cool. Two straws.”

Tiresias leaned towards Roscoe like a Vargas Girl, like the cheesecake on the nose of a B-29 headed for Berlin, jutting her head at him all angled coyly, and her hands spread with wide fingers down on the portable bar. The heels were helping her attitude, she felt. They were six-inch leopard print beauties. Neither Tiresias nor Sheila had ever heard of the company that made them–Hoggins Aviation & Byproducts–but both agreed that it didn’t pay to be a snob in a 24-hour shoe store in Hollywood. Tiresias had lost her shoes three or four felonies ago, and they almost pulled the Super Bee over on Sunset and bought a pair off a hooker’s feet, but then spotted the lit-up shop.

Sheila bought a pair of black boots to replace her yellow Converse hi-tops; she got the blood off the rubber toe cap, but droplets and splotches had soaked into the canvas sidewalls. The boots were made, the label said, of laather; flexing the material in her hands, Sheila thought that the misspelling may have been deliberate. Her pair of perfectly shabby Doc Martens was back in the Lincoln, and Precarious refused to go back to the car until dawn. Sheila argued with him; she loved those boots; it had taken a decade to get the tongues to loll just right.

“No, not until it’s light out.”

“Don’t make me wear these things.”

“I’m not making you do anything,” Precarious said. He was sitting down and trying on a pair of sneakers that looked exactly, but not precisely, like the sneakers he had been wearing. “If I was making you do something, I’d make you leave town.”

“We can’t. I wanna find out how this all ends.”

“What if it ends badly?”

“Nothing ends badly in Los Angeles, Lee-Lee.”

Sheila was quite literally the only human being on the planet, including his ex-wives and children, who Precarious would let call him “Lee-Lee,” and she was only allowed to once in a while. She was standing over him in her socks, and she bent over to kiss the top of his maroon ball cap. Precarious looked up at her, kindly, and said,

“That’s the dumbest shit you’ve said all night.”

She straightened back up and rummaged through her enormous purse.

“You have no sense of adventure.”

“I have a sense of self-preservation. We should book it for home.”

Sheila held out a pack of Juicy Fruit. Precarious took a stick, unwrapped the foil, slipped the gum in his mouth.

“The gum doesn’t change my opinion.”

“It wasn’t a bribe,” she said, chewing. “And we’re going to this party. Fucker set us up.”

“Which fucker?”

“One of ’em. What brand are those sneakers?”

The running shoes were gray, with red accents and tan soles. There was mesh involved. Other fabrics, possibly.

“None. No distinguishing markings whatsoever. And nothing on the box.”

“That’s very authentic.”

“Yeah, they fit.”

There was a cashier up front behind the desk. He was chubby, and reading a magazine about a very specific kind of fishing; the trio had been notified upon entrance that he would not be helping them, and he wasn’t checking in the back for anything.

Tiresias stalked out of the aisles to the front section where Sheila and Precarious were. Leopard-skin high heels.

“Well? These were the sleaziest ones in my size.”

“Ooh, I love ’em,” Sheila said.

“And they’re only kinda my size,” Tiresias grimaced. “Why must we suffer for our beauty?”

“You don’t have to. I look hot as fuck in comfortable shoes.”

“You look hot as fuck always.”

“Love you. Seriously, those are fabulous. You look like an off-duty stripper.”

“I look like an off-duty mud wrestler, sweetie. AAAAHahaha!”

She catwalked up and down the length of the shop. The woman was a master of high heelery. Tiresias had, as a child, been scolded en pointe by various balletmistresses, and sweated through years of dance lessons in jazz shoes, and attended many dance parties in towering platforms. She had once shot a commercial for Arrow Beer where she ran down a flight of steps in stilettos, full speed; she nailed it on the first take, then refused to sleep with the director, who made her do it 15 more times, and she didn’t break any of her ankles The trick, she thought, was keeping all your weight on your toes as if the heel wasn’t there at all. The other trick was not caring that your feet hurt. Sheila wouldn’t wear shoes she couldn’t run or fight in. The two of them had different childhoods.

Precarious had utterly no idea why women wore those damn things. Looked uncomfortable. Neither had he ever seen the sexual appeal, but Precarious had spent his entire working life surrounded by hippies; for at least a decade, every women he dated had been wearing barefoot when they met, and so maybe his tastes were a bit skewed.

“What are those?”

“The best I could find,” Sheila said about the boots. She was sat next to Precarious and lacing them up.

“Why didn’t you just get new Converse? I saw some over there.”

“Those aren’t Chuck Taylors. They’re Chick Tylers. Everything about them is…off.”

“Oh.”

“And they were damp. But, like, not the boxes. Just the shoes. I didn’t want any part of it.”

“You made the right call, sweetie.”

“We should take acid,” Tiresias said. “You have some, right?”

“That’s a terrible idea,” Precarious answered.

“It’s a party. I love going to parties on acid. Everyone’s faces go all wobbly and you get to say real stupid shit to people. C’mon, sweetie.”

“No.”

“Sugar pie.”

“No.”

“Daddy badger.”

“Badger?”

“Your mustache is thick like badger fur.”

“Yeah, okay. But we shouldn’t take acid.”

Sheila stood up next to Tiresias and they made Charlie’s Angels poses in the full-length mirror. Clompy jackboots, black leathers with the lace-up crotch, The Snug tee-shirt; leopard-print six-inch heels, straight-legged trousers cut to accentuate the tushee, white button-up not that was not very buttoned up.

Tiresias fussed with her cleavage and said,

“This bra is not the one for the job.”

“Fuck that. You look great.”

“I’m thinking no bra.”

“It’s a Hollywood party,” Sheila nodded.

“You’re saying no bra?”

“I’m saying that it’s a Hollywood party.”

“You’re right. Fuck it. I’m going to this shindig loosey-goosey. Maybe there’ll be producers there.”

Sheila took her by the elbow, and pivoted her from the mirror; looked her deep in the eyes.

“You do know that Pilot Season is over for you, right? This year, at least.”

Tiresias knew that she was 27 years old (29, if you asked her driver’s license) and that 27 was, in actress years, a billion. How long could she host the Late Movie as Draculette? Ten years? Twenty? That wasn’t a career, it was a sentence. Window was shutting for her, she thought.

But she was not a complete idiot, and–thinking of the murder they’d been framed for along with the murder they’d actually committed–saw the logic in skipping town.

“I’m just gonna count it as a success despite what actually happened.”

“Sweetie, you made more money in one day than most actresses in LA make in a year.”

“Yeah, but–you know–it wasn’t for acting.”

“No, fuck that,” Sheila said. “When we were with Lady Buttermilk? You acted your ass off. You reminded me of Isabella Rossellini.”

“I’m nothing like her.”

“No, like, your aura.”

“Oh, thank you.”

“We’ll come back next year, okay? We’ll find out if it’s okay to come back next year, and if it is, we’ll come back. And we’ll be much more organized.”

“I need to get more organized. What do you mean, ‘We’ll find out if it’s okay to come back?'”

“Dude, we fucked shit up hardcore here.”

“Hardcore,” Precarious added from his seat.

“That’s because we’re punk,” Tiresias said.

“We’re punk as fuck, yeah. But we assaulted a cop and stole from rich people.”

“What you’re saying is that we’re folk heroes?”

“Tell me you understand that we need to leave town.”

“After the party.”

“Right,” Sheila agreed. “After the party. And we get my car.”

“So it’s not urgent?”

“Escape should be sooner rather than later. But one of those Buttermilk assholes framed us for murder and I’m gonna find out what the fuck. I’m gonna find out what precisely the fuck. And the fuck is at that party, so we’re going and finding what the fuck.”

“You’re pissed.”

“I am. I’ve never been framed for murder before. It’s infuriating. What the fuck?”

“It wasn’t personal,” Tiresias said, rubbing Sheila’s arms.

“That makes it worse. I can name half-dozen people with valid reasons for framing me for murder. But this is just us being some disposable piece in a rich asshole’s plan. When someone you know frames you, it’s like they’re saying ‘You matter.'”

Tiresias hugged her, and said,

“You do matter.”

The hug became deeper.

“Tell Precarious we should take acid for the party.”

“She’s right,” Sheila said. “It just makes sense.”

It did not make sense to Precarious, but he recognized the logic as similar to that employed by his former organization. Why not floor it? You already grew your hair long and read the wrong books. He had read way too many of the wrong books: self-published malarkey about how various ethnicities were secretly aliens; rumorology (that is, the study of Sacred Gossip); far too many volumes involving ley lines and what they had to do with George Washington’s secret spy corps; experimental novels written in first through sixth person; but mostly nerdy sci-fi. Cheap, thick paperbacks with lurid covers and pre-yellowed page edges that would float around the band and road crew. The kind of science fiction where the author did a lot of research and didn’t want to waste anything, so there’s 14 pages on sword-smithing. You could learn something in between the fuck scenes in those books, Precarious always figured.

“Polytely,” he said.

“Wha?”

“Hah?”

“I think I’m saying it right. I only read it. It’s got to do with how you solve a problem with multiple goals that contradict with one another. Which is what we got. We wanna retreat and revenge at the same time. Ran into this kinda thing all the time in the Dead.”

Sheila sat down next to him and said,

“What did you usually do?”

“Well, the second thing we did varied, but generally the first response was to drop acid.”

She pecked Precarious on the cheek and leapt up; Tiresias did a move she liked to call the Boogaloo.

“Look how happy I am. I’m doing the Boogaloo,”she said.

“Tirry, you gotta stop saying that.”

The move was not the Boogaloo. It was a spastic mixture of the Running Man and the Cabbage Patch. Tiresias just enjoyed saying “boogaloo.” The two women did their Charlie’s Angels poses into the mirror again.

“Come here,” Tiresias said. “You be Charlie.”

“Charlie was just a voice on the phone,” Precarious told her, not rising.

“Then get on up and make yourself manifest, Chuck.”

The flavor had run out of his Juicy Fruit–the gum is notoriously lossy in re: flavor tenacity–and he wanted a cigarette, so he spat the pink wad into a piece of tissue paper yoinked from a shoebox, cleared his throat, walked out the front door in the gray-with-red-accent sneakers he had not paid for, got into the 1971 Super Bee parked outside, started it up VRAAAAAM and then occupied himself with finding his smokes.

The chubby cashier put down his fishing magazine and stared at the two women.

“We’re paying for that gentleman’s shoes,” Sheila said.

They did, and their own, and joined Precarious in the car, where he had taken a dark-brown glass bottle from leather pouch with a familiarly skull-shaped logo burnt into both sides. Dropper. Back of the hand, back of the hand, back of the hand, salud, lick, lick, lick. VRAAAM the car and FFT PHWOO the cigarettes and west on Sunset once more, through the sloppy, weaving cars. It was after midnight in Los Angeles, and Angelenos believe in drunken driving. If God did not mean for us to drive drunk, then why did He create alcohol and cars? Furthermore, why would He put Santa Monica so far from Silverlake? It’s not like you can walk; that’s not a walk, that’s a migration. The bus is out of the question. Once were trolley cars that zipped and clanged and connected the L.A. Basin, but no longer. They made a movie about it, starred a cartoon rabbit. The boulevards are wide, but dangerous, and the best you can hope for is that whoever you hit is as plastered as you, and waves off any legal or financial entanglements in favor of getting moving before a cop drives by.

Tiresias did, indeed, go loosey-goosey. It came in handy soon when they arrived at the Buttermilk place to find the gate guarded by immense men; they had bulgy sports jackets and asked for names. Before Precarious could answer, Tiresias was across his lap and halfway out the window (and halfway out of her shirt). They were with Holiday Rhodes, she told him, the man’s much-needed management team. The immense man, who gave far less of a shit than his earpiece suggested, waved them through.

Sheila slipped the five hundreds back in her purse as Precarious eased the muscle car onto the grounds, then pitched her torso over the front bench seat. She kissed Tiresias on the cheek and said,

“I thought we were gonna have to bribe him.”

“Tits are nature’s Swiss Army Knife. Useful in almost any situation. AAAHahaha!”

