Part 2: Night at the Races

A quirky literary trifecta: memoir, manual, and manifesto

This post is the second of a four part novella. If you’ve read Part 1, dive right into Part 2 here, and if not click on the link for background and starting from the top:

Part 1: Night at the Races

FOURTH RACE

FOR CHARIOTS AND WAR STALLIONS $2 HIEROFECTA AND $3 HIERATIC WAGERING
PURSE: LINKING UPPER AND LOWER KINGOOMS
DISTANCE: ABOUT 2,500 YEARS

Within the newly constructed Ancient Egyptian exhibit at the Field Museum of Natural History here in Chicago, located just off Lake Shore Drive and a few hundred south, you can see artifacts and actual specimens all the way from the Early period of the Nile civilization to Grecian times.

Intact papyri, pottery, naval vessels, wood, stone and metal tools, whole mummies (in various states of burial, from fully wrapped to x-ray photograph still), and samples of the very same limestone rock used to construct the Great Pyramids can be found, along with a host of pictures, models, and drawings illustrating different aspects of Egyptian life, from birth to ceremonial death.

For the ancient Egyptain, dying was serious business — with an unparalleled lust for living and life (therefore staunchly believing in the reality of the afterlife and a crucial need for ample preparation), the average Egyptian spent most of his religious life either communicating with the dead, or preparing for the death of themselves or a family member. The highly celebrated aboriginal text The Book of the Dead, or, more precisely, Chapters of Coming Forth by Day, is a series of chants, or spells, dating from prehistory, up through the Heliopolitan Recension of the the Vth and Vlth dynasties, through the Theban Recension of the XVlllth and XXllnd, and onto the Salte Recension of the XXVlth and following, all the way to the Ptolmemaic era, conquest, and the end of the Empire around the time of Christ.

In essence, each chapter, or spell, is a set of hieratic or hieroglyphic writings appealing to one or more deities, male, female or hermaphroditic, human, animal or a combination thereof, appeasing them through praise and promise, in order for the soul of the dead to regain his or her faculties in the world beyond. For the heavenly realm of the Egyptian was a place much like the reed fields and river valleys of the manifest plane, only with bounties more bountiful, and tortures more tortuous. Once dead (in body, at least), your soul would rise up in its tomb, and proceed to chant the spells written on the walls, spells to regain one’s hearing, sight, eating abilities, breathing powers, sense of touch, sexual potency, and so on.

A large portion of the texts describe the procedures necessary to gain admittance into the den of Osiris, how to appease Anubis, the Jackel-headed god, in order for him to deliver you into the outer chambers. Once there, your heart is removed, and weighed by the goddess Maat against the mass of a feather. Should your heart be heavy, then the ravenous eater of souls will dispose of you promptly. Should your heart balance with the weight of the feather, the ibis-headed god Thoth will write you down in the book of justice, and you may proceed onward, escorted by no less a personage then the fertility goddess Isis herself, along with her dark twin, Nempthys, deity of childbirth and the dusk.

Passed this crucial step, you might try and gain entrance to the fabled Seket-Hetep, or Elysian Fields, consisting of the personal estate of the god Osiris, complete with hosts of lovely maidens, flowing wine and good winds, surrounding farmlands rich in grain and grape, guarded and heavily protected from the base and banal by a series of twenty-one pylons with their respective keepers of angels and demons. To enter you had to know the spells for each god at each pylon — make a mistake, and if lucky you might start all over again, if not, you might find yourself consumed by the likes of the evil god Set, chomped into the Void by the big bad brother of Osiris.

To know those important spells in the afterlife, you required during your earthly stay a healthy pocketbook, sound connections, a priest who knew what he was doing, and scribes who would copy the appropriate passages from the Coming Forth without error. For moving up in this contemporary world of ‘science’ and ‘reason’ today, not much seems to have changed, at least in a figurative sense.

The high point of the Field exhibit for me was seeing one particular mummy, propped upright within this airtight glass case, its primordial physique half unwrapped, its finely preserved facial features identifying him as an older gentleman, perhaps forty, forty-five years of age, whose deportment even in death implied some measure of wealth, nobile origin.

I couldn’t help but wonder about the mythos surrounding his death and burial, about the odd mixture of imagery characteristic of the old texts, of the tales of poetic wonderment and metaphysical genius placed directly alongside and amongst the lowest of crude ramblings and brutal polemics.

He stared out at me and the passing flow of Chicagoans, unmoved, speechless, locked in time, trapped on display, a frozen specimen who couldn’t rap on the glass, ask for a pardon from the governor, gain divine clemency from some astral demigod.

What might have this gentleman done during his lifetime to warrant such terrible punishment, to be put forward for the mass’s amusement like some captured Ethiopian slave or Asiatic barbarian? And what might that Egyptian nobleman or priest be thinking, his soul still behind that glass, his spirit constricted, captured, compelled to forever gaze back at the demented faces of Aftrican tribesmen, Goth and Visi-goth savages from the northern wastes, Mongol primitives from the east, all these less than human forms co-habitating seemingly harmononiously within one gigantic, seething, frothing gathering of paraded beings, making faces, laughing, pointing, pushing, rapping on the glass, wearing unspeakable garments, consuming rancid looking foodstuffs, clutching demonic devices that flash brilliant lights in his face, black boxes that speak with the voices of the gods, defying the laws of earthly or heavenly reality?

Poor guy. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could have warranted such punishment. Why me? oh gods and goddesses, why me?

That’s certainly a question Franz Kafka seemed to ask himself: why me? And like our Egyptian friend just off LSD, Kafka’s heroes always screw up their lines, are unable to appease the Right People. Wake up first thing in the morning and after some weird-assed dreams, only to turn into a giant bug and miss your train; get arrested for a crime you know nothing about and whose charges are never made clear to you, an arrest eventually culminating in your execution; travel to a far-off town in order to get into its stronghold only to fail inexorably; travel to Amerika cause you got a girl knocked up and wind up losing yourself completely within the unconscious mass of the continent: not exactly a fun way to go, and far from easy reading, Sunday afternoon page turning in the park. Why me?

Wrapped up like a mummy. Dashiell Hammett, even with a bad heart condition, had more gusto: not ‘Why me?’ but ‘Why not?’ sez that irreverent Sam Spade, all V’d out, a blond Satan to the last, who never does find the Falcon, though is at the very least given the pleasure of sending Brigid O’Shaunessey up the river. ‘Why not?’ is right: Why not?

Kafka gets tossed into existential anthologies for some odd reason, his shorts acting as some respresentation of the ‘dilemma of modernism’ or some stuff like that. Don’t get me wrong, old K. wuz pretty swell. He described the malaise of the outcast admirably well. That he was a German Jew living in Czechoslovakia (thus a three-way outsider) is secondary to the universality of his plight, and his tremendous intuitive ability to put that angst convincingly on paper. But where Kafka loses first billing at the Dead Authors’ Convention is his marked lack of faith, his abandonment of hope, spirituality, the innate religious sense we all share.

In his now famous, over-anthologized short “The Gatekeeper” (more or less extracted from his longer The Trial novel, I believe), we find our Kafka loser-hero at one of the first doorways to God and His Law, only the guy standing there with hat and beard won’t let K. inside. Symbol of the separation and isolation of humanity from each other and the world, of its infinitesimal, relatively meaningless reality in the face of universal vastness and resultant divine indifference, the gatekeeper slams the door in poor K.’s face, just before he drops dead, plunk! “This door was meant only for you,” sez the divine doorman, the blessed bouncer, “and now I am going to shut it.” The black dot forms and shrinks, the orchestra raucously revs up only to peel suddenly out.

Th-th-th-that’s all, folks!

Is that progress? It took nearly two thousand years after the fall of Egypt to acquire such a bad attitude? Granted, the scene makes sense when we consider how those who hate life would have no respect for death, either.

One more series of questions, though: what of the gatekeeper? He was immortal, was he not? Or was his existence dependent upon K., perhaps a portion of K’s very own consciousness, since the door was “meant’ only for K. and no one else? Might the gatekeeper have been lying, taunting K. all along?

I make my way down to Victor, a guy who neither jibes nor taunts, so smooth that if he wore a suit of velcro, he’d still be able to sweat a polka or dance some house music in a velvet ballroom. Hey! Want some lightning rap, or some house science, white boy?

Getting down to the ground floor is a bit like entering a contemporary version of Dante’s Inferno, the whole place arranged into a grand hierarchy of separation and distinction, from leather cushioned polished brass glistening dull yellow incandescent lighted “Good evening, ladies and gentlmen, our bar is open, good luck to you this evening, will you be dining, two in your party or three?” of the Derby Club up on the third floor to formica table topped cheap plastic paneled harsh neon fixture blazing “Take your hats off no work clothes no sweats no attitude or you can’t get in I’m being kind to your ass just to let you in so watch out we’ve got you under surveillance” of Ground Zero, rejects ending up in the Grandstand next door, a place they have to literally hose out after the end of every day.

Derby Club, Mezzanine Deck, Second Floor of the “Clubhouse,” to grisly grimy Grandstand: jacket and tie, no jeans, and barely human of the air conditioned rental spaces to overt Neanderthal, all arranged into a complete spectrum of the worst of every social and economic class imaginable (with a little fantasy thrown in, no doubt). A shitty place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to work there.

Victor, for two years already, has kept his cool, has successfully kept the Bad Ones out, and winked and grinned at the Ones ambling on in, a steady flow of humanity, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five daze a fear, many of them frequent flyers, determined disasters, watch your step!

DRESS CODE
2ND FlOOR: REMOVE CAPS
NO SWEATSHIRTS OR T-SHIRTS NO RUNNING ATTIRE
CLEAN AND NEAT APPEARANCE
DISCRETION OF SUPERVISOR FINAL

“How ya doin Mike, how’s your night tonight?”

“Hanging in there, Vic, how about yourself?”

“All right, yeah, pretty good, uh huh… Watch your step goin down, watch your step now, thank you, uh huh, watch your step going down, caps off gents, watch your steps, thank you, have a good night now, watch your step…”

Of the many roles demanded of the OTB’s gatekeeper, one involves warning people of The Step, six or seven inches of this chasm no one really knows what to do with that threateningly lies across the pathway leading to and from the twin elevators located next door in the foyer of the Chicago Theatre. Older women have been known to topple walking canes over funny tafetta hats, businessmen winning or losing have nearly lost it all when not paying close enough attention.

Needless to say, the jump seems appropriate to the entire place, a kind of objectified metaphor for the sado-masochistic exploits perpetrated day and night and on every level of consciousness and unconsciousness across the marble and plastic spanning the length and breadth of this OTB’s reeking innards. Watch your step! Better yet, don’t even take that step, folks, if you know what it might do to you.

A tomb it be, a crypt! Equally obvious is the appointed doorman’s frequent inability to make such an overtly psychological and unbusinesslike warning, even mentioning the striped yellow plunge entirely optional and the discretion of the employee on duty. Victor, forever smooth, goteed and buzzcut, arrayed in red low cut V-necked sweater, official black pants, socks, and shoes, and wearing glasses fit for an arc-welder, loves to blirt out the warning, is best at it, being known to implement his policy when ten yards away, facing the street and staring at the girls coming out of The Chicago, simultaneously rapping with one of the porters from next door. How does he do it? Watch your step! He even likes to go and open the glass door leading to the elevators for people, another voluntary action whose significance I would shortly enough discover.

“Why do you say that all the time, Vic?” I wonder.

“You know, Mike, you be nice to some of those folks goin up to the Club, say greetins, open them doors for em, and sometimes, when they win big, they tip you good, you know what I’m sayin?… Watch your step goin up, watch your step… One time, that black gentleman in the dark sport suit, you know him? Bill? he won a straight trifecta with some serious longshots in there, and he gave me thirty-five dollar, you know. And that wasn’t too bad, not at all. I make sure I open the door for him, that’s certainly right and proper for me now, uh huh. Watch your step…”

“Really?”

“Yeah, uh huh. And thats happen to me on many a time. Thirty-five dollar, sometime twenty, you get fives, you get five a lot, uh huh. The white folks like it too. Sometime you get some stares, like they don’t like you to
be sayin it all the time, they say some things, but, you know, it work for me, sometime pretty good… Cap off, sir, that’s right, caps off now, thank you… If you want, you can even go on up and open that glass door for the
rest of em. Those old white women like that the most. Yeah. Watch your step, watch your steps now, have a good night, uh huh… Those old white women tip good, they have some good tippin, you know what I’m sayin? uh huh. Watch your steps, watch your steps goin on up now, uh huh… Sometime it be funny as hell, too. You be watchin em come on up to the step, all cool and togethuh, and then you yell out ‘Watch your step!’ and they panic like, and almost fall over, cause you done gone on and said it to em!… Watch your steps, watch your steps goin up… Shit like that be funny, I’ll tell you, uh huh. You just gotta watch em is where it’s at, just gotta watch em go on by.”

The stream of people moving by the door is usually steady, sometimes intense. Victor knows just about everyone entering, and can tell a non-regular from a mile away. He’s spent two solid years at the door, applying for and receiving a job as porter at the OTB several weeks before they were to open. He works hard, has an extremely pleasant personality, and does what he is supposed to do, plus, as we have seen, a good deal more.

The sad irony of the whole scene is that Victor clearly has seniority for advancement beyond the floor supervisor level of authority within the company, only his distinctive speech pattern, and doubtlessly the color of his skin, have precluded him from rising any higher within the corporate structure.

