Happy Now? I'm here again. It's me... Buffy Strangelove... Remember me? It's time for re-entry. Turn the mobiles off. I'm under the floorboards and in the waiting room. I'm needled. I look around and cultivate contempt for my fellow passengers. All except Dionysia, my intended. I love her, because she's like me, because she is me. I forgive everything where she's concerned. I'm looking out at the planets and I'm flirting with rage. I've just had my 6th, one drink too many and I'm eyeing up a suitable target for dischargeable anger. When the gods fall out, mortals tremble. And I'm raged up, full of anger. My last re-birth was ineffectual. I blew it. Big time. I flew in at 8:00am a reduced presence. Never got used to the stomach churning pressure bursts that characterize cheap economy flights up and down the world, never acclimatized to the sudden loss of altitude, scoring a cheap lesion of freighted panic in my temporal lobe, electrical circuits suddenly billowing with undischarged energy...

Planes cleared for landing choreograph a mimetic ballet of grace. In and out over the sea, lugubrious and of undisclosed tonnage, the planes score out these vectors of intent, bad intent, whose directness mimics their passengers' incorrectly assumed infallibility. It's a conspiracy of complacency, airline placemen affecting indifference, producing a kind of somnambulant acceptance of the inevitable. Out to sea and a few circles described gracefully against the nothingness before banking back towards dry land. Birds of a feather, ironclad, bursting energy barriers, and churning the uptight stomachs of raged-up economy fliers, back from backpacking holidays and mini-breaks to the continent.

I have to admit I don't seem like the best of flyers. I act out like a novice, wincing and palpitating with fake anxiety. I grip the arm rests in simulated panic, my furrowed brow describing an outright unease, a pretence which keeps in check my propensity for flight violence. I feign a nervousness I don't feel, affecting a satirical antidote to the spurious serenity of my becalmed and complacent fellow passengers. I scream suddenly and ridiculously, a falsetto shriek of comedy horror, and harvest the baleful looks that are cast in my direction. Every narrowed eye, each gritted tooth a scalp, a trophy on the sideboard of my petty shadenfreude. I'm famous, or infamous, for brawling on charter flights, getting boozed up and petulant, peevishly niggling at fellow passengers, laughing as we hit turbulence, giving the attendants a hard time, asking for yet more booze, tsking ostentatiously at the way people recline in their seats. I'm always good for half a page of tabloid jokiness.

As we come in to land, engines throttling back, I discharge gently I'm noticed, a turn of the emanatory head a goddess well known to me is sitting three rows in front. My wife Dionysia, beautiful and stylish household goddess, flame headed and heavy lidded, knows from this gesture of infinite tenderness that I intend to become her, at least until customs are cleared. We sit apart so as not to attract attention. We are twins, separated at birth, and re-conjoined in love, mutual dependence, respect and gnosis. Elephant gnosis . The energy flows are open (yeah!) re-birthing season is again upon us, the elephant tracks are re-emplaced and we are about to re-open London for numinous devotional action. The electricity reservoirs are dangerously full (again), all gurus, accountants, PR men, friendly politicos, personality broadcasters, agents and commissioners of TV documentaries (and parody documentaries, and reality shows and all cable blether shows, niche slots for insomniacs and the needy mad, the belligerent mad and the quietly desperate) are primed for action. Disqualified from appearing on any of my shows are the disenfranchised who, under common law, are "idiots" and "lunatics in their non-lucid intervals". The country, opened up to the clandestine presiding spirits, like all potentially numinous countries repeals freedom as and when it suits. A show of selective "democracy" is enough to get us fighting mad. We hate that. If the greasy politicians and psycho-secular power brokers knew we were landing, the shit would really hit the fan. So for now, I have to secrete myself. We'll clean up here, not from a coarse desire for attention, fame or money, but out of love. Love, hate and fecklessness. We are boozed up already. We'll spread out in London.

I wanted to marry Dionysia many years ago, but she was from a different caste, and was disadvantaged in my dreams by the furious opposition of her mother and especially her father from contemplating a re-birthing with me. But I overcame all opposition. I always overcome all opposition. I'm a can-do kind of guy. I operate out of rage, from under the floorboards. I nurture bitter obsessions and nurse vendettas in my bosom. People better watch out for me. I killed 'em all. Palace coup, gunfire ringing through the windy corridors, made to look like an accident. But anyway, as I say, Dionysia and I were joined in birth, joined like royalty at the head. The shared brainpan eventuating massive Gnostic capability, approached in intensity only by the larger mammals. Like elephants. Whales too, although cetaceans don't have their unlimited power. Unfortunate associations and alignments with navel gazers and earth huggers circumscribe cetacean power. They're too closely identified with bleeding soul types, tainted slightly by association. But we're self-selecting see? Our kind of exhibitionism is beyond the scope of satire. We appear as we are, self selected. The best surgeons were dismissed and we were subsequently enabled to separate ourselves. Tripartite separation oh, did I mention Frank? No? Well Frank's a bad man. He was involved somewhere. We killed him though. Oh, later on. Frank doesn't have a psychology. He doesn't behave as you might expect, doesn't conform to traditional narrative linearity. He was married to Dionysia before me. He was my brother, but like I say, I killed him. He became an academic, reason enough one might assume for fratricide.

Through customs, I blend in. Not willing to attract attention to myself, I am secreted in translucent carrier bags; I morph into more seductive forms. I become sexy, stylish, high heels clicking over the parquet. Giving out pheromone signals, I turn heads, distracting attention from the fact that I am toting a good deal of surplus electrical baggage. At this stage one of my clandestine familiars, a gentleman dressed in the American style, with long unkempt hair and with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, approaches the customs officials and introduces himself. After an eternity of pretended efficiency and half-arsed officiousness, they are still staring bleakly at him. He then pleads for clemency on the grounds of his own stupidity, a plea that is rejected. Meanwhile I am able to sneak through with the minimum of fuss, the sniffers' attention distracted by the American who continues to loudly proclaim the innocence of the camera which he wears around his neck, which he claims is a dependent. My essential being meanwhile is hidden under a starkly effective mink, a cosseted fetish in furs. Frank is in a duty free bag and Dionysia is me again. The customs men are, as I say, too pre-occupied or dazed to realize that all other observers and potential troublemakers are in the throes of love. I am able, from the bag, to capture the desecrated hearts of all men and women in the vicinity with a capacity for beauty. They are suddenly aware (in some cases for the one and only time in their lives dimly recognizing that there is something they've forgotten to take care of, something intrinsic, something fundamental) of the over-riding need for love . These people immediately break down sudden emotional incontinence, hugging each other, spontaneously keening and moaning. Low level heartbreak, all the more poignant as it is of course merely a temporary window into their forsaken-ness, mischievously and maliciously opened by me, a window whose existence they'd always thereafter be aware of, but which they'd have no means of re-accessing. Heartbreaking all round. They sense for this one transcendental moment that their lives have up till now been lived according to un-likely and highly spurious rules. And because of my ersatz malevolence they will forever after be obliged to live with the memory of something they can never recapture. Like I said, I'm a can-do type of a guy. I have to hurt to make the connection. Ruthless honesty and soul searching, in the quest for personal attention, must be rigorously applied. I plan to re-awaken the urge to seek attention, to recapture the briefly enlightened moment of transcendence. Otherwise they'll never know. But this is only a foretaste. This is only the beginning. There's more to be done, electricity to disperse.

