Hello Chummies,
I write for an on line music magazine (Perfect Sound Forever,) and they just posted a 2009 best album list…….perhaps we are now removed far enough away from such lists to make it more tolerable to look at…. This general concept is becoming more an more irrelevant for a variety of reasons…but with that said…fuck it…
Feb 3 2010
“What will a Grounds Hog do now?”
By: Ossip Maltempi
He called on friendly acquaintances
Phone calls that were never answered
Choosing minor holidays
(chiefly American minor holidays)
caller would wish them well
hoping that holiday would be enjoyed
thinking to himself that children’s favorite holidays
tend to be those where they receive the most gifts
hardly surprising of course
but amusing when wondering how most children
felt about President’s day or Grounds Hog Day
where at best
they may not receive a garbled lesson of some sort
from a well meaning adult
a mortgage underwater
a debt obsessed government
promising ameliorating conditions
would eventually thaw off the big horses hind legs
and spread to cover all of us
These acquaintances usually never call back
I could pretend to be calling from
A cookie cutter tax preparation business
Letting them know how most accountants
Aren’t aware of the deductions one could make
If they are taking certain medications for syphilis
These acquaintances
They will remain
In the back of the poorly working
refrigerator
Of never to be friendships
Instead of providing help in slowing the foreclosure process or pressuring banks to renegotiate, Obama’s solution is for the Fed to flood the banking system with enough money at low enough interest rates to re-inflate housing prices. What Obama seems to mean by “recovery” is that consumers once again will be extended Bubble-era levels of debt to afford housing at prices that will rescue bank balance sheets.
It is an impossible dream. American workers now pay about 40 per cent of their take-home pay on housing, and another 15 per cent on debt service – even before buying goods and services. No wonder our economy has lost its export markets! Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be.
Till my <Rikooyous> Marls our Nous
He came alive as the thought of his weakness grew. There were painful admissions made in the chair that never merited sitting time commensurate with it’s worth. Old smoky black lacquer wife poured comfort tongue and taste, two fingered death waltz with negligible ferrymen. And I thank god that it does not present itself in any chillingly sappy way, and that those we love the most we might very well hardly ever know. Glance passers, interloping gassed sentences ululated in a room of groomed senescence.
HE came alive the more he fought himself, touching himself, fighting himself, robbing himself of any sleep, a deep sleep always interrupted at the same time, every night, early day. He realized his worth, and was not troubled by its relative insignificance, but coolly enraptured by it, not trepanned into an oily blue and white drop cloth. Tears moving from cage from ribs to eyes. I am always traveling where I am, and therefore writing more than I will ever write, and for better, for damn better.
But, the world is our Swedish apple peeler. Do you want to
After finishing her half-hearted jumping jacks by the rear entrance of the Half-a-Hill recycling plant, Tiwara was ‘served’ with papers indicating her role in the “mud for boots scandal.” It was just then that the governor had brandished what he later called an amnesty-pennant, proclaiming that the thirty year old women was a secret fund raiser for the state, and deserved immunity for her minor role in the aforementioned scandal. No one knew exactly why bartering precious Mohawk Valley mud for low quality work boots was such a malodorous to-do.
Tiwara, unaware of her exoneration almost occurring simultaneously with the scowling cornering at the hands of the state paper server, held the hand of a stranger. This stranger was a long time, yet silent admirer of Tiwara. Though he had plumbed down to a rubbery floor of many an incoherent knotting of her unknown attributes and how she would respond to his ways; he could not bring himself to any emotional high or low ground. When her sweat mingled with his, his left ear almost deaf now for over twenty-four hours for the first time in his life, preoccupied him voraciously.
For those that are new to this blog, the rest of the story can be found on this site, squeezed between this and that….
Thank you for reading:
Domenc
It was basically Emmy Lou’s idea to place this invisible scale in the restaurant. That’s a goddamn fact. I don’t give a damn what the story became later due to an unhealthy mixture of lying and real laced up grass, and Chinny’s mind scrambled up on lust, and who knows what else contributed to the baroque levels of bullshit associated with the decision to allow this invisible scale thing to happen at the restaurant. She convinced all of us to place the scale in such a spot that one was hard pressed to avoid stepping on it and therefore have their weight revealed on a screen for everyone’s amusement.
I’ve seen Ray and her scraping by each other… getting feel ups from each other… I’ve seen Ray brush his wood on that slab of leg. I’m not afraid to use that sort of description, BBQ style. I don’t think Ray wanted to go along with the hidden scale room. Perhaps his pride in thinking he knew that such an odd…’uncharted’ gimmick to create a new odd trend or sensation or something, needed a ballsy backer, was also responsible for his going along with it. I’m sure it was, even though Ray was not the vainest of guys for sure. But still. It almost seems, and I truly think, that Emmy Lou sabotaged the restaurant. She went to work on Ray. Was she working for someone? What about Gary? Was he in on it or just some passive dupe or…
At first all the flirting and the scale business didn’t much bother me. I didn’t feel threatened. I didn’t think it threatened business. People did seem to find the scale amusing, a bold statement about how unimportant things held sacred like ‘weight’ was, or some sort of bullshit like that. I liked Ray well enough. I was getting close to him. He was my partner and everything. Our bad blood was thinning out to a hammered little lost whistle. But it got to me. I know, I just really know, that I was alone in thinking there would be anything remotely funny or interesting or intriguingly odd about having every patron who dined in this particular area see their weight revealed on one of the large white walls. It was the stupidest idea ever! It was incredibly imbecilic. It would ruin everything eventually.