“Not jogging.”

“Almost. I said almost. Nothing is without drawback. Are we packing?”

“I am. I don’t know about Precarious; I’ve never seen his dick.”

Tiresias headbutted the side of her skull, softly.

“We’re not,” Sheila said.

“No,” Precarious shook his head. “We’re not.”

“Both of you are?”

“Yes.”

“Yup.”

“And I don’t get a gun?”

“No.”

“Nope.”

She palmed the top of Sheila’s head and pushed her into the backseat.

“Why nooooot?”

“You’re whining,” Sheila said.

“It’s a choice. Telllll meeeee why I can’t have a guuuuuuun.”

“What did Polonius say? C’mon, Tirry, what did Polonius say?”

“Polonius, the reptile wholesaler on Merwin Street?”

“The other one.”

“He said Know thyself.”

Sheila popped back over the seat right behind Tiresias and nuzzled her cheek-to-cheek, rubbed her arms up-and-down.

“Right, sweetie. And I want you to answer me honestly because I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

“Do you really think you should get a gun?”

“Yes.”

“What happened when I took you shooting?”

“I cried because I was startled. Not because of the gunfire itself. My finger just jerked on the trigger and the noise was much louder than I expected.”

“And I’m not trying to invalidate your feelings here.”

“I am totally not getting that from you.”

“Good, good, good. But you did cry, and then you put the gun down, and then you left and walked home.”

“That was Little Aleppo Tiresias. This is Los Angeles Tiresias. I’m pistol-packing and hard-bitten.”

“That’s what you should do: if there’s trouble, bite someone hard.”

“Oh, c’mon.”

“Absolutely not. Since when do you know Polonius the reptile guy?”

“I didn’t tell you ’cause I wanted it to be a surprise. Thinking about adding a snake to the act.”

Back home, Tiresias was the Horror Host for KSOS’ The Late Movie Show, or at least Draculette was. Monday through Friday, midnight crept up and there she was reclined along the spookiest couch anyone had ever seen, in a dress blacker than a cave and so tight that it precluded any activity more strenuous than telling dirty jokes. Far too much mascara. The wig. Never fangs, though. Tiresias tried them once and her cameraman–whose whooping and easy off-camera laugh stood in for the audience–found her vocal fumblings so hilarious that he pissed himself. As a comedienne, she was incredibly proud of herself, but her producer side recognized that sounding like she just had a stroke was not a sustainable bit.

The movie, the commercials, her. Five minutes each. Repeat until three AM. Hour a night, when you add it up. There was no money for writers, or other actors, or props. Tiresias found the skeleton who played her ex-husband, Fatty, in the studio building’s basement; it had been left there by Mortuary Mindy, a previous Horror Host; no one had ever looked into the bones’ provenance. The devil made regular appearances as a frog figurine painted black. A fan sent in a stuffed bat, so she hung it from the rafters and called it Count Fang. Sometimes she made prank phone calls. Rarely, she would discuss the films, and then it was mostly to apologize. She was forbidden to talk about the commercials.

“Ooh, that would be great. You’re not gonna become one of those snake people, are you?”

“That’s the thing keeping me from getting it.”

“No one who has a snake has one snake. They have, like, nine. And they’re gateway pets. First, it’s a snake, and then you’ve got a frilled lizard or a coatamundi in your apartment. Stick to cats and dogs.”

Precarious feathered the accelerator and asked,

“How is your cat?”

“I don’t have a cat,” she answered to her left, then swiveled her head to the right. “Why does everyone think I have a cat?

“You seem like you have a cat. Your aura,” Tiresias said as she checked her makeup in a handheld compact mirror.

“It’s a Sagittarius thing.”

“You blame everything on that.”

“Longest driveway I ever seen,” Precarious muttered.

The main house was lit up like a nuclear explosion on Christmas morning; the gables were spackled with color; the Corinthian columns blazed. Were it not for the solar panels and temperate weather, the house might have been in Devonshire overlooking the moors and the peasants. Great, swooping wings off the center structure–three floors? four?–with its isoceletic pediment making a frowning brow over the grand doors. Shallow steps leading up.

“Gimme two of those hundreds,” Precarious said. Sheila slipped the bills over his shoulder; he folded them, palmed them, pulled the car up next to the valet, shifted into Park, left the key in the ignition. Tiresias got out, slid the seat forward, yanked Sheila from the back. They primped themselves, groomed each other, checked for boogers.

“Just leave it right there,” the women heard Precarious telling the valet as they set off up the stairs. Sheila had her industrial-sized purse; Tiresias carried nothing, having locked the Halliburton briefcase (containing most of the money and all of the incriminating evidence) in the trunk of the Super Bee.

“I couldn’t feed a snake,” Sheila said.

“The intern will do it.”

“Then get the snake. Very sexy.”

“Natassja Kinski in that poster.”

“Hot. Do it.”

“The only problem is that the big ones are expensive. I could only afford, like, a gopher snake or something.”

“Is that a real animal,” Sheila asked, “or something you made up?”

“Real thing. They eat gophers.”

“Are they pretty?”

“If you’re really into the color ‘brownish,’ I guess.”

“How big?”

“Two, three feet.”

“Sweetie, you’ll look like you have a turd draped on you. It’s one step up from waving a handful of garter snakes at the camera. You need a snake like Alice Cooper’s.”

“I told you: they’re expensive.”

“You made six grand today. Buy the cool snake. Just don’t become a snake person.”

“Are turtles sexy?”

“No,” Sheila said.

“Scary?”

“Not in the slightest. Why?”

“I could get a great deal on a turtle.”

Polonius Humble ran the reptile shop back in Little Aleppo; he had named it Herpes despite friends’ protestations. They did not know his customer base. Bawdy bunch: the overlap between the reptile-owning and orgy-attending communities was heavy. He sold skinks and night lizards and tonguebacked igunanas. Snakes from adders to vipers. Itty-bitty turtles and giant, snappity beasts. He could get you a gila monster, but you needed to put down a deposit.

“You don’t buy turtles, sweetie. They live in ponds. You can just, like, pick one up.”

“Not the ones Polonius has. The man’s got the fanciest turtles you’ve ever seen. You think the butler is gonna recognize us?”

“We were here, like, six hours ago and haven’t changed clothes,” Sheila said.

“We have new shoes.”

“I still think he’ll know it’s us. The question is whether he goes to Lord or Lady Buttermilk when he sees us.”

“Hundred bucks on Lord.”

“No bet.”

The party had whipped loose from its moorings, and elegance had hidden in the back bedroom, cowering under the duvet; all the canapes were long gone. The good coke had come out, not that nine p.m. shit you had to share with your agent’s assistant. Several beautiful teens had been concussed. The music was loud, and by someone’s client. The hallways were staggering. The pool table had been desecrated. Emilio Estevez was fingering an Asian woman. Couples snuck off, sweaty scrums humped next to the pool. A hand, semi-greased, shot out for Sheila’s ankle. She leapt, dodged, swerved, smacked into Tiresias.

“Babadook!”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts, Sheel.”

“We know one. He’s a cop. You have a crush on him.”

“I do not. And Romeo’s not really a ghost; he’s just spiritual.”

Tiresias muttered that last bit. Her spine was spitting off sparks and etchysketch lines drew themselves between stars, shook away into nothing, the pool was breathing. From her left and a foot lower came Sheila:

“Holy shit.”

“You, too?”

“Drinks?”

“Something.”

Which is how they came to be standing in front of the portable bar on the back patio by the pool manned by a bantamweight named Roscoe–just Roscoe–asking for a root beer float and talking whatever nonsense Sheila was talking, and so engrossed in their dealings with said bartender that they didn’t notice the big guy with the crewcut and the broken nose staring at them from across the pool high in the Hollywood Hills, which are so very far from Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

A columnist from the Cenotaph once described Little Aleppians as “carbon-based random opinion generators” and she had her finger on the pulse on the community. Locals tended to believe in the official story (Oswald killed Kennedy), the official unofficial story (the CIA did it), the alternate official unofficial story (the Mafia did it), the predictable unofficial unofficial story (the Illuminati did it), the unpredictable unofficial unofficial story (two opposing sides of a holographic universe collided at the exact spacetime point that was JFK’s skull), and the batshit crazy story (invisible draculas) in equal measures and also depending on who was asking. Agreed-upon reality was argued over in Little Aleppo, at least until something blew up.

Something blew up.

Dampin’s Pianos had been on Aloferra Street for going on 50 years; the showroom was the size of two basketball courts, and its windows took up half the block and advertised sales on Bösendorfers and Bechsteins and Beisners. Most were black, and a few were brown, and none were white because white pianos are for assholes. That’s what Mercy Dampin thought, at least, and she owned the place so she must have been right. Grands, too. There were a few Babys over in the corner by the bathrooms, but mostly it was the imperious Grand in all her slightly-different-but-always-massive variant: Classic, Full, Recital, and the queen herself, the Concert Grand. (Pianos were female, Mercy thought. It was obvious. Look at them.) Other instruments often have gargantuan subspecies, but most are novelty creations useful on few occasions, and all except the upright bass is ridiculous-looking. The baritone sax is among the least dignified of all horns, and no one wants to hump the contrabassoonist. Only the mighty piano becomes glorious with size.

Along the intrastellar lanes that whiz and gee high above and slightly to the west of Little Aleppo and every other neighborhood in the galaxy, alien races often apply the Grand Piano Cutoff to civilizations they encounter. “Have they whipped up a grand piano yet?” That was the whole test. Had to think up a culture’s worth of bric-a-brac beforehand to build a piano. Needed to invent math, and have an Industrial Revolution, and figure out how to kill elephants. The piano is an unaccidental object, and the alien races who zip and zop along the interstellar lanes apply the Grand Piano Cutoff: it is forbidden to vacation on any planet that has invented the instrument.

Mercy Dampin did not know about the GPC, and did not believe in spacemen of any sort, but she would have agreed with their choice of benchmark. Something about the curves, maybe the shine, maybe that she did her homework lying under one as her father, Forthright Dampin, played and waited for customers. Bach and Beethoven and all that mustiness, and jazz, too, and just whatever came into his head or fingers at the time. Mercy took lessons, practiced, never came to her. She could play–put the music in front of her and she could perform it–but not musically. Forthright died when Mercy was at Harper College, and she took over the shop.

She let the local players swing by. It was quiet in between customers, and there is a great deal of “in between customers” at a piano showroom. Freddy from Senegal would thank her for letting him “get rambunctious for a moment,” and Plums Jenner teased forgotten chords out of the keys until he started crying and left; Mercy finally had to 86 Smiles Davis for his recidivistic smuggling of one or more cats into the store. Annabelle Monk came in a lot. She was Mercy’s favorite. She smelled the best, for one, and had not once nodded off in the bathrooms back where the soundproofed cubicles with uprights in them waited for school to let out. Dampin’s had since its opening seen moderately-priced piano lessons from moderately-talented piano teachers as its most lucrative stream of revenue, which is why Alan Delon, who was 12, and Laila Ma, who was a sophomore at Harper College, died in the explosion along with Mercy.

All the sound there could ever be, and then none. There were pedestrians on Aloferra, but not right in front of the shop and so there were no deaths on the sidewalk, but a couple on their first date had their ear drums blown out and so did a man walking his dog, a terrier, that sprinted away after the blast. The Toyota parked outside had shattered windows and the heat had bubbled the blue paint off the doors. The man did not notice the terrier’s flight, then he did. “LUCY!” he yelled, and then dug around in his ears with both fingers, and yelled again. “LUCY!” The dust and smoke hit the daters, and they were gray and she threw up on him, and he ran like the terrier, and she threw up again. The globe had been blown off the lamppost, and the bulb was hanging and then fell a dozen feet to the ground.

