ALMOST A DEAD MAN - CHAPTER 3 - 1982

THREE

The summer solstice sun was falling through the trees. The nature-park north of Hamburg was dead still. The approaching evening heightened the darkness within the corridor of tall pines. A rutted dirt road led deep into the new forest. No sign on the rusting wrought-iron gate said to where. A crumbling stone wall surrounded the property. Electronic sensors, video cameras, attack dogs roaming the grounds, and armed guards had once guarded the Von Hausen state from the Baader-Meinhof Gang's reign of terror in the 1970s.

1982 was a different story. The revolutionaries were dead, serving prison sentences, or in exile in East Germany or Libya. A low profile had served Germany's uncrowned aristocracy as the best defense against the masses. A wild swath of brush, brambles, and thorn trees within the estate's walls acted a barrier between the road and the estate's gardens. Flickering torches led to a Nineteenth-Century mansion. Laughter echoed over the neglected rose gardens, where the partygoers drank champagne and ate foie gras with a grace passed through blood.

The men appeared powerful and the wives looked ten years younger than their real age. The facial and physical uniformity was the result of centuries of interbreeding. Teenagers in chic outfits danced to Dexy's COME ON, EILEEN around the crumbling fountain. Exquisite girls undulated sinuously, while the blasé boys shrugged from side to side. Behind the twin turntables Bertram Bellepas was dying to dance with several of the female guests, despite Kurt, the owner of Hamburg’s most popular nightclub, having warned against fraternization with the upper classes.

These people preferred for the help to stay in place and the older set viewed the nightclub parvenu with all the suspicion the rich hold for someone ascending from the lower class. Few could understand their host’s association with such the nightclub owner, to whom the aristocrat simply referred to as the 'entertainment'.

Hamburg was a small city for a population of 1,600,000, especially in the nightlife. The two men had met countless times at parties, concert, and clubs. The baron had maintained a healthy disdain for the parvenu. Some people are the help.

Last year Lukas Von Brucken’s had inherited his title to discover his late father had ravaged the fortune as revenge against his only son's youthful rebellion. His inheritance had withered to an antiquated steel mill completely indebted to the banks and enough money for a two year holiday in Gstaad and Mallorca. His destitution was no one's business, which was why he threw this party tonight. It was one thing to be bankrupt and quite another to look pleite or broke.

His young wife skated through the crowd a goddess on silver stiletto heels. A shimmering silk sheath molded to her tanned skin. Her silver-blonde hair cast an unearthly halo around her angelic face. THe marriage to a man over twenty years her senior and the antithesis to her ingenuous purity had mystified everyone.

Lukas' thinning hair and the mottled flesh were the penalty from drug abuse. His bright smile was a smirk of decaying teeth. Considering how hard the baron had lived throughout the Sixties and Seventies, his achieving forty-two years amazed no one more than himself.

Vanessa Von Hausen greeted Lucas with a kiss on the cheek. If he was capable of pity, then he might have felt pity for her marrying him, instead he kissed her cheek, consummately acting the role of a loving husband.

“Having a good time, darling?”

"Lots of fun. Come dance with me," his wife whispered in her ear, touching a red spot on his shirt.

His grimace confirmed another meeting with Petra Wessel, Hamburg’s premier dominatrix. A spot of blood stained his shirt and she withdrew her hand, as if his masochism was as contagious as the Plague, when priests led around flagellants to purge the pestilence from Europe.

For his part Lukas' savored Vanessa's naive revulsion.

”Dancing is best left for the young in body and heart. You’ll have more fun with Kurt.”

“I’d rather dance with you.” Vanessa still prayed for his salvation, but turned her turquoise blue eyes on Kurt Oster. His criminality lured her pure soul and she motioned to him to meet nightclub owner on the dance floor. Many of guests scrutinized their host to gauge his reaction and Lukas might have warned Vanessa to be more discreet, but their falling in love was all part of a grand plan to fend off financial ruin.

Vanessa swayed back and forth, her belly grazing Kurt's thigh. Silky strands rippled across her spine like a theater curtain closing on the stage and the lengthy gold necklace swung between her compact breasts. The melting scent of her perfume wafted in the night air. Feeling the hard nipples shift across his chest, Kurt almost kissed her, then stepped back from his partner.

Surveying the partygoers' faces, he recognized many from newspapers and magazines as the upper echelon of Northern Germany. Most were capable of reciting their lineage into the Middle Ages as opposed to Kurt’s obscure peasant roots. Their families controlled riches beyond imagination, while his wealth originated from any number of semi-legal schemes, but their fortune had not come through pious acts. Murder, theft, mistreatment of workers, pollution, and poisoning the food supply were just a few of their crimes. They were no better than him and he whispered to Vanessa, "One day soon I will take you away from all this."

