Part 1: Night at the Races

A quirky literary trifecta: memoir, manual, and manifesto

Background

Memorabilia trigger entire experiences, taking us back to sensations, feelings, and thoughts from a moment in our past. Writers are titillated and terrified when finding old content, the objectivity afforded by distance in space and time both a blessing and a curse as roles reverse, the writer reading as a reader would, exposing all bravado and blemish.

I’ve had such a mixed bag of reactions digging through decades and megabytes of scanned journals, essays, short stories, screenplays, plays, novellas, and in this case, a bizarre combination of all these literary forms. Generally I’ve been satisfied with the quality of my writing, having early on found my own voice, and gained the appreciation of clear, succinct prose.

Recently sharing many of them with the world to read — and AI bots to rip — has been fun, not too much cringe with the fling. Exceptions abound, of course, including an overly dense and complicated screenplay I wrote while collaborating with another Mike Spitz that might have influenced a Coen Brothers movie, and this “memoir, manual, manifesto” big ole mess.

Summer, 1991: I just turned twenty-seven, the age Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones, Amy Winehouse, Robert Johnson, and other stars died. Eighteen months before, my mother had committed suicide, I became estranged from my father, and with a backpack of emotional baggage moved back to my native Chicago from LA.

My manic-depressive mother I had gotten over, special thanks to her dying, but my father’s shadow loomed over me with reinvigorated darkness. I had made the understandable and likely inevitable and necessary mistake of cutting him completely out of my life, which of course succeeded only in avoiding my issues with him, and empowering them through his absence.

As described in another post, during this phase of life I was in full-on flight mode, running so fast and fervently that I got absolutely nowhere. Part of my non-strategy was to avoid anyone and anything that might even suggest I had become an adult human being, including and especially lasting romantic relationships, and a career decision that made any sense at all.

Smart, knowledgeable, personable, flexible, good looking, male, white, the world was my oyster — so of course I chose to fuck it instead of shuck it. Psychologically I could handle my pathologically avoidant attachment style — after all, it had helped me survive to that point — but rent and food made their unreasonable demands, necessitating finding some sort of job.

I don’t remember the pointless gig I had before I got hired for the pointless gig from which spawned this literary monstrosity, but I do recall simply responding to an ad in the local paper, as I describe in the story below, and walking in the door. About a month into the gig I didn’t get fired or quit, and the idea struck me to adapt the experience as backdrop for a novel.

Rereading this 80,000+ word turd thirty-three years later, I’m teleported back to that strange, wondrous, and awful era of my life. Most striking are the vivid and resonant memories of the fun and fascinating people I got to know and interact with — a reminder not only of these kindred souls, but why my writing was so tortuous: they hardly figure into the story at all.

Night at the Races is very much me: simultaneously over the head, and between the legs. By that I mean my tendency — in person, and on the page — to come across as both a scintillating intellect and a crude moron. The dumb things that happen in the story were my early attempts at self-deprecating humor, interspersed with hamfisted hyper-philosophizing.

What’s sadly lost in the complexity of this tale is any genuine catharsis of my struggles when I wrote it. The irony is that I was so busy running away from my tortured past that I also ran away from the raw angst that could have fueled a truly powerful and successful literary effort. My vulnerable self hid behind all the bombast and bullshit spewed on these pages.

In retrospect, the narrator is a “literary narcissist”: utterly self-absorbed, obsessed with writing the very best story, without ever bothering to write a good one. Obviously derivative of Joyce, Miller, and Burroughs, my failures reflect some of theirs, at least in terms of conveying simple, honest, and heartfelt humanity. I similarly fucked up before, and noted:

At bottom is the inchoate writer’s tendency to try too hard. Lacking experience and low in self-confidence, the reasonable goal of good enough is superseded by the irrational compulsion to over-compensate by over-doing. The end result is putting most of the effort in areas with the least consequence, and neglecting or ignoring the essentials of storytelling.

Although 100% true about that screenplay, and this odd tale, both projects have their moments, and are worth sharing for their flashes of brilliance, and the lessons since learned. This mess isn’t all bad — isolated paragraphs and a few sections have not only survived their silent decades, but still shine like a crazy diamond. A seasoned editor could chop this into a gem.

More credit where credit is due, Night at the Races tried to mash up Hunter S. Thompson with Thomas Pynchon, bold and brash given the circumstances. That I never bothered to get it published, or even showed it to anyone aside from confused and concerned friends, are testaments to the prodigious effort being just an exercise. I was building my chops.

All that begs the question of why I’m posting it here. Suffice to say that no book is ever satisfactorily finished, and no writing ever completely wasted. As the author, I peer back through these thousands of words and overall give them a C-minus, whereas others with zero skin in the game might hate or love them with equal and unabashed ferocity. Let the readers decide.

Here goes…

A Night At The Races

“Kind Of Big For A Pill, Don’t You Think?”

© June 21st, 1991 by Michael Spitz

(Per)Version Number One. The games have been deranged to convict the guilty. Void where distributed. Copywrong conscriptions comply. Quarantined or your mummy back.

Federal Gnaw specifies that all stratification, unification, colorization, polarization, infatuation, deforestation, colonization, evacuation, orchestration, indoctrination, departmentalization, infestation, simplification, duplification, intoxication, detoxification, invocation, evocation, complication, dislocation, isolation, rumination, confiscation, fumigation, irradiation, amplification, permutation, hyphenation, peroration, emulsification, saponification, procrastination, masturbation, guest relation, host station, or literary emancipation is strictly inhibited without the repressed, smitten dissent of Mr. Mook Enterprises, or any co-conspirator thereof.

Copied blight MCMXCI, with the patience, remonstrance, circumstance, happenstance of his 1 megabyte RAM MacIntosh SE, Mr. Zapf’s Helvetica and Dingbats typefaces, a borrowed Laserwriter NT, and all those fine friendly folks who waited while I articulated, matriculated, calculated, and confiscated one excuse after another as to why this damn thing took as long as it did to finally get to this stage and printed out, hardcopy, 300 dots per inch. Phew.

TURF TALES

NEW JOCKEY INDULGENCES FOR TONIGHT’S CARD:
LONG, DENSE RACES SHOULD HOLD SOME SURPRISES

Gertrude Stein once said that she rode only for herself and strangers. Close friends and fellow handicappers have this way of perpetuating high odds this evening on ‘Prometheus Complex,’ another instance where the intimate knowledge of a jockey’s personal standings destroys the maintenance of a healthy horaeplayers’ distance and objectivity.

As if lashed to a rocky promontory, a voracious vulture swooping down to gnaw at his eternally regenerating liver, we find rookie jockey Shane Mookster in an uncomfortable place this evening, suspended between the gods and humanity, between corporate boxes and grandstand, caught at the midpoint of celestial contempt and mortal jealousy.

Those High Rollers, well, they’re pissed at him for having stolen their racing secrets, for disseminating it without discretion among the profane: total purses, average winning payoffs, a statistical matrix revealed in every program, a network of information not even those corporate execs can control. And all those other folks down within the two dollar seats, stinking up the grands, yep, they offer the Shanester a hard time too, since as even a compulsive knows, nobody likes a smart ass: first through the line or last, the Mookster gallops with impunity back to the shedrow, when a missed lash of the whip, a forgotten break, a miscalculated sprint, could make all the difference between win, place, show.

Bets are made, time and energies wagered, and Our Favorite must deliver, as friendly promises, favorable stats in the Daily Racing Form (America’s Turf Authority), or a fairly decent running record, all become meaningless in relation to how tonight’s race will actually be run, what that photofinish will hold in store.

And for a young jock with no major Stake victories, each racing excursion an innovative exercise in experimentation and tolerance, allowances must nonetheless be stubbornly made for those standings, both for young rider and silent wagerer. You might know him too well, foil him with his own foibles, ponder him through his own imponderables, only to finally catch him with goggles and riding shorts down — but remember, any relationship works both ways: Wager At Your Own Risk, as not only do you know this particular Jockey, but also perhaps a few of those sombre silhouettes and eerie reflections out there on the track, hanging on tight to pace car, markers, and guard rails, amorphous postmodern forms fluttering and wavering down and across those wide open fairgrounds, yearning for places immarginable.

Then again, try and pretend someone else is riding, forget you ever read about him, for horseracing is a mirror that, like Alice’s, reflects one world while acting as a charmed gateway to yet another: since the latch opening Pandora’s Box is also connected to that starting gate, you can be sure that more than ponies will be racing around and around tonight, Hercules still busy cleaning those noisome stables out back.

So, sit down in your big comfy chair, don’t mind those playful black and white kittens at your feet, pay no attention to that strange clock ticking monotonously away on that mantlepiece, kick back, relax, and study this program intently. As any amateur turf better will tell you, reading an endless series of statistics is meaningless compared to actually seeing those races run, while a true professional will gleam at you with watery eyes, buy you another cup of bitter black coffee, and show you how it’s done strictly by the numbers.

If horseplay has any beneficial elements at all, they might involve tuning the compulsive wagerer to pay closer attention to detail, the reductive elements of living and life. Reality then becomes richer, more full, and also more complicated and even dangerous.

But that’s okay for any true gambler at heart: as long as the adrenaline keeps flowing, pumped up and pounding, a bad call, a missed opportunity, any mistake becomes not a signal to stop the presses and offer the program to some other sap, but to overlook one’s problem with vertigo, grab onto that topmast, damn the torpedoes, and sail full speed ahead into one’s very own figurative and literary annihilation…

FIRST RACE

FOR SILLIES AND DARES, 21 YEAR OLDS AND UPWARD
ADVANCED STAGGERING PERMITTED UP TO 5 MINUTES PRIOR TO ROAST FIRST HALF OF THE DAILY TROUBLE
DISTANCE: ONE SMILE
PURSE: GET A JOB

“I’m sorry, boss, but having a ‘Mook’ nametag will get me a bit more attention around here than I care to have. Thank you, though. Sir.”

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. A horse’s ass and bitter medicine, the art of walking to and fro hurriedly as though you had someplace desperately unimportant to get to and are urgently off to nowhere in particular — working diligently and erroneously on that Groucho gait, with a hanging sign out on the door that sez ‘Gone Snarkhunting.’

In a world of quacks and human forgeries, the overtly unemployed find themselves casteless and untouchable, victims of severe myopia and astigmatism caused by the daily perusal of the classifieds. They run into things. Friends stop buying them lunch. Their center is lost. All days of the week begin to sound the same, as historical dates, legal holidays, the diurnal equinoxes, birthdays of loved ones all cease to retain meaning as Reality itself slowly, inexorably, goes out of focus, expanding into this gross technicolor malfunction.

Calender pages fall down onto the floor, are stepped on and discarded, as the totality of human experience bifurcates into valid experiences held only by the employed and the dead, leaving little to fill the twilight void of unpaid bills, afternoons at the Belmont beach reading old magazines and staring out to Nothing, ever longer evenings sitting comatose at various bars on Lincoln Avenue, discussing for the umpteenth time the FBI murder of John Dillinger just down the street and half a century ago with a bunch of wheezing, whining, wallowing drunks and contemporary hooligans, eventually rediscovering nicotine addiction and futility in the process.

