Part 3: Night at the Races

A quirky literary trifecta: memoir, manual, and manifesto

This post is the third of a four part story. If you’ve read Part 1 or 2, dive right into Part 3 here, and if not click on the links below, starting from the top:

Part 1: Night at the Races

Part 2: Night at the Races

SIXTH RACE

FOR MARES EIGHTEEN YEARS AND BOLDER
TRIFECTA, TETRAFECTA WAGERING PERMITTED THIS RACE
VERSE: ANYTHING FROM TENNYSON OR LATE JOHN DUNNE
VERSE: “THE ETERNAL DRAMAMINE LURES TO INDIGESTION”

Taverns, bars, clubs: places of solace for the lonely, surrogate families for the physical or spiritual orphan. The Road To Jerusalem is perhaps the most frequented and oldest still-functional tavern, embedded in solid granite not far from London, the place used to be a stopover for crusaders on their way to meaningless martyrdom in the East. One wonders what bartenders must have been like in Britanny around the year 1100: what did they wear, were sterile conditions in any way supported, did they have to do side-work, night inventory, too?

You can still squat behind that very same huge oak slab that catered to fabled knights and their horses, slurp bitter bitters drawn up like sour molasses from the oak kegs in the dewy cool dampness below. These days at the turn of the twenty-first century, war still rages in that part of the world, as elsewhere, and people sit sombrely behind the throne of their local alcoholic alchemist, the tincturers of toxology, the matrons of mixology, more to converse and coalesce than imbibe and inebriate, although the one is certainly conducive to the other.

Gambling, socializing, and booze are as homogenous a combination as you will probably ever find, numbers, nonsense, and toxicity expressions of their Unity found in confessional booths the planet over, the mathematical first very present at this particular locale, the other two very necessary, even when you’re miles from the nearest track, and across the street from NBC studios in downtown Chicago. Ready, camera, action!

With ponies running every half hour or so, a cityfull of gossip to share and argue about (Chicago not having a winning sports team since the Bears went all the way a half decade ago), one would assume that the bartenders at this OTB would be more than satisfied as to the clientel, their generosities, their appreciativeness for supplying these distinguished patrons with such a necessary, time honored function.

Wrongo-bongo. The only bartenders who make any real dough are the ones who have been there for at least a year, and have established themselves with a suitable cltentel. Perhaps as high as ninety-five percent of the people entering the place are regulars, there between two and seven days every week. For David, Bee, and especially James, the tips are slight though steady, and these irregular regulars as familiar as family, orphans of the real world sharing a martini and a racing tip, both side of the bar.

David is a South Sider, wife and family, wants to go back to school, registering at one of the local colleges about town. Polite, never meticulous, he’s good company. You can usually find him working the Mezzanine or second floor, and his rapport with the customers is excellent. He doesn’t like talking about how much he makes or how much he doesn’t on any particular occasion, so don’t even bother asking. He smokes, quits, and then takes it up again, so odds are about even money that he’ll have a cigarette for you to borrow. On one occasion, he even asked for a cigarette from one of his patrons, and passed it behind the bar and onto me, Mook the mooch, striking again, unlucky as usual.

Bee is almost always up on the third floor, the ditzy bartender all the clubbers just love. She makes silly comments, knows absolutely nothing about the horses and isn’t exactly planning on attending any handicapping class in any foreseable possible future. She loves to joke around, and is constantly worried about her hairstyle, which is usally all over the place, kind of like Mr. Mike’s only there happens to be a whole lot more of it. Once I went up to Bee, leaned over her bar, and my face inches from hers, said to her: “The world is my oyster.” She loved it. Now, every time I see her, that in one way or another acts as theme for our conversations. “The world is my oyster.”

James is perhaps the most successful employee in the entire place, perhaps earning more, with tips and all, than a manager like Slip and twice as much as any floor supervisor (the irony of which remains clear and present when I ask James if he could do something or other). Born and bred in Kentucky, among horseracing and prized racehorses (his father actually owns a few), he loves to wine and dine everyone from many of those low life regulars to the occasional, generous, high roller, and many folks caught somewhere in between. Infinitely personable, James cruises up and down, serving and swerving, consulting programs with the clueless, menus with the artless, a fellow who confirms the existential premise that you Are exactly that which you Do, and James definitely Is a waiter and bartender, and exceptional ones at that. Blond, boyish, and bouncy, he is no doubt the favorite on the floor next to Nullie, many folks asking for him by name at the door. Only question is why he remains there, waiting and tending bar, when other possibilities would certainly abound. Allegedly his father has asked him to return to Kentucky, help ride and train some of those thoroughbreds. I have suggested PR work, what with his character and personability. Either way, he doesn’t care to be bothered with those concerns now, comfortable in his job, how much he earns, where he stands in relation to that world flowing by around and through those dirty windows on the third floor, overlooking State Street and the spidery ‘L’ platform.

New bartenders are not having such a good time, the arachnophobic world definitely not being their oyster at this OTB. Amy, Zoe, and Ada arrive around the time I do, and they complain about their situation, and justifiably so, though all for different reasons. and to different ends.

“Whose going to be the first to fuck Amy?” inquires Tom the security guard, his mind always on his work. “God, does she have a cute face.”

Cute face, maybe, but she doesn’t last the evening, as she is unable to even mix a martini, and is let go before curtainfall. Sorry Tom, Hugh doesn’t run this joint: Jacob Boheme would have fired her, too.

Zoe can mix a drink and then some, holding steadfast, wondering if she’ll pull the necessary $100 a week in order simply to survive. “Tell me a story,” she asks me as I stand next to her bar.

So I begin: “‘I’m sorry, boss, but having a ‘Mook’ nametag will get me a bit more attention around here than I care to have. Thank you, though. Sir.’ Inhale. Exhale…” You know the rest, at least so far. She seems to like it. I seem to like her. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale…

“Tell me another story,” she asks me again, turning curious.

“Well,” I say, “I had a very unhappy childhood.’’

Turns out, so did she. Similar to Bee, her father was a difficult case, with tendencies toward abuse, alcoholism, the irony of the profession these women share rather clear, sometimes even humorous, while the irony of mine remains somewhat more ambiguous, oddly ridiculous.

“What’s your background?” I ask, interpersonal movement from stranger to just strange now a go for both of us.

She turns to the TV screens looming behind her, and smiles. Having grown up on television, the only friend in an unfriendly home, we both possess a family shared by twenty million other Americans. With daddy gone insane and mom crying in the kitchen, Bugs Bunny, Mannix, Gilligan and the Skipper, Magilla Gorilla, The Maytag Repairman, James Bond, Johnny Carson, Sonny & Cher, the Channel Two nightly news team, and a host of others fleeting and flippant were there for us when no one else was, a surrogate nuclear video family with their faces and fancies electron-beamed pixel row-by-pixel row, lined up like the horses before a race, two dimensionally bursting out into our kiddy konsciousnesses, distracting us from life, momentarily saving us from suffering in a world where we knew no different, and yet instinctively understood that something was drastically wrong.

I laugh at her fun, thinking for a moment about those long, idle, meaningless Sunday afternoons in the darkened livingroom, how one hell can never be a substitute for another. She tells me that her father was a Romanian-Hungarian emigre, her mother, Italian, and both severely nutz. I reciprocate by saying that both my parents were Hungarian, and nutz, too, so we have more in common than we originally thought.

Another thing we seem to have in common is that are both “air signs” (she a Libra, me a Gemini — things to keep in mind), and we both like to eat, in vast quantities, so we agree to have dinner sometime, somewhere, if we can afford it. Ada has trouble affording such things, as well, what with a wild and crazy evening on the second floor producing a rude comment, a sneaked cigarette, three degenerate weirdos taking up space and not drinking anything, and about $4 in tips, wow.

Her twin sister adA comes in every once in a while from her waitressing job down the street to lend her twin some support, read at her bar. Genetically identical, they live together up in New Chinatown by Argyle, smoke the same brand of cigarettes, and complain about each other’s boyfriends. From South Carolina, raised in Seattle, WA, they offer a fun kind of energy to the joint, a “southern” American zeitgeist, coupled with the groove of the Pacific Northwest, if you will, infusing us Midwest folk with their unique blend of country attitude and spunkiness.

Ada, for one, often gazes around her, a mixture of utter dismay and condescension at the human devastation she witnesses taking place around her, harmoniously coexisting in her expressions that simultaneously say “What the fuck?” and “Why me?”

Interestingly enough, almost as if by virtue of their unique relationship to each other and its physical proximity, their personalities had to polarize in order for them to successfully Maintain: Ada seems decidedly the introvert, more reserved, heady, the practicing artist, while adA takes on the role of the extrovert, more outgoing, informal, outwardly vivacious… but hold on there, wait a second now. Ada seems more fashion conscious, the organizer, while adA is also involved in the arts, video, writing, sculpture, plenty of opinions floating around here… who can tell, and why even bother with the analysis when they’re both so much fun?

Sure, they argue now and then, sparks across the gap between positive and negative aspects of The One: I like sparks, and unity, at least on this level, is an illusion that destroys individuality. I love to listen, sit at their bars. adA and I appear to have a rapport — I LIKE HER. Program these three words into the postscript language of the laser printer, magnetize the drum by the action of light amplification through the stimulated emission of radiation, ink the device, roll the paper stock across, make photocopies. Lock that statement in time, place it in a desk drawer, no light, and take a peek a few years from now, remembering another visual clue, a graphic hint for us, this TV generation. A few years from now, and events, people, transform and become transfigured — the paper will oxidize, the ink, fade. Lock that statement in mind, place it where entropy cannot reach, where memories last forever by wont of being forgotten. Hey, bartender! Mix me another! Truth or Dare.

Shot glass, pony, cocktail, highball, collins, chimney glass. Old fashioned, double old fashioned, whiskey sour, balloon glass, sherry glass. Brandy snifter, champagne glass, beer and wine glasses — and these are only the
glasses. Crack. A flunky of high school chemistry (and most of high school and college, for that matter), I really don’t know how they Do It. Jiggers, strainers, blenders, corkscrews, mixing spoons, measuring spoons, tongs, pitchers, squeezers, muddlers, can and bottle openers, wine cork retrievers, stirrers. coasters, cocktail napkins, champagne buckets, wine coolers, an infinite array of gadgets, novelties, and heavy-duty equipment. Hardware of the job, tools of the tirade, you can make some killer cyborg out of all this stuff, and we haven’t even discussed the booze and exotic mixers yet!

Gin, vodka, rum, brandy, bourbon, Irish spirits and the Scotch mystique, tequila, various flavored liqueurs, wines, punches, hot drinks, and the new yuppie craze, boozless booze and shots without the zip. Yeah, uh, can you make me a Lillet Noyaux (1 1/2 oz. gin, 1/2 oz. calvado, 1 tsp. cream de noyaux, orange twist, shake with cracked ice, add twist, pour into cocktail glass)? Or how ‘bout a-a-a Pink Mermaid (1 1/2 oz. light rum, 1/2 oz. lime juice, 1 tsp. heavy cream, 1 tsp. grenadine, 1/2 an eggwhite, shake, pour into chilled cocktail glass? C-c-c-can you make me a C-c-cold Coffee Chantilly (1 oz. vodka, 1 oz. coffee schnapps, 3 oz. heavy cream, 1/2 oz. triple sec, shake with crushed ice, pour into chilled brandy snifter or wine glass)?

Screw Robert Boyle, Antoine Lavoisier, the conte di Quaregna (“Mr.
Mole”) Amadeo Avogadro: they might have revolutionized chemistry, but could they mix a decent drink? Look not to the big whigs of science, the guys you see pictures of in the Museum of Science and Industry, but to the turbaned muslims and weirded-out magickians of old for better tips in mixology and the fine art of distillation. Hiccup! Excuse me.

Most historians of science dismiss alchemy as a gargantuan waste of time, just another expression of the dark, dim, dank Medieval Period, where superstition, hocus-pocus, and bad metaphysics contorted, corrupted, and condemned the middle aged mind of humanity in a convoluted cascade of ignorance and bad alliteration. Maybe so. Most alchemy, like most of just about everything else, was a load of crap, Sturgeon’s Law applying not only to science fiction, but all other human fictions as well.