Working in the Derby Club on three, although not exactly Heaven, is surely more innately interesting than having to stand at the front, no television monitors to watch, no dinners to swipe, being forced to cut through the rabble, the likelihood of a physically confrontational situation there being the greatest of the entire joint. As these potential problems move slowly up that creaking escalator, the machine’s mechanism giving the impression of continous ascent to the second floor, unseen gears and pulleys toil noisily and incrementally, catching, releasing, then catching again, more than half of the drive belt, with its steps that appear at the bottom only to fold themselves flat at the top again, a majority of functions and sources of power crammed into and underneath those floorspaces, down amid the shadow reality of ducts, electrical conduits, ventilation shafts, circulation and recirculation, the unknown forever more significant than the known.

Look beneath those resinous wrappings. Occasionally, a breakdown occurs: security must be called, and usually Johnny Nimbusson, Scotsman from Wisconsin, will appear with key in hand, ready to shut the thing down, reverse the flow, irrepressible conflicts abated. Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorville, Gettysburg, bloody ambiguous battles of an ambiguous nation, the melting pot from its beginning too hot to handle, invisible lines, boundaries, separations characterizing the struggle and pain of human beings whose color, creed, and culture remind The North — that irrepressibly repressed white male North — of origins, unconsciousness, dark and everlasting death, living (there goes the neighborhood, Jackson!) right next door, hell, right inside our own homes! White, black, modern and ancient — the court of the Pharaoh and the burning planes of the Sahara, a dozen contiguous dynasties and the invasion of the Hyksos warriors. Consider, if you swill, an ancient Egyptian symbol, overt and covert, exoteric and esoteric, of The Northern Winds:

Four-headed ram-god Qebui, one head for each of the Winds, whole within the part, part within the whole, total control as microuniverse encompasses macro, a composite deity of animals domestic and wild. Winged windgod, born by those salty, cool Mediterranean breezes, release of the blue, very blue Nile waters. The feather of Maat, symbol and active agent of Truth, balance, judgement tops this quaternion: whose Truth is at issue here is not at all clear.

For Egyptians, their North meant fertility, freedom, foreigners, vast ocean spaces of blue and green, a stark contrast to those blazing deserts of Sahara, the tip of Africa resplendent with savage tribes of old peopling that merciless Western frontier. Farther on high in latitudes, chilly breaths of Wotan blow, the lightning bolts and hammers of Jupiter, Donar, and Thor strike, and not only on weekdays. Crystal palaces, noble ideas, a metaphysics and mathematics to tame even the gods — white men forget all-too readily the price paid for such “progress,” overlook the balancing realities of natural laws they struggle so resolutely to overcome, and in the end and all the while throughout, fail.

Space Shuttles explode in Ponce de Leon vapor streams of water and blood, radioactive waste, industrial pollution, ozone depletion and carbon dioxide greenhousing tarnish our phallotechnic world on the Outside, while prejudice, inequality, discrimination, elitism and privilege perpetuate oppression and injustice on the Inside: no Mercy. Yet.

Victor doesn’t seem to mind his gatekeeping role so much, a Job is a job, one must find one’s place in The System, while he honestly enjoys rapping with most of the folks who stream by in that infinite wave of misfortune waiting to happen and happening all of the time, as home boyz such as yours fooly here get swept up up up and away to work the floors on Level Three and the Mezzanine, greasy VO5 shampoo haircut and Transylvanian peasant Hungarian looks notwithstanding, low melanin content in our human hides opening more doors here than any college degree ever would.

Training is training, the need to learn all the ropes on all the levels pressing, so there I stand, letting Victor know that the time has come to take his long awaited dinner break. Dinner? Tea time? Luxury of luxuries: can I have a cigarette? He don’t smoke. If anyone deserves a break at this point, midstream of fourth race in tonight’s card, he does.

“Thank you, Mike, thank you, cause I is hungry, I’ll tell you!”

“What’s good to eat?” Burp, the Mahi Mahi ($17 .95) ancient history.

“Well, you know, Mike, the BLT club sandwich ($1.89) from the deli on the second floor is mighty good, mighty good, yeah, uh huh. And I think I’m gonna get me one of those, yeah, with them hams and turkeys in em, uh huh, I thinks I will… Watch your step. Watch your steps goin up… So you take care now… hats off, my man, hats off on the way up them steps, hats off if you please, uh huh… You think you can handle the floor?”

“Sure, no problem.”

Famous last words: Sure, no problem. Then, BLAM! I didn’t know what hit me, officer. I was standing at the door, and before I knew it, the lights went out. A blackness — a blackness? Whose? No Sir, I didn’t notice the assailant carrying that sawed-off shotgun into the establishment. No Sir, I didn’t notice that he was wearing a ski mask, paratrooper uniform, and bullet proof vest. No Sir, I didn’t notice that, I mean, he could have been wearing chain-store underwear underthere — Certainly, I digress…

Movie violence, like Nabokov’s movie love, Humber Humbert romancing his bone onto the pages and into the hearts of lit snobs from the academy and Stanley Kubrick, who made the movie about that movie love, before HAL 9000 freaked out and Alex the droog did some of that ultraviolence, the grazhny bratchy, well before the world was destroyed over the protection of our precious bodily fluids, yee-haaaaah!

To contribute to the surreal atmosphere, Ted Turner colorized movie stills, framed and tastelessly arranged, adorn the adjacent wall as you enter the Clubhouse, just opposite to the escalator going up, watch you step, watch your steps going up. Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in Saratoga, Will Rogers in David Harum, Charlie Chan At The Race Track, and, of course, The Marx Brothers in A Day At The Races, honk honk honk.

“lt’II break daddy’s heart if you have to sell him,” sez that luscious Jean Harlow, a little bubble of text on the side. Poor Clark looks truly moved by this, his cheek bones ready to implode. Groucho doesn’t seem to give a shit, absorbed as he is in a scam that would’ve worked pretty good, if only he could have controlled himself better at the mutuel tellers, and neither does that Will Rogers give a flat look, sequin shirts invisible underneath that fancy jockey garb. We figured he wuz short, but not that short, huh?

No accident that these movie stills, these framed and polished examples of robbed reality, stolen time, grace the entranceway of the whole place: might not that comprise every gamblers dream, to stop time, somehow change it, or better yet, fast forward The World Reel into the future, and find a way of coming on back, remembering where one was, what one was doing, who one might have been when the projector stopped and the house lights came on? What joy, what pain, what elation and suffering might be captured forever in a 24th of a second? Might the entranceway to our astral tombs be decorated with the stills of our life, twenty-four times the number of seconds lived, the corridor stretching for several million miles (if we’re ‘lucky’ enough to reach out, several times the distance to the Moon}, with plenty of time to kill, so don’t worry now, you’ll see it all, again and again and again, the end of that Reel attached to the beginning, as long as the projector keeps functioning and the bulb stays lit, you’re OK, a situation easier than actually living, though perhaps not as interesting, though who knows?

What with the popularity of pornography, video games, Hollywood, and other forms of displaced, sublimated experience, who can tell whether a representation of the thing isn’t as much fun, perhaps even more, than The Thing itself, eh? Enterprising entrepreneurs might exist, you know, even (especially?) over there on the Other Side: for a small fee, they might even offer a service whereby the unpleasant frames can even be removed, perhaps replaced with copies of the more favorable action stills. Don’t forget now, these stills are special, 30 and counting, sense memories, tactal imprints, stereo sound tracks, state of the art.

And what about some serious editing, no movie any good without the hidden Doc behind the curtains, flicking all the switches, scaring the piss out of a little girl from Kansas with a doggie fetish: we’re talking about effective rearragement now, an interior decorator, celestial personages who make their deathlihoods from creating a brand new set of memories by strategically placing our live’s movie stills out of sequence, skillfully matching and grouping them to maintain coherence and continuity, though denying the earth bound rules of causality and science. Didn’t like the way that particular relationship ended? No problem. Try this. Take a look. Take several. Satisfaction or your dummy back. Which life would you care to live, who would you like to be? And you need not wait to die in order to try and play director or editor, but come on in to this OTB at State and Lake, and you can begin to master the fine art of self-deception and kharmic imbalance. Movie love? Why bother, when horsey love is only a ticket away? Do they have souls, too, those beasts they ride? Watch and see. Two dollar minimum trifecta. If not, bet em to place, no place, this place.

Yet, another Situation does, in fact, develop, real life real time three dimensional situation, no movie stuff, right here right now, my body, my soul, no filters, no lost words or late night drive-through revelations, as this crazed Latin looking type with scraggly black hair and a leather jacket with buttons and gang insignia walks on past me and up toward the escalator, carrying a Taco Bell bag and a poor attitude, minutes after Victor is safely at the deli on the second floor, rapping with Leo, chasing those blues away with the help of turkey flesh and bacon, hold the mayon no fries, thank you man, uh huh.

“Excuse me, but no outside food in the place.”

“What? Why not?”

“We serve our own food, and they don’t allow people to bring their own inside. You can take it back outside, finish it, and then come back in.” He begins to walk back, and then I blow it. “Sorry about the inconvenience.”

“Sorry. Sorry? Why you say ‘Sorry’, man? What you ‘Sorry’ about, huh?”

Watch your step.

Lesson #2 of OTB experience: never, ever, apologize for an action you are compelled to mandate.

Stick to your guns — demonstrate any vascillation, and you are dead turkey flesh, served with or without mayonnaise. Fried. Diced. Ouch.

“I’m sorry you have to leave, but that’s the policy.”

“Sorry? What kind of fucking shit is ‘Sorry’? Tell me, man. Why you say that? Why you say ‘Sorry,’ when I don’t even fucking know what the fuck you ‘Sorry’ about man. Tell me. I don’t even fucking know. I want to, I fucking really want to know, you hear me? You hear what I’m fucking saying to you, man? ‘Sorry.’ What kind of fucking shit is that? ‘Sorry.’ Hah! ‘Sorry,’ he says to me. What the fuck? I mean, what the fuck, man? What the fuck you trying to pull on me, man. ‘Sorry.’ ‘Sorry’ what? I give you ‘sorry,’ I make you ‘sorry,’ cause I know you ‘sorry,’ ‘sorry’ my ass, fucker.”

I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Softpack, but, uh, this kind of work wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. Yes, I realize that, but painting houses seems safer to me. When painting the exterior of a house while on a stainless steel scaffolding, suspended thirty feet in the air, with a poor sense of balance and bad eyesight to begin with, the worst thing that can happen to me is that I fall off and break my neck, paralyzing myself from the toes on up. This job now, you know, Mr. Softpack, well, it involves certain risks that I obvious did not, assuredly could not, foresee…

Fortunately, the Sorry Guy listens, at least to the extent of walking slowly back on out of the joint, repeating repetitiously redundantly over and over again that one word, like some crazy inner-city mantra, “Sorry,” as if I said something that I shouldn’t have, even though what that something was or could have been made no sense to me, or, probably, to him either. Sorry.

I forget about him, until he returns ten minutes later, this time extremely smooth, getting behind this party of three women, on their way cheerfully to lose lots of money on the mezzanine. As I begin to signal to him to come on back down from the escalator that is carrying him indiscriminately to the second floor, he starts giving me all these hand and arm signs, urban sigils of demons whose names and faces adorn garages, school yards, overpasses, parking lots from Darnen Avenue to North, presumably a type of gang code, all the way up to the top he does this, up and out to the second floor, another neighborhood.

And as he speaks to me in his twisted urban semaphor, he begins telling me vocally this enigmatic story, something about someone who wronged him, and something else about how someone else did something terrible to that original someone in response. Disappearing up top, I wonder if I should simply leave him be, when another patron, apparently a regular who witnessed the exchange, comes up to me and warns me about him, how he was busted on several occasions less than a week ago for pickpocketing, vagrancy, abusive language, stealing tickets, loitering, outside food violations, arguing with the tellers, arguing with the patrons, and how, in general, he was, is, and forever shall be, serious trouble. No shit. Sorry.

So, onto the talkie I go, kkkcracklekkkkkkkkcrackleccchhhhcracklehhhh. “Yo, security, this is Mike at the door, over.”

“Waddaya want,” says Bleary, guard on the Second Floor. “This better be good, cause I’m eating a sandwich.”

“Uh, this crazed Latin looking type with scraggly black hair and a leather jacket with buttons and gang insignia has cruised up to two, and someone told me something about how he was busted on several occasions less than a week ago for pickpocketing, vagrancy, abusive language, stealing tickets, loitering, outside food violations, arguing with the tellers, arguing with the patrons, and how, in general, he was, is, and forever shall be, serious trouble, over.”

‘Well, if he hasn’t ripped off the basement safe and murdered a mutuel manager or two by the time you finish with your goddammed description, I’ll see if I can find the fucker and bring the bastard down.”

“Ten-four.”

“Ten-four my ass. Keep this in mind, Mark, and don’t you forget what I do for you, or you are going to regret it. Over my asshole, under my nose.”

Ah, the efficiency of the reserve corps. About two minutes later, Bleary, the guard assigned to two, brings down the guy, cuffed and freaked out, and proceeds to throw him out of the building and back onto old Daley’s failed State Street mall. No small feat for a security officer who tips the scales at about 275, is maybe a whopping 5' 6" in boots, is gruesomely homely, and has even less hair than I do.