And then the sirens wailed. Atop the Fords in red-and-blue bubbles that the cops of the LAPD (No, Not That One) scorned as out-of-date but the Brass wouldn’t replace, and in thick red bars crowning three-axled trucks bristling with jacks and prybars and ladders. Grand pianos burn for longer than you’d expect even under direct hosing, and the strings melt and break and PING WHANG themselves free from their moorings. After a few of the firemen got their coats sliced open, the chief pulled them and watered down the building until it put itself out. The cops kept the crowds, which had begun to gather, from approaching the scene or stealing a firetruck. The paramedics tended to the deafened couple and the dogwalker. The reporters showed up. Print first. The Cenotaph‘s offices were closer than KSOS’ studio, plus the bomb went off during the 5 o’clock news so all of the cameras were being used.

“Hey, Chief. Chief,” Iffy Bould called out from behind a round cop. “Honey, lemme through.”

The round cop was Officer Honey. He was the most spherical man anyone had ever seen; the Abstract Mathematicians at Harper had proven that you could derive Pi from him.

“Chief said he didn’t wanna talk to you.”

“Which chief?”

“What?”

“There’s two chiefs on the other side of you. Police Chief and Fire Chief. Which one said he didn’t wanna talk to me?”

Officer Honey had big round thoughts; he sensed a trick, but could not pin it down. Honey wanted to take his nightstick to him, but Iffy was a journalist, so he could not be struck in the head with a baton, at least not without much more distraction present. Were he poor, or a minority, Honey could get away with what was locally referred to as a Little Aleppo Knighting, but it was 198- and you weren’t allowed to beat up reporters in public anymore. This was a serious to blow to Honey, as it was his customary opening move when dealing with the public.

A thought occurred, bounced around, lost momentum, left a smeary husk. A gotcha thought. A plug for that big fucking mouth of Iffy’s. It was:

“Which one did you want to talk to?”

“The one who didn’t say he doesn’t wanna talk to me.”

The plug was chewed up, spat back. Honey now contemplated his customary second move: sneaking off. The only bad thing about being a cop, Honey had decided very quickly upon receiving his badge, was the work. He liked the uniform, and he liked hitting people and telling them what to do, and he liked the free food. Oh, and parking wherever he wanted. Sometimes Honey parked in his neighbor’s driveway because fuck him, that’s why. Great perks being a cop. But the actual copping part of being a cop was not for Officer Honey, and so he had mastered the art of being somewhere other than a crime scene.

“Which one didn’t say that?”

“I got no idea what people aren’t saying, Honey. You can’t quote a negative.”

After fighting and flighting, Honey was all out of ideas. He had been with the force for over ten years, and had never needed anything beyond violence and absence, so he decided to start again and hope for a different result, or the piano store to explode and kill him.

“Chief said he doesn’t wanna talk to you.”

“Me specifically?”

“Maybe.”

“Did he mention my name?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Do you remember whether or not he said my name?”

“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”

“You don’t.”

“Chief said–”

“HONEY, LET HIM OVER, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!”

That was Chief Somme–Frenchy to his friends–the police chief. He was standing by the hood of his car around eight feet away, within the protective cordon of bright-yellow sawhorses that cut off Alaferro Street on both sides and contained the blaze and the firetrucks and two cop cars. Except for keeping the crowd back, there was little for the police to do until the flames died out. The chief was staring into the fire pondering the immense load of shit that had just been dumped in his lap. He was trying to, more rightly, but Officer Honey’s voice had wrapped around his brainstem like ivy climbing a pole, but instead of chlorophyll, the ivy was powered by dumbfuck. Chief Somme could picture it, was enveloped in the vision, the curling tendrils reaching towards his mind and infecting all they touch, turning sunlight into sweet stupidity. He swayed a bit, caught himself.

Officer Honey pulled the sawhorse back, and Iffy slid through. Lolly Tangiers followed; Honey closed the barrier on her waist.

“Ow,” Lolly protested. “Really?”

“She’s with me,” Iffy said.

“Chief told me to let you over. That’s it.”

“She’s part of my equipment.”

“Hey,” Lolly protested again.

“Equipment is a step up from where you were a couple weeks ago,” Iffy said to her. “I worked for the Cenotaph for two years before I was technically equipment. There’s kids out there that would kill to be equipment.”

While she was sure that statement was not specifically correct, Lolly did appreciate the truth in it. She had started as a Copyboy, which is the journalistic equivalent of one of those novice monks always getting whamped with bamboo sticks. Plus, she had to make the lunch run, and there is no less thankful job in all the indoor-employment world. It is the Kobayashi Maru of the office world, in that the lunch run can never be perfectly completed and is therefore more a test of character than a simple errand. The deli will always be out of beef stroganoff, or you would buy the weird, expensive mango-carrot-blackberry juice instead of the weird, expensive mango-carrot-boysenberry juice for Barry Cho and he’d break into tears. One time Lolly had been sent on the lunch run and forgot the list back in the office. She had gone around the bullpen with her notebook, carefully recording each order, and then–she guessed and verified later–set the notebook down while putting on her jacket and not picked it up. She couldn’t go back up. The male reporters would make fun of her. She didn’t feel it was sexist, as the male reporters had the previous week tormented a Copyboy into quitting by sending him out for fictitious foods such as  face cheese, Baked Alabama, and gluten-free seitan in the shape of a robust panther. She couldn’t go back upstairs.

So, Lolly took the cash and went to Cagliostro’s for pizzas; it was only a couple blocks and the pies were still hot when she got back, so the smell hit the reporters before they could get mad and no one complained, except for Barry Cho, who broke into tears. She only had to get Iffy’s lunch now, and he got a tuna sandwich from the deli on the corner pretty much everyday, and always gave her enough money (unlike half the cheap bastards in the bullpen) and a couple times he bought her lunch, too. It was easy lifting as far as paying dues went. Herbert “Hurl” Lowry was the Cenotaph‘s star columnist. He wrote square-cut sentences about the average Little Aleppian on Tuesdays and Fridays, and physically berated his cub reporter the other days. Hurl did so, and fequently. It was how he had received the nickname. Iffy had so far not winged anything at her skull. He had tossed her some things–car keys, a banana–but that doesn’t count. He had also so far not hit on her, not even a little bit, not even when he was drunk. She had drawn aces as far as the mentor thing went, she figured, so if her lot was to be called “equipment,” then so be it.

“Let me in,” Lolly said. “The man can’t do his job without me.”

“You heard the equipment,” Iffy agreed.

“I’m press!”

Iffy drew his pack of Kools from his pocket, offered it to Lolly, Honey, both refused.

“The equipment is press equipment,” he said

“Chief Somme only said for you,” Honey stuck to his talking point.

“She’s like my shoes. Can I wear my shoes over to talk to the chief? Think of her as my shoes.”

“Is she equipment or shoes?”

“Shoes are equipment. They absolutely fit within the category.”

“Then why are they two different words?”

“Did you really just ask me that?”

“Can’t answer, huh?”

“HONEY, YOU CRETIN, LET ‘EM IN!”

That was Chief Somme again. He often thought of murdering Officer Honey, just straight-up shooting him in the face during roll call one morning. Or running him over six or seven times: forward, reverse, forward again. He had tried sending Honey out on dangerous missions, but the muffin-headed fuck was incapable of getting killed. He got lost on the way to active gunfire incidents, and ran out of gas on the way to hostage situations. Plus, he was too recognizable to send undercover. (Chief Somme had tried sending Honey to infiltrate the Gabacho Brothers’ organization, but they just got him drunk and sent him home and had their lawyer file a complaint in court.) The chief thought about staging a break-in at Harper Zoo, dispatching Honey, then pushing him into the lion’s enclosure. On the other hand, the chief thought, why should the lion get the pleasure of killing the fat little fungus? One shot, no one would blame me.

The worst part was that Chief Somme had no one to blame, not for sure. The position of Chief of the LAPD (No, Not That One) had only recently fully professionalized. Until the mid-70’s, the position–had been filled by representatives of whatever criminal faction was in charge. It was much like being a medieval Pope. To further the analogy, there were on two occasions in the late 50’s more than one Police Chief “appointed” at the same time. The Cenotaph made tons of jokes about schisms and Avignon, but nobody got them. 1963 was the Year of Four Chiefs . Marleybone, Tannoy, Finnegan, and Beginagain. All the paperwork was fucked up from that year. One of them must have hired Honey. He had checked the files, but there was no definitive answer. Honey just arrived, full-formed and round and shitheaded. Was he immortal? Was he even human?

“Chief Somme,” Iffy said. He had lit his Kool along the short way, and it dangled from his lip as he flipped open his leather notebook.

“Bould.”

“How many dead?”

“I got no idea. At least one.”

“What happened?”

“Building exploded.”

“Someone blew it up.”

“Gotta wait for the forensics team to say that.”

“A masked figure hacked into the evening news earlier tonight and said this…”

Iffy flipped through his notebook, Lolly handed him hers, he read from the opened page:

“Good evening, Little Aleppo. My name is not important. What is important is that the man calling himself the Downsider reveal his identity and take nude photographs of himself. If my demands are not met, things are going to start blowing up. This is the part where I show you I’m serious.”

And handed her notebook back.

“Shouldn’t we take this threat at face value?”

“How can we take someone who won’t show their face at face value? Checkmate, dingus.”

“I don’t call you names, Chief.”

“Off the record?”

“Sure. Off the record.”

“I just saw the fucking teevee thing just like you did. That was ten minutes ago, I got here five minutes ago, and now it’s now. I got no idea what’s going on. No one does. It insults both of our intelligences that you thought I would.”

“Don’t blame me: you give off an air of authority and competence.”

“I’ll know what I know when I know it. Which will be sooner rather than later, but right now I don’t know dick about fuck. As clueless as you, and that’s saying something. Let’s go back on the record.”

“Sure.”

“As you can see, our response was almost immediate. Within minutes. My officers formed a cordon around the area to give Little Aleppo’s brave firemen the proper space to do their jobs. They have not completed their search of the building, but we have one dead so far. We are working right now to identify the victim and notify the family. Off the record again.”

“Okay.”

Chief Somme pointed at the young woman in the brownish sport coat that she had chosen specifically for its shapelessness. Iffy had approved: it was one of the most boring garments he had ever seen. Reporters don’t put themselves in their stories, he had lectured her, and that begins with the wardrobe.

“Who is this person?”

“Lolly Tangiers,” she said, and extended her hand; Chief Somme shook it.

“Tangiers?”

“Tangiers.”

“Like the fruit?”

“Like the city.”

“I don’t give a shit. Back on the record.”

“Okay,” Lolly answered.

“She doesn’t get to say when I’m on and off the record,” he said to Iffy. “I don’t know her. That’s your job.”

“She has my proxy,” Iffy said.

“She can’t have your proxy. You’re present.”

“Let’s go back on the record.”

“The Little Aleppo Police Department will work tirelessly to ascertain the facts behind this incident. We will pursue every lead, and in fact we’re working on several leads right now. If there is a connection between the broadcast and the explosion, it will be fully explored and the perpetrator brought to justice.”

“You have leads?”

“Several. Like I said.”

“Can you tell me about them?”

“Of course not.”

“How do you have them? The bomb just went off. Was there a warning from somewhere? Did you keep this information from the public?”

“Off the record. Don’t be an asshole, Bould. I have no fucking leads.”

“That’s not how the record works. I have to say we’re off it.”

“I declared it.”

“No. It’s not a declaration thing. It’s the thing where the two guys are launching the nuke and they both have to turn their keys at the same time. You can’t just call it.”

“The girl nodded her head when I said ‘off the record.’ I saw it.”

“She’s a young woman,” Iffy replied.

“My name would be great thing for you fellows to call me,” she said.

“Quiet, equipment. Chief, would you like to amend your statement about working on leads?”

“What I meant to say was that we are working on developing leads. And remaining open to all possibilities.”

“Such as?”

“Commies.”

“You think the Russians did this?”

“Wouldn’t put it past ’em. Fuckers don’t fight fair.”

Chief Somme had a brick-sized walkie-talkie on his belt, which squawked three times and a deep voice came out.

“Chief?”

He took it to his mouth, clicked the talk button.

“Chief Somme here.”

