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At the Well of Conduction
Gimp Graphomania #1: Pittsburgh, PA, 6/27/2023
Datz rite Groe, you drunk, back dat shid up!
Yes sir, baked up.
Punky was somewhat flumuxxed moments ago when I asked her to mix 2 shots of rum into each of my three morning coffees…
It has been 7 days since Doc Dread informed me that my knee was “structurally sound” and then showed me by way of x-ray cartoon shadow that “your spine is compressed.” He then shot me in the lumbar with magic juice and Young Brett ushered me fourth into the world, five minutes with THE MAN having tought me more about by structural dysintegrity than 3 hours at urgent care.
“James,” says the strapping stud, “Doc looks tired. Back in the day he was never tired.”
What a fine young man—took me to pharmacy, bank, pharmacy, diner, back to the Brickmouse House, where he handed me off to the stud who retired me from stick in May and said, “We ought to spar some time,” and as Brick Mouse shook hands and swallowed hard, edited, “easy like, no ego, just technique.”
After he left and Brickmouse, more of an over-built creature like me than the apex HE, while helping me through spinal decompression evolutions counseled, “James, it would be an honor to help Brett prepare to Smack down other cavemen. However, for me, that is a hurdle too far—let me see if I can decompress this for you.”
And we fall together as a team: the Titan, the Artificer and the Empathetic Genius: one boldly, decently striding, one sympathetically conniving and one actively caring. We are the three Monkeys of Could: beast, brain and heart.
Brett took my scripst in. But I would have to pick them up, because one was an opiate pain killer. I wanted to cry when I asked Doc for that and he shook his head and gave me another chance to pussy out and I did… this man, 2 years ago got crushed by a tree and took not an asprin and I, shaken and craven had asked for the mercy of the Poppy.
I was experiencing the myopic selfishness of the critically spent, unsure of those around me. Brett, patiently stalking me as I hobbled a-crutch back to the pharmacy, took control as old ladies looking at me with fear, like I would would die and them be unable to aid though near, would ask if I was in line, and Brett’s strong, clear, commanding voice would say, with a note of kindness, “Ma’am, our script is not filled yet—you go ahead,” and I would nod thankfully, as if it was something gracious I had said.
What a man.
28, I think.
I was stocking shelves and sneaking by hoodrats on my way to work.
He is training with British SAS troopers, a Gurkha, even, at Fort Dicks, and returning to thank me for, “Being there for me when I was young.” [2]
I try not to cry.
He tries not to notice.
“James,” he says, before we pull off into the gathering rain, which I did not realize until then always gathered anew about a hopeful mane, “I knew, when you told me that you were too bad off to lay it down [1] that you were bad off. So I’m here, whatever you need, James.”
I felt like Nestor being put to tender bed by Achilles.
The next morning, after Brickmouse had tended me and I took 5 hours making my guest bed and clearing the visitor deck, he came home from a hard day at work and drove me to Megan, the loyal cook and wife of the wandering creep who she knows, damn well stops off first to see Miss Ezz, and says, “So nice to meet you, Megan. I believe I will see you tomorrow. Please take came of him—he’s not very good at it.”
She sucks off her cigg and blurts, as the Mexicans marvel at a white guy double parked, “He’s a dumbass and a half, Baby,” thanks for bringing Poppy home.”
As he leaves and I practice traction on the crutches she wonders at his departure, “Fuckin’ Keeanu Reeves with Patrick Swazzy’s ass—and God let you hit that with a stick—no wonder your buggered up! Well, here’s to the view!”
“Fawk, babe!, I’m dyin’ here.”
The second brother of the two next door, the brawny Mexican who told me once upon a Negro Shewing time, “Don’t worry Poppy, we got this!” came home and looked at me, hobbling on the porch, “Poppy, what happened?”
I could tell by the look in his eyes he hoped dearly that I had not fallen prey to Negroes.
What a man, like Brett and Brickmouse, about 5’ 11” and all muscle. I immediately save the next feral Negroe to skulk through the hood and say, “Oh, my rucksack was too heavy—should not have tried to make off with all of Cibolla’s gold!”
He pats me on the shoulder and reminds, “Poppy” if you need anything, I am here!”
I get it, the strong, the striving and the raw young, they crave that example of the Fallen that snarls, “Never done,” and it helps in there quest to become.
The next day, a Friday I think, five days past, I spend 2 hours relearning how to walk and stand. I check my phone and Megan has texted me at 7:27 A.M.: “Saw Keeanu first thing, what a beautiful man!”
“Yes, babe. I hit him with a stick once and then he put me down… and yes, his wife is a beautiful as you imagine and I never look twice…”
“Fawkig lyin’ dawg!” she texts back and all is rite in the world.
At 10:45 I head out a-crutch to Eastern Avenue to get the Essex, Whispering Woods or Franklin Square bus to Stemmers Run, were I will board the Towson bus and meet The Man in the Hat, Father of Brett, at Towson Town Center. Our land Lady, Georgia, widow of such a better man than me, Bruce, Megan’s oldest brother, say, “You be careful now, come back to us.”
I had been supposed to sand and paint that porch of hers that I now limped off of into the gathering rain.
It takes a half hour for me to get 5 blocks!
I get soaked in the rain and two tractor trailers stop and wave me across Rolling Mill Road. I must look near death for these Jippos to shed a care.
I am covering old ground. In 1993, I came here by night to work at the supermarket—now I pass it by by the morning light. The original back injury put me out of work here, exactly 30 years ago setting me on this course.
I board the bus and the driver says, “Money man, it but $2 dollars to take this shuttle can, Big Money—Big Money!” and I fed those two ones into the meter, confident that the next bus would have a broken meter and that there was no need to buy a $4.80 ticket.
Aboard the bus, I receive 2 pics of me crutching along Rolling Mill from Brickmouse, who had been working on the rack system above Megan’s job site, accompanied by a text, “You are moving better today!”
Afoot for four minutes, I boarded the bus for Towson and the meter was jammed—go figure, and arrives in Towson at 12:30, 30 minutes ahead of The Man In the Hat.
He is stuck in traffic and I turn and see The Brass Tap, “I’ll be in the Brass Tap, bro,” text I, and by the time I get into the place, past the other, fatter, blacker negro on crutches outside, I recall that The Operator had paid me $300 for “talking to me about stuff that would melt a psychiatric brain” and decide I’m buying.
Confidence thus extruded, I get up on a stool and see Kelly Blake form Portland’s favorite drink, Apple Crown, and order, a double shot, a Bud Light, and salt shaker.
By the time The Man in the Hat entered, and I introduced him as “My brother,” the decks were cleared for his trademark deprecation, “Miss, you are beautiful and the bar is well appointed… But how can I sit down and enjoy myself in a place where you admit a one-eyed pirate—with one leg no less?”
“Oh, because he’s a perfect gentlemen sir!”
“Oh,” says he, “Only because he hasn’t been able to lurch off that bar stool and haul you off—I will remove the reprobate from your midst, miss!”
I smile at her and turn to him, “Like that, Bro? She thought I had money—now I’m your red-headed step brother?”
“Pretty much.”
My scrap-made brothers and fate-made caretakers—I thank you.
Notes
-1. I had a Wednesday morning date with Miss Ezz, my darling top girl, a shorty who could raise the dead, even drunk and morning fled, a loyal, lusty girl of some 30 years, which I canceled, for fear that she would look at me and cry rather than…
-2. I discover while talking with his father 2 days later that he had written the Dog Brothers and they never got back to him, even though he had bought there products. He is probably the third best stick fighter in the world, and they snubbed him. He would never tell me such a thing, pitting he mentor [me] against his hero [Top Dog] for he is us come together, and senses it as a her should. As the ladies at the diner gawked at him and I eyes his shoulder I said, “What is your nickname in the army?” he grinned, “Shoulders, as soon as they saw me they said I was hauling the SAW.”
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posted: March 27, 2024   reads: 232   © 2023 James LaFond
‘When the Wheels Fall Off’
Ambulatory and Ocular Notes: Baltimore, 6/22/2023
Two years ago a friend chewed me out for being a hobo, told me that I was not “the Mister Jim you used to be” [meaning I was not looking so rugged] and that I ought to consider closing down “the minstrel road show,” and renting a room from him. He continued, “What happens when the wheels fall off?” I have not spoken with him since, and no regard him as a sending, for events have conspired to fulfill hi prophecy.
Heading east I had many plans for the 3 scheduled months:
-Visit a sick friend monthly
-Get the guts checked for hernias
-Do podcasts with Don Jefferies, The Myth of the 20th Century Crew, The White Monkey and Lynn Lockhart
-Fight at Man Weekend
-Complete 3 novels
I did fight at Man Weekend, the only two days in the East that I have not been afflicted with the return of the screaming eye seizures. For the entire winter and early spring the eye had been behaving. The eye abated for training day and fight day and as soon as the Appalachian highlands were behind us, the pain returned. Maybe it has to do with being between Tranhattan and Brainwashing City. As I lay abed in Jersey, making a piss poor house guest, hiding from the light, I even wandered if the goboment were beaming microwaves at me. On the precipice of Tin Foil Hat Pychosis I took the train to Baltimore to get my hernia checked. In so doing, an hour and a half standing at bus stops and then rocking on a city bus where there was standing room only for an hour, trashed my right side. Every time that bus stopped my weight and all of the weight of my every possession shifted to my right leg as I stood on the spinning disk at the center point of the over-long accordion bus.
It is June 22, cool and wet, as I right, exactly two weeks to the day since I could walk. I now hobble on crutches. Tomorrow I begin a crutch mobile odyssey by bus, multiple cars and train, to visit a sick friend. I have written perhaps 3 chapters since the onset of this, with the pain preventing me from sleeping or sitting or standing. Tying as a post anthropod shrimp squirming on the floor and crawling to various softer places is tougher than I thought.
Also, my once high pain tolerance has become crushingly bitch-like—quite the blow to the geriatric hobo ego. Hernia surgery is out until next year, ironically put off by a mishap had while making my way into health care range. Yesterday morning I was beginning to feel like a fish caught in a net and hauled ashore. Then three fellow fighters, my head coach Doctor Dread, Brett and Brickmouse, turned my condition aroudn just as I was thinking of quitting and renting a room in their terrible town.
One day I did spend 6 hours on crutches, using busses and accessing a distant Urgent Care. The staff were pretty much horrified by my condition. But, as Brickmouse told me yesterday, I am only that lonely hobo in spots, for most of my times getting by in this negation matrix, I am lucky in my friends:
“James, it is an honor and a pleasure to help you. You are stubborn and self sufficient. So, and I think I can speak for the rest, its nice to help someone who avoids help and then hits bump in the road.”
He said this after he bought me a lighter backpack and a plug in heating pad, performed traction on my spine and filled up bottles of water to place by the guest bed I inhabit.
This was a mere 3 hours after Doc Dread made room I his busy day to x-ray me and hit me with a needle that delivered me suddenly from shaking agony to just plain old hurts like hell pain. That was made possible by young Bret driving into town, taking me to Doc, and holding those many doors that you never really consider until you have to open them on crutches.
Brett then took me to the bank to cash the disability checks written for me by The Operator. Finding out that we couldn’t spar that man took me to a diner, said it was a consultation, and paid me for drinking on his dime as he had his pancakes and spoke of violent things. Bret then dropped off my scripts and took me to lunch. He wanted to talk about, history, power and the Bible and we did, making me feel like old Nestor advising Achilles.
I said, “In the Army, what is your nickname?”
“Shoulders, they took one look at me and said you’re the SAW gunner!”
I then discovered the irony of pharmacy placement in supermarkets as Brett patiently shadowed me while I hobbled back to pick up the subscriptions. He even directed traffic by the window, making sure the old ladies got in front of us.
That was yesterday. The people that have helped me move about and acquire the things a gimp needs over this past two weeks are:
-Brickmouse
-Brickmouse Bride
-Uber Joe
-My Sister & Mother, two church ladies who put up with the Devil on their couch for three days.
-Incognegro, who drove 50 miles with a pair of crutches
-Doctor Dread [three times]
-Lynn, who mailed me knee braces and scheduled my Kaiser appointments
-Nero the Pict
-Georgia and Megan who provided a bed on he same level as the bathroom and cooked for me
-Tami and Heather who called me an Uber
-Dereka, the hot Uberess who was kind enough to take me to the liquor store on the way to Georgia and Megan’s place in the Barrior
-Manuel, the Barrio Boss, who offered his assistance.
-Brett
And the people who have offered to drive me by stages to and from the train.
-The Man in the Hat
-Erique
-Mescaline Franklin
-Jennie
Brett spoke in kind tones, in his deep voice: “James, we will meet up again and train. I’m so glad that this didn’t happen to you in a fight. Because if anybody is going to medically retire you I want it to be me. I’m hoping one day, that between Sean and me, we’ll talk you into Christianity—or beat it into you.”
And he grinned, holding the door.
Despite the various misfortunes I have brought down on my own busted head, I look around and find that I am blessed.
Thank you.
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posted: March 27, 2024   reads: 229   © 2023 James LaFond
Beast versus Crumb #2
Results of A Submission Boxing Bout Fought: 3/22/24
The Beast O’Neal
Birmingham, England
-6 feet
-192 pounds
-58 years
Crumb the Crackpot Cracker
-5’ 7”
-168 pounds
-61 years
We were supposed to have video, but that did not work out.
Some big Murkan land whale was shooting dissolute hoops on the court while O’Neal and I shook hands, placed mouth guards and slipped on gloves.
Last year, O’Neal rarely hit me.
February, he caught up to me and I started to cut angles, turn him and get behind him—quite the little bully there.
Since we decided to fight three weeks ago, O’Neal has actually been training his foot work. That made the difference. Last week I schooled him 7 of 8 rounds him shoving me out on the 7th. Comparing notes, I was still sore a week later and he never felt a thing but a sore nose bridge.
We started at 1:20 P.M. just as the rain broke long enough to permit the lesser angels to sneer down.
Round 1
From left lead I tried to deal jabs and move, but his reach got me, so I went to his body and came up to his head. We traded power punches, him thumping my left floating rib. I went up stairs and he returned, so I shelled, looking at his chest, and he used both forearms to shove me out by the shoulders.
30 second break.
Round 2
From southpaw I beat down his jab with stops. He caught up to me and I stalled by stepping on his foot. He then bored in behind a 1-2 and I beat the body, him doing the same, to my left floating rib. The extra weight, and the cause within me that I should be able to trade from the pocket and bang him around, got me hit hard.
He shoved me out again.
30 second break.
Round 3
This one initially went my way, even though he thumped my forehead and, rang my left ear [which is bruised] and thumped the body again. I had him turned and in my wheelhouse but he kept stepping around. I circled out wider to get behind him and he called me out as I hit him with a combo to the body, from clear out of the tip-off circle.
30 second break.
Round 4
We went for each other and as we grunted and traded punches the land whale stopped shooting hoops. O’Neal came up the middle between my gloves and hit my nose. I returned a hook to his head and he banged the body twice in the same spot as before. I was hurt and went for him by shift stepping southpaw behind him and hitting him with a 5 punch combo to the body, three above the kidney and two to the chest, then up to the chin which he deflected by pulling in his shoulder. I was on the hunt. So as he started to step around I checked his shoulder and felt the intercoastal between the floating rib and bottom rib strain. One more power shot there and I might be injured and unable to spar or use crutches, so I called myself out.
4 rounds to 0, for The Beast O’Neal.
Time, 1:30, 5 minutes, minus 90 seconds for 3 minutes 30 seconds of boxing, with few jabs thrown be either man.