“You were great, Bleary, just great. I called you, and you got the guy, and got rid of him. I owe ya one, man, I really do. If it wasn’t for you I don’t know what I would do, honest. I’d be stabbed, I’d be dead, I’d be totally and completely fucked up, shimmied down, and shipped out if it weren’t for you, Bleary. Thanks, man, thanks a lot, man. I owe you my life.”

I risk a stupid grin. It doesn’t work. From the grinding, groaning, greasing escalator, 275 lbs. of flab, bad breath, and even worse attitude rising up and back to the delicatessen. Who’s more sarcastic? Who cares the least?

“You watch it, Mark. If you treat me just like everyone else around here, then you better watch it, is all that I can say.” A moment of silence, a wild eyed stare, the effect works tremendously. “You better watch it, Mark. Cause when that shit goes down, when that shit really truly goes all the way the fuck the fucking way way way down, then don’t come on calling to me, no fucking way. You got that, Mark? You hear what I’m saying to you, Mark? How ‘bout it, Mark? You hear me, Mark? Does Mark sabe? Huh, Mark, huh?”

Is he serious? oh shit, n-now what? And how does the ugly bastard know that my name tag isn’t the right one? Did he murder the original bearer?

Lesson #3 of my OTB experience: never assume they don’t know, since they most probably do.

I resign myself to truth, justice, the Moronic Way, as we ping-pong back and forth with a stare-down ricochet: “Mike” — Fart, wheeze, slobber, gurrrrgle, escalator slowing, “Mark” — How far to push it? watchout champ, could get ugly, “Mike” — Undaunted: a scratch, burp, miscellaneous frothing, “Mark” — Keep cool, he’s almost up there, what if he’s serious? “Mike” — Piss, moan, gargle, drool, hack, huge hippopatamus yawn, “Mark” — Holy bovine! A trace of a smile along his facial cleavage: “Boris!”

“Watch your step, watch your steps goin up… How ya doin, Mike? Was you okay at the door? Get any action?”

Phew. Victor. Help me. I’m going to die. Save me. Take Julie the buxom blond bombshell all for yourself, lipstick and all. I don’t care. Make me watch. Tell her to say she loves me, and then reject me, repeatedly, till I die. Save me help me help me save —

“No problem, my man, no problem at all. Smooth, smoother than a baby’s behind, is all that I can tell you. How was your club sandwich over from the deli? How’s Leo? He doing alright up there on two?”

“Good, real good. I had some fries with it, too, and a Pepsi, uh huh. It certainly hit the spot, you know. Leo be OK. He a bit tired though, since he been here since about twelve o’clock today. I heard that you called security while I was gone — is you alright?”

“I had the situation completely under control, Victor, completely under control.”

“Good, because they attacked the last floor supervisor we had here, beat him up real bad, just before they hired you. They called an ambulance. They had to carry him outta here. Luckyhe had insurance, though. You’re his replacement, Mike, uh huh.”

“Huh?” What good is a dead bouncer? Place mat? Scratch sheet? Imp?

“Just kiddin Mike, ha ha ha. just kiddin real good now… Watch your step, watch your step comin up… Well, if you’s alright, I suppose you can go on up to the second floor, and see what you can see. Make sure they gets them hats all off, and make sure there be no smokin in the no smokin section, uh huh. If you gets any problems, then just call on ol’ Bleary, you meet Bleary already, right?”

I indicate the affirmative with outstretched arms and this beefy, shiteating grin.

“Ha ha ha, thass right, uh huh... He be a character, that for sure. He cool though. You just gotsa get ta know where he be comin from is all… Watch your steps now, goin up… hats off, gents, thank you… Yeah. He be OK. Just don’t get on his bad side, is all, cause then he can be some trouble for ya, uh huh… Watch your steps, goin up.”

When employee gets juxtaposed with patron, strange things happen. For the employee in question, one’s identity is temporarily lost, snatched away into the seething mass of humanity, rising up and cascading down alongside and amongst them, acting as an interactive escort to their ensuing inexorable obliteration of personality.

Going up the escalator, walkie-talkie in hand, I felt as though I were a technical adviser, a racing expert, coming to see the win, place, show. Equally strangely, the man coming up swiftly behind me immediately recognized my presence as a supervisor, and proceeded to introduce me to the mores of the second floor, letting me know right off the bat how out of synch I was.

“Come on, Jack, you work here so you don’t give a shit bout gettin up to place no bets. Hurry up now, I gots to get me to a window, I gots to make me some money. Hurry up, Jack, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. Why is you so slow, why is you so damn slow? I gots monies to make, monies to make right away, and you is holdin my ass up.”

Out on the floor, the tumultuous timbre of screaming, yelling, pounding, cursing hits me like a bursting filly fresh out of the starting gate. Tables and chairs are arranged in rows to the left and right, the bar, deli, and pari-mutuel tellers straight ahead, to the east. Lines have formed at the windows, men and women aged twenty-one to seventy-five stand in line, pester each other, gaze at television monitors, count down to post time, and rumination over bets about to be placed comprising the entirety of their reality until the race is off, the money is lost or won, and the next race continues this ceaselesss sine wave of nervous tension, manic excitement, cataclysmic letdown or megalomaniac inflation, in between regrouping and reinstating floor-reconnaissance, a beer or order of trench fries with sweet catsup from those tiny plastic bags to augment the experience, disrupt some of the cyclical continuity.

A-a-a-and they’re off!

One must be careful of falling head over heals, assholes over walkie-talkie-antennaes, slipping on discarded losing tickets, a toxic wasteland of spilled beer, coffee, various (not so precious) bodily fluids, a recklessly placed chair or protruding foot, “oh, excuse me, sir, just passing through, passing over.”

Whoops. Ouch. Help me, help me somebody. I am in total control, I am the floor supervisor. I am tall, oh so very tall. I am a little person, tiny, look, real small, so please leave me alone, please don’t look at me… White trash, in a suit and tie.

As I cruise the floor, checking tables for outside food, making sure that no one is being abused (verbally or physically), no one is smoking in No Smoking, breaking glass, destroying any fixtures, jimmying the cigarette machine, arguing with the mutuel clerks, most look back at me, their eyes telling more tales than any novel, any continuing study of social and race relations in Chicago.

I am from Mars, the Gulag Archipelago, the future. I am all-powerful, wielding the capacity to evict them all, and yet somehow exposed, jeered at, everyone’s victim, an easy target of sardonic ridicule and overt contempt. Like Wells’ Invisible Man, I am translucent, and ironically enough therefore vulnerable, a freak, a marked man, leaving footprints in the snow, every move an anomaly of human behavior, telltale signs exposing me to the masses. For I am a living, walking, talking, greasy-haired symbol of cold, tired, activated and actualized Authority. Worse still, I have the added bonus of being a symbol of cold, tired, activated and actualized white Authority. White male Authority. White male greasy haired Authority.

Not all the patrons on two are black — many are emigres from an array of countries east and west, Germans, Greeks, Danes, Latins, Frenchmen, Arabs, Anglos, while many are white, middle class, their eyes more fixed on winning or losing at the track than in their immediate vicinity. But in a city of such poor race relations, a place Martin Luther King, Jr. cited as the worst example of urban racial tension in the country decades ago, such tremendous inequality and prejudice emanating from both sides of this valueless racial coin, Susan B. Anthony hatepiece, the black/white issue becomes inescapable, permeating every floor, colorizing in greyscale every action however minute, every discourse, however inconsequential — especially enveloping those issues having to deal with control, rule following, maintenance of what The Corporation considers a comfortable gambling environment.

If I was at all confused on the escalator as to my place, my responsibilities, my identity at the off track, then every look in my direction, every hushed whisper as I pass, every clandestine maneuver in the back booths remind me, educate me, pummeling that invisible though omnipresent boundary line into my consciousness.

“Are you lookin at me? Don’t look at me, look at someone else.” A juxtaposition of Hugo Hackenbush and Travis Bickle, genius and madman, both white trash, inside and out, the seen and the unseen, the felt and the unfelt, on both sides of this proscemian arch of power.

In The Predator movies, a few mean old aliens from many many light years away descend to this planet in order to go on an interstellar hunting expedition. They work alone in areas extremely hot in physical temperature and Earthly conflict, staulking their fleeing human prey with a battery of hyperadvanced hardware, equipped with the ultimate in light-bending camouflage, laser-guided missile systems, with optical sensors seeing principally in the infra-red band of the electromagnetic spectrum, observing the heat emitted from the very flesh of their prospective victims. Searching war zones for a compatible adversary, they single-out their warrior human complement, systematically eliminating his compatriots in a dual effort to make him more vulnerable and a good deal more upset. As their final confrotation looms closer and closer, the human animal begins to realize that he has been selected, actually chosen from amongst the many by this spacebeast for the singular honor of engaging in a battle to the death: the alien is on galactic safari, and other aliens, on this trip humans, are his involuntary quarry.

Douglas Adams’ Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal is just as savage, though a whole lot less clever than Mr. Predator. The RBBT is so dumb, in fact, that it suffers from the illusion that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you, so the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy strongly suggests in its witty and pugnacious splendor that when encountering one of these Beasts, your best bet is to place a towel around your head, thus blinding you and perpetuating the illogical illusion.

As floor supervisor, both these analogies alternate in respective significance, the only problem here being that learning how to discriminate between the relevance of one metaphor and another becomes increasingly difficult.

Sure, seeing in the infra-red would help, illicit smoke rings visible from yards away, McBLT’s and Dunkin Donuts glowing dull orange against the greyish-blue backdrop of cheap formica tables and chairs, from within the pockets and jackets of patrons seen and unseen, while possessing the power of virtual invisibility certainly couldn’t hurt, an unseen arm leading drunks, vagrants, problem cases up and out those double doors.

Similarly, being a composite bad guy alien, part insect, part slimy reptile, breathing chlorine tetrafluoride or some other such noxious gas, mandibles clicking from inside my space helmet, racial issues would clearly not enter the picture: if pressed, I would merely have to remove my mask, be called one, ugly, motherfucker, and then summarily proceed to evacuate, eviscerate, or eliminate the troublesome gambling patron with missile, spear, or a bad case of alien halitosis. Being a Bugblatter Beast, on the other hand, I would pull some inverse illogic on them by covering my own head with a towel or scratch sheet, thus pressing the point that if I can’t see them, then maybe they can’t see me.

Either way, my real world situation as a white, male, human is awkward, being forced into a position where the use of authority is both dangerous and necessary, where the dictates of my job require biased impartiality (our rules are arbitrary, but their enforcement is not), and stubborn ambiguity (exceptions can never be made, though violations are never cut and dried). If I perchance should forget my name, my place, my earthly white, male, let’s not forget basically bourgeoisie identity, then our patrons will be more than happy to assign me a new one along similar lines, cast into the lingo-image of their choosing.

“Excuse me sir, you’ve gotta take your hat off.”

“Wha now? Wha?”

“Your hat. You have to remove your hat when in the establishment. House rules.”

“What kind a rules be those?”

“Sir, the sign is posted in front, right when you walk in the door.”

“I be leavin in a while. Jus one more race, then I be goin.”

“That’s fine, but you have to take your hat off right now if you want to stay here.”

“Are you biased? You biased. I don’t see you talkin to nobody else like this.”

“No other person is wearing a hat.”

“You mean no other black person be wearin a hat.”

People within a radius of five yards are now attentively following our conversation. Handicapping, beer guzzling, cigarette smoking, touting, louting, grouting, snouting, flouting, have virtually ceased.

“Look around. You’re the only one wearing a hat, the rules say you have to take it off if you want to stay here in the Clubhouse side, and my job is to make sure you take it off if you want to stay here in the Clubhouse side, and that’s all.”

“You givin me a hard time cause of my color, and that’s all.”

“Your hat. I’m going to tell you this just one more time. Your hat has to come off.”

“What be this here, church? You the preacher? What you preach, white boy?”

“I preach that your hat comes off, or you have to leave. And if you don’t want to leave, then the gentleman standing over there in the corner with the handcuffs and the .38 can convince you to leave.”

“Oh! So now you be threatenin me?”

“What’s so hard about this? All you have to do is take off your hat, and I’ll leave you alone to lose as much money as you want to. I haven’t singled you out, I don’t play favorites, and the rules are the rules. Considering they aren’t too tough, I suggest you follow them, to make your night and mine just a little bit easier. Let’s go. Off.”

“Look! Look at my ticket. Look how much I bet.”

“That’s irrelevant. I don’t care if you spend two grand or sit in the corner and eat french fries. Your hat has to come off. Now.”

“It be a nice hat, though…”

Whether the rules make sense or not, whether my position at enforcing them is justified or not, whether they are blatantly in error or just plain mischievous, the reaction I receive to any comment is standard: I am making a personal afront against them, white, black, Asiatic, sweet smelling, maladorous, short, fat, Jew, Catholic, whatever, I am in their face, compelling them to defend themselves, save face in any way they can, usually at my expense.

Tickets in the face, a bad joke, a personal rebuke, any and all techniques are employed in order to change the subject, breach my authority, or demonstrate the incontestable reality that a dire mistake has been made, and that I should either leave them alone, or apologize for the intrusion, and then leave them alone.

And with any judgement call, that certain amount of subjectivity certainly doesn’t help, as any hint of ambiguity is capitalized on, used as a device to weasel out of situations whose solutions are usually only a hat lift away. In all fairness, when the issue of whether or not to toss someone out once they have been let in come to the fore, things can get even more messy, even more complicated and disconcerting.