Most historians of science, resplendent in their bottle-bottomed horn-rimmed birth control glasses, poorly fitting knit sweaters, driving around in foreign automobiles and trying to drink Absolut in order to look cool and “fit in” (wherever that ‘in’ might happen to be if you’re a sexually frustrated historian of science), most historians of science, I say, display a marked insensitivity to those decidedly subjective aspects of their enterprise, signing off the descriptive, interpretive aspects of Heisenberg, De Pauli, and even Schrodinger and his feline with a scientifically historical type of condescending air, shoo shoo, poo poo, and doo doo to the mind and its mechanisms, to observer not only altering, but actually in some manner creating the observed.

Thomas Kuhn, that swell guy out of Stanford, blew open the issue with his much acclaimed and highly controversial Nature of Scientific Revolutions, relating how the character of the academy, its values, and its internal contingencies shape, transform, and finally dictate not only what gets studied and how, but the results, theories, and actual models that are used and maintained within the sciences. Re-coining the phrase paradigm, Kuhn described how the very practice of science and the nature of the scientific canon is as much dependent upon individual ego, arbitrary situations, and human foible as upon any objective, eternal truth that lies waiting for us to discover and elaborate upon.

Folks like Feyerabend and Foucault get even more intense, the former writing a treatise on our need to abandon all method entirely, the latter bringing a whole bunch of political theory into the picture, making science look more like an aldermanic run-off in Chicago than any noble quest for truth.

But the essential point here is this: the Western Tradition since Plato and Aristotle has been one of a search for that truth, a naked, objective, eternal truth that lies independent of the arbitrariness of experience, yet ironically enough, can only be confirmed through it. Trace occidental philosophy, from Descartes onward, and you trace a quest for verissimilitude and logical consistency. Rene justifies knowledge through splitting mind from body, thus initiating that dastardly dichotomy, an intellectual situation best described with a quote from Mr. Tom Robbins via a good friend, “He put Descartes before des horse.” Hume inquires about knowledge, and tosses cause and effect out the window, paving the way for Kant and his systematized search for the synthetic a priori, a philosophical adventure where the treasure consists of proving that the existence of experiential objects is shown to be true by virtue or our capacities to experience them. Confused? So was Kant.

He ends his magnum opus by waddling across the page, believing himself to have also proved God, immortality, and a whole bunch of white, male, Christian, Prussian, bourgeoisie values in the process. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. What Kuhn writes about science applies to every human endeavor, restating what Nietzsche so ardently wrote about more than a century ago, that morality and value underlie everything people do, think about, or study.

And if you still believe that the sciences contain the last bastion exempt from such banalities, reassess, ponder, and try again: for starters, consider the phlogiston theory, cultural anthropology, and, of course, alchemy. Examine social contexts, the values of the time, and balance these ideas with the human propensities to distort, separate, discriminate through incrimination.

Good, bad, or ugly, truth isn’t so much the issue any more as how hypothesis and theory jibe with the universe without (physical sciences) and the universe within (psychology). We shouldn’t ask “Is this true?” what with the whole notion of “truth” so suspended in the sky, but “Why is this theory important for us as human beings?” If it “works” outside in the “objective” world, then great — we can build a better explosive, a faster airplane, a taller tower. And if it moves us and grooves us emotionally inside our skulls, then the idea is worth considering, regardless of whether it makes any rational sense or not, irrespective of any practical import, however tangible or intangible.

Thus alchemy. Kuhn himself began his revolutionary studies of science when he was assigned to teach a class at Stanford in the ancient sciences, principally those of Aristotle. Kuhn stared out of his professorial window at a rose garden and wondered: how could such a fellow as bright and creative as Aristo be so totally, utterly wrong when it came to physics, chemistry, even many aspects of biology? He could certainly classify, but he couldn’t correlate for the hand of Hera. What up? Kuhn began to realize that old A. wasn’t “wrong,” only his ideas concerning physical science were somehow “different”. Aristotle was working from a vastly different cultural and historical perspective. The way in which those greekies used words, concepts, ideas dictated how and what part of the world they noticed and considered relevant.

Similarly, the alchemists of the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries in Europe used a different set of paradigms, were concerned with different issues than the Sunday evening corkscrew pulling paranoid phys grad student fresh out of the Sorbonne. The alchemist with brains figured that they weren’t tinkering and taunting Nature to physically turn lead to gold, but were employing a symbology to describe deep rooted, virtually instinctual psychological and psychical processes that no other language was suitable to describe.

One problem with language is also its greatest strength: it analyzes, separates, distills, if you will, the free-flowing Everything of the universe into manageable chunks and bits that we can subsequently talk about, manipulate, implement. But the problem with using language to describe the inner Self is that most aspects of consciousness and unconsciousness exist as correlative, interconnected, statistical feelings, dispositions, dreams, images, capacities that evade analysis, isolation, direct study. Any “part” of the mind is inextricably linked with most of the others.

Combine that reality with the notion that sense impressions, feelings, memories, expectations, drives, fears, ideas are all similarly linked, and you describe a complex that will forever evade any effort at simple, direct study. To say one thing is to say another — to remain silent is to communicate what otherwise cannot be scrutinized.

Add to this analytical dilemma the realization that many inner truths about the mechanisms of mind must be searched for, explored, excavated from the recesses of an instinctual, unconscious past that continues to live, flourish and dictate the very course of our everyday experiences, but in subtle, silent, elucive ways that go counter to many of the beliefs and functions of top-level “reality”. The reptilian mind, the medulla obligata, is alive and well, inside each and every one of us — and how, may I ask, does one communicate with a lizard?

How does one hold a conversation with an independent entity or entities inside us that have no center of character, that obey forces that have little to do with logic, reason, or most aspects of the “outside world”? We
are all (most of us, at least) born with twelve ribs, five fingers on each hand, four limbs, two eyes, a nose, etc.

Might we not also be born with innate attitudes, dispositions, drives and tendencies as hardwired into our minds as the chemical processes that comprise our metabolic, lymphatic, circulatory systems? Simply because we don’t think about these functions obviously doesn’t mean they are not there, in action, keeping us alive.

And what about the autonomous portions of the brain, that so-called unconscious mind that Behaviorists reject and Freudians make a killing off of? Invisible, experienced more indirectly than a belly ache or sore, might we postulate the brain as simply another organ, its secretions our thoughts, feelings, hopes? And where’s the boundary between hardware and software within that human mind? Do rigid pathways of learning and knowledge exist, and if they do, how do they dictate the manner in which we experience the world around us, of which we are thus an intricate part? Might we discover ourselves not so much by gazing inward, but by gazing outward, into the world and its objects, finding ourselves within that created world, eventually finding something out there in there that we might be pretentious enough to call a recognizable universal blueprint, the sign posts of Eternity, the fingerprints of a lesser demon, the signatures of God?

That, in a nutshell, was the mission of the alchemists. The Chinese accept chi energy as flowing through everything. Since micro and macro are
fundamentally aspects of the One, the human body’s lines of force and that of a street, a city block, an entire continent must be respected. Buildings in the city of Hong Kong, for instance, must all be constructed so that their
chi-energy is aligned with that of the land mass. Skyscrapers, exactly like acupuncture needles, must pierce the living flesh of Mother Earth in ways harmonious and in synch with lines of chi.

In the cult movie Liquid Sky, heroine addicts shoot up to urban vistas of the New York skyline, needles shooting narco drug into vein analogous to Babel Towers sucking the planet dry of physical resources and energy, both organic representations of the same phenomenon, only observed from different levels of awareness. The mystical sense of awareness is geared toward a diametrically opposite path: he or she obliterates the outside world in an effort to directly, purely, uninterruptedly experience the mechanisms of mind, independent of outside sense impression, distraction, interference.

“Hash, coke, herfo-eene… hash, coke, herro-eene…” chant the pushers on Amsterdam streetcorners. You can take the stash to the canals, or hang out for a weird evening alone in your hotel. By closing one’s eyes, shielding oneself from the universe outside, meditating, concentrating, certain images, thoughts, ideas can surface, produced from deep within the brain, waking dreams that would begin to display patterns, laws of behavior that the mystic interprets as being the absolute truths of God.

The alchemist, on the other side, expends his energies outside the intricacies of his head — they would study, mix, purify, play around with matter, trying to discover those same truths of the mystic, though out in the world of objects and events. The mystic, introverted in technique, isolated, becomes the Platonist, shooting for form at the expense of content. The alchemist, extroverted in practice, linked with things of the world, becomes the Aristotelian, innundated with content, often times losing brain blueprints and spiritual schematics in the rush for detail, analysis, exterior transformation.

But both speak in the language of dream, as both understand the limits of the language of daylight — as alchemy becomes increasingly more sophisticated, it eventually drops most, if not all of its “experimental,” “empirical” side. The tinkerer turns back to his books, and throws away the key to the laboratory.

Replete with symbols, exoteric and esoteric, the language of the lab becomes the code of the spirtualist and pychologist. The Calcinatio, Solutia, Elementorum Separatio, once used as terms and part of a technical
nomenclature for chemical processes, become adapted terms for spiritual initiation and symbols of transformation. Coniunctio, Putrefactio, Coagulatio, Cibatio, Sublimatio, Fermentatio, Exaltatio, Augmentatio, Protectio, words once utilized to describe the course of an analysis of matter become symbolic codes for the bubbling over of the inner recesses of mind out and into the tangible, the objective.

By manipulating matter, or its representative symbols, skilled alchemists actually want to transform themselves. The perennial example of turning lead to gold is again a transformative process, only one not of turning a base metal into a more valuable one, but of creating emotional, intellectual, and spiritual enlightenment out of the banality of the everyday, the primitivism of an uneducated human being, the inertia and deadness of unenlightened existence.

While the mystic honors the God found within, the alchemist wants to teach It a lesson, infuse the dead, the inanimate, the decomposing stuff of the universe with vitality and consciousness. Most people, condemned to consciousness with no vehicle for its transcendence, are forced to suffer from the transitoriness of experience, the imminent fear of death. Their bodies become not the vehicles for spiritual rebirth, but the tombs of their own mundane damnation. An occasional dream, an intense sexual encounter, are the only bridges that exist toward personal ascension, freedom through release.

Not bad for the pure at heart, though, eh? With but a tiny smidgen of open mindedness and credulity, a life, a universe can transform itself. How ‘bout mixing me, then, a Paracelsius Punch (1 oz. nigredo [solutio, separatio, divisio], 1 oz. albedo [mortificatio, calcinatio, putrefactio], 1 oz. rubedo [omnes co/ores, cauda pavonis, tinctura alba], coniunctio and matrimonium in a warmed collins glass). Thanks, that really hit the spot. Woo. Did you change the channel on that television monitor? Who’s that? A voice, chanting in Vergilian hexameters, waffs eerily over the bar top:

Spe simul ac furcis, cura et digitalibus usi
Quaerebant praedam socii: via ferrea monstro
Letum intentabat: risus sapoque trahebant

Queen Elizabeth l’s court astrologer, Dr. John Dee (1527- 1608), was also obsessed with language, and how it influenced the ways in which we could deal with The Other Side. Acting with his skryer, Edward Talbott, later known as Kelley, who sat before a crystal known as a shewstone, Dee jotted down Kelley’s visions and eventually constructed a highly complex 27x27 grid of letters and correspondences, squared off regions representing fire, water, air, and earth sectors within which were located yet another level of these respective alternating demarkations, worlds within worlds, a spiritualist map or blueprint of the universe, the detailed analysis and
invitation to the thirty ascending aethyric levels to The One.

Each level of initiation was assigned a symbolic three letter acronym in the angelic tongue known as Enochian, the levels rising in a continuous sequence from TEX, All, and BAG all the way up up up and out out out to ZOM, ARN, and LIL, one or several squares of the spiritualist chessboard and its repective hosts of denizens, demons, angels and monsters having to be mastered on that way toward Infinity.

In Kelley and Dee’s cooperative vision, the entire gamut of occultism comes together. Seeking answers, descriptions, one need only spend some time with their 3D alchemical roadmap, steering from one pyramid to the next, each square as wonderful a stay as any Alice had to endure. And the nature of this weird system? True? False? Who gives a shit — the fiction is there to learn from, borrow ideas from, extrapolate upon. Like the alchemical principles upon which these forms are based, one need not waste time with the epistemology — just grab a friend, a shadowy summer dusk, sit back, and if you like, have yourself a drink…

Enlightened, dreamy, I stir the exotic mixture around, and hope I don’t get spotted by Slip, who would certainly write me up for drinking on the job — bad enough getting busted smoking cigarettes at the bar, shit. Night manager Slip’s old man has worked at Sportsman’s Park for twenty years, and Slip, now twenty-two, has been with the company since age fifteen. Nepotism might be as evil a hiring procedure as it’s common, but Slip is essentially OK, a guy with a solid sense of humor and a basically good will. His youthfulness is often times apparent, though, creeping out of the woodwork of the fineries of his position.

