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 19^th 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

Jutnk Telepahy joins those joking antipodes… What to do with them when they fall apart? Let it crash on you, and seize on the humanity from the failure of the same.

Minutes before predicting the confused bray of a locked up giraffe… The end of the world not nigh, and nigh enough. Water tight lift off suspension. Suspension. I’ll feel better in 2012. Am better than I’ve ever been. Because I’ve been better….no splits.

For the holidays, I feed those that have had to pay too much capital gains tax. For those that are not terribly literate among that grouping; I read stories about about the greed and control wielded by government. I find that it mitigates their repressed feelings of pseudo guilt about their own ‘light dabblings’ in greed and control.

the man so lonely: he regretted unsubscribing to junk mail companies

the man so incapable of sleep–: the first time he took clozapam (anti-anxiety pill) was was when his brother gave him two before boarding a flight from New York to Argentina to visit a reformed hooker named Juliette. His brother told him: “Take two of these, you won’t wake up you fucking insomniac.” The man took two pills of clasped with a brand name water than intensely bothered him, as the label showed emaciated people in the background looking at a dam of water fall into a verdantly furred black hole. He took these pills shortly after drinking almost undrinkable wine, and listening to the woman seated next to him prey about her all her children (which comforted him in a mild and unembarrasing way until she got to a boy named Hermoso Hermoso who did something with duckling that did not make sense. Our flying man  fell asleep for the entire nine or so hours of the plane trip down to the southern hemisphere.  It was awe inspiring for him. He knew not the gauzy tongue of a deep  When he awoke to the lights of Argentina, the spanish speaking woman did the sign of the cross over him and said in Spanish (which I will try to translate:) I thought you were dead, you looked so happy Mister.

In Dallas, which is 44 percent Latino, police have issued at least 39 citations to drivers for the non-existent infraction of being “a non-English-speaking driver.” The latest perpetrator is Ernestina Mondragon, who got ticketed by a rookie cop after she made an improper U-turn while taking her daughter to school, and could only summon the criminally few English phrases she knows. She was so upset she had to go to the E.R.

I won’t see Low at the Beer Garden. Bitch. What a dumb city. What a name. Voice messages….who want them? I’m done with them. I’M done with you Heviliah. This isn’t real? Why not? I’m an everyday person, the person you see doing whatever, and you think nothing. You don’t think, oh he has no teeth or, oh, he’s great in bed.

This is what happens to me. This is what’s going on with me. I would like to start a new career, food, wine, hotel industry, behind the scenes hospitality? I don’t know. I would like some guidance, gussied up as amazingly fortuitous or not. I will run with the bullshit if it lands the right way at the right….

People want so much from you with their voices and messages, and voiced messages. They just become contacts to me, become pustules from a bad breakout that won’t play eradicate somehow. Just send me words…. I don’t feel as obligated to…

That’s the main game, becoming it, from the nation, to the planet, to the person, to boredom boring one’s insides into an endless cup of flavorless fountain soda. Inside you can hear the cacophony packing up to leave. What’s the main game? The end of the personal, and the big time days of the oh so personalized world, that really isn’t there at all.

Paid, I’ve paid.

Just give me little words to peel away. I can peel them away, drive away, dialogue rash anecdote! And here it is… no answering, no voice to put on. Honesty and directness, that’s what everyone wants! Oh yeah. Cure! Cure for everyone! Party time for the hale ascetics!

I don’t fucking know. See this tongue? See this thumb sticking out sore, bloodied rainbow jaw, and scratch off gold ruminations gone ploood?

Swoosh; peacock, so bored, too much to avoid doing. Lost my SIM Card… Where the hell is it? I lied about the knives. Whole day’s fucked! My apartments a mess! A voice message and it’s getting darker sooner.  I was listening to Gorga’s show. I turned if off. I’m listening again.  I thought it might serve as some sort of a minor tonic, burn away some puerile inner-bitching. Summertime is the best for listening, but for quiet? I’m not sure. Some hold with summer… for quiet.

It must be Gary. I knew it was. I don’t know where the time goes either, and I hate that fucking expression.