“Yo Mike, do you copy, over.”

“Yeah Slip, what can I do for you?”

“Peek over at the smoking section on two, and see if you can spot The Clopper.”

“The Clopper?”

“Yeah. She’s this woman in a light blue denim jacket, who wears these really loud wooden shoes, like the type you see in St. Pauli Girl commercials. We’ve had some customers complain about all the racket. If you hear her, give her a couple warnings, and then throw her out. We don’t need this kind of thing. This is our place. We own it.”

“Ten-four.”

What’s your twenty? Do you copy? read me? Roger. Over and out. Ten-four. Cops and robbers, Dunkin Donuts, you’re in the shit now, kid, welcome to the war of words, as every vocation, every type of communication, has its own vocabulary, its own system of syntax and semantics.

The syntax and semantics of the second floor are different, of course. Sure enough, I walk over into the section, straight across from the bar and deli, and not thirty seconds goes by when I hear her.

Clop clop clop clop. Clop clop clop.

Not only is she excessive in volume, but quite obviously deliberately so. She has clearly mastered the acoustical properties of her wooden shoes acting vociferously against the hard floor tiling, has calculated the maxima and minima of her motion’s derivatives, plotted vectors across the Cartesian coordinate system of the second floor tile-matrix, alternating tiles differentiating xy values linear and geometric, instantaneous second, third degree calculations succesfully implemented without the aid of slide rule, calculator, or portable computer.

Several customers hold their ears as she passes on by, smile, smirk, grimace, complain, shrug their shoulders. A couple of old men laugh, and throw losing tickets at her. A cigarette butt goes flying in her direction, descending to the tile network snowflake like, air resistance fooling folks for millennia that rate of fall is constant. An American astronaut, bouncing on the Moon’s seas, proved Galileo correct: in one hand a feather waa held, in the other, an iron hammer. He let go.

They both fell at exactly the same rate, the lunar atmosphere essentially non-existent, no gases to resist free fall, a place great for Mr. Wizard experiments, lousy for tuburcular patients and most forms of life as we know it. “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it,” an English techno-punk band called The Time Lords samples from that Star Trek TV show, “not as we know it, not as we know it.”

Our Clopper here walks, or I should say stomps, with the artful grace of a trained ballerina, the concussive impact of a Brontosaurus, although, as things will turn out, she is definitely not a vegetarian. I want to dematerialize her with a phaser, beam her somewhere, anywhere, far far away, introduce her to a Klingon, feed her to a Rancor Beast, rrrrrrrroooooooowwwwww! Burp.

“Excuse me, ma’am, but we’ve had several customer complaints about your shoes making too much noise as you walk across the floor.”

“What shoes?”

“Those wooden shoes you wear. They’re too loud. Walk softer or get some new ones, or I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“Who complained?”

“Some other patrons.”

“Which ones?”

“We’ve had several complaints.”

“Then you should be able to show me several complainers.”

“Listen. All I’m asking as that you either walk softer, or buy new shoes.”

“These shoes are the only shoes I own.”

“Then you are going to have to walk softer.”

“Let me talk to your manager.”

“I’m the manager on this floor.”

“You ain’t no manager. I wanna speak to the manager. The manager of this whole place. I ain’t gonna talk to you. Get me the manager. I ain’t gonna leave.”

“The manager is going to tell you the same thing I am. What’s so hard about not making so much noise?”

“I don’t have to listen to you. I don’t hear no complaints. You get me the manager, or you leave me alone.”

Frustrated, I walk away, check for smokers in No Smoking, encourage non smokers to take it up again, pointing to tables with ashtrays.

Lesson #4 of my OTB Experience: Never let a situation hang loose.

Either take care of it totally, immediately, or ignore it from the start. What’s left suspended will come back enpowered, with a vengeance, sooner than you ever anticipated.

“Hey, Mike.”

“Slip, go ahead.”

“Call me on line 10 as soon as you can, over.”

Oh oh. Instant kharma? Was he watching from the wings, and is disappointed, unnerved, bored? My curiosity tickled, I make my way down the stairs, walk by Victor with a smile, and over into the foyer and the program booth, where Alf reigns queen.

“Hey, Alf, can I make a quick call?”

“Shore, Mike, okay… You know what, honey? While you do that, can you relieve me for a few minutes? You want a cigarette? Here, babe, here’s a cigarette. You go right ahead and make your phone call, smoke this cigarette, and I’ll be right back, okay?”

Alf is notorious for asking supervisors, managers, porters, anyone and everyone short of the customers themselves to relieve her, bring her coffee (“lots of sugar babe, lots and lots of sugar”), buy her hot dogs, club sandwiches, cigarettes, tend to the booth at odd moments that, by sheer coincidence, happen to correspond completely with program purchasing rushes immediately after we open, between day and evening cards, right before lock up.

One can’t be too critical of her: once in the booth, you are isolated, with no recourse but to call for help in moments of pending emotional or biological need, send in those reinforcements, feed the troops with bummed gaspers.

For Alf, these events culminating in booth-evacuation are not only more frequent than normal, but oddly related to each other in some causal manner; her hairstyle changes rather regularly, as well, although causal connections on that score are decidedly more obscure.

Anyway, I innocently enough hop over the glass countertop, aerial view of the day’s racing forms, scratch sheets, horse magazines, promotional invites, customized “Winner’s Circle” pencils, all nustled in a maroon, fake velvet lair. I punch 10 on the telephone and call over to Slip.

“Hey, Slip, it’s me. What’s up?”

“Now this is strictly confidential, so don’t go telling nobody about this. This is strictly between you and me, you understand me, so I don’t want no one else to know. You know Wanda at the bar on two? Well, Moodless and I really think that she’s ripping us off, not ringing up all her beers and drinks. So I want you to go back on up there, and hang out near her bar. Don’t be too obvious, but see if you can spot something fishy. Peek over and see if she is ringing up everything she is serving out.”

“Well, sure, but that might be hard to spot, Slip.”

“I know, but we’ve gotta do something already. I’m gonna send Willie up there in about a half to count out her beers, and check that figure against inventory. For now, just cruise over and see what you can see.”

“Gotcha. I’ll give you a call if anything turns up.”

Internal affairs, spying on fellows. The CIA’s budget is over thirty billion dollars a year, more than what the Federal Government dishes out for education, and yet our Intelligence people were unable to predict the Iraq scene, had no idea what would happen in Russia, and basically have no handle on what is going on in the world. At seven bucks an hour, I come substantially cheaper, though admittedly my own level of competence at this task would leave much to be desired: I enjoy working with my fellows, and find the prospect of ratting on any of them, even if proven guilty, abhorrant. Leo, who mixes his time between grill cook and floor supervisory functions loves this kind of thing: let him do it. Besides, I like Wanda, too. Nice girl. Kind of funky, but who isn’t around this place, on either side of the bar? Conflict of interests here? Wouldn’t I be doing the same thing as her if given the chance? And even if not, do I care?

More identity confusion: employer, employee, aggressor, aggressee, gambler, gambled, and now spy, counter-espionage agent, a lone operative, working in an alien field, planted. Typical stuff for any type of security job, but once you are asked, once experientially there, a part of the whole picture, moving the chess pieces becomes more difficult when you’ve just discovered that you are on the board with the rest of them, one of the hands from on high doing something suddenly weird, such as castling, pieces flying all over the place, a loose pawn falling to the tiling, wonder if they will even notice.

I saunter passed Victor again — Christ, for a second I check to make sure he is acting properly, at his post. The scene is going to my head as levels continue to shift. Who’s watching me watch? Who’s watching them watch as they watch me watch? Who’s directing the movie?

The escalator still works — a semblance of constancy in a fluxuating universe. Heraclitus was right — change is the only constant, and one’s character determines one’s fate. In a fundamental sense, these two observations are intimately related.

Upstairs, I walk determinedly though with no apparent direction, confidently though with trepidation, smoothly, though in a self-conscious kind of way, over on up to the deli, and begin rapping with Leonard. Leo has a wonderful character: enthusiastic, soft spoken, a real lady charmer, a hard worker, he has a sardonic, matter-of-fact sense of humor that just won’t quit. On the darker side, he loves the feeling of control, and often tries to maneuver his way into situations where he clearly doesn’t belong. His speech patterns are amazing, always reassuring, orientating, an auditory anchor of confidence and reassurance for himself and others in a universe that sways like a lost ship at sea, waves pounding against the bow, Leo at the helm, “Hey boze,” sez he.

“Yo, Leonard, how’s bizz.”

“You know, boze, there’s no bizz like show bizz, no bizz I know.”

“Heard you were hauling some serious ass the other day.”

A peek, a peer, Wanda seems oblivious to my presence, perhaps a tiny bit too oblivious. Should I just go up to her and tell her to be careful, that she is being watched? Should I ignore her completely, and simply tell Slip I saw nothing suspicious? Then again, why am I here? What’s my job? Don’t these people have a right to check up on their own property?

“Yep, workin hard, workin hard, Mike. How be your first day on the job? Nothin like startin on a Thursday, huh? Mess up you whole week.”

“Not too bad, Leo, not too bad at all.”

Two beers, three: impossible to tell whether she rings up all of them or hits a NO SALE and slips the dough into her own tip jar.

Hmm.

“What happened to your hair, Mike?”

Burgers sizzle, frenches fry, fat dances on the grill like a string of chorus girls doing the Berlin Burlesque, while the coke machine gurgles rambunctiously into the evening sounds of murmur and mayhem.

“Excuse me?”

“You got the nappiest head uh hair I ever did see on a white boy, ha ha ha.”

“Every hair has a number, Leonard, every folicle is catalogued.”

“Yep, then somebody must uh got all those numbers crossed, boze.”

Change the subject. “You see that woman sitting in the light denim at that table?”

“Oh, yeah, the lady with those damn wooden shoes. She a problem all the time she in here, Mike. I hear they thrown her out of every track but this one. I don’t know why they put up with the broad here. Not even cute enough to stay.”

“Yeah, she gave me some slack earlier. Any more noise, and I’ll make a move.”

Evidence inconclusive (Wanda’s thieving — the state of my hair being obvious to everyone but the bald and the blind), I begin to walk back downstairs when I hear it again, oh, god.

Clop clop. Clop clop clop clop clop.

“Excuse me, ma’am, but here we go again.”

“Where we goin? I wanna see the manager. I ain’t goin nowhere until I see the manager. Get away from me. You ain’t no manager. You got no right to tell me nothin.”

“Well, I’m afraid you are going to have to — “

“Hey Mike.”

Pause. God, not now.

“Slip, come in.”

“Go on up to the host desk in the Derby, and call me from there at 10.”

“Right, I’m on my way.”

Now back to —

“Mike!”

I turn around, and notice Wanda waving in my direction. Is the gig up? Whose gig? Why am I the paranoid one now, distraught, angst ridden all of a sudden? Was this in my job description? Where’s a softpack when you need one?

“Hey.”

She signals me over, so I turn around and approach behind the bar. She leans over to me and, whispering in my ear, sez: “Oh, Mike, you can leave her alone, she’s OK, she really is. They’ve talked to her a hundred times before, but I’ve seen her, she wears those shoes even in the winter months, in the cold and snow. She doesn’t bother anyone at my bar, she’s a decent tipper, so let it slide, huh?”

Intrusion. And who are you to talk? What’s happening. I liked you. I like you, I honestly did, I mean, do.

“Sorry, Wanda, but we’ve had complaints. It’s not only her shoes, but it’s how she wears them. Seems she does all this on purpose. Have you seen how she walks? She does it on purpose, and Slip told me to warn her and then get rid of her if she doesn’t listen.”

I want to ask her about the irony behind someone tipping well and being unable to buy themselves a pair of shoes, when the next thing I know, The Clopper is gone, vanished. Mission accomplished? As I move on over and cross the floor to the elevators, I notice Willie on his way, shrugging his shoulders. Time for The Count. Simultaneousness and simultaneity, compounding my compunctions. Treason. Last cigarette? Anyone got a cigarette? And what the hell does Slip want from me now? Why don’t these people leave me alone?

“Yo, Slip.”

The Club here on top is filling up, with longer lines at the tellers. One can virtually feel the energies building, rewing up for another conflict. I notice a severely underdressed man in a wrinkled and tattered plaid shirt, yearning for a supervisory axe.

‘’Yeah, Mike, Willie should be at the bar now. You notice anything?”

“Can she pull a NO SALE without a key?”

“Yeah, she can. Do you think she might be doing that?”

“Possible, only to be totally honest with you, I couldn’t tell one way or another.”

“Well, okay, thanks. Willie’s count should tell us something more conclusive.”

“Right. Keep me posted.”

I move over to the guy in back, wondering how to subtlely word his imminent evacuation from the Club. On the way, he has time to hustle on up to a teller, and place a bet just before post time. As I turn over the procedure in my mind, considering what recourse to take should he resist (ask him for his Club Card, specify the sign at front, appeal to basic reason and simple common sense, two of the most dangerous kinds of appeal possible), he gets himself into an argument with the teller, complaining about his ticket.

Lucky break.