If one can define ‘maturity’ in any substantive way, one might say something like “patience, an ability to discriminate the relevant from the irrelevant, calmness.” Impatient, hyped up about inconsequentials, constantly restless, Slip still has a way to go, and don’t we all, hey! me too! stop for a sec, and don’t think I have this Attitude by virtue of being The Author, here — sure, I got my own problems, one of which consists of feeling these compulsions to drink exotic drinks, smoke borrowed cigarettes of various irrevelant brands, and gossip at various bars, and not infrequendy invade the kitchen area, mooching what I can and cannot.

“You’re looking for a write-up,” sez Slip.

No, I’m not looking for one, but my tummy growls, grrrrrrr. Corporations are structured beings, hierarchical, layered like the minds that create them, large operations that have the same legal rights and recourses of an individual human being. Employees are the bugs, the bacteria, the microbes of its body, staring back up at the Planners, Builders, wealthy Controllers like blotches on old Tony Leeuwenhoek’s lenses. For The Bossman, employees inhabiting every level below are expendable, a necessary evil. Management and owners wish they could run the whole show without them, wind up the inanimate, soulless automatons to do all the work, silently, switty, gutlessly. Power is necessary, right?

Someone, somewhere must make those Decisions. Ironically enough, the pyramid enpowers and also weakens its practitioners — the higher up you go, the more narrow your vision, and thus the more paranoid you become. Each individual bug means nothing, but the churning, seething mass of them might mean yogurt in two days or a disease that will kill you, a forced bacteriological K.O. down to their microscopic level, your own managerial flesh decomposing back into those teaming, nameless masses.

As entire countries, corporations, reflect on a grand scale the neuroses and struggles individuals go through, so too do individuals reflect many of the mechanisms that help govern a country, corrupt a company, for from where else do we acquire much of our learned habits and traits than through the total consciousness of the Nation State, political or economic, in which we are born and raised? Born, raised into a Company, kissing ass means more than bending over backwards to appease those a notch or two above — it dictates a change in attitude, a 180° shift in values. For Slip, the adjustment has not been easy. When a busboy brings him bread, he scrutinizes it, and calls me to the table from two floors down via his walkie-talkie.

“Look at this, I mean, look at this. Can you believe this, can you even fucking believe this?”

What? Believe what? That the busboy didn’t cut your bread? Micro and macro, big deals and little ones. I bring back the bread. Who will bring back Slip? Not that he is wrong, or grossly over-extending himself, but consumed, swept up in taking responsibility for that which does not matter, that which is fueled solely by his own need for that very responsibility. What’s relevant, what isn’t? And who’s the one actually being threatened, Slip, the busboy, or that fateful basket of bread? No, Leo, I’m not talking about letting them drink weed and smoke whiskey out on the floor. Control is one thing, reckless ignorance another. Standards are set, maintained, but whose standards are we enforcing, and why?

Blessed Water, Purified Mercury, Virgin’s Milk, Pharaoh’s Glass, Evening Star; Eve, Euphrates, Electron; Wax, Veil, Placenta, Menstruum, Root; Hermaphrodite, Hae, Hypostasis, Hyle; Salt of Nature, Oil of Sulphur, Precious Stone of Givinis, Diamond, Foundation of the Art; Wax, Vulture, Fugitive Slave; Chaia, Cambar, Caspa, Cherry; Aibathest, Alborach, Azoch; Full Moon, Mother, Metal of Metals: we break the bread in all traditions, and in all, Women have been left to dust the crumbs from table.

As if striking out against nature herself, men have built up a society, a value system based upon aggression, material power, death. So pervasive is this male ethos, so ubiquitous and domineering, that men, even women, embrace values that are as humanistically meaningless as they are overtly destructive. Global War, economic competition, personal alienation, a decimation of the feminine in us all — Tomahawk missiles, fiscal failure, misogynous madness, poles on the Moon.

We take so many aspects of our society as a stalwhart given, that alternate perspectives, a chance for freedom, are dismissed as subversive, labeled “radical,” or “revolutionary”. We should listen. The Counterforce is present for a reason, a natural balance to energies that have predominated societal consciousness on nearly every level for two millennia. We should listen, while keeping one foot solidly poised on the terra firma, Mother Earth.

Feminist separatism, similar to Black separatism, Jewish separatism and the like, represent extremist views often reflecting the projected biases of that which they criticize, and are therefore more a sign of the urgent need for cultural change than an effective humanistic solution. Whenever one ingredient of any mixture predominates, it throws the entire brew out of balance — opposing forces regroup, attack in an effort to regain the original state of equilibrium. What spews out is plenty of intense heat, anger repressed for centuries, a tumultuous welter of rancor designed to startle and awaken.

Sorting through the chaos, one is often hard-pressed to be able to differentiate between aggressors, as similar tactics and philosophies are practiced by both sides. In the ensuing shuffle for power, ideology is often sacrificed for the political expediencies of the moment, common sense and fairness for the thrill of released anger and an illusory need for revenge. The elixir explodes in the face of the alchemist, the mystic collapses in a state of overwhelming euphoria, both of them wiped out by their own enthusiasm and reckless desire.

I saw Sonia Johnson in Santa Cruz, lecturing at the university there, and as she spoke, hollered, quaked on the podium, I saw not a woman, womb of world, man’s equal and (optional) companion, but the grim satire of an angry male, clever satire thinning suddenly to involuntary parody, as she began to stutter with hatred, shooting Artemis arrows at targets more a figment of her own frustration and indignation than the problems she was trying to address and redress.

Yes, we live in a male-centered, male-dominant society. Yes, women are treated unfairly, are used and abused, sexism not only common but absolutely ubiquitous. The question then becomes, this diagnosis completed, what to do about this problem, how to combat it. To reveal the dilemma to others is essential, yet to effectively combat it begins within, “Control,” sez green and muppety Yoda, Jedi master who lives in a giant carbonated Soda, back here again for some more lessons. can’t seem to get rid of the little guy, “Control, control keep you must.’’

Political maturity is in knowing when to act and when not to, in being sensitive to what can be done at any given moment and what cannot. Contrary to the dictates of the United States Marine Corps™ and the Communist Party, Systems come and go, but The Individual and everything he or she represents remains forever supreme. The Three Musketeers weren’t a bunch of pansies: they knew that a retreat into the glade merely meant that they could come back to fight again yet another day. Imperial Star Destroyers loom in geosynchronous orbit above, cruising the ionosphere in ten cityblock long, masculine triangular splendor, thrusting, pulsating matter / anti-matter engines glowing a deep and crimson red, reverberating rumblerumblerumble as Our Heroes zoom off with a half dozen black and silver twin-hexagonal TIE fighters in hot pursuit, rrrrrooooooohhhhh! the fun of Destiny sometimes as frequent as the inevitability, if one allows that to be so.

Fight for freedom, but free oneself, first. Learn tolerance and understanding, the truth that many complex reasons exist for the way things happen to be, in order to appreciate that intolerance and misunderstanding is what led to this mess in the first place.

“Men go wild in bed,” a friend of mine once said, “since that’s the only place they can.”

She meant that males cannot skip down the street, go goo-goo eyed in shop windows or break down when a rock ’n’ roll star gets a new haircut or is married off to some Hollywood harlot. Only when receiving horizontal refreshments is the American male permitted to voraciously vocalize, express himself non-verbally and vociferously. Trained to Take It, society deems a man truly A Man when he is able to commit major surgery upon himself during a battle of trench warfare in WWI Europe, without anesthesia, with only one usable arm, no bandages, under mortar fire, being gassed, in the dark, alone. Whether successful or not becomes irrelevant: as long as he doesn’t shout, or — God forbid — cry.

This tendency toward ultra-machoism has even invaded the gay community. Another friend was in a bar when a stranger out of nowhere collapsed onto his lap, stone drunk, and summarily began to fondle his groin area.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the unexpected visitor said, “Hope I didn’t hurt anything.”

To which my friend tesponded, “You can’t hurt steel, so get off of me.”

Underneath every macho man, sez Burt Reynolds in People magazine, is an insecure little boy. We should believe him, since he should know. To an artist, to anyone sensitive to life and what it has to offer, balance, an eye for symmetry, is where Beauty lies. For within every man lies a woman, dormant, hidden, subterranean, and within every woman, a man of shadowy scope and intent.

“I’ve heard that nobody gives a better blow job than another guy,” sez Johnny Nimbusson, groucho0brows fluttering up and down, up and down.

“Why, cause they have one?” I suggest as a plausible explanation to this married man with kids.

Homosexuality, bisexuality, tranvesticism, transexuality, more boundaries, separations, analyses of the human condition to selfishly capitalize on or sensibly discard into the dustbin of erroneous preconception and unjust discrimination. Whenever I go to ask Theresa, one of the porters, to do anything, be it sweep discarded tickets, check the bathroom, or clean a soiled window, she invariably asks me, “Do I have an option?” At first, I don’t understand her question. “What?” I ask, to which she repeats that same odd question, more a statement, really: “Do I have an option?” What a woman! Does she have an option? Do any of us?

OLD PAGAN PROVERB: Before enlightenment, do the laundry. After enlightenment, do more laundry.

Nullie, the waitress in the Derby Club I was meant to interrogate regarding the evening’s atrocities up front in the teller lines so very long ago, does her own laundry, and more. In between cycles, I’d love to save the Universe with her. Working two full-time jobs, one at the University Hall offices at UIC, the other her waiting and bookkeeping at this OTB, she has had to deal with more three-letter bureaucratic code combinations than would otherwise be healthy. Supporting herself, putting herself through college, she lays waste to Nimbusson’s assessment that she is educated beyond her intelligence.

Come on, Johnny, the CIA actually hired her — they really did. She applied, and was subsequently flown out to Viriginia for more testing. She passed. Apparently, a few of the reasons she didn’t take the job were because she was unwilling to sign away all her first amendment rights, the acquisition of yet another acronymic trigrammaton would have sent her reeling for cover underneath a glaringly innocuous top secret folder or dossier, and the prospect of residing in Viriginia wasn’t altogether appealing for her. A fan of books like The Closing of the American Mind and American Cultural Literacy, she honestly seeks academic transcendence through elitism, much like she seeks romantic transcendence through celibacy, but will sooner or later get over both. (If she could dump the CIA, she can certainly dump the University of Chicago.) Watch out.

Many intelligent people get swallowed up in such pedantry when they look upon the current scene with disgust, and finally discover someone eager and willing to discuss many of the problems, offer a few enticingly simple “answers,” though unfortunately from a vantage point that created the mess in the first place — who, might we ask, is really asking the questions?

“One reason academic competition is so fast and furious,” said one dilettante, “is because the stakes are so dismally low.” Academicians, egoes the size of Rotterdam, create their own dilemmas in order to glow in the false glory of their own frivolous and self-indulgent solutions. Bloom, the American mindcloser from UIC, is a case in joint: starting out with the rather obvious and glaringly unoriginal assumption that the current pedagogical scene in the States is atrocious, he feels that blame must be applied, changes implemented. Since he is also convinced that at bottom The Academy both influences society and dictates its standards (instead of the other way around), he blames tendencies toward liberalism and “cultural relativism” within the university for complex problems gripping many aspects of society as a whole.

If society is all screwed up, then the books intellectuals read in college must be the cause. Change the canon, then, change the standards. Since society is moving deeper into liberalism, set standards, set absolute standards, set standards matching the conservative dream of timelessness and stasis, select works from a world unchanging and unchangeable. All well and good, but the question arises, justifiably, as to which books, which ideas we are to select from that stone statued aeon.

Worship of the classics is similarly akin to a contemporary denial that artistic creativity is possible anymore. If everything has already been done, if everything has already been written, than what is left for us to do, but write about the past, instead of forging a new art, a new future for ourselves?

A victim of a really poor relationship or two, Nullie exudes the aura of one pissed off though still looking, disappointed though still hopeful, a woman frustrated by men and their world though simultaneously still attracted to them. The mixture of acute phases of oscillating attraction and repulsion often times being a bit much to bear, both for herself and for a few of those patient, mutually attracted souls around her.