Good job—he hit a lot harder than I did. Last week I had him walking into punches. This week he kept the center and waited for me and I ate the power.
We will try and do another bout this summer.
In the meantime, O’Neal will not have a sparring partner. He has good control and would like someone to train with. I left him with the gloves and a spare mouth guard. If you are a Portland area man who would like some boxing fun, contact me at 443-686-0598 and I’ll send O’Neal your phone number.
My conqueror also bought me two 25 ounce Coors lights in frosted mugs at the Timeout Pub.
Thank you.
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posted: March 26, 2024   reads: 270   © 2024 James LaFond
‘You Okay?’
Going to Urgent Care on Crutches in Baltimore City: 6/14/2023
Written from memory on 6/20/2023.
I have been unable to walk since Friday, June 9. On Wednesday the 14th I stepped outside of Georgia’s house, where Megan rents and cleans and I had lain up for the night.
Lynn scheduled me a 7:30 A.M. LYFT ride with a black guy named Michael in a small sedan. I was headed to Kaiser Urgent Care in southern Baltimore County, a 2 to 3 hour bus haul. Lynn is so nice. Pulling the door shut behind me I felt it lock, turned the knob, and knew it was secure. I have no key and the ladies were at work.
It was 7:27 A.M. I made my way on crutches out to the front walk by 7:29.
7:30 came and went, reminding me that we were on CP time.
7:35 Michael rolls up, looks at me, looks at the Mexican men coming home from their rained out roofing job—yes, it was beginning to rain—and drove off.
My knee and hip were in agony from the bus strip out of Baltimore the Monday before, in which every time the bus stopped, all of my weight and the rucksack’s weight shifted onto my right leg. It had gotten progressively worse until the leg froze around dawn on Friday. I felt like I had been cut down in the ring by a Muay Thai fighter. I needed a doctor to get a look and perhaps order an image.
Was I damaging the knee with all of the mobility work for the hip, thigh and groin, traitor muscle knots pulsated like some mutinous alien crew of the meat ship me?
3 larger than golf ball and 8 smaller knots yet remain.
I crutched for 15 minutes from Eastdale to Eastern along 54th.
Taking the Orange City Link bus down to the courthouse, I asked the driver where the Yellow line picks up and he pointed south across Fayette. Crutching to the curb barely before cars started pulling off I found that this was the stop to Mondawmin, not Kaiser, and began limping around in search of the southbound line.
Next to the Baltimore Police Department Central Precinct parking garage a light skinned man about my size and age, with an eager gleam in his eyes, and looking about for third party observers, said, “You alright?”
He was savoring, I am convinced, his last mugging, I haven fallen past most of the links in our food chain to land at his feet. I glared and he backed off, looking at me narrowly.
Over 4 blocks I crutched, the only paleface out of some hundred souls. Many SUVs and some cars and trucks driven by ghost people and BPD officers cruised about. I crossed 4 streets at rush hour on crutches while the white light walking man blinked on the crossing light, giving way to a red countdown, which I barely beat. I did discover that Baltimore drivers are not completely soulless. While they will normally try to hit you while making a left turn on red as you use the crosswalk, sometimes even speeding up to get you, these drivers simply tried to bump me at about 5 MPH, like sheepdogs nipping at a lamb’s haunches.
I noticed not a single police officer on foot, though numerous squad SUVs. The street was being patrolled by 4 African American armed private security. The detail leader seemed to be the man in unmarked BDUs, who was short, bald, and wore a .44 magnum revolver in a tied down leather holster on his right hip. Every person on foot either ignored me [most] by looking pointedly away, or glared at me with unconcealed hate.
Boarding the Yellow as one of only 2 patrons, the other being a Sikh in turban, I ask the very obese light skinned driver the bus’s destination, and he looked away, clenching his jaw, refusing to answer.
I sit in the first row of forward facing seats and observe.
Two stops out a security guard boards to go home and behind him an extremely muscular man of some 40 years. Even his face had muscles and his jeans and shirt fit like paint. He scanned his ticket and it gave off an invalid beep.
“Hey you, you back there? Yes you, you in red, your ticket is invalid.”
The man returns up there and says, “I just paid two dollas fo dis ticket.”
“Wrong ticket,” chirped the driver, “next time buy an all day pass. That one is retired.”
“Okay, okay, mah bad. Can ya juz’ let a brutha slide.”
“Why should I?” chirped the fat driver.
The man made a fist and to punch the driver and the driver pulled the plexi-glass shield back to cover him and pointed at the camera and then the legal notice about mandatory time for people convicted of attacking transit employees, saying, “Its Fed-eral!”
The man made two meaty fists and posed, “Well I’m gonna best somebody down on dis bus if dis disrespect continue!”
He looks down at me and I wave him to me, then looks back at the driver who says, “I’ll let you slide this time. No go do what you want.”
I waved the thug over again and he sat down across the aisle from me, “Look man, I’m goin’ to the hospital. This is a one way ticket for me en this is my last bus. They are not supposed to be transferable, so don’t scan it for this guy, but it will be good for the rest of the day.”
“Really man, you sure you don’ need dis?”
“I’m good, this is yours.”
He shook hands and bumped fists with me and said, “Mah Man, I will not foget dis. I see you sometime en I’ll do you a fava.”
As the bus made its way past the urban blight around Martin Luther King Boulevard and out through Pig Town on Washington Boulevard, into Baltimore Highlands the muscular thug spoke with the off duty security guard about peace and love and respect. At last, he offloaded at Baltimore Highlands, in the worst stretch and shouted to me, “Thank you again, Mah Man. I won’ foget!”
I waved as he walked towards a huddle of hos and yos before a boarded up wood frame house and the bus made off for its destination.
At I last got off at the Urgent Care door and hobbled in, some dozen of the diverse staff openly horrified at my pain levels as my every muscle was quivering with the effort of using the crutches. The x-ray techs complimented me on not crying or passing out when they forced my knee straight and my legs open, bumping fists and saying, “You were a trooper in there.”
The white queen though, Doctor Karen Manhate, MD. MP, she did a minimal check, threw my ace bandage in the trash and asked me if I wanted pain pills.
“No, I just want to know I’m not tearing the knee apart doing the upper leg and hip rehab.”
Her look of disgust, that had been etched on her face ever since I told her that I did this taking a city bus with a rucksack on, intensified. She dismissed with the news that the knee only had slight arthritis and instructions to rest for two weeks.
The sedan sent to pick me up arrived and I have been trying to evolve back into a biped ever since.
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posted: March 25, 2024   reads: 453   © 2023 James LaFond
Mop Head
Rabbit Jack: Motherboard #1. A
‘What a headache,’ he inwardly groaned as something less vital, but once more so, drearily moaned, “Bitchmade muvafucka, yee done fo me, do a’leas’ I ain’ owned.”
He could not clearly see. There was no sight on the right and something clacked opaquely before his left eye. His hands were not free to fix this… because he leaned on them. He let go of the thing in his left hand, brought it to the thing that he supposed was his over-sized eye lid, fussed with it, and it did dull-like hurt, found the buckle on the left side of his head— and thought, ‘Really, I’m wearing a belt for ahead band’—and was stricken with a doubt-filled pause, ‘Am I dead? Is this a bad dream?’
The groan below turned into a hissing gurgle, “A course you not dead—I ‘bout to be dead, what dis affray were all ‘bout you stubborn Mamma’s boy!”
A memory of a sweet, angelic voice came to his mind, ‘Lefty loosy, righty tighty,’ and he screwed the shutter on over his eye and could see again clearly.
There, beneath him, in the center aisle of the bus, a stone dead bus, out of gas and empty of people, snarled Mop Head, a man he recalled, but how he knew him he could guess not. Mop Head was on his back holding a hatchet what had some blood and pale, blotched skin on it and was snarling up at him, spitting bright blood from his terrible imposition, for Mop Head, the half-Jamaican parts dealer was impaled, literally stuck to the floor.
“Datz right, motherfucker! Comin’ back to yer bitchmade ass yet! Heh, the injustice o’ dis shit here! I went up side yo head not near good ‘nough!”
“We’re alone, there’s no one else on the bus,” he mumbled bemusedly.
Mop Head cackled in a vomiting way, “Dumbshit, been ten damned years since da gas run out!”
“I used to take this bus home, to the Brickmouse House?” He mumbled and half believed as he turned and looked out of the bus windows. The two four lane streets where this bus was stopped was jammed with cars, trucks and two other busses, some on their sides, some stacked making walls, blocking the northerly way. The corner gas station was an actual heap of scrap, from gutted buildings and vehicles. There was even a backhoe in the intersection, decked out in traffic lights fallen from the poles that mostly leaned over it from where they were broken off. The backhoe looked like a yellow Christmas tree.
“What?” he turned droolingly to see down the way this bus had come and his left hand jerked upon what it was holding as the man he had half-forgotten beneath him moaned, “Motherfucker, ged it ove wit, twistin’ dis shid in my gutz ain’t right!”
He looked down numbly and saw the man trying to pull out a piece of re-bar that had impaled him and noticed that the rusty and bloody iron was attached to the steel pipe in his hand, that was the crossbar of a blued steel pipe crutch, the kind he had never used before, that shackled to the forearms, that polio kids used back in the day.
“I’m sorry,” he, said, and meant it, down into the eyes of the suffering creature beneath him, a man that he, or some part of him, had known well enough to recall his name.
The coppery brown man, his pallor somewhat ashen, looked up at him in horrific dismay, eyes wide and bloodshot, “Finish it man!”
“Finish what?” he asked.
The man whose name he somehow knew looked up to him, “Bitchmade man, you a rancid motherfucker to be sure. But dis no time ta mend yo crooked ways...finish it!” he cried.
He looked around, not feeling whole or even whole awake and said, as if some distant bell tolled within, “I can’t fix it...God knows I was never a mechanic. But, I knew people, people around here, who fix things. I’ll be right back with help, get you fixed right back up.”
“No, motherfucker, God no!” Cried the man as he gently pulled out the crutch from his own lean body, gored between the open curtains of his black flannel shirt.
Blood gushed from the wound, and instead of applying pressure with his ashy hands, the Jamaican, aptly named Mop Head for his dreadlocks, cried, “Retarded motherfucker, you snapped ma spine.”
“Sorry, I’ll be right back,” echoed he in the bell-like precincts of his aching head. The words were received by a creaking of lesser metals and plastics as he pulled open the once automatic doors, barely able to stand between them on his numb legs, his crutches dangling and playing a steel on aluminum song as he did so, and stepped down into the gutter. The gutter by the storm drain and the old bus stop received him with a popping of his knee and the voice above and behind him in the bus gurgled, “No, ho, ho, o!”
His crutches clanged on the crumbling concrete, their bottoms not being cushened with rubber but oddly capped, one on the right with a meathook and the one on the left with a large gauge drill bit, both mounted to the rusty re-bar with hard rubber gaskets, intern mounted in blued steel pipe.
‘What cool crutches,’ he wondered, ‘But I’d like the old kind that I could lean on with my arm pits. This must be tiring.’
As he thought this he heard a trundling, squealing, scurrying of uncountable feet. Down from the dilapidated bus stop eves, up from the choked gutters, out of the various heaped, wrecked, parked, flipped and chopped vehicles choking the street, surged a gathering torrent of rats, at first creeks, then, streams and finally into two mighty rivers, one flooding up into the open front door of the bus and the other around his crookedly booted feet, to fill the bus with squeals of hungry glee and usher off poor Mop Head to wherever those slain according to the unfathomable laws of happenstance by wheezing gimps so went.
A sadness suffused him. His shoulders so sank. His head also hung, dripping somewhat onto his shoulder, hand and crutch.
The rats soon passed him as the bus rocked under their hungry wake. He stood back in numbed awe and sad reverence, braced himself. A reverie of offloading from this bus between a pretty girl and a gnarly drunk while a great big fat man held the doors for them all, upon a sunny day, conjured a sadness in his heart.
As the bus rocked under the dead gray skies, he stood and saluted, and spoke aloud, “Apologies, Mop Head, I meant to get the EMTs.”
As he withdrew his hand he saw there something like a phone, no, like grandpap’s watch, with real hour, minute and second hands, but with a screen.
‘Well, I’ll be,’ mused he, and then woodenly limped on, one boot riding upon another as he crutched up a hill he could have sworn looked mighty different yesterday, a hill he had known, whose sun-kissed asphalt was now heaped with junk, whose clean concrete was half-rendered to a crumblestone by weeds and baby maple.
He limped along like a newlywed who had woken next to his dead bride, too numb and too goddamned dumb to wonder why his dear had departed.
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posted: March 24, 2024   reads: 324   © 2023 James LaFond
Tyke of Pipes
Act 5: Tyke of the Orphan Pipes
Ascent, Caesarsday, Second Day of Sepulcher
Tyke
Motherless-the-Bun they had named him. For he had no known mother, unlike the majority of the Mob Pipes, who were to the lad and man distinguished by the anonymity, and becoming acquainted with their characters, one might suspect the studied scarcity, of their fathers. He had arrived among them holding but a sandwich bun, one of the long ones that was able to accommodate strips of bacon, and when left on the steam pipes with sliced cheese betwixt, made a lusty supper.
The Mob Pipes dwelt in the long west to east alleys, joined by short, north to south Horseshoe Alley, that connected Knight’s Street with Bell Station. At the far end of their realm, before the Gate of Pipes, barred these past 8 years since the Plebe-Mob Street War [1], yawned the Well of Bawdy Sprites. These were the mothers of the Mob of Pipes. These well and set up dames were acrobatic performers of the low stage and circus tent, set up in the round of an old nunnery walled off to be damned by the Church to punish the nuns within for having intercourse and founding out children to the Mob Pipes.
These pious old dames faded and were tenderly pulled down from their 12 windows above the paved Well where nuns once had sung holy hymns and ushered off to hospitals for the poor. The acrobatics among the nation of whores saw an opportunity. While a rake of the patricians, a boss of the plebes, a centurian or the like must need gain entrance to the Well by paying the Lictors of Bell Station. [2]
So there, at the base of that sultry well, as the acrobats of desire recline and pose from their modest three-staved, ashwood balcony railings, the paramour woos his harlot as they bid for his affections, fan their painted faces in false modesty and even sing some in imitation of that race of nuns who had come before.
This had become quite the show at the expense of certain base morons. So the well-to-do bring foot men who hold a black screen before the gate. Even this is not sacred. Jude of Mirrors, a carnival alchemist, said to have escaped a cruel Moorish captivity in France, sets up an array to this day and charges for the view to those who would look into the receiver of his chain of spying mirrors.
Despite his mere age of Eight, Tyke, sir named The Tyke of Pipes as their very Moses, not found in a basket run down the river, but rather with a bun toddling down the sewer, knew the history of his tiny nation like The Pope Knew the Bible. Trent Pipe, their Mob Boss kept Tyke ever with him as a sent lookout, confidant, messenger and the like. Trent was by far their eldest, a Gent of Pipes one might say, figured by the Bawds, their motherly kin, as nearer to 22 than 21 years. The older of the bawdy hens, the Witchy Three, forever argued over which of them gave birth to that storied Pipe.
Lore of Pipes
Thus contained well and understood in the mind of Tyke of Pipes.
In Days of Yore, before the coming of steam power, some sixty years or three lives agone, a certain gang of waifish half-orphans, put out by their mothers for the sin of departure by their fathers, took, as a trade, to the fifes. Organizing themselves in small bands of fifers, and on saint days in a great troop, and then scattering to the various alleys and hideyholes, bridge casements and forgotten basements to avoid service and transportation, [3] these fellows earned a tiny bit of fame.