I approach, tell him that he is out of line. He disagrees, shoving the ticket into my face, telling me that he bets big, and should be left alone. I respond by charitably pointing out to him that not only is he being rude to the employees, but that he is grossly underdressed. He questions my statement. I describe the dress code. He calls me a jerk. I threaten to call security, waving the antenna of the walkie-talkie at him. He relents, slowly, painstakingly taking his time to gather his belongings, but at long last, he leaves, swearing at me from under his breath, down the steps to the second floor

Lesson #5 of my OTB experience: Stick to your guns.

Most people like to make a show of things, redeem their vanquished egos by giving you as hard a time as possible. Hold fast, and tolerate it — look like you actually enjoy the fanfare.

With the rounds around the Club finished and the place basically stabile, at least for the time being, I walk toward the back, and down the stairs to the Mezzanine floor. Aside from being about half the surface area, with a lewdly carpeted green floor and a slightly more wholesome look, “The Mezz” is laid out almost identically to the second floor, the dress code here a bit more stringent, no jeans, no denim, maintaining an atmosphere only slightly less vile than one floor down.

I anticipate few problems until, horror of horrors, Marlon Brando never had it this bad, not even in the jungle, I see The Clopper, surrounded by Elisabeth the mutuels manager, several security guards, and an uninvited host of half-interested patrons. Apparently Clops had been more resourceful than I thought: no she hasn’t left; she has been faithful to her word and rounded up one of my superiors, softening Elisabeth up fairly well in the process, a process not too difficult to become adept at with Elisabeth: she commutes on the Metra, lives in a burb, and loves power, respect, the cleavage of obedience, however obsequious.

“She says that you are needlessly hassling her, Mike.”

“I say that she is way out of line, and should be removed from the premises.”

“Where is Slip?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“He’s the one who first told me to watch her. He’s going to tell you the same thing as I am telling you, which is that this woman is rude to the other patrons, and has refused to cooperate.”

God, I can feel those waves of self-satisfaction and spite flow across Clops’ face, She grins, wickedly, oh so wickedly. I have been turned into Superasshole, and she loves every goddammed second of it. I should put on some geek glasses, just to suddenly fling them off, jump into a telephone booth, or better yet, through one, crash!

“Give me your walkie-talkie.”

My blood pressure must be measured now, if you dare measure it, in astronomical units, in the pneumatic standards of heavy earthmoving equipment, in the logarithmic gauge of the Richter scale. I give it to her, and boy, would I like to give it to her.

“Hello, Slip, can you come in?”

“This is Slip. What’s happening, Beth?”

“Can you come as soon as possible to the Mezzanine please.”

Handing me back my talkie, I walk away, the situation hopeless. Marshall and Bleary stand idlely there, laughing to themselves, but not openly enough for their mocking rancor to help my plight in the least. What happened to charming, naughty Beth on the waves, laughing with us, and not power queening her way all over us? How did she get this position in the first place. Stay in college, everyone told me. Were they right? Moments like this, I feel like Rodney Dangerfield, rejected again, getting no respect.

He as least can make an excellent living from self-deprecation. Half-assed, I fall from one meaningless job to another, broke, no respect.

“My wife, my wife she welcomes me when I come home one evening,” Rodney’s eyeballs bouncing manically around their sockets, his arms and legs spasmodic and unsavory. “She sez ‘Hey, baby, I just put a mirror on the ceiling!’ I go ‘That’s terrific, sweetheart, how romantic of you! Whatever made you want to do that?’ She shrugs and sez ‘I like to see myself laugh.”’

Down to the deli area, I run into Slip, about to make his way up. I wish I could laugh now.

“What’s going on?”

I brief him, expressing my angst rather voluminously. He sympathizes, shrugs his shoulders, and heads on over to the Mez to see what he can do. Sandy shows at the counter for a drink, and I try and make myself feel a bit better with him and Leo.

Sandy deals with this all of the time. “Yeah, that sounds pretty typical. Last week, I busted someone at my other job, and the manager came out, yelling at my ass for me to take the cuffs off. ‘Take the cuffs off, take the cuffs off!’ he was sayin to me, when this guy had just gone nuts on this crazy-assed rampage, tearing up the whole joint like he made his own self God or something. ‘Take the cuffs off him,’ the manager said.” Shaking his head, “Yeah, people just don’t know when and what is necessary. What
can we do? What are we supposed to use during these times, harsh language?”

“Yep, boze, you know it be frustratin,” adds Leo.

“Might as well just let em all drink whiskey, smoke weed on the floor. They want us to keep the order, and don’t give us no right to be rough when bein rough is right.”

“I sure could have used you fellows a few minutes ago, but thanks for your encouragement.”

Needless to say, I feel a whole lot better about the incident. Curious as to how this whole seen is resolving itself (Lesson #6 of my OTB experience: never stick your nose into finished business, or business that has in the meantime become someone else’s business. You’ll end up offending yourself and others, and for no reason, since the issue was taken out of your hands to begin with), I mosey on up, back to the Mezzanine, and oh no! find what but the entire scene repeated, this time in my stead Slip standing there, explaining policy to Elisabeth, rather unconvincingly. Before I have the chance to lose complete control, the group disbands, leaving Clops and myself together. She gives me her Look, and walks right passed my face, rubbing those heals into the tilework and my braincase.

Clop clop clop clop clop clop clop!

Enough to send me trotting away, fuming, in two minutes ready to murder her, or Elisabeth, whomever I might find first. “When I was in the jungle, all I could ever think about was getting back out, and when I was out, all I could think about wuz getting back in” — Martin Sheen learns all about Conrad’s Kurtz, sent up the river to eliminate the ultimate deathforce, a West Point man of honor who transformed savagery into a religion. On the way, the boat flowing through the murk and stink and rancid decay of The River, Marty learns about hypocrisy, the dark side of Mercy, “cutting them in half with a machinegun, then trying to patch them up with a band-aid.” Every attitude, every mood, every emotion has its corollary — polar opposites are abstractions, we all float in the muck between extremes.

Regardless, I am infuriated at Beth, not so much for defending Clops, but for applying the concept of Mercy opportunistically, with little regard for its intentional object aside from what the action itself can do for Beth’s
own ego.

To prevent bloodshed, the destruction of a fashion statement, I sit at the Mezz bar, and ask David for a coffee, relax the nerves, you know. He listens, as my mind begins to wander, about the nature of power, control, domination, on both sides of the gender issue. Rape, instances of domestic violence, sexism at the work place, even silly fraternity boy pranksterisms that contain within them unspeakable acts, the defamation of Woman. Another side: denial, the tease, the manipulation of men through the use of sex and sexuality as a power base, a form of sensual power play, a porno queen’s life of gaining material strength through one’s own exploitation.

Fundamentally, when you clear away much of the emotional ambiguity and the cultural arbitrariness, domination and psychical territoriality are phenomena both amoral and genderless. Male, female, young, old, black, white, us, them: core issues are instinctual issues, are conflicts that refer to passions run amok, an unconscious search for any content to fill animalistic generalities, savage forms that seek out any arena in which to build and release energies frenetic and complex.

Granted, many instances of opportunism come to the top, when political decisions capitalize on peoples’ prejudice and the thoughtless habits of common denominators low and lowering. A woman’s right to an abortion, ERA, divorce laws, availability of contraception, sex education in the schools, are issues used by the male-centered power structure to maintain their hold over society, to sustain a cross-cultural status quo whose disruption would threaten not merely ingrained social and psychological patterns, but economic ones as well.

For He who controls the flow of capital in capital-ism controls our standards, our values, the rest of those ism’s, establishing cultural norms that are as fictitious and deceptive as the marketing procedures used to sustain the mostly unnecessary products and contraptions of a consumer society about to consume itself, a schizoid Pac-Man eating monsters, maze, and the Ms.. The sad irony is that most Ms. Pac-Women know no different: caught up in a materialistic world, their interests essentially similar to the men who oppress them, they employ similar tactics, though often in an inverse manner. Stereotypes are cheap, now that CD players are so popular: The Man sez “yes!” The Woman sez “no!” The Man sez “please!” The Woman sez “only if…”

Among the regulars at the OTB, one couple stands out: He wears sunglasses, a sport coat, slacks — she in summer gear, a blouse, a short skirt, funny hat. Neither of them work, spending all of their time floating from one track to the next, this off track facility to that, one race flowing into any one of a dozen others, all the time, every day, the races. Stop for a second, and think about them, feel them as a symbol, our Apollo and Aphrodite of the post-modern world. They both take substantially more than they contribute, they both dwell in a racing fiction, removed from the outside, oblivious to it, and neither could care less. He loves them ponies, you can tell right away. That’s all he does, and he does it all the time.

Does she care? Does she concern herself whether ‘Bugle Boy Dan,’ or ‘Brilliant Ones,’ or ‘Post Royal’ will come in on that wire? Hard to tell. You can see her leaning over him, gazing idly at the scratch sheet, but pay close attention now, she leans over him, not that scratch sheet, her hand pressing firmly against his shoulder, rubbing him, cooing in his ear with every victory, squeezing his hand tight with every defeat. Which roles are left for us to play? The Void is laughing, laughing in its own dark, our dark, the dark of the twentieth century:

Men must finally give women their long overdue freedom, and women must remain Woman enough to accept their newly discovered power with the dignity and the determination not to repeat the very same abuses perpetrated by their chauvanist aggressors.

FIFTH RACE

FOR REGISTERED RECEIVED AND/OR FOILED FOLLIES
ENHANCED PLAGIARIZING REMITTED FIVE YEARS BEFORE FACE
SPARSE: _______________________________________
DISTANCE: TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

Most experienced gamblers will tell you, aping advice given in the daily programs, that consulting racing forms, programs, or scratch sheets, no matter how accurate or detailed, means little in comparison to actually being there, watching, feeling, cheering those horses past the quarter-mile marker and down the final home stretch.

With your own money on the race or someone else’s standing next to you, the cumulative energy, enthusiasm, and raw experience of the race engrains itself on your memories, each and every horse spectacle an array of complex lessons, a series of mental and emotional notes to be taken and remembered for the races ahead.

If our groups of regulars have anything going for them, it might just be their very regularity: day in, day out, they slowly, inexorably come to know trainers to watch, jockey habits, individual horses, how a field will play when conditions are good, sloppy, fast, muddy. They become almost instinctively accustomed to the stats, when to bet favorites, when not to, how those numbers “feel” on any given card, day or evening.

What remains odd is how our remoteness from each track, Sportsman’s, Maywood, Balmoral, and Arlington, has little effect upon these facts. In this sense, the fly boy hanging in the rafters at Cozy’s on a Sunday afternoon is about as near, or as far, to all the action as one of our very own low-life pin striped Marlboro cigarette smoking regulars in the Derby Club on State Street: each specimen has their face sucked into a program, an irritating twitch or two emanating from their autonomic nervous systems, a predilection toward alcoholism, and a tendency to watch the monitors more often than the live action.

The latter cannot watch the races direct, of course, but the former usually doesn’t even bother to. Kind of like watching a game at Wrigley through spreading the baseball cards for each player upside down on your living room carpet and then wondering how the plays might turn out, placing bets with your roommate in the kitchen and checking Harry Carey periodically on the tube just to make sure, the horseplayer is all numbers and twisted intuition, so it doesn’t really matter where he or she is at, on track or off. As long as they can yell, pace, scream, throw shit around and generally make a nuisance of themselves, they are OK.

Die hard, life long trackheads would categorically disagree with me, but being of the ignorant off track mentality myself, surrounded by it every day of work, I must restrict myself to those lost creatures commited only to the bucks, and not the soul, of horseplay. Sure, you can find those true blue all American horsey aficionados on a clear day at Arlington, but you’d probably have to peer through an old O.W. Holmes stereoscope in order to find them. From what I can tell, those Golden Days of racing are mostly over, dying with Eisenhower, Viet Nam, electric Kool-aid wiped on the doorknobs at the Democratic National Convention. You need a sense of true National pride to be decadent in a horseracing sense: perhaps that’s why they still crank out “The Star Spangled Banner” at the beginning of each day at the races.

Anyway, security at the tracks is just as rough, I hear, as at any OTB: the crowds are mostly suburban out at the field, but still gamblers at heart and weird all around. They will sooner or later come spinning around those turns, even when standing still. Go and see for yourself.

News coverage of our nation’s recent war in the Persian Gulf was qualitatively different from this strictly horselike phenomena. Whereas the actual process and personal outcome of betting on the ponies is all most of these folks ever really care about, horse sweat, squabbles behind the sheds, intrigues between track, trainers, owners, and the mob, and the torching of Arlington as temporary, tiresome irrelevancies, mere curiosities to ponder should they become common knowledge, War, like it or not, is slightly more interactive an enterprise for us all.

Filtered through the talking head, media blitz reality created for us via satellites and in studios, we find it almost too easy to forget about the blood, the pain, the human suffering beneath, between and amid all those meaningless statistics, video game clips of high tech death machines in action, voices of foreign correspondents superimposed over maps of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Baghdad.

We might receive certain information virtually instantaneously from the source, but the exact nature, the intensity, the relative bias of those reports are never pondered, are taken as readily for granted as the morning oats bucket for ‘Son of a Bunny,’ ‘Jacky Wacky,’ or ‘Tomahawk Lancer,’ or whether Mark Guidry, Francisco Torres, and Kerwin Clark have jock itch, or if the owners Mack and Sandy Hall will break even this year.