"Do not talk like that." She looked around to see, if anyone might have overheard him.

“Why? I’m not worried about what these people think. They only have money, because they either were born rich, married someone rich, or stole it.”

As the stepson of a Hafenstrasse butcher his birth had excluded a 'silver spoon in the mouth' and Germany's complicated laws of inheritance protected any true redistribution through marriage. The only way to achieve his dream was by robbing from the rich to give to the poor and he held Vanessa tighter.

"You do not love Lukas and he does not love you"

“How can you say that?” Vanessa was flushed with excitement. Up to this moment their flirtations had been only a tease.

“You think I associate with these people to get ahead? They hate me and everyone like me. Your husband as well. I only serve a purpose.” His hand slipped down her back and then they danced in a dizzying circle. “You must know how I feel about you and I think you feel the same way too. I am working on something to change both our lives and then I will ask you to leave behind all this all. Somewhere in your heart you will find a way to say, "Yes."

Vanessa snapped back her head. She was married. Her life belonged to Lukas, though she demanded without any conviction, “Stop.”

"Why?" Kurt sidestepped around her, then pulled Vanessa tight like an Apache dancer. “You want it as much as me."

The song ended and they broke their embrace. Vanessa’s face turned a scarlet red, as Bertram segued into LE FREAK. The international disco hit by Chic launched the young dancers into a frenzy. On the terrace Lukas clapped his hands in feigned delight and waved for his wife to come over. Once she was next to him, he put his arm lovingly around her and asked, "What did Kurt say to you?"

She paused for a second, attempting to conjure a lie, only her upbringing demanded nothing, but the truth. "Kurt wants to take me away."

"Oh, don't they all, my dear? What else did he say?"

"That he had something big planned that could change everything for him."

"What? Like rob a bank?" There was nothing more pathetic or more vulnerable than a lower-class fool in love with their better like they believed in fairy tales. Vanessa lowered her head.

"He did not say."

"Of course he will not." Lukas kissed his wife on the cheek and cautioned like a concerned husband, "You should stay away from Kurt. He is trouble."

"Thank you for the warning." Vanessa was trapped playing the princess in a diabolical fairy tale, but knew her role well. She was studying fairy tales for a master’s program in literature at Hamburg University. Lukas' family owned the both editions of the 1812 Grimms’ Fairy Tales. They really weren’t meant for children or the naive. "If there is anything I have learned from you, it is that no man is harmless."

“And few women too.”

Lukas walked away, as tears formed in her eyes. Only one woman satisfied his libido and he should have married Petra, except his titled prejudices forbid such a luxury.

Lukas entered the library stood before the monumental 32-volume dictionary of the German language started by the Grimms Brothers and completed in 1961. So much effort for nothing. Only a few thousand copies had been sold, since few people were wealthy enough to afford a full set. His father had bought thousands of books and those never read crowded the library's shelves. Lukas had upheld the tradition by occasionally holding them, as if the sentences, paragraphs, and chapters could be absorbed through osmosis, though not a word passed through the covers to his hand.

Vanessa had come into his life with her research of how fairy tales role define good and evil in western culture. lost in these old books like a Cinderella trapped in a tower. Not only the Grimms brothers, but was easily enthralled by classics E. T. A. Hoffmann he Nutcracker and the Mouse King or Nussknacker, Das kalte Herz by Wilhelm Hauf und Mausekönig and Johann Gustav Gottlieb Büsching, Puddocky. He had become not so much smitten, but bewitched by her innocenct belief that these tales formed our morality. He had remained a gentleman and listened and laughed with her interpretations of humanity.

Lukas regarded books as dusty reminders of the past and his entire life had evolved into a series of remaking the movies he loved; DARLING, SUNSET BOULEVARD, INFANTS DE PARADIS, SALO, and most lately Jean Renoir's black-and-white version of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.

Lukas slammed his fist against the wall. He had been tricked by an addendum to his father's will that the inheritance was null, unless he married. The old man had been mad enough to imagine that his sacramental union with a girl as pure as Vanessa might rescue his soul from damnation. He often fantasized about disinterring his father's corpse for the animals in the forest to scavenge, except his designs of destruction were meant only for the living.

Lukas envisioned himself reincarnated as a dissolute noble in Visconti's THE DAMNED, reveling in the cinematic daydream. The door to the library opened for his secret guest. Lukas motioned for SS Tommy to take a chair. Few of the partygoers knew Cali's right-hand man and Lukas shut the shades, while SS Tommy warily sat in a rich leather chair. The blonde pimp had met Lukas Von Hausen at several clandestine meetings for a neo-Nazi movement. He considered the Count a soft believer, since he was Oberklasse, a drug addict, a homosexual, and now a S&M slave to Petra Wessel, whose dead eye tracked SS Tommy whenever they were in the same room.