Now, in the kitchen, the oven hot and glowing, she ambles over, smiling, watching me consume mass quantities of the cream of spinach soup. Instantly, we make a mutual appraisal. I give myself 5-to-4 odds that before the week is out, I’ll be asking her for her phone number, feel the sine wave of her love/hate, as the board shifts to 3-to-1. Down boy, down. I drool staccato as a Thompson. She is cute, extremely cute, and that ain’t no horseshit. She is so round and full that I want to snuggle amid her cleavage. Her hair is brown and all frizzled out, as if she accidentally adjusted the radio station while in the tub, although I’m the one who feels more like he got his lithium batteries recharged with eighteen kilo love volts of Raw Desire, galvanic meters spinning spunkilly, dials cranked and cranking, circuit breakers breaking, amperes amping, capacitors capacitating, resistors cease resisting, lines of force all crackling and buzzing, call Con Ed, send a professional, grid down, lights out, engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin…

Traffic cops set up stop signs at major intersections where the signals no longer function, airplanes remain locked in holding patterns above O’hare Airport, emergency battery-power switches on and illuminates the corridors and maintains the alarms, wailing sirens can be heard in the distance, commercial Zeppelins cruise the skies with flowing messages on their bottoms, “Don’t Panic. Help Is On The Way. Repeat. Don’t Panic. We Have Nothing To Fear,” the Coast Guard is alerted, customers in the floors below begin evacuating the entire building, sounds of running feet can be heard clunking in all those artifically illuminated passageways, jet aircraft fly in attack patterns overhead, sonic boom concussions resonating resolutely the stainless steel counter tops and grey plastic cabinets back here in the kitchen as the soup of the night still simmers, the oven glows warmly, while Errol and Thomas laugh, giggle, tease, and sway, hey hey, this white boy might have his day —

“Hi. I’m Mike.”

“Why hello. I’m Nullie.”

I know, I know. When can we get to the good stuff? “How long, uh, have you been working here?”

“Too long. Are you the new floor supervisor?”

‘’Y-y-y-yes, yes, yes. Yes. Yes, I. Yes. Yes I, I, I. Yes I, Yes I a-a-a-a-am.”

“So, what do you really want to do with your life?”

Oh god. Exposed. Revealed. The woman’s got X-ray eyes. Twelve seconds, and she’s already seen right through me. Into me, for god’s sake. Help. Help me. I am not strong enough for this. Sorry, god. I didn’t mean it.

When I played doctor with Francine Paradise in the backyard of her mom’s house at age 7, I honestly thought we were just doing that, playing doctor, nothing else, honest. I told her I saw the procedure during the Emergency! television show, and thought we would have fun re-enacting the scene. A young dark haired girl was found drowning in this Beverly Hills swimming pool, and the paramedic just went straight up to her and sorry god, really now, my intentions were good, they really were. Please. Don’t punish me like this now, please. Strictly Platonic, my fantasies are — whoops! I mean my thoughts, my thoughts, god, my thoughts on this matter are completely innocent here, I mean, I just met the woman, and I think that she is a pretty hot looking woman — no! no! I didn’t say that, I mean, I mean that I meant to say that she is a kind, intelligent woman who no doubt —

“Hey Mike. Can you do me a favor, can you do me a big favor and get the hell out of the kitchen?”

Oh oh, Slip attack. Thus busted, I have no choice but to boogie on out, and Do What I’m Told. I discover through circumstantial evidence that Slip and Nullie were once Involved, and feel the kharmic backlash. Hmm. Two Gemini’s. Bad combo. Too much air. The winds blow strong. Better keep clear of this, take things as they are, let things happen or not happen. My crude and lewd portion of self figures I’d have better luck in the Playboy Club on Walton, behind the indoor swimming pool, in the grotto room, where they used to —

SEVENTH RACE

FOR PROBLEM CASES, SOCIETAL MISFITS, THE TERMINALLY UNEMPLOYABLE
BET WHATEVER THE HELL YOU CAN, QUIT BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE
REHEARSE: GETTING USED TO THE JOINT
DISTANCE: EDGE CITY

“You’ll never believe where I met my wife,” says big Tom, thick shaded glasses, thin mustache, large pot boiler of a security guard belly. “I’m serious, even if I told you, you’d never believe me, especially since we’ve been happily married for an absolutely lovely twenty-five years, have two great kids, and a nice house in the suburbs.”

“Let me guess…”

“Yep, we met in the Playboy Club on Walton Avenue, just behind the indoor swimming pool, in the grotto room, where they used to have these wild and
crazy orgies. That’s right! I met my wife fucking. No shit. I used to work for Hefner. He had a bunch of Jews running things for him. Ask anyone, no better boss every walked the face of this lousy planet than Hugh Hefner, Pepsi™ Cola and all. And that’s where I met my wife. We saw each other back there one Saturday afternoon, screwed, liked it, dated steady for six months, still liked it, and then moved in with each other, got a place not far from here. Soon after that, we got married, and have been together ever since. And after several emigrations, two bouncy, bratty, obnoxious little kids, we’re still happily married, and recall those days in the grotto with great fondness and warmth. How about that one?”

“How about that one.”

“And how about this one?” pointing to Ada, behind the bar, reading an ancient copy of Mr. Boston to kill some time.

“She’s pretty cute.”

“She’s Jewish, too.”

Tommy is one of those guys who loves his heritage, is tremendously proud of it to the point of pomposity, and forever is seeking out one of his own, to tease, ponder, and share all the misery, guilt, and humor of the race.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Hey, Ada,” asks Tom. “Why do Jewish men always die before their wives?”

Ada looks up slowly from her text, smiles, and asks.

“Why?”

“Because they want to!” says Tom, chuckling softly, more to himself than for the benefit of those around.

“I’m insulted,” sighs Ada. “1 really find that insulting,” she continues. “Where did you hear that one? Why are all men so rude, crude, and generally terrible?”

“Hey. Why do Jewish women wear gold diaphragms?”

Ada is beginning to blush, notices it, and shrugs nervously, oh oh. “Why?”

“Because Jewish men like to come into money.”

“Oh, Jesus, Tom, you’ve gotta learn how to control yourself,” I say, trying to spare Ada some of the misery, only it doesn’t seem to work.

“Hey. Why don’t Jewish women swallow?”

“‘Cause they don’t want to get pregnant,” shouts over Gold, the Jewish broker.

He apparently visits the Club two, three times a week, sits at the bar in the same seat next to the register, Mr. Gold resplendent in pressed slacks, topsider loafers, white silk shirt, and red suspenders. His hair is thick, black, Ashkenaz, and he wears it greased back to augment his dark, broad features. Large, thin, red rimmed glasses hang from his semitic schnozzola, and he never fails to carry with him this dapper green and silver palm-sized handicapping computer, one that he rarely hesitates to blame when the horses don’t come in as bought.

“How’d you do yesterday?” asks Tom, poking at one of Gold’s racing programs.

“Oh, pretty good,” replies Gold, “I broke even.”

“How’d you manage that?” wonders Ada.

“I didn’t come in.”

Various low lives hang at the bar, some wealthy, some not, some friendly, some snot. During the races, they tend to become rather animated, situations that rarely startle Ada, few things startling Ada, aside from getting tipped.

“Come on, you homosexual! Come on! Come on! Cocksucker! Come on! You faggot, you cocksucker! Come on! Come on!” yells one of them, a curly-haired financial analist.

He displays this strange tendency of calling his losing horses various diminutive terms for gay, not that he’s every seen or experienced a homosexual racehorse, or wondered what that might be like. In Hungarian, we say lo fas, or, literally translated, “horse cock” when we mean to say “bullshit”. Whenever someone gives you a rap or tries to con you in Budapest, all you have to do is say lo fas (pronounced “low fuss”), and they would laugh at your funny American accent, and go away. Such a linguistic anomaly would certainly interest this strange human anomaly sitting at the bar, although I have never ventured to elaborate upon the Finno-Ugric colloquialism for him, or any repressed homosexuality, likely lingering in droves.

“Come on, you twinkle-toed cocksucking faggot! You Ho Mo Sexual! Come on! I don’t believe this shit! Come on, you lousy bastard queen bitch faggot! Turd burglar! Shit dick! Bum bandit! Come on!”

“That guy has an attitude, Mike. Throw the bastard out,” suggests Maximillian, our wise guy Cuban waiter, plugging a drink combination into the computerized register.

He’s new, too (high turnover at this joint, eh?), and his hair is as crazy as mine, only he seems to have a whole lot more of it, greasy waves frilly and fucked up, making him look as though he were attacked by a blow dryer at some indeterminate time early this morning. During the course of my stay, we succeed in lending a new dimension to the term “male bonding”…

Max is now an inner city young black male:

“Come on now, you Kentucky Fried chicken-necked, lame-assed, pencil-dicked, black-shoeshine-polished, Mick-Jagger-lipped, chrome-domed, walkie-talkie-in-the-cheap-suit-pocket, flashy-tie, bowel-legged, nasty-smellin floor supervisorhead motherfucker, I’ll pop you in your big-assed bugle nose, shit.”

Max is now a highstrutting Mexican-American from Stockton, CA:

“Puta madre! Donde esta su amiga, pinche mericon? I keel you. I keel you family. I have friends, friends in Mehxicoh. They keel you for five dollah. For five doliah, they keel you, they keel you whole fuckin family, puto.”

Max is now Kato, and I am Inspector Clousseau (or Max is Clousseau, and I, Kato — we have trouble sometimes figuring out which is which, who is who around here):

Ka-chomp! Max busts me in my nose, but I wheel around, and kick him smoothly in the groin. Undaunted, he fakes a left, then a right, then pops me in the eye with another left, ouch! Max is now carrying an entire tray full of entres. I sneak up behind him, Waaaaaaaaah! and he makes several checking motions, barely saving the food and drinks from a fatal drop to the cheasie green carpeting.

“Get to work immediately, Max,” sez I in an artificially official capacity. “I don’t want to see any more of this walking around doing nothing, leaning against the wall, hanging at the bar, or I’ll bust your funny looking Aztec nose, you got that? I’ll bust your head, you Fidel Castro cigar smokin, cocaine tokin, missile crisis strokin, Batista ropin, Jai alai pokin, ninety-mile free zone hopin, criminal influx refugee slopin, long necked goofy eyed Scarface lookin nappy headed mother — “

“I’ll waste you, man. I’ll fuck you up. I’ll rip your head off and shit down your neck. I’ll murder your pet poodle. I’ll club you to death. I’ll help you explore new territories in extreme pain and bereavement, you cheap suit wearin, shit eatin grin starin, giggly-assed, furry Hungarian gulash necked, soup du jour suckin, ape walkin, slo talkin, flash tie fairin, big headed, sloppy haired mother — ”

“Oh, shut up you guys,” says Jewels, the heavy-set female Polsky bartender from the second floor with the cherry red cherubic face. ‘’You people spend all day joking around, and you never get any real work done. What do you do here, anyway, Mike? I never see you do anything. You walk around, and eat, and smoke cigarettes, and talk, and I never see you working. I’m going to tell Slip, I really will. You watch me.”

Jewels is the whiner, and everyone knows this, though no one has been able to quiet her fury. At first I was almost shocked by the magnitude of her bitchiness, but as the evening wears on, less so, her attitude a natural expression of her psyche — unpretentious, essentially honest, what you see is exactly what you get, so she ceases to disturb my fragile sense of continuity after our first blow-out.

“She’s not Jewish, is she?” inquires Tommy.

“She might as well be,” I say, further insulting Ada.

“It’s hot in here, god, is it hot,” whines The Whiner. “I don’t want to work tonight. I want a salad from Taco Bell. Where’s Slip? I want to talk to Slip! How can we work here when it’s so hot? I’ve been here since eleven. I’m tired. I’m hungry. Slip! Where’s Slip? Look at Max! Max doesn’t do anything, either. Maybe he got his work ethic from Mike, who probably got it from the welfare bums on two. What did I do to deserve all of you? Tell me? I must have done something totally awful, and the worst part of it is that I don’t know what that was. If I knew, I certainly would never do that again. Whatever in the whole world could be worse than this? Worse than working with all of you. Tell me. Look around. Just look at what I have to put up with. Slip? Slip! I’m going to call Slip right away. Why can’t I just go home? I want to eat something. I’m hot. I’m tired. I’m thirsty. God.”