When war called, those up and over 12 years would present themselves to the sergeants of the muster and find themselves for piping in the Legions or aboard decks in the Navy. For this ready service, the little time keepers of battle, the pace setters of march, where forgiven by Caesar’s men for the likelihood that their very pipes had been made of stolen and sawed pipe, usually copper, sometimes of rich folks’ sink or bed stave brass, and that half and again of their nutriment had been thieved from better mouths.
Then came the steam engines, the steam whistles, the machinery noise-makers to put the fifers out of business in much of the Navy—and for a certain the better portion—and losing their boyish tasks of piping the work hour, the lunch hour and the end of work for gangs of workmen. Now, the factory whistle did this, had run them out of work like so much beer turned to piss.
In a fit of rebellion, Sweat the Pipe, Boss of the Bell Station Pipes, set his best fifers to joke the industrialists, and in small groups, from big to tiny, imitated the factory whistles with the use of increasingly large and even iron pipes. This jest caused confusion among workers and overseers, lost money for the uppity ups, and brought the brute intentions of strike breakers, iron police, slave catchers and train conductors against the Fife Tykes, now called the Mob Pipes, for they fifed through iron now, the better to brain a constable for interrupting their song.
Conductors, overseers, police and lad-nabbers all converged on any Pipe caught in the open to such slogans as “trains on time” and “no fake breaktime!” The battle was hard fought and one sided.
Eventually the Pipes barricaded themselves in the two long slots [Knight and Bell Alleys] and one short slot [Horseshoe Alley] between Knight Street and Bell Station. In an irony of spite the official bullies gated each end of that narrow nation, stuck as they were between the Iron Furnace to the north on Bridge Street and the Steam Works to the south fronting on Light Street. The super-heated air venting from the roaring pipes at the back of the iron works mixed with the sweat from the hissing and knocking pipes out the back of the Steam Works that piped its dragon’s money breath to power the summer fans and the winter radiators of the rich in their fifth floor apartments…
Betwixt Fumes and Steam, between Heaven and Hell as they imagined, dwelt the Mob Pipes, apartments built of scrounged pallet scaffolds, songs and fight provided by brass, copper and iron pipes. This mob were the gallant protectors of the Bawdy Sprites, who they might avenge by scrambling out of their vertical warren by night and taking to the roof tops as if in weird flight.
The Bawdy Sprites, likewise, being the mothers of many of them, used their influence with their powerful and daring paramours to sustain the orphan gang and eventually to place out older members in some service or another. Former Pipes were renown fine spies, footmen, agents of industrial sabotage, and as hit men.
Gate of Knights
“Tyke, Tyke bring ye peepers back out our gloried past and ye head out yer second-story ass!”
“Yes, Boss,” answered he, blinking himself out of his reverie, “what a wonder this is we see! Lookie, Japs wee sketching that mug o’ swords and letting loose doves to soar. Why?”
Check, from where they stood behind the flat iron steam grate fence, upon their spy pallet, his hair greasy red and his pale finger long, agile and strong, stabbed that singular digit as if it were an arrow that could fly and take life at the burly form of gladiatorial arrogance down four stories and across Knight Street.
“Tyke, that ain’t no Knight—with what we got truce rite. Dat is a Scot, clear as can be seen, limping still aswagger with his Irish Knocking Blackthorn rod! Dat Burly bastard even gets ta wear ‘is blasted helmet about in honor of slaughterin’ our homeward kin in wayback Ulster, Dublin en Belfast!”
Tyke looked and saw one of the two awesome and taciturn—never speaking they—armored knights who stood at the base of the stairs of House Equis, Chapterhouse New York. One of these well fed beasts handed a helmet he had been holding for this visitor while whatever business was conducted within.
“What of it, Check? An uppity up o’ the arena, a longtime boss o’ sword it seems by his medals.”
Hissed Check, “Just galls me is all, what his did ‘over our ancestors en how he en his near here helped do to us in the Plebe Mob War. Them blackthorns were beatin’ down Pipes the very year ‘fore you was born.”
‘As if I were born to mere bear witness to sorrow,’ mused Tyke, “too thoughtful by a yard song” it was well known.
He piped up as a Pipe should, “Why are all those wee Japs following him and sketching—look, one just got run down by a steam car!”
Check was aghast, as ever over injustice to children, “Look ye, Tyke, his mates but take his notes and leave him lie. They spies of some Jap boss, the doves like messenger pigeons, I bet. With da steam presses a clackin’ prattle high en low, news be gettin’ ta be a big grift.”
“What do we do?” wondered Tyke.
A firm hand came to his shoulder, “Nuffin’, so long as ‘e observes the Sanctity of Pipes.” [4]
The great, limping figure of gladiatorial wars, looking a glare at the sketching Japs, strode directly for the Knight Gate below them, chained against the Lictors, pad-locked with a mechanism indeed gifted by the Knights, grabbed the chains, snarled a horrid snarl, and snapped those iron chains between hands that must have been equal to that of a circus ape!
“Oh no he didn’t!” exclaimed Check.
“Boss!” yelled Tim Pipe below as the gates clanged in against the factory and furnace pipes.
“Go roust the whores—this be bad, Tyke,” whispered Check in a hurry, then to yell, “Pipes—breach Knight! Breach Knight!”
A clangor of pipes sounded all around, wee fifes piping as well as the steam pipes knocked and the distant train whistled. Tyke having utterly disregarded his orders, hefted his pointy pipe and looked up at Check, who seemed to have forgotten his own command as he growled, “Its all-in!”
Notes
-1. All 12 factions of Plebes, each taking for their colors the habit of one of the Houses Munera, had waged a six day war against the 60 Mobs, these being reduced to 40 Mobs by the time the Lictors and Praetorians interceded on behalf of the criminal Mobs. After all, the Plebes were an aspirational threat to the patricians and the mobs the partners of the rich in many a greasy grift. Not only did the numbers of the Plebes save any faction from extermination, but the refuge their presbyrs, matrons and barristers were granted by the gladiatorial houses in their monastic fortress homes. This had left some gall in the hearts of Mobsters concerning certain Houses of the Sword.
-2. So known for having the greatest and loudest bell of all of New York’s train stations, so large that hundreds of bats take their rest within between rings.
-3. Being put to service as a foot boy or transported off to toil on the frontier, upon a patrician farm or in some godforsaken colony oversees.
-4. A non aggression truce between the House Equis and the Mob Pipes, that did provide for spy work and paid access through the alley in order to more quickly access the congested platform at Bell Station. Occasional Pipes were educated by the Chaplain of Knights and forwarded out of their misery to some useful trade, making their alumni and overall fraternity an extensive and formidable lateral society.
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posted: March 23, 2024   reads: 372   © 2023 James LaFond
‘My Good Brutha’
On the Irish Trace in Northeast Baltimore: 6/7/2023
Returning through the Inner Harbor by bus I noted, under the hazy sky and red sun [1] that heavy policing was present around the tourist and suburban attractions, that the pale land whales were being protected, explaining the thin city police presence in the Northeast. This made me curious, since I would be busing through Hamilton to the Brickmouse House, what had become of my old haunts, the small city unneighborhood I had lived in from September 2010 thru February 2018? That had been the period in my life that had made me as an urban blight and violence writer. I had not said goodbye to a soul, simply vanished.
I off loaded from the back door at Hamilton and Harford and stepped down on a high rubber tread platform. Three miles of Harford Road, from Parkside Drive north to the City/County Line, has been transformed, like many other American Main Streets via civic construction projects implemented in 2020-22. The four lanes have become two lanes. The unused bike lane has been placed between the sidewalk and a new broken, scalloped parking lane. Planter boxes, concrete blocks, wooden and plastic and rubber barriers bolted to the asphalt, has made this main artery into an elongated parking lot.
The Hamilton Tavern is papered over and shut down.
I stalked like a ghost inspecting the scene of his murder as the few motorists slowed and looked at me like an accident in progress.
I can hear loud music coming from the open doors of Brennen’s Pub, over which I rented a couch in 1981.
A midget with two twisted little legs, a small black man who must crawl, prowls along the raised rubber parking block at the Northwest corner of Hamilton and Harford and raises bottles of water for sale, his cooler behind him near the sidewalk. The drivers ignore his unfortunate form.
I am about to drink too much booze and have not eaten for a day. So, noting that the motorists are mostly Gawds driving really nice sports cars, gleaming white and silver, I circled back to him. He came up to my knee.
“How much?” as I drew out my wallet.
“A dollar, sir,” he looked up, extending the bottle as far over his head as he could, to reach my hip.
I gave him $2 and took the proffered bottle, the other wiry ashen hand wrapped around another bottle and a few $1s.
“Thank you, sir,” he said as he crawled towards traffic to hold his remaining bottle on high.
Entering Brennens I knew I could not stay for long. It has become a typical black bar, requiring on to gesture wildly and yell to order a beer.
Loud music that one has to yell over.
20 Kweens, screaming.
30 Kangs, yelling.
3 mudsharks, pallid, wilting wallflowers, one gimp to fatties.
2 towering, hair-hatted barmaids who ignore me. I tried to get served, but whatever of the three small gaps at the bar I found they turned away.
The Kangs glared hulkingly down.
I went to look for the bathroom behind the bar, having forgotten that the men’s room here is not next to the lady’s room but around back, and a kind, white bearded man with a smooth voice stopped me, standing and touching my arm, “It is around back, sir.”
I took his hand, “William, thank you.”
He was surprised, not recognizing my appearance but my voice ringing familiar. Hawk, Quin, and the other men who make their mark in the GQ Mugging Inquest of 2014, are not here, only William. His bar was becoming what I wrote of in The Last Whiteman, the haunts of Heavy Hand Fernando and Grope. The streets were not yet filled with tents. But the anchors and platforms have been put in place.
The bathroom was disgusting as I waded through piss to the urinal. Noting that the beers were only served in plastic cups, I left, out into the hazy light and walked up the hill past more closed businesses, the stone church that served in The Last Whiteman as the Meat Police Barracks and visitor hostel. Buildings had been leveled on the east side, where the stone church that served as the Guardsman barracks in The Last Whiteman, grinned wanly down.
The few groes on the street step away from me and give me space as I slowly amble and inspect what has become.
Two worn paleface wenches leave the Shamrock, where Big Ron and I typically meet for beer. I enter and Terry, the owner says, “Hey, where’s the crew?”
“Ron doesn’t know I’m in town—left the rest in Tennessee and Jersey.”
“Miller Lite?”
“Yes sir…”
I had four beers and two orders of chicken fingers over the next two hours and observed a more gentile changing of the pale to dark guard.
A southern man who remodels houses and rents them from the Carolinas to Maryland, arrives with his adult grandson to play pool. Four friends join them, a fat 50-year old with money, hipster tastes and a neutral dialect, and two other black men in their 60s, still working construction and showing up in their yellow safety vests after work, all to play pool.
The leader of the group, ten years my senior, addresses me, “How are you, sir?”
“Good, thank you.”
I observe their play for two hours and note that race even matters in pool. While the rowdy groes shooting pool down at Brennens could hardly keep the ball on the table and joked constantly, these men affected a serious air of respect for the table, and for the man shooting at the table. The grandson, a tall, lean fellow with willowy braids that hung past his ears, they called, “Black Jon Wick,” one saying, “I should take a picture when he’s bent from the side and say, “I’m shootin’ pool against a mop!”
Grandpa was training his scion by, “Whooping your ass,” Not through instruction, like paleface pool players tend to do, but by example. Overall, these men shoot well, but hit the ball far too hard. They shoot according to a hierarchy of risk instead of pure technical execution. If a bank shot is possible, then the easy shot is passed up for the risk. The style of the game fit the players. The wins were tallied, runs respected, but the real reward was the compliments that came when that needlessly risky shot was taken and made.
It was 9:15, so I texted the Brickmouse Bride that I would be home before 10.
“Cool, cool beans,” came the text.
Two mudsharks of a higher caliber came in to shoot pool and play mandingo bingo.
As I walked out I noted that there were drunken, insane, forlorn and homeless men about—a new development. The absence of the cops out here permit these creatures to defend themselves against the packs of wild yutes, who are nowhere to be seen.
I walk a block, stop and do a 360, knowing that this is a pure hunt zone and that it is serious enough that the packs of younger teens are done, no longer hunting the night, deprived now of their police protection. I do not want to fight any of these men over a perceived slight.
[9:07 AM, while writing this, heard a shotgun blast from quarter mile, followed by sirens and three .45 APC reports.]
Arriving at the Sikh Liquor Store next to the fire station, a large black homeless man with a Moses staff is preaching to two bums, one godly dark, the other the pale shade of evil. He was preaching about the evils of alcoholism, gathering a flock from the kind of customers the Sikhs are well rid of.
Looking for a glass bottle of lite beer for a nightcap, I see a fifth of craft vodka in glass priced at $9.99. I grab that for Brickmouse Bride, find a bottle of beer and am greeted by a man with a black luster of oiled beard, “My good brutha, what may I do for you?”
“Next week, I’d like to purchase some Johnny Walker for a friend, could you give me a price?”
“Right back, Good Brutha.”
His blood brothers are one watching the door, the other loading the cooler.
“Thirty-six dollars, sir. Comes with two glasses. Ask for the gift pack.”
“Thank you.”
“Tonight, fourteen, sixty, sir.”
I gave him $16 and waved off the proffered change.
“Thank you, Good Brutha, have a safe night.”
And I did, waking up here in a friendly home as my host made his morning coffee in the predawn dark.
Notes
-1. Canadian forest fire smoke, I am told, perhaps explaining the cool breeze.
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posted: March 22, 2024   reads: 754   © 2023 James LaFond
Stepping Out
A Test Bout for The Beast O’Neal: 3/21/24, Portland, Oregon
The man I named the Beast, feels unworthy and ashamed at that moniker. Also, being new to boxing, beginning with me in 2020 and not having a bout yet, sparring only when I am in town and healthy, which is unusual he did not realize that he got the best of me last time we sparred. I had a black eye, under the patch, and was sick to death from nausea for the next few weeks. Last week we just din line drills, because I thought taking a punch would kill writing for a whole week.
I named this man, who has never been ina fight and is a reclusive fellow who works with computers, The Beast O’Neal, because he is Gaelic and Neal is in his name. But mostly, because when we sparred last year for the last time and he knew I was just tapping him with jabs, he began head butting my fist.
He confided in me that he really wants to feel what it is like to be in a fight. He takes mass transit in Portland, which has been abandoned by most commuters because of the homeless tweaker and homey groe infestation. Portland Joe is not here to box his ears off. James Anderson is not here to crack a rib and knock him around. There is just this worn out old crumb.
So, I promised him a fight along the lines that we used for test bouts in stick and knife fighting from 1998 thru 2006. I did 20 bout sets with over a hundred fighters, measuring their skill in defense and offense against a common value, me. These are fights—so let me explain.
There is no time limit.
We are alone, with no morale support, just like at the bus stop.
Minimal gear is used: mouthpiece and 6 ounce gloves
There is no ring or cage: you have to stay in through willpower.
We can hit as fast as we want.
We can hit as hard as we want.
We can call for a break four times only. [1]
When we step out of the space, we have called for a break.
We can quit at any time.
When we hurt the other man, we give him a beat to realize it and a chance to call for a break, step out or quit. Since we do this on asphalt and concrete, we don’t want to KO a stunned man as his head my spatter on impact.