In a dream, they watch me pass through customs as though they've seen an angel. As indeed they have. I've always been a prick-tease like that. My beatific countenance always evinces a beatific spirituality co-mingled with deadpan whorishness, a devotional come-on, Hollywood inspired. So, this brief inner stirring, this all too transient tumescence of the soul is, for these tormented individuals, for whom the presence of angels is heartbreakingly only for this one moment among many a possibility, so sad. So sad. Oh well, things to do. Tracks to lay, agents to contact. I'm actually lying when I say that my actions are born out of malevolence. But I can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. I needed we needed, to clear customs intact.

So this is how Dionyisia and I skip customs. We show them the light, briefly enough for their hearts to be broken. Our custom is thus to slip un-noticed although fully re-birthed into country after country, onlookers in the reception lounges uneasily aware of an incipient divinity within their grasp. It's a responsibility we don't intend to evade. I've lived under the floorboards too long. Through a natural talent for outsider intransigence, I spin webs, spiritual matrices to catch the souls of those willing and able to see us our visions, to re-cog us as the angels we may well be. I'm traduced for this by apostate ex-gods, stethoscope toting functionaries, obsessive demiurges, surgeons of the base levels who stalk me and my dreams, who are in pursuit of me, who are switched off, who don't believe in this thing that we've become. Non-twinned and from the lower castes, they eke out a living carving out the tumours and lesions that mere flesh is prey to. They are hospital vampires drinks parties with the admin whores, civic unction displayed at all times, kickbacks from the drug companies, reliance on pure hospital grade morphine, holidays in the darkness of needless operations.

They say:

"I help people... people like you...."

To which their patients reply

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning... what you want it to mean..."

"You... you just leave... my wife... alone!"

"If you've got a problem with your conscience, it's gonna get a whole lot worse afterwards, believe me."

The above dialogue filtered through to me from a distant place. Some sort of waiting room. A place in which the vengeful pursuit by Ahab of my tripartite godhead had been ruthlessly fictionalized, for a purpose not of my own making, brought to life by second rate actors. My life had, in this tarnished version, become cheap (although expensively assembled) Sunday evening drama. It was an echo from a pre-birthed age, a psychological past, and a past in which people were able to believe in a narrative psychoanalysis of their motives. An age before psychology had not yet become entirely coffee table. An age of production values, devalued intent, faces upon which expressions can be read, no matter how artful the attempt to conceal motives. Faces lit ingeniously to capture the spiritual essence of this or that character. Like we ever believed in that. Maybe some did. Maybe. But I resolved to use it later on in my dealings with Frank, who would need some careful handling when it came out about me and Dionysia...

(other voices intervene here) There might be a way around this though. Let this drift, till management takeover. Finance? Overdraft. Also, don't minute this. Divisional stringency and a lifetime's drift. In Academe. I WILL be at future meetings. Wankbait has som.th. to say. Review progress -> instigation. Human remains/resources fr. Rebirthings. Scumcunt. We can't review this until we ourselves are reviewed. I am process/in review. Hellenic. Subjudice. Mythological format to confound psychologist linearity. Suggested alter-ego - Nobby Wyse – English and Foreign Livestock. Be more fruity. Tombstones of the failed re-birthed observed on back of pick-up trucks all over N.London, instigating enquiry. The permanently dead now taking up valuable space. Pachydermal hints already picked up by, er, "switched on" types in city slacks. Mobile phones are humming with incidental intent. Click, bzz, crkk…this is how we know. It's Walkman interference. Matrices are in confusion at this time. (Some say) tragic metaphysician, under the influence of half-baked occultism: lounge music (wink) cocktail music, dinner jazz intonations at odds with the badness of the intent. Me I'm the only boozer who's not intimidated by Frank, he don't scare me. That's what normal people do – whistle. I whistle right in his mug. He seems confused. Medusa Rappa the ex-witch has SHOT her newest lover but being her ex-husband I fully support her actions. I understand misconceived intent. This is now burnout. There is a residue of superfluous electricity. The newly enfranchised (locators of the soul in the SELF) have devised extreme hedonist templates for city living. Result: too much electricity. Rectify this as a matter of urgency...


...Speaking in tongues like some dippy fucking fairground fortuneteller, I come over like some recidivist psychopath on the revenge trail. The guys in peaked caps look askance. They're immune to this pheromone jazz. It happens, fellas, but I can see I need to explain to you how I reviewed this received information for future boardroom level emanations. I am a man of authority and command respect in the City, my solutions to multifarious spiritual problems generally praised if not entirely understood by the dipshit moneymen, the currency grinders and power brokers for whose soul needs I have undertaken a kind of responsibility. It's about electricity. Superfluous electricity is produced here by "irritation", a very modern phenomenon occasioned by close proximity to other power sources and over use of gadgetry. And by over-reliance on therapy fetishism, a synonym for extravagantly lived, hyper-solipsistic lifestyles. The have it all mentality. Only gods can have it all. Mere pre-birthed individuals produce, in the attempt to "have it all", a superfluity of electricity, which needs to be discharged somehow. I have the key. City bimbos routinely assume a countenance of objectively perceived glamour, behaving as though actions don't have consequences (and of course they don't -but they don't know that) and as though celebrity debauch is in and of itself transferable to their own quotidian realm. They behave as though there is no price to pay. The tab is never picked up. The bars are full of raged up X chromosomes, heedless of excess. They are no different in appearance to the fallen stars of their imaginations. They fall into and out of nightclubs; get blotto on tomorrow's mortgaged time.

Or again, for example, excess electricity is produced in extremis by macro-biotic types who've developed an "interest" in eastern religions, a misguided yearning after elongation of personalized Terran linear time span. The doomed quest is heart breaking. The quest for re-tumescence of the perceived Inner Core of Being, being itself putatively located in the inner core of the so called Showoff and Display part of the brain, the temporal lobe, located next to the hippocampus. This proximity produces in pre-re-birthed individuals a surfeit of electrical activity, of bad intent, intent which if not discharged in ritual peregrination of the old bus lanes ends up surging impotently around the city precincts. Hence the importance to all personalized spiritual efforts of this organ within an organ, this wheel within a wheel, previously (wrongly) assumed to be concerned exclusively with locomotive and direction finding abilities. Of course, all (so-called) primitive cultures invoke power over nature via repetitive and ritualistic perambulations, an evocation of divinity via the obsessive treading and re-treading of pre-determined routes. Rain invoked, or in this case dispersal of a surfeit of electricity, achieved by treading the elephant trails, mythic route-shapes which, when viewed from above (from a space ship or whatever) delineate a vast Picasso sketch, a domed trunked head; trunk and ears, dome viewed head on. This is of vital importance to all that follows. Everything follows from the nature and shape of the city's ex-bus lanes. You following me fellas?