As much as he hated the aristocrat, the Party was in no position to exclude members, especially one whose family as well-connected as the Von Hausens, but come the revolution, Lukas was destined to be put up against the wall with the other race traitors, so the Fifth Reich avoided the same mistakes of the Third Reich.

"You didn't invite me here for a social chat, so what do you want?"

"Besides a united Germany, what is your fondest dream?"

"To be King of the Reeperbahn,"

"What if I could help that dream come true?" Lukas' original purpose in attending neo-Nazi meetings had been to incense his father, except the old bastard approved of their politics. Lukas continued associating with this motley organizations in case the connection might come in handy one day and today was that day.

"You? How can you help me?"

"Who stands in your way? Ein Schwartzer in such a position. Cali. It has come to my attention that Cali and Kurt Oster have something in the works. Something that might help both you and me, if we were to interfere."

"What?" SS Tommy smiled, for the mention of Kurt's name confirmed the rumors about the nightclub owner’s affair with Vanessa Von Hausen.

"That is still their secret, but I have a way of finding out."

Taking on SS Tommy as a partner was as risky as grabbing an egg from a snake hole, yes a partnership was a danger he was willing to risk, because while a snake bit any hand stuck in the hole, no one said Lukas had to be the one snatching the egg.

"Du verarscht mich. I'm no sucker." SS Tommy crossed the room and seized the baron by his lapels.

"No one said you were,” Lukas answered without struggling. The pimp had swallowed his bait. "I have a man following Kurt. Who is not important, but he is very good. When he tells me any new information, I will tell you. Are you in or not?"

"If I find out you have been lying to me in any way, I will kill you."

"I hope you find that unnecessary." Lukas flipped his arm against the pimp's wrists, freeing himself. His right arm slipped around the pimp's throat in a classic shime-waza or chokehold at the city’s premier Judo dojo. "You may think me a weak man, but if you want to better yourself, then stop playing the strong man with me."

Lukas tightened his pressure.. Another five seconds and the pimp dropped to the floor unconscious. He released SS Tommy, who sat in a chair coughing convulsively.The Count slapped him on the back.

"Breathe slowly and the pain will go away faster."

"I underestimated you."

The taller man had him in a death grip a few seconds ago

"Many people think I am my reputation. The don't know the real me and as I said we can help each other.

"When would this all happen?"

"Maybe a month. Maybe two."

"Will it cost me any money?"

"Only time and your special talents." Lukas adjusted his jacket, strangely aroused by the confrontation. SS Tommy’s thick finger pointed at the baron, trying to regain some bravado.

"Remember. If you fuck with me...."

"You will kill me." Worst things might happen than SS Tommy’s threats and Lukas calmly said, “So are we in agreement?”

The blonde pimp nodded and the two men shook hands.

Lukas opened the door. "You'll understand, if I ask you to leave by the back."

"No offense taken," SS Tommy fantasized about paying back this sleight and walked through the woods to his car parked on the nature park’s road. .

SS Tommy drove his Ferrari out of the estate, rubbing his throat. King of the Reeperbahn appealed to him, not because of money. He had more than he needed as well as every woman in the Eroscenter. His base desire the power to strike back at everyone who had ever stood in his way. The list was topped by Cali, because 'King of the Reeperbahn’ even sounded better once SS Tommy ruled the street.

55 REMSEN

In the fall of 1975 I worked as a substitute teacher at South Boston High School. The city's school system was torn by busing riots. Poor white kids attended school in poor black neighborhoods and vice versa. No one went to classes, unless the TV crews showed up to interview a white politician presching segregation, then the white boys fought the riot squad. It was a bad scene, but I was getting $85/day to insure no one firebombed the empty classrooms. Most school days I wrote poetry. Some of it wasn’t bad.

I moved into a cheap Brookline basement apartment . Upstairs was a two-family commune. The parents believed in free love. I had dated one mother's second daughter. Hilde had told me that she was 18. We had lasted less than three weeks. Her parents said that the young blonde was too young for me.

"How young?"

"16."

"You're right." I was twenty-three. Too old, but their daughter's next boyfriend was a thirty year-old car thief.

My best friend met Hilde’s older sister. Terri was almost twenty and was very sexy as to be expected of a Combat Zone stripper.

Two weeks later AK deserted his college girlfriend and moved into the commune's attic with Terri. We were one big happy family.

AK taught school during the day and played keyboards for a popular funk band at night.

The New Yorker was Jump Street's token white boy.

He dealt with the promoter.

When Jump Street were hired a weekend gig at a club in the West Village. AK invited me to join him. Hilde's sister was staying behind for a family gathering and AK confided in