Then, suddenly from across the way at the teller lines: “Fuck you! Cut me off again, and you’ll regret it! Lousy punk!” Oh, no, not again. I make my way over in my officially artificial capacity, and see what the story is this time. Apparently, this half-drunk businesstype with a wrinkled shirt and sparse head of greasy hair, and a bearded, tint-lensed high roller with a New Yorker accent have gotten in each other’s way. I inflict them both with
my forever sophisticated diplomatic talents, displaying my adeptitude at maintaining palsy — I’m sorry, policy.

“Calm down you guys, or I’ll have to throw you both out.”

Turns out the bearded fellow is a real case study, a true compulsive. He insists he is sole owner of an “Import / Export” company, which could mean anything from a front for foreign illegals, a pornography studio, or a crack house. Anyway and regardless, we kind of take a natural liking to each other, proving yet again that anonymous dictum that you can always tell the personality of a man by examining the company he keeps. If my job responsibilities demand that I circumnavigate this wigged-out wasteland pace by ruminating pace by psychotensive pace, wondering and wandering when the Levee will finally break, washing me back into my very own prenatal Zero, trying to stay conscious in the excruciatingly boring and
grindingly dull meanwhile, the compulsion of The Modular Man has similar effects on the other side of the linen tablecloth.

Portable phone interminably at his side, he first arrives to the Club without bothering with host formalities, and invites himself to an evening of pain by sitting down bruskly, sighing tremendously, and slamming the evening’s program onto his table. Pushing his chair back, he reaches over to adjust the television monitor, turning the volume way to high, wincing noticeably, and then down to a more suitable level, though still too loud for his neighbors, who, most of them regulars too, make faces, scoff, turn silverware around and around again on their napkins, oh, shit, not this guy again, why doesn’t he just simply win for once, commit suicide in order to sustain the state, and have his remains shipped to the Churchill Downs fairground, where they will be ceremonially spread into the rose bushes, a new beginning for a tired, tired soul.

For all I can tell, he enters the Club several times a week with the sole purpose of infuriating himself to the point of nervous breakdown. Always betting the trick stuff, Daily Doubles, Pick Threes, perfectas and the like, he loves to miss a trifecta by a single horse, raise his arms to the one Everlasting and Eternal God who, in all His infinite wisdom, has set aside an infinitesimal portion of His incomprehensibly vast and incontestably Just and True cosmic consciousness for the sole purpose of fucking up one particular bet — mine!

How can this kind of thing happen to me? What have I done to deserve this? Jesus fucking Christ I’m a stinking Jewish atheist but I believe in You for the only reason that You must exist because only an Omnipotent, ass kicking son of a bitch such as yourself could ever screw me over this bad.

The Modular Man loves to lose, and he succeeds. He would like nothing better than to waste one thousand, two thousand dollars a night, but in such a way that he knows perfectly well that barring this stupid mistake that grievous miscalculation the other lost opportunity, he could have driven home with a ten thousand dollar cashed voucher, which in the long run wouldn’t make any difference for him anyway, him being so goddammed rich to begin with.

He just loves to lose, and does that well. Problems occur, of course, when he wins: nose buried in the program, he seems almost ashamed. Rarely does he parade a victory, as the majority of the regulars always do. Instead he will retreat to his table for a few minutes, only to return to the betting tellers in order to place a long shot bet even more farfetched than the last. Statistical realities are in his favor, shame less a virtue to him than violent, unmitigated, directionless, raw driving mad anger anger anger, at himself, the mutuel clerk who misunderstood his request, himself, the waitress who brought the cold soup, himself, the asshole standing in front of him in line, himself, himself, himself, come on, fella, we know who would be the first to go when you got really pissed off.

Actually, though, the tension and imminent threat of total mental collapse seems somehow to be therapeutic for him. Unable to vent many of his pent up frustrations while at work, with his girlfriends, in traffic, speaking on his cellular telephone, he uses this facility as an anger-stimulus, a direction, a justifiable, tangible, societally acceptable target for his limitless negative energy.

As the evening progresses, and I notice more of his patterns, we both get more bold, I with my diabolically dithering comments, him and his beard with his hypertension and general state of systematically increasing angst, a Malthusian gambler’s syndrome, where monies made available from week-to-week increase arithmetically, while net losses increase geometrically, another argument for survival of the richest — keep playing until the money runs out or you commit suicide, whichever comes first. One cannot be sure who is more tortured by his habits: his wife or his accountant. His mania forever maximized, I suddenly catch him gnawing on the end of his little green pencil, folding his program into dada origami shapes that look like swans hit by an environmental accident.

“Tense? Nervous?” another Regular, seated next to him, asks. “Head hurt? See a doctor.”

“Fuck off.”

“Tell me your secret.”

“I play the numbers.”

“Like the lottery?”

‘Worse. I think things over, and then I lose.”

“At least you get to be a bit more interactive.”

“Screw interactive. You know something? One of these nights I’m going to come back here with a goddamned machine gun, an Uzi, you know, and spend half of the first card oiling and loading the thing, getting it nice and ready for when I lose a ten thousand dollar double trifecta by a nose later in the same card, and then spray this whole stinking joint with hot lead, totally wasting everybody, including and especially you.”

“Don’t worry,” his neighbor assures him. “It’s already been done.”

“Yeah? Must have been a while ago. I think the place needs another sweep.”

Turns out the other guy in the exchange is clinically paranoid, a basket case, looneytoon, psychopuppy, pharmacy freeloader, front man for organizations clandestine and operationally fictional. I spitzname him “The Paranoid Gambler,” a misnomer that makes more and more sense as the evening progresses, as he searches his program for the colophon of the grand cabal, the collision point of the ultimate collusion.

He peers from behind cloudy reading glasses, his wrinkled short sleeve shirt a fleeting symbol of the last vestige of his individuality, and I catch him pacing back and forth back and forth as he thinks the pari-mutuels people are deliberately trying to deceive him.

The Paranoid Gambler speculates wildly and highly creatively about manic mechanisms that he seems to understand completely, while at the same time their essences somehow remain stubbornly hidden from him, elusive, a smooth conspiratorial tease, impresses even him it does, this complex layering effect of this dire duplicity, this supple yet fastidious true nature of the informational, multinational, database lie.

Intuitions twisted and twisting, a mystical pessimism that won’t go away, a transcendental fascism with undercurrents that are overwhelming, Our Paranoid Gambling Man is incessantly on guard, aware when most are sleeping, fighting when most are dreaming winning dreams in a plot designed to defeat the naive, the innocent, the unprepared. But he’ll show them!

He won’t let these bastards play any funny numbers on him, oh no oh no oh no he won’t! If he has to, he’ll go all the way to the top, all the way to the plush offices and hushed surroundings of The Racing Board itself with this one! He’s written letters, arranged meetings, signed petitions. He knows people, people who count in places that make a difference, in differences that make a place, he’ll make any person, any System, any Systems and its many persons, collapse under the weight of their own infamy and greed!

But the situation is getting progressively more dangerous: They know about him, They know that he knows, and he knows that Their knowledge of the extent of his knowledge will impair his efficiency, deprive him of his one true advantage, the element of surprise. The Paranoid Gambler hates to lose, and will do anything to divert, subvert, obvert, convert, revert, pervert the figures, the command centers, the dark hidden worlds that plague him.

He waves me over after the raucous ruckus with our Import / Exporter (can an entente emigrate? can a scheme be schematicized?), and takes me to the his side, an initimate now, his arm around my shoulder, as I am perchance the only one left whom he can trust.

“Are you sure that simple laziness might not be to blame for all this?” I finally ask.

“That’s just what I thought — at first. A case of basic, rather gross negligence, yeah, uh huh, that’s just what I thought, just what I thought. But look at this. Look at this. They show the Daily Double probables up there on the monitors, right?”

“Right.”

“They show the perfecta, quinella, and trifecta straight and boxed bet pay outs, right?”

“Right.”

“They even show the Pick Six now and then, when it’s pooled and running for that particular card, right?”

“Right.”

“Now look at this. I mean, look at this.”

“Pick Three’s, yeah, so what?”

“So what? So what?! This is what: They never show the Pick Three payouts! You know what I’m saying, you know what I’m saying to you?”

No, niet, nem, nein. No, I really don’t know what the hell you are talking about, but go ahead, ’cause it’s my job, I guess. They pay me for this kind of thing, even though I’m not sure what this kind of thing is. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

What were you saying?

“Yes, I do.”

“You know what I’m saying? You see, the Pick Three pays more than the Daily Double! You understand me? You understand what I’m saying to you? The Pick Three pays more out than any of those other bets, so they deliberately aren’t showing it to me! It pays out more! And you know which one they never show on the damn screens? Do you know which one they never show?”

Let me guess.

“The Pick Three’s, right?”

“Exactly! Correct! I knew you’d be with me on this one! You got it! They never show the Pick Three’s, because the Pick Three pays more out!”

Oh. My. God.

“That’s amazing.”

“That’s right! The Pick Three pays more out, so they never show it! How do you like that? What do you think of that? Can you get me the mutuels manager? I will remain silent no more. I have my rights. Who’s the manager? Who’s the mutuels manager tonight?”

Hmm… I can hear machine gun fire off in the distance, from beyond the dew drenched palm trees, rattatattatttarattat, I can hear the sounds of choppers slicing through the heavy, humid canopy of air, flying in formation gracefully above, whoogwhoogwhoogwhoog, their shadows in mirror formation on the threatening silence down below.

“Elisabeth, oh, Beth, do you read me, Beth, over? Do you read me, do you copy, Elisabeth, this is Group Mickey, Group Mickey to Elisabeth, over.”

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 —

“Oh, no problem, sir. I’ll call her right away. Right away. Tall, attractive woman, that’s right, that’s right sir, the woman with the dark hair, black and white dress. She’ll be right up to help you out sir, do everything she can for you. Thanks for your observation, thanks for pointing this out to me. I appreciate it. I really do appreciate it. Even more importantly, Others coming after you will remember, remember and appreciate this.”

“Others? What Others?”

Like the floors below the Club, what I hear is that we have our own bevie of regulars up here in the Club, an entire eschelon of which sit back in one or two of the back booths, ashing on the tables, piling up empty beer bottles and dirty glassware, being loud and generally rude to the waitstaff, arguing with the pari-mutuel tellers, tossing losing tickets onto the floor, underdressing on occasion, complaining about the service, making a general nuisance of themselves.

Bill, Archie, a guy who looks like an underweight Richard Pryor, and an old man in a brownish-beige suit who looks as though an unexpected fart would knock him summarily over — ambulances arriving too late, death by a combination of trauma and methane poisoning, another strange case for the books of the Cook Country Hospital. Granted, they each have their interesting and even humorous eccentricities.

First we can consider well-dressed Bill, a black man in his late thirties, built and forever chain smoking someone else’s cigarettes, who incessantly mutters whole words, an odd occasional phrase, just above the audible range of floor superviors, waiters, and fellow compulsives.

“Big bucks. We’re gonna make some big bucks tonight, yeah. Number seven. Number seven is gonna pull through on it, gonna pull through on it, all right.”

Archie, his face badly scarred, must have been in an accident years ago, the disability from which must finance his insatiable gambling obsession. He is rude and overbearing, and when not rude and overbearing, is condescendingly overpolite, which is substantially worse. Displaying a penchant for iced tea (free refills), he gestures and raves from yards away, demanding service, service that a patron who is incessantly overloud and undertipping hardly deserves.

The Richard Pryor clone always has The Big Tip, The Break, The Nightcap Nuance, The Secret Jockey Disclosure that he will drape resplendent in statistical certainty, a mathematical oxymoron and S(n-1) Neverneverland leading to every credulous fools’ demise, including and especially his own. Before each race he parades around with program in hand, gesticulating wildly, as if all should repect and admire his intuitive handicapping acumen, which they finally refuse to, familar already with his track record, his penchant for picking poison.

The Old Guy, well, he seems there for the ride. He never seems to bet, acting as a kind of fixture, the Elderly Apostle of OTB, Saint Gastronomous, fumigating the familial.

“Big bucks tonight. All right. Long lines. Big, long-assed lines. Not enough tellers tonight, uh huh, not enough tellers. Not enough tellers mean some long-assed lines, long-assed lines mean more time to worry, all right,” mumbles Bill, raising both arms up into the air, then letting them drop by his sides, repeating the gesture several times, finally lighting up another cigarette, this one a Kool, last one a Marlboro, before that, a small fake Havanna cigar, menthol, regular, and mouth cancer vapors permeating his Hawaiian shirt and dress slacks. He paces back and forth, inhales, then paces some more, back and forth, he paces back and forth, raising his arms and then dropping them, he paces back and forth, he paces back and forth, all right.