That’s what happened…patron steps on scale, and their weight appears on the right hand corner of the back wall of the dining section. The number fades after a few seconds in a disintegrating like fashion. This corner has built into it a very large High Definition, super fancy television that blended in with the off whiteness of the wall. The screen itself mimicked the walls color when not showing other images. It was pretty difficult to detect. Besides one’s weight, you would also see some sort of image or series of images that followed that private and sometimes embarrassing number. Other times there would simply be a succession of interesting images, images thought to excite hunger and digestion, cool stuff that didn’t distract one too much from their company, or create an anti social atmosphere.
I didn’t mind that. I thought that was fine, but I wanted that scale and all that weight stuff removed. It was Emmy. She was the brain child of this nonsense. But Ray and Gary became more and more involved with the images. Ray got really into it, not so much Gary, but that’s not to say he didn’t support it. I suppose this was a way of distracting them from the eventual problems we would have with patrons angered over seeing their weight displayed in public as they were about to order victuals! It was simply a matter of time before someone got really pissed off. What were the chances that some possible positive word of mouth about the whole back room business would be enough to counter the eventual bad press and reputation we would catch like a crippling venereal disease from angered patrons?
So this moose-gobble sabotaging bitch got us all laughing that night with the screwy Lucy, talking about this invisible scale idea that was supposedly used in some extremely successful restaurant pandering to the same sort of ‘art’ crowd (Whatever the fuck that means.) It was a scale that one had to step on as they walked that one down step onto the outdoor section’s floor. You could shut the scale down. It would only be used occasionally to start a buzz about the restaurant, appeal to some humor our clientele was suppose to respond to because we were located in an area known to be home to many artists, failed academics, nutty shrinks, that sort of thing. Well, Emmy’s pitch sounded great, and we heard all those reassurances over and over. I did like the idea of the images shown on the built-in TV that would be more subliminal, to help with digestion, or create a tranquil atmosphere. I really did like that part of her pitch.
So I got sold. Chinny sure as hell got sold and whipped on being sold. He thought he was so ‘with it’ as they use to say. He really understood Emmy’s vision, trusted her know-how of what was in or what could be in, what would be daring in the restaurant business , really avant-dumb ….understood in an adulatory way. Ray did voice a few concerns about offending people, and then Emmy started talking about how we could have contests…and this and that. Patrons in that dining area could guess the combined weight of the room that night. They would jot their guesses on paper we handed out, or tell their server. They might win a free meal, or bottle of wine! They would really want to spread the word about all the fun they had at The Oldest Tree House. What great word of mouth fire we could stoke!
So Gary got sucked into all that. I was the only one against it. I was more than vocal about it. I didn’t trust that bitch. It was those fucks, stoned as anything. I wanted her fired. I warned Ray about her. I cared about Ray now. But he just infuriatingly ignored everything, got really weird about it. Things really deteriorated. There were a few patrons that were not thrilled to have their weights flashed on our screen. But you know what happened? I ended up getting forced out by Ray and Gary. They accused me of betting on the individual and group weights of patrons, running an illegal game on the side. I allegedly told select customers what I was up to in order to get money from them for giving them certain ‘inside information.’ That was nonsense. I know that I had a bad reputation for such things. But this was way beyond the pale of what they were accusing me of.
It was me! I fucked up they say! I fucked up. It was a set up. It might have been sabotage, someone who knew all of us, working with someone else, who in turn was working with someone who wanted what we had, what we embarked on. Well I wasn’t about to take this accusation lying down, or take it like the old Sam might have. Not with what I’ve been through. Fuck that. They forced me out, but that place wouldn’t last anyway. It wasn’t just this blockheaded weigh you’re patrons in a restaurant nonsense that did them in…as if that wasn’t enough. I did those mother fuckers in. I did those bastards in because they would not believe me about how I thought Emmy was using them, that she was in cahoots with a guy that I most certainly saw pushing her up against a brick wall and sucking at her mouth over by Delphi 2’s small free standing 1930’s era cinema on Nogsicorg Road between Route 18 and Grandervum Service Road. Did she know Low? I could not remember if I knew this Emmy from Leg Up. I could not remember. I know… I was getting paranoid.
I knew that prick as an ex investor of Prawn Dawn who got told to keep his money and take a hike because he was more than an unscrupulous scavenger. This guy was planning to open a restaurant in the same neighborhood we were in. He wanted us out. He wanted what we had, as well as open up his own cookie cutter trendy restaurant. Andrew Belsker had somehow got information that a developer was going to procure the rights to knock down a large swath of an industrial park in the neighborhood and have it rezoned for residential use with the help of a patron of ours who was the most angered with the invisible scale (just so happens.) Belsker knew that our location would become a gold mine. He wanted to take us over, or force us out before official word got out about the redevelopment project which was assured to be approved and make this neighborhood’s real estate, and concentrated money supply take off to the stratosphere.