That’s how we really decided to get together, to finally have that talk. We’re adults now. I’m talking about Ray and Gary, and me of course. The radio show, Gorga’s, we all called in one night. This night, the one you may not have realized I’m still shooting out of, like a delayed bad high.  Gary disguising his deaf Gary voice, with some other voice, talking about how he wanted to bring Rizzo’s Snorissbeam’s virginity back, because he fucked up the first time, didn’t get her all ready for his Lincoln Navigator, or whatever the truck brand name he used for his genitals at the time. Funny fuck. He was. I’ll give him that.

Gary just talking without a hint of facetious gaga brim bubble, not a shredola of call-in show sabotage glee. I will admit– his call brought my interest back into the show. It wasn’t simply because it was him, and I was sort of shocked that he was in town. This was when I truly realized that. I didn’t want to hear of the special glow in the dark backpack from some stiff’s youthful reminiscences, some youth living in the pricey Quincium district close to where I knew C  Ray was now taking up residence. I wanted to hear Gary go on and on, exiting words lewd and funny on the topic of Rizzo’s Snorissbeam’s virginity. You can’t bring that back Gary, you dumb neck breaking fuck! Ha——!

Not long after that call, that call in show, we all sought each other out. We listened to each other’s calls. Gary’s call was first. I called shortly after. That’s how it worked. That’s how it works. It’s that stupid, and seemingly fraught with something powerfully other than human or material guiding the coalescing of…

Gorga talking to Gary: “What’s her number Pete? (Gary’s bullshit name) Shall we give her a call, and see if we can connect you again? We can’t bring back Rizzo’s virginity, but we could send you guys to the mall freighted with Uncle Hard Pretzel coupons. Yes? You can buy t-shirts, and everything might feel normal again between you guys. Yes? Uncle Hard coupons… It’s not every day. Was Tell us how you would do it differently? What did you do with her pants? Did you really ask to call her parents while in mid-coitus? What did you say to her mother? Did you talk to her mother? Or was it her big sister? You dirty bastard Pete. Who is this?”

Gorga kept on using Gary’s alias. She sounded more and more alarmed, something much more thrown off and angered, than some am I hoodwinked jokey edginess. When Gorga repeated who is this, I kept on saying Gary, Gare, (sounded like Glare without the L.) I kept on saying ‘glare without the L, on the floor with the radio off, computer on…  I kept saying, I forgive you, and what right do I have to say that, and shit like that. And yes, I think Gorga was not totally fooled, as evidenced at the end of that call, from what she said, the best that I can remember. I’m sure Gary called in before.  Bastard could really disguise his voice.

None of us used our real names. We sought each other out. There was a dizzying clash of feelings, emotions, anger, need for peace. It was certainly comical. We would talk about Low, and other people. I will stay away from her. I have to. The court says so. I will still occasionally listen to WDTIX.

I can do their theme song with my penny whistle. I bought Incredible Pushups to do pushups. You twist them when you’re coming up from a pushup. They rotate. I get stronger. I drew a number of animals with some green metallic paint on the black polymer surface of one of the Incredible Pushup rotating things with a very soft expensive brush. On the other one, I wrote Roman numerals. They looked like doomed buildings, my Roman Numerals. Its part of a game, a game called ‘when you notice this, when you notice that.’ You should play.

Voice mail! Who now? I don’t even pretend to have friends anymore. But I would again, and forget this game. But it’s difficult not to fondly recollect… in tranquility, the closest I’ll get to equanimity, certain emotions…

First I had to think what each animal represented. I assigned values to each one. Horse this, Rat that, understand? Perfect Pushup game, a new one all the time. I enclosed them in a lemon bright rectangle. My eye would need to focus on one of them. Whichever I focused on first, I would make a mental note, and then look askance at the other pushup rotating device, note the first Roman numeral I saw. I would do sets of fifteen or twenty. I would write down the results. I have an elaborate system devised wherein I decide if I will punish myself or reward myself for what I took in while doing the pushup set, a mean average based on my first looks.