“This is Aron. Me and Relleno are over at the teevee studios, Chief. No one weird’s been in or out today. No new hires. The guy who owns the place, Loomis? He says it was Communists.”

The walkie-talkie dropped to the chief’s waist, and he pointed at Iffy with the other hand and said,

“I told you it was Commies.”

“I really don’t think it was them, Chief.”

Back on the walkie:

“Question everybody hard. And check every inch of the building. And then go check the antenna.”

To Iffy:

“The teevee comes from the antenna, right?”

“The one on Mount Lincoln?

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

The walkie:

“Go check the antenna.”

“The one on Mount Lincoln?”

“The giant fucking antenna on the top of the mountain that can be seen at all times from everywhere in the fucking neighborhood, yes. The antenna. Go up there and check it out.”

“For what?”

“For irregularities. Be a fucking detective.”

“Hey, Relleno! You know anything about antennas?”

There was a crackle.

“No, Chief, he doesn’t know anything about antennas, either.”

“Aron, get the fuck up there.”

“Chief, it’s getting dark.”

“And take pictures of the scene so I can look at ’em when you get back. Over.”

The walkie back on the belt, but it squawked again.

“Whaaat?”

“Chief, you around a teevee?”

“I’m at the fire, dipshit.”

“Yeah, sure, okay. So, uh, Loomis? The owner? He’s on camera now and ranting about Communists infiltrators in the neighborhood. He’s gonna get everyone all riled up.”

Paul Loomis owned Little Aleppo’s teevee station, KSOS, and he was a Commie-fighting man. He was a business-owner. He was an entrepreneur. He had a massive head, and had to his knowledge never been wrong. That watch he’s wearing? Same one the astronauts wear.

“Aron, what are you saying?”

“Should we stop him?”

“Is he threatening anyone by name?”

“No.”

“But you want to stop him?”

“He’s really going wackadoodle, Chief.”

“Detective. Son. What you’re describing is a coup.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Still. Let’s not do that, okay?”

“Off the table, Chief.”

“Do the interviews and get the fuck up that hill. Over.”

Chief Somme replaced the walkie on his belt and said to Iffy,

“All of that was off the record.”

“The junta attempt? Sure.”

Crowds growing on either side of the trucks and cars and men and fire. Not the usual boisterous tumult, and the food carts stay a respectful distance back. No one even heckled the cops, and Little Aleppians had been known to heckle cops during religious services. Folks in the neighborhood were not virgins to explosions. Criminals blew each other up all the time. The Gabacho Brothers simply adored sending bombs to people, but the recipients always deserved their fates. This was different. This was not that.

Beer-Cooler Ethel still sold tallboys of Arrow, though. Iffy bought two, slipped one in his coat pocket, popped the top PSHT and slurped the foam from the lip. He was walking south, back to Pryor Street, back to the Braunce Building, walking quickly. Back to the typewriters and presses and deadlines. The Cenotaph‘s readers needed to be told what had happened, and it didn’t matter that the Cenotaph‘s writers had no idea themselves. The paper’s gonna thump onto doorsteps 12 hours from now, Iffy figured. Might as well not be blank.

Lolly caught up with him, matched speed, and said,

“I interviewed the Fire Chief.”

“He tell you to fuck off?”

“Tell is underselling it. He demanded I fuck off.”

“Yeah. He’s working. There’s a building on fire.”

Iffy handed her the tallboy. It was white with “Arrow” in red script letters; the cross-bar of the “A” is an arrow pointed towards a bullseye that replaces the “O.” Over the years, there had been dozens of varieties from the local brewery. Arrow Air was the low-calorie offering (it was half-water). Arrow Paprika sold phenomenally in the Hungarian diaspora, but that was only a handful of guys named László. There was also Crossbow, which was the company’s attempt at entering the “alcoholic beverages you can’t get in a bar, only a liquor store and not a nice liquor store, one with bulletproof glass in between you and the cashier” market. On paper, Crossbow was a malt liquor, but in the can or 40-ounce bottle, it was plain old Arrow with two or three shots of pure grain alcohol poured in. Introduced at a price point intended to lure customers away from their customary tipple (addicts are brand-loyal), Crossbow was an immediate success with the cirrhotic and belligerent. The Town Fathers made it illegal within weeks, their argument being that “the only people drinking this shit are the exact people who shouldn’t be drinking this shit.”

Beer-Color Ethel sold plain old Arrow. PSSHT Lolly raised her can up towards Iffy. He clunked it with his, and she took a sip.

“You gotta drink that down. Finish it before we get back to the office.”

“A lot of guys drink at the office,” she said.

“Yeah, they’re degenerates. Y’gotta at least keep up appearances.”

He lit a Kool.

“Paper went to bed at 4:30, though,” she said. “It was already printing when the explosion happened.”

“Yeah.”

“Are they gonna stop the presses?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Do you think they’ve already done it or do we get to do it?”

“Do it? Do what, dramatically burst into the room and yell ‘Stop the presses?'”

“Yeah, that.”

“It’s so much more mundane than that,” Iffy said. “Goose tells one of the union guys to turn a key.”

“It’s not a big red button under a plexiglass shield that flips up?”

“Nah. Guy named Eddie turning a key.”

“Is it an impressive-looking key?”

“Regular key.”

The smell of fried piano was still in the air, and both slugged from their tallboys. In the morning, the Cenotaph would name the dead, Mercy Dampin and Alan Delon and Laila Ma, and note their ages and home addresses. A black-and-white photograph of the fire held purchase above the fold, and within the newspaper were various conjectures, and residents snapped it up. A second printing, even. Something about the story just hooked the readers, and there were plenty of them in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

1. Setting A Scene
2. The College Tour
3. A Morning Early in Little Aleppo
4. It’s Only Jukebox Music
5. First Appearances
6. Got The Radio On
7. A Mild-Mannered Reporter in Little Aleppo
8. Window Dressing
9. The Road In
10. The Middle of the Night in Little Aleppo
11. Dreaming In The Canyons
12. On Background
13. Two Monks Walk Into a Bar
14. The Pros From Little Aleppo
15. The Fire Of Memory
16. Take Your Shot
17. All The Salty Margaritas
18. Mobsters And Monsters
19. Stories Twist Together
20. The Lid Is On
21. Passing In Little Aleppo
22. Pining Among The Palms
23. Stacking The Deck
24. Out Of The Frying Pan
25. The Sick Man of Little Aleppo
26. Death And Birth
27. Calling For Backup
28. For The Record
29. Completely Over The Rainbow
30. A Betting Man
31. A Rallying
32. A Christmas Morning In Little Aleppo
33. Last Step

“I should have done more fucking.”

“Did you not do enough?”

“I did my share, but I should have been absurd about it. Just rubbed up against people. Maybe even tried a man.”

“You never?”

“God, no,” Steppy Alouette said. “Have you smelled them?”

Lower Montana laughed in the darkening shallows of the sunroom of the house on Pharaoh Lane. The light was all sliced up and low-angled and stumbling; it slammed into mites, smoke, particulates, all whirling and pirouetting and behaving as though they were still invisible. There’s no end to the foolishness the invisible will get up to.

“I’ve smelled them.”

“Well, there you go. Like spoiled dog meat, and it got worse when they got all sexed up. Did you ever go into the backroom at the Wayside?”

“Not when it was in use.”

“Horrific.”

The Wayside Inn used to be on Sylvester Street, and now it is again. In between, it burned down. The new building has picture windows, and a sign advertising that one can find the gayest Bingo game in the neighborhood every Monday night, and one flag that was red, white, and blue, and one flag that was all the other colors; they fluttered and whipped SNAP echoing up and down the street so no one could ignore the noise. The old building was a door. From the street, at least: just a door, black. Inside, the el-shaped bar was to the left and the tables were to the right and the dance floor was beyond that, and the backroom was beyond that, behind another black door that was not a door, but thick rubber curtains. One percent above pitch black; there was groping, stroking, sucking, fucking, and occasionally even soul kissing. By last call, the floor was an abomination. Women did not go in the backroom, just men. Social scientists drew numerous conclusions from this fact, and some even developed theories.

“Why were you in there?”

“It was just the once, but it’s burned into the nostrils of my mind. I had taken acid, and I simply had to see for myself what was going on back there. This was ’73. I was very late to acid. I avoided it. It turned people into poetic twits. But Manfred insisted and insisted and insisted, and finally I just wanted him to shut up.”

“What did you think?”

“I had a delicious time. Except for the backroom nonsense. Wonderful night, and then we went for pancakes. Grew rather fond of LSD, as long as we’re being honest, but it was a toss-up what you were getting. I ended up calling over to Harper for a chemistry professor. He’s still there. Gianno. Short with a massive beard.”

“Professor Gianno. He plays Santa at Christmas.”

“Many would thank him for his gifts.”

“He cooked you acid?”

“I don’t know if there’s so much cooking involved. There’s mixing and swirling. Possibly heating, but I don’t know if heating is the same thing as cooking. And oodles of custom glassware. Do you know what an Erlenmeyer flask is?”

“No.”

“It’s expensive, that’s what it is. But it was worth it. Perfectly pure. All killer, no filler. Ha! I love that. Manfred used to say it. ‘All killer, no filler.’ He had to tinker around with the recipe, I remember. First batch came out sideways. Made you believe you were a hot-air balloon for eight hours. It got old quick.”

“I’ll bet,”

“But he figured it out. Maybe too well. Became sort of an accidental kingpin.”

“He plays Santa at the Christmas party,” Lower said.

“Santa was a drug dealer, sweetheart. You can’t publish any of this until after he dies, too.”

“He’s in his fifties.”

“Learn patience.”

Steppy wore very little jewelry, just a necklace with a small, teardrop pearl hanging from it and earrings that matched. Her fingers had thinned between the knuckles and bore no rings. She had not worn a watch for 30 years, since her eyes got too weak to read the time without glasses. Lower had a Timex Ironman watch with a glowy-green face and a tactical band, and a wedding ring which was silver.

The watch lit up the corridor in the basement, which was larger than the house above; this was in keeping with tradition when it came to stately manors. Poor folks’ houses are set on top of land, but the wealthy dig deep. The wine cellar was the size of a suburban public library, and a gym with outdated but not dusty equipment: medicine ball, the strappy thing that goes around your waist and vibrates. Cold storage for furs and joints of meat. A room full of volleyball nets. Dry sauna, wet sauna, damp sauna. Game room with pinged pong, foosed ball, an Asteroids machine. Two-lane bowling alley. Panic room and the panic larder and the panic wine cellar.

Nooks, too, and the immortal companion of the nook: the cranny. The basement scared the shit out of Steppy when she was a child. Long passages, narrow and slanting off in three or more directions at once; perspective would shift on you down there like a rack focus; there were hidden staircases and doublebacks and at least several chambers. If you turned left, and shouted, your voice would echo; if you turned right, it would not. This was unnatural, Steppy felt, and so she stayed aboveground until she had need of a basement.

Sometimes, you need a basement.

“Chair was in the middle of the room. Very important. If you put the detainee against a wall, this bolsters the confidence. You want them to feel adrift at sea. Middle of the room.”

“How many were there?”

“Chairs? Just one,” Steppy said.

“Torture victims.”

“They weren’t victims, Lo. They were spies.”

“Whom you tortured.”

“Nazi spies. They don’t get sympathetic titles.”

Boxes now. Full of old slacks and civic awards. Several exercise machines purchased late at night off of the teevee. Single lightbulb plumped from the ceiling. No chair, and no Nazis, and no blood at all.

“Sink over there,” Steppy continued. “And the table was against this wall. Very unpleasant table. You’d rather not have anything to do with it.”

“What was on it?”

“Sharp things and blunt things. It was war, Lo.”

“How many?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A couple hammers, some scalpels–”

“How many people were tortured?”

“Not too many. More than we anticipated, though. One interrogation led to another, that sort of thing.”

“Do you still have the records?”

At age 30, Steppy had been 5’4″, but that was a long time ago and now she was just barely taller than Lower, who had been five feet even at age 30 and was now 35.

“Records?”