It was Amy Duncan. She was the one who really acted outraged about her weight being displayed. I knew it was an act. I didn’t know at first. But when I found out what kind of political power she held in town and her relationship to Belsker, well– that eliminated any doubt that she was putting on a show that night. I can still hear her screaming at the top of her lungs about how outraged she was. She threw a plate of lobster ravioli into Gary’s face when he went on apologizing to her, explaining to her that it was all just for fun and so on.
I could see her throw a punch at Ray as he was giving her more rehearsed sophisticated reasons for why we had this set up, and how everyone knew about it who dined there. It was so popular, and people thought it was a great antidote to all that obsessing about diets, and weight, and image. He went on and on with that sort of talk. Duncan decked the neck breaker. She then contacted every paper, radio station, organization, you name it. She contacted them, and raised hell about how awful we treated our patrons, how little we respected their privacy, how insensitive we were.
I felt miserable. It was a few weeks after this spectacle that I got accused by the whole staff including Emmy Louise, of gambling on the whole damn thing. I still don’t know how this rumor got started. I shouldn’t think about it. I’m seeing my therapist again. I’m fucked! I’m just fucked.
There was no way to counter the bad press. Sure there were people who supported us, and not just our steadfast customers, but we were done. I was done. I was incensed about how this all went down, how I was ignored when trying to prevent this scale debacle, as I began calling it, and then accused of using it to benefit me secretly. I was betrayed and made an enemy. Ray wouldn’t even give me a chance to defend myself, never mind Gary. It took so many years to make peace with myself, with these guys. So much of that had to do with having a chance to heal by running into Ray and Gary, discovering he was living town, actually becoming friends, opening The Oldest Tree House. It was miraculous the way it all happened, and I’m no believer in miracles, but it just felt that powerfully unbelievable that all that could and would happen.
I was outraged, and began telling some of the most loyal patrons I knew about how Ray and Gary used me, ignored me, and got played by Emmy Lou. Many of them believed me, and no longer dined there. I helped put that restaurant under. It deserved it. How could they do that to me? How will I find peace now?
Sam did not gamble on the patron’s weights. I let myself believe he did. I had quacko little visions of him while taking a piss, somehow fixing the digital read out on someone’s weight. I’d see the big weak Bing cherry red dots forming numbers, and Sam’s smirking confidence as I waggled off the end of my urination. But he didn’t, and I wasn’t simply manipulated by Emmy. My inability to give him the benefit of the doubt was due to our shared past, his abusive gambling on me in the most egregious personal and dehumanizing way. This much would be obvious to anyone who really knew me. I’m not trying to excuse myself from my own set of wrongs. It was simply impossible to get past that. I lost control of my better judgment. It’s clear what Emmy Louise did now. She is currently the night hostess at A Better Night. She must have known something about us, before she even met us. I don’t want to speculate anymore. I’m sick enough from all this.
I sometimes desperately watch her walk from her car to the back entrance of A Better Night. I do have lusty thoughts about her as she presses buttons to activate her car alarm. I fantasize about having a little control with buttons of my own. Instead of a panic button, there would be a fuck me fast kiss me slow button, a button I would worship as certain ancients worshipped Mithras or perhaps Jok who might allow some precipitation fall if the proper black goat was slaughtered by his subjects. Anyway, instead of an open door button, I would have a… I’m sorry. You get the idea. I can’t stop the ideas. My libido get’s over worked when I feel emotionally at sea, when I feel I’m losing purpose in my life. Purpose?
I’m sad, it’s terribly sad. I do cry. I look at Emmy and I see a Dorothy from my Chittenango past, a Dorothy flattened by the shadow of a falling house. I won’t spray the Wizard of Oz can too thickly against this wall I’m thudding up against. I don’t want this rut to blast me back to those painful moments. I’m trying to regroup. I might open up a comedy club for functional Autistic people, or do something very challenging and wildly unexpected. Maybe I will start my own line of juicer. Are juicers still a hot sell? Gotta make a note to check into that.
A Better Night is the name of the new restaurant that Andrew Belsker opened up where our dream restaurant died. Sometimes I visualize the bones of our old restaurant rattling underneath A Better Night. I could imagine The Oldest Tree House still perfectly intact and untouched but aged, wizened into a living artifact, growing in some labyrinth of crushed dreams. I know it’s corny. It reminds me of those tacky horror films where some sunken luxury boat suddenly comes back to ‘life’ or revealed and unhidden to some lucky witness, who ends up being not so lucky, because… Ok, ok…
So our restaurant is practically unrecognizable now. It’s been over two years since The Oldest Tree House was forced to dissolve. The neighborhood is a real estate gold mine now. It’s choked with affluent younger professionals living in new construction ‘green’ buildings, a million pretty girl’s texting their boyfriends or internet dates, riding their bikes, wearing the fashions of the moment with puissant nonchalance. Everything sort of looks and sounds and smells like a music video in an era when music videos ceased to be any fun, and weren’t really music videos, but meta-videos, where more and more of the punched out music was a stand in for something else, ancillary bird house clock creature waddling out of the fashion of the moment hole maybe on the hour maybe not….