Defense is more important than offense in survival situations. In the ring and cage, offense rules. But against a pack of armed tweakers, trading blows, unless you are a Mike Tyson, is not a good idea. So, although I have not done this with boxing, I think using weapon fighting logic for purposes of a survival oriented, rather than prizefighting bout, makes sense.
We fight in the tip off circle on the basketball court, keeping us within two steps or less. One foot must remain in or the other man simply need point at your feet and you have taken a break or submitted. Ancient pankration was often decided in this way.
In ancient boxing and in London Prize Ring Rules, breaks were permitted. In LPR, one could simply take a knee and get a 30 second break. This just increases damage. Klietomackus and Aristonikus took a break circa 216 B.C.
O’Neal and I will have 30 seconds, timed by the man who stayed in or did not call for the break. The standing man counts this off.
The man who stepped out or broke, steps back in by the 30 count or has submitted.
I developed the 5 point system for weapon fighting because no one in real combat situations, that took 5 or more strokes from a weapon prevailed. With weapons a point was awarded for an effective stroke, awarded by the man you hit, from among his five points.
When Aaron hit my hand, I stepped back, raised it, and said, “One,”. I was down to 4 defense points and he had taken that point and put that in his offense total.
When Aaron did a spiderman leap, broke my stick, bent my face cage and then put me in the mount with his stick across my throat, I submitted, losing the other 4 points and ending the bout: 5/5 to 0/0.
On the only one of 20 bouts I beat Aaron in, because a hot chick walked by, I finished with 5 offense and 4 defense and him with 4 offense and 0 defense: 5/1 to 4/0.
Adding up 20 such bouts gave percentages: overall, offense and defense. The longest one was a double stick bout with wax wood against Chuck Goetz, which I lost after 10 minutes by KO.
Doing this with boxing could be very nasty as we can hit each other for every if no one steps out or calls brake.
I break is called by stepping back and putting both hands before or above your face.
This man surrenders one of his 5 points. The other takes it and fro there we work our plus and minus columns.
So, Tomorrow, Friday, March 22nd, we will see how this goes.
This is essentially a test on enduring a fist fight for as long as possible, against a guy who is used to getting punched, with the option of 4 retries. This will be a test mostly of composure.
On Tuesday 26th, I will post the results along with a fitness report for both of us. Beast O’Neal, told me after we decided to do this, “You might feel faded, but I am certain you have numerous dirty tricks up your sleeve and that for me it will be a rough day.”
I did assure him, “I promise to be as dastard a coward as ever put on gloves!”
We will see, how two old potato crackers, one now a crumb, do in our rustic recreation of who must carry Young Master Richard Barrett’s luggage down to the Steamer.
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posted: March 21, 2024   reads: 829   © 2024 James LaFond
‘A Bottle of Water’
Notes on Being the Last Pale Distaff Pedestrian in Squatamalla: 6/7/2023
A matronly monologue.
Baby, work is crazy enough. A customer buys a detailed used car and inspects it and then, 60 days later, claims his rims came scratched. They won’t replace the rim this idiot scratched on a curb, so He rolls up to the front door. I never realized how nice people were when we were young when these buildings were made, until now, when you find yourself working behind a counter or a desk in a business and realize that any asshole can drive right through the storefront window or glass doors and do you in. That is exactly what this man was threatening to do.
He pulls up in front of the showroom and guns the engine, threatening that he is not leaving until he sees the boss, who is a petite little woman who I’m sure you would be into. All of the men from Service are up there, the desk men too.
“Where she at, a wanz ta tell her how bad her bidness is!”
Well, the dumb coon could not see her because she’s five feet tall in heels behind a line of big black men. The cops are being called left and right, you can believe that, and this coon is calling the cops too, even as he is threatening to drive his car through the showroom window!
Then, we get the Kaweens! Thousand dollar hair does, painted nails and wearing just enough cloth strips to keep those giant titties from flopping all over their five hundred dollar purse. They generally want to kick a white bitches ass. But the younger women protect me, give it right back, like, “Bitch, you talkin’ all high en mighty, but what junior high school bitch dressed you dis mornin’?”
Oh, then its on!
We did have this one really decent, respectful black woman. She had a legit complaint and we were addressing it. Then her white girlfriend comes in and wants to fight, is talking all this racism and discrimination bullshit. The white bitches are the worst. They usually show up with their black man, who they are buying the car for and who they parade around like he is king of the world.
Well, it could be worse, I could be getting called a bitch while I’m standing behind a register loading up all the shit these people eat and drink. At least at the dealership I sit. Baby, gettin’ old sucks. I’m hurtin’.
So, I was walking to the store to shop at about 1:30 in the afternoon and this well-groomed Latino man comes up to me, he’s a young man. Usually the Latino men—really always, all except this time—they go out of their way to give you space, say good morning, cross the street, step aside. But this guy was, A, Fruit, Loop!
“Ma’am do you have a bottle of water in that bag, I’m thirsty.”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
I didn’t and I remembered what you always said about when they ask for something, that its about the eyes and getting you to look down at what they want so they can get on you. Well, I was so flustered that I turned around and started heading back and he followed me. He had already passed me, then turned around and asked me for the bottle and now he was following me.
I turned and put up my hands and said, “You are freaking me out!”
“I’m thirsty ma’am. I want some water.”
I’m limping home on my tired old feet and he is following and saying, “Is it bothering you, that I am following you?”
Finally, I get to the gate and go in and turn so he’s not on my back and he stops and says, “So is this where you live, where you keep the water?”
“Yes, me and My Husband!”
He left and I kept thinking about how crackheads get so thirsty and that he was really evil. It’s just us women here, and the guy next door is now constantly drunk and worthless. He works, but she’s beautiful and fed up and I think might leave him. In any case, I don’t know Mexican, but I know drunk in Mexican, and that jabbering fool is drunk anytime he is home. Anna’s man, on the other side, he’ll come. But he wasn’t home, he was at work. It’s the same old thing when you’re a broke-ass bitch, if you have a good man that is sober and able enough to protect you, he’s not home...he might be coaching knuckleheads in Jersey, fighting in Tennessee, shoveling snow in the mountains...or, even if he’s here, he’s at work, at the gym.
Baby, the life of a broke bitch was never good, but being a broke old bitch is worse.
We were standing on the front porch for her monologue.
Three Latina children pile into the yard with their bicycles as she waves her empty hand and smokes her cigarette and they shout, “MegMeg, MegMeg!”
“Hey, Baby, does your mother know you are out?”
“Yes, Meg Meg!”
The fattest one, a 120 pound 5 year old, looks up tearfully over the wire fence at the one-eyed ghost standing next to Megan and the lady divines her fear, “Don’t worry, Nina, this is my very best friend, come from a long way away. He’s a good man. Don’t let the beard and the eye patch fool you.”
I waved and the girl waved back as their short broad and still pretty mother came out of the house with a papoose on her back, “MegMeg! You Poppy back!”
“Yeah, they let him out of jail again—let me see that fat little sucker on your back...she looks beautiful, just like her mamma.”
The children were now all clamoring around their mother as Megan turned to me, “Fertile Myrtle, God love her. Kicking out one was tough for me and I think she’s got another on the way.”
“So, Old Man, how long, a day, a week, a month maybe?”
“If you see the well groomed guy, you will point him out, you won’t play queen of the world?”
“I guess its a week then.”
“Two.”
“Sure, I’ll point the spic out. Coffee or tea?”
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posted: March 20, 2024   reads: 1001   © 2023 James LaFond
Beast versus Crumb #1
Results of A Submission Boxing Bout Fought: 3/14/24
This is the first in a series of three articles to post:
-1. Beast versus Crumb #1, Tuesday March 19
-2. Stepping Out, explaining the test bout logic, Thursday, March 21
-3. Beast versus Crumb #2, results of our parting bout, Tuesday, March 26
Preface, Friday 3/15/24
O’Neal and I have been friends since early 2020 when we started training during End of the World Kill Everybody Bird Flu. He wants to feel what its like to be in a fight. Yesterday, I checked his footwork, and, lo and take hold, for the first time in four years, this Gael has done his footwork home work. He is working out of a closed guard, which I said is okay if you are defending or trying to win on points in amateur boxing. Well, it turns out that the you tube coach he follows is a trainer of amateur champions. I advised him, that we should do a review, test and hone what skills he has, that a week out from our bout, it is a waist, in the least, to try and introduce a new skill.
O’Neal is fair in coachability. If we had more time and I was the kind of coach that yelled and talked loud enough to hear from across the room, he’d be further ahead. I have not been able to impress on him the importance, of checking, measuring, clinching and shoving.
“These are against the rules, are they not?” he asks, in that same innocent tone he used when he heard The Colonel playing David Allen Coe outside the elk butchering shed while we threw horseshoes three years ago up in The Cascades and said in his British accent, “They do not play this on the radio!”
‘Of course they are. Everything except punching and moving is against the rules in boxing, so everybody breaks the rules all the time and overwhelms the ref. If you hold me for the tenth time you might get a warning. Besides, this is for self defense, if you are being out punched, you better grab that little bastard and run him into a wall.
“Can we spar today, like we are going to do the bout?”
I didn’t want to. My eye had been killing me. But it hurt so bad to talk, I figured, ‘why not,’ and gloved up.
We both started with 5 points.
We stepped into the tip off circle, touched gloves, and went kind of easy. He was cutting me off with his right, so I switched southpaw and he cut me off with his left, so I started whacking his guts and he started thumping me lille, noggin.
It was on.
He was starting to use his reach and throw combinations.
I could not stay long and tall enough to keep him off, so shelled up and counter punched.
I came upstairs with a left hook and he danced out after eating it.
He had 4 points left.
We crossed gloves and I tried to dominate him from southpaw muggins and he blackened my right eye with a jab and rang my left ear with a right.
I went in and hit the guts with combinations, came upstairs and he ate a good left hook. I then came down and hit the guts with both hands and he stepped out.
3 points left for the Scotsman, the evil mick twerp still holding 5.
O’Neal comes to scratch and starts leprechaun hunting so I dig to the body, go up and down, and the prick catches my left thumb. I shielded high and gave up the body, and he pounded on my popeye wrists and wee noggin. I start wing blocking, which I had thankfully not schooled him on until now, get him in the wheelhouse from orthodox and staged a muggin, him stepping out and calling for a breather.
2 points left for the Scot.
A young gal walking her dog looks worriedly over. My head is ringing louder than usual and I can’t recall the action in much detail.
O’Neal says, “So this is fighting, aye?”
“Yep, can’t help it, can’t keep you off, have to get nasty.”
“I can’t hit your body.”
Reach around behind my elbows and bang the short ribs.
We scratch and go at it without a touch of gloves and I bore in, getting a mouse under the left eye for my trouble. Shelling up I shovel to his body which he blocks and come up stairs. He eats a shovel in the chin and reaches around with his right and thumps my short ribs and I think, “Awes, hell!.” It still hurts, today.
I step back, and when he advanced I just throw a few combinations on autopilot. He steps out and calls for a break and I hit him three more, my reaction time so slow that a left and right I had phoned in three seconds ago where in progress while my mind was saying, ‘I should not be hitting him, but I am.’
Saved by the negro in my potato-hearted soul.
1 point to go and I just throw until he quits, getting dinged in the right eye again, it still swelling today, both of them being moused.
That bout might have ended, according to our point scheme, borrowed from stick fighting point bouts, 5/5 to 0/0, the first number offense and the second defense, or in this case tenacity.
That was not enough for the Beast and he wanted more crumbs with his leather pudding, so we added three rounds.
Round 6 he outpointed me and I worried his body. His arms froze up, his shoulders too tight, right about as I got warmed up and thought about taking off my hoody lest I sweat, then decided against losing the cushion.
Round 7, I went after this man in peek-a-boo and tried to finish him. He checked both my shoulders and shoved me about ten feet, a full three feet out of the far side of the circle.
He grunted, “There, I shoved, am I penalized?”
“That round goes to you—I have to stay in with your big ass. That juiced my legs, just trying to resist that shove. My bad leg [right] is about to fold. I’m going to have to stand in front of you this round.”
“Oh, good, I get to find out what nasty tricks you have from there!”
For the eight round we touched up and went for it. He busted up my left shoulder with a right straight, bruised my left and right wrists with elbow catches, checked my right shoulder with his left [now sounds like a box of cereal when I move it], and then stalled. So I started banging his body. He began to move and jab and his arms froze up and he called himself out, “What’s the point if I can’t punch. Why are my arms so tired?”
Your shoulders are tight and you are anxious—this is knew to you. But finally, after 4 years of not checking, you are doing it—it came out in this.”
“Was this a fight?”
“Bro, I hurt both my shoulders and my left elbow trying to hurt you—this was like fighting 8 novices back to back. I did not pull a punch, not one, and tried to level you with a lateral hammer fist [strained right bicep and forearm below elbow]; most importantly, we kept score, our egos were on the line and I wanted to quit a couple times—you awakened the wimp that I have duct-taped to a steam pipe in the cellar of my soul so I had to choke him out.
Crumb: 7 to
Beast: 1.
I expect to do as many rounds next week as O’Neal needs. We will do rounds until one of us quits. In that case, I am inclined to suggest that the leader may not win by quitting while ahead, allowing us to resurrect the No Decision from the era 1900 thru 1919, before the Walker Act in 2020 legalized decisions, or a Draw, left up to the fighter who did not quit.
This type of fighting is the best way to train for survival situations, as we are trying to defend and dominate without producing a body, where MMA victors must kill their adversaries unless a referee is there to drag them off the unconscious person they are beating or choking. The worst thing bout prize fighting formats for preparing a fighter to survive a criminal encounter is that he is not legally responsible for his actions.
Boxers still die in the ring every year.
Typical “street fights” usually on side walks or parking lots, last 3 to 10 seconds. Our rounds averaged 30 seconds, the longest a minute. The arrival of third parties and the lack of criminal will, keeps most encounters to a 10th of the amount of time O’Neal lasted with an evil twerp. This format was developed for self defense testing of weapon skills in 1998 and will be detailed in ‘Stepping Out.’
PS:
The funny thing is, my eye which keeps me in bedded dark for 14 hours a day, and which is sizzling right now from writing this, was made no worse by having two stiff jabs sunk into it yesterday. This tells me I need my glasses prescription adjusted.
Thanks for the check up, Doc O’Neal.
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posted: March 19, 2024   reads: 1076   © 2024 James LaFond
‘Bust a Move’ Baltimore
On Baltimore City Buses from Penn Station, Charles Street to Hamilton: June 5, 2023
[Unknown at the time, this bus ride ruptured a disc in my back, pinched the femoral nerve and damaged my knee and hip, injuries that yet prevent me from walking. -9/1/2023]
I wait outside of Penn Station for 15 minutes. The Orange Line heads to Towson Town Center in the County from somewhere deeper in the city. I board the bus with my ruck and it is fairly crowded. It is an elongated accordion bus. So I stand with my back to the accordion material on the spinning disc between the front and back portions.
The back deck is packed with Gro punks.
The mid regions are populated by working black men and women.
The front section is crowded with cripples, gimps, crazies, retards, mamas and babies.
At North Avenue a stocky dark rap gawd boards with his white bitch, both rapping to his phone, which is their studio.
At 25th an older, fatter version of the rapper boards and the rapper waxes ecstatic:
“Nigga-nigga-nigga—please!
Westside Nigga, Eastside Nigga, Northeast Nigga…
Watchyah gonna do when I goez upside yo Jew [1] wit deese!