“Yes.”

“Of war crimes? Are you asking me if I kept records of war crimes and, if so, can I give them to you so that you might publish them?”

“Yes.”

“They got misplaced during the last Spring Cleaning. I’ll ask the White Russian to look for them.”

The women had returned from the basement an hour ago, and maid had been in and out of the sunroom twice, but Steppy had not brought up the matter.

“After the torture, of course, came rock and roll.”

“The Snug’s album. Tell me about that.”

“Same room. I think they set the drums up in there, or maybe vomited on each other.”

“How did you even meet them?”

“Gianno brought them over. Sell enough drugs and you’re bound to befriend some musicians. The singer was charming. Johnny or Jimmy or something. Called himself something absurd, but I threatened to throw him out of the house if he didn’t tell me his proper name.”

“Holiday Rhodes,” Lower smiled.

“The other three were dimmer than dirt, but he had a bit of a spark. They showed up at a party and someone brought a guitar and there’s a piano or two down there, so a hootenanny broke out. They liked the sound, apparently, and so they tried to talk me into letting them record down there. And like I said: I was taking too much acid at the time, so I said yes.”

“They made a good record.”

“What was it called?”

“Daytime Villains. It’s a good record.”

Lower Montana had purchased Daytime Villains the week it came out on vinyl in 1973, and then several years later on cassette, and now owned the compact disc (which was remastered and included three bonus tracks). It was The Snug album that sounded the Snuggest; the boys were iterating as hard as they could, boosting all their favorite tunes and smashing them together with caterwauling harmonies overlaid. The lyrics were murky and buried and brilliant, and so was the bass (except the brilliant part), just guitar and drums going shlanga-lang THWACK like Jesus owed them twenty bucks; it was music to punch a cop to, it was maximum rockyroll. It was a record so good that the band who made it could coast the rest of its career, and The Snug did.

“I liked Motown. Born in ’07, don’t forget. Heard it all. The big bands and bebop and country and all of it. Always stayed up on music. Went to the Absalom and the Davidian, saw the new acts. Listened to the deejay at the Wayside. I used to go to the loft party on Good Jones Street. Nothing worse than an old woman still listening to the same music she did when she was 17. I heard it all. But I liked Motown the best.”

“Manfred, too. He used to put a big stack of Motown 45’s on his record player when we cleaned the house.”

Lower Montana was a historian, and thus given to evidence, facts, figures, and she had been trying to pin down the precise number of teens, cast out of their parents’ homes for the crime of faggotry, that Manfred had housed over the years. It was at least 30, and she had been one of them, and she could hear the cheeeeyikuhSHACK of the singles replacing one another on the spindle as she and Manfred tidied the already-immaculate bungalow on Fantic Street.

“The man kept a tidy home.”

“Indeed.”

“There wasn’t too much of it. Not like this,” Steppy vaguely gestured about. “This needs staff to deal with. Ludicrous place. There’s ten bedrooms, did you know that?”

“No.”

“Ten. Daddy had it built when I was a baby. Overestimated his virility, I think. Ten bedrooms. That’s a dormitory, not a house. Hide-and-seek would go on for hours. But there were other men to impress. All men do is try to impress one another. So there’s ten bedrooms.”

“Always room for company.”

“Mm. Always company. Artists. Lots of artists. Some painted, others lied. A few political refugees. I had a ballerina the Soviet Union was trying to assassinate once. Very glamorous. Always company. I knew so many different types, you see. It was fun to bounce them off each other. There were disasters, though. Sprout Samperand.”

“The bank heiress.”

“Entirely my fault she blew up.”

Sprout Samperand owned the Fourth First Bank of Little Aleppo until it exploded, after which she no longer owned it because it did not exist and she was dead. Her body was found in the ruins along with three others corpses quickly id’ed as members of a local anarchist’s collective called the Bringers. Raiding their squat soon thereafter, the LAPD (No, Not That One) found an arsenal large enough to be called “Texan;” the rest of the group was rounded up viciously and violently and two Bringers accidentally beat themselves to death in the holding cell. Residents approved heartily of the polices’ methods; you can’t have bank owners being kablewied up willy-nilly. Bad for the local economy.

Not so long after, the Cenotaph ran a series documenting that Sprout Samperand was not blown up by the Bringers, but instead blown up with them, as she had been the group’s benefactor for years. The report included documents, receipts, minutes from meetings, legal filings, medical findings, and hundreds of hours of first-hand testimony; the neighborhood read the story and went immediately back to blaming the anarchists.

“How.”

“I introduced them. You must understand that Sprout was dreadful. She was an animal-lover, and she’d take in these wretched creatures and then she’d corner you at functions and describe how the animals were falling apart. I remember she had a collie with no muzzle one time, and the dog’s sinus prolapsed and she had to wedge it back in with her fingers while the thing howled in agony. She imitated the howls. This was at a charity luncheon, Lo. This is what kind of person we’re talking about.”

“A bit socially awkward.”

“She was a social disease, that’s what she was. But, you know, I couldn’t avoid her. There’s only so many wealthy people in the neighborhood. When Sprout was around, one had to make one’s own fun. So I would introduce her to the wrong people at parties. Con artists, regular artists, charismatic drug addicts, you know the type. And then she’d call me the next day asking me if her car was over here. Oh, I’d laugh.”

“She never caught on?”

“She did not. But then one night in ’66 or early ’67 I had a party and got her and the Bringers together. All she wrote. Next time I saw her, she was wearing a beret and raving about The People. For the first time in my life, I wanted her to talk about dogs. She talked me into going down to their little clubhouse, an abandoned duplex all the way on the Downside. I don’t remember exactly what street it was, but the sidewalks were littered with dead squirrels. Seemed like a bad sign, but I went in anyway.”

Lower took a sip of her cold coffee and asked,

“And?”

“And what? It was what you’d expect. Dirty young people and brown rice. They were having what they called a Teaching Session. One of them started in about how we should dynamite all the dams and shit in the yard. “Let’s shit in the yard, comrades.’ And the rest of them sat there nodding. ‘Yes, let’s shit in the yard.’ I was appalled.”

“Well, they were anarchists.”

“Anarchists. Pssh. Most of them were middle-class kids slumming. None of them had done the reading. Couldn’t tell Bakunin from Bokonon. Anarchists. Pssh. They had their little meeting about destroying authority, then the girls went into the kitchen to start cooking and the boys sat around scratching their balls. Same thing happened at a Communist meeting I went to once. Funniest thing.”

“So how did it progress to bombs and guns?”

“I suppose incrementally. I wouldn’t know anything that you couldn’t read in the paper, if you trust the paper. Never went over there again, obviously. Didn’t see Sprout for six months or so; enjoyed it thoroughly. Then: boom. At least she went fast. Much better. Never linger.”

Twilight was near and the blue sky had become inky and severe and romantic, and there were clouds shaped like finger low by the horizon, and the last birds were becoming the first bats. Steppy had a blanket over her legs and he hands were folded in her lap. She did not fidget. She had never fidgeted.

“Tell me more about the Wayside.”

“Well, people needed someplace to go, didn’t they?”

Lower fidgeted. She had always fidgeted. But she said nothing. Humans detest silence, especially American humans, and will fill it with chatter if you sit there and say nothing. Lower said nothing.

“The cops were bastards,” Steppy continued. “They still are, but not like back then. They were permitted every cruelty. Cops will be as cruel as society permits them to be. The raids. When the cops raided the casino or the brothels, they had the decency to call ahead. Not the Wayside. Boom, here they come again. Haul off the kids. Slap some of them around.”

“You?”

“Me what?”

“Were you ever arrested?”

“Once. Little fat boy named Honey snatched me off my chair. Handcuffed. Put me in the paddy wagon, can you believe that? Barked my shin getting into the thing. So they put us all in the holding pen or cell or whatever it’s called. It’s got the bars and the toilet and the metal benches. Just like in the movies. Must have been 35 of us. I’m sitting up front. Chief comes in to look at the night’s catch and sees me. Never seen a man go that white, and I’ve known several albinos.”

“He recognized you.”

“Mm. I was the signer of all those checks for the Orphans and Widows fund that he dipped into to buy a Cadillac. Easy to pick out of a crowd. Fowler. His name was Fowler. One of those men that needs to shave four times a day, just disgustingly hairy. His hands and knuckles, ugh. Anyway, he opens up the cell door and Oh, no, Miss Alouette; there must have been some mistake. Let’s get you away from these degenerates. So I told him Chief Fowler, I am one of the degenerates. Grand round of applause.”

“Good for you.”

“Yes. Doesn’t register on the lummox. There’s been a mistake, ma’am. Please let’s go. And I said If I leave, then everybody leaves. Fowler just stands there in the doorway. You can actually see him thinking. He may have been counting on his fingers. Finally, he steps back and says Have a nice night, ladies and gentlemen and whatever you are. He was pointing at the drag queens. He did that to be cruel.”

“And you all left?”

“All of us. Went right back to the Wayside and we had a tremendous party. And after that, when we got raided, the cops only snatched up the poor-looking kids. The weird-looking ones. You know, some people slip by in this life and others can’t help themselves. I’d see them, all these young kids, and they’d be dressed so outrageously. People would yell at them on the street, or chase them, or worse. But they couldn’t help themselves. I liked what you wrote about Orphic.”

“You’ve said.”

“That poor thing. Her funeral was the first time I cried since my sister’s death. Not for Daddy, I didn’t cry. I felt as though I should have, but I didn’t. But she was so sweet and so young. 19?”

“18 when she died.”

“18. Brains bashed in on the Main Drag. Just for walking down the street being herself. Parents wouldn’t claim the body. For the best. They would have buried her in the wrong clothes, under the wrong name. I paid for the tombstone. You’ve seen it.”

“It’s tough to miss.”

In Foole’s Yard, on the small rise near the entrance, 12 feet high and 15 across and carved from one piece of alabaster marble, is a tombstone that reads

ORPHIC MYSTERY
1950-1968
Dreamer, Dancer, Friend

and shines like a disco ball.

“I was advised to add more to it. And You Motherfuckers Killed Her was the consensus, but I was never one for democracy. Simple. Leave the blame implicit. What good are accusations in the graveyard? It just had to be big. Like she was. You never met her. You can’t imagine how big she was.”

Steppy started laughing, that turned into a cough, two shallow breaths, a knock TOKTOK on the low table separating her from Lower in her chair, here is the Belarussian maid, uniformed and unsmiling and bearing a silver tray with an assortment of pills (pink, blue, another blue, yellowish) and a glass of water. Steppy throws down the pills, sips, hands the glass back to the Belarussian, who refuses it.

“More vater,” she says.

“Don’t tell me how to drink. I know how to drink.”

“Doctor says more vater.”

“My doctors are idiots. Out.”

The Belarussian does not move.

“Leave it on the table and I’ll drink it.”

She does, exits.

“Dying is a chore,” Steppy said. “Never let anyone tell you differently. Death is fine. But dying? It’s just a plod. I was talking about Orphic.”

“Yes.”

“6’5″ in barefeet, and she never wore anything but the highest heels she could find. She was so glamorous. 18 years old. We buried her the right way. We buried her with her name.”

She reached for the glass, gave up, set her hand back on her lap.

“Tomorrow, Lo. Enough for today. Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you different versions of the lies I told you today.”

The cops closed off the Main Drag for the procession to coast south, hearse followed by luxury cars followed by beaters followed by a fire truck. Past the museum and past the hospital and past the schools and eastward into the foothills where Foole’s Yard waited for Steppy Alouette to take her place among all the upstanding citizens of Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

The sun came up over Little Aleppo, and so the Morning Tavern opened its doors, no matter that it was Christmas. Fisherman and drunks and women who lied to their husbands about being joggers were waiting on the sidewalk on Widow’s Way, and the bartender in the tank top had room for them all. She had black hair under a Santa hat, and tattoos sleeving her arms. No one had yet fed the massive chromed-out jukebox, so it was quiet but for the grumbling and unwanted poetry. Scrabbling on the roof. Rats again, the bartender thought, or maybe something’s gotten loose from Harper Zoo again.