“No no no, you gots to hear me through on this one, you gots to hear me through. Now look hee, look hee,” Richie, Jr. quips, pointing to the program, advertising his folly so all can hear, “this horse ‘Jacky Wacky,’ it be bad, I tell you, it be bad. It made a time a 1:33 on that last race, you remember, you remember now, since I knows all about it, I knows…” with no one listening but the Old Guy.

Old Guy nods, shakes his head, but he seems to nod and shake his head at just about everything. Some say he’s dead, others claim he is a gamblin’ ghost, his kharma lost long ago to the Citibank Corporation.

“Big bucks, big money tonight on that one, all right. Let’s go. Let’s roll it on out. Big bucks. Lotta money, lotta money on this one, all right. Big money. Big dineros. Long lines. Can’t make no bets, with these long lines. Cigarette. You got a cigarette, cigarette for these long lines, right.” Arms up and down up and down, just few pounds lighter, and he’d take off, mumbling all the way to wherever the winds would happen to carry him.

“No. Look at his time on a fast track,” argues Archie, our resident illogical negativist. “A fast track. This isn’t a fast track, is it now? You look at this, look at how it did there. You look.” Archie takes on the air of someone whose shit smells like rosewater on a hot summer’s day.

He picks up his half-filled glass of iced tea, and waves it in my direction. Looking up at me briefly, he commands, “Go and get me some ice for me, will ya now my boy.”

I point to the bar, and smile.

He raises his arms up, now, and then drops them. Must be contagious. Perhaps their cigarettes are laced with good cheer, sweetness and light. Up and down up and down — doubtlessly, they will all meet in Heaven.

Meanwhile, I see that Beth has come up to discuss the subversive tactics and covert operations of her inter-office procedures with The Paranoid Gambler. They huddle in the corner, murmuring to one another, almost intimate, a conflagaration of flagarations.

I wonder about the guy, and figure his psychological state is not surprising. A gambler is forever at the mercy of forces beyond his or her control, visiting Edgecity, often times forgetting to first check with the tourist bureau. Ceaselessly on the brink, the breaking point can never be too far away, one’s visa lost with the luggage.

A reverse polarity works here: pick a winner, and one is akin to God — you have seen the future, divined the statistical runes correctly, successfully interpreted those rancid goose innards on the road to Rome. Arms raised in an All Hail, you salute your commanding officers, and the Word is given to begin construction of the protective enclosure, the boundary wall of the civic mandala. Pick a winner completely randomly, or based upon arbitrary personal hieroglyphics, numbers based upon mommy’s birthday, the date you got married, when your in-law died a violent death, and even better for you and your fate, for then you have established proof that the universe and you are then in total harmony, your sins have been therefore absolved, your existence finally justified. Unseen forces are indeed at work, and they are on your side.

On the leftward path, Lose, and you’re nothing, the Big Zero, whale shit, porous fecal matter of sea urchins, a blasphemous surrealist portrait of your own demise, a doomed member of the Qlippoth, or Shells of the Dead.

Up down, down up, down down down, riding the sine wave blind wave from elation and ensuing megalomania, down to failure, the Ultimate Zip, a losing night, back up again to a win (a titular tease), and the wheel spins round and round, where it stops, only your accountant knows. If you don’t start out a manic-depressive, this place will certainly turn you into one.

“Attention Winner’s Circle Patrons, the time for your medication has now arrived…”

Silly Jake, one of the tellers — I heard how he snuck on the PA system one evening and made that announcement. No one noticed, not even the managers. Surprised?

“Excuse me, excuse me, Sir,” an older gentleman in a starchy, pressed suit comes over to me.

In his left hand he holds a vodka martini, from his parched lips a cigarette hangs loosely, a long column of ash at the tip any moment now about to flutter silently to the ground.

“Yes?”

“Excuse me, can I have a word with you, please?”

Unaccustomed to such politeness, my own surprise for tonight, I wander over to him, curious.

“How can I help you?”

“Excuse me, don’t mean to distrurb you, but have I to tell you something.”

“Sure, go right ahead.”

“You know what? This might sound a bit funny, but you know what?”

“Really now, don’t be shy. I’m here to help you.”

“Well, I think that I’m a compulsive gambler.”

“You think so? Are you sure?”

“Oh. Oh yes. Yes. Yes indeed.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Well, I came in here telling myself that I would stop after the Second Race. I bet all my money, lost most of it, and here we are, in the Seventh Race, and I can’t stop, I really don’t know how to stop.”

The ash finally drops, a powdery universe with less than a second to survive. For some reason, I can’t help but think about the Dr. Seuss TV episode of Horton Hears A Who, where Horton, this swell elephant with a predilection toward bathing and sentimentality, hears this barely audible “Hello! Hello!” coming from this tiny fleck of dust, suspended haphazardly on this pink poppy, and proceeds to discover a complete, independent world in there, its top scientist, a bespectacled Dr. Whovee, convinced about the existence of extradusty lifeforms, and therefore embarked upon his own SETI program. “Hello! Hello!” drifting to Horton’s big old elephantine earlobes.

A jealous ostrich overhears Horton talking to the dustspeck, declares Hortie looney, and lobbies the jungle jumpers to ostracize the poor guy and get rid of that lousy speck of his, hurrumph! With the wicked and wiley Wickershunne Brothers hot on his trail, Horton tries to tell the Doc that they’ve all got to make as much noise as possible in order for their tiny existence to be verified, or all the citizens of Whoville will be destroyed by the umimaginative and easily threatened macro animals of Earth.

A villainous vulture grabs the poppy from Hortons snout, and dumps the thing miles away, amid this vast field of identical flowers. Ears perked, Horton plucks, and finds the prized pop, only to have it snatched away, Horton, his horn, dustspeck and all.

— Boil that dust speck! Boil that dust speck! — We are here! We are here! We are here! — Boil that dust speck! Boil that dustspeck! — We are here! We are here! We are here! —

Down below, Old Doc Whovee runs frantically up and down the length and breadth of micro-Wholand, in a vain effort to make sure everyone, each and every Whoperson in Whoville, from whoplumber to whobanker, from whoteacher to whohandicapper, is contributing.

Still no good, the sound can’t break through the outer clouds of Wholand, and every one seems to be whoing their hearts out, while their Whoniverse remains perilously poised on the prickly pip of Horton’s protracted proboscis, ready to fall into the seething vat of hot oil — Boil that dustspeck! Boil that dustspeck! — all those macrofolk with their microbrains drooling with excitement over poor Horton’s imminent demise — Boil that dustspeck! Boil that dustspeck! — Commerical break. Stop biting your fingernails, go out and get another bag of potatoe chips, dip. Ready? Thirty seconds, twenty, ten, a whodown, a countup until…

Finally, in the remotest corner of the remotest room, Doc Whovee finds this beany-wearing nerdish kid, playing with a yo-yo, silent. Silent. Not making a sound, quiet, yo-yo going up and down up and down. So the doc suddenly grabs the kid, hauling ass up to the very top of his Whoscope, supported by multicolored helium balloons way high in the whoclouds of wholand, his prized instrument an audio telescope to the eardrums of Horton, and hopefully those of the Wickershunnes and that bitch of an ostrich.

“Come on! Sing, dance, shout! Make a noise, any noise, please!” implores Whovee, The Kid being kind of shy, a bit introverted, satisfied with playing with that yo-yo, up and down up and down.

After a few tense moments of annoying, heartstopping ambivalence, The Kid raises his dorky head and finally decides what sound he is going to make:

“Yop!”

Words as physical structures emanate from his lips, and rise out and up, much like the smoke rings of the Caterpillar in the Disney adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, minus the overt pyschedelia.

The three letters and exclamation point rise higher and higher, floating gracefully until they encounter the barrier, the YOP! making those dense whoclouds burst open, and a torrential audio outpouring — We are here! We are here! We are here! — inundate those big critters up top, bending their hearts, opening their minds, the dustspeck and its tiny inhabitants saved, the W. Bros. not such a bad lot afterall, Horton promoted from lunatic pachyderm to all around swell Elephantidae maximus.

And just to boggle your mind further, the show, not insensitive to the yet undiscovered tenets of Fractal Geometry and Chaos Theory, the peculiarities of non-linear dynamics and the New Physics, recursion and self-similarity as the dynamo for twenty-first century science and philosophy, this cartoon show that’s too subtle for kidz and too
sentimental for adultz, ends with the old doc kicking back to relax after The Crisis is over, only to notice this tiny tiny dustspeck floating in front of his nose. “Hello! Hello!” gyrating forth from Whowhoscopes unseen.

“Oh, no!” sez the microdoc, might there be another micro-micro-doc on the other end downdown there, Doc Whowhovee of the Whowhovilles as an added bonus for idle Thursday evening metameta-speculation? TO BE CONTINUED…?

“I don’t think I know how to stop (we’re back, toplevel with The Confessional Gambler), I really don’t. I seem to lose my self in all this, and the deeper in the red I get, the more I have to stake, as if only by doing that I might be able to save what’s left of myself. Really,” taking a deep drag from his cigarette, another irregular tube of ash about to fall, “I’m not sure who I am any more, nor what I can do to find out. I reach down inside, but I get scared of what I’m going to find there, and then run back to the betting windows, hoping that I might avoid the whole situation by picking a winning horse. I want to yell, to scream, to cry out, but I can’t seem to do that either. Hell, I don’t even know what I’d shout out if I had the guts to do that. What do you think I should do about this?”

Our compulsive here honestly wants to know, poor guy. He looks sincere, albeit a bit subtle, sentimental.

“Have you sought professional assistance?” I suggest.

“Yeah, but my psychoanalyst, he prefers Arlington.”

He pauses a moment, taking another deep drag from his cigarette, a sip from his martini. That was really funny. Should I laugh?

“The guy demands Live action, you know what I mean? He’s all into time as a therapeutic kind of thing. He even gives out timepieces for the holidays, you know. Anyway, you just can’t delay anything, he says, hold people or events back. You have to ride the flow, he says. When it comes to the ponies, he hates that sterile, detached, televised feel. Says it’s even worse than shrinking heads in his high rise office.”

Frame by Future Frame
Description: Duration: Technique:

Scene 1: Short range shot of Rodney, one of the mutuel tellers, sitting on his couch at home in front of his television, smoking a cigarette, a huge mound of ash collecting in a tray by his side. The phone rings on a nearby coffee table, and he answers it.

“Yeah,” he says, “sure, Chris, what’s going on? Sure I have a some time, what’s going on?”

Ten seconds.

Cut to:

Scene 2: Long range shot of Chris in a hotel office, sitting opposite a suit and tie manager type, flanked by two security guards. He looks frustrated, though relatively calm. He speaks directly, quietly into the receiver.

“I’m over here at the Hyatt near Arlington. They refuse to cash my payroll check, and I’m short only fourteen bucks on my room and board. Can you come on over here, buddy, and help me out? I really need to ask this favor from you now. They won’t give an inch.”

Fifteen seconds.

Cut to:

Scene 3: Medium range shot of Rodney, extinguishing cigarette, standing up from couch with receiver in hand.

“Sure thing, ace. I’ll make it over there as quickly as I can. Just try and hang tight for now. Don’t let em shaft you in any way. Give me about twenty.”

Seventeen seconds.

Fade to:

Scene 4: Montage, a veritable pastiche of shots, short, medium, and long range, of Rodney driving to the hotel. Angles are from outside the automobile, catching it along the expressway, views taken from overhead bridges, traffic copters, high rise apartment towers adjacent to the expressway.

From inside the automobile, a profile shot of Rodney driving, layered with various shots of passing sights, signs, sites, the hotel looming in the distance, a super close up of Rodney’s hands on the wheel, taking a drag from his cigarette, extinguishing it in the car’s ashtray, adusting the mirror, etc.

Twenty seconds.

Fade to:

Scene 5: Shot from behind Rodney’s head, toward and through front of windshield, catching his auto pulling into hotel parking lot, only to find a squad car with flashing lights.

Scene is sustained until Rodney pulls up next to car, and much to his surprise, discovers Chris in the back seat, restrained with hand cuffs.

Fifteen seconds.

Cut to:

Scene 6: Close range panning shot of Chris still cuffed in the back seat, of patrol car, looking over to Rodney, smirking, shrugging his shoulders, then blankly gazing off into the distance.