Nigga-nigga-nigga-nigga—”
They rap insensibly on in a rapture of feral negrotude. Culturally, this unattractive white woman is the most Africanized creature on this bus of some 70 souls. They are two feet from me, her in an erotic trance rapping “nigga-nigga-nigga-nigga” in a duo to his “bitch-bitch-bitch-dick-hungry-bitch,” as all three primates gyrate and the bus spins. Then comes the conversation…
Nigga: “OG—what up!”
OG: “Heard yo was back in da game, Nigga!”
Bitch: “You heard right.”
OG: “Who you, bitch?”
Nigga: “She my bitch, OG. She white.”
OG: “Don’t care ‘bout dat race shid—is she a good bitch?”
Nigga: “Da bes’ OG. She done dropped a baby just da udder mont, second one she dropped fo me, and my fatha en me beefin’ ‘cause my bitch be white, en he all wit dat hate, so we on da street en dis bitch bring it.”
OG: “So I hears it. But a bitch ain’t got no race but da race o’ da dick run up in ‘er. I’ll tell yo fatha dat when I sees ‘im. Now whats dis I hear about my Nigga’s bitch steppin’ up?”
Bitch: “Look, OG, dat big-ass no account nigga up dare at Penn North gotta problem with ma man an dey both grown-ass men en it ain’t my place ta interfere. Dare was a poleese watchin’ da entire time but he weren’t gonna do shit wit deese niggas throwin’ hands, nor me—nigas is, niggas does.”
Nigga: “Lookie here, OG, dis nigga big, long, tall en swole. He give it en I take it en give it back—throw of muvafuckin raw ass hands. Den he keep reachin’ in his pocket en I keep hittin’ him en he reachin’ still—punk-ass nigga fo show.”
OG: “In front a da poleese? Dat a stupit nigga, dat nigga needs capped in da head fo he gotz no sense!”
Bitch: “See, OG, I gots my bottle, vodka in day Polish glass bottle, hard and square wita handle. So I see dat no account nigga pullin’ some shit on my man—and bam! Bam da fuck down! Now, I throw some hands wit bitches, done beat shit outta many a bitch. But a lady don’ throw no hands wit no big nigga, no she don’t, she bring da bottle!”
Nigga: “Yeah, den down go dat nigga en da knife go clatterin’ en my bitch is bringin’ down da bottle again an I bringin’ the shoeleatha...gettagettagetta, fuck a fuck ‘er betta!”
The phone is being clicked with a silver watch band and used as a rattle to keep rhythm as the three primates gyrate and rap:
OG: “Nigga-nigga-nigga!”
Bitch: “Bigga-bigga-bigga!”
Nigga: “North en Penn poleese frontin’ niggaz!”
End song.
OG: “Now, I needs ta know, is da poleese still skulkin’ up at dis 7-11 across Nort Ave.?”
Nigga: “Sho is. Gotz da boyz countin’ stash up oba da way down by where da devil pray—feel me, OG.”
OG: “Feel ya right—ged off here. I’ll stop next stop en double back hine da poleese.”
The ciphers of savagery soon depart as a mob of six foot hair hatted high school girls pile on the bus and crowd around the accordion area. A tall, thin, gay kid, light of skin, wearing yellow smiley face slippers and carrying a pink purse, hides behind me from the ireful glares of the big dark sisters.
Up and up, ever slower, the bus progresses under the red sun up the steepest hill out of Baltimore, past City College and 33rd street up Loch Raven Boulevard. It takes a total of an hour for the bus to make it from Charles and North Avenue to Loch Raven and Taylor a hundred yards over the county line.
I offload and cross to the south side of Taylor and the bus shelter. A homeless black man with wheely cart and a tall KFC Rite Aid clerk are there with two light skinned twins, a boy and girl of perhaps 14. A big beefy wigger with black hat and backpack is there and sees an old drunk with a bottle and a wheely seat and says, “Ole Man, watch you doin’ drinkin’? Dat ain’ no good for you.”
The old wastrel snarls, “What is Eddie doing dating your wife—answer me that?”
“I ain’t got no wife—I am DE-VORCED!”
The young fellow gets up and goes to stand next to the old wastrel, “I’ll help you get on the bus old man. Here, listen to this to cheer you up.”
The kid, about 25, then turns up his smart phone and it sings out a rap song, “I got da bird flu!”
The light-skinned twins think it is a great song and begin to sing, and laugh and dance to it, “I got da bird flu!”
A harried black woman of 40 years, losing her figure to those years, came shedding tears past me as she begged, “Anybody got a cigarette I can buy?”
She was in great pain and I coldly ignored her like the rest.
She yells, splashing tears and crying, “I didn’t ask to be give one—I just need to buy one! Don’t ya’all care? Does anybody in dis worl care!?”
She looked at me, tears gushing down her face, as I noted that she had three full grocery bags, one with assorted boxed cereal, [2] one with Irish Spring soap in shoplifted quantity and the other with clothes. “Please, mister, have a heart en sell a bitch a cigarette!”
She cried effusively in great spasms as we cringed collectively, the mute audience in the sad theater of her demise, “A bitch ain’t got no life in dis worl! I broke! I alone—no man! I’m a good bitch, I am! Please, somebodydydydydy—I’m dyin’ in my mind—please! Somebody-anybody, can ya’all buy some Irish Spring—as cheap as you want? Please, some-bod-eeeee! Ahhheee, please help a bitch out!”
She turned and looked up into my face, hoping that I wasn’t a total creep like the rest of Baltimore, that perhaps I really was an outsider, “Please, please, I beggin’ some-bod-eeee! Help dis bitch out—I got ta bust a move!”
And with a great sigh of pain, she whirred by me, her bags spinning as she cried loudly walking east on Taylor, unable, I sensed, to bear any longer the fact that we did not care.
The wigger started his music back up, “I got the bird flu!” and the twins began to dance and sing… and so the sorrowful woman was erased from the collective mind.
The #54 bus pulled up and we boarded. I kept the ruck on and sat longways on two seats by the back door and waited another 15 minutes for the various people headed home from work and to work to board and offload. Some of the young women dressed up at 2:00 to work the afternoon shift were quite easy on the eyes. I would have helped one of these women out. One of them had a small boy with her who kept looking at me and saying to her, “There is a pirate on the bus!”
At Northern Parkway and Old Harford Road I offloaded to take my hike to the wonderful Brickmouse House. Behind me the boy, all of five, declared, “The pirate is gone—will he be back?”
It took 2 hours to get from Trenton New Jersey to Baltimore City by train, then 2 hours by bus in Baltimore to get from Charles Street and North Avenue to Northern Parkway and Harford Road.
Notes
-1. Head? Wallet? Surely some Natsy can translate this.
-2. Apple Jacks, Fruit Loops, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Honey Nut Cheerios, two Kellogs and 2 General Mills brands.
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posted: March 18, 2024   reads: 1201   © 2023 James LaFond
Motherboard
A Novel of Post Economic Baltimore: A.E.G. 30: Prequel to Tinman
Copyright James LaFond 2023
A Crackpot Book
Lynn Lockhart Publisher
About the Title: A.E.G. has replaced C.E. for Common Era, as that designation replaced A.D. for In the Year of Our Lord. A.E.G. means After Everything got Gay, meaning A.D. 2020, placing Motherboard in A.D. 2050
Dust Cover
Thirty years After Everything got Gay, diversity engineering has taken the place of physical infrastructure preservation. As Baltimore eats itself alive, the bosses yet thrive. By the length of white winter, the Boss, in his high tower, wishes to be warm, and not like the proles below, shiver. By brief of gray summer, the Boss, confined to the 33rd floor, declines to sweat and starve as the looters below look longingly up. But all around, in many oddly sustainable places, humans have gone to ground.
Tinman is the story of the last HVAC mechanics operating in Baltimore, to be written in 2024, Gawd willing. Motherboard is the prequel about the world these mechanics inhabit while not zip-lining from roof to roof cannibalizing the heating and cooling mechanisms of another age to maintain the suites of the Company Bosses and their food coolers. Motherboard is a view of life on a likely, future ground floor.
Inspirational Quote
“If he’s in front of me—he’s already dead.”
-The Operator
Reader’s Note
On July 10, after suffering a crippling injury since June 5, my condition became worse and required my transport to a medical facility. In too much pain to speak above a whisper and in nervous system failure, a crew of dispersed and diverse knuckleheads provided transportation and housing for this ailing sack of meat.
As I sat one dawning day, shaking in pain, drinking whiskey so I could pass out again, my host, The Brickmouse, regaled me with stories of his work as an HVAC mechanic in a corrupt city with failing infrastructure, in a trade increasingly dominated by designed obsolescence, being fanciful regulations to save the Planet which have the effect of using even more toxic resources, but making more money for the manufacturers, whose lobbyists own the politicians and regulators who draft and pass bogus laws.
I grinned and observed: “I was a frozen food and/or dairy clerk and grocery store manager for 36 of 38 years in retail food, and had a lot of interaction with HVAC mechanics. Ironically, Nero, who brought me here, is an HVAC mechanic. You are, my eldest son is, and the man who runs the nearest boxing gym, are all also HVAC men, what carpenters call tin-knockers. This begs for a novel, written next year, when I can hopefully type rather than shake, shiver and drink at your table.”
Both The Brickmouse and Nero the Pict, were intrigued by the idea and began discussing what means by which they might be able to continue the operation of some heat pump and refrigeration at the far end of a slow collapse economy. The Brickmouse also noted how he gains easy access to government buildings, including the City Courthouse, just by having an HVAC badge and work clothes, especially while hauling 20 pounds of highly explosive refrigerant into the building! Such men in the downgraded future would be even more hallowed, perhaps even to the point of being bound to serve the highest echelons of society.
Motherboard Inspirational Notes
The bride of this model for the Last HVAC mechanic served as my nurse for some months, even pouring my whiskey when I was in too much pain to hit the glass. She is a wizard of computer technology, forever having new gadgets and tech packages delivered to the Brickmouse House. The house where I draft this is almost smart, with many aspects controlled remotely.
A few days ago I woke at 2:30 AM in East Baltimore, next to Megan, after a long brutal and surreal dream. Aspects of the dream did not altogether make sense until I texted the darling land lady on my way back to the Northeast: “Buzzard to roost ETA 9:00 am.”
“Roger that… :) cool beans!” she texted back.
When I arrived to an empty house, her down in Washington D.C., I think, she texted me, “You made good time 10 minutes early!”
As I entered the alarm was disarmed and the temperature controls switched on. Later that day, when The Brickmouse returned from fixing “the Judge’s Elevator” air conditioning, and I related the dream, including one of his wild rabbit pets, who he cultivates clover for, he interpreted it to me in a way that made it fit the proposed story.
Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5 & 6 of this novelette come directly from that dream. Chapters 4 & 7 tie the dream into Tinman as a prequel, based on actual interactions between the writer and patterned characters, depicting what is going on down home while The Tinman and his last remaining associate, Zipline Cline, are negotiating passage across a devolving urban landscape.
The Protagonists
The Viewpoint characters in these novels are all patterned on actual Baltimoreans:
-Motherboard, wife of the Tinman, patterned directly on Guiallo Girl, bride of the Brickmouse, combined with a young girl who forever circles the block on her scooter
-Tinman, after my host The Brickmouse
-Zipline Cline, after my transporter, Nero the Pict
-Drew Drop, after my benefactor The Operator
-Jaseman, after Jason, head waiter at The Esoteric Cafe and paranormal investigator
-Big Ron Automaton, a robotic version of my friend
-Crutch, after the crippled author
The Story in Seven Acts
Taking place in Northeast Baltimore in the neighborhoods of Hamilton and Parkville.
-1. Rabbit Jack
-2. House of the Brickmouse
-3. Clutch the Snitch
-4. Crutch the Glitch
-5. Big Ron Automaton
-6. Jaseman Ham
-7. Good Lord
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posted: March 17, 2024   reads: 767   © 2023 James LaFond
First Sword of All Rome
Act 4: Ernest O’Neal, Under Barrister of the House Equis, First Knights of Christ
Noon, Caesarsday, Second Day of Sepulcher
The brazen door rang under the hammer of brass that served as the door knocker to the House Equis of New York. In days of Yore a certain heathen chief of the Mohawks had affected the iconography of Nordic heathenry—twas said he was a foundling brat of some Norwegian house. Fire and hatchet scourged this then small settlement, protected by but a few bondmen organized in a weak trainband. The House Equis sent a ship. Off tramped 12 knights. Off flew the head of the hammer wielding chief into oblivion.
That brassy hammer head which Chief Thunderstick had employed to dash out Christian brains, said to have been wrought by some fiendish dwarf of Finland, was then blessed and repurposed as a door knocker, a device that echoed so sinister-like through these hallowed halls. Those brute, brazen caws, like death birds come to battle, Ernest O’Neal had never, in his fifty years of service since his elevation from the gutter not three Sarmation paces [1] from that door, gotten used to.
And here it rang again, beyond his own gritty ken. A victor in six combats, an honored survivor of two more versus rival muneral kind, Ernest remained “too kind by half” according to Chaplain Carr, who had mercifully found for him this legal post, to which he was but barely qualified. His Master Barrister, Jubal was patient in his turn with Ernest’s weak bookery, to the point of retaining his services despite the obvious fact that when Jubal passed, Ernest would not be fit to succeed him and would find himself serving a new, younger Barrister brought in from London no doubt.
Despite his dread of that drear knock, it always and again in this instant, brought out the best in Ernest, who clicked his brass usher heels together [2], looked up over his right shoulder to the awesome form of Rex Born, first and most glorious of their kind, and inquired with one narrow gaze, ‘Shall I?’
The towering, lantern-jawed paragon, shoulders so wide that Ernest ever wondered if he were entirely human, looked down over his medal hung shoulder [3], from under his still blond shelf of brow, captured Ernest with those glassy eyes of winter sky, and grinned, a grin as wide as a dinner plate, his voice rumbling, “Ernie, get your ale-bitten ass to the door.”
Ernest smiled, knowing that his superior in all things but years treasured him like a dear pet, never permitting himself to harm the merely big man of Irish descent in sparring, and looking away from his seduction by alcohol with that ever present grin.
Ernest was 57 years, an old 57.
His Master, the Legate and master of them all other than the Chaplain, was a mere 49 years, yet to show a gray hair upon his head or to have his flaxen locks thin by so much as a strand.
Ernest clicked his heels again and proceeded towards the door, the altar of brands at his back, flanked by that awesome gladiator most merely called The Sarmation. Jubal was away up Hudson Bay on an errand. The Chaplain, his dear soul so worn, would be abed until the Hour of Ascent.
Yet whatever dolt thudded on the great brass bound door of white oak, painted in actual dust of gold, was either hurried or deaf.
The Irishman in Ernest came to the fore, and he fairly bellowed, “Hold ye horses ye ass of a clod, lest I cuff ye simple I will—beggar at the First Door!”
Silence reigned now on the lesser side of that hallowed door.
Rex chuckled like a very god of mirth behind him.
Ernest seized the door handle in his left hand, turned the jury bar in the other, raised it to the lock to his right, and shoved the left hand panel of the door, an act that would take the strength of two normal men, but which Ernest prided himself on mastering one handed, curled his lip in disdain and fixed to unleash his harp of a scourging tongue on whatever waif begged a place among their trainees, and…
…He looked into a bare, branded shoulder, as thick as Rex’s, though not racked as broad and lacking a hand of height. Where Rex was seven feet minus an inch, this knob was six feet and five to Ernest’s short six feet.
A curious gaggle of tiny Jap children sketching upon pads with pencils were infesting the three stairs down to the gutter.