I hear the gazpacho at ‘ABN” is every man’s dream of a woman, and every woman’s dream of a man, as well as every man’s dream of a man, and every woman’s dream of a woman, and also every hermaphroditic dream gazpacho… melon with crispy prosciutto laced together in the cool and sophisticated pool of incredibleness, and yes I’m getting confused, and still crying, but holding the shrillness of it all in my knuckles, in my chewed fingers. Yes, let’s not be so heterosexual about our comparing ‘ABN’s’ gazpacho to a ‘dream’ of…
I’ve wanted to call Sam and do whatever I can to gain his forgiveness. He’s moved, and I have not been able to trace his whereabouts. I’ve thought about hiring one of those agencies that helps you track missing people, but keep chickening out. Sometimes I see the number or numbers 116 dancing in my head. Sometimes Leda Ray is holding a shiny white sign with that very number in black and red written on it. She’s riding a bicycle that travels across water. There is a new city far off beyond that water. I want to go there, but there is no there.
116 is the weight of Amy Duncan, or was the weight of Amy Duncan. There should be a band called The Weight of Amy Duncan. Amy and Emmy both work at A Better Night. I think Duncan is some sort of manager. I have a thing for managers of restaurants, especially night managers, if there are day and night managers, then the night manager title becomes more meaningful of course.
I desperately want to walk into the restaurant for perverse and sentimental reasons. I don’t have the courage.
I don’t talk to Gary much anymore. He’s back with Heveilah Low. I hear that he is trying to start a satellite radio program. Maybe it’s already on the air? Maybe he has his own call in hour. Maybe it’s some sort of super free form, constantly changing goofy call in show with some wacky guest-star DJ coming on every week. There are a lot of these satellite radio programs out there. How would I know which one was Gary’s? If he’s still with H. Low, perhaps, that would make it easier. She would blog her program, disseminate the thing to death. I would find out. I would call in. Maybe Sam would call in. I don’t trust Gary. I have a funny feeling Gary did something terribly wrong, or allowed it to happen. I won’t know. It will be one of things you will never know.
We could reunite. I could tell Sam I was sorry this time. It wasn’t him. It’s all so stupid. The way things fall apart after these incredible rapprochements, these sort of fortuitous collisions that spark a new amiability, or drive to put something together, to work together, to bury enmity, to build over it, to open up for business, to close business, to stand as sentinel in front of doors behind receding home. Maybe I will try to paint it. I can’t, but what the hell.
No one hates fancy and nonsensical coffee names more than pensioners, and the old in general. Witness how an old person (not-urban–ex-Dada or beatnik or something…flies into an anticipatory rage when ‘forced’ to walk into a contemporary cafe…forced because there is no where else to go…. They wait on line eying the exotically named drinks: Squirrel Nut Decaf, Purple Nurple Mocha Blend, Apocalypse Calypso Cinnamon Reward, et cetera…. They are forced to listen to music denigrating WW2, Planters Nuts, old cars, and Family Walks..et cet… The old person becomes progressively more acerbic, waves of anger coruscate around their blood rivers, splish splashing as coquettes in a bath of avocado juice, then finally…. They get to the cashier, who of course, is apathetic, and slightly sardonic in overall demeanor. Cashier is impatient as old person looks at chalk menu board in despair. Cashier is not unsumpathetic to old person’s confusion, but this is not noticed by ‘OP.’ Old person shouts: I just want coffee, regular, straight coffee, no bullshit, no skinny why-bother whipfree pussy-fusion. I don’t need any kangaroos on a broken bicycle house blend…….and so forth. He is stammering, quite rude, often vulgar, but delightfully old and cuddly in appearance. A respectable old woman who is drinking liquor from a glass jar, appears scared of what will happen. She begins to urinate on a stack of Noam Chomsky books or something like that.
The old person’s tirade becomes so wearisome and frothy, that the counter person begins developing heart problems. As the young coffee person dies, the ‘OP’ sips on a very handsome mug of the most exotic and luxurious cafe drink available, replete with unusual edible ornaments jutting from the silky membrane of treated milk. As the counter person receives medical assistance from two specialists who happen to be reading various high brow magazines in cafe, old person increasingly mellows out, and begins listening to i-pod, which he/she is not quite sure how to work at first, but then uses this device, as well as other devices that the youths of today are surgically attached to, in order to mock the moribund and ultimately quite terminal state of employee. At one point, such a device is placed on genitals of young barista, while ‘OP’ declares something or other about MP3s, and sperm, that makes no sense. After this death, old person destroys signs of all fancy coffee names in shop with a toy violin, and walks away from cafe with a posse of other old dicks.
(I have to refine idea..but I think it’s ripe for volleys of improvisational zeal.)