I’ve got it down. I’ve got this game down. How do I punish myself? I’m not violent. I’m not a sore loser. I cannot countenance a cheat, a cheater.  People look at the wrong rules. They don’t listen, pay attention… I spend so much time. I don’t talk like I’m thinking now when others are around, at the learning center or a ball game.

I love music, making special meals with the radio on. I only listen to a few songs with any great passion, only a few songs make me angry. All of Cheap Trick…all of their songs scour my last nub of good will. When I found Gary’s number, one of the first things I said was: “Fuck Cheap Trick.” I called him before Ray. That was much more difficult. I turned the man into a sort of craps table, a shoe of cards, skipping slot machine, something like that. He laughed. Gary actually laughed.  We were talking! I softened, the absurdity of the call, his laugh, this enmity we were dragging around had lost its entrails.

Why should they really know me? The cheaters… I want my survivors to know me. I write a lot down. It’s time for another omelet. I’ve mastered making them. Chives are dirty, so I clean them, add part of a brick of cold cream cheese. My green and white omelet is perfect. Who doesn’t like to look at the heavy cream around the burnt silver frying pan?

A lot has to do with how hot the pan is when you pour the egg mixture. I say ‘a lot has to do,’ and I’m talking about, I mean, how the dish comes out, its texture mainly. I’m not angry all the time. I think about these things. I have a love of making food, preparing, plating it, thinking about courses, things like that. I won’t gamble anymore.  I’m getting better. I’m meeting Chinny Ray soon. I feel like I really can with a heart spared a jabbing to death by my past actions towards him. I contacted him after hearing him break down and cry on that phone call to Gorga. The pain I felt hearing him recount what happened to him in college, what he would bring back, or live over again if he had the chance, do over again. Gorga was crying. This topic, how it game up just as we all listened. It was amazing, almost enough to make an obdurate non-believer believe in something out of nature, or supernatural. I poured myself a drink, slow whiskey cold.

I knew Ray in college a little. I thought he was a wise ass. Before the whole gambling thing went down, before the game I called Chinny Ray’s Wardrobe took off beyond my wildest expectations, made a minor celebrity of me on campus. Ray tried to buddy up with me after I was attacked by Gary who went to the same college I went to in western NY. They didn’t like each other, Ray and Gary. At that time, Ray was still blithely oblivious of my game starring him of course.

Now this program…Ray, breaking down, crying…  It was not easy to stay on that phone, choking that phone like a fake spider at the end of a drunken night in a cheap rocking chair. He had no idea yet, Ray had no idea about how so many students, even some faculty members gambled on what items of clothing he would be wearing on a given day (including accessories for supplemental points towards cash reward.)

So we buddied up sort of. All my games, the betting, those white cards we distributed, pocketing cash, every article of clothing of Chinny Ray’s wafted along in my head, (not many to count) making me so sick. The English teacher who always bet the same: tight stone colored chinos with drab olive sweater and those cheap brown sneakers, Poonies, or whatever they were called. He was smart that English teacher, and a fucking perv to. D.H Lawrence my ass.

So there you have it. I was listening to Ray. Ray’s quavering voice, all the details as Gorga’s breathing got labored on the silent other end of the phone magic totter. He wanted to bring back his years in college, his early years. The gambling we did robbed him of those years, wanting to remember even the parts where he enjoyed himself, oblivious of my game. Me, I was the leader of it. I was the main fuck, but not the only. Everyone, all those bastards who would stealthily follow him around campus, the awful, viscose penalty boot to the sack, every shitty eye on you, every joke circulating at a party. Ray might have been just sitting around in the kitchen by the Chex mix party bowl, wanting to vomit, downing light beer or grape juice and vodka or whatever. I felt sick listening. I was behind this miserable call, this heart desiccating tale. He wanted to bring back those years, no one gambling on his clothing. No hidden cameras by his dorm room, no privacy eviscerated, turned into ethereal diarrhea, or whatever you want to name it, Gorga getting teary in vox.