The hippocampus is thought to be one of the most important brain structures involved in memory. The case of the patient Medusa Rappa, one of the most famous case studies in neuropsychology, strikingly demonstrates the importance of the hippocampus. In 1983, as a 27-year-old woman, MR underwent brain surgery to control severe epileptic seizures. The surgeons removed her medial temporal lobes, which included most of the hippocampus, the amygdala, and surrounding structures. Although the operation successfully controlled MR's seizures, it had an altogether unexpected and devastating side effect: MR was unable to form new long-term memories in a way that she could later retrieve them. That is, she could not remember anything that happened to her after the surgery. She could not remember meeting new people or new experiences for more than a few minutes. This resulted in her later shooting dead a former lover, who'd come round to try and effect a reconciliation. Still in possession of a latchkey, he'd insinuated himself one morning into her flat and then her bed in confident anticipation that his overtly romantic gesture would meet with her eager approbation. Instead he awoke in her a startled revulsion that found immediate expression in action of the most affirmative and precipitate nature. Amazed to find a man she didn't recognize in her sleeping quarters, and to make matters infinitely worse a man sporting a lascivious smirk, a smirk which he imagined was the precursor to renewed and impassioned relations, she expediently reached over to the bedside table, picked up her shooter and blew a hole in the centre of his forehead, rendering his own hippocampus, along with the rest of his brain, permanently ineffectual. His memory, both short and long term, underwent a sudden and irreversible turn for the worse. Notwithstanding this inconvenient episode, her memory of events prior to the surgery was mostly intact, and her reasoning and thinking skills remained strong if somewhat febrile. A further side effect, which was noted at the time but suppressed (for reasons we can't guess at) in the case history, involved a loss of spiritual intent and capability. Friends noted that she'd become indifferent to matters of the self, to the renewability of the soul and was turning up late, if at all, for Polarity Massages and Mythic Rejuvenescence sessions. Researchers concluded that the hippocampus and its surrounding structures in the medial temporal lobe play a critical role not only in the encoding of episodic memories, especially in binding elements of memories together to locate the memories in particular times and places, but also in spiritual capability and devotional direction finding (peregrinatory invocation of divine intervention)...

...Whole daze. Days. Forgotten to talk. Neighbourly watch, even at the moment of crisis I cultivate error correction. Collective error correction. I am aloof generally. Lazy bastard in other words the city's former bus lanes, now reserved for elephants, are vital as conduits for electricity dispersal. I want to live but there's too much other stuff. Stuff I created. I can't live in this pre-corrected state. I'm here in the waiting room, eyes half open. My sight's going, I see my reflection in you. Or me. I can't tell which. I am psychoanalyzed by Ahab, and I went AWOL. I slept in Finsbury Park. I wasn't there. I don't know why not...

...To get back to me: through customs, re-entry via the channels of no resistance. I do not resemble my passport photo and it's pure sleight of hand that I get through. I am Dionysia and she is me. I am in her duty frees, a perfume of incalculable seductiveness and overpowering pheromonal effect. We are each other, joined at the head and arse, at birth, and now split asunder. Otherwise like last time, it's air rage re-entry. Cause, by misbehaviour in and around the cockpit (ritualistic slagging of the pilot and his/her sexual orientations) a nosedive and potential disaster that is only averted by some pretty sharp thinking on the part of the airheadhosts and hostesses. I've been wrestled to the ground and subdued on more than one occasion, Dionysia observing me from a window seat with a quiet smirk of appreciation. It assures us safe passage through customs. But I don't want to use that too often. Good gags should be used sparingly.

So anyway, back in town, in the waiting room, the walls seem to press in on me. (Hi fellas! It's me. Buffy! I'm here again!) Single 60 watt bulb, attendant hosts and hostesses in night robes, masked and scrubbed, are seemingly intent on psychoanalysis. Can you believe that? In this post-psychological world, they cling to outmoded forms as jealously as would a visiting academic to the impression that he might still possess (as though he ever did) some form of sexual charisma. I am obliged to recount, under hypnosis, my impressions of the guiding principles of my, er, philosophy, for want of a more appropriate term. I glance mischievously at Dionysia, who turns up the volume on her walkman. The faint tss tss of escaped sound announces that she understands. She increases the volume and I notice, although the flight attendants don't appear to, that there is a faint blip in the electrical power supply to the building. She turns it up some more, and finally even the personal trainers/therapists in attendance on me (rather too closely for my full comfort I have to admit) are obliged to notice a significant diminution of the power supply. Their perturbation is a picture.

I am of course merely playing a role here. I've never been in a hospital in my life. I don't believe that there can ever be a reason to enter these establishments unless accompanied by a camera crew and with full SAR-B (suicide assisted re-birth) accreditation. I realize that in my very English assumed self-loathing I cut a very Bogardian figure, a sort of nervy academic type, with military bearing but suggesting a history including some deep personal trauma that might account for my, ahem, psychosis nurses falling in love in discreetly British fashion with my tortured countenance. I am just a poor boy, not a man, a boy in need of love and understanding, a manboy endowed with the face of a neurotic, a monkey-genius. English nurses go for that one big time. More than once, I've woken from general anesthetic proclaiming my love for some sweetly countenanced English rose and more than once I've observed that love reciprocated, if un-acted upon, these gorgeous creatures unwilling or unable to abuse their therapeutic position. I wouldn't mind a bit of abuse. I'll tell you that for nothing.

The head shrink Abrahams is pushed to and fro on a sort of metal trolley. He assumes the aspect of some sort of panjandrum of self-importance, issuing orders to his underlings, imperiously barking out directional commands like the captain of some circumscribed vessel that's destined for the rocks, his messianic expression clearly indicating the essential obsession with which he endows his every action. He's a man possessed. I fancy He imagines Himself as Ahab, and I am His Great White Whale. Not that he actually has any need to assume this dictatorial and frankly ridiculous, self-aggrandizing posture, his absurdly self important conveyance entirely at odds with the actual role he fulfils, which is merely that of facilitator of my dreamtime musings. Like all limited (non-twinned) professionals, he can't bear not to be the centre of attention. Very like Frank in fact. In fact, maybe he is Frank.

So anyway there I am lying there in Finsbury Park, watching the scored planes fly overhead, a whisper of breeze, the shadows of the nearby trees looming large and grey. I notice that the tune on my Walkman is increasingly compromised by a variety of electrical blips, squeaks and buzzes. Interference. The ether is loud enough in itself, so I wonder what's causing this. My listening pleasure is somewhat diminished, my ears full of electrical discord. I see quite suddenly, at the crown of the hill, a small herd of elephants, intermingling with the shadows. The electricity seems to ebb and flow as they move into and out of my immediate vicinity. A group of mobile-toting life-stylers saunters past and the electricity seems to swell. The ckk,bzz,tss,crkkk intensifies and then recedes. But still there's a residual pool, a reservoir of understated voltage disturbing the general ambience. And then it happens. Something happens to alarm the elephants. They are distracted by some commotion at the other end of the park. There is a trumpeting, a honking, they relinquish the sanctuary of the trees and the crown of the hill up by the running track and the lake and stampede down towards the Seven Sisters' Rd. And as they go, I realize that suddenly the air has been cleansed of previously stagnant electricity. They have somehow contrived, by their sudden removal, to decontaminate the surroundings of stale electricity. The air has been purified, somehow distilled. The tune on the Walkman is now crystal clear, the ambience somehow divinely regenerated. To say that this discovery is a watershed in my pre-birthed existence would be an understatement. Literally an understatement. Everything follows...