Granted, none of us (as far as I know) have placed bets on number of Iraqi and Yank fatalities, speed and nature of the war’s outcome, whether Israel would retaliate or not — but men, women and children were dying, flesh and blood individuals were on the other end of those vapor comtrails and launch trajectories, and most Americans spent a majority of their mental effort in planning Homecoming parties, parading in parades For and Against, tying yellow ribbons on traffic lights, telephone poles, parking meters, and, of course, those old oak trees on Cornelia Avenue.

Not to launch a moral commentary or tactical qualification as to whether we should have been there or not, but to express an open complaint as to the series of deceptions and counter-deceptions perpetrated both willfully and unconsciously by the news media, State Department, Pentagon. Cover stories in People, Newsweek, Time welcome the heroes home — Schwartzkopf has been named “sexiest man in America,” while the oil fields still burn, millions of refugees wander the wilderness, and the war “trials” have only just begun.

As Tacitus wrote more than two thousand years ago, we have left a wasteland, and call it a peace. What was it like to be there? What’s it like now? I yearn for that dewy smell of horseflesh, stables, the grounds immediately before post time. With our faces in the program of life, we lose a sense of the reality that underlies it all. Handicappers from the start, we are all handicapped, trapped in a handy Bud Light American TV reality that we all too often take for granted, consider a pixellated universal given.

I have a friend who told me a few first hand tales from on yonder, an officer who was actually stationed for the duration of the conflict on the guided missile launcher U.S.S. Bunker Hill.

One complaint Bryan had was that he knew good ’n’ plenty about the submicro realities of the attack in his particular neck of the warring woods, but knew next to nothing about the field of operations as a whole. That’s where I came in: although mailservice was a disaster, everything I wrote and sent to him arrived eventually, and entirely intact, a box of candies getting through, had we bothered.

A running joke we maintained during the course of our epistolary exchange involved evil Abdul, the mad Ay-rab censor, distant third cousin of Catch-22’s bed ridden Yossarian, blotting out adjectives, gerunds, all modifiers, moving on to whole paragraphs and entire letters, leaving only “Sincerely, your friend Mook” on the bottom. All that late night scribbling work for naught, cruise pencils imploding, prelaunch disaster fiascos come one, come all.

Fortunately for Bryan and I, Abdul wuz, like Yossarian, unpure fiction — and our naval correspondence was unfiltered, and most appreciative. When he arrived back in the States for a visit with a mutual friend not too long ago, he conveyed that appreciation through a few of those first hand tales, ones worth commiting to paper, relevant on track or off.

On the night of the beginning of the so-called Air War stage of operations, January 16th, 1991, five incoming enemy aircraft were detected. As the Bunker Hill was floating closest of all American naval vessels to the Iraqi coast, the ship went on immediate alert, the entire crew sent to stations, all hands on deck. Standard procedure then involved closing all the bulk heads, ventillation shafts, all circulation systems, effectively sealing off the ship, compartment by compartment, in case of impact.

The scenario was running like clockwork, as fine as any drill, until the code command for the ventillation close-off flashed across the headsets: “Circle William”. Fearing imminent doom, the officer at the main board looked up, and started flicking those switches, breaking those breakers, panic stricken, as fast as he could. As he pulled the last line at bottom, he glared up and noticed an entire row of breakers up top, “W” with a circle emblazened around them — he hit those as well.

Ten seconds later, the control deck several floors above received an urgent message on the hot line, straight from the Pentagon War Room: “Bunker Hill, Bunker Hill, do you come in, do you copy, over!” Turns out the tiny pixel blip of the ship simply and all of a sudden vanished off the Pent’s War Room monitors: either the ship was wasted, a direct Ay-rab hit, or something was totally, drastically wrong out there, as all power had Bloop! gone kaputnik, black out, the Big 0. (Remember Peter Sellers in that Kubrick Klassik: “Gentlemen! Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!”) No guidance systems left on board, no defensive capability, barely enough juice left to keep the floating powder keg floating. What up?

Following much commotion and military hubbub, Navy Dick in desert cammo sniffing around PPI scopes and hardware old Mike Faraday never would have dreamed about, The Source was discovered, the situation rectified, though after forty solid minutes of total, absolute defenselessness to any incoming attack, had any have made it as far out as the Hill’s position at sea, north-by-northwest in the Gulf, less than one hundred clicks from Hussein’s bad boyz.

And yessir, you’ve probably already guessed what happened: the poor, frightened lad had not only hit the vents, but also the master controls. Seems that in his state of Fear, he was temporarily unable to distinguish the standard “Circle William” symbol from the one for the Westinghouse Corporation. His circuits had crossed, and the ship had almost crossed the circuit to oblivion.

Next day, an all points bulletin was radioed to every goddammed ship in the U.S. Navy, as teams of techs took sanding machines and other light equipment into every control room, every engineer’s station, etching away at Westinghouse logos from here to Tripoli, no more Circle Westinghouse. The company itself was notified, told to change the sign, or lose the whole Navy contract.

How’s that for a SNAFU, a juicy tidbitty news at nine from a grapevine that almost got squashed? Apiece of information you won’t see next to the Zinfandel, Robert Mondavi, Acacia Chardonnay, Dom Perignon ($115), and Louis Roederer Cristal Brut ($125) of the Derby Club wine list, or hear about late night from Ted Koppel, be he shitpaced drunk or stone bold sober.

[EDITORIAL INTERMISSION: I am hungry, and am going out for some fast food on the corner of Broadway and Cornelia. Right now, it’s the evening of Wednesday, May 22nd, 1991, 10:07:21 PM — whoops, now :23, :24, :25 {lucky I can type, huh?} :29, :30, :31 — you get the picture, and I’m fairly exhausted. That War’s over, while more battles rage in domestic suburbia, downtown Chitown, on the Mackscreen of a tiny studio apartment on the North Side.

I’ve tried to get this thing finished for a bout of fancy-schmancy laser printing at my uncle’s office tomorrow morning, but since this is only the Fifth Race, the remaining half merely in butt naked outline form, I doubt if I will make this third, fourth? deadline. I keep telling people this thing’ll be finished May 12th, May 18th, May 23rd — realistically, though, I’m gonna take some more time with it, and hopefully finish {don’t mean to ruin the notion with the motion, as if telling people about meeting a moral temporal goal will make that very accomplishment impossible} by my twenty-seventh birthday, Friday, June 7th — but no, now it’s already June 19th, so, yet another deadline, how about the Summer Solstice, June 21st? A Gemini to the core, Castor and Pollux oily and ethnic within, I remain thoroughly ambiguous, on page and off.

You simply can’t rush these words, as they have a mind of their own. Weird moods, unexpected and sudden changes in the weather, a late night chance to write or an early morning burst of creative energy, a zillion other seemingly random, irrelevant realities that comprise my personal ambience make all the difference to what finally makes it out and onto that postscript page, while any effort in trying to trace that causality, duplicate it in any way, is doomed to fail. What might work one day will bomb the next — consistency is for technicians and public accountants. As a result, a decent writer learns how to merely ride the flow, pull a chaotic rule or habit from the mess, and appreciate the fact that writing is merely a record of a certain fleeting meditative state, a printed copy of otherwise irrecoverable modes of being and feeling.

Oddly enough, I am cheating a bit both with this message and its meaning: by the time you read it, many parts of what I have already written above will also have been changed, so these words will not have the same import to you in some indeterminate time in the future as they do for me now, hungry, ready to shut this machine down, and run out for a gyro sandwich with extra cajun spicy sauce on the side.

Writers, as Faulkner noted, are highly skilled liars: we compress time, even history, fine tuning and polishing a stream of dribble into “Art.” And what a luxury art is! What a ghastly crime to sit on one’s ass and bust braincells over correct syntax, a better or worse choice of word or alliterative pun, while Outside, the protective ozone shell depletes daily, CO2 levels are relentlessly rising as greenhouse warning is imminent, the threat of nuclear winter a terse reality even for those far away Tasmanian Devils hanging around in trees and suspended within the humidified depths of lush jungles: how can anyone even concentrate? Don’t we ever realize that there’s a war on?

Meanwhile, on the Inside, we might remember how Marcel Duchamps and the surrealist movement wanted core stuff, direct lines to the centerless, infinitely deep and vast unconscious, a destruction of that ARTificial interface, and thereby produced reems of “automatic writing,” tossing technique and tell tale teleology to the devils, leading the artworld inexorably toward the post WWII movement into Abstraction. Old Gertrude did plenty of that auto stuff too, while I have to admit to being something of a classicist at heart. Any bozo can grab a notebook and scribble: the tough part is in making it work, in transforming the stream into a dream that, much like a good Salvador Dali piece, melting clocks on beaches and the bust of Voltaire juxtaposed into Catalan courtyards, remains representational enough to convince, yet weird and discontinuous enough to really freak people out.

Dali, nifty guy that he wuz, took this philosophy to heart and soul, betting on a longshot across the board and succeeding brilliantly: when teaching art history at the Sorbonne, he would lecture with one foot suspended articulately in a pale of milk. What a guy! Modigliani blew it, according to my own estimation, when he dumped the church, those crosses and squares and perpendicular lines washing out finally and completely into the 20 voidplane. Art need not be representational, but pure form gets boring after a while — lacking any and all anchors to the external world, it gets sucked up into all about and of itself, an introverted nightmare that might sell well at Southby’s when your dead and look nice hanging above a matching dining room set owned and cohabitated by a decor-conscious homosexual couple living in the Village, but doesn’t exactly move and groove the mind as such a financial and critical expense should warrant.

As an added aside here, this narrative, loose to begin with, replete with content (not all of which relevant nor for that matter even representational), completely breaks down, boom, finis. Porky pig has poked his head out, and the maroon tunnel sucks the silly bastard right into the black hole at the end of the screwy instrumental number. Not only is my “necessary horseplayers’ distance” removed here, but I reveal my rather terse, primitive eating habits, my forays into gross gastronomical masochism, a geocentrism of the greasey spoon, chomp chomp chomp burp! ohboyohboyohboy, slam all this tiresome schtick, I wanna eat.

Anyway, wish me luck with the rest of this, parts of which you have already read, and again, sorry about the delay {and this remarkably insufficient and self-indulgent intrusion into the body of this narrative}. Love once again, Mook.]

Where was I?

Oh, yeah: my buddy had a few more tales to tell. Over tall beers, wasted on the steps of our friend’s rented house in Villa Park, IL., he also related how his ship was responsible for the first Tomahawk onslaught fired against Bahgdad. Missiles not much larger than a few feet in breadth and a couple human beings in length, guided artillery of hyperadvanced technology given the name of the chief weapon of a race we Americans systematically exterminated, initial target that fated evening was the central telephone station, whoosh! out and up from the multiple silos on board, the thing cruising straight into the air a few hundred feet only to Holy Shit! seemingly stallout the engines Christ! cutting flat but only long enough to fall snoot forward 90° and make itself comfortable skimming the surface of oily water and scarred earth to explode in a macho maleatrom of phallic fire and airless pain and dying.

“We’re All Connected,” sez those marketing people at our AT&T corporation, and we’d better believe them. Those switchboards across the U.S.A. are operated by inanimate machines now, relays clicking in rooms where no one can hear them, and while these electronic presences give you less slack about midnight calls out for pizza delivery, good luck trying to get a solid handle on the town’s gossip, and don’t you even think about any possibilities for romantic involvement across them wireless spaces, those electronic silences between one shadow world and another. One ringie-dingie, two ringie-dingie, that magick matron has closed shop, gone to tend her herb garden, polish her crystals and consult her gypsy cards.

Friend or foe, stranger or estranged, most of us would have problems these days trying to figure out which wuz witch, who wuz whom, lost in any kind of differentiation between human beings and their creations used to kill.

What has been forgotten, what has been lost from so long ago? Nothing has been forgiven, nothing has been found as that technotorpedo of doom made it that long distance to the phone company, doubtlessly inflicting more damage than if you had landed on someone else’s utility space, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred million dollars. Phone’s dead, honey, must be the Yanks.

Might there have been a metasolution lying in some submarine treasure chest, a way of ending the match with no band-aid boo-boo’s, no hard feelings, no rusty anchors lodged in our souls’, as if one could turn over the chessboard, shoot the referee, quit the band, drop out of college?

My friend had never made it to the academy: straight outa high school and into the Navy, Davey Jones not a Monkey nor a Stardusted pop star, but a real guy twenty thousand leagues below them oscillating waveforms. His family was nonetheless proud of him, and so were we to a certain extent that Villa Park night, as he drank, and sang, and related stories of places far away, adventures of the only career person amongst us. He had a job to do: at least someone did.

Proud, too, was a friend of his father’s, who worked for a subsidiary of AT&T, and who had lost the contract for the Bahgdad phone company to the ITT corporation. So elated was the guy that the son of his best friend had been there for the big blow-up that he promised him lunch when he got to the States for R&R. We all promised him a party, but somehow, he ended up paying for the pizza.

No one can tell what the cost will be for this kind of conflict, though certainly we all must pay, even if all the lines are down. A few might scratch their heads and wonder, lose their appetites, and keep trying to place that call — the dim chance of a busy signal is always a good sign: that way you know for sure that at least one other person has gotten through, lines of transmission still open from the other side.

Johnny Nimbusson, insecure security guard, entomologist of the ethnic, erudite exterminator and master race blaster, doesn’t worry too much about Davy’s nightmares beneath the sea, or those salvos of electro-zen arrows screaming across polluted blue skies above.