Everyone was dressed neatly. They would come. We would meet. There would be a katrillion scattered episodes of menial or otherwise— personal Armageddon’s going as I waited. Everyone gets a free liter of Zero Spirit Shock soda to drink and toss. Everyone would be predigested, would become their experience. All resistance absorbed, used to keep the awful brittle but bruising order of things up. I kept writing sentences that started “Everyone…” I stopped. I stared at people passing by. Some of whom might be greater friends to me than any I might imagine without uttering a single word. Passing them, they pass you, they are still, and you are, together but not together. The way things really work the mechanics of how things that don’t work—operate.

Ding Dong. I was still getting dressed in my house in my head as I dozed into the runner of news squirting itself into wraparound dross under some somnolent interview. A myriad of outfits were slung over various chairs in the large basement where I store my wine, ride my garage sale exercise bike, peek at old costumes I use to wear back in Chittenango time, stuffed in boxes. I went with a vintage Gitman Bros sky blue button up shirt and a pair of stylish brown suspenders with a very fine set of red pinstripes on the back lower portion of the legs.

I was dressed in a more self consciously elaborate way.  I want to be stylish but not saliently so, as many men do at perhaps a certain point in their life, or on a given occasion. It is a hang up I still have now and then, years after I discovered that strangers and friends were betting on what I would wear every morning. Sometimes I wake up in the morning, and I draw a picture called ‘Chinny Ray’s Revenge.’ This was an exercise suggested by my therapist, and had proven successful.

I had a reputation for not having much style, and for my wardrobe to consist of a few generic staples, and little in the way of accessories.  Betting on my exact outfit with the paucity of its possible constituent parts so pointedly emphasized by a nonchalant sharp, would lead a gambler into a dangerously cocky faith in ‘winning.’  There’s nothing more American than the scene of a confidence man moving from city to city, awakening festival, to somnolent gathering of those looking to cheat the world, potion eyes stuffed with a crystal blue flagon, leaky tent throats unable to get cleared in time.

The game would only occasionally result in a partial victory most of the time. Such partial victory payouts or belief in future payouts were enough to keep the sucker stream felicitously flowing. Sound familiar? Singing: the micro, the macro, the fed, the fen roll, the magic of compound interest, the NGO, the Paper View, Dollar Dreams or Less Canopy blowing like a sail on evaporating seas, the two day sale, the mucky pup state’s dangling handlers and the whole damn paper empire… Sam Forskrenn knew this better than anyone. He made a lot of money off my misery. I was going to think of it, so I tried to think of it in a cold disinterested way, to learn what it was about, to disinfect myself from its refueling sting.

a story most blowhards on the radio (never mind most of TV land) on the so called left of right do not speak about because they know they champion the same slime that they dramatically vilify… All tax payers and citizens in general, should be outraged instead of yammering on about individuals or political parties.

I’m a big dick! Did you hear me? A big messy, fussy, stale dick with lot’s of lucre. I fucking own the media (but why should that matter, it’s a matter of ‘free speech. I bought my political position, and therefore can be more ‘honest’ than other politicians, because I don’t ‘need’ the money. Have you heard this oh-so-compelling argument before? I must insist on a ‘left-wing’ conspiracy, dark persecuting red toga draped Trotskyites visit me at night and play Spanish Civil War songs in my ear to taunt me. I must lay the blame on these wicked politically motivated foes as opposed to my obvious and myriad crimes, coupled as it is with an acute disgust that many may possibly have (not under the corporatist haze of distractions,) with my nations history of ‘funny-business’ regarding money and politics— to put it mildly. God! I’m like fucking AIG insurance, or one of these persecuted and harrowed Investment banks under-siege by the socialists that want to plug up the good times, and force everyone to stop having sex, and take up community work, or compulsory hammer and sickle crocheting, (who are only flanked by former Wall-Street and financial company ‘gurus’ and top dogs for looks, and to deceive the weak eyes of the the business elites of the world who are in fact so fooled. You see, they really take orders from bearded Marxists on radical college campuses eating blueberry flax and Engels diarrhea goulash, somewhere in the Pacific North West. Yeah, it’s me talking, Silvio fucking B, hooker whispering sweetheart of the hard working ‘finance’ north, teenage girl ogling so-called scum-bag of the corporatist-clown-euro-right, Berlusconi the harlequin! Hello dears!