Digitized science fiction rumblings can be heard in back, the pinball machine goes TlLT with nobody controling the solenoid universes contained within, some joker plugs another quarter into the jukebox, forcing everyone to listen to yet another rendition of Frank Zappa’s Zoot Allures classic “Wind Up Workin’ In A Gas Station” (let me see ya thumb, let me see ya thumb…). Another beer? Oh, sure. Why not? For that matter, why?

Memories of noon wake-up calls in cheap hotels on the West Coast intrude sometime before last call is announced, dredging one’s sluglike consciousness out into the receding V of yellow-sulphur lights and that long, seemingly aimless journey home to more sleep, more internal decay.

Returning home finally at two o’clock in the morning after bustrips harrowing and remotely suicidal to find remants of several repoman calls mockingly flashing on one’s unworkable and unhockable answering machine, ensuing dreams of shattering glass, violent death, and suspension in a large body of murky water seem oddly appropriate: two weeks, three weeks, a complete lunar cycle, and motivation grinds to a hault, one’s sense of self lost in piles of spent beer cans and last life’s garbage.

Objects are clung to, a fleeting existential anchor: soiled carpet, book shelf, the telephone (still work?); board games, deck of stylized playing cards, Fender Telecaster (sell it?); desk covered with discarded manuscripts, photographs of lost loves, a veritable plateau of personal bureaucracy and entropy. A public accountant would grow ill, a close friend blush, a Republican publicist scoff, while an impressionist painter would smile lewdly, set up easel and canvas, ask if there might be anything left in the fridge, and suddenly turn Neo-Expressionist, whatever that means.

“I mean, boss, that having a ‘Mook’ nametag is slightly strange, will probably get me comments and into situations around here that I rather would do without. But thank you, anyway. Sir.”

Many artsy types understand the value of suffering, and therefore suffer in an even worse way from the delusion that the downside should be in some manner overtly edifying, just another ‘experience’ to live through and learn something from. If anything, down times, psychodeadfall burn-outs, those negative values in the sinewy sine-wave of life, regardless of their emotional necessity and apparent artistic value, are even worse for the artistically motivated, as one can imagine few things more painful than being uptight and strung out at the same time.

For both the principal plight and saving grace of The Curious revolves around trying to carve a semblance of meaning and reason out of the dithering randomness and insensitivity of the world, of discovering a technique whereby hidden connections, archaic hints, a list of answers to the cosmic crossword puzzle are somehow revealed, simply by asking the right questions.

Words of two letters, three, four, five, and six are compiled and studied: soul (Egyptian religion) BA; banana (Polynesian) FEI; vortex (English synonym) EDDY; tree (Buddhist sacred) PIPAL; rain cloud (Latin) NIMBUS — linguistic bits and pieces, scraps of experience, made meaningful only if a place can be created for them, of if a creation can be placed around them, within them.

Composite experiences extracted from the world are similar: to suffer, to fail, to fall are infinitives that we can justify only by virtue of the lessons we claim to learn from them. Coceivably, six letters should not be an arbitrary limit to our task, as seven, eight-, nine-, even ten-letter words are equally relevant, and in many ways, essential. Only problem is that the lists get longer, more complex, one winds up spending more time doing the researching than playing the puzzle, in reading the signs than following their advice, in writing the words than actually living.

We get lost in our own difficulties, and forget what the whole game might be about, why we run that race in the first place, and that quick starters often tire by the final home stretch. And yet, through it all, those shadows still linger. No accidents, no bum raps, no bad breaks in an artist’s struggle. One must begin to understand and eventually admit how internal, how personal, a life-malaise is, how inevitable and responsible one must be toward neuroses fostered on the inside.

Aside from temporary, decidedly external factors, one remains chronically unemployed because one chooses to be, or a part of self forces one to be; a person in this culture becomes broke and hungry because that same part or parts demand that kind of pain, demand that type of counter-balance, for reasons as multifarious and complex as the people who suffer, the nature of suffering itself.

Perhaps such pain forces us to sit down and consider, lie down and analyze, gloat over, sulk over, ponder the past, the very nature of that pain, that struggle, for only by immersing ourselves headlong into a crisis, can any meaningful growth take place. With every dawn might come a soliloquy rejecting the bad attitude, a new breath, a new day and OK folks, today is going to be different, today our whole approach will change, only to make that first cup of coffee, feel a mild headache or toothache, look out the window at the panoramic haze of Chicago’s North Side, and feel that ancient, all-too familiar personal inertia and societal gravity crawl up and ever-deeper inside like a disease, the depression sweep over consciousness like some ridiculous looking hat that one is compelled to wear for an indeterminate while longer.

And there one sits, telling oneself one second that sure, times are hard, so just sit back and take it, another second getting pissed off at the idleness, knocking oneself for not ‘getting back on out and into things,’ realizing that part of the pain and suffering is this very same restlessness, are savage expressions of those parts of being that simply won’t let go, won’t let go of that pain, while the ego wants to jump headlong through the glass, screaming Geronimo! out and into some Lookingglass World, finally able only there to set aside the shadow and do what one wants to do, live life the way one wants to live it, at long last freed of the burden and isolation of living someone else’s nightmare.

Not so simple. Easier read than won. Trouble is, that nightmare side is one’s own, and the only way to get over to the last square is to handle the dangerous topography of the square one inhabits at the moment. A map is supplied to help, but the terrain keeps shifting, and, oddly enough, so does the map. As human beings, we demand solutions, timetables.

When will the glass finally break? Must we gather all our strength, hold our breath, and force ourselves through, or will it shatter of its own accord? Will we hear the sound before or after we go through? Will the sound be pleasing, or will our ears ache with that great invisible crashing? Wil the sharp falling splinters of glass cut and hurt us, or will we be able to go through unscathed? Will it happen now, some time soon, or shall we be doomed forever to live out our mundane lives in this world of fat cushion chairs and face less clocks on the mantelpiece, of parents away from home, and some odd feeling of impending thunder and storm?

Hold on tight, though: Biiinnng! The bell sounds, and off we go, on impulse, without a thought in our heads as we sit poised on our steeds, breaking out of the gate. And don’t worry if you missed this race, they’ve got plenty more in the card to follow, and more cards to follow after that.

With patience, an acceptance of the track rules, the Three Veils should part, and you just might find yourself actually Saved, one of the very few who followed the proper hints, noticed the correct signposts, knew the right answers, correctly annunciated those secret names of power… as to every cyclical trough, a crest, however meager, looms in the distance. Lux Occulta, Lux lnterna, The Primordial Point is breached, First Pinciple attained, the Virgin Birth initiated, as you gaze stupefied at The Vast Countenance, Point within the Circle, that Ancient of Ancients, Concealed of the Concealed: where the intellect fails, instinct eventually takes over; where instinct fails, we trust Destiny.

Make enough inquiries, plan a few interviews (get tired of idleness, poverty, severe melancholia, dreaming dreary dreams of a distant though filthy rich relative recently alive though unknown, now dead and bemoaned, “Sniff, sniff. Too bad I never knew about Uncle Mephisto. Sniff. And too bad he went off and died of ptomaine poisoning without letting us know. Sniff sniff. Oh, and how very nice of him to leave me that condo complex in Orlando — ” hang tight and something eventually will click. Fire the psychoanalyst, send that telegram to Florida, ride a hired taxii straight to the sanatorium: it’s all in the Name, yours and someone else’s, in whom you know and whom you don’t, in what you’re willing to put up with and what you won’t.

And when all else fails and the money runs out, when the landlord knows your first name and no one writes to you anymore, well, you can use your last CTA token to ride downtown, eat your last hot dog on Wacker Drive before you adjust your cheesie tie, peel the lint balls off of your cheap patterned sportcoat, cross your fingers, and dump today’s early edition of the Chicago Tribune into a garbage can on State Street (apply at an Off Track Betting Parlor? why not? Goethe’s Faust begins with a bet, why can’t mine?), walk up a few doors to the place in the ad, and then hurriedly cast any spell you happen to remember, hoping this next bossman will be charitable, an all-American kind of guy.

Mr. Winston D. Softpack is a hard working all-American fellow who seems to have been genetically engineered — bred, if you will, at least according to his superiors at corporate headquarters — to be General Manager of an Off Track Betting parlor. Either that, or his mammy somehow knew all along that he’d eventually wind up in Chicago’s North Loop, at the corner of State Street and Lake Avenue, running an outfit where coming in a distant third can actually send you winding on down and back to the moneyman, that greasy haired teller who helped send you up the river in the first place.

Mr. Softpack appears haphazardly and when you least expect him in expertly tailored three piece pin striped double breasted suits, punctiliously polished shiny black Florsheim shoes, matching silk hanky in left front jacket pocket, has expertly groomed light brown hair, wears very round and very large thin-rimmed yuppy glasses, and attempts to conceal, rather unsuccessfully, a distinctive southern accent that a fellow named ‘Winston’ should certainly be allowed to maintain, even when working the floor of a horse betting parlor in downtown Chicago, U.S.A.

And like most successful managers, Mr. Softpack exudes a weltering tumult of contradiction and crafty compromise, a tumultuous weltering of malediction and smooth talking. He adheres to value, though remains practical. His demeanor is calm, though suspicious. He is forever watchful, though clumsy. He forgets things, but remembers enough to warrant a calm, suspicious, watchful attitude on the part of his pragmatic though dispensible employees.

In my case, I somehow sensed that asking for a nametag with ‘Mook’ written on it would be a rather clumsy thing to do, so I didn’t. I also sensed that what any complex person would demand was simplicity, and I did, or at least tried, to deliver just that.

“Then again, if you don’t see that having a ‘MooK’ nametag will get me any more attention around here than would be naturally comfortable, I certainly wouldn’t mind, then. Thank you, thank you very much. Sir.”

Gulp.

“Well, that doesn’t matter anyway,” replied Winston, who couldn’t have cared less, “since all we have available right now are two nametags, one labeled ‘Mark’ and the other ‘Boris’.”

They are approximately 1/2" x 1" in size, with thin, stenciled red lettering on a white plasticky background, similar in appearance and consistency to those formica tabletops you find in various greasy spoons around Uptown.

Red and white? The International Red Cross and Rosicrucian Society, Coca-Cola, Marlboro, the Chicago Bulls, the Knights Templer and Switzerland. Big money and big secrets: find the causal connection, discover the subliminal patterns, connect the dots, and try not to get too paranoid too quickly. You might not like to think so, but those television cameras peering down from the office corners and the folks sitting on the other end behind them remain constantly active and are watching, even if you happen to be truly paranoid. Trust no one. Suspect everyone. The walls have ears, the doors have eyes. We are counting on you. This job will self-destruct in —

“I suppose I’ll settle for ‘Mark’ then, Sir.”

Another wise move. Already, I could feel that I was gaining his trust, establishing a substantive liaison with my new boss, an entente of ego. If this works, I shall be accepted among an elite few, initiated into a Brotherhood of Bouncers: Conjugate ‘to illuminate.’ Rip one pants leg and shirtsleeve. Try to say ‘Myself’ in the voice of Saladin. Answer weird questions, in the dark. Put one hand on a Racing Form, the other on this walkie-talkie: Do you agree to allow yourself to be hoodwinked? Sweared at? Swung at? Wisdom, ancient and accepted: I will one day know, and be proficient at describing, where the cigarette machine is located on the Mezzanine Level.