As a result of this epiphany the city's abused bus lanes have become, by my divine Gnostic agency (soul regeneration), elephant trails. They tread the well-scored vectors, all around the city, dispersing electricity by ritual peregrination. This divine act occasions in the tuned in citizenry a kind of spiritual calm lays the tracks for intense post-psychological soul searching, or Elephant Gnosis as I've termed it. Via this patented and affordable technique, citizens are afforded previously hidden opportunities for spiritual Rejuvenescence and suicide-assisted rebirth. It's no secret. I'm a big noise in the city and in the channels of mediated power. I assume multitudes of personae, electricity flees my agents, and I re-birth at will. I enter and re-enter. I have discovered previously hidden secrets, the divine and arcane secrets. I fictionalize and re-fictionalize, adumbrating the outlines of Gnostic self-therapy. Multitudes of additional personae are re-birthed, multifarious aspects of the self, all interchangeable and clamouring for attention. The self is (needless to say) the most precious commodity, the currency of ubiquity in this meta-therapeutic age, and I have hi-jacked all available outlets. I hold the leases on all franchised outlets. Elephant Gnosis has been patented. I precipitate as many elephant-gnostic emanations as I choose. I am plurality, in a newly minted pleroma of inconsequence. Hot shit!-30-

(5/13/08)

THE CHALLENGE

by John Tottenham

(excerpted from THE INERTIA VARIATIONS)

THE CHALLENGE

If I am not doing the work
That for some obscurely grasped reason
I believe it is my duty to perform,
Then I cannot, in its place,
Allow myself to do anything else
That is pleasurable or productive.
The main challenge, ultimately,
Is not to fall asleep during the afternoon.
-30-

(5/9/08)

W.B./NEIGHBOURHOOD OF INFINITY

by Brad Zukovic

(excerpted from DR. BUCK'S LETTERS)

From a counter seat at Gower Denny's, I watched Jack Ternan emerge from an oily blur of superheated air.

The heat was really shattering of the boulevard now, and Ternan's bowed legs were massive in the glassy distortion, his shaved head craning high above traffic. From thirty feet, I made out a brow with a mouth-slash-pissed-off '40s freak somehow still walking around. An unemployed actor was with him: a Viet Nam vet who'd ordered a coffee at Denny's and saw the same cup staring at him twenty years later.

Next to me, McCaw had the maps out, and not the usual USGS topos of the Mojave desert either. These were military topos of places where they lit cobalt shots. He had Plutonium Pass circled in blue felt pen -- that's west of the Skulls where you find the Epson Salt Works if you feel like pushing the rental up a twenty-mile wash through sand traps. There were maps of China Lake and the Nevada Test Site... dry lakes where the dust devils follow you... uranium dumps... and the unobtanium of a cheerleader's hips moving timelessly in time, mortar in the pestle of her gold country.

Jack Ternan barged into Denny's and a couple of sleepers at the counter lurched up to greet him. He looked like a thing out of fllm noir, which he was -- a heavy who had pissed away a run of Warner's gangster flicks when he started caving in the jaws of his co-stars. Jack's comeback began when his Billy clubbed mug appeared in "Hollywood Sodom," a hipster coffee table book. That mug shot caught the attention of the young director Carlton Spigarelli, who hired Jack as the gangster chief in the first of his neo-noir hipster blood baths -- the ones with the spaghetti western sound tracks. On screen, Jack played flat and real, and at age seventy-eight he was back in the chips. Unfortunately, Jack had gotten into it with Spigarelli, sending his teeth through his septum. Jack was blackballed again, bunkered in a day hotel near Hollywood and Vine, watching tourists through a tinted window and masturbating.

"We makin' a run?"

"We are making a run, Jack," said McCaw.

We drank fresh drip coffee and it was the first morning of the world. McCaw was two months from a shallow grave in Trona -- explaining how the military copped an algebra of Banach spaces to send a drone down a chimney. Jack was doing a Walter Brennan shtick for the waitress and plowing down French Toast. At that moment I felt the cold breath of the future, but just as surely, the scene froze in a defensive reflex -- entering the permanent record. I looked at the collar bone of the waitress, thinking, "There is a Moment that crosses all moments, even as they flow."

I must have said it out loud because McCaw answered, "The Dedekind infinite -- William Blake was onto it and that's what they're modeling with quandles in 3-space -- running analog drones of of knots. That's what we want to see."

"I don't give a fuck about drones," Jack said, stabbing a finger at the map. "I want to find some gold."

At that moment, Duce walked in, two months from being killed by a train in the yards east of downtown. Duce was a homeless, late 70's punk -- flush with cash, having just appeared in a hipster documentary wherein he fingered a former Clown Room stripper in the death of Kurt Cobain. Jack got up and embraced him. They had gotten tight playing Donkey Kong at the Cahuenga 7-11.

"Now," said McCaw, spreading maps. "We are going to need water for this trip -- lots of it." -30-

(5/1/08)

TEUTONIC DOLPHINS SWIM AS THE DMV BURNS
4/24/08
from-Cole Coonce

(excerpted from Sex & Travel & Vestiges of Metallic Fragments)

My driver's license expired on my birthday and I never knew it. LAX's Homeland Security caught the lapse last month as I attempted to board a plane to Kennedy. I was lucky to be allowed onboard.

A month later and it is Indian Summer and any suburban adjunct to Los Angeles with a smattering of foliage is on fire. Meanwhile it is a soul-sucking afternoon at the DMV on Rosemead Boulevard. The parking lot is over run with shaved headed hoodlums in hopped-up Hyundais jousting for fleeting parking space with housewives in Honda CRVs. In the glaring sun I pulled over on the street while the others played bumper cars in the motor vehicle parking lot. And to think, this is where the driving tests starts. Fair enough: if you can make it out of that asphalt atom smasher alive, you deserve to drive. That should be the whole exam -- make it out of the parking lot without getting killed and the city is your motoriffic oyster.

Inside the DMV, there is even less personal space and the only thing that would make it more tedious would be to show up with a hangover.

The lines to get a license are tangles of confusion and entropy. Even with an appointment, the passing of time is five gears in reverse. After visiting three windows, I was told to take a number and go sit in the blue section. I was in a blue chair, next to the blue hairs -- old ladies whose medications were a few molecules off -- and I tried to ignore their rants and harangues about stolen debit cards and purloined passwords delivered in a stutterinc clip and pointed at the gunfire-proof glass.

This is America as the New Second World, I thought, as marble-mouthed public address announcements about assigned numbers going to assigned windows gurgle through blown speakers. It was completely unintelligible and each announcement was merely an alarm to look at blasted-out teevee screens, whose parallelogram framed a matrix of a sort of bingo game, with numbers correlating to the next available window... If you ignored the garbled salvo of sound, you ran the risk of not looking at the video monitor and thereby missing your number and starting the whole procedure over again. The cacophony was accompanied by Japanese girls talking into phones and asking what their friends were wearing at the new Brad Pitt movie. It was post-modern, post-war Poland.

Back on the street, the sky was mercury and the silver Chrysler was baking, and it didn't cool down until I pulled off the freeway and parked under the shade of some nascent oak trees at the Rose Bowl Aquatic Center.

By then, the sun was on its downward arc, the hydrogen lumens lighting the soot and particles that had collected from the surrounding fires. I swam and swam, and closed my eyes as I did the backstroke. I was in shadows and then I was in sunlight and back again.

The pools were half-empty, but a smaller one had a swim class for rugrats. Toothsome Pasadena milfs monitored their munchkins and provided sensual visual respites as I would pull up to the lip of the pool and catch my breath.

My workout was done when I saw her exit the women's showers and saunter towards the water: blonde, stout, and sculpted with an hourglass body, her amber skin offset by a bicep tattoo of a pattern that resembled the concertina wire from a concentration camp. She wore a red one-piece that fit like latex. She rolled her tresses into a rubber cap and draped a pair of cobalt blue goggles over her limpid eyes.