Domenic Maltempi
Sam was a funny mother. He was probably nuts, a sort of part time sociopath with a mean-kind streak like so many other people I’ve run into. Chinny had a talent with getting literary with the menu. It wasn’t too bad. I could understand it, and I understand you gotta do those things if you don’t want to be lumped in that pile of every other two step-up from the fast food ladder. Little Chinaman of Chittenango was a fearless dresser to. I didn’t talk about that much with him, probably should have. He calmed me down. I felt like kid around him. Not afraid to say whatever I wanted to.
I never got all into Sam’s crazy game like a lot of other people at school did. I did get involved, but not like so many people. That was a while ago. I never cheated or anything. Sam was just so paranoid after a while, and he had some people point to me about cheating, because I was winning. I looked guilty, but it was those guys that cheated. You can keyword ‘Chinny Ray’ on a searchy and come up with people blogging about that shit like it was some famous national joke from the late shows, a joke from some important douche bag from whenever.
It was fun to tease Chinny Chin as if nothing ever happened. But there is probably no such thing ‘as if nothing ever happened.’ The best sort of forgetting isn’t usually possible until it’s too late to make a damn of a difference. When ‘The Oldest Tree House,’ opened up for business on a snowy November Saturday, the three of us were dressed in our finest. That’s no joke. I had been reading up on the restaurant business shortly after moving to Delphi 2, which happened to be the same week Sam did.
I don’t know how it happens like that. Crazy shit really, where people who you were never really close to, but came across at some early feeling part of your life, they come back body and all, or come back differently, into your life, and make this smashing impact in some pinprick way that really soaks you up in a common fluid, and I have no idea. Telling these stories about this DJ we all were getting with now and then, dating and everything. It all seems so insignificant or way over-blown at first, that impact, and then it turns and turns.
I try not to think much about why we are all in this town now. We all moved to this state, to this little city, and it’s not like we got much in common outside of going to college, you know….. as people. I know Ray grew up in a little shit town like me, but that’s about it. I didn’t dress up like a doll or whatever he did growing up with that wizard business. I worked with my dad cleaning up animal shit, and driving a truck up and down for hours and hours every day.
I was in a whistling club once. It was a group of hearing impaired people. It was suppose to be a sort of you can do it thing, a support group.
I find whistling disturbing. I get angry when I hear too much whistling. I once thought that gay people whistled more than straight people, that I could tell a queer gay whistle like a bad guy you’ve seen a bunch of times in everyday life, in a line up, but with sound… I could identify that whistle. I remember having a friend tell me he was gay, and I had to not be friends with him anymore. Now I feel like shit about this, but back then I was just like…. I knew it, and a queer whistle haunted me. Then, I had ideas about helping him not be gay. Maybe if I could teach him to whistle like a straight guy, really work on it. He would change. Can you imagine? A sort of un-gaying whistle camp program! I would start a whistling straight camp or something. This was my idea. I remember writing about this in a one subject spiral like I was trying to save my life with a secret letter I had to sneak out of a prison or something.
We all worked so hard to put this restaurant together. Each of our strengths we’re harnessed to make it as successful, as different from the pack as it could be. It’s not like we became best buddies and just decided to do this. It’s weird, and don’t make much sense, like getting married, or believing god talks to nice guys only as opposed to pissed off Polar Bears or bored women.
Most days I would just shut myself in Delphi 2’s main library, or occasionally sit outside pouring over my notes, or reading certain books or expensive magazines that covered the news about restaurants, or new business ideas in general. I needed to know if gin would be the new vodka, and emerge from its long held position of obscurity. I took a bunch of notes, and tried to befriend as many people in the business as possible. Can’t even remember how many hostesses I dated. I always found the day hostesses to be very different from the night hostesses, but I could have just made a whole lot of phony correlations like everyone else about so many things.
The library was always crammed with hot little missy fingers, adorable bite-my-neck-now babes, combing the special periodicals, digging into their books as they dragged on 100 length cigarettes, smiling at me. A guy’s got to be hopeful. I thought being an owner in a restaurant would be a ticket to poly-tang central. That wasn’t the only thing on my mind, but quite often it was.
We had all raised a large amount of capital, and built our free standing building in a vacant lot where a gigantic white ash tree grew. The lot had been some kind of superfund site, a dry cleaning place or something like that had been there before. It had been cleaned up. We got the land cheap. ‘The Oldest Tree House,’ was located on a fairly well walked strip of the south side of Delphi 2, where pedestrian traffic was heavy. The fading film star, Oren Sazer was still a favorite home town son, and owned a large and damn charming home dating from the 1890’s not more than a few blocks away where many artists had once lived, and now some rich people or their kids in college lived.
It was Chinny’s idea to create an actual tree house above the restaurant that one could walk up a short flight of carved and beautifully stained wooden serpentine like stairs to. This special tree house dining area would have a through the classic ages of many civilization look to it, a sensual and simplified composite set of décor and over all feel from materials and what not, of civilizations thought to be ‘classic’ in maybe an arty sense. That wasn’t my thing, my description, but I heard it spoken about all the time and could talk like that if people asked.