Shit, money, and the Word have been described as the spiritual quintessence, the existential backbone of American culture, and nowhere do those three yanky archetypes come together more smoothly, homogenously and organically than during the course of an interview for prospective employment.

Throughout all this, Winston was beginning to respect me, and I could tell the eagle was circling, ready to dive. I was beginning to panic, though, and he could tell. My own deportment shifted accordingly. I felt as though I wanted to cry.

“And just one more thing, Mook.”

“Mike is fine, Sir.”

“And just one more thing, Mike.”

“Mook is certainly okay, if you like.”

“Do you prefer ‘Mike,’ or ‘Mook,’ then?”

“I don’t mind either way, Sir, but if you ask me to choose, then I would prefer ‘Mook,’ since that’s what my friends know me as. But now that ‘Mark’ is the only nametag available, you can go right ahead and call me ‘Mark,’ even though my name is legally ‘Mike,’ which no one calls me.”

As I said this, I could feel some measure of confusion passing across his face, obscuring half of it into shadow, like the darkened penumbra of the Earth across the Moon during a solar eclipse. Houston, we have a problem…

Primitive humanity went wild when an eclipse would steal five minutes of their day, tens of thousands toiled for decades in order to construct the ziggarats of Sumeria and Central America, built to predict these celestial anomalies. Now we know such phenomenon to be nothing more than a periodic alignment of the solar system, an astronomical situation as commonplace as volcanoes on the Jupiterian moon lo, returns of our own synodic month. But in an era when technology was Magickal and the fertile goddess reigned supreme, shadows had more meaning than their material sources, and silence was more cherished a commodity than the white noise of the marketplace or stable.

In his office that early Saturday morning, a copy of Good Housekeeping’s Illustrated Guide to Cooking looming on a shelf directly above our heads, a computer printer chattering in the rear, the entire establishment devoid of employees and patrons, hum of cityscape and industrial horizon down to its daytime weekend minimum, different rules seemed to analogously apply. We were both vast bodies of considerable mass, and tidal forces were having their compressive and expatiative effects. A careless error, a twisting of my tongue, and all hope might be lost forever.

As if struggling for aeons to have a word with the archangel Metatron himself, only to have the door shut in your face, the Holy Countenance denied to you for all eternity, disappointed as Charlie was during the penultimate scene of Willy Wanka and the Chocolate Factory, half a clock ticking away, half a desk, half a chair to sit on, half a soul who frivolously rejects a young boy’s dreams.

For Winston and myself, tectonic plates were shifting, the Richter scale ricocheting, and entire continents with their host civilizations were about to share their embassies, conduct diplomatic liaisons, throw outlandish parties, down in the murky, deep blue depths of Atlantis, D.C. Would he think less of me after this decisive phase of my interview? Would I be forced back out onto the streets, the tiny print of newspapers, the unappetising melancholy of another dog on the drive?

To relieve some of this tension, I tried to simplify matters: “I know that ‘Mook’ is a bit awkward and unusual a name, Sir, so when I do finally get my proper nametag with ‘Mike’ on it, you can go right ahead and call me ‘Mike,’ and drop the ‘Mark’ and ‘Mook.’ Of course, until then, you can go ahead and call me ‘Mark’ while forgetting entirely about the ‘Mook,’ even though my name, technically, remains ‘Mike,’ as I won’t mind that, I certainly won’t mind that at all.”

“And just one more thing, Borus,” he replied. “I realize that people tend to be slightly self-conscious about their personal appearance and physical hygiene, so I don’t want you to get upset over this suggestion I’m going to make for you now.”

“Oh, no way, Sir. I’m open to criticism on all fronts.’’

My hair, I knew my hair to be completely out of control. The problem’s my hair, isn’t it? I had this Greek girlfriend, an aficionado of American film and performance art, a couple years ago who used to call me ‘Nappy Head Mike,’ doubtlessly a reference to my Transylvanian locks. “You tawkin to me? You tawkin to me? Well, I don’t see anyone else around here, so you must be, tawkin to me….” She made me a birthday card out of an old, wrinkled Chinese restaurant take-out menu, scrawling illegibly with a crayola crayon all over the Moo Shoo shrimp and Beef Kao: ‘Happy Birthday, Nappy Head Mike.’

Her own hair was all fucked up, too, what with all the alchemically concocted die and mousse crap she used to put in it, shaved extremely close along the sides, a virtual buzz cut, the rest pointing straight up into the air as if those frolicsome folicles were antennas tuned to some alien frequency I was never able to zero-in on, with or without my bass-booster JVC. All these details didn’t seem to matter though, especially since her hair was naturally beautiful, and would have been absolutely stunning if let be, a fact that was meaningful at the time, for reasons neither of us really understood.

We were both young. Very young. And very much infatuated with each other. And since The World wuz a good deal older (and still remains, for that matter) than either one of us, we had a marked disadvantage. Perhaps her self-induced coiffure craziness was a fashion statement, some type of postpunk Art Nouveau expression or living Dada ready-made bob. Who knew? I sure didn’t.

For Aristotle and the ancient Greeks, hair was described as being akin to excrement, a kind of ductile, stringy, tenacious headshit that you couldn’t feel or sense with, just like that other unattached shit, down below. One might wonder, then, about the Samson myth, Delilah emasculating the musculebound mucho machoman with a bit of feminine charm and a pair of sharp scissors: did those gregarious Greeks somehow know all along about that subtle link between creative power and the unconscious, that psychic connection from jism to genius we all thought Nietzsche and the German immoralists described through Zarathustra and their like and Joyce through the scatogolical habits of that noisome Hungarian, Leopold Bloom? Tune in next week, same time, same channel.

Where wuz I? Where wuz Winston? Yep, paying close attention, following the mythical beast to wherever and whatever it might lead me, one of my finer points, just like German clockwork precision, Sir, hunting right there along with ya…

Sie suchten es mit einem Fingerhut,
Sie suchten es vorshichtig,
Sie gangen hinter ihm mit
Gabeln und Hoffnung
Sie bedrohte ihm mit einem
Bahn-beitrag
Sie bezaubern ihn mit
Lachehund Seife

“Now Borus,” Winston continued, “as you will be working in an area of High Visibility, we expect you to wear only jet black dress pants, black socks, and black shoes. If you wear a patterned jacket, then keep to the solid black below, is that alright with you?”

Phew. My hair has always been something of a disastrous dilemma for me, a rascally irreconcilability that I prefered not to address, especially during an employment interview. For my complex mass of tufted ripples and lugubrious shocks weaves itself into unimaginable Gorgon’s head knots and furrows of such topological monstronsity that it forever would befuddle the very greatest of mathematical minds, the most adept of hemp slinging sailors.

During freshman year of high school, I tried to grease it all the way back like that John Travolta, only the combination of a Neanderthal bone head and glasses as thick as the astronomical reflector on Mount Polamar made me look more like an American Grafitti reject than just another horny suburban adolescent trying to find some squeeze. After three embarassing and loveless hours at school, the hair came down, the grease came out, but the damage was already done. Feeling comfortable with girls in the former half of high school proved to be an agonizing, time consuming process, and I have blamed my hair for that ensuing year-long nobodyloves-me-acne-pimple-1-have-no-home-overly-selfconscious- involuntarily-celibate-Just-leave-me-alone teen age Rebel without a hairdresaer malaise ever since. People remember these kinds of things. Maybe that’s why greek love and I were so tight for a while (two weeks): we both had really fucked up hair.

“No problem, no problem at all,” I grinned. “Anything else?”

Never, ever, ask for a follow-up in a tense situation. Pack up your shit, and get the hell out as soon as possible.

Lesson #1 of my OTB experience: Don’t create problems that aren’t even there — cause like they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Live and learn.

‘’Yes, Borus,” nodded Winston. “Just one more one more thing. Your hair needs some work.”

Aaaaaaaaargh! I knew it! See? Take laborious notes. Pay very close attention to lessons and assignments. Answer the questions at the end of each chapter. Do all the extra credit work. Think about possibilities for a group project. Concentrate. Regardless of all this human diversity spread before us, independent of that vast array of Total Possible Experience, everyone seems compelled to learn the very same lessons, over and over again throughout the course of cultural and personal history. How we go about learning them is what makes us unique, and the extent of our willingness to learn these lessons and perhaps even understand their mechanism is what allows us to distinguish one person from the next, make judgements when judgement is due.

Within the struggle that is life, some pay close attention to these guideposts, while most gallop headlong through the gate and blind onto the field, not paying heed to track conditions, odds spreads, jockey weight, or company payola. Most make it to the end, some win, most lose, the crowds still cheer from the grandstands and private boxes, as right, wrong, moral or corrupt, the races continue day in and day out, and who’s to say whether the whole process makes any sense at all.

Life goes on, and so do them ponies. Like mobsters in New York City and the United States Marine Corps in Saudi Arabia, we’ve all got a job to do, right? No one ever said this was going to be easy, especially when, in the case of my hair, certain chromosomes malfunctioned right from the start.

“You don’t have to make any changes, Borus,” continued Winston, “but if you want to Move Up in the company, well, people are going to notice that you look like you just Got Up in the morning, which, I’m afraid, doesn’t exactly produce the same results.”

But I did, I did just get up this morning, boss.

“You can use some gel, get your hair into some order, and then you’ll be alright,” advised Winston. “Yes, I think you’ll work out just fine here, just fine. You can start next Thursday evening, up in the Derby Club.”

Phew. No more repocalls, rubber checks, friends who tell me to get lost until I find a job. (From here on out, I would only have to worry about those friends who’ve told me to get lost, no strings attached.)

“Rob Another will be around there to get you rolling,” he added. “Right now, though, I suppose I should take you up there and give you a quick tour of the place. Grab your nametag, hold on tight, and let’s go. And by the way — ”

Let’s see here, ‘Mark’ or ‘Borus,’ a ‘Mook’ now ‘Mike.’ Might hair consistency and identity crises be causally related? ‘

“Yes, sir?”

“Don’t ever go out that door,” pointing to the ominous looking door on the far side of the office, the one with a sign on it that read THIS IS NOT AN EXIT. “We try to keep that locked at all times. You can go out now, but only
this one time. All right?”

We went out The Door and up the elevator, as I wondered what exactly I had gotten myself into. For all my initial trepidation, the overall vibes seemed right, so I rode the feelings along, telling myself that reasons existed for my presence there that morning, that regardless of the butterflies fluttering up and down my intestinal tract, hidden mechanisms were faithfully at work, ones that I should respect, allow to operate, not question or interfere with.

The elevator doors opened, a room that moves. We went up to 1, past 2 and MZ, and finally to 3, “Bing!” and we had ridden out the belly of the Beast, and straight past the finish line and headlong into the Abyss.

SECOND RACE

SECOND HALF OF THE DAILY GRUMBLE FOR LAIDEN WILLIES
30 TO 40 FEARS
BOLD VERSE: “IF THE FOOL WOULD ONLY PERSIST IN HIS FOLLY, HE WOULD BECOME WISE.”
PICK RISK STARTS HERE

Doubtlessly one of the most fascinating and disturbing autobiographies ever written is Aleister Crowley’s ‘autohagiography.’ William Blake wrote, several centuries ago amid his apocalyptic poetry and weird multicolored engravings, a few verses to the effect that the most Evil of people had the potentiality of becoming the most Good, only at some juncture along the way, forces as mysterious and amoral as the spiritual mechanisms governing the Universe sent them over that leftward Edge.