Ernest had to shake his head to clear that weird image from his mind, now fresh for duty.
On that shoulder was scourged a brand that slew the curse in Ernest’s throat, the brand of SPQR and underneath the basket-hilt claymore and spiked targe brand of The House Thrax, commonly known as The Scots. Below that brand, and upon reflecting he had to admit beautifully so, were pressed 5 sword and nimbus brands, forming a kind of flower on the massive bicep of the man at the door, a man who snarled under his breath, held an odd candle can in his hand, and jammed that branded shoulder into Ernest’s chin and knocked him to the floor as he barged surly-and-blast-all in.
A man not easily knocked down, Ernest looked up to see the spiked nimbus of silver on black tunic, vest and pants worn by the offender, set like so many steely stars in a black sky.
“Awe, catch me strokin’ Rex!” muttered Ernest, knowing himself the butt of a brotherly jest and then wincing in shame as his Green Isled anger echoed above among the hallowed rafters of his saving place.
Rex Born answered, as usual with that grin, as the man who had just shoved him down so easily, extended a hand, and the grating voice admitted, “Apologies, Under Barrister. Max Born, of the House Thrax, to demand sacred parley with my fellow son of Rome’s First Whore.”
“No offense, Max,” grunted Ernest as he rose, seeing in the face of the elder of the Brothers Born, that life had been even more unkind than to Ernest. That great chin was thrice scarred, the left cheek twice pierced, the left brow hair whisked away into some arena not to be reattached, the great nose broken not once, but thrice, admitting no air through the left nostril it seemed, a great saber scar running across the forehead that must have blinded the man in that combat, a dent in the shaven head—mostly balded and some shaven to make of the crew cut a barber’s jest—no, three dents, proclaimed helmets battered in with shields and untold damage done to the brain within…
Max would have winced, but apparently owning a mirror, agreed with Ernest’s visual assessment of life’s rough turns, “Yes, Ole Boy, life has been brusk to us both,” then patting Ernest on his back and nudging him forward congratulated him, “Honorable Office ye earned, Ole Boy. Even if I had the brains, I’d lack the patience.”
Ernest clicked his heels and stepped Sarmation wise towards the altar and grinning Rex, noting with some sorrow that the elder of the Adulteress Prodigies of the Sword, limped in the manner suggesting a wrecked knee and a torn hip, literally on his last leg of litigation. [4]
Rex grinned as Max limped, until that less perfected and infinitely more battered giant, slammed the odd candle canister down on the Altar of Oaths, the very altar where the waif of the gutter once and again known as Ernie had pledged a life of service to Christ.
“Rex,” snarled Max, “a damned barleyman in a can? You expect me to stand for an ocular imaging so some Censorious crow may make coin hand over fist from the already poor? You expect me to whore my likeness on the back o’ yer damned pictocan!”
“Max, Max, Brother from another sire, please…” soothed the much better-looking giant.
Max growled like a bear, “Rex, how does one even eat the soup within—what tells we not a need a witch to magic da ting open!”
The official discourse had already broken down. Ernest patted Max gently on the back, a signal to relax, expecting a back hand, but earning merely a shrug.
Rex produced a small metal thing, like a single steel tooth that folded upon itself between his perfect finger and thumb. He then took the can easily in his left hand, pressed the tin gum of the tooth against the side [5] pressed down with the steely fang, pierced the tin can, and began to saw—rather chew—around the top of the can until, finally, the top end of the candle canister, was peeled back like the lid of a round box to reveal barely, beef, carrots, potatoes and gravy within. Rex then grinned, pointing to the contents with a tin spoon he produced, “You see, both of you oafs could feast from this: carrots and potatoes for Ire Ernie and beef and barely for my bastard brother’s highland taste.”
They were aghast as Rex spooned the yummy goodness into his mouth and then picked the can up and drank its contents. He swallowed, grinned his usual mirthy smile, and spread his arms, “The merchant sells the canned food and remits a portion to our funerary fund and we toss these little can openers emblazoned with the brand of our house to the poor tykes before we cut each others’ damned throats!”
Max and Ernest were still speechless, so Rex continued, patting Max on the back, examining his elder brother’s dented and scarred mug with some obvious concern, “Dear Max, when was the last time you actually avoided eating a shield edge or a pummel? There is barely enough of that mug left for our mother in her shameful tower to recognize, if we visited. The residuals, royalties if you will, for your picture on the back end of MY can, will defray your looming hospital expenses lest you beggar your own small chapterhouse with your reckless decripitude. Tiny Japanese slave girls to massage your hurts and receive your love—might dance in silken glee over the money had from standing for a single picture to grace our barleyman can!”
“I will not,” snarled Max. “I demand Holy Trial by Combat.”
“With me?” tenderly asked Rex, pointing to his own heart with his left hand, the right still resting on his brother’s broad, armored left shoulder.
Max simmered, grinding his teeth.
Rex sighed, “I so informed the Chief Industrialist of Agriculture that your answer would be so.”
Max then looked into his brother’s eyes, who winked and drew out a vellum contract, “Signed by My Chaplain, and yes by your Chaplain, and by myself. This is the Writ for Holy Combat I told all you would demand. But Brother, I ask you not to sign, for before me, you cannot stand.”
Max snarled, “Oways wit da fancy words, aye, Bro!”
Holding out his right hand for an ink quill, which Ernest eventually managed to fill with the inked instrument, Max pressed the document down on the altar and labored to print:
M A X T H R A X,
Then, in a brief flourish, Max pressed the quill, which snapped, but was recovered and made an almost florid, cursive X.
Max then glared at Rex as he handed the broken quill to Ernest and Rex said, with some concern, “Jesus, Max, did you even read it?”
Max gritted his teeth stubbornly.
Rex seemed sad, “Those grunts at House Scot, didn’t even learn you up? Christ, Brother, Chaplain Pane even taught Ernie here to read, write and cipher!”
Max was simmering, the teeth no longer grinding.
Rex pointed to the words at the bottom of the contract, an after clause, Ernest could see, and read:
“The above signed to Holy Trial by Combat, is honor bound by House Thrax, to, before the appointed time of combat, report to Pictus Trent, Camera Obscurist of The Manhattan Daily, by
Internment, Breadday, Fifth Day of Sepulcher, to have his likeness preserved for plebe signification.”
Max went somewhat lax in his shoulders and jaw, a tear wetting his right eye, the left eye seeming to be too damaged to cry.
Rex said sadly, “See, Max, you’re on the can after all. Now it falls to my damned part to play Cain’s jealous hand.”
Rex sighed as Max silently turned and limped towards the door, Ernest following, and taking note that Max was using his knob-headed blackthorn riot stick as a cane to support his wrecked right leg.
Ernest hurried ahead of the visitor and held open the door, advising Max, “Max, I’ve spent some time helping in the chapterhouse hospital. The doctor of bones, advises that the cane be used on the opposite side of the hurt leg, that it be let out ahead of the good leg and then when the hurt one lurches forward a third friend leg of a sort is there already for support.”
Max looked down thankfully through his half-wrecked face, switched the stick over to his left hand, and nodded an unspoken ‘thank you’ as he departed the Brazen Bound Gold Door of the House Equis, Chapterhouse New York. The shamblethorn [6] form of Max Born was fairly swarmed by a flock of scribbling Jap Tykes, fairly twittering like doves turned to monkeys, still beautiful with the innocence of morning yet tainted with the likeness of Adam, fallen so far, Ernest thought sadly, from his intended place.
Notes
-1. A Sarmation pace is a stride and a half, as few of the Knights Equis are under six feet and those that are strive to stride in longer paces to maintain this pedestrian conceit.
-2. Ceremonial brass over shoes, without soles, employed to announce the progress of a gladiator towards an official account.
-3. The medals of a gladiator are hung as iron shoulder scales, hooped somewhat like a horseshoe but flat in the way of the scales of the manica gauntlet. As rank is achieved a new medal is added, until finally 7 overlapping plates, each faced with the raised brand of the house were added. These attached to a brass collar and gorget, the gorget worked in the SPQR brand, secured by way of a woolen and rawhide strop [tanned leather forbidden] under the right arm.
-4. Arena combats between members of rival houses to satisfy matters of debt, honor and jurisdiction, are typically called a litigation, being legally binding and contentious examinations of God’s Will.
-5. Readers born after 1975 see the P38 can opener.
-6. An Irish upon Scottish insult related to highlander riot control duties in Old Ireland.
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posted: March 16, 2024   reads: 731   © 2023 James LaFond
A Hobo Historian Video
Oliver Is Going Thru the Video Archives
First stop is slavery.
i recall, about 18 months ago we did videos on movies with slavery themes.
this is one of these. we just talked about it, but my oxygen levels are barely conscious. Mandingo was my favorite.
I no longer have the technology to post a link.
So please check out the comment section for Oliver's link.
Thank you.
JL
...
oh, look at this dodo—there is a box on the right hand side of the main page that has the video listed, as if by magic.
Bemused...
JL
...
Techtard had some help from a telepathic canine this morning and figured this out:
-JL, 3/16/24
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posted: March 15, 2024   reads: 1454   © 2024 James LaFond
‘Suck Mah Dick Merka’
Profile of the Patel Brothers American Empire: Somewhere, New Jersey, June 1-3, 2023
The eye had been sizzling badly and preventing writing. Resting was beginning to freeze up and bring back old injuries. So, in the warm afternoon sun I walked on Thursday June 1, towards the Wells Fargo about 3 miles off. The small town has been 100% taken over by Hindus. The many gold and jewelry stores brought in The Groes, who hit them about ten months ago. I wanted to see what kind of security measures had been taken.
I was armed only with a tactical pen.
The beautiful Bollywood women on posters tower larger than life from the storefront windows.
A private security detail is on duty: a blond, middle-aged female supervisor, a big, beefy, uniformed, mulatto, private cop, and a lean African private detective with open carry 9mm and an armored vest under his black T-shirt.
Ahead, as I walk towards the Garden State Parkway bridges, a lean, ashy Groe attempts to board a transit bus with some demand or another which is answered with a closed door. He is 200 yards out and flies into a rage at the world:
“Suck mah dick!” he chants with outstretched arms of rage indicting heaven.
“Suck mah muvafuckin’ dick!” he yells at the departing bus, indignant it seems, that submitting to felatio by a driver is not accepted as bus fare.
He then steps out into traffic and spreads his arms at the motoring Hindus, “Suck mah dick, bitchez!”
He spies me and heads my way, pulling open his shirt and showing his long, lean Haitian looking torso and screams at me, “Suck mah dick, nigga!”
That I am—he got that right. I am sure I can put this pen into his windpipe the way he is posing, but don’t want to. I start scanning for debris: big stones, bricks, discarded landscaping stakes, a pipe, retail shelf molding, windblown tree limbs that have been cut into club length and discarded, like everything the Hindus do, over the bank. An entire paleolithic arsenal is at my disposal. I cross a side street that will bring us together at the corner, thirsting for that five pound oblong rock to smash his skinny feet to mush, a grin of blood-lust creasing my face… and he veers back to the center line with a gruff and disgusted look over his shoulder at me, “Not taday, nigga!” then points at the fearful Hindu woman behind the wheel of the minivan I am passing to get to that holy stone of negro Nirvana and he yells, “You, brown bitch, suck my black dick!” and she winces and peeps.
I wave to her and smile, walking past my forsaken stone towards the pile of cherry tree limb clubs ahead.
A look over my left shoulder assures that he is focused on her, spreading his arms and grabbing his penis at 12:45 PM, “Suck mah dick!” then spinning in the street and daring motorists to affront the penile god he is. They speed around him in a panic.
Then, as I look over my shoulder and head up hill, he bellows, “Suck mah dick Merka!” even as he faces off with the protectors of the new Hindu America, Sergeant Karen and Mulatto Copman and rages “You, bitch, white bitch, suck mah fuckin’ dick!”
The female officer hopped back in the passenger seat of the private patrol car as the big cop confronted the scrawny face rapist. The urban Gawd darted around the protector to Segeant Karen’s command car SUV and began slapping the vehicle and yelling, “Suck mah dick—BITCH!”
I continued on out of ear shot and looked ahead, mapping the ground litter for weapons in case this Gro was about on my way back.
Thirsty, I stepped into a Hindu coffee shop and poured a cup of coffee as the owner asked, “Would you like milk, sir?”
“No, thank you.”
I paid the $2 and continued to the bank, did my business, and came back again. When I returned thru Little Hindustan I stopped at one of the many Patel Brothers establishments. They have restaurants, bars and other businesses and provide a good selection of Mexican food to feed their laborers. An out of date pint of Himylian salt yogurt drink made Rick’s list and I enjoyed that as I read the extensive listing of 17 states and the numerous addresses of Patel Brothers businesses on a sign outfront. Their motto is ‘Our Cuisine, Our Culture.’
The feral Gro is nowhere to be seen. The African detective, a private cop, is conducting a traffic stop of a Motor Gro!
Ahead, two large, pale electrical contractors with a work van and bucket truck, who are doing power line work for either the municipality or a private Hindu concern, are being told to move, that they do not have the proper permit, by a Somewhere County Plain Clothes officer with his $70k car with light up windshield. The big, bald, paleface foreman yells at the dapper mulatto cop and refuses the citation with a “Fuck you!”
As he gets in his van and slams the door the cop runs up like a divorce summons server and throws the citation through the open window of the van as van and truck pull off.
As I walk by, I see the private cop SUV cruising by, then, I cross a side street and halt as a big Hindu man in a van makes a left turn and stops. I motion for him to continue and he says firmly, “No, you, sir!” and I cross.
Coming down the street ahead of me is a beautiful 18-year-old Hindu babe wearing very little, sashaying along. Not wanting to be tempted to check her out, I cross the street a half block before we pass. Noting this, The Devil’s Bride crosses diagonally so that we get to the other side at the same time and place and she rolls her sweet hips under her bare belly and above her bare yummy thighs—quite the slut, and swings on by.
As I return to the neighborhood of my host, three county police cruisers are thundering in to support the plain clothes mulatto. On relating this, my host said that those electrical workers had been working there since 8:30 A.M. when he drove to work.
Two days later on Saturday, I walked the area to see what it was about at peak hours. A 20 year old babe, scantily clad and a solid 9.5 passed as close to me as she could, grinning and swinging her hips.
Families are out and about, two to three generations at a time.
The catholic church has a banner announcing a Spanish language Sunday mass.
A Christian church of unknown denomination is in service on Saturday morning, being attended by people who look like Christian Indians, having abandoned their traditional dress for Anglo style attire.
On the security detail I count:
2 SUVs, 1 parked, 1 cruising with driver type unknown
1 unmarked car, parked with blacked out windows, occupants if any unknown
2 plain clothes Africans who look very seriously dangerous, who seem to be operating from the unmarked car, from the weak side of the street.
3 African American armed security guards, strong side
4 mulatto uniformed security with body armor, strong side
1 commander, a good looking blond, Major Karen, strong side
That is just what I saw to cover the 4 by 4 block town center.
In our feudal future, I see the Patel Brothers, who have their own Sikh guards and lookouts in traditional garb at their store fronts, and whatever cartel of Hindu merchants they are in civic league with, as forming oasis’ of consumer security in the howling, Gro-infested wasteland of Suck Mah Dick Merka.
Notes
The weak side of the street is where there are few high value targets and narrow passage and offers a vantage on the deeper strong points for the roving detectives to observe whoever might be observing or approaching their stationary forces from behind.