I rested my back against the pool's edge as she swam. I tried not to stare. Her form was flawless. Perfunctory, but as graceful as a dolphin, if not a leopard. I tried not to be obvious about my admiration for her strokes, but I would watch her porpoise through the water and out of the shadows and the sunlight would hit her face as she swiveled for air and it was a wet, expressionist painting.

She climbed out of the pool, the water dripping off of her carnal can. Her exit was as smooth as her swimming, as she had deftly unraveled her blonde locks with one leg still in the water...

I left when she did. I sat in the car with wet shorts, and thought of beauty and propagation. I keyed the ignition and the radio reported more ocean and desert winds fanning ubiquitous flames.-30-

(4/24/08)

SWEETNESS

by-John Tottenham

(excerpted from Tuesdays Are Always Dark Days)

'I used to walk the streets of strange cities, I used to think about you.'

It had been a long day. I had driven five hundred miles. I decided to spend the night in Cincinnati. The city held a strange allure. It was one of those cities whose rough exterior harbored a certain benignity. And this was a quality I hadn't encountered anywhere else I had stopped along the way. And the further I drove the more I realized that I didn't want to stop anywhere else, that I was intent on winding up in Cincinnati. Something might happen to redeem a trip that hadn't been as adventurous as it might have been. The following afternoon I could drive up to the Dayton airport.

For a week I had been on a supposedly remedial tour of the rust belt, wandering around depressed industrial towns and wasting time at obscure racetracks. My intention at the beginning of the trip had been to drift aimlessly but I failed to surrender to the first minor meltdown. In the midst of it, from a motel room in Columbus, I called a friend in upstate New York who urged me to visit. Consequently, knowing that sanctuary awaited me, I didn't immerse myself in other places as much as I should have. I realized that I was thwarting my intentions and experienced regret in real time, constantly rueing the latest version of what might have been.

I arrived at 10.30 and headed for the Travel Lodge in Newport Kentucky, on the other side of the Ohio river. The bald and paunchy night clerk checked me in. He asked if I was in town on business. I mumbled affirmatively. I gave him sixty dollars and he gave me the keys to room # 217. It contained two double beds. The double curtains excluded that annoying morning sunlight. Upon entering I yanked the cord of the loudly humming refrigerator from the wall socket, lay down on the bed and masturbated languidly, letting all the anxieties of a long day on the road ooze out. Then I showered, shaved and changed into some fresh attire.

I drove across the bridge into dead downtown Cincinnati , along Broadway, left on sixth and right on Main. Some semblance of street life became apparent as I proceeded into the Over The Rhine district, a crowded neighborhood of decaying architectural splendor bordering downtown. Attempts to revitalize this designated historic district had been interrupted three and a half years earlier by some ugly race riots.

I drove north up hillsides straggling with faded gracious dwellings and into the quaint old north side, up Hamilton, to the Comet bar, a place where young people congregated late at night. The seats at the counter were all taken. I occupied a table and accidentally eavesdropped on a mean-spirited conversation between two sorority girls which afforded some insight into the mind of a rapist. It was a miserable way to cap a long journey. I left after one beer. I stopped off at an all-night convenience store. As I walked in a shoplifter ran out with goods concealed beneath his coat. One of the clerks ran after him. I browsed tabloids for about ten minutes, bought a Snickers bar and left.

I got back into the car and drove downVine, a steep hill that became grimier and more perceptibly vice-ridden as it unwound into Over The Rhine. At the corner of Fourteenth I stopped at a red light. This was the eaten- out heart of that blighted neighborhood. Veiled transactions took place in dilapidated doorways and on empty lots. Standing on the corner, to my right, was a woman who would have grabbed my attention anywhere. She was looking straight at me. I wondered what a beautiful white woman was doing in that neighborhood at one o'clock in the morning.

As I turned away it finally dawned on me that she was a prostitute. I looked over again. She was smiling and nodding her head in an inviting manner. Time slowed down. Her eyes sparkled. I recognized that if I didn't yield to this moment I would bitterly regret it later. The light turned green. I leaned over and flipped the lock to the passenger door.

She climbed in. 'Hi honey.' Any concerns that she might have been a transvestite were instantly dispelled. I could scarcely believe my eyes...my nerve...my luck.

She was slender but potentially voluptuous.

Her dark hair was piled up. She wore a colorful horizontally striped blouse and faded blue jeans. The blouse was cut low exposing part of a tattoo above her right breast. Around her neck hung a large cross.

Face powder covered the rough parts of her complexion. She exuded warmth and vitality. These qualities were immediately apparent. I was stunned into a state of silence. I stared into her eyes. She wanted to know what I was looking at.

She seemed to expect me to open the negotiating. I asked her how much she wanted.

'Seventy five bucks,' she said without conviction. She expected me to talk her down. But I wasn't feeling too talkative. I said seventy-five would be fine. It was unsettling to consider how much less she might have settled for.

'What are you into,' she asked.

'My tastes are very simple,' I said.

She said she had a place we could go to. I suggested we head back to my motel room. That was fine with her. We were already headed that way, though with her beside me I was plunged into such a state of distraction that I lost all sense of where I was. She didn't have much of a clue either.

I told her I didn't have any prophylactics.

'We should get some,' she said in a rusty whine, which sounded both tired and alert, jaded and innocent.

Five minutes ago I had been driving back to the motel in a disenchanted mood, a moment later there was a beautiful woman sitting beside me. I didn't tell her that I had never been with a hooker before but I did confess that I was nervous. Such were my efforts to suppress rattling nerves that, on the evidence of the shaky stunted utterances I did come up with I was afraid she might think me a dangerously repressed deviant. But she didnt't appear to make anything of it.

Her name was Sylvia. She hailed from Lexington Kentucky. She was twenty-four.

'That's right,' she said, 'a single mom.'

She used to work at an escort agency in Lexington. I asked what kind of clients she dealt with there.

'Horse people,' she said.

'Centaurs?'

'What?'

'Any jockeys?'

'Pat Day,' she said.

'I thought he disdained the pleasures of the flesh.'

'One of his daughters goes to the same day care center as my daughter and she doesn't know he's her father.'

Suddenly we were thrust together in the night. There was a conspiratorial aspect and an element of trust was involved. An arrangement had been made. She complained of hunger. Once over the bridge the lights of a White Castle stand could be seen shining a few blocks away. After driving the wrong way down several one way streets we made it into the drive-through lane. She tried to order a Number One meal but the employee on the other end of the intercom couldn't decipher our requests. We had to drive up to the window where the order was taken in person by an ashen-faced old woman.

'So what do you do,' said Sylvia.

I avoided that question.

'What's your profession?'.

Thankfully we were interrupted by the server's muddled instructions.

'Shit, I'm wore out now, ' said Sylvia at the end of a complicated exchange during which the word 'coke' had to be repeated four times.

While we were waiting for the order I stared at her.

'Hello,' she said, apprehending my gaze and smiling sweetly.

'You have a great smile,' I said.

'Thank-you,' she said, 'it helps.'

She started singing as she delved into the bag.

'Best White Castle I've ever eaten,' she said after a couple of bites. 'It's wonderful right now...I probably won't think that tomorrow.'

We drove off.

'Prophylactics,' she sang out, 'now where the fuck is the store?'