All mystics from all cultures agree that on a fundamental level of being, our secular notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are transcended and made inconsequential, for within that Primum Mobile, that Divine White Brilliance, that sensual scintillation and immintent corruscation of Absolute Origin, no such differentiation is possible, be it physical, emotional, intellectual, or even ethical. For to Be one thing is Not to Be another, and therefore to be anything at all is to be limited, analyzed, separated, rivetted by the shackles of mortality, inevitable finality, Death.

Thus Hamlet’s dilemma, a Dane punk of the 17th Century New Wave, trapped between life and its responsibilities, death and its eternities, too many options across the short wave bands of hate for uncle and hardon for Ophelia: Take the fox and run we might harken a bark in the late 20th Century, hypocritically trotting as we are, Western Civilization poised at the brink of adolescent breakdown and planetary meltdown, society staring shitfaced at the skull of Ronald McDonald and Edward Teller, that smiling skull staring right back at us, live and in our faces, burgers and bombs, counting down, down, down.

For to be Hamlet is not to be Aleister Crowley, and Mizter Crowley the Qabbalist would wholeheartedly have agreed, and after an eventful
earthly existence replete with mountaineering expeditions, libel lawsuits, Masonic initiation ceremonies, heroine fixes, meetings with various Famous People, manick-depressive breakdowns, meaningless excrusions into synchronicity, hateful divorces, bankruptcy hearings, acute alcohol binges, copyright infringements, short story compositions, excrement foragings, tenement flat evictions, mistress beatings, and lengthy passages of exquisite though highly twisted prose, he came out and tried to tell you so. Shooting for the very top and taking the scenic route along the way, Crowley was a true gambler at heart, sacrificing everything and everyone for the sake of that momentary thrill, that approach toward a consummation of the Holy Trifecta. He saw a New Aeon approaching, and made himself its High Priest and Grand M.C., the Phil Georgeff of religion, gazing through magickal binoculars, announcing them as they came sinning around that celestial turn. Good evening lazies and gentiles, the pari-confessional windows are now open. Presenting driver changes, scratches, overweights — please check your programs.

If you take an inquisitive finger and follow the stats, the track schematics, running a line along that mystical Hebrew ‘Tree of Life’ from its thrice veiled foliage of Negative Limitless Light up top and then down past its
Supernal Triangle (occultism, like German, often capitalizes most nouns, not all of them proper) of Spiritual Crown, Archetypal Father and Mother, you just might find yourself in the Abyss of Knowledge, symbol and living representation of Humanity’s Fall from Grace, aftershock of our ancestors’ over-publicized Garden of Eden episode.

Before The Fall, humankind wuz unconscious, instinctual, and therefore sinless. With the dawn of consciousness and communication came self-awareness, shame, moral responsibility, guilt, a capacity to understand and actually dictate the course of natural events on the planet. You pays you money, you makeuh you choice, one ticket will get you all the way through — the point here being that just below this Abyss lies the so-called Ethical Triangle, comprised of Mercy, Strength, and Beauty, Platonic aspects, like horses, given simple names to ease identification and mystical wagering. Within this triangle the play of opposites, the dance of Shiva, dictates success or failure, rightness or wrongness, the aesthetic sensibilities of the bourgeoisie.

Victorian spoiled brat, post-Elizabethan heathen, Crowley at least had the brains and guts enough to realize that the only way to transcend his upbringing, overcome himself and the disaster that European ‘civilization’ had become, was to plummet headlong into his own Depths, to explore and finally hopefully escape from the hellish Wonderland of the dark side of occultism. Alone, broke, mostly forgotten by both gods and humanity, Crowley himself must have realized his failure toward the end. Much like Jesus, Karl Marx, and Walt Disney, ideas in the vacuum of mind and early Sunday mornings before tea time seem all-too appealing, their intoxicating temptation for application greater than the ability of those same ideas to sustain themselves, to mutate successfully to the inherent pressures and ambiguities that comprise the Real World, that ‘Big Picture’ everyone talks about and so very few people seem to even remotely understand.

Stretched like a propaganda slogan across the fontispiece of each edition of his privately printed magazine The Equinox, was scrawled Crowley’s self-assigned and self-serving mission: TO SYNTHESIZE THE AIM OF RELIGION AND THE METHOD OF SCIENCE. Unfortunately, he merely succeeded in combining the overt dogmatism of the former with the dangerous insensitivity of the latter. Humanity sought redemption, and all it could find was a quack horsedoctor with a gambling problem. Moving into the New Age, this guy was a die-hard Piscean in spirit who sorely misunderstood the Age of Aquarius — and he sure wasn’t the only one.

Crowley’s failure was society’s failure, art’s failure: in our time Christianity has become a televised evangelical joke, Communism an economic and social disaster, Mickey Mouse the archetypal representative of corporate reality, the American ethos of I’m Okay And You Are Fucked Up projected on a grand, La-La Land scale that blows the mind and vanquishes the nuclear family pocketbook. When Art fails, whom do we blame? What recourse can we take? Can we even begin to think about setting limits, assigning standards to a realm as expansive and all encompassing as it remains amoral and timeless?

In an era when Julian Schnabel is equated with Picasso and Brett Easton Ellis with Faulkner, do we simply give it all up, hang the palette and pen, hock the canvas and computer, and read T(ough) S(hit) Eliot’s epically epicene poem The Wasteland while sitting on the toilet bowl, taking a good, hard, long crap? Ka-Whoooosh! Humanity is so replete with failures, misfits, the dispossessed, that our specious species might be a described as a gross exercise in over-compensation on the part of the gods.

According to Genesis, we were created in their image: maladjusted, existentially fucked up, generally missplaced. To make themselves feel better, the gods must have held conferences, attended meetings, made group functions. With Olympus in shambles, the thermodynamic rent to Nature herself forever unpaid, They could at least have the saving grace of gazing down to the mortal planes below, respendent in wave after entropic wave of ceaseless war, greed, hunger, jealousy, vehement conflict and suffering permeating every level of mortal existence, and all to lighten a lonely immortal afternoon.

But exceptions have become the norm in our contempory world of dying gods and immoral men: that tough turded and unnameable Lord of the Old Testament has been transformed into community Sunday school fodder, the Aztec wargod can no longer be appeased with the living, still beating hearts of the freshly sacrificed, but with video cassette recorders, Nintendo games featuring Mario Bros, and the satellite based telemetric guidance systems of cruise missiles. Conversely, we have changed the lightning god Thor into a comic book hero and Saturday morning cartoon celebrity, while Rocky Balboa in many circles is considered a true and much feared demigod. Our astral sights have become confused, our mundane trepidations and everyday aspirations strangely juxtaposed.

Prevalence of mass media and worldwide telecommunications have replaced the priests of Heliopolis and the confessional booth, aa instantaneous access to the planet is now no further than our living rooms, Johnny Carson a good friend of mine, with specimens of his special line of suits hanging luminously in my uncle’s closet. Where do we go from here? In an age when standards and any notion of absolutes are abhorant to our upcoming aesthetic sense, how can we keep ourselves from floating away, weightless, borne on the winds of greed and self-interest?

If Art can teach us anything, it might teach us something about teaching, sharing. Schopenhauer’s precocious dream was one of educating the educators, of teaching not only about the world as we might experience it, but of demonstrating how that very experience is as much dependent upon how we are taught to experience it, as any of the underlying ‘reality’ we immediately sense and at long last try to understand. In this manner, he was as far from his contemporary metaphysical System Builders as possible, and old Schops knew it, walking his miniature poodle and only friend down the Karlstrasse. One amusing apocryphal story (notice that the dryer the subject matter, the more prevalent and amusing such apocryphies become) mentions how he would deliberately schedule his lectures at the University of Tubingen to exactly coincide with those of the ever-more popular Hegel, as if to intentionally spite both the demented genius and his tiresome Absolute.

Historically, much like Mr. Crowley, Art Schopenhauer failed to enlighten the mainstream, and personally, again like Uncle Aleister, he had trouble getting along with people — and a causal link is certainly probable. Either way, they both had a point, even if they didn’t mean to. For every observation is self-realization, and every book a kind of biography. The first person is not only common in literature, but ubiquitous, regardless of how many artisitic levels might mask us from this fact. Blake’s poetry wasn’t for the seminary or the ivory towers of academia, for Billy B. knew that the marriage of Heaven and Hell was a description of every level of being from the polished floors of the archdiocese to the dust and filth of the gaming parlor.

In the language of the New Physics, nonlinear dynamics and Chaos Theory, reality can be depicted as a scaling function, its truths independent of size or perspective: pour a creamer into a cup of steaming coffee, mix Salmon orange with Vermont green on an easel, and watch those swirls swirl, those vapors vaporize, your early morning wake-up brew mathematically identical to a Big Bermuda Blow or Jupiterian Jumble. To think, to feel, to write, to paint, to compose, to effectively communicate something — anything — meaningful is to partake of the world, to grab a hold of a part of it, transform it into an image of yourself, and like some Chinese Box, keep pulling and opening in an effort, however futile, to find the mythical jewels, the winning Tote ticket way at the very bottom.

Only problem is that the deeper we get, the more boxes we open and remove, the less expansive the available volume. To complicate matters, hot on our trail is The Detective, dusting for prints faster than we can open, inspect, remove. And as Zeno’s tortoise and hare, we can never win no matter how hard we race, since that strange and wonderful geometric series we find ourselves within has infinity for its limit, each increment progressively more tiny, more obscure. The unknown is more important than the known, to say one thing is not to say another, to remain silent is, in this sense, the only way to speak the truth.

Thus we are all doomed to fail as the stakes get higher, the returns smaller, the speed of light, symbol of timelessness and therefore immortality, of infinite mass and therefore omniscience, our ultimate, unattainable goal. To live forever is to heave the weight of the entire universe onto one’s shoulders, to tediously carry the burden an infinite distance at infinite speed, the raw experience of that futility our sole motivation for continuing in that timeless, spaceless void, a place that some fortunate souls can legitimately call Home.

What we might learn from perpetual limitation, from failure, from the failures of others and especially ourselves, is what moves us and grooves us, is what leads us to growth and maturity. Camus tried to transform that arch looser god Sisyphus into an existential tragicomedy, a fallen angel turned rising devil, an immortal mortal whom godless humanity could relate to, empathize with, even worship in some odd, French existential kind of way. But the whole movement was doomed: Sartre became a commie, and Albert got wasted in an automobile accident.

What began as a nice alternative to Nazi kraut nihilism and John Dewey style yank pragmatism quickly degenerated into that same frenzy of name calling and academic rancor that made Alfred North Whitehead abandon his -’s and +’s only to see God, and Bertrand Russell to stand out with the hippies in protest, misunderstand Nietzsche, and drink martinis well into his ninetieth year. “You gotta choose your grandparents well,” said the old lecherous logician in response to a journalist’s question regarding his finesse and apparent longevity. Same goes for which group you choose to follow, which master you choose to accept. As Crowley himself wrote of himself somewhere, if you are seeking a Master, then expect to become a Slave. For it takes religion to turn a pathology into a metaphysical system, and it takes philosophy to turn a metaphysical system into a pathology: seems that either way, you lose.