Patrons sitting in the main dining room could see portions of the exclusive tree house dining area if they looked up through the large opaque sky roof. It was a teaser alright. It was a media buzz reservoir that never got over tapped. We wanted to create a one of a kind curiosity and wonder-whip, entice people to want to make reservations and pay a premium to dine up there far in advance. Book it up baby! We spent so much money on an elaborate lighting system, and all these odds and ends from these time periods. It all combined to give this exclusive space (enough room for about eight) a feel of timelessness, of childhood too. We gave a lot of consideration, and brainstormed our asses off at many a session at various restaurants and drinking spots, trying to get the whole fucking plan just right. But it was that tree house dining part, our centerpiece that we spent the most time on. I think too much time. Our business plan itself could have used all that damn attention.
It wasn’t a lack of business plan that fucked us. It wasn’t a woman either. That’s what Sam thinks, but that’s too simple. He started in with his weird fucking gambling stunts. Should have broken his neck when I first got a tingle about all that. She was in on it somehow…gambling on people’s weight, that stupid invisible scale and the weight on the wall. It was supposed to be daring and funny, and bohemian fuck-off different. But it was fucking stupid. I thought Sam was all done with all of his gambling urges. He told us all about his counseling, remorse, how he was really just a professional now who longed for……and so on and so forth.
Chinny was really into to this whole tree house concept, this place where couples would go for an extra romantic date in an unusual place both friendly and old fashion, and strange or unfamiliar as a place to enjoy a meal. I loved it up there, but was more into the business end, including interviewing. Christ did I interview a lot of dickhops, and bingyfinggys. I did a hell of a lot of firing in that almost three years we were open. This was all before we decided to put invisible scales on the flooring of our popular outdoor dining section which was run by Emmy Louise.
It was a mistake hiring her. I still think Chinny Ray was having phone sex with her. Ray was always saying shit on the phone in that hanky panky loud-soft gulping way: yeah, you deserve that righh, righh? It fits perfect righh? How’s it going to fit perfect? It’s going to fit just perfect, righh? You’re going to be good now? How good is it? Then you will get rewarded. Stuff like that, really corny, lots of heavy-quiver questions. It was sexual. It was obviously sexual. Never heard those ‘T’s’ at the end of ‘right’ for whatever reason. That was the grossest part about overhearing those calls, not hearing those ‘T’s. There was something chaste about the letter T, or something wet leafy on a shivering tummy and lewd about the absence of them in such a context. I confronted Ray about it. I knew it was Emmy he was getting all worked up with on those calls.
She was never around when he would be talking like that during operating hours. I never heard Ray have phone sex when Emmy was working. He said he was checking inventory or some shit, but he was getting his phone jollies with that crazy bitch. We got really high one night smoking this pot that Emmy said she got from one of the top surgeons in town, Doctor Shineblast (that’s what it sounded like at least.) I think it was laced with some Crystal Meth, or something even worse than that. I’m not sure. I don’t fuck with any hard drugs. Life is fucked up enough.
That night Emmy began flirting with Ray overtly. She complimented him on his scarves and shoes, and after shave. It got annoying. She was waxing poetic about these compliments. I didn’t trust the bitch. I felt there was something more than just pot we were inhaling into our blood. I even said something casual, not accusatory or anything, about how the pot must have been laced. Everyone sort of chuckled it off, dismissing my claim as if I was just saying what I said to compliment the grass, or just a jawing stoned sophomore getting all verbally kablooie. That night stands heavily in my mind as the beginning of a very messy end. It happened about two years and a half or so.
We closed up the Tree House a little early, and lit this laced doob on fire. I had a great mixed CD that no one ever let me put on. It was a countrified version of Salt and Pepper’s ‘Shoop.’ No one gave a damn, but I did. I liked it a lot. I began to get irritated because Emmy got everyone to agree to put on her The very Best of England Dan and John Ford Coley. How many times can you listen to that? Ray held a big laugh in check. I knew he thought the album was a bunch of laughable crud. He continued to get close to Emmy, almost breathe on her. I could see his hand just levitating over her creamy white legs under those short pink corduroy shorts. I was racing around our restaurant with the reckless speed of a time traveling skinny raccoon just let loose in a maze of exotically putrid garbage cans.
I was hopped up on something. This wasn’t just some high grade marijuana. Gary tried to calm me down, but I thought he was trying to pin me to the ground and hurt me. It took a while to come down off that. I was a little unclear of what was going on.
Hello! Vulpine Doxy!
Dom’s Video Game Idea
A radical republican group composed of various tightly knit arms, including a militant wing, travel through space and time to aid groups they sympathize with in their struggles. Whether diplomatic/political, arts and music, economic, or whatever, this progressive force’s members are competing against another time traveling force that with more limited abilities to travel through time, and motivated in an antithetical fashion to our people’s power entity.
Let us call this radical republican force for autonomy and justice, The Parachuting Wolves of Liberty (PWL) Rather than rely on some charismatic, rock n roll like guru or exotically attractive and understood as ‘primitive’ leader, the PWL will be a much more egalitarian force, with rituals meant to deflate the pull of hierarchy, et cetera.
Our group materializes in Chile, trying to thwart the coup against Salvador Allende, they then turn up oust Pol Pot, or Mao Ze Dong, wage war against their own people. They are not restricted to any time period, but do not venture to times without hierarchy, or widespread slavery (for example.) One might see them help the communards of 19th Century France, or protect Patrice Lumumba as he fights for the betterment of all people in the Republic of The Congo.