The fat man in the red suit entered, sat at the bar, took off his white gloves, stuffed them in his pocket, looked like he wanted a cigarette.

The bartender said,

“Egg nog?”

“Cutty and Sunkist,” the man replied.

“That’s an awful particular drink.”

“I’m a real special guy.”

The bartender, being a bartender, had heard variations on that sentiment from just about every man she’d ever poured a cocktail for. She found the Cutty, spritzed in the orange soda from the gun, added some more Cutty because, fuck it, it’s Christmas.

The man sipped the drink, nodded, sipped again. He stared off into space, which was impressive given that there was a wall six feet in front of him.

The bartender said,

“You look familiar.”

“You should smell me.”

“Tough night?”

“Not tough.”

“Long night?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well, it’s over now.”

“Nah. Still got Hawaii.”

She smiled, professionally, and dawdled down to the other end of the el-shaped bar, stopping to pull two pints of Arrow Brown. (Arrow Brown was a stout that was advertised as “the thickest, brownest, flattest beer we’re legally permitted to sell.”) The Morning Tavern was filling with all sorts of humanity and other mammals: the insomniac, the sozzled, folks with dead families, saxophonists. There was a woman who called herself the Empress of Spokane, and insisted everyone else did, too

When the bartender came back to the red-suited man, she said,

“Another one?”

“Another one. You got a radio?”

“Yeah.”

“Could you turn on KHAY?”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot,” the bartender said, and clicked on a transistor behind the bar. She did not need to adjust the frequency; it was already set to 107.7…

“…on your FM dial. You know where to find your pal Frankie Nickels. She’ll play you the hits. That was Christmas Head by The Snug, but you knew that. I hear the boys are back in the studio, or at least in their lawyer’s office. There’s percolation to the situation, least that’s what I hear through various grapevines.

“But it’s Christmas, cats and kittens, and so you know what’s coming. Turned into a bit of a tradition. Didn’t mean it to, but apparently you all like this story.

“So I’ll tell it again.

“Some stories are too good to hear just once. Some are too important and we’re all so damn thickheaded. Gotta hear ’em over and over to get ’em to sink in. This one starts back in the fogginess of time. Real long ago. Before we had pinball machines, and before we had mirrors, and before we had hot-air balloons. Before we had bridges, even. Before we even learned how to write our names.

“We invented war.

“And it was real static for hundreds of thousands of years. Bunch of our young men sprint at a bunch of your young men. At first, everybody had a stick. Later on, we figured out how to make swords. Whoever won got to march on the loser’s lands and steal all their stuff and rape all their women. Greeks, Chinese Romans, all them empires you slept through history class on: bunch of guys sprinting at a bunch of other guys.

“Guns are a lot more recent than you’d imagine. And they only got worth a damn real recently, in a historical sense. There’s a reason all them Redcoats had bayonets affixed. Still a bunch of guys sprinting. Civil War saw the Gatling Gun, but just a little bit. Armies were still charging in the 1860’s.

“But it’s the new century, and we got a new war for a new world. Globe got all connected up in the 20th century! Should’ve thought twice before laying all them railroad tracks and telegraph lines! Should’ve known what would come with it! Some dippy Archduke gets shot and the whole planet goes kablooey, man, ha ha ha.

“So now you got machine guns. Good ones, too. Spit fire for hours and hours, and not need a break. Bullets the size of your thumb, 600 of ’em a minute, pumping downrange at three times the speed of sound. Set one up every couple hundred yards and that’s all she wrote, cats and kittens. In a world without tanks or air support? Better than the Great Wall, or Hadrian’s Wall. Who needs bricks when you’ve got a Browning?

“Under intense stress, the human will dig. Didja know that? People caught in burning buildings, the investigators often find scratch marks by their bodies. When the situation becomes primitive, so do we. Those first soldiers in 1914? They heard those machine guns and they dug straight down until they had themselves a nice trench.

“Nothing good has ever come from a trench.

“Everybody settled in real quick. Got the English and French–and ain’t they shocked to finally be on the same side in a conflictagration–on the left; the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians and Ottomans are in the middle; the Russians are on the right. That’s what the maps say. That’s what the books say.

“There were scared, cold children in holes being shot at for reasons absurd. That’s what your pal Frankie Nickels says.

“Nobody listens to deejays anymore.

“19 years old, 20 years old. Sign up, boy! Ain’t no legs gonna spread for you ‘less you sign up! Poor little bastards never saw the world coming. This is 1914. Just the start of the stupid. Trenches got dug out all nice and reinforced with wood and cement later in the war, but in ’14? They were holes. Naked mud. This is Northern Europe. Chilly up there starting around September. Best to be indoors, with a roaring fire and a bottle of whatnot and someone feisty to hide under the blankets with. Anywhere but a hole in the mud getting shot at.

“Home by Christmas. This was the general consensus, and you know what I tell you about that general consensus, cats and kittens. Run! Trust in General Motors, General Mills, any general but the general consensus! It’s usually just the laziest thought available. The boys will be home by Christmas, all the London papers trumpeted in the Fall of 1914. Roundabout December, they stopped printing that.

“Boys! Should’ve been living with their mamas. Learning how to lie to girls. Drinking with their buddies. Reading books. Writing books. 19 years old. 20 years old. British, German, who cares. Just little boys got told to do wrong by old men should’ve known better.

“O, those old men. They had read their books. O, they had read their books. And all them books defined war as a bunch of young men sprinting at a bunch of other young men, armed. And so that’s what the old men ordered up. ‘Over the top,’ that’s what they called it. Get out of the hole which was keeping you so safe from the machine guns of the enemy, and run forwards towards them machine guns.

“It had to work eventually.

“Christmas rolled around. It does that. And we’re not ever gonna know who started the proceedings, but there was doings transpiring. Strange alterations in the expected, ripples reverberating all up and down the betting line, people acting all funny. Seems that Christmas got a hold of one of them boys, 19 years old, 20 years old, never been away from home for the holiday before, and that boy started subordinating all melodic-like.

“Harmonizing with the enemy, ha ha ha.

“Carols! Those German boys started singing Stille Nacht and those British boys sang Silent Night right back at ’em. Line’s 400 miles long from north to south, so we ain’t talking about everyone, but enough to make a difference. Boys started singing at each other. And no one was shooting. This was Christmas Eve, and no one shot at each other that night all the way until dawn, which was cold and clear.

“When it got light enough, the British boys could see that the Germans had set up Christmas trees along the tops of their trenches. Not real trees, I guess. They were jerry-rigged, ha ha ha, but they were good enough. Christmas tree don’t have to be big to be beautiful, just has to mean it. And so the boys sang at one another until they couldn’t take it no more and someone popped his head up.

“Can you imagine? The Yuletide spirit is one thing, but sticking your head out of a trench in the First World War One? That boy’s balls grew three sizes that day, cats and kittens.

“Didn’t get blown off, though. Brit, German, we ain’t never gonna know who was the first, but he didn’t get his head blown off. Started walking towards the other boys, the boys he had been told were his enemy, and I’m gonna bet his opposite number was already out of his hole and walking towards him, and then they met in the middle and shook hands and wished each other a Merry Christmas.

“Peace on Earth and all that.

“All their brothers-in-arms followed, leaving their rifles behind. Nobody had much in the way of stuff, but gifts were exchanged. Tobacco, a fresh pair of socks. It wasn’t about the object, it was about seizing a chance to be kind. Sometimes we forget that human beings are full of humanity. The German barbers cut the British boys’ hair, and the other way ’round. Some of the officers could communicate, but the enlisted men mostly just smiled, and shook hands, and clapped each other on the shoulders. Which was enough, y’know?

“A guy had a ball.

“They played soccer. Tommy versus Fritz. Ground was frozen stiff and full of holes, but they didn’t care. All up and down the 400-mile long line, games broke out. There were no girls to talk to, so they kicked the ball around. 19-year-olds, 20-year-olds. Never gonna know how many, though, but seems a couple dozen. Robert Graves even wrote about one of the games, if you can believe that, but he wasn’t there and you know you can’t trust poets. Doesn’t really matter what the score was.

“Early Christmas supper out in No Man’s Land, together, all the boys sharing their squirreled-away goodies, and then back to the trenches at sundown. Sun goes down real early in December in Northern Europe.

“In the years that followed, the High Command on both sides would makes damn sure to schedule heavy shelling during the holiday.

“Now, I’ve been telling that story for I-don’t-know-how-many years right here on the Frankie Nickels Show on KHAY–Hey!–and I always did wonder just what the moral of it was. Story’s gotta have a lesson, cats and kittens! Otherwise, you’re just listing sequential events.

“When I was younger, I thought the moral was that man was pacifistic by nature and only became belligerent under duress, but I’ve been to the DMV too many times since then to believe that anymore. When I was a bit older, I thought that the soccer games were the important part. That given the freedom to choose so, people would pick playing over fighting. I dunno.

“Lately, I been thinking about those barbers and their customers. About having your enemy sitting in front of you, back turned, and a pair of scissors in your hand. About sitting there with your neck exposed. Maybe we should expose our necks a little bit more.

“It’s good for ya until it ain’t.”

The Morning Tavern had an Old Testament jukebox, ferocious and vengeful and chrome, with 45’s in it that went CHUNK and KASHWANG when you offered up your dime and opinion. Tasteful neon. It was an appliance. P-11. That Christmas song. The Irish one. The guy with the teeth, and the redhead. The sad one that got all the details wrong. Banjos in the arrangement, and the small transistor behind the bar playing KHAY–107.7 on your dial–was drowned out.

The man in the red suit raised his white eyebrows, and nothing else. He was nearing the end of his drink, and the bartender with the black hair and the tattoos asked,

“Another?”

“Quick one.”

She did. He gulped.

“Where do you think faith comes from?”

“Desperation,” the bartender answered too fast.

“Then why do children have it?”

“Children believe in the boogerman. Children can’t be trusted.”

“Sure they can. They haven’t learned how to lie yet.”

And when he said this, the man in the red suit’s eyes glowed. They were charcoal black, and still they glowed, and the cheeks above his beard reddened, and a calm overtook the bartender like she had no rent to pay or food to buy, and that she was encompassed by love and security, and the man tossed back the rest of his drink, threw a hundred on the bar, dismounted his stool, and continued,

“Terrible what becomes of adults. Have you seen my Blitzen?”

He was pointing downwards, so the bartender looked downwards, to where the man in the red suit had taken out his penis and testicles.

“He guides the sleigh.”

“GET OUT! Get out, you sex pervert jackass!”

Which the man in the red suit, having gotten what he wanted for Christmas, did. The door flapped open and shut behind him, and the bartender leaned against the well drinks, removed her Santa hat, replaced her Santa hat, made herself a Cutty and Sunkist and choked it down as punishment; there was scrabbling on the roof audible in between jukebox music, rats again or something got loose from Harper Zoo, and faith was a toss-up as always in the Morning Tavern, which is a bar in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

“Those are the handwillows.”

“Handwillows? Which ones?”

“With the speckled-sort-of leaves. All trunk-ish.”

“I see the ones you’re pointing at,” Lower Montana said. “Is that what they’re called, handwillows?”

“It’s what I call them,” Steppy Alouette answered.

“What do arborealists call them?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t any on staff.”

They were back in the sunroom, having had lunch. Tomato soup, and then chicken dumplings. Steppy got half her soup down, almost two dumplings. Both refused the aggressive and multiple offers of sour cream from the maid.

“Must mix sveet vith sour or vill get chilblains,” she admonished.

“Oh, hush with you and your Old Country nonsense.”

“Is dangerous, vun taste all by lonesome.”

Steppy threw her napkin at her.

“Out.”

The maid’s black-and-white uniform was starched, and so made a racket as she left. They were in the formal dining room; Steppy didn’t eat in there much anymore, but she liked being fancy for guests. It was how you showed love, she thought: by breaking out the good forks. The exterior wall was mostly window, and it faced north so there was never any harsh glare, just creamy illumination; it was bright enough that the stemware needed to be truly clean. All fourteen places had been set, and Steppy was at the head of the table with Lower kitty-corner to her right. The art was neutral; the floorboards were even.