Four seconds.

Fade to:

Scene 7: Short range shot of Rodney and a floor supervisor wearing a “Mark” nametag conversing behind the teller counter in the Derby Club on the third floor of an OTB in Chicago.

Rodney offers a cigarette to Mark, he accepts one, and as they both light up, the teller shakes his head and begins to relate what happened after he found Chris with his hands in cuffs in the back seat of that police car.

Twelve seconds.

Cut to:

Scene 8: Close up of Rodney’s face — “So I get to the office, and they tell me that he tried to cash a payroll check that had a closed account on it. They called security, who called the Arlington Heights coppers, who arrested him on a ‘deceptive funds’ charge. I told them that the fact the account was closed wasn’t necessarily his fault, and offered to pay the difference to the hotel on my credit card. The arresting officers agreed in principle, saying that they would take him in first, run some prints on him since he wasn’t carrying any identification, and if he came up clean, then I could go ahead and pay the bill, and everything would be squared off, Chris walking scott free.”

Nineteen seconds.

Cut to:

Scene 9: Close up of Mark’s face, listening, then speaking — “Right. So all would be well if he came up fine on the computers, which, I assume, he finally did, right? I like Chris, and hope he’s okay.”

Seven seconds.

Cut to:

Scene 10: Close up of Rodney’s face — “Here’s where the story will blow your mind. I call the station later in the afternoon, like they says, and speak with the arresting officer. He tells me that Chris has a warrant for his arrest in five states, with a list of felonies involving counterfeiting, embezzlement, misuse of funds, and forgery that stretches longer than your fucking arm. His real name is Chris T. Meaney, and he had at least seven known aliases, aka’s up his asshole. The copper told me that after he finishes one term, they’ll slap on another. The guy is twenty-eight now, and he should be out of the clink by the time he is fourty-eight, fifty. Can you believe that one, huh? I couldn’t fucking believe it, ha ha ha ha ha ha. A conman, busted and thrown in the slammer for a serious stint. No more bloody mary’s for that guy, ha ha ha ha.”

Seventeen seconds.

Cut to:

Scene 11: Close up of Mark’s face — “He told me he worked in real estate, and I believed him. What a smoothy, the face of an angel. No wonder he got away with it for so long. Wow. I never would have thought. No one else seemed to think, either. I had loads of fun with him my first night on the job. We hung out for a while in back, and played the ponies, joked a bit. Are you sure now about this?”

Fifteen seconds.

Cut to:

Scene 12: Medium range shot of both of them — Rodney says, “Yeah, a total conartist. I believed him, too. Real estate, ha ha ha ha ha. Used to go out drinking. He tired to date one of the bartenders before she got the axe, that girl Amy, remember? Just goes to show ya, huh? Ha ha ha ha ha. Guy was stupid, though. He was smooth, but he got busted. He should have stayed here, kept his nose clean. His problem was that he thought he was hot, and preferred the track. See him in twenty years, out again at the damn track, celery stalk in his hand, ha ha ha, if he’s luck — ”

Fifteen seconds.

Sudden black out.

Channel. Volume. Brightness. Contrast.

A part of my function as supervisor in the Club is acting as make-shift host, greeting and seating people down for dinner. Essentially, I ask them if they care to dine, number in their party, and whether they have a smoking or non-smoking preference.

A tall, thinly built man in his late twenties with long, black, curly hair, makes his way unescorted to a back booth, tosses the night’s program and racing form onto his table, and quickly switches the TV without looking at it over to the race circuit on Channel 3. Mike, Mark, Mook or Borus, none of them perchance back in the kitchen eating soup, and thus able to perform as a responsible host, notices him, and takes the visitor a copy of the night menu, extending greetings, a curious stare.

“Name’s Chris,” he says. “I’d rather be at the track, but going out there is a pain for me. Traffic, parking, the bullshit. When I go, I stay at a hotel out there, so I can make it an event, get sloshed. So I figured I might as well settle in here tonight, see what you guys have to offer compared to over there.”

“No problem. Hope you enjoy the visit. Would you like dinner this evening?”

“Naw, just a bloody mary. Extra tabasco. Helps me think.”

“I’ll get you a waiter, hang tight.”

I work my way toward the back kitchen, swinging the door open so that my face protrudes from the other side.

“Yo, hey, yo, you creepy Cuban commie cucaracha, you got a guy in one of the booths, wants a drink, immediately, so hurry the fuck up.”

Whaaaaaaaa-Poooooosh! Ouch!

Maximillian’s fist comes from seemingly out of nowhere, smacking me upside the head. I go carreening back into the dining room, dizzy, swaying, stunned. The bastard. He got me. MAX 1 : MIKE 0. Death.

Once my orientation and composure has been regained, I experience a mild tap on my shoulder.

Max: “Guy in the back booth, wants a bloody mary, right?”

Doom nation.

“Extra tabasco,” I say, under my breath, as I hear Max giggle and head to the bar. I follow. Perhaps I can trip him with a full tray of drinks.

“Someone should devise new additions to the races,” suggests a lawyer type in a silk tuxedo shirt, slacks, tennis shoes. “I don’t know what, but something, just to make them more interesting. Six to twelve horses in a race, ten to eleven races in a card, one to two cards in a day, yeah, big deal, so what?”

“What the hell do you propose?” wonders Gold. “That the goddamned horses should fly?”

Interesting idea: a four-dimensional hyper-race. From a mathematical point of view, the races watched and bet upon are essentially two dimensional affairs, the planal ring of turf, grass, or dirt, forward, left, or to the right, the topological totality of action.

With a horse in front and on either side, there simply isn’t anywhere to go, especially for the evening harness races, those buggies stubbornly clinging to space and time, their jockeys often forced into subversion, clandestine rule breaking, to force an opening, push through the pack. Inquiry! Inquiry! Hold all tickets on this one!

Imagine horses (and their buggies) that could maneuver up and down, too, adding a complete dimension and its infinitiude to techniques in passing, strategies in pacing, a veritable mind twist that would drive even the most docile handicapper batty.

Four-dimensional literature to describe it would seriously blow some minds, critical and otherwise. Consider the astounding appearance of this highly simplified and over stylized two dimensional cross-section of a four-dimensional racing program, scratch sheet, or short story about a rather strange guy’s first evening as floor supervisor at an off track gambling facility on State Street, Chicago:

Although simplified for the purposes of depiction here, imagine each “face” of this “hyper-program” covered with prose. Keep in mind that the printing itself is not the apparently two dimensional (ink does have some height on the page, although insignificant to us) reality characteristic of our presses, but is actually three dimensional in form, creating what I might call here “text objects”.

As far as I can understand it, writing in four dimensions might be something like listening to music for us in three: the words express meaning not only through accepted habits of syntax and applied semantics, but the 4-D reader can directly experience a kind of “meter” and “harmony” to the words and phrases, as the cadence becomes spatial (and tactile?), not only phonetic.

Consider our word, HOME. Its four dimensional textual analog would seem, to us lowly 3-D people at least, to have an infinite amount of variation and “text-ure,” dependent upon the particular context in which it appears. Being truly three dimensional, large words might imply strength, solidity, emotional intensity, small words the opposite, rough feeling words anger and pain, smooth ones love and sensuousness, with a continuous spectrum available between extremes.

Thus, four dimensional dictionaries perhaps have entries of infinite length for a finite collection of words. (Might five dimensional dictionaries have infinite entries for an infinite collection of words? Such an extrapolation, though probably erroneous, is still interesting.) Sentences are read not only from left to right and top to bottom in our 4-D litfantasy, but also from front to back. Letters, whole words, possess not only length and width, but also contour and depth, a kind of topography of typography, with the words that I am plowing through here being veritable landscapes of prose, information utilized to describe conditions of horses, turf, and weather as detailed and complex as the actual phenomenon themselves.

Remember, I am only referring to horsey sheets and racing forms of local Chicago tracks, many of them inherently boring and of a highly inferior style if examined from a strictly literary context. But imagine now four dimensional counterparts to our prose narratives, entire 4-D novels, detective stories where the descriptions and clues concerning a mystery are in the very shapes of the searched for objects or pieces of information?

The possibility of four dimensional symbolist poetry completely blows my mind. As our concrete poets used to create 2-D shapes from their work (like that famous ‘Apfel’ with ‘wurm’ eating through it), might movements of 4-D hyper-concreticists lobby the artistic circles of their world, hoping for a better utilization of their dimensional resources, where the reading of a book would actually involve physical travel in space, as well as in time and mind?

Hmmm…

“‘Wager Wabbit’,” wonders Gold loudly aloud, shaking his head, tossing a folded program onto the bar.

“Get that horse to fly and I might bet on him. But who the fuck in his right mind would ever bet on a horse called ‘Woger Wabbit?”’

“Well, I heard you bet twenty bucks to win on ‘Spazzo’ the other night,” blurts out the homophobe.

“And goofy name or not, he placed, and screwed your ass over.”

“‘Spazzo’ is one thing, but money on ‘Woger Wabbit’? Give me a goddamned break. Shit. Give me a goddamned drink.”

“Are you a religious man?” I walk over and inquire of Gold.

“Not any more,” he says, “not any more. It’s my wife, you see…”

Sex, superstition, and gambling have been linked since the very dawn of history, the pre-adolescence of the species. Ancient Egyptian priests practiced celibacy for a period of anywhere from a month to a full year
before the consummation of an important ritual, the menstral baths of Massada survive to this day. Jonathan Edwards would rip open the fire and brimstone gates of hell to condemn heathens, blasphemers — ever hear a Southern tale-evangelist pronounce ‘blasphemers’ (blazuh-fee-em-moorz), kind of the same way he’d pronoun ‘asshole’ (az-uh-hoh-luh), throwing in that extra fine syllable or two and corresponding facial contortion of the sphincter muscles for that special, ee-van-uh-juh-el-i-cal emphasis) — and masturbators — that you don’t have to pronounce, ya Just Do It…

Sex and gambling combine in much the same manner, as all sources of energy must be tapped or systematically avoided to either refurbish or maintain the vitalism of the soul during moments of intense
meditation and fervent concentration, whether these sombre spiritual moments be directed toward god, pony, or right back toward peoples of our sensual desire.

Oddly enough, most of our Club patrons are men who appear nightly sans their wives, girlfriends, and “friends,” although occasionally, I am told, a guest appearance is made. As an effort in compensation, we have our regular contingency of prostitutes, one of whom in particular is very visible, in the Club and basically throughout the place. Moving from table-to-table sometimes, I see her wandering, artificially stringy, permed and teased hair, cute though somewhat disturbed face, a large canvass bag at her side containing — who knows? — most of her worldy wealth.

At first amusing, she now saddens me, a living, walking symbol of this whole joint, much of life in this country, really, where a sell-out is not only common, but expected. A loveless past, loveless future, substitutions get made along the way, the rejection, dismay, and hatred get projected into the physical, into the monetary, a dismal substitute for things that should be a given, but rarely are.

The older I get, the more I see of the world, the more I begin to understand its human mechanisms, the more I become convinced that the family unit is the most significant archetype existing in the world. Our legal systems were founded on arbitration between families, a collectivisation and generalization of principles used to prevent feuding, maintain the peace between clans. Industrialization, colonization, the rise of mass urban living, all contributed to the systematic, inertial disjunction of family value, pride, security. The rise of the mafia, inner city gangs, increase in crime in general, are but shadows of the forgotten archetype, the rejected psychical blueprint that has gotten pissed-off and has returned to haunt contemporary society, re-establish emotional balance through an upsurge ot the unconscious, instinctual, animalistic aspects of that which we have denied ourselves.

And what have we done to women in the process? With over two thousand years of conventional female symbology that reeks of purity, whiteness, virginity and sensual death, no wonder that the women girls look up to these days are Madonna and her like. At long last, an international slut without shame, a fashion whore who markets herself and her body and its various functions openly, outwardly, with no guilt, no regret or embarassment — for prostitution, pornography, and sex crimes flourish only in a society that has the repressive mechanisms to warrant their prevalence.

May we all live to see the time when a woman like Madonna will bore us all to tears, when our collective symbols reflect not the tendencies for denial and self-sacrifice of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but the open, free, multifarious imagery of an era when the human body and its processes were considered sacred, and therefore allowed to function with boldness, self-awareness, and impunity from metaphysical nonsense and shame.