“When last we met,” heavy mechanical breathing here, the voice of James Earl Jones adroitly modulated through a synthesizer, light sabres poised and ready to strike, master and servant, ‘’you, were The Master, and I, I was but The Learner. Now, I, am, The Master.”

“A Master of Evil, Darth,” sez that Alec Guinness right back in old man Skywalker’s face, the ultimate Wise Guy of Sci-Fi, Obi-Wan back from hauling ass around the Death Star, craftily hynotising Imperial Stormtroopers with the Evil Eye, gumming the works, knocking out that tractor beam so Our Heroes could escape, back into the Void.

As that George Lucas knew, all processes of intiation take time, are painful, and require great sacrifice and personal hardship. To master any Art is to start with the basics, and keep trying, keep plugging away at a medium that doesn’t want to give any more than you have sweated out into it. “Error easy to make, is,” that Yoda might have said, and he would have been right.

For the Muslims, Heaven and Hell are immediately adjacent to each other, separated only by this thin wall whose acoustical properties allow each side to hear the other, The Damned listening attentively to the blissful cries of The Saved, the lucky ones forever reminded of the tortures that await all the faithless and fruitless on the other side. With error as near as truth, and infinitely more tempting, we have to occasionally try our best, shrug our shoulders, and say “What the fuck?”

When all else fails we can rely on failure, on the pathways set before us by virture of having little recourse elsewhere. Many would say that the races have already been run, that everything has already been written. Other, more enterprising and care free people might go on to say that even though life might be someone else’s dream, reality merely the reverberations of the Red King’s snores across the Lookingglass World, the only inevitability is effort, hard work, and hope.

“Life is a myster-y,” sings Madonna, in one of her less corporate and more sentimental moments, “Everyone must stand, alone.” Alone? Lonely? Madawnna? Sure, even Miss Fortin must occasionally ascend those spiral stairs to her deluxe Paris penthouse suit unaccompanied by Italian fashion designer, American movie star, French model, or astral projection of Marilyn Monroe. Sing it for us, babe, on the home stretch: “I here you call, my, name I And it feels, like — ”

THIRD RACE

$2 NOT-SO PERFECTA WAGERING THIS RACE
ADVANCED PLEA BARGAINING PERMITTED UP TO 5 GRIMACES BEFORE
POST CURSE: THE MOTHER OF Al.L BATTLES
DISTANCE: TOO FAR, TOO LONG

“Yo there, Mike. Come here. That guy in the blue suit and gold pin wants to have a word with you.”

The older mutuel teller, John, balding, librarians’ glasses hanging from his nose, wearing a tuxedo shirt and a light blue bow tie, sitting steadfast behind the betting counter and gaming machines, a caricature of a caricature of an older teller, John? yes, balding, librarians’ glasses hanging from his nose, wearing a tuxedo shirt and a light blue bow tie, standing up now from his Buddha position, pointing and speaking softly, as if not to disturb the rest of the already disturbed patrons.

Men and women in diverse states of alcohol intoxication and nervous tension mill about, wondering what’s going on, following John’s rickety finger in a direct line right toward Our Hero on the night shift, Mr. Mook, now Mike alias Mark though never Borus, off and to the rescue, ready on the scene, having lept from his grafittied phone booth resplendent in his cheap black and white patterened sport coat, uncomfortable black dress pants, black socks and Rockport shoes, slicked back hair restrained with unmentionable quantities of VOS conditioning gel, kind of like that Buster Keaton, only in distorted sound and vision and minus the necessary attitude, Supermook what up? and everything seemed just fine for the past hour or so up here in the Derby Club until now…

“What? Which guy?” Mike now confused, suffering a bit of sensory overload just as several people have taken their eyes off of the television monitors, probables boards, racing programs, high ball glasses, waiting earnestly for a Situation to develop, a much awaited break in the routine of this ‘private’ Members Only Club, with its velvet cushions, leather-backed cushion chairs, artificially marblized tiling, glistening brass, dull yellow incandescent lights peering out from behind glazed glass receptacles, framed copies of classic engraved prints of horsey races and horsey scenes ‘A Pleasant Ride Home,’ ‘Weighing,’ ‘On The Town,’ adorning the walls near desk and bar, apologetic and over-courteous hosts, bartenders and busboys spinning, gliding, tootling around and about to service the unservicable needs of this essentially low-life downtown crowd.

In other words, a place you would expect Al Capone’s ghost to saunter in wearing black and white two tone shoes, a canary yellow tuxedo outfit, rose boutonierre on right lapel, light pink banded fedora with a peacock feather protruding South Side pimp style from the top. Old Al suddenly grabbing this astral Thompson whose manifest version was once purchased from Sports, Inc. a long time ago but not so far away immediately off Diversey Parkway, Al proceeding to machinegun half the goddammed joint, clearing the once crowded betting queues of professional people with more money than they know what to do with, various fakes, fonies, cramped degenerates, stamped red and white racing tickets, martini cocktails with and without olives, buxom waitresses with gaudy lavender lipstick, myopic old men with scratched and greasy pince-nez hanging from long hooked noses, waiters carrying Mahi Mahi deluxe entre dinners with navy bean soup dijour ($17.95) all suddenly cascading in writhing frenzy to that fake marble floor.

Mr. Alphonse Brown, dealer in antiques and merchant of death then calmly walking up to one the few remaining tellers (might he be John?}, placing a trifecta (“box it, Al, you gotta box ’em, know what I’m saying to you?”) superduper longshot bet, 3–1–4, a gangster gematria of hidden meaning and ominous import, the horses, Shit! All three of them crossing the line win-place-show but out of their proper sequence (should have listened to the guy, Scarface, or at least stayed a ways southwest from here in Cicero).

Pissed, Mr. Capone throws his tickets disgustedly to the floor, signalling his demonic henchmen who suddenly appear at all the exits with greasy ethnic grins, polished fingernails, Sicilian snickers, WWI style flamethrowers and homemade nitroglycerine bombs that go Ka-BOOM! totally wasting the whole fucking establishment, walls of fire, splintering glass, many dead rich people all tumbling down with eternal finality to State Street three stories below.

“Well, Mr. Spitz, can you tell us where you were during this uh, exchange?”

“Sorry, Sir, but I was in the kitchen eating some of that expensive Mahi Mahi, while the gay cook was telling me all about his new boyfriend Mario, who left him so callously for this afro-headed body building reefer smoking beer guzzling Fidel Castro cigar sucking Caribbean sex god — “

Might this absence from the scene be legitimate grounds for a dismissal? and this, my very first night of work? Ohmygosh ohmygosh ohmygosh what can I do now? someone help me! oh yes, Union Steward! Union Steward! I need my Union Steward! There ain’t no Union here, Pal. Of course I exaggerate. I fantasize, wantonly and extremely self-indulgently. But, hey, You know how the first day at a new job usually goes… and you can be sure there’ll be much much more to come…

Like M.C. Escher’s print ‘Night and Day,’ one can virtually sense an eerie kind of tessellation pattern existing between light and dark, fullness and emptiness, a place packed with compulsive gamblers one moment and a gaudy though vacated Saturday morning walk-through with the General Manager the next. The first time around accompanied with Winston, I saw this Derby Club in its pristine wholeness, vacant, the initial tour more like a guided trip through Disneyland than a tiresome afternoon in a Mickey Mouse suit after punching the clock at noon, only on Saturday morning I could actually subtlely sense the presence of ten thousand discarded betting slips, countless pacings and drunken bar-binges, an eternity of days at the races all permeating the visually empty ambience surrounding me.

This evening, my first night of work, I strongly experience the inverse effect: men and women float about, sitting, standing, pacing like their ghosts of the weekend walkthrough before, while I sense the emptiness, the isolation, the thousands of hidden tales, untold stories that flutter and flow in their wakes of death-despair and compulsion. Each has a past, a point of origin, intersecting up here for an hour or two tonight, their basic point of commonality being their need to place bets on horses, and little else. Engineers, bankers, lawyers, doctors, various professionals; an equal complement of legitimately dressed bums, winos, compulsives who obviously cannot maintain the habit, whose clocks wind down with every passing race, every destructive evening at the track. Regardless of crowd character or even density, it seems, that odd singularity between the present and the absent, between the winner and the loser, always makes itself felt, and the longer I stay, the more I can feel its relentless presence, the more I cringe at the vortex of other people’s inner shame, that human networking of gloom wired together by some idiot technician for yet another flickering night at this OTB.

But now, with this altercation of sorts, I walk among these living ghosts with a particular task at hand, and try to rectify a Situation that I neither saw nor would honestly care to take any part of. I wonder how often these kinds of conflicts on the floor develop, hope for the best, give myself 5 to 2 odds that the thing will blow over, nice and easy, nice and easy, even though this sudden whirlwind of miscellaneous sensory input and new job experiences and responsibilities spin my head some, confusing me…

“He hit me.”

Jesus Christ, where did you come from? Mr. Mike has seen The Victim moments before, sitting in back with this other gentleman in black horn rimmed glasses and hair white as Saint Nick at the Races, this strange glint in his eye, boyz and girlz and the morning presents they crave and endure sleepless nights over far from his gluey snot nosed consciousness, both of them not only forever minding their own business and silent in that all-too typical gaming addict’s silence of murky silences, but completely oblivious to the waitstaff, most other patrons, and even the horses, pixellated in rapid and vapid sweeps of the electron gun all night on the monitors around and several feet above, fffffffffffffffwwwwooooohhh, woe boy, down boy. ‘Tomahawk Lancer,’ ‘Satanic Majesty,’ ‘Overbaby,’ ‘Man Ray,’ ‘Son Of A Bunny,’ where do they get those names? And wonder what kind of rules are stipulated in the Jockey Club Manual, as to proper length, problems with copyrighted material, avoidance of obscenity and obscenities, no names or titles of political figures allowed for sure, now then ladies and gents, hee-ee-re comes ‘Nixon’s Nose,’ or ‘Saddam’s Stallion,’ ‘Bush’s Apron,’ or ‘Desert Stomp,’ just like Genesis, first book of the ancient Pentafecta, The Name as symbol of power, power over the animals, power over humanity and the gods they fight for and worship, power to win or lose at the races:

Be a NAME DROPPER
Leave us your business card
and win a Pre-Race Party
for you and your friends!

Pass the popcorn mate, say now, all sorts of folks can bring their cards in, just like all sorts of folks drop names: in literature, the use of metaphor is central. The trace, metaphorical anchors, analogue linkages — to quote, to refer to, has often been depicted as a sure path toward enpowerment. Most take name-dropping, in all its forms, for granted, a tool so ubiquitous that like a professor yearning for tenure, most otherwise self-conscious writers pass on most of their analysis to instinct, frontal lobes directed toward more pressing matters. Introduce a reference, we assume, and an entire work is included, subsumed into your own. Eliot, Pound, the host of modernist poets dived assholes over fountain pens into this kind of technique, to the point of turning extensive cross-referencing and extreme density into a religious passion. Writing in Joyce’s wake, contemporary authors must ask ourselves: are these modernist axioms still valid?

What relationship might exist between the use of such metaphor now, as opposed to a century, a century and a half, two centuries ago? Might most of its use be attributed, on a fundamental level, simply with habit, arbitrary house rules that people forgot to question, even when questioning was cool? Or does some deeper awareness exist?