There was a drive-through liquor store a few blocks away, Big Daddy's.

'You've got it babe.'

'Uh-oh, another one way street,' I said, backing out.

'That didn't stop us before,' she said.

I erupted in tension-releasing laughter.

'Can I get a little half-pint?' she said.

'What?'

'I don't know... something dark... not clear.'

Whisky?'

'Yes...Kessler...how come there's no liquor stores in Cincinnati?'

'There weren't any where you were standing around?'

'No'

'What do you want, a half of Kessler?'

'Yes, just a half-pint. Just get something that's cheap.'

She was requesting the smallest bottle of rotgut, when I would gladly have sprung for a bottle of the finest. Why should someone of such singular charm and beauty have to scuffle and suffer when so many led graceless complacent existences? It was already beginning to distress me

'Do liquor stores stay open this late...in Lexington at 12.01 it's over.'

'Lexington seems kind of repressed,' I remarked. 'There isn't much going on there.'

She groaned in assent: 'nothing...absolutely nothing.'

I ordered a half-pint of Kessler's and a pack of condoms.

We drove away. 'Alrighty,' she said, 'let's do it.'

'Thank-you very much,' she said after a few more bites. She said thank-you a lot.

'You're most welcome,' I said.

'Is Travel Lodge pretty nice?'

'Not particularly.'

The motel was a few blocks away. I took care to enter through a side door, avoiding the night clerk. I opened doors for her. She inspired me to behave like a gentleman. I had seldom known graciousness to flow out of me with such ease.

As soon as we entered the room she wanted to get the distasteful matter of payment out of the way so that we could relax and enjoy ourselves. Money changed hands. I had the exact sum of $75.00 in my wallet.

'You've cleaned me out,' I said. I lay down on the bed.

'Aren't you going to take your shoes off,' she said.

I turned on the television. Some election coverage was screening.

She couldn't be bothered to vote, she was fed up with the government. She lay down beside me and I reached out to touch her prematurely sagging breasts.

'How often are you with a woman who'll let you do anything you like to her,' she said.

'Actually,' I said, 'quite often.'

She stood at the end of the bed and encouraged me to breathe deeply. She made the appropriate gestures with her arms... breathe in, breathe out...and excused herself to brush the White Castle taste from her teeth.

As she emerged from the bathroom she was singing. 'An old R&B song...by Shirley Murdoch.' I had never heard of it.

'Shall I get undressed?'

I told her not to, that it was not a negative comment on her body, just a quirk of mine.

She wanted to take a shower. She said it would 'make it nicer.' She suggested that while she was gone I should 'create a mood.'

She said these things with a mixture of kindness and mockery. She wasn't as bored and business-like about it all as she understandably might have been. I formed the impression that this line of work was something she only resorted to when times were hard.

I lay on the bed, trying to compose myself. I could hear her singing in the shower and it gladdened me that she could relax in my presence even if I couldn't do the same thing.

She emerged with her hair down and a towel around her. I told her to put her clothes back on. In her hands she held her panties. I told her not to put them back on. She seemed to find my request unusual and confusing.

'Okay,' she said, 'not the panties.'

She put her pants and her blouse back on.

She lay down beside me.

'I probably won't be able to get it up,' I said, unzipping my trousers and pulling out my prick.

She began lazily sucking on it and I relaxed at once. Then she picked up the tempo and started making a lot of unnecessary noise.

'Do it slowly,' I said, 'soothe me.'

I formed the impression that my prick couldn't be of less interest to her, that she was probably mentally reliving some pleasant event from her past that had nothing to do with sex. But at least she was making the effort. That, in its way, was affecting and deserving of reciprocation. To my surprise, I found myself with something resembling an erection. Enough of one that she was able to slip a rubber over it.

'I'll do you from behind,' I said.

She bent over the edge of the bed and pulled down her jeans, exposing a skinny white ass. I positioned my knob at the portal and, with her help, stuffed it in. I got a few good thrusts in before her exaggerated moaning deadeneded any incipient ardor. It felt as if I were thrusting at nothing. Her absence was almost palpable. Her body felt weightless, as if the substance had fled elsewhere. I told her not to bother faking it.

'I'm not,' she said unconvincingly, 'it's erotic.'

'How many other men have you been with tonight?' I asked, giving it another weak thrust.

'One other guy...a chiropractor...in his fifties... fifty dollars...straight sex.' Her hair fanned out wildly across the synthetic bedspread.

'When was the last time you had an orgasm?' I wondered out aloud.

' A month ago,' she said, 'just because you have sex doesn't mean you come.'

'I know,' I said, wilting in earnest.

She reached down and offered some halfhearted encouragement. I requested that she lay down flat on her belly. But in the process of pushing her across the bed with my sagging member still inserted I lost it to a degree that rendered any further squirming futile. We collapsed into laughter. I removed the condom from my limp knob, stretched it several feet and flung it across the room.

'I doubt I'll come,' I said.

'You said you wouldn't be able to get it up,' she said, suggesting that maybe I'd already achieved enough for one night.

Though I knew it wouldn't make any difference I asked her to suck on it some more, which she proceeded to do listlessly and to no avail.

'Tell me a nasty story,' I said.

From between my legs she described a recent three-way. It didn't have the required effect. She gave voice to some gently scornful impatience.

'What are you used to?'

'It usually takes them about five minutes,' she said.

I was pleased that she felt comfortable enough around me to exhibit the full range of her apathy. I asked about the proclivities of other men. 'You'd be amazed by how many men are into being dominated,' she said, 'then there are the other kind, the ones who like to dominate...I don't like that.'

She continued to toy with my flaccid knob, although both of us had given up on restoring life to it. I was quite at ease now and didn't want our time together to come to an end. I was secretly hoping that she would spend the night.

'I don't care if I don't come,' I said.

She got up.

'I'll bet that's the easiest seventy-five dollars you ever made,' I said.

She agreed that it probably had been. 'It's been a pleasure, she said, 'it really has.'

I walked across to where she was standing, on the other side of the other bed, and tried to kiss her. She opened her mouth, tendered a little tongue, withdrew it quickly, kissed me politely on the lips and turned away. The act of kissing seemed unsavory to her.

She claimed that she had to be somewhere at two-thirty. That was in about twenty minutes. She had an appointment to watch another girl being fucked by a man who was so fastidious that he wore condoms on his fingers. She couldn't find her cigarette lighter and became more distracted about it than a missing 25 cent lighter seemed to warrant.

After combing the room for about a minute she gave up the search. I was glad that it couldn't be found. It would make a good souvenir. As we walked out I peered into the bathroom. My pomade jar was open.

'Did you use my pomade? I asked her.

'Yes,' she answered with guilty sweetness, 'just a little bit.'

It delighted me that she had used it: another souvenir.

As we walked down the corridor she defiantly waved her half-pint of whisky at the ceiling surveillance camera.

We got into the car and drove off.

I remembered my camera. I asked if she would mind if I took her photograph. She didn't mind at all. I wanted to get a shot of her standing, as she was when I first laid eyes on her. I stopped the car and we got out. She stood in front of a wall on a quiet street. I was about to take a photograph when a police car cruised up behind us. 'Don't worry about them,' she said. They drove by slowly. Once again she flashed that winsome smile. I managed to snap two photographs. 'Are you going to show them to your friends back home,' she kidded me: 'this is the whore I fucked in Cincinnati.'

'D'you live downtown?'