“I’d fire her, but the woman cleans like the devil’s after her. It’s a shame I’m dying; the house has never looked better.”

“You’re not dying.”

“Oh, can it.”

So Lower did, and ate two more dumplings, and then two more–they were pork, and Lower was usually a vegetarian, but Steppy didn’t allow vegetarianism in her home–so that there were none on her plate; silently, the large Belarussian entered, served Lower four more dumplings from over her right shoulder. Then came the ladle of sour cream, which Lower parried with her butter knife CLANG and the maid lunged, so Lower riposted CHANG their eyes were locked.

“I don’t want any.”

“You vill summon the demons Dazhbog and Stribog! Eat the soured cream!”

Steppy yelled, or as got as close to yelling as she could, at the two of them,

“Hey! Knock it off! You! Out!”

The large Belarussian withdrew, and there was a sound that was like silence, but also like a woman chewing a dumpling.

“Do you,” Lower asked with her mouth full, “know her name?”

“What’s the point in being rich if you have to learn the maid’s name?’

They were back in the sunroom, having had lunch. The mismatched furniture, the empty bird cage, the chair which maybe used to be orange that Lower sat on, the faded-green couch Steppy had laid out on and covered herself with a knitted blue quilt, the low table in between them with the whirring tape recorder. Two cups of coffee, one with lipstick on the rim.

“Where were we?”

“The dining room. Don’t go batty, now.”

“What were we talking about?”

“The War. No, not quite. We were talking about my sister. She was killed before the War, although it had already started, really. It was personal. I found that out later, it was personal, and that made sense because neither she nor her useless husband were political in any sense. But I suppose if the person you have a problem with is a Brownshirt, then it’s a political problem. Poor girl. At least there weren’t any children.”

Steppy sipped her coffee, grimaced, placed it back on the saucer, continued,

“Daddy had to go over there to get her body. I think that’s what killed him. Bardolph’s family threw a perfect fit. Can you imagine? ‘Ze vife vill be buried und de sacred grounds viz ze husband.’ Ridiculous people. Pedigreed, the Europeans. They’ve all got their papers, just like the dogs at the show. Affencrumtz Schnickter Gustav Gustav Bardolph Edelweiss Jurgen von Knucklehoff.”

“That was the husband? The count?”

“I’m missing 10 or 12 of his names. There were 19.  He had  a mnemonic to help you remember it, and he tried to teach it to me, but it was in German and I wasn’t paying attention to him because he was a twit.”

“How did your father get your sister’s body back?”

“Paying off everyone in sight. They had names and a castle, but Daddy had his checkbook. A checkbook is much better than a trebuchet against a castle. I remember going down to the Fourth First Bank to make these complicated international transfers. He brought her back, and we buried her in Foole’s Yard where she belongs. And then Daddy went next to her a few months later. Don’t let anyone tell you that 1936 was a good year.”

“I don’t think anyone has.”

“And as far as I was concerned, the War had started. Bastards had killed my sister and my father. So I did the only thing I could: sicced the museum on ’em.”

The Little Aleppo Museum of Art was the pride of the neighborhood, even if most of the neighborhood had not visited since being forced to as schoolchildren. There was a healthy history of businesses advertising themselves as “museums” in the area since shortly after its inception–Professor Parness’ Palace of Ethnic Freaks comes to mind–but LAMA was the first, and so far only, swear-to-god museum. Gift shop, docents, post-docs carefully wiping dust off Vermeers, Robert Hughes’ photograph by the door with a note reading DO NOT ADMIT. It was a world-class establishment.

“Maybe ‘sicced’ is a bit much. One must avoid self-aggrandizement. Daddy always said that. Might be why the crowd at his funeral was so small. Or it could have been the rain. One of those.”

Steppy had quit smoking cigarettes 30 years prior; she reached for one on the table, laughed at her own hand.

“The Nazis were looting art. You know this.”

“Yes.”

“Thugs. No one who appreciates art could ever loot it. Heist, maybe. At least there’s a bit of panache in a heist.”

Steppy’s eyes clouded over as if she were thinking of something she was not telling Lower.

“But looting? Banging on the door in the middle of the night with a gang of armed goons, knocking Grandma to the floor, and ripping the Kandinsky off the wall? Terrible days. So, anyway, I bought as much as I could. Klee, Roeder, Moll. Whoever was on the Degenerate List. They didn’t start burning paintings until ’42, did you know that? July of ’42. They started burning Jews in January of ’42, but they held off on the paintings until July. Essie would have found that funny. She was such a silly little girl.”

The sky was bluer than a meaningful guitar, and the grass was soft-looking, and the trees were varied; there was a mandala made from posies and mums that Steppy used to trudge halfway through looking for nirvana, only to get bored and decide to play tennis; two courts (grass, clay); the pool, which was shaped like a pool and not like a kidney, with its diving board; the gazebo and the portcullis and the pergola; the creeping ivy and the throttling ganymedes; fountains catching piss from angels made from chubby plaster; several small monuments to dead peacocks. There was no barbecue. The gardeners were toiling. That was the difference between a backyard and grounds: a backyard needed a swipe with the lawnmower once a week, but grounds required constant staffing.

“Bought everything I could. Hated most of it, but what do I know? We had some people in Paris, Berlin, Munich. Art dealers. Half of them were Nazis, the other half were pretending to be. It cost less to bribe the real Nazis. Always wondered why that was. Anyway, we got as much off the continent as we could. You should have seen the museum. Packed. Packed!”

“With people?”

“God, no. Little Aleppians enjoy talking about art, or forging it, or using it to launder money. But look at the stuff? Never. No, I meant the museum was packed with art. Walls were full, you could barely turn around from all the sculptures. Place looked like a warehouse. And the warehouse looked like the Collyer Brothers’ house. I had to start giving things away to friends. ‘Here, take the Wollheim. Hang it in the children’s nursery.’ Didn’t you ever wonder why there was a Chagall on the wall of the Wayside?”

“The one by the bathroom? That was real?”

“Oh, yeah. Owner never came calling for that one. Make sure you write that in your book. I gave the damn paintings back. Most of them, anyway. Most of them. Some went to the wrong Jews. And I got conned out of a bunch of Picassos, but that’s no great loss. We kept records, but…it was complicated. And then the War officially started.”

“And you joined up?”

“Joined up? I wasn’t an 18-year-old farmboy from Iowa, Lo. I received a commission from the Navy. OSS. You know what the OSS was?”

“They became the CIA.”

“That they did. And I became a spy.”

“You spied on the Germans?”

“How on earth would I do that? I know just enough German to tell the waiter to stop bringing me sausages. I spied on the British.”

“We didn’t spy on the British.”

“Of course we did. We spied on ourselves; why wouldn’t we spy on the British? I hated it. Not the work, the work was a hoot, but Christ I hated London. Nothing but rain, and you couldn’t get an orange. Plus, you know, the nightly bombing. Came back home as soon as possible. Late ’42, I believe.”

“And did what?”

“Same thing as in London, but warmer. Little Aleppo was riddled with spies. The harbor? The Hun wanted it gone. The foreigners were easy enough to catch, but then there were the double agents. Neighborhood was thick with them. Nazis had a spymaster who lived on Polanco Street. Said his name was Smitty Johnson, which was our first clue. Never did find out what his real name was. We turned him. Which made our jobs easier, honestly. Much simpler to find a double agent when you’re the one who’s turned him into a double agent.”

“The logic is becoming circular here.”

“War is hell, Lo. We used to interrogate suspects here. In the basement. I’ll show you later.”

“Here?”

“Well, we couldn’t take them anywhere official. Used to bring them up in a gardener’s truck. They’d be in a big sack next to the mulch. No one notices a gardener’s truck on this street.”

The large Belarussian entered, refilled the coffee cups from a white, porcelain pot, exited without a word.

“And that was my War,” Steppy concluded. “You’re not bored?”

“Not at all. No, not at all.”

“Stories about the old days. Despicable. No one was ever interested in old King Arthur, fat and bald and Excalibur’s all rusty, and he’s still at the Round Table telling the same old jokes. ‘Did I ever tell you where I got my sword?’ No one wants that.”

“Historians do.”

“There was an eighth Segovian Hills for a brief period in ’52. It was immediately branded a Communist.”

“None of that is true.”

“So? Put it in your book, anyway. Spice things up.”

“I don’t even know if I’m writing a book.”

Little Aleppo: Everything We Can Prove had been a surprise best-seller after mistakenly being labeled as Fiction and reviewed as such. SciFi outlets praised Lower’s world-building and gloriously haphazard blending of the real with the semi-real; the Asian lady from the Times called the book “…almost too American, if wobbly in its plotting.” The publishers (Harper College Press) naturally were after her for some more material.

“You must. Publish or perish.”

“I’m tenured.”

“Publish, anyway.”

“Tell me about Manfred.”

And Steppy Alouette was young again, or at least middle-aged, at the sound of his name.

“He served on the USS Dextrous.”

“Yes, and took Communist shelling.”

“Oh, he told you, did he?”

She pointed towards the filigreed cigarette box, and Lower flipped the lid open, took out a well-rolled joint and silver Dunhill lighter FFT PHWOO and handed the joint to Steppy; they were both smiling.

“You have to admit there’s something very primal scene about it. Being shot at like that with nowhere to run. Can’t blame the man for being shaped by the experience.”

“His war was different than mine. He was a waiter when I met him, among other things. Nero’s. I think the menu’s exactly the same today as it was then. This was 1960 or so.”

“Among other things?”

“Well, you knew him. Manfred was social. He knew everyone. So he would introduce people.”

Lower took the joint from Steppy’s skinny fingers.

“A pimp.”

“Oh, God, no. Pimps have hats and that whole thing. Manfred just…monetized his little black book. He knew young, sexy people without any money, and he also knew old people with money who wanted to have sex.”

Lower slouched back into her chair.

“The man was a father to me.”

“Daddy had a side-hustle. Get over it.”

No one grows up smoothly, linearly, itty-bit at a time, no instead it is like slip faults within the earth that crack and shift dozens of miles in one sudden and terrible stroke, and you’re a different person just like that–retconned, the geeks would say–and all information needs to be reevaluated, and the info’s sources, too, and you feel like there should be a soundtrack. Atheists never use that as an argument: if there was a God, then why wasn’t there ominous music playing when she told me she had something to confess? Why weren’t there violin strikes when my brother started coughing and couldn’t stop?

“It’s just a bit…tawdry.”

“You always did leave the bar so early,” Steppy said. “And you’re young.”

“I’m 35.”

“You still think you can know people.”

“You can absolutely know people. Absolutely.”

Steppy had the joint now, which was creased and folded in on itself just like her fingers, and she shwopshwopshwop small puffs from it (favoring her lungs) and there was her sister and there was daddy and there were her tortoises.

“Maybe you can. Perhaps I just didn’t learn how. Maybe you’ve figured it out.”

“Manfred.”

“Mm, right. He was a waiter and whatever when I met him. Took to him right away. I loved him; we hated the same things. Only gay man I could ever take in large doses. Flippant and tetchy, most of them. Not Manfred. And he wanted to open a bar.”

“The Wayside.”

“My name. Well, I didn’t come up with it. But I suggested it.”

The original Wayside Inn was a saloon/brothel established in 18– right on the Main Drag, the second business venture (after the Turnaway Mine) in the valley that had not yet been named Little Aleppo. Miss Valentine owned the joint, and she had girls, whiskey, opium, games of chance and ample spittoonage. She burned, along with half the neighborhood and 36 other souls, in 1871 during what would be called the Wayside Fire. They threw the whores’ bodies in the mass grave up in the Verdance, where everything grows; they named the courthouse after Miss Valentine.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why name it that? It was…it was kind of a terrible place.”

“Only if you read books. If you watch movies, it was a violent paradise. Honest and rugged.”