Have writers of late discovered or rediscovered hidden truths, a way of linking through cross reference (internal and external) the discontinuity of the world, stringing it along with smatterings of mysticism, alchemy, the occult in order to get at that One, that Point at the end of The Sentence? To discover The One through The Many, or The Many through The One is central: how an author goes about answering this question dictates a life path, an objective that will forever steer and veer, left or right, in or out.

Is literature like substituting one dogma for another, like taking your hat off before some reality more basic, and at the same time more transcendent, than any single style, form, genre? Or is it like adopting a grand scheme, like leaving the burner on throughout and not even bothering to step in the front door? Say, why do you have to take your hat off when you walk into this OTB, I mean, is this like going to church or something? Has The Question been answered, at teast within the limited context of this narrative? At least partially?

Yep, even some of these guys in the Club believe in horsey karma, playing the odds and handicapping like throws of the runes, dealings of the Tarot, readings of the astrological nodes, for why would they actually weigh them horsies before each race? hard science? horsephysics? bah! numerology, man, the way those numbers come together. At one bar, they keep a twelvesided die, or dodecahedron, just in case a better can’t decide, feels a bit lucky, slightly synchronitic that evening. Serendipity? A hidden connection? Destiny? You call the shots: ‘Secretariat’ is an incarnation of Vishnu and Shiva, no horseshit fellas, an equestrian form of Brahma, a Bovine Boddhisatva, so the analogy between metaphysics and horseracing is tight, pay close attention now, as East and West, Good and Evil, the cultures, the ideas, the morality and immorality slide up and down next to each other, snicker and grope, giggle in the dark together, and hang closer than you ever thought they would, Ace.

Nothing’s for free, folks and some things cost much, much more than they ever could be worth. You have to work, people, even to lose. Keep on with it — throw the scratch sheet and the dictionary out the window.

“This guy?”

Mike’s eyes follow a younger fellow dressed sharp and walking back to the dining tables. The Indian gentleman with the complaint begins to follow the youth into the dining area. Not good. Especially when Mike was busy in the men’s can, taking an urgent piss when all this went down, and not at his prescribed post next to the betting lines, watching to make sure that older Indian gentlemen who are really weird but mind their own business don’t get hassled by a young spoiled bratty punk whose daddy is said to be a rich Jewish lawyer, making unbelievable sums of dineros representing famous sports figures, multinational corporations, notorious State Street Off Track Betting Parlors, and the very last vestiges of WASP ruled Anglo-America.

“That man there,” says the complainer about the complainee. “I was standing in the line, and he hit me.”

“Okay now sir. Just tell me what — ” Gotta get some info, feel like some traffic cop here. Constable On Patrol: Constant Off Petrol, the art of running out of juice before post time. The horses are still racing, so life goes on at Maywood. Oliver Wendall Holmes, epicurean epicurean, breakfast table philosopher and archetype of the well-bred New Englander, once wrote that “horse racing is not a Republican institution; horse trotting is.”

Along the turnpikes of New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, harness racing became the arbiter of local disputes, the very symbol of East Coast bravado and snobbism, carried pure strained through the Messenger and Justin Morgan
lines and around and back the foodchain to the Midwest and beyond. Oddly enough, very little of that corresponding New Englander attitude allowed itself to get carried with the ponies out West, and like the practice of ‘trotting under the saddle,’ all pretense and pretension faded away well before the formation of Gamblers’ Anonymous.

For the regulars, irregulars, regular irregulars and irregular regulars of this OTB on State, what racing symbolized to its founders centuries ago means less than the cheap etchings nailed upon the walls. ‘The Sport of Kings’ now caters to the prolies, and Oliver W. Holmes is remembered more for his legislation, lugubrious prose, and stereoscopic picture viewer than horse commentary or equestrian enthusiasms. Hard to find a WASP at the track these days, as racing has shifted from a rich man’s idle entertainment to a compulsion practiced most vehemently by the one’s least able to afford the loss, those most compelled to savor not the thrill of victory, but the agony of sustained defeat.

The OTB at 111th on the South Side embodies this reality: the Derby Club at State tries to refute it, or at least provide an arena for the wealthy horseplaying minority to strut their various anachronistic fashion statements. So now, fellas, as horseplayers’ honor has gone out with knee britches, trench warfare, and enthusiastic investing in the petrochemical industry, how ‘bout let’s forget the whole thing, guys, huh? Let’s all just sit down at the bar, order a round of mamosas, and talk about making some joint investment on the Nikkei, or opening up some junk bond outfit in Reno. Lee lacocca makes seven figures a year, regardless of how his company is doing. Horselosers that we are, why can’t we? The weather, the weather’s tremendous up there in Nevada. Really. How’s the wives, kidz? ‘Five Star Fun’ sure looks like a winner to me, and at 2-to-1, you’ve got plenty to lose and little to gain —

“He cut the line,” the distraught customer continues. “I told him to get in the end of the line, and then he hit me. No one hit me since I was child. I will not stand for it. I will not stand for it. I call the police.”

Our silent Indian businessman is no longer so taciturn. He points his finger, and continues, inexorably.

“Do something, or I call the police. Right now. Right now I call the police. You do nothing for me, and he hit me. I call the police, I call the police right now.”

The coppers? Now you’ve gotta be kidding, Svengali. Don’t you know that
cops have better things to do than play the ponies? Hi! Officer Friendly here, a grand of degenerate dope money on ‘Krooked Keystone’ to win. See, I told ya Mr. Mook looks just like that Buster. Any babies to save? Nope, just my own tired ass. Besides, champ, lookee here: those cops, they don’t dress properly enough to be even allowed up here. ‘We have a complaint from up there.’ ‘I’m awful sorry, ociffer, but we have a dress code here in the Club, and I’m going to have to a-a-ask you to leave. Should you return with proper attire, I would be more than willing to welcome you back inside. Have a pleasant evening. Just kidding. Would you care for a complimentary salad with bleu cheese dressing on the side?’ Always nice to have a uniform around, you know. But would they care?

“He hit you?”

No visible signs of Impact. He’s a Regular Customer, and so is the kid with attitude. Herbie? Did someone say the kid’s name is Herbie? Harry? Herbie?! Love bug, a volkswagon with personality. Figures that some Hollywood screenplay writer would christen a sentient kraut kar with a Jewish name. Many Jews still don’t purchase Mercedes or Porsche because of the War’s atrocities. Elie Weisel, Holocaust Pop Star, bestseller of Buchenwald, rejects the verfiability of history by claiming that only by actually experiencing the horror first hand can one understand the phenomenon. Boo to that one, Elie, and boo-hoo to your brethren who boycott Weiss bier and Legoland.

Like Ziggy Stardust, Elie’s gotten sucked up into his own mind. People suffer and have suffered atrocities and pain on all levels and in all situations, and who are you to quantize the misery of others, or even your own? One need not have had a two year reservation at Auschwitz to know what people can do to other people, or to experience the horrors of The Camp, the madness of those Spiders from Mars.

Revenge is sweet but rancor is futile and perpetuates the hate that zapped you and your relatives in the first place. History is complex, and so are its mechanisms. To remember what happened is essential, but to carry along the hatred is to infect the future with the madness of the past. Chill out and calm down. Enjoy what you have, since you seem to have an awful lot. Mr. Mook here is a genetic Jew himself, and shakes his head when the fairly recent anti-Arab dictates of the late irate Rabbi Kahani look an awful lot like those Nuremburg laws of Naziland, 1936: Shalom Heil! Sure, a State of War is not a great state to be in, but one must remember the suffering and oppression (on every side) that has led to the entire saddening state d’affairs. Diplomacy, compromise, a willingness to respect and contend with diverse and divergent opinions, Israeli or Arab, is the only disposition that can ever lead to peace.

When Made in U.S.A. F-15s with Stars of David emblazened in blue on their sides grill noncombatants and civilians in Lebanon, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Gaza, when the Massad openly and wantonly practices torture and techniques of terrorism on Palestinians, when Israel considered apartheid South Africa its staunchest ally next to the United States — what would the Bal Shem Tov have said? Rabbi Akibah? Massada was a successful stronghold, until its warriors were overrun, and commited suicide. Might that be a lesson to be learned, one contrary to the one usually taught in the Hebrew schools? Who’s our heroes now? What’s happened to Herzel’s dream, that long sought after Zionist ideal?

FUCK NOT WITH THE KID
LEST INSTEAD OF FUCKER,
THOUGH BECOME FUCKEE

Who’s the Fucker these days, Moyshe? Have we suddenly forgotten what prejudice and hate and discrimination and intolerance are all about? “Hear Oh Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One.” There you have it, the plural possessive and monotheism linked three times a day for all to hear, oh well. The Chosen People having Chosen themselves again, the schlamozzl schlemihling his way back into and out of History, agressee now agressing, States of War forever Waring, humanity’s leper messiah choosing, acting, willing a world as unlike their own ideal as those of their adversaries — when will it stop?

Shalom Aleichem and Salaam Aleikeem to both of us: Shem wuz a penmen and a merry old soul wuz he. No favorites here tonight, my 5-to-2 spread a loser, as both these fellows, Jew and Gentile, Human and Hindu, lose as much money in one evening as Mike makes in an entire week, which certainly isn’t much to make, but is even more to lose, I suppose. Gotta keep things nice and easy. They’re both wrong, they’re both right. Diplomacy? Where’s my job description? Steward!

“I point my finger at him,” continues the disgruntled regular, “and he hit it away.”

Yeah yeah yeah. How ‘bout another opinion here, take some slack out of the decision making process.

“Johnny, did you see what happened over there?”

“No, I was busy taking a piss in the stall right next to you, jerkoff.”

The Crest of the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers looks something like what the symbol for the Red Cross would have looked like, had Hitler won the war. Most tellers are alright, some are unspeakably arrogant and dangerously creepy, while a few will go either way, depending on the crowd. Granted, their job is not an easy one, having to understand the turgid betting orders of a host of hostile extraterrestrials, Neanderthals, and yuppies from River North.

At the same time, their patience is not commensurate with the magnitude of their patrons’ relative inhumanity. Tellers have been known to throw tickets at customers, ignore requests, and generally behave in a manner more becoming of hostile extraterrestrials, Neanderthals, and yuppies from River North.

And what remains most mysterious is the tendency of a majority of the customers to insist upon the use of the human tellers, when automated counterparts in the form of betting machines reside next to each queue, on each floor. When any patron can bet on any race at any time before post (granted, the odds shift, but a majority of folks don’t string bet), most insist upon jumbling all together, pushing, pulling, cursing, sweating, steaming at each other, desperate to get that last spread in before the horses are off and running down the first quarter mile.

No time left, is right. Before Mike realizes what has happened, the older guy has gone off to the dining room, and the shouting reaches 300+ decibels as you think they’ve got some Industrial Light & Magic technologies THX 1138 (decent movie, especially for a young, 23-year-old director) wraparoundsound system back there. Woah, knew the joint was fancy, but not that fancy, sure would love to crank some Led Zeppelin through that rig, tweeters tweaking a zillion cycles a second, woofers woofing trebly trebbles and booming basses, thirty percent of the total output of the Zion reactor channeled straight into the galloping gizmos of this megasystem hey hey momma say the way you move’s gonna make you sweat gonna make you groove before Mike can get his ass over there to mediate. Tum it down! Turn it down!