'Right down there close by where you saw me.'

We drove along fourth street to Covington and from there across the bridge into downtown Cincinnati. I told her where I had come from that day, that I had driven from Buffalo to Cincinnati, from the northeast to southwest corners of Ohio.

'Ohio's a big state,' she said, 'there's really no way around Ohio. You have to go through it. You came a long way, baby.'

'Yeah.'

'What's New York like?' she said, 'I'm curious.'

'Well,' I said, 'the city is a place unto itself.'

'That's what I hear,' she said, 'what are the people like, are they fucking assholes?'

'Yes,' I said, 'but there are many kinds of them and it's very expensive.'

'Yeah, I heard it's fucking outrageous...I heard it's outrageous.'

'I wasn't there this time around, I was in Buffalo.'

'What was that like?'

'It wasn't as gritty as I expected.'

'Yeah, I heard it was pretty classy.'

I remarked upon the ethnic diversity of New York City.

'Cincinnati's got a little of everything,' she said.

'It's all black and white,' I said.

'Yeah, that's true...that's true...that's very true...it's either black or its white.' She pondered this. It seemed to contain fresh significance for her: 'That's very true...it's either this or that. It's either shit or crap. There's not too many imbetweens.'

She told me that she had worked as a telemarketer for a while. The week she brought home a thousand dollars she thought she had it made.

'I injected a little sex appeal into my pitch,' she said.

'Did you meet anyone?'

'One guy, a producer...of hard-core movies,' she added ruefully.

She complained about the company she was forced into on the street and lamented the toothlessness of other whores.

While waiting at a stoplight I took another photograph of her. Once again she switched on her winning camera smile.

A police car loomed in the rear view mirror. 'How long have you two known each other?' she said, imitating their likely overtures. She was in a hurry to make her appointment and expressed impatience with traffic, yelling at a lingering vehicle to make haste. We found Vine street. Clusters of dubious sidewalk activity were still in evidence at this late hour. Yet another police car drove behind us.

I pulled over on the corner of Fourteenth and Vine. Sylvia stuck the half-pint into the top of her pants and got out of the car.

'Thanks babe...have a good evening, baby.'

That was it. The lack of ceremony was somewhat disheartening.

Alone again.

I drove back to the hotel in a state of rapt wonderment and went to bed, pressing my face in to the pillow where she lay.

I checked out of the motel late the next morning. I drove up to Eden Park, a sprawling tapestry of green situated on one of the city's supposed seven hills. On one ridge resided the art museum. Below it lay Mirror Lake, a circular pool surrounded by a walkway fanning out onto a lawn which culminated in a shorn rock side reminiscent of Roman ruins. It dropped onto another verdant ridge and afforded a pleasing view of far-flung rooftops and red brick below. I walked around it four times. There weren't many other people around. I was tired but suspended in the lingering glow from the night before. The experience had brought me into contact with life, opened me up. It was precisely the kind of albeit one-sided connection that I craved. It happened, of course, when I was least expecting it, when I had given up. It was something I had waited about fifteen years for.

Throughout my travels I had always desired one thing above all others: to enjoy a sweet fleeting encounter with a beautiful stranger in a strange town. Many times I came close but not quite close enough. Variations on the theme occurred but the ideal continually eluded me. Until finally I consummated it... with a whore.

I had never sought out a whore or romanticized the condition of one. Once or twice I had admired one on the street but I never considered doing anything about it. Much of the pleasure in a mutually gratifying sexual act lay in its not being an act, in knowing that the other party's excitement was sincere, and that one was responsible for it. With a whore such arousal would be feigned and I had no wish to suspend disbelief in such a situation. One could do exactly what one wanted with a whore, but if they didn't enjoy it there didn't seem to be much point. Fakery, no matter how sublime, wouldn't work. I had nothing against it on principle, I was merely constitutionally opposed to it. I imagined that it was something I might be obliged to resort to as an older man. Then an unsettling thought crossed my mind: maybe I'd already reached that point.

I stared at a tree. It was yellow and its leaves were beginning to fall. I realized that this was the stage I was at in my life. Whatever blossomed in the autumn of its years?

Not much, but presumably, if one had never blossomed at all, a certain moldering efflorescence might be possible, even at this belated stage.

A familiar melancholy was seeping in, one that often rose up in the wake of memorable chance encounters. A fresh potency and poignancy altered my surroundings. I recognized once again that it was only when traveling, plunging into and rising out of these states of transient alienation and transcendence, that I experienced with clarity the true beauty of life.

I drove back downtown. I was hoping that I might find her on the street and take her out to lunch. I could imagine nothing more pleasant than sitting across a table from her and making polite conversation, treating her with tenderness and respect. It wasn't normal for me to feel this way towards a woman. It was highly irregular. But I had always been attracted to girls who put on an appearance of being much tougher than they really were, and she, in a way, was the ultimate manifestation of this type.

I walked around Over The Rhine. There weren't many whites around. Most of those who were appeared destitute, as did most of the blacks. She wasn't anywhere to be seen on Vine or the surrounding streets. Some other whores milled around the vacant lots. I wasn't interested in any of them. If a thousand whores were picked at random from the streets of a thousand cities and she had been among them, she would have been the one I picked. There was no doubt about it.

She was probably sleeping. Or she could be back in Lexington, picking her daughter up from the day-care center. Did she divide her time between the two cities? Who looked after the kid when she was in Cincinnati?

What did I know about her routine? I was beginning to ask myself a lot of stupid questions. I knew almost nothing, only what she told me, and I tended to believe she told the truth.

Doubtless she had forgotten me by now. There was no reason to think she wouldn't have. I was just passing through, with a hunger for experiences that she regarded as ordinary. I hadn't given much of myself.

I was too burdened by a sapping (self) consciousness concerning the fragility of our relations: of how much it meant to me and how little it meant to her. I would always remember her. But soon I would return to my usual lazy routine on the other side of the country. I couldn't touch her life as she had touched mine. And it would all inevitably recede into dull memory.

I lunched in a booth at Kaldi's. This establishment contained two long rooms. One served as a bar, the other as a coffee-house. Each side was stacked wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling with overflowing book shelves, crammed with dusty and unwanted old tomes. A blonde woman was sitting at the bar. She looked nervous and distracted, with a doomed look in her eyes. Something in my peripheral vision flared up. While she was lighting a cigarette her hair had caught fire. She put it out as if nothing had happened.

I got back in the car and drove nowhere in particular. Then I drove back down Vine. One and a half hours remained before I had to leave town. She might be back on the streets by now. I could still take her out for a drink. I could give her my phone number or get hers, if she had one. If it hadn't been for that patrol car I might have had the presence of mind to take care of such matters before we parted. And due to the lurking Newport cops the photographs on the street had been taken carelessly. It was a good thing they had been taken at all.

I couldn't picture her clearly anymore. All that remained was a beguiling blur. An insinuating essence in danger of becoming overidealized. This usually happened when I dwelt continually on an unfamiliar woman. Many faces had been lost forever in the void of fixation. The features would resurface, only becoming clear again when the memory faded. A photograph, however, would eliminate such concerns.

I continued my search on foot. It was becoming apparent that no real hope of finding her existed. In the air and in my bones it was palpable. I crossed Vine at Central Parkway, the wide artery separating Over The Rhine from downtown. In the light of my imminent departure the city became elegiacally serene. Workers poured out of office buildings into the soft autumn evening. Everybody appeared helpless, blameless and incorruptible. But she wasn't anywhere to be found and it was beginning to appear unlikely that I would ever see her again.