In any event, this game strives to be an anecdote to the typical war games, where is mostly just about the carnage, or inciting jingoism and bloodlust for the would be cheese doodle lazy-boy warriors of the empire. There should be much more emphasis on trying change the attitudes of various peoples who at first might be neutral or enemies by associate, as opposed to bombings et cetera. A video game that might aid in raising revolutionary consciousness, or at least the beginnings of an historical awareness that will serve as a corrective to the official, state glorifying, violence means ‘truth’ history which of course is what one is taught, and most widely disseminated, regardless if these texts are slightly less egregious in their omissions, prevarications, and otherwise.
The group may go to other solar systems, planets, universes, whatever, looking to learn about new peoples, interested to see if similar struggles exist. The PWL are also all about music. We can the ‘rock-star’ type of game and fuse it with the battle type games in our own unique way. PWL performances under various monikers will play shows to boost the morale of people they are supporting, or as a sort of weapon against its enemies (Sonic Warfare.) Without going into too much detail, the PWL will not torture or treat unfairly any enemy, as they rightly understand that such actions would gradually corrode and efface who they are, what they stand for, et cetera.
Many members of the PWL perform as musicians, and artists. Many types of music from time and place are celebrated as well as individual talents. Diversity and tolerance is not preached, or used as a quieting sort of slogan-powder for a false sense of liberality, but simply built in to the culture of the PWL, a placeless anti-state. Watch the PWL get under Hitler’s skin by performing some sort of music the Nazi’s are sure to hate. Watch the forces of the Spanish Inquisition flee in fear, their prisoners free, as a PWL sells out a show, and leads its fans into jailing the torturers, and killers. Hell, we could even make such figures or forces as Nero play drums for a song he really abhors. You get the idea.
Again, it’s not all about punishing enemies, and making a mockery of dictatorial assholes, and rightwing or left-wing death squads, but about trying to change consciousness without resorting to low/dishonest practices.
I wonder if such video games as the one I’m trying to outline exist. Who knows? As an extra to this games feature, or an intricate part of it, you may design non-lethal weapons using potions of the PWL budget for R@D, and creates words and phrases, for a new language………
Dom Maltempi 12
(Sorry for this slightly confusing way to post this story.) Please scroll on down for the beginning.
Thanks you for reading,
Domenic
E-6
It did not help matters that I began to date the therapist I mentioned before. She was an important factor in exorcising a noxious form of recycled insecurity, and so much pain and anger caused by this callous and damaging game at my expense. As I began to show strong signs of not allowing the wardrobe gambling game to affect me, in fact to be empowered with the experience, boomeranging its bite, my relationship with Dr. Torrequada became more and more romantic.
How could I forget being dumped by the always exquisitely dressed Dr. Torrquada while my left hand was tied to my own bed post by an aged ill fitting give away T shirt with a fictional so called ‘nougat’ monster representing some gimmicky candy bar that was now only sold in certain parts of South Carolina?. Why all this… just before telling me that she needed ‘space’ or whatever it was she decanted then and there with much blurble and bluster. I was denied even an onanistic ending of it all; my body and spirit crumbled at the thought of what that shirt represented. How it instantly stood for my shabby and almost dystopian blandness in clothing, or what I irrationally imagined to still to be the case. Tied with it, dumped…
Yes, I knew it was all bullshit. I didn’t care about having just a few pairs of Brave New World khaki pants that could hardly be distinguished, or the clothing I possessed in general back then. Big fucking deal… I know. It took me back. It took a while more to feel liberated again from those freshly resurrected ill feelings from that time in my life. It was during times such as the latter mentioned relapse into a flaccid gloom, that I wanted to strangle the memory of that gasconading little fuck Sammy Boy the foreskin choker. Oh yeah, I had names for him. You try to laugh everything off as I did to myself that night in the restaurant waiting for Sam. Not easy. He thought he was such a smooth operator, just gliding on the stupidity of others. Or what was Sam really up to? How interested was he in simply making money?
Sam contacted me after chancing upon a call I made to a radio program broadcast on WDTIX Norohosquet. If this was not strange enough, Gary also called into this show. Yes, we all lived in Delphi Two, had dated the same DJ from WDTIX, and were now to meet at one of the most highly regarded Asian Fusion restaurants in town: Prawn Dawn. Everyone would be dressed neatly. We were all familiar with the place. We even occasionally stopped in for drinks, but never noticed, or were at Prawn Dawn during the same days or time.
So yes, I got there before Gary and Sam, and chatted with L the bartender. She told me stories of Gary and his various dates that had me spitting up my Geckle Loom and Lime on the rocks. Gary the groping slickster! He was an entrepreneur now. L knew quite a bit about the old Neck Breaker from my freshman days of college. Why shouldn’t Gary be an Entrepreneur? I chided myself for being so superficial and prejudiced in my immediate thoughts. I suppose we all move on from reciting the Two Live Crew to bigger and better things. He couldn’t be as insufferable as an Andrew Lewis, my co-worker, who told endless stories of the avant-garde composers he stopped listening to during high school, while he pretended to champion a so called persecuted business elite in South America and wore fashion clothes mimicking working class attire from some bygone strong American Union era, clothes made in slave wage labor zones. Of course Andrew was sitting there at PD slurping up Yaki noodles with some glamour girl clutching her telephone as she occasionally looked up at Lewis’s pretty scallion green watery eyes.