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posted: March 15, 2024   reads: 1562   © 2023 James LaFond
Summer 2023 Writing Journal
May
-30. bad eye, proof and update front matter to Porch, Slave, Of Ichor and War and SPQR, finish scheduling posts for December, listen to Gibbon and rest, ongoing ocular disaster
-31. schedule posts thru January 12, ran out of calendar, listen to Gibbon 13, 14, 15, rest, buy train ticket to Baltimore, 1208 AD#10,
June
-1. eye bad,1407, noon walk, dinner in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, next to a gangster who had to be told to turn his youtube phone worship of Da Gawds down by my host and agreed he had been out of line, writing with eye patch and glasses on, midnight walk,
-2. eye bad 4 am, 1299, outlined back matter for SPQR
-3. eye bad, took walk, went to family cookout attended by Myth 20 listeners and was checked for a wire and interrogated as to whether or not I was a Confidential Informant, burying this account here and will use in fiction, not journalism, as my driver and area host was very offended and I am trying to write fiction and history, left early and went to strip club where we were treated much better by Latina whores and black goons than by big brained white men…and unable to make this up, the gangster from the eatery in Elizabethtown was running the strip club!
-4. woke with eye seizure at 4 A.M. a bit later than usual, wondering if I’m being remotely harassed by viewer, will use that in a novel, sparring with stick today with an excellent Jersey fighter, wash clothes, pack
-5. 8:30 am ruck out to train station for the trip to Baltimore on the 10:09 #185, afternoon ruck and bus from Penn Station to Brickmouse House, bad eye seizure, consult with The Operator
-6. woke by eye, 1238, listened to a Breck interview, visit Megan and assess the job of sanding and painting her land lady’s porch,
[the eye is just sizzling and it seems related to overcast but unproductive skies, the threat and not the wet of rain. Am working on blanking out in a trance for a few hours to avoid a second dose of meds in a day.]
-7. bus from eastside to northeast, coffee with Miss Ezz, 6 emails, 1530, to doctor on southside, visited bars in Hamilton,
-8. eye woke me at 4, 1465, 1059, hits snake and bag with fist and stick 30 minutes, dumbbell exercises 40 minutes, 1324, coffee with Brickmouse, Dinner with Doc Dread, 1466,
-9. wake with crippling hip and knee dysfunction, wash clothes, can’t walk or write, listen ti Daniel Defoe’s A General History of the Pyrates, therapy
-10. walk 200 yards and puke, therapy, rest, whiskey, Defoe, 1646,
-11. shrimping on floor, get crutches
-12. shrimping on floor and passing out
-13. barely crutch mobile
-14. 3.5 hour crutch bus trip to urgent care, xray clear
-15. therapy and rest
-16. began crutch therapy doing fencing and boxing footwork on crutches, first decrease in pain from 9 and 10 to 7 to 9. first increase in range of motion
-17. same as 16th, begin to write again,
-18. rest and therapy
-19. 1140,
-20. 1250, still can’t walk
-21. cortison improves crutch mobility
-22. therapy all day, eye cycle continues
-23. crutch and bus from eastside to Towson, man n Hat drives me to York PA, Mescaline takes me to Lancaster
-24. therapy 6 hours, try to write filling out this, try to do some discussion videos, can’t walk
-25. Erique takes me to train and I take Train to Pitt to visit Rick who is sick, Omar the trucker
-26. therapy
-27. 1645, improved brief standing
-28. 1337 AD#11, turned corner on therapy and mobility walked a bit, over did exercise and knocked back a bit
-29. 1715 AD#12,
-30. 1354 AD#13,
July
-1. 1599 AD#14,
-2. 1132 AD#15,
-3. 1104 AD#16,
-4 thru 12. a haze of painting
-13. 752,
-14. 1369, finished Immediate Post Life at 12,171 words,
-15. 2047, 1684, 1973,
-16. 2454, 2381, 2529, 2525,
-17. 1622, physical therapy evaluation
-18: 2226, 11 emails, 1342, 1803,
-19: 1933, 2268, 1011,
-20. 2921,
-21. 1393, AD #17,
-22. too much pain to write
-23.
-24.
-25. 1191 AD #18,
-26. therapy
-27. 1811 AD #19, surgery consult, dinner with The Operator
-28. Completed American Dog
-29. rest
-30. 734
-31. 1,078
August
-1. 1693, 2,245,
-2. therapy improvement, dinner with The Operator
-3. scheduled American Dog posts, therapy visit
-4. 2352,
-5. 8 hours therapy
-6. began writing SPQR #2
-7. 1893 SPQR #2, read Solomon
-8. 827, 1012, read Sirach, 1038
-9. proof writing from 7th and 8th, dinner with The Operator,
-10. 1446, 3 emails, 1545 SPQR #A1, coach The Operator, drinks with Brickmouse and Bride
-11. 1659 SPQR #A2, was able to stand and shave!, spend weekend with the ladies on the Eastside.
-12. 2131 SPQR #A3, outlined SPQR #AB
-13. 1273, 478,
-14. proof above articles, 1056, began proofing Prentice Dolphin to page 57,
-15. 937, 1583, proof Prentice Dolphin,
-16. spinal doctor, I have a rare nerve injury, dinner with The Operator
-17. began bundling unpublished and print only books into anthologies for the site estore
-18. set up 7 omnibus collections for estore, 1764 words SPQR A3,
-19. 303, 227,
-20. 1059, outlined 3 part book inventory, unable to sleep from nerve pain
-21. bad eye seizures and leg tremors, formatted omnibus ebooks for the site estore, summoned by Preston from across the alley to ward off Buckethat the Groe
-22. eye seizure wakes me, 1276, 1603, began Out of The Cookie journal,
-23. 1515, skyped with a reader from Greece, set up more site features, dinner with The Operator, emails,
-24. proofed uprising, proofed Ranger to page 22,
-25. proofed Ranger to 215,
-26. shopping and packing, to Eastside by car
-27. proofed rest of Ranger?, 804,
-28. Proof Seeker Cane, 804
-29. 1828, 1147, Proof Holiday Blue
-30. back to Northeast on bus, Proof Timejacker
-31. Proof American Dog
September 1: make features for novels edited above, email complete works to webmaster and editor, to Pennsylvania for final visit to Lancaster area
End of Crackpot Summer
Articles/Chapters = 67, all time low
May-June = 16
July = 24
August = 27
Books = 2
Journal = 1
Novel = 1
Expenses
Train tickets: Jersey to Baltimore $112, 80: $192
Room rent: $200, $200, 200, 300, 200, 50, 400: $1550
Sedan: $50, 25, 50, 20, 20, 100, 20, 20, 20: $325
Bus: $20, $5, 5: $30
Food: $54, $70, $10, $50, $70, [living with women who cook is getting very expensive, a can of peas is now over $2] $35, $90, $20, $10, 30, 10, 7, 40, 140, 44, 100, 100, 80, 20, 50, 80, 240, 10, 20, 270: $1650 [Wow!, and I lost weight?]
Meds: $20, $22, 75, 29, 1, 30: $177
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posted: March 13, 2024   reads: 1719   © 2023 James LaFond
Immediate Post-Life
Summer Spent in the Murkan Mid-Atlantic: May 30 thru August 31, 2023
Copyright James LaFond 2023
A Crackpot Book
Lynn Lockhart: Publisher
Dust Cover
The author, after having his final stick fights and boxing bouts, is stuck in the East preparing for post-life malingering via medical care. The following journal represents the writing that life forced upon that addled mind as it sought to only complete history and fiction projects.
Written under duress at the behest of some crueler muse.
Dedication
For the Brickmouse, who has offered his nice house as a berth for the recovery of an unworthy sack of skin.
Inspirational Quote
“My Aunt, God rest her soul, was one of the good people. Me, I’m one of the bad people and I’m still here. What does that tell you about this world? She was the bright Ying and I am the dark Yang. You, I can figure—you’re all smooth with the light, but then you’re dark like me. So, just in case, if I get whacked—that being a hazard implicit in being a jerk in our wonderful hometown—then I expect you to avenge me.”
-A Man I coached in Knife Fighting last night, being Monday, June 5th, as he dropped me off at the Brickmouse House
The type of journalism I do, was developed to expand my ability to investigate certain mundane things, like human aggression, and to be able to write realistic—which is not to say believable in our fake construct—characters. Most readers will insist that the man above does not, could not, and at the very least should not, exist. Yet, last night he bought me dinner and insisted on stocking the liquor cabinet of my darling land lady. I accept what God and his wicked sisters The Fates send my wretched way. The circumstances of this specific miserable life are above my modest pay grade and I regard as none of my business.
Since returning east my ears have rung like electric sirens, and my eye has sizzled like a my hand once did when I grabbed those live wires under a frozen food case in 1991. I have grown convinced that something or someone is stalking me. It is only a feeling supported by odd coincidences and strange sendings, insane people in obvious pane who have sought me out across the country, seemingly and in public according to some insensible giddy impulse.
This past Saturday, the 3rd I was threatened by an insane Bantu as I hobbled to the bank in Somewhere, New Jersey. Later that day I was threatened by a casual acquaintance of some five years, a philosopher with numerous publish works to his credit, if he discovered that his suspicion that I was a Goboment Agent were confirmed by yet more suspicion. I will not write about that event, as it involved third parties who are people I love.
On arriving in Baltimore yesterday I was approached by Bust a Move, an openly insane woman screaming and crying for my aid. The crazies have multiplied from among stranger kind in my life. So, amidst this, when a fellow dark spirit from the unhappy dusty corners of Murican life, contacts me for counsel; for advice, training and brotherhood—for he too is being sought out by random crazies—then I sense a quickening. That quickening, from under my tin foil sombrero, seems to be that the metaphysical underpinnings of this fake world are reshaping reality. Reality, as most people determine the visible world around them, is to me, merely a construct projected out of the Invisible World that we are not privy to. The over welming surge of insane people, to you might be drug addicts, but to me they are sendings from beyond. The Evil Gods are either sending the insane like T-cells to wipe out We the Virus, or are driving people insane on an inner level that compels them to seek out the random stranger who seems most at peace and either attach or attack.
I’d rather be attacked at this point.
Or, perhaps it is just me that is pulling apart. Perhaps I have simply lost my mind and the electric signaling in my head and the severe pain in my eye is merely a symptom of my poorly deserved demise.
I can tell you this, that college educated white people, now fill me with deep dread. I can hear the induction in their voice. I can see them seeking puppets for conduction into their zombie inferno. I am terrified of white people now. They seem more and more like blank bio-slates that the evil powers of the overworld etch their whims upon and unleash like a torrent on the few unwashed souls left bobbing down this terrible river of the damned.
I was alone on an extended bus yesterday with 60 feral negroes, total savages, most, kind souls some. They overlooked the weird old beard in the rucksack in the corner. But earlier that day as I sat on the train to Baltimore, packed with New Yorkers, going to Washington D.C. to work, all cipher-like whites of various hues, all speaking the same dialect with the same empty eyes and needy voices, tapping away on their laptops, I was gawked at like a zoo exhibit. Two beautiful woman [0], three men, and one crippled old woman, whose faces mine accidentally met as I hauled on my ruck and made to exit the train in Baltimore, a place none of those on my car were headed, looked at me like that black pygmy held in a British zoo some 120 years ago.
Some of these episodes will be told in detail in the early pages of his work. I will then strive to write as little to nothing as possible in this journal and keep my little eye use for important work. This will hopefully be my slimmest book ever writ, limited to the ten or so pages I intend to write today and tomorrow covering June 3rd in ‘Suck Mah Dick Merka’ and June 5th [1] on the bus in ‘Bust A Move’ Baltimore.
There is a problem with my writing mind in that I have great difficulty in not continuing the Harm City journalism and the burglarizing of mass transit conversations.
The initial two chapters, hopefully part 1 and 2 of this entire miserable journal, will be titled and hopefully written tomorrow:
‘Suck Mah Dick Merka’
Profile of the Patel Brothers American Empire: Somewhere, New Jersey, June 3, 2023
‘Bust a Move’ Baltimore
On Baltimore City Buses from Penn Station, Charles Street to Hamilton: June 5, 2023
Notes
-0. Looked like a Bollywood pinup girl, had gone to the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts and was working for an NGO in D.C. and Argentina before going into acting full time. My one eye did inspect her ample bustline while hoisting on the ruck as her big blue eyes regarded me with fear over her pouting ruby lips.
-1. Those miserable Manhattan/DC white people, aspiring to their cartoon riches, do not deserve to be trivialized in this rough screed. The pathetic, apish, chanting Groes on the green Line, hopefully one of their number having just been shot by that large caliber revolver that sounded to the west just now, do possess the virtue of entertaining anticisms and will be remembered below...yo.
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posted: March 13, 2024   reads: 1798   © 2023 James LaFond
‘Sure and Dexterous Hand of the Founder’
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon: Summation 13-14
Diocletion was the son of a slave who worked his way into position of trust in the imperial structure. Then, when he was forced on pain of death if he refused, to become emperor, he spent 20 years attempting to develop a sustainable system that would permit him to resign, to retire to an estate, and have a few years free of bloodshed. He was a pious pagan and has been regarded as a persecutor of the Christians, though the evidence is thin. He was not a champion of Christianity and prayed to the old gods, he being a rustic man of the lower classes, and Christians of the age predominantly urban and suburban people of the upper classes. Christianity will be the subject of the next and final summation of this first volume. [1]
Dioclation appointed a co-emperor, a fellow Augustus, by the name of Maxim. This man was the opposite of Diocletion, a brutal rapist, torturer and fearless soldier. Diocletion cut a deal with his opposite so that he might focus on administration and war in the east against the formidable Persians and arrange for peace south of Egypt, where the Nubians were induced to form a buffer state against their fellow Blacks of Meroe.
The two Augusti appointed each a Caesar, who would do most of the fighting on the frontiers. Thus, Rome had four emperors, two senior, two junior, with the Italian homeland where none of these frontier born emperors came from, protected from the fierce northern barbarians by two armies, that of Maxim, who would manhandle the Sarmations and Eastern Germans and that of his subordinate, Constantius, [0] who would handle the Franks and other Western Germanic tribes and the terrible Picts and a rebel general in Britain.
In the east the brilliant and deft Diocletion had an army to fight the Persians in concord with a heroic Armenian prince who was said to be able to snap the horns from a bull’s head. This prince had a heroic companion, a warrior named Mango who was a deserter from Chinese military service in Central Asia. Dioclation also had a brutal general, a Caesar he appointed, named Galeanus.
The Persians would be broken and the northern barbarians chastised and driven back across their borders, or, like some tribes from the eastern Frontiers of Dacia, and Scythia provide tribal units to fight other barbarians in Britain. The emperors were reverting to the ancient Persian model of a mobile court and the use of client kingdoms and conquered tribes to provide ethnic units for service far away from their homeland.
A modern example would be if the U.S. Government chose San Francisco as the seat of a western government and the military function and logistical personnel of the Pentagon and the of the two presidents and two vice presidents were placed aboard air craft carriers to patrol the restive world. The deal with the two Caesars, was that they would succeed to the rule of their half of the empire when their boss retired, which they did, after 20 years.
Predictably with the retirement of Maxim and the ill health of Constantius, who should rise to Augustus in the West, would result in the following:
-Galeanus wanted it all.