I returned to Kaldi's. This time I sat at the bar. A motley assortment of solitaries were gathered there. I sat by the window, keeping an eye on the street.

'I met Syd Barrett somewhere east of Cincinnati,' said a young fellow on the other side of the bar. Nobody picked up this thread of conversation. The girl who had accidentally set fire to her hair passed by on the sidewalk. I drove down Vine one last time with the malt glow washing over me.

The moment I first laid eyes on Sylvia had been incomparably vital and significant. It could never be repeated. She was beyond me now, had always been beyond me. Sheer chance had allowed the privilege of this one magical encounter. The corner of Fourteenth and Vine was enshrined. But she wasn't there now. Her spot was occupied by some obese hag in an anorak.. And I was running late. My plane back to California left Dayton in two hours. Dayton was an hour's drive up highway 75, and it was rush hour.

I barely made it to the airport in time, a bedraggled spun-out wreck, emptying out my suitcase in the departure lounge, worrying without reason that I'd left the camera in the rental car. I boarded the plane exhausted but unable to sleep, pressed against a window, staring down at the cities of the west, glittering like the dying embers of forest fires, while continually replaying and reflecting upon the events of the night before.

In trying to recapture that first moment it entered my mind that she might not have been alone on the sidewalk. She might have been talking to a youth... some sort of exchange had taken place... she had waved him away when she realized a motorist...a prospective client...a john... was checking her out. Something of this nature had taken place but my mind wouldn't fasten on it. I hadn't been paying strict attention at the time. Did I notice her standing around there before stopping at the red light? And how long did I spend at that red light? Between that first moment and my unlocking the passenger door ( at the time it didn't occur to me that this could have been done automatically, without reaching over ) seemed to take much longer than is normally spent at a red light. And what if that light hadn't been red ( ... if I hadn't waylaid myself browsing tabloids in a convenience store ...if I hadn't jacked off in the motel room before going out...if I hadn't taken a nap in that truck stop parking lot...if I hadn't got lost trying to get out of Youngstown)... I would presumably still have noticed her... but she wouldn't have given me those beckoning glances...I might have driven around the block... and by the time I returned she might have been gone.

I remembered the last lucid thought I'd had before the sudden jolt of seeing her, and it had been this: whatever made me think I'd find what I was looking for in a bar...I'm more likely to find it on the street. I had no idea how prescient it would be.

In the reflection of its crowning event what at the time had been a long and tedious drive assumed a lustrous sheen. I remembered the clouds drifting over Erie. The sad eyes of the tough ex-steelworker panhandlers. The air of irreversible decline that permeated that heartbroken town. At the city limits a sign read 'Thank You For Visiting - Please Come Back.' There was something almost unbearably plaintive about that appeal. I resolved to return. I drove on to Youngstown, a once-thriving steel town plunged into hopeless and ominous stagnation. I had hoped to eat lunch there but not a single restaurant was open downtown. The stores were all closed and there was little sign of activity of any kind. I drove on, sinking and spiralling. I had planned on spending a few hours walking around Akron as the sun went down. I arrived earlier than expected and found, once again, that I had overidealized a place in advance. A bright sterility encumbered the city. I sat in a bare bar. The old lady on the other side of the counter bestowed a candy upon each customer when they ordered a drink. Everybody in the place was toothless, even the young people. I walked for an hour or more in the hope of getting lost but there was nothing to lose myself in, nothing in the air. I stood on a bridge and gazed down at the water trickling along a concrete riverbed, idly contemplating suicide. Upon the approach of a stranger I moved along guiltily. I left before the sun went down and drove straight into Cincinnati, regaining energy as that destination neared.

I considered making an honest woman out of her. A ridiculous notion, of course. Besides, she was probably a lesbian. I had read somewhere that most prostitutes were lesbians or addicts. About the latter I hadn't thought to ask at the time. It wasn't unlikely. She had been almost irrationally perturbed about the missing lighter. Why did she need it so badly? If the work didn't support the habit then the habit would probably be necessary to anaesthetize the work. But she didn't seem ravaged or hardened...yet. She had her whole life ahead of her. As much of it as remained. A pretty face with a bleak future. It was a shame that she had reduced herself to this precarious way of life. Naturally, I wanted to save her from it. It was the oldest story in the book. Whore stories were a dime a dozen. There was nothing original about becoming infatuated with a fallen woman. I rued the descent into exhausted cliche but what could I do about it? Surely a young man - even a middle-aged man - might be excused for getting sentimental over his first experience with a prostitute.

I liked to think that I might have provided some relief from the deprived bodies and slobbering old men that constituted her clientele. She had said that it had been a pleasure, the easiest money she'd ever made ( little did she know how I would cling to these perhaps insincere words ). But perhaps she didn't view me as being markedly different from the rest. Perhaps she didn't think about it much at all. It was just something to be endured as painlessly as possible. And what of the chiropractor: might the recentness of that coupling have explained her need to shower? Or was that just another way of killing time before she was obliged to put out? There were many unanswered questions. And many that weren't worth asking.

I returned to my empty and frivolous existence on the other side of the country.

The incident continued to haunt me. Unfortunately, I couldn't keep it to myself.

I regaled friends, acquaintances and strangers with the details, questioned my motives in doing so, and felt guilty about it afterwards. It wasn't always taken in the intended spirit. Most people were chiefly interested in the coarser aspects of what had transpired. With each telling the story became staler. And sullied were the memories I wanted to preserve.

All the while her features became evenvaguer.

It took a week before I ventured into the one-hour photo department of a drugstore. It didn't feel like the right moment but I had already waited a long time. I returned an hour later, placed the envelope on the passenger seat and drove across town in rainy traffic. After half an hour I parked on a residential street and removed the photographs from the envelope. The emergence from romanticized memory into stark reality of such a highly anticipated image induced a certain uneasiness. Here at last were the three photographs, all I would ever have to remember her by: the two of her standing in front of a brick wall, with arms folded and a smile of sweetly inviting resignation that calmly shattered my cheap and shallow intrusion. And the close-up in the car: how fine the flow of her pale features in the hard glare...and the freckles on her shoulder, exposed by low-slung blouse...and her broken nose.

When I got home I propped this photograph up against the lamp on my bedside table. The next morning I took it down and put it back in the envelope. The vicarious aspect of my fascination bothered me. Though I had long ago succeeded in falling from my social class I was perhaps still too intent upon living out the stories that cast a romantic spell over my mispent impressionable youth. But this latest episode, kin to a few other fleeting encounters, contained some unshakable native truth that I couldn't deny, no matter how hackneyed it might appear under cold observation.

I kept replaying the moment our eyes first met: myself a spellbound john at the wheel of a rental car, her appearing out of the sidewalk mob and moving to the edge of the pavement with an unerring instinct for a customer's probing gaze. She looked out of place amid such squalid surroundings but supremely self-possessed. The way she bobbed her head up and down with that eager-to-please smile, obscene as it might sound, was infinitely charming. My sense of wonder was reawakened. She went straight to my heart. Seldom does a woman give of herself so freely, bravely and vulnerably. That it was offered at a price, indifferently and indiscriminately, didn't depreciate the generosity of the gift.

It left me with exquisite pangs.

But like everything else, it faded...into dull memory.-30-

(4/21/08)