“What do ya want from us here, old man?”

The Young Lawyer To-Be who didn’t finish undergrad liberal arts college in Muncy has his whole entourage with him, two middle aged scum bags and a knock out brunette in a bright purple paisley patterned dress, who’d rather be somewhere else, but isn’t quite sure where.

“Can’t you see we’re busy?”

Busy? Busy doing what, dick head?

“He come in the line,” yes, he continues, “and then he hit me.”

Oh oh, the old guy is pointing to me now, explaining a scene he has already explained. “No one ever hit me. I will not stand for it. He come in the line and then he hit me. I will not stand for it. He hit me.”

“Alright now folks, let’s take things one step — “

“Fuck you, you old Hindoo faggot,” suggests YLT-B. “Get the hell out of here.”

“You see? You see? He hit me, and now he insult me!”

“Okay, now,” I finally intervene. “What exactly went down?”

The law school reject’s surrogate uncle goes into a short spiel, something about Mr. Charm there giving a bet to Ms. There’s No Place Like Home, who happened to be standing in line just in front of our Bombay Businessman with this bad overbite.

Then everything got ugly. He pointed to him, then him got his pride hurt and him hit he’s hand, him going off to the dining table, he left to complain to management all about what him done to he.

What? Yes, confusing, and yours unruly is left to figure it all out, or at least try to calm the downlift mo fo party plan a bit, the whole interlude rude and red hot.

“I come back,” continues the disgruntled. “I come back here, I tell you, and next time I come back here, I bring something. I come back here, and next time I come back here I bring something to hurt you. I hurt you next time if you do that again. I come back here next time — and I kill you!”

Take note that his ‘kill’ sounds something like a strained ‘keeel,’ even though the evening’s difficulties have nothing whatsoever to do with yachting.

“Yeah,” sez the lawyer reject’s surrogate uncle, lawyer reject not talking much, just letting the old fucker do all the work, which doesn’t seem too bad at the time, since the old fucker seems to be really enjoying this.

“Yeah?” here he goes, “well, let me tell your dark twinkle toed cock sucking faggot ass something. You come back here, and I’ll kill you, and I’ll kill your whole fucking family! You got that? I’ll kill your whole fucking family!”

Hmm, I wonder if there might not be some of that Mahi Mahi left back there in the kitchen, what do you say? Even if it’s dolphin, I won’t complain, just serve that stuff right up, thank you. Sentient life hasn’t got a chance out here, so why should it down there?

By now, all the residents of the Club and its dining room proper are listening attentively, no doubt hoping that one or both members of this feuding match will draw a pistol, jagged-edged street knife, stiletto, razor blade, steak knife, and that blood will spill, splatter, spot, and stain some of the nice leather furniture.

No extra charge folks, just step right up, step right up, and notice if you will, the dazed look on the old man, how he clutches his racing tickets, as if he somehow hoped that his fate rested in the 6th race tonight at Maywood, ‘Jack Wacky’ to win, and win he did friends, right between the eyes. Step right up, and pay close attention, close attention folks, how his adversary, the young guy with the bad perm fell bleeding all over his girlfriend, ruining that pretty purple outfit, soon to be a collector’s item from the night that the longlongshot ‘Overbaby’ made it in at 30-to-1. Step right up, yessirree, step right up, don’t crowd out the paramedics now, leave these brave lifesavers to their grim task, step right up, one full price ticket (seven dollar minimum for drinks) will take you all the way through, step right up and enjoy the show.

“Don’t bait him, don’t bait him,” is all that I can think of saying, perhaps that phonetic analogy to boating is still floating in my mind. “Let’s just call this quits fellas, alright? before anything worse comes of this.” Then speaking over to the monsooned Victim, “Come along with me, sir, and I’ll escort you back to your table.”

After more hassles and hassling, my presence does have something of a calming effect on these bozos. By then, several security doods show up, one named Marshall and the other Sandy, and make themselves busy, wandering up and down, making sure that the Situation has been contained. This essentially involves oogling and ogling the aforementioned buxon waitress wearing the excessively gaudy lavender lipstick, mooching some munchies from Errol in the kitchen, watching a race or two, smoking a cigarette, having a drink, all the while talking to various Club members about nothing in particular and shit in general. They successfully portray an uncanny image of total control and fundamental self-assurance, generate an aura of calm indifference and asskicking machismo: in other words, they quite obviously don’t give a flat fuck.

Most are Chicago cops during the day, so this is plenty of nothing compared to what they are used to, and they let everyone know it. Many of those who aren’t cops in another life have this serious attitude problem, looking for some heads to beat in, since they lack the proper exposure, and this, also, is made known. Either way, one is left to speculate about their utility, a pastime futile in the face of grim gamers’ reality. If all else fails, call a doctor, since by then, it’s too late anyway. And if there’s a complaint about the help, simply consult the mute jockey with the blond curly hair and the horn. He’ll tell you all about it.

“Never since I was child, did someone hit me. He hit me. Did you see?”

“No sir, I’m afraid I was detained in another part of the Club with other pressing matters at the time,” piss still dribbling inside my cheap black Haggar™ dress pants, Vikings long dead with fermented onions fossilized to their remains, rusted battle axes, iron tipped arrows, pikes, swords, spears interspersed throughout, heads bashed and battered skulls facing east-west, recapitulating in death the path of the sun across vast burial mounds, legends of conquest, territorial expansion, odd brewing practices and a brand name for formal slacks the last remnants of a once great civilization in the North Sea.

They say that the Icelandic tongue has changed so little over the ages that Leif Erickaon himself could understand a modern day newscast, minus all those new fangled words for such technogadgetry as airplanes, cruise missiles, microwave ovens, viral contamination, and nuclear meltdown. Leif probably wouldn’t care though, bottle of thick mead on the formica table, feet propped up on the vinyl divan, wiping his greasy hands in his laphound, thinking up new names for pretty countries he wouldn’t want people to visit. He perchance would have called this Derby Club here something like ‘The Horse Trough,’ just as he gave the name ‘Greenland’ to that huge vista of sterile wasteland that only a Dane would eventually want to own, referring to his own northern green paradise of hot springs and nubile blondes ‘Iceland,’ just to keep everyone else well clear of all that natural springs heat, sweat, jungle juice and fine living.

Landing in what is now called North America, Leif coined the name ‘Vineland,’ a catchy name no doubt, one independent of political significance, as Leif and friends had better things to do than systematically decimate a native population and call it “Western Expansion”. Leave that distinction to us Amerigo Vespuccians. All in all a clever man, that Leif, New World Explorer, fermented onion guzzler, one of history’s early marketing geniuses. What we are now coming to understand in 1990 those Nordic types knew all about way back in 1000, way before Gutenburg ever pressed, Mr. Mook ever pissed. Goebbels and Marshall McLuhan step aside, I’d put my bet on those not so cold barbarian winds any day, especially in a place like this, an Icelandic hunt…

Sa sogte de sarken med gaffel og kiv
for at sla den med stumhed og stylter
og true dens liv med et regulative
De lokked med smil og med sylter.

(Then they searched the coffin with fork and spoon
to strike it with dumbness and stilts
and threaten its life with a regulation
They enticed it with smiles and jams.)

“He hit me.”

“I sympathize with you completely, Sir.” Is my fly still unbuttoned? “But have to point out that both of you are regular members, and that I cannot play any favorites here. Right or wrong, my job is simply to maintain a nice, calm, orderly gaming environment.”

An entire serving tray of empty beer bottles, high ball glasses, silverware, cups, saucers, and dirty ashtrays goes crashing to the floor in the kitchen. A couple shouts and the scuffling of feet ensues. Various obscenities in Mexican slang can be heard muffled through the swinging doors. Oops. Come on, Errol, things can’t be that bad. Think about how terrible Mario must feel…

“You know what I think about,” the terminally distraught one continues, “you know what think about?”

Let me guess…

“I think about that you see four men there, and I have only my own self and my only friend, you see. You know what I think about? I think about that you only want to make money and do not care about a person who minds his own business and is a good citizen like my own self. Look. Look here. You see this pin of mine? You see this pin of mine? I am a Shriner. You see this pin? I am a Shriner, so you know that I am a good citizen. I make no problems, and he come up, and he hit me. You do nothing. He hit me, and you do nothing. You are only interested in making the money. He hit me. He hit me.”

Much like psychotherapy, where the analyst is essentially supposed to sit back in a big comfy chair, scrawl protracted notes on yellow pads in illegible handwriting, try to listen attentively for fifty minutes every week only to send the bill at the end of every month, I have to similarly listen, let the guy ventilate his facial sphincters, verbally repress himself.

That way, he stays happy and I stay employed, a situation mutually beneficial, at least to the point where he keeps losing money and I keep working. Not exactly the best of all possible worlds, you understand, but underneath the surface, behind the facade of the everyday, some kind of twisted reason must reign. Freud wrote that the unconscious has its own form of logic, its own rules and regulations, forms of communication and modus operandi.

Freud never bet on the ponies, although he did smoke lots of cigars. “A horse is a horse, of course,” said 60s television’s riveting personality, that Mr. Ed, doubtlessly misquoting the horny Viennese doctor on his now infamous “sometimes,” fondling the shaft of tobacco and resin as he spoke, “a cigar is just a cigar.”

As a meaningless aside, aficionados of Freudianism and its founder have been libidinous in pointing out that not only did the old Freud smoke cigars frequently, but that he was actually observed, on more than a single occasion, and by more than one professional nailbiting paranoid neurotic notetaking witness, to be chewing on their tips. Amazing but rude.

Say there keepers of biography, Kokaine Kreeps, and psychoanalyzers of the Great Psychoanalyzer, what sombre sexy truth might be drawn from that little apocryphal story? Might we one day be forced to dump the entire enterprise, and substitute all those lecture notes, seminars, and protracted ten-year-long therapy programs for a fine box of Havannas with a brief note inside saying “Never mind the dream imagery, just smoke one of these.”

Such action would probably leave most of us in the oral stage for good, but at least we would have better pan-Cuban relations, and an increased tolerance for Fidel Castro, covert CIA operations, and John F. Kennedy. World stability remains delicately in the balance. And what do ya know, Sigmund, a cigar might very well be just a cigar, but the compulsive gambler certainly can’t be getting enough, or, what do ya say, doc? perhaps too much, huh?

Gamblers pace, smoke, jabber amongst themselves, wait in long lines, push each other around, consult, snicker, moan, take a leak, come back, ponder programs like they were Trump’s last will and testament or the Bible, chew tobacco nervously, spit into ashtrays, drool on mahogany tabletops, smoke some more, chew on the tips (I’ve seen it myself, sure have!), discard half-full Fritos wrappers, stare wild-eyed up at the screens, reminding one more of johns waiting in the anteroom of a New Orleans whorehouse than what a bunch of rich doods should be doing on just another Tuesday evening in downtown Chicago.

Should be doing? Whose superego is the issue here, their’s or mine? And what is more insane, to make tons of cash only to blow it on the races every night, or hang around there twelve to ten, two to twelve, six to eleven, wearing Viking pants, a cheesie suit and tie, greased back receding hairline wish-I-had-some-hair-left-to-grease-back haircut making seven bucks an hour and simultaneously redefining the Frank Zappa term ‘Cheapnis,’ trying to bring a remote semblance of order to such an establishment? Place your bets before post time, don’t get shut out now, here’s your chance to win big!