Steppy was right. Historians know the past for what it was, monstrous and covered inch-deep in shit, but the rest of us can hear the reins being slapped around the post outside the saloon, and the double-doors swinging, now the piano stops and everyone appraises the newcomer, and then the piano kicks back in and from there a man can make his fortune, or not, according to his wits. There are also hoochie-girls.

“And, besides, no one else was using it. So the Wayside Inn it was.”

“Manfred told me that he opened up in ’63.”

“It was 1964. In February. The same night as The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan.”

Lower picked the joint from her hand.

“I’m going to close my eyes for ten minutes.”

“Should I go?”

“No. We haven’t gotten to the end yet.”

And the light came streaming through and swallowed everything that was, which is the point of a sunroom, and Lower shut off the recorder and sat back with the joint and her coffee, regarding the handwillows on Pharaoh Lane, which is a street in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

The Main Drag was in mourning, for whom it did not know. The pickpockets had streamed out (casually, of course) from the Seven Bells that afternoon; each had black armbands stuffed in pockets and stashed in shirts and ferreted up sleeves, and soon the ebony garters began to bloom on every street in Little Aleppo. The event was not without precedent: the armbands appeared, and a week later the Cenotaph would run an obituary for an “appraiser, procurer, and broker in previously purchased jewels,” or someone who enjoyed “art and efficient travel,” or an “boundlessly competitive amateur statistician,” along with a line–conspicuous and acontextual–about how the subject had never been indicted. By then, the funeral would have already taken place, along with debts settled, and properties transferred, and stashes re-stashed. But for now, just the armbands. The pickpockets also collected for the wake while they were making their rounds, but never from someone they snuck a cuff on. Bad luck. Worse: bad form.

The Seven Bells was packed tight, and its occupants relaxed. No crime had ever occurred in the building, though thousands had been planned, and a slightly smaller number celebrated; there were rules about that sort of thing. The card games were, paradoxically, the only honest ones in the neighborhood, and a stranger at the bar who told you about a rich sister locked away in a Catalonian jail cell could be trusted completely. Gloria Daio owned the joint and made the introductions, and she clanged an iron triangle behind the bar and there was quiet as she raised her pint of Arrow. The sharps and the sharks and the flim-flammers and the floozies who were not as floozified as they appeared; the cold readers and the backdoor bandits and guys with white vans and promises of high-fidelity; long conners and short changers and middle-deckers: they all raised whatever they had, too.

“To Big Daddy Don Dandy,” Gloria called out.

“To Big Daddy Don Dandy,” the crowd answered.

Big Daddy Don Dandy could be found at the Betty’s Perfect 10 on Frewer Street when he wasn’t on the road. New lanes had opened up on the Upside, place called Shooby-Doo’s, one of those vintageous joints with an aesthetic throughline: neon and waitresses in poodle skirts that came right to your seat with your ceviche and the housings for the ball returns had tailfins on them. Betty’s Perfect 10 was actually built in the 50’s and, so, was much shittier. You stuck to most of it, first of all, and there was no ceviche. A guy on parole would make you wings, maybe. There was a bar which did not feature any draft beers, and a bartender who should not be asked for anything complicated. There was a high desk, and behind that were shoe-filled cubbyholes and Betty. Her last name was Gow and her husband Max named the establishment after her when he opened it in 1956. Ten lanes across, and Max always called Betty his perfect ten. Max called a lot of women that. Died on top of one. Betty got over it, and she got the bowling alley, and she got Big Daddy Don Dandy.

He was the greatest bowling cheat in the world.

Within the genus cheater, there are many and varied species. The familiar card sharp, the wily dice palmer, the pug taking a dive in the third: all branches of the same tree. The bowling cheat had one advantage over them all, which is that the vast majority of their marks didn’t believe you could rig a bowling match. No Western has ever featured a scene where a guy got shot after being caught with a hidden bowling ball up his sleeve. The Clash didn’t write a song called The Bowling Cheat. Fixed? Bowling? Not a thing, the public believed. Bowling cheats liked that just fine.

It was a small fraternity, but worldwide. Sully Sprat worked out of Worcester, Massachusetts, and specialized in candlepin; Jocko Warnocke was from New Zealand and made a living off indoor bowls; Le Gordie Magnifique rolled five-ball in Montreal; Joey Tilt-A-Whirl played skee-ball down the shore in Jersey, and everyone liked him so he was allowed to subscibe to the newsletter and attend meetings even though they were certain skee-ball was not technically bowling. Big Daddy Don Dandy had the West Coast. All of it. The king needs his lands.

He rolled at lane #2–“Never roll next to a wall. One day, you’ll know why.”–starting in mid-morning and continuing through the afternoon and into the evening. Some nights, Betty would leave the keys on the high desk, shut all the lights except the ones over his lane, take off home as he spun his ten-pounder down the oiled-up plank. Hit the six. Hit the six with no hook, just glance it off the sheerest splinter of the ball. Hit the six with no hook, just glance it off the sheerest splinter of the ball a hundred more times. Hundred more. Now do it lefty. This is what the marks did not know. All cheats are masters. It was no good having an ace up your sleeve if you didn’t know the math that told you when to take it out. Hit the six a hundred more times.

The door to the bookstore with no title went TINKadink and Mr. Venable, who was in his customary seat, smiled and said,

“Big Daddy Don Dandy.”

It had been decades since anyone had called Big Daddy Don Dandy by anything by the fullest of names. Even after a few drinks when people couldn’t quite pronounce it–Bin Danny Don Andy, Bog Diddy Wah Diddy–no one would ever think to address him as “Don” or even just “Big Daddy.” Mr. Venable enjoyed saying the name. Also, Big Daddy Don Dandy was a buyer in a neighborhood of browsers and shoplifters, so Mr. Venable smiled doubly.

“Venable. That a new suit?”

He was wearing his customary suit.

“It is not.”

“No shit. You look like a J.C Penney’s that killed itself.”

“You’re sunshine on a cloudy day, Big Daddy Don Dandy.”

“My presence is a present. I come seeking incunabula.”

“Just woke up on the incunabula side of the bed?”

“Something like that.”

Big Daddy Don Dandy had eyes like poached eggs, and a mustache the shape of a slice of bacon; his whole face was breakfastish. His hair, in his youth, had been thick and brown and was now jet-black and thinning. He was wearing the shirt you’d expect, and it had his name written in white cursive over the left breast.

“Something has come in, I believe, that may pique your interest.”

“My interest is not that piqueable.”

Mr. Venable took his feet off the cluttered table that served as his desk and slid papers around until he found the one he was looking for. Took a sip of cold coffee, grimaced, took another. Reading glasses.

“A pamphlet. From Bamberg, I believe, and dated to 1481. 40 pages. Excellent condition for what is essentially a 500-year-old magazine. Illustrated with six engravings.”

“Is there an author involved?”

“Mm. Fellow named Hoggoth.”

Big Daddy Don Dandy didn’t say anything, just smiled but it looked like a smirk.

“I see piquing.”

“And the title?”

“It’s in Latin. Shall I translate for you?”

“Placere legit.”

“On the Sapping of Ball-Strength as Related to… I have no idea what this word is.

“Todesstift?”

“I believe so. Is that the vulgate?”

“Very much so.”

“It’s down in the Rare Section. No, wait. One floor up. Medium-Rare. Go through the annex until you see the bust of Shakespeare. Flip the head back and press the button. No, the other button. Something will happen, and it shall be very obvious what you should do. Do that thing. If you see a mirror, run the other way: the Candymen and Bloodies Mary have been cross with one another for weeks and you don’t want any part of it. Oh, and don’t enter Genetics under any circumstances.”

“Why?”

“Time warp.”

“Again?”

Mr. Venable shrugged and Big Daddy Don Dandy disappeared.

There are no secrets in this world, just books you haven’t read. Big Daddy Don Dandy had read ’em, though. Spin and her Counter-Aliases, plus an Illustrated Essay on Hidden Weights and Measures by Rapsin–that one was 1711 and had the politesse to be written in English–and A Guide to Drag Coefficients for the Perplexed by Natan Natansky, which was from 1872 and required several different maths to understand and also included some dirty woodcarvings in the index. And he’d read the owner’s manuals for every piece of equipment in your average bowling alley, and all the ones from the above and below-average alleys. Did you know that ramping up the speed on the ball-return could scar–almost invisibly to the naked eye–a ball, and throw off its balance? Big Daddy Don Dandy knew that. He read it in a book. And the code for the automatic scorer program. Just a little fiddling and it would register your opponent’s point as a .9 instead of a 1. Cost him ten percent of his game. Big Daddy Don Dandy knew that, too. Amazing what you could learn from a book.

If you played him at Betty’s Perfect 10, well, you lost before you unzipped your bag and polished up your balls. Didn’t matter which lane you picked, and Big Daddy Don Dandy would always let you choose the lane as long as it wasn’t #1 or #10. You’d do no better at your home alley, either. Big Daddy Don Dandy was an expert at pretending he’d never been somewhere before. And when he was on the road, he used a less conspicuous name. He was Earl or Eddie or Dick or something beer-and-a-shot like that. Only the big money games.

Only one way to cheat in dice, really, when you boiled it down. Change the suckers out, replace ’em with a more obedient pair. Roulette had two points of attack: the wheel and the ball. Cards, well, you were back to one avenue of chicanery–the deck itself–that was being fiercely guarded by every eye at the table, and others above. But not bowling. Big Daddy Don Dandy insisted that there were 119 different junctions at which the game could be fiddled with, and over 40 of them took place behind walls or under the floorboards. Hell, if you were the unscrupled sort, you could wedge a hitch into the ball return that replaced your opponent’s ball with an unbalanced replica. If you were that sort.

The bowling cheats called them “cracks,” and there were thousands. There was the Orange Peel, which took two guys and a plunger, and the Stamp Act, which no one thought was possible and so worked every time, and the Mangy Mutt, which Big Daddy Don Dandy hated doing because of the strain on his thighs, and Mercy’s Cap, which, was fast and reckless and depended on the weather, and Punctuated Equanimity, which required learning French. Or you could just wing an ice-cube under your opponent’s heel as he made his approach. Big Daddy Don Dandy love that one. It was honest; it was how he beat Jerry “Delicious Cantaloupe” Mutze back when he was coming up.

But now he was at Betty’s Perfect 10 and leaving the 7-10 split standing. You think knocking those pins down is tricky, try leaving them up on purpose. And then he hits a strike, which he did not mean to do, and so therefore should not have happened, and his left arm is…

Betty runs out from behind the high desk.

It had been 18 days since it rained in, so it was raining steady on the windows of the bookstore with no title when the bell went TINKadink and Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, walked in. She was wearing a new dress which was a happy shade of red ; she had bought it for the rains; she made it a point to be as bright and cheerful as the spectrum would allow when it rained. Her galoshes were yellow like a child’s, and her umbrella was sky-blue just to remind everyone what tomorrow would look like. She shook it off and left it with two others, both black, on the warped floor board where customers had been setting their wet umbrellas forever.

She had that day’s Cenotaph in her hand.

“Was this the guy who the armbands were about?”

“Seems so.”

Mr. Venable was in his customary seat, and that day’s paper was pushed to the side of the cluttered table he used as a desk. It was open to the same page that Gussy’s was. Obituaries.

“He used to come in here a lot. Randy Andy Panda Bear.”

“Big Daddy Don Dandy.”

“He was sweet.”

“A lovely and learned man. Just shouldn’t wager with him.”

“Apparently,” she said, and found a phrase in the article. “What does it mean when they say he ‘rewrote the rule book?'”

“He was a cheat.”

“At bowling?”

“Mm.”

“You can’t cheat at bowling.”

Mr. Venable took a sip of his coffee and waved towards the machine to offer Gussy a cup.

“There are moving parts and humans are involved. You can cheat at it.”

“How?”

“While wearing funny shoes, I would imagine.”

The rain slid down the windows of the bookstore with no title and puddled on the sidewalk of the Main Drag, where black umbrellas bloomed like funeral armbands in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

 

For Ricky Jay.