Bloated by feelings of our own self-importance and blinded by the mistakes of our predecessors, we trudge into the 21st Century with unclaimed baggage and a predilection for getting onto the wrong aeroplane, beating the stewardice with uncomfortable pillows, fuzzy blankets, plastic trays, and waxlined barf bags when we realize that the flight from Hawaii to Brazil is considerable, and that, whether you like physical reality or not, the sun crosses the sky from east to west (watch that gradual darkening, those shifting shadows!), independent of mood or meterological condition. Going against Nature might be natural, but so is Death. How we choose to die is oddly dependent upon how we choose to live.

Johnny Nimbusson is on a diet, though is immune to bleu cheese dressing. He succumbs. Serving tray with a yummy spread of house salad, dressing, bread basket, butter and lemon-bobbing iced tea drink, he retreats to a table in the Mezzanine, and I join him down there, his coordinated conversation best orchestrated while being fed.

Our talk winds around and across a dozen different subjects, as it usually does, gravitating toward literature, Art, miscellaneous gossip, the usually unusual, the atypically typical. Chomp chomp chomp. Johnny eats as he speaks, slowly, calmly, thinking things over between mouthfuls. A Pisces, he is immersed in the sensory, although he’d be the first to dismiss astrology as more hokey bullshit to talk about, laugh at, and finally reject.

Patrons sit off in the distant corners, consulting programs like astrologers, hunched and subversive, wondering if they can get away with smoking in non-smoking, eating some more outside food from Taco Bell or Dunkin Donusts, now that supervisor and security are occupied. Somehow, though not altogether surprisingly, the question of my current abstinence from indulgence in house salads and other Derby Club cuisine comes up.

“No, I’m not dieting,” I confess. “I’m just broke.”

“What do you mean?”

“Actually, I have no cashflow this month. I think I’ll barely pull rent.”

“You gotta do something about that. You can’t live like that.”

I am suddenly tranfixed in time and space, an unwelcome invitation to deja vu, the art of seeing someone else living your life a long time ago right this
moment, though without the fun and excitement of reliving anything particularly pleasurable, or through somebody I can identify with. On many an occasion, I have found myself confiding in surrogate daddies of one disposition or another, people I respected by virtue of their life experiences, the emotional significance and need for a mentor, guide, master whom I thought I could trust.

Invariably, my rather bohemian existence would enter the picture, sparks eventually flying, culminating in a walk-out, usually on my part. “I think that I will be gone for rather a long time,” said that martyred Brit Arctic explorer, voluntarilly wandering out forever into the tundra, sacrificing himself when he realized the horse meat wouldn’t be adequate for the entire team — should have taken dogs and sleds, guys, exactly as I should have looked for daddy elsewhere.

The essence of our society being extroverted, materialistic, the sign of “success” has thus become monetary, putting great pressure on those who can’t or won’t deliver in the financial sense. One grows older, and wisdom is equated with money in the bank, a career position that guarantees material security and stability.

Not that those things are innately bad, far from that, as I would be the first to say that eating three meals a day and not having to worry about next month’s rent should be considered far from being a luxury. Ah, youth, you say. Wasted on the young?

“Ak-ptooey!” like that Bill the Cat sez in the Sunday morning color comix. Looking around me and my memories, at all the older folks who were never there to help or assist us in any way, who actually hindered us consciously and unconsciously with their own brand of darkness, I’m tempted to say that many lives, many lies, regardless of age, are wasted, Wasted in the inner-city drug sense, lost in some thorazine stupor of powerlessness, fear, emotional blindness, and even jealousy.

I look at my father, for one, the selfish, selfless professors at college, the entire generation ahead of us. What have they as a whole given us? What kind of hope? What type of advice and wise council? For that matter, what type of world that we have been forced to cope with and grow up amidst Time magazine calls us The Lost Generation, when all I can conclude is that we never even had much of a world to lose.

The archetype of the Teacher, the Master, is certainly very strong, inevitable, really — for how are the young supposed to learn, how are the truths that lie eternal to all ages to be handed down and shared? How is The Void to be breached, its vastness filled? Must we all go through the pain of rediscovery, with no helping hand to guide us? We are taught to lie, we are taught to cheat, and steal, and grab whatever we can take, with no thought of others, of the natural world that we decimate in the process.

Our educational institutions and the ideas they promulgate are for the most part a flamboyant sham, the professors are a host of cowards and thieves, places of business hold tyrants who run heartless enterprises worshipping only money and the wanton materialism it represents. Lost among ourselves and our own ideas, we have only those akin to us who will stand by us, support us, give us some council and education. We have all been born into an ungodly travesty, and in this sense, all of us, each and every last one of us, is a survivor.

Hold on tight to the guard rails for a second, contemplate some etymology. The English word career comes from the French carriere, another word for race course, a place you race cars. Hmm. Amusingly appropriate.

Our society is running, gambling for time and energy. Eisenhower paved half the surface area of the States with enough high-speed roadway to get to the Moon and back. Movement, travel, secondary to the American dream of an auto in every suburban garage, a garage at the side of every suburban home. As Americans, as Westerners, we all have to DO something, the effective, tangible sign of happiness and accomplishment represented by an elucive concept known as “functional”.

When a person is depressed, we present our diagnosis based upon his or her “inability to function” — Stop — What does that mean? A person should function, yes, but in what manner? Was Richard Nixon healthy and sane by
virtue of his ability to function, when functioning meant carpet bombing Hanoi and the port of Haiphong in the midst of final negotiations? By virtue of his skilfullness in coining such a ridiculous and self-contradictory phrase as “peace with honor”? by behaving like an opportunistic despot, propelling his nation into futile war, economic recession, corruption at the very top? Is the measure of a human being based upon his or her ability to acquire wealth, acquire material possessions, hold power over people, regardless of the ramifications?

When Nimbusson tells me that I am not living my life as I should simply because I have no money, I am angered, frustrated, feel alone — not so much in that I feel insulted in that errors have been made (while in all fairness I admit that they have, only not quite in the manner or the magnitude it seems my partner considers them), but by the difficult reality that a living symbol of conventionality, material comfort, and moral ambivalence sits across from me, judging me based upon standards that I consider anitthetical to my own value system.

But the real problem is that I like Johnny, enjoy his company, and know that something has changed between us, that subtlely, obliquely, things won’t be quite the same in the mental patterns we weave, in the good times we like to share. Idle talk is idle talk, while tendencies soon enough become apparent, and divergences of opinion begin to penetrate deeper and deeper.

To stock the Void of meaninglessness and human isolation, we all fill our lives with various emotional contents that make life worth living, that best satisfy our individual needs. Since emotional need and any remote semblance to any “objective” truth are usually irreconcilable, most of us opt for short term solutions, approaches that, even if counter-productive or self-destructive, at least give us a sense of self, provide the motivation for going on living. With the intellect essentially the slave of the passions, we fabricate models, ideas, paradigms to fit our heartfelt, basically irrational worldviews, attitudes we cherish, from step one — the generation of fictions and their method of application being arbitrary, we pick and choose what works best for us, what we believe will make us happy.

When people disagree, look not to the panoply of factual information presented, but to the core of their moral fiber, to the essence of their values, their drives and idiosyncracies of self. Johnny and I are of different worlds, and our disagreements have absolutely nothing to do with logic, or reason, or some attempt at resolving the errors of the world, or even ourselves. Truth is not like a ladder rising up to Heaven or spiralling down to Hell, but is more like a complex associative network between extremes, a branching tree with axiomatic foundations, statistical directives, while possessing a natural duplicity, an elucive kind of arbitrariness that defies absolute analysis, complete evaluation.

Kurt Godel formalized the dilemma in 1930, proving the speculation of Bertrand Russell that a given set cannot be both Complete and Consistent at the same time — and what applies to abstract logic oddly enough applies to just about everything else, giving a new twist to the nonsense of Lewis Carroll and even Edward Lear. With limitations of method and Wittgensteinian ignorance forced upon us by the very laws of the Universe, nonsense might be the only manner through which we can come to understand ourselves, the world that has created us and that we turn around and recreate with every observation, every attempt at analysis.

So, forget the White Rabbit, don’t bother with Sylvie and Bruno, but go right ahead and consult dictionairies for the various translations if you feel like it, since we have some serious Snark hunting to decipher and launch tonight, of and into the wilderness:

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care
They pursued it with forks and hope
They threatened its life with a railway-share
They charmed it with smiles and soap

Leaves, fruit, the green, living canopy of the tree is but the surface of Reality of as we experience it. Underneath the bark, channels of water and lifeforce flow, insects fester and breed in the roots, the entire structure feeding on the shit, the decay of the forest floor, the rains and moisture of water that circulates and recirculates through the aeons, generating not “truth,” no, whatever that could possibly mean in this most basic and banal of contexts, but the rawness, the animality of experience, expressions of the life and death forces, the teeming, searing, often times violent and amoral eddies and vortices of Nature that knows and accepts no other purpose than simple Being. Any “decision,” or “meaning” is an abstraction created by consciousness in order to lend some rational credence to all that change and forced transformation, all that necessary suffering, destruction, and painful rebirth. The con continues: human living would be impossible without it.

But as we learn from some of these naked experiences, we learn also how to select the fictions which work best for us, both on a personal and societal level. Contradictions are inevitable, as they are in any willful act, for to move favorably in one direction is to move unfavorably in another, to move positively is to also move negatively. Transcendence, reaching that state of enabling oneself to realize freedom from the constrictions and inherent contradictions of Natural Law, is yet another fiction, but one, like any other, which will possess some measure of relevance if we learn how to make that sophisticated lie work for us in the long run, instead of against us.

Mr. Meaney tried to circumvent the human system, and he failed, tossed into the clink for ten to twenty — Johnny Nimbusson has appeased society, and has been rewarded, close to six figures a year, his very own name signed on the checks. I stand somewhere suspended in between, a legal radical, an unassuming and often times apathetic bohemian whose standards, intuitions, frustrations, personal complications have led to a strange mixture of circumvention and appeasement, a young man whose time has not yet come, though some day or night might, in a manner that neither a family man nor a felon can as yet ascertain. A broken family, problems in school, limited options in certain areas often point to directions and possibiliites that otherwise would never have been noticed, let alone embarked upon.

If the uncertainties and trepidations of life create disorientation and existential Fear, they also hold the keys to hope, real magick, the dynamics of faith. “Whatever doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger,” wrote that other weirdo, Fritz Nietzsche, and he was right. As a human being who masochistically enjoys the thrills and spills of scribbling in the funk of the baboon-god Thoth, the idea of living and life as a literary piece following the syntax and semantics of the written Word is intriguing and all-consuming.

As any decent writer knows, the personal success of any literary exercise has little relation to the jealous rancor and over-inflation of critics, stranger or personal acquaintance. Keep your eyes on the monitors, programs, media fictions of contemporary life. What you see before you is a longshot, though a content one.

Regardless of how they will place at the finish, the transcript of life continues, riders and betters, readers and writers, all as a series of concurrent ironic juxtapositions, these polar opposites becoming unified at the place where parallel lines converge, where the infinite and the infinitessimal are one.

And as the Big Ship slowly sinks off in the distance, the point of its bow raised up to heaven, red search flares lighting up the cold night sky, wreckage strewn haphazardly in its oceanic wake, flotsam and jetsam, lights and shadows, Tweedledum and Tweedledummer, barrels of light beer and dark, fantoms of psyche and eros all bobbing up and down like stenciled patterns on some neurotic’s silly hat, survivors trying not to choke on all that lewd verbiage, trying to grab onto something solid, less dense than water. For we’ve all got quite a wait till the rescue ship arrives — if it ever will — but we meantime share the warmth, and some good cheer, with those we can trust, feel some measure of comradeship with.

What to make of Johnny N., images of a helicopter on the roof of a skyscraper, a good guy detective wearing a cowboy hat leaping to the roof? What to make of Johnny N., with his wonderful sense of humor and his capacity for compassion? What to make of Johnny N., of all the older folk who seem to care in their hearts, but who have retreated to distant shores for cheap whores and para-sailing before the boat ever left port?

What to make of our water logged transcripts of our lives, floating in the womb warm sea behind us, the Moon reflecting off those tranquil, breezy shores, as we lay waiting for that one lone craft and its boney-fingered cloaked ferryman, willing and able to carry us over to the other side, and only for possession of that silver coin pressed against our closed eyes, that last bet before the Big Race? You choose it — heads or tails, zero or one?

Continued in Part 4…

Part 4: Night at the Races