-his newly chosen Caesar, Lucinius, a cruel vicious man, did not trust Diocletion to stay in retirement,
-Maxim wanted back in,
-Diocletion, the brains of the outfit, reminded Maxim that a deal was a deal and that he should really try gardening
-The loyal soldiers of Constantius, a solid and respected leader, upon his death bed in York, elevated Constantine, a young and vigorous conqueror, to oppose Galeanus
-Lucinius and Constantine both favored the Christian church and established extra brutal civic laws and revived the old Roman family extermination policies. Lucinious had the widow and daughter of his former boss, Diocletion hunted down and butchered. Constantine was simply a brute that signed off on such laws as executing newlyweds who did not get permission to wed from their parents.
The strong man, Constantine won victory and made rule from the eastern frontier where he and the emperors of his age mostly came from, the centerpiece of a new Roman Empire under the Cross, that would be governed from the modestly renamed Byzantium, known until its fall about 1200 years later as Constantinople.
As a novelist surely would have predicted, the complex management of four power centers required a flexible mind such as that of Dioclation, a mind formed in service, in a climb up through the ranks, the mind of a slave, of a civil servant who thought of the Empire as more important than himself. A warrior, virtually born in the saddle riding for his father, who was said to have sired Constantine upon a tavern owner’s daughter, while on campaign against the Sarmations on the Black Sea, was unfit for such civic compromise.
Constantine did support the reinvigoration of such pagan rites as boxing. Indeed, in the year 383, Varzadates, who would have been a younger relation of the Armenian Prince whose best warrior was Mango the Chinese mercenary, would win boxing at Olympia, the last record of such a victor by name. The rule of Rome by fighting men from the frontier was given stability and 20 years of coordinated victory free of civil war, by the one frontiersmen from among them whose father had been a bookish man [an accountant, I suspect] and who had taken to administration. Once that man stepped aside, weary to sickness of playing this brute off against that brute, the true nature of these frontier chieftains, would reveal itself in an imperial manner that canted ever towards the eventual feudal order that would replace it in the west under Christ and in the East under Islam.
Maxim would ignore his old boss’s suggestion that the growing of a fine head of cabbage could hold some meaning for that man of slaughter and rape he had somehow tamed for a generation. Maxim and his brute son would suffer what they had so often dispensed. The most chilling aspect of the disintegration of the Diocletion’s reforms, was that, seemingly in a bid to prevent the lineage of such an intelligent man from continuing, his family was exterminated by the very men he had trusted to protect them.
The Roman Empire was headed for a level of cruelty and a lack of forethought that exceeded that of Caligula, Nero and Commodos. As ingenius as the stop gap system was, designed as it was by a man caught in and laboring at the point of ten thousand swords, the costs were multiplied by four even as the economy suffered from war and a climate shift. The Huns were on their brutal way across Asia. The cold winds that drove them would eventually result in the Plague of Justinian in 525, perhaps the worst year in the history of Western Civilization and the true end of anything like Augustine Rome.
Notes
-0. Father of Constantine.
-1. Convincing evidence that Diocletion persecuted Christians as a priority are as lacking as evidence that Constantine and Lucinius were pious Christians.
-2. Stirrups found in the late 200s in Britain were likely from Sarmation levies, this practice by the time of Constantius some hundred years old.
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posted: March 11, 2024   reads: 1896   © 2023 James LaFond
Authors of Elder Earth
Series Sketch Updated
The world of Elder Earth and Wester New England was conceived of for the story Up Shingle Creek, written for my niece Jamie in Utah. [This became the novel Wife— which was completed in November of 2022.] Having merely begun that work in October 2021, and left it fallow for my return to the location, I became deathly ill and resurrected the discarded outline for The Sorcerer and re-titled it Sorcerer! and began fleshing out the wider setting of Elder Earth for to place the story in a setting I had been.
The excitement of one reader, Paul Bingham, for Sorcerer! moved me to write Ranger? set in locations where I had been with my friend Riley in 2018 in Red Rock Canyon and Denver, Colorado, and through which I had journeyed by train, hiked and lived for a week of my passage to Paul and Leanna in Southwestern Missouri. The third portion of that novel I am writing now, set in the windy quarters of The Four States that Paul and Leanna showed me.
I have yet to conclude Up Shingle Creek and must, before winter sets in, complete Knight also. [The former complete now, in 2023, and the latter yet to be begun and awaits my hopeful 2024 return to Montana.] This would do the bare minimum of fleshing out Wester New England and carrying the narrative begun with Sorcerer! to a satisfying conclusion.
However, if wicked Fate and uncaring Time permit, a more complete series might conclude as such:
[Modern locations in Brackets are the locations I have traveled to in support of that novel.]
(Modern location in parentheses are those I must travel to to write this book.)
Depending on time left and travel open to the writer, these novels may well be written out of their series order, which is chronological.
-1. Sorcerer!
Set in Awes West and Awes South
[Wyoming]
-2. Ranger?
Set in Awes West and Awes South
[Colorado, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri]
-3. Wife—
Set in Awes West
[Utah]
-4. Slave.
Set in Awes West and Czardoor
[Pacific Northwest, Oregon and Utah]
-5. Knight:
Set in Awes West and North
[Redlodge and Whitefish, Montana] (Tobacco Valley, Montana)
-6. Booger…
Set in Awes South and Voodoory
(Arkansas, Louisiana)
-7. Vagger;
Set in Easter New England and New Ireland
[Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania]
-8. Scout’
Set in Wester New Ireland
[Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania]
-9. Paladin*
Set in Awes North and West
(Wisconsin, Michigan)
-10. Alienist ~
Set in New Spain
[California] (Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Southern Utah)
-11. Factor#
Conclusion set in Awes South, Voodoory, New Ireland and Saint Mary’s Town on The Bay of the Mother of God in Easter New England
[The above as well as New Jersey and Delaware]
I do not expect to conclude this and leave this here largely as a fancy for readers who might wish to pursue the thing to its conclusion.
Thank you for your interest.
I wish Paul Bingham to be the series reader.
Thanks to Zack Berk, Leanna and Reuben Chandler for their reading and encouragement.
James LaFond, May, 14 2022, Harford County, Maryland
Note on the Literary Conceit
The numbers below indicate the authorship of the novel in the series listed above.
The narrative device of assigning authorship from among the cast of literate characters is the source of the sue of odd punctuation in the titles of the various books. The factors Blair West [1, 11], Hayward [3, 5, 11], Ghast, Book [2, 11], Dast [4, 11] as well as the Confessor at Saint George [2], Minstrel Jim [7, 8], Paladin 2031 [9], the Alienist Ulysses Saddler [6,10,11] who examined The White Lady as a child and became the foremost authority on Monstery and Voodoory, and the various letter writers of Wester and Easter New England
The last volume in the series, being Factor# is envisioned as a Council called by the Archbishop to which frontier factors, alienists and paladins are summoned to discuss the risings of Monstery and Voodoory and the possibility of a peace with Voodoory and alliance with Dastardy and New Spain in the face of the terrible scourge of “hellish upwellings” that has cut off oceanic navigation—the crescendo of the series being the turning of the very Oceans against Christendom and the separation of New England, New France and New Spain from their mother countries, as well as Dastardy from Czary.
This council would be the event at which the actual 9 volumes of recent lore are presented, the various authors meet or are reunited, and the calling of a Crusade devolves upon the Archbishop of New England at Saint Mary’s Cathedral.
-Corrected and expanded, after proofing and editing Ranger? in East Baltimore, August 27, 2023
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posted: March 10, 2024   reads: 1112   © 2023 James LaFond
Increase Publico’s Patrimony Draught
Act 3: Doris Synchronus, Unbranded Slave of the Censor
Night, Ascentday, First Day of Sepulcher
To speak was, some instinct within had ever instructed her from her beginning, to be at once unheard and undone. A curious childhood never obstructed with her own verbal interruptions, never even by a whispered question, had confirmed her babyhood held suspicion that talking was a trap by way a soul was devoured by this evil world of Edom. [1]
Yes, the reading of books, hymns, gospels, scriptures, and the listening of young ears to a play of Sophocles, these endowed the reader with True Sight. But let that reader speak any portion, however so honestly and innocently worded, of the Universal Truth and he was devoured by the world, his wise oratory alike to the caw of a bird caught in a trap awaiting the trapper’s bird-braining stick.
A song was begun so easily, so effortlessly, at the touch of her dear brother’s forefinger and a whispered request, “Dear Sister, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden,” or “Ulysses beyond the Pillars of Hercules,” or “Samson and Delilah, sister…” Such suggestions, in reality commands from their kind Master filtered through the agreeable form and malleable mind of her twin brother, merely unleashed her nature, a nature expressed in song with such tragic gravity that her fear of speaking was thence veiled in sound. Her voice could imitate the organ, the fifes, the fiddles and lyres of various timbres—never the drums; never ever the drums and symbols of discord!
Gypsies with brass finger symbols and rattles, ensigns with martial drums, soldiers stamping their hard shod feet, at one performance or another, when she was directed to provide the elemental sounds of angels, demons, God Almighty and the sorrows of mankind, were at her Master’s disposal. Her cue given with such tender touch, Orpheus then conducted a one-man play, commanding the instrumentalists with a pointed finger or note sign, even a pointed toe extended at the terminus of his sprite-like leg.
This tune, this sound of winds, of hunger for knowledge, the slither song of tempting illumination, of lost nakedness, the torrents of Wroth Right suffusing the whimperings of beggardly wrong, this song caused her unbranded shoulder and unbranded neck to burn—for she knew, knew in her infancy, that her Fate was not just to be bought by the Kind, but to be sold to the cruel, to be branded upon her dainty shoulder and thence to run and be branded upon her storied neck.
She knew all of this.
Only Orpheus knew that she held predictive, prophetic lore within her unspoken mind. His gift for mime, their gift of unity in synchronicity, permitted her to impart the surety that she knew their future, that The Fates were now angels and came to her in her silence with the Word of God.
The nuns knew and adored her, sensed her communion on sight and had to force themselves not to kneel and bring charges of heresy upon she and them.
Brother knew, that she must never speak, and must never lie under a man, lest their gift be shattered.
This their Master knew on kindest instinct.
Through evil hands they had been delivered by the Shepardess Angel of Orphans into the care of the single, decent man of power in Edom.
Confounded by the props, by Orpheus and his lyric leaps, by the musicians, listeners to their various performances did not ever seem to notice that her first note was always the same—whether a pirate accosting Julius Caesar and sealing his own doom, or the carpenter nailing Christ to the Cross—not an ear, tricked as they were by Orpheus’ command of their eyes, noted that her every dirge began the same. Each and every song of Doris must begin with that same note, the song that ushered her into this cruel world ruled by savage Edom.
Orpheus had come into the world first, silent until he was slapped by the hard, slave physician, his pale shoulder home to a crude raised brand. Then he cried.
There she lie, within the severed womb of a mother twice doomed.
She remembered, recalled all. Her mind from the early calculated that speaking causes forget, that animals never forget, even across generations, because they decline to speak and jabber jaw like amnesiac mankind.
The cold man, so cold he knew no cruelty, only function according to his purpose, his master having been paid to so save the two jammed up babes, gazed in upon her.
From her mother’s bloody welter she was taken and held up, her cord cut, her bottom slapped. As she was turned face down and met the eyes of her dying mother, the vessel that had in long suffering brought them into the realm of suffering, they saw each other in eyes, knew each other to be but sparks of a soft fire soon to die.
The brute physician thought Doris dead, though her dying mother in her eyes saw a long life ahead.
The slap echoed, and did not sting—mere flesh under hand as it was.
She smiled, smiled down at Mother, and in joy that eviscerated woman passed from care with a moan that echoed something of Eternity. The cruel madam of the theater where their mother had been impregnated, who had not bothered paying the physician to attempt to save the worn out dancer—once a featured attraction, now but a vessel for new and unspoiled property—looked into the eyes of Doris, yet to cry on the third slap.
Baby Doris turned her head as Orpheus her twin sobbed behind her in the nurse’s caring clutches. Into the eyes of the leather skinned matron that fresh baby looked, looked searchingly, for a heart that might be there, and found it, flickering wan behind a dark bier of night. The woman’s voice froze in her throat as she was to give the command to stop spanking that pale bottom. The fourth slap came, and the death moan, the release into Eternity that had let go from the throat of her dying mother, issued like wind song from the tiny mouth of Doris.
Doris smiled on her song coach, her left hand extended over the purple arm, her right hand cupping her coif of flaxen hair. Only the nearest of the darling “sketchies” the curious Japanese speed artists whom Doris loved having about, noted this wry grin. But only Doris knew the forever unspoken memory that had filled the theater matron with such horror, those wide baby eyes that spake behind that Angelic groan, “Let me go, Bitch. Sell us to a good Master and you might sleep again.”
The grin gave a note of judgment to Adam when he accused with a pointing finger and a fiddle of Irish strings, to Eve, that she had beguiled him who so ever after would fall…
She saw through one languid lid, forever in repose that had been surmised as the chemistry of Morpheus [2] that such Oriental medicine that had been credited with the dreamy quality of her form, was now being drunk in a great cup of wine by the only Master to whom she could ever be kind.
Her song sung like wind across the chamber, stunning the musicians to silence, awing the patricians in attendance who took it for the wailing of the Cheribum at the green-gabled gate of Eden. [3]
Her undertone and cadence, barely discernable to the cultured creatures gathered witlessly about like flowers shading the actors thinking they understood the sun, was felt deeply by Orpheus. Her twin shivered, then shook, balked, then leapt to the feet of their Good Master, Increase Publico. That man, as good as a man could be while Great, was quaffing eagerly of a silvery rhyton, a vessel normally reserved for serving; drinking his death. In the same quaff they new, the two, they of a closest kin as well as weird ken, that they were doomed to branding at the least, rape for certain, torture probably and possibly the unthinkable—separation.
Orpheus framed his Master’s final draught between his long sprite like hands as Doris sang the spear-slain song of Hoar Yore. The orchestra, barely able to keep up, did well enough that the audience was convinced that the performance was a piece of scripted genius. The speed sketchers of Kyoto caught the sense of a great act, that the patricians in attendance would all swear was their Host’s scripted fall from his social place even as Adam fell from his edanic place...and that he did so with serene grace.
The crescendo of the tragedy, as Publico fell off to nether reaches beyond worldly worries, was somewhat marred by Gentile Publico’s bemused response, “Fawkin’ Hell, Unx—just like that, no by your fuckin’ leave Caesar here be my upsman? [4] Unx, Unx, don’t be a knob, Unx!”
Ears of weird kind sensed the truth of it, the both of the Synchronus Twins. For the depravity of Gentile Publico was well known to be eclipsed only by his greed. Thus, an orderly disposal of the estate, less the turmoil of the Third Man of New York [5], slipping away into oblivion by his own hand during a performance of the Fall of Man, was understood by both twins, to be the last act of kindness their Master could bestow upon them…
As Increase lolled on his divan, his nephew tugging at his sleeve from his chair, cursing like a mobster, the musicians sawed a funerary dirge at the urging of Doris who sang the departure winds of God.
The patricians drooled in stunned silence. The guards came to their master, abandoning the doors. Orpheus tenderly damped each lantern upon the round in a dimness of soul conduction. She could see her brother’s flesh bead with sweat and his face grow sallow with fright. So she nodded to the curtain behind which God was suppose to have vanished in this retelling. Like so they too abandoned their wards, slipping off through the south door as the patricians rose in a worried state at the attention of the guards to their drooling Master.
Notes
-1. The ancient Hebrew term for Rome.
-2. Opium
-3. Lesser angels
-4. Upsman is New York slang for a nepotistic replacement named by a retiring official upon his official resignation.
-5. The First Man was the Consul and the Second The Tribune.
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posted: March 9, 2024   reads: 1126   © 2023 James LaFond
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