“How many men, women, and children were blown away in the War, John?” I ask, almost rhetorically.

“Who cares?” he says, “they’re all a bunch of cockroaches anyway.”

With humid summertime climatic changes transforming Chicago into a sweltering metropolis this late May month, my tiny kitchen is full of them little squirming guys, so maybe I know what he means. Then again, maybe I don’t. Either way, rhetorically or not, Nimbusson never claimed his specialties to encompass international affairs and the fate of the egregious or exoskeletal. Champion of the micropoltical, harbinger of the locally harrowing, John makes for great conversation, some fine Scottish wit, and a generally entertaining train ride home.

An accomplished gossip artist and prestidigitator of the personally perverse, he keeps his eyes and ears peeled not only on and about the compulsives and low lives who float at the OTB, but in and around the affairs of its employees.

“You know, Michael, ‘The Winner’s Circle’ is a fairly ironic name for this place. I mean, everyone who comes in here is a loser, including the people who work here.”

True enough. But if I have any qualms with this local politico, part time security guard and bibliophile, it has to do not with his particular choice of words, but their respective definitions, expressly implied and overtly declarative.

A veritable Harpo-attitude on his surfaces (you expect a horn to be in his holster and not a .38, while most seem to naturally trust him), and a voracious Groucho-sensitivity within (he does, in fact, smoke at least one four-dollar cigar a day), any conversationalist companion has to be a bit careful as to whether Johnny sez what he means, means what he sez, or simply enjoys poking, jabbing, jibbering, and quaking in the earwicking background of everyone else’s freakiness, honk! honk! honk!

Standing around at the base of the escalator, or simply passing on through the foyer and already swallowed up by this place, a prospective gambling sap or regular customer will read a very different sign than those innocents and wisefolk passing by with their purses and prides unabsconded along the hexagonal tilework of the forever failing State Street Mall:

Predominantly visual creatures that we are, our mammalian brains make learned though automatic allowances for this type of jabberwocky discrepancy. Not so with Johnny: one can never quite be sure as to the jabbering wicky-wocky, ticky-tocky perspective, outside or inside, the mute curlyhaired musician, or the smartassed quack horsedoctor — or perhaps even a hypothetical juxtaposition of the two, a weirdo Italian con artist and fancy pianist weanig a stupid hat several sizes too small, even though Nimbusson hates those darkie dagos, also, among others, though less so than your typical Irishman or Brit.

“You see, Slo’s basic problem here is his Irish blood,” sez Johnny, West of Edin.

“That’s absolutely right,” comments William, the Irish security guard and Chicop.

“Hey hey hey now,” interrupts Slo. “What is this scam? Ha! Ha! Ha!”

“Well,” continues William, rubbing his chin as if transfixed in deep thought. “I figured you were alright when you told me you were of mixed blood, with the ingredients being one part German to one part English. But when you at long last informed me of that heart stopping secret that you had some wop stuff in there, well, I don’t know about that. You spoiled the whole brew. No wonder you work here.”

“Ha! Ha! Ha! I told you I had some Irish in me too, finally, ha! ha! ha! And that I did! Boy, that sure rocked your world! Ha! ha! ha!”

Slo, much like Mr. Mike, has this rather unnerving tendency of laughing after just about everything he says, when most of what he says isn’t particularly amusing.

“Ha! Ha! Ha! That’s what I tell all my girlfriends to really piss them off! I tell them that I have the charm of a German, the sensitivity of an Englishman, and the drinking habits of an Irishman! Ha! ha! ha!”

“Yeah, that must have been an interesting threeway,” speculates Will. “They all must have wanted to murder each other, annex each other’s bodies, and ended the whole damn torture by buying one round too many, with someone else’s money. I’m surprised they produced anything at all, let alone Slo here.”

“Ha! Ha! Ha! That’s just what I tell all my girls, ha! ha! I tell them the only way they could have me, is if they get me plastered, ha! ha! ha!”

“The only way they would take you is if you shared that excessive amount of booze,” hypothesizes Johnny. “Make them deaf and dumb first.”

When asked what, exactly, I do here, I am forced into a moment of embarassing silence, punctuated by the totally useless observation that the single most important aspect of my job is my presence on the floor, another way of saying “not much”. Like a toy soldier of old, my time is split between vast periods of inconceivable boredom, punctuated by a few sporadic moments of terror.

Whereas that might sound somehow noble or intrinsically interesting, the boredom is inversely proportional in intensity to the terror, the terror more like a series of shoulder shrugging inconveniences than bone crunching situations. And if I do so excruciatingly little in between receiving complaints, periodically ejecting drunks druggies and general trouble, presenting menus to wackos in the Derby Club, or stealing food from the kitchen, you should check out most of the security team. If pressed for more information, here’s what many of them might say:

JOHNNY: “I read fine mystery literature in the office, eat salads with bleu cheese dressing, and talk about people.’’

WILLIAM: “I usually flirt with the attractive pari-mutuel tellers, attractive waitresses, attractive bartenders, and totter back and forth in the very same place a lot.”

TOM: “I talk about the good old days when I used to work for that Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Club, crack various sex jokes stolen from the inside covers of those same centerfolds, insult the proletariat, flirt with the bartenders, eat soup.’’

MARSHALL: “I stare at the nylons and high fitting skirts cruising by on State Street. When I encounter some stubborn trouble in the grandstand, I take them back into the Chicago Theater fuseroom and kick the living shit out of them.”

BLEARY: “I annoy people. As many people and as often as I possibly can.”

JACOB: “Basically, I kind of stand around.”

SANDY: “I talk about my real job.”

Sex, violence, boredom: the American Way. Army recruiters allegedly consider the military as an “Adventure,” while a hard working Chicago cop will certainly find more live action on Division Street than most GI Joe types in the Third World. Be all you can be. Sandy be a patrolman, and apparently a decent one at that. He’s seen everything under the hazy Chicago sun, and more.

Bone chilling beats in the wintertime freeze, beach patrols in the searing heat, shotgun on the fabled and unfabulous Humboldt Park paddy wagon, third shift. Losers, boozers, users; weekenders, public defenders, sex offenders; conmen, highwaymen, aldermen. Sandy seems to have been everywhere and done everything — well, almost — and finds the time and patience to work a couple nights a week at this OTB, overall remaining unscathed, a survivor amongst the dead and dying, tell tales and tall signs from in front of that tin and nickel star, and behind.

For neophytes such as myself, starring in this cat and mouse profession a whole lot more dangerous and substantially less amusing than those Saturday morning looney tune realities that most closely resemble what we have to do and how we have to do it, Sandy is a great soul to commiserate with, especially when such commiseration involves complaints regarding not the abuse of justice and authority, but their noticeable absence.

“Hey, Sandy, what kind of rights do I have? I mean, if someone takes a swipe at me, will I get sued if I fight back? Will they come and arrest me, another case of reverse indiscrimination?”

Hasn’t happened yet, but then again, it’s only my first night on this job.

“No, you won’t get sued. You might get your ass kicked, is what it is, if you just stand there lookin stupid, so you’ve gotta be aware of you surroundings, know what I mean?”

Sandy is usually assigned to keep a watch over the dreaded grandstand area, so he knows what he means, which means something, sometimes mean.

“So, I can do anything I want to in order to defend myself?

No L.A. video stuff, but just what’s required to keep the order around here, right? For a month in the early spring, you couldn’t turn on a television without seeing the nth repeat showing of the consumer electronics scoop of the year, an amateur home taping of the savage beating of a captured motorist in Los Angeles, only a few months prior.

After a high speed car chase around and about some of the seedier parts of town, Rodney King was finally stopped, yanked out of his auto, cuffed, and as several cops stood idle, two or three went at the defenseless assailant, wailing on the guy with clubs, fists, and feet. Unbeknowst to the officers, a video fetishist with camera running caught the “arrest” from across the street, handing the tape over to a local TV station. The ensuing uproar blanketed the newspages, police, police captain, and Suffragette Cityhall under fire, digital videoland evidence of what citizens had been complaining about for years, the excessive use of force by paid law enforcement officers hired to protect and maintain the police — I mean, peace.

To hear about police brutality from a neighbor, relative, and friend, or to experience it directly for oneself, was one thing: to watch it daily on the evening news along with one hundred million other people was another. And with our MTV mindset, our stubbornly steadfast and gradually diminishing twenty-two second attention spans, many Americans probably conceiving of God as an AWACs tech, sitting in front of those brightly colored screens, sending out secret signals through the astral aethyrs, prime time, hot spot, big shot, CBS, NBC, ABC as the coded, temuraic names of archangels benign, malignant, and mostly indifferent, that living room photographer’s tape was an absolute clincher.

Seize The Act itself on videotape or computer disk, rob a juicy chunk out of spacial and temporal reality, hold it on magnetic media in the binary form of zero and one, and ecclesiastical justice should be imminent, the sword of Damacles should fall: expect four to six weeks for delivery, or, for your consuming convenience, FAX machines are standing by to receive the binary assailant’s MO for even faster service!

“What’s the difference between beer nuts and deer nuts?” Oh, god, it’s Bleary.

“Gee, guy, I don’t really know. What’s the the difference?”

“Beer nuts are $1.98 a pound, and deer nuts are under a dollar. What happens when a Jewish guy with a hard-on walks into a wall?”

“Let me guess…”

“He breaks his nose.” Without waiting for or even expecting a response, Bleary meanders off, holster creeking, hips swaying, his pantaloons barely able to sustain such mass, irregularly and asymmetrically distributed about a center of gravity several feet below the floor with a forward vector thick as a doberman’s grin, ruff ruff.

“Like I was sayin, Mike, you gotta watch out for yourself.” Sandy continues: “I would be in situations where several officers in my unit would drag somebody in, cuffed, and take him downstairs, and beat the fuck out of him. Problem was, that they would do this after they had brought the guy in. What was I goin to say to the judge if we’d be brought up on charges, if the defendent looked so fine just up to the point he gets to the stationhouse? Not much you can say there, really. And you know something, that’s exactly what happened: the boyz did this one guy up pretty good once, and he went straight to the courts. They flew the fuckin lawyer in, some nice lookin white boy from the West Coast. He was smooth, let me tell you. He knew exactly what the jury wanted to hear, and told them. He knew exactly what to say to get my ass all tied up, and he said it. ‘Well, now, officer Sandy, you’re looking mighty sharp today.’ Yeah, right. There I sat in uniform, smiling like this mealy-assed motherfucker, as this young punk stole the show. ‘Now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury,’ ladies and gentlemen? half the jokers seemed to be on welfare, while the other half must have worked for the phone company, or somethin. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, my defendant here claims that of the several officers who stood by idle during the course of his beating, one of them was colored. Can you identify him for us?’ You wouldn’t believe this, man. I sat back in the box with eight other guys, the ones there that night, and I was the only nigger there! Eight home boys and me. What did he mean, could he ‘identify’ the colored man? So, I got messed up on that one.”

“Charges were pressed against you?”

“Yeah. I got out of it with only a stiff fine, but still, that doesn’t exactly look right on your record, you know what I’m sayin? Things go down even these days, but times are changin, and so am I. Back then, when we got busted, I was single, you know, with nothing to worry about but my own ass. Now I’ve got two kids, in private schools, a mortgage, the whole deal. I don’t need some young punk straight out of the academy with a macho-complex to mess up my professional carreer. These days I make sure that I don’t get into situations like that — these days I tell them, ‘hey, you better think about what you’re doin, man, and either way, I am out of this here, you see?’ Sure police brutality happens — a lot of things happen out there, on all sides, including the political one, you can be sure. That L.A. shit was bad, bad all around. You had some tempers flare, as they do, and they fucked somebody up right on camera. In general, though, the face of the police force throughout the country is changin. Before I used to consider myself a bad ass, roving around, in control, you know what I’m sayin? Now, I get some new recruits to train out in the field, and they’ve got college degrees, specialties in forensics, ballistics, whatevertheficks, and they make me feel old and stupid. Man.”

“And you don’t think that a large part of the scene is racial?”

“Oh, sure it is man, sure it is. And that’s on both sides, too. I mean, you got a few rookie black cats, stationed out in anglowhiteysuburbia, pulling fancy BMW cars over for minor speeding violations and giving those folks some seriously unnecessary attitude. ‘Come on, motherfucker, get out da ca’! Get out da ca’, fo I kick yo ass!’ Homey sitting there on the inside with his girl is saying to himself ‘What the fuck is going on, here?’ And sure, next thing you know their badge numbers are taken, officers get reprimanded, and shit, you have yourself another ‘race’ issue. Then again, you’ve got white patrol officers, assigned to Cabrini or Robert Taylor. Time comes to use some force, undo a situation, and boop! whitey is Mr. Badguy again, kickin ass in the ghetto. So you see, none of this is easy. Not at all, not at all. Laws of the jungle are crude and rude, and most folks don’t understand what we have to deal with out there, every single day. They want the streets safe, but spend half their time worrying about those people assigned to keep them that way. How do they expect us to do our jobs, with both hands tied behind our backs? Excesses occur, I know: but ain’t crime an excess? Ain’t it an excess when old people get robbed, young women are raped, stores get held up, their owners blown away?”

“I guess the middle ground is the only way to go?”