Sam was the next to walk in. He wore soft stone baggy pants and an ill fitting indigo blazer with a tight fit. His right hand was bandaged, and I noticed something that looked like a Tic-Tac-Toe game marked up on the soft white gauzy surface of this bandaging. Sam walked right past me to the men’s room. When he came out, his hair was combed to the other side, its wet seal fat slick dirty blonde locks heavily parted, a sort of Maginot line bristling with product. A pack of candy cigarettes was slightly bulging from his jacket breast pocket when he walked. Maybe he was trying to quit smoking real butts?
Sam walked right up to me without looking at me. He put his head on my left shoulder, and began to shake his head from side to side. I was a little freaked. My mom had done something very similar to me when she told me about the death of my little sister. I was stunned, frightened. My exuberantly comical and upbeat mood scattered into clumsy phalanxes on a retreat to an abolished homeland.
“Why shouldn’t we be friends? We should be very good friends. That’s what I think. Because I know we can. I sense that we can. I think there is something about us that. It’s been some time. I’m so….”
Sam went on talking in this breathless manner, short sentences speeding pass sleepy toll booth operators, rapt slurry going for a midnight jog from a cold morning mouth. I did not doubt his sincerity. I did see him nervously eye my clothes, looking me up and down in a very intimidated or guarded way. Was everyone looking at my clothes? Why was everyone ordering the tuna? I began to sweat, clenching a fist, breathing painfully with each inhalation.
It passed. My jovial mood returned. The overhanging lights of the Prawn Dawn Bar we were sitting at regained their regal ease. I think I even laughed a bit, as one does at a school bully they encounter in a future scene when you can clearly remove yourself from yourself, watch an everyday chimera of the supposed so-solid and unwavering, get scratched out into insipid glyphs, the melt-play of a spoiled pot of pretend. Once seen, you have little doubt that such a bully or show off or however it went, became nothing more than a diminishing continuation of a sort of over confident caricature now stricken with a fatalistic humbleness that might temporarily tip over into amiable chauvinistic buddy-up play.
Sam Forskrenn asked me for my forgiveness. I granted it with a smile and relief. I did not want a big deal, or a lot of talk. I wanted a quiet moment of shared deep reflection. Prawn Dawn became as loud as I ever heard it at that moment, and therefore all the more quiet. A guest had berated a waiter for opening a pot of steaming mussels into his face. We talked about how we thought of each other over the years, how the thoughts changed. We talked about enmity in general. It got deep. It got shallow.
We finished a good two drinks together before Gary finally walked into the restaurant from the back entrance where the municipal parking was located. Gary looked cocky and ridiculous, but almost tender somehow. I was touched and slightly amazed about the ease of mutual volubility with Sam, as well as the very effusive and particular stories we bandied. We were sometimes upset at each other, very curious, in need of understanding, sympathy, forgiveness, and so forth. I have to admit that these twenty or so minutes with Sam at the slick and ultra-modern darkly lit back bar at Prawn Dawn, were to my mind, easily, the most unambiguously open hearted conversation I’ve ever had. I listened to every word of Sam’s as if he were me, and not just any me, but one that desperately needed to be understood in a time of great sorrow and vertiginous doubt or confusion.
We all shared a love of fine cuisine, and cooking. This continued to surprise me, even as our chitty chat turned to the fascination, nay, great interest we shared in opening a restaurant. Gary certainly didn’t strike me as a man with a critical palette, or a yen for excellent victuals or culinary innovation, or anything of the like. I was wrong. It was understandably hard to picture or fathom that there might have now been a foodie or something like that stored in the body of a person I only remember as basically an oversexed boy, sucking the final flavor particle air out of a bag of cheap BBQ chips, and then farting onto his bed dripping of filth and gyrating to terrible light porn rap or Cheap Trick cover band music.
We all studiously avoided talk of the gambling on my wardrobe from college years. There was hardly any talk of Heveilah Low or the now vanished FLP pills scene at Leg up Beer Garden. Any contentious topic was more than contained. It was obliterated by a new and odd feeling of unity, and pertinacity of purpose. We did speak a lot about Delphi 2, the strangeness of not running into each other (But we did of course, in certain ways we never really noticed or wanted to notice.)
Gary did eventually tell a dirty story about dogging H Low on some cheap party boat in Nova Scotia. He kept on giving details of some turquoise hippie necklace she wore, how it looked on her tan skin, the slipperiness of the boat’s bathroom floor, the FLP pills they were on. The detailing in this story became both enthralling and extremely unsettling; it was in short, irresistible. We all laughed at the idea of intensely fucking on a so called party boat while one and their partner were both transiently fluent in Farsi, or was it Tamil English…..out of their pretty skulls