Wait a second. Did he say Shriner? Parades of Masons in aprons marching in two step, overweight tuba players, old gay men in red suspenders riding on the backs of fire trucks, fifty-year-old dancing girls, tarnished representatives of the local glee club, denture cleaning ads, Depend™ undergarment TV commercials, real estate salesmen in black suits and yellow bow ties, self-playing organ and grand piano conventions, YMCA, PTA, NRA booths at company picnicks, dirty drinking fountains in town squares, sloppy pre-marital sex in the back seat of daddy’s old Packard, all these images and more come to mind. Social clubs, business circles, say, whatever really happened to the Ancient and Accepted Rite, the Arcane Truths and Secrets of Atlantis, Egypt, Ancient Mexico, the mysteries behind the Great Pyramids, UFO’s, numerology, that Tarot?

One question a contemporary American Mason can never understand nor answer: how is it that the last bastion of the Mysteries would be held by the mainstream of bourgeoisie society? Dinosaur death, the Baringer Crater, Gypsy truth, the migration of the Huns, the fleeing of the Incas, diaspora. The perplexities of the universe, the map of the cosmos, all these eternal collusions contained within the initiation rites of pharmacists, foot doctors, accountants, and insurance salesmen?

Hmmmm… Might such a procedure guarantee that these mysteries will remain hidden? What safer way to store a sub rosa rosiary, an arcane arcana, than by keeping it with those who know not its import, who can never tap its power or fineries, and yet know that something lies there, sparkling, scintillating in the dark, waiting for its keybearing messiah to arrive and share the spoils with those faithful and worthy enough to partake?

Those who have proven themselves through the long and painful trials of parades of Masons in aprons marching in two step, overweight tuba players, old gay men in red suspenders riding on the backs of fire trucks, fifty-year-old dancing girls, tarnished representatives of the local glee club, denture cleaning ads, Depend™ undergarment TV commercials, real estate salesmen in black suits and yellow bow ties, self-playing organ and grand piano conventions, YMCA, PTA, NRA booths at company picnicks, dirty drinking fountains in town squares, sloppy pre marital sex in the back seat of daddy’s old Packard…

“Yes, I am a Shriner, in very good standing, very good standing, yes.” Do they have Packards in India? “You know what I think? I think that you only want business, and do not care, do not care at all, do not care at all about the people here. You only want to make your money, and you do not care at all, do not care at all about me.”

“No, Sir. I only work here.” Now that’s original. “My job is simply to keep the order. I can’t play favorites. I’m sorry your pride is hurt, but we should all forget about this thing before we make a bigger deal out of it than the situation demands.”

Several patrons have taken interest, and one by one they take me to the side, allow me to gain their confidence through listening to their inane advice. A few think the old guy is to blame, but most hate the punk. Sides form, conflicting opinions shared, as if they each saw a different scenario take place. Lucky they have line judges on the track, right fellas?

“Throw the geezer out.”

“That old Mason is making a big issue out of nothing.”

“That young punk is an obnoxious loser. Watch out for him.”

“He’s trouble, you’ll see. Real trouble, and the little shit doesn’t even know how to bet, for Christ’s fucking sake.”

“He came up to my line one night,” a teller sez, “claiming that I gave him a perfecta when he really said trifecta. I said to him, ‘Read my fucking lips, P.E.R.F.E.C.T.A. is what you said, and since you seem far from perfecta, that’s what I gave you, asshole’ but instead he goes on about how I owe him five hundred dollars, and he says to me ‘Give me my money,’ like he owns the goddammed joint, the creep.”

One guy gets pissed at me, for not throwing them both out right away. Same guy is underdressed, so I figure I should simply throw him out, and solve the problem.

Another at the bar suggests that I should ask the buxom waitress with the incendiary lipstick to choose. Figuring that just might be a good idea, I try to find her, only she’s back in the kitchen, trying to console Errol. Errol is back by the walk-in refrigerators, sobbing among the cabbage and Uncle Ben’s rice. Hector, one of the bus boys, is balancing a tray full of dishes precariously on the tips of his fingers and speaking rapidly in Spanish, suddenly stops when he sees me, starts again, then stops, only to stop yet again, and proceeds to give me the Hairy Eyeball.

“You speaka Spanish,” sez he to me.

“Un pocito. Por que? Are you talking about me or something?”

“Oh, nooooh, boss. I hear you speaka to Juan the cook, damme Mahi Mahi, so I think you speaka good Spanish. So, you speaka good?”

“Oh,” shrugging my shoulders, checking tonight’s soup to see if it might augment my nutritional intake, or lack thereof, “not much. You can go ahead and say what you like, I won’t be listening, and besides, I really don’t care.”

“If we speaka fast, very fast Spanish, then you don’t understand nothing, is that right boss? When we speaka fast, comprendes nada?

“Head on down to the door, will ya Mike?” the night manager interrupts here, a youngish kid named Slip, whose pappy works as Turf Manager at Sportsman’s.

Turns out to be a decent enough guy, whose humor and compassion more than compensate for his over-enthusiasm and fleeting sense of naivete. He enjoys yelling at you, given any opportunity, though in a manner more akin to a pissed-off fellow than The Voice from on high. His youthfulness and need for control leaves him with little option but to vocalize, and vocalize he does. Of Polish descent, his too blond, crudely permed, tightly cut hair seems unnervingly unnatural, almost sewn on, some of the last vestiges, perhaps, of his days as a Yuspy (Young Suburban Punk). I speculate that the primary reason the two of us get along so well tonight is that both our hairstyles are totally screwed, Slip trying a bit too hard, Mook not enough, both extremes leading to the very same creepy coiffure catastrophe.

Slip is up in the kitchen now, yelling at Thomas the dishwasher, Errol the cook, and Mook the supervisor, all of whom seem rapped up in a whole lot of nothing.

“Victor has to be relieved for his break, and the Club seems to have settled down a bit. If we have any trouble, I’ll send for ya with the talkie. Why you spending so much time in the kitchen, anyway? What’s in here? Go out on the floor. Do your job. For now, go down and relieve Victor. What the hell is going on here? Thomas! Wash the dishes! Errol! Get back to work! If you don’t have anything to do, then find your asses something! You hear that, Mike? Go down, and I’ll call ya. ’Til then, scram. As for you two, shut up and go to work. Work! Work! What is wrong with you guys? Huh? Huh! Huh?!”

Thus busted, thick patterns of soup grease still on my mouth, a nervous arm coming up, apparently randomly, to wipe the slop away, yum.

Communication between floor supervisors, managers, utitility people, and security guards is greatly facilitated with the help of walkie-talkies all of the above wear on their belts, carry in their hands, or in some way shape or form affix to some body part, intruding or protruding. At first, I used to fuck around with my talkie, making weird noises, imitating voices, and creating general havoc, until the night manager caught on rather more quickly than anticipated. Maybe living at home has made his ears more sensitive.

“Owwww-oooooba-doooooba-doooooo.” I was just too smooth. They’ll never recognize my voice, no way, I thought, I’m a new guy.

“Mike, quit fucking around with that thing, or I’ll bust your face, over.” no slipping by the Sliphead, eh? People can be pretty damn twisted, by gosh.

“How did you know it was me?” responded Bob from the second floor.

“Wasn’t you, Bob, it was Mike, right Mike?” inquired Sliphead way down from Somewhere Below.

Corporate flow charts and organizational schematics always start at the top of the perennial pyramid, and work their way down down down. Off track reality at State and Lake dictates a different organization, one where all the big wigs hang out in the basement, shuttling commands up into the belly of the whale via radio, telephone, and personal messenger. Big Decisions are made up top and around, are carried clandestinely about for a period of anywhere from a week to four years, remain dim potentialities in a file cabinet, on computer disk, or lost only to be found and then lost again amid the cellulose chaos of an unnumbered folder, are finally implemented where required, only to succeed, fail, or maintain the status quo, the original idea long forgotten on after another round of mojitos on some Caribbean isle.

Same for most places. Especially huge governmental institutions, like the Chicagot Transit Authority. Ever go down to one of the underground ‘L’ stops, such as Washington? Yum yum yum, place is dirtier than the dollar. Too bad, since all executive type company people, much like their mortal compatriots on the streets below (and below the streets) live out their lives and irretrievably, inevitably die human deaths, as their respective corporations live on, merge, change names, realize new vantage points of tax exempt status, enjoy the legal classification of an individual, all the while avoiding the all too human dilemmas of having to endure extreme bouts of boredom, frustration, high tension toothaches, low resolution headaches, nasty nausea, impotence, delirium, jealousy, acute psychological breakdown, cramps, heart failure, lung cancer, bad humor, halitosis (one’s own [and especially someone else’s]), manic depression, psychosomatic diptheria, you name it, somebody somewhere’s got it, and chances are they aren’t named Searle, Rockwell, or Zenith, Siemens — more names you know, flip through and look them up in Fortune 500 magazine, then radio in the rate of progress of the planet to your operatives on Tau Ceti and Barnard’s Star, see if they care, see if they give a shit —

“Owwww-oooooba-doooooba-doooooo.” replied someone else, as by then, the habit had caught on, and ’twas open game for anyone working that evening.

“All you boyz are making me hot and bothered,” said Elisabeth, the assistant Mutuels Manager speaking from the office area, a sign of bad things to come (if only I’d paid attention to the proper signs).

“Owwww-oooooba-doooooba-doooooo!” came an excited voice, and for a second or two, I couldn’t tell whether the voice was mine or someone else’s.

But Slip remained undaunted. “Listen you bums. Cut this out, or all of you get the axe, ya got that? What are you guys doing? We’ve got a ton of shit to straighten out tonight, and you jerks are filling up the air waves with all this crap. What if I got attacked, huh? What if something important had to be said? What if we had a fucking riot situation, with a bunch of degenerates flinging furniture and shit all over the place? Get back with it, you got that? over.”

Sure sign of a Company Man: even when sorely fuming, eargerly pissing and moaning, he maintains proper walkie-talkie code procedure, over.

“Now I can’t tell which one of you I want,” continues Elisabeth, snickering into her set, “I feel just so confused with so many of you wooing me for my favors…”

“Me,” I yell, “You want — ” Cover blown, a not-so subtle end of my discourse in walkie-talkie wackiness, projected pranksterism.

As kidz, my cousins and I would get on a cheap set, and listen to the cockpits of 747’s flying above us in the cool summer evening skies. Once, we actually got a response from an actual cockpit from actual pilots actually flying above us, something like “hey you kids, cut that stuff out!” which as you can imagine really gave all of us one humungoid kiddie power trip. In this case, though, since I was unemployed and broke for so long, owing all my friends lunches, part of my rent, VISA payment, and much much more, I decided not to take a crash landing this time around, and resolutely resigned myself since then to talkie messages of greater pragmatic import.

Device in hand, it’s dangling antennae bit dangling as dangling antennae bits have this tendency of doing, I head off now to the elevator, press the roundish arrow, what’s going on now, first night and all, which way? I cruise on down to the first floor and my visit with Mister Victor, gatekeeper of the gamers, guardsman of the groove, captain of the clueless…

Continued in Part 2…

Part 2: Night at the Races