“What middle ground? You’ll see, workin here a while. There ain’t no such thing as no ‘middle ground,’ not in here, not out there, nowhere. You can be lucky if you get your ass home at night, is all. Aggression don’t know skincolor, position in society, how much bread you got in the bank, who the fuck your grand daddy was. Human beings are basically wild and out of control, regardless whether they represent one thing or another, regardless whose side they happen to be on. So, you just watch out, and keep cool. Don’t hesitate to defend yourself, but don’t get slaphappy. Yo! I gotta get goin. You take it good, now, I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah, take care, Sandy. Thanks for the advice.”

“That ain’t no advice, Mike. That’s just common sense.”

“Hey! How do you make a hormone?”

“Not now, Bleary, not now.”

An automatic defense mechanism is engaged within the dim recesses of my mind — next thing I know, I am up the escalator, back on the second floor, Bleary a distant memory, thoughts about Sandy and his “lecture” flowing through my tired brain. What a solid difference between actually attending, attentively watching a race happen, and simply reading about the results, placed amongst a score of other statistics, inside a program or racing form! I can’t think about this distinction enough. To Be there, experience the experiential — to hold onto and take a chunk of the discontinuous, illogical, sporadic stream of the world, not necessarily judging it in any way, but simply trying to understand it, discover trends, tendencies, mechanisms, just like any decent handicapper.

What a mistake snobbery, premature judgements, impatience create: if you got out there with your conceptions fixed, thinking you know before you have an opportunity to feel your ignorance in the face of all that -isness, then forget the whole process. You might as well cash your chips early, turn in your voucher, and snuggle fetal position deep down dark inside the embryonic fluid of your own one dimensionality and emptiness.

Yes, the world is basically harsh, unconscious, often times downright bestial. Every instant, every incident has behind it and through it an infinity and infinitude of “reasons,” “causes,” “effects”. What Is, simply Is — what Was cannot change, and from certain vantage points, what Will Be is as tangible, incorrigible, and inevitable as a landscape, a garden arrangement, a piece of finely crafted pottery.

“Successful” people don’t moralize, sentimentalize, rationalize this universal mess — they capitalize on it. “Unsuccessful” people moralize, sentimentalize, rationalize from a loser’s point of view — they hate the world not because of its innate banality and indifference, but because they can’t have as much of that banality and indifference as they would like. Standpoints of the powerful and powerless, the tired legacy of the haves and havenots: “Very nace indeed! And makes us a daintical pair of accomplasses!” writ that Jimmy Joyce. Lucihere, and they both come together. “Understanding” people stand under, they take into consideraiton their personal limitations, and work on those things they can change, making an effort to transform their own lives and those around them, trying to produce a better, more meaningful world by building up, not merely tearing down.

Whichever approach one chooses to take, whichever disposition is chosen for us, we all must face moments of boredom, jealousy, anger, elation, doubt. Faith becomes a key, then, a universal superglue to mend life and living together, to bridge a gap between living and dead, life and non-life, a cry of the instinct, a duplicity of the inanimate.

Leather jacket with buttons, ripped jeans, weird sunglasses and very nappy hair: he’s back, the living parts of him and the dead, all of them coming implacably on up the escalator, oh oh. Why does he do this to me? Winston? Are you there, Winston? Wastes like a cigarette should.

“No no no. You’ve been tossed out before, remember? I can’t let you in, man. You know that. Come on now.”

I wave the dangling bit of the walkie-talkie at him for effect. He stops at the top of the escalator, and looks straight at me, his pupils invisible behind those weird shades. The glasses are shaped like two ellipsoids placed side by side, two twin focii roughly corresponding with those lost eyeballs, double vision, making his face look like that of a deranged feline. “I just want to make a phone call. Let me make a phone call, man, just a phone call, alright.”

He keeps moving, yikes.

1 Stop
2 Listen For Dial Tone
3 Deposit Coins

I get in his way.

“No. No. You understand? No. You have to leave. Period. Right now. You have to leave right now, down those steps, you got that?”

“Man, I hate you.” He points a shaking finger. “I fucking hate you, man. You’re an asshole. You’re a fucking asshole, man. I hate you.”

He begins to move closer. I notice Bleary from the corner of my eye, a peripheral visual of smirking, smiling horseflesh, watching me and my situation from in front of the mutuel windows a little ways away across the second floor.

“I fucking hate you, man. You give me a hard time. Why, man? I hate you! I fucking hate you, man!”

I’m special, so special, I gotta have some of your attention, give it to me —

“Bleary!” I call out. “We’ve got a problem here. Bleary!”

In the movies, when the shit really hits the fan, a young director or flashy, Brian De Palma style old one will engage that tried and true slo mo effect: you see the knife fly, stabbing the poor bastard as the frames roll by, 24 a second now stretched to the equivalent of 18, 16, 12 frames of fear flashing flamboyantly and artlessly — ouch!

Our conception of Reality becomes interpreted in this manner in times of crisis, two or three seconds seeming like an eternity when The Horror hits, and I can’t say for sure whether our minds have been programmed by the media and the movies to react this way, or whether Hollywood sensationalized a psychological function or defensive capacity we all share.

Either way, the next three seconds of my life seem taken from a De Palma ripoff movie: Roll ‘em! The degenerate’s arm gears up, his elbow bending to accommodate, as his expression noticeably alters from “I hate you” to “I hate you and am now going to do something about that hate.”

As the fist approaches in that slow motion video mode, I know I don’t have the energy or time to duck, so I do the best I can, remembering long, hot afternoons in the park as a youngster: I do a limbo, stretch! first lumbar vertebra, latissimus dorsi muscles straining with the effort, creeek.

Whoosh! goes his taught fist, millimeters from my nose, the cartilage audibly sighing. The momentum of the punch sends him slightly ajar, and I have a chance to grab him, and push him in the direction of the stairs.

Braced now for a second onslaught, I feel ready now, and sensing this, he pushes me away, and lumbers back down the steps, yelling at the top of his lungs various obscenities, articulated plans for my forthcoming and imminent ceremonial urban assassination.

I radio for assistance, sympathy.

“Yo, security to the escalator, security to the escalator, over.”

“The races aren’t over yet. We’ll reverse the thing in a while.”

Great, Johnny, just terrific. He must be in the back security office, reading a serialization of the game Clue™.

“No no no! We’ve got some trouble down here, security. We need some help getting that trouble down and out the front door…”

Meanwhile, The Trouble is down by Victor, pushing him out of the way. By the time Bleary, Johnny, and Marshall make it down to the entrance, trouble is punching the glass at the inner door, and stomping his way out, cursing, kicking, promising bitter revenge. He savagely kicks the outside door open, swinging the door out like a saloon door in New Orleans, circa 1880, almost smashing it in the face of some compulsives, on their way into the building for the second half of the evening card.

“Shit!” says one, an elderly black man in a checkered shirt and cap. “I figure dis might be a sign o’ some kind! Maybe I should get my back ass on home!”

As Trouble goes marching south down State Street, disappearing among trouble equally troublesome though less obvious, oblivious in booze stupor and crack heaven, a small crowd gathers by the front, recapitulating the atrocities. Slip shows up, wanting a basic run-down. I describe what happened, as Bleary mimicks my hand waving and a few of my expressions. I laugh at his teasing, and he teases me further, imitating my nervous laugh and eye brow gestures. I tell him that he almost got me killed, and then he laughs, saying that that just might have made his night, only now he has to settle for a minor insult or two. I receive feedback from the rest of the boyz, not all of it encouraging.

“You should have kicked his ass, Mike.”

“Why didn’t you just let him inside?”

“Oh, he’s bad news. You should have at least radioed for help.”

“We should have grabbed him before he made it outside, and taken him back to the fuseroom.”

“He should have actually made contact with your head, Mike. That way, he might have done your hairstyle some good.”

“Don’t worry there, Mark. Had his fist made impact with your face, he would
have been worse off than you, what with that stubble you have, he would have slashed his knuckles.”

“Do that again, Borus. Come on. Bend back for us. That was fun to watch. Come on, bend, bend, bend for us now. Didn’t know you had that kind of defensive capacity inside ya. That kind of athletic flexibility. Cathy Rigby step aside! What a move!”

Slo ambles on over, ten minutes after the incident is ancient prehistory.

“Did I show you my impression of a compulsive who lost all night, ha! ha! ha! Coming down the stairs? Ha! Ha! Ha!”

“No, Slo, you didn’t.” Oh, hell, perhaps some comic relief might do me good, even if it’s Slo’s type of relief, god.

“Great, let me show ya, ha! ha! ha!”

He runs up the escalator, looks below, checking to make sure that I’m watching him, and then starts his routine. He steps one step at a time, swaying his hips back and forth, with one hand on his walkie-talkie, the other between his legs. He moves to the left, right, then back again, his hand stroking his pantomimed member in sync with each step, head jerking back and forth, eyebrows inquisitively up, with a look on his face that speaks of a mixture of defeatist dismay and ejaculatory elation. He makes it to the landing, about half-way down, and can’t keep himself from laughing at his own act, loudly and uproariously, Ha! ha! ha! His laughter booming across the entire trying transome. Ha! ha! ha!

“You like that? You like that one? Ha! Ha!”

“Wonderful, Slo, just great. You do that at home?”

“What!? That stuff? Never! Are you kidding?!”

He seems truly shocked.

“You know something? You guys are all a bunch of liars, you really are.”

“What are you talking about?”

“All this stuff about getting laid every night. What kind of shit is that? Liars! Each and every one of you! Liars! Ha! Ha! I don’t do that stuff. I get laid, sure, but I won’t do it to her unless she gets me really drunk, you know what I’m saying? I won’t do it to anyone unless she gets me really fucking shitfaced stoned out of my gord drunk drunk drunk! Ha! ha! ha! You know what I’m saying? Ha! Ha!”

“I never said I get laid every night. I do stroke off every now and then, though.”

“You what?!?! Ha! Ha! You do that stuff? Really? Naw. I don’t believe it!”

“Oh, yeah, sure. Once a week, I’d say. Good for ya. Keeps the circulation strong, the juices flowing. What now? You say you never do that kind of thing?”

“No way, man. I’m like a camel. I save it up, good six, seven months. Then I go to a bar, maybe, and they have to get me drunk. You go tell Beth that. You tell her that if she really wants me, which I know she does, that she’s gonna have to get me totally wasted, or I won’t even fuck her, you know what I’m saying?”

“You never jerk off?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Then what do you do with it?”

“What do you mean, ‘What do you do with it?’ What do you think I do with it? What do you think I do with it — what should I do with it? You guys are liars, man, nothing but a bunch of liars. If you tell the truth, then you guys are sick, man, nothing but a bunch of sickos. Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha!” He shakes his head. “Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha!”

God knows, gods know. Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Stanley Kubrick, them and a host of others trace war and aggression, in one way or another, to sexual anxiety. Rollo May writes about modern anxiety and links tension to a lack of love received in the early years. Sex as mysterious, repression as d-d-d-dangerous. We might dive a bit deeper, and relate it all to energy,
waveforms, nature going against itself, trace the whole mess to power centers, instinctual impulses, a lightning connection between polarized opposites, a statistical expression no individual action or person can circumvent.

Who knows? Would the world be a whole lot better if we’d all be getting some, cigars or grease pencils, mandalas or glory holes, condoms at the bottom of Cracker Jack boxes? Probably. But human beings are notoriously never satisfied, satisfaction itself an anti-climax, a dull reminder that the Absolute is more a fiction than the chaulk board scrubbing janitors of Tubingen ever realized. Our capacity to relate concepts to each other, to sublimate and project ourselves into different areas and interests makes satiation a useless goal. If we have all of one thing, we relate that thing to other things, part of the ten thousand things we can never “possess,” or “have control over,” whatever those terms even mean.

Introverted or extroverted, thinking, feeling, intuiting, or sensing our primary function, the energy flowing in one direction and in one psychic disposition or another, the same issues, the same problems are there for all of us to face and somehow overcome.

As the U.S.S. Bunker Hill sailed out of the Gulf area, the air and ground stages of the War over, many thousands of human bodies left as crackling fat deposits on the desert floor, Bryan’s skipper came on the PA system, and announced to the entire crew R&R itineraries, a minor change in schedule.

“Originally, boyz, we were to sail toward Japan, but we’ve had an alteration of course. So, instead of heading on over to Nippon, we’re gonna cruise on toward that Phuket, Thailand, because the whores are cheaper and there’s para-sailing. All hands to quarters. Let’s ship it on out, over.”

Techno-death on a major scale, the systematic reduction of an entire nation back to pre-industrial times. And what could those fellows do? In our Worlds of repression, and death, and power for power’s sake, what could our floating fellows do? Check the quartermaster’s office, make sure no one’s AWOL — what place nobility, honor, pride, when the vast machine of high tech destruction grinds its grinding course, buzz, whir, click!

What place sentimentality, depression and worry amid the vast incontenance of a worldwide military bureaucracy whose books have to be balanced, whose tonnage / kill ratios must be maximized, like books of The Dark One’s accountant, carved into the bark of the Tree of Death.

Once again, our only hope might lie in being able to revel in the raw experience of it all, to sit back and have another drink while we can, ponder the realities of a future uncertain when and the end that’s near, order appetizers and make idle conversation in a back booth at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Should the waiter turn out to be a Bugblatter Beast, ask for the food to go, and put the bag over your head. Most of the world’s leaders and decision makers already know all about this highly effective defensive capacity, even though the nearest Bugblatter is light years distant.

Continued in Part 3…

Part 3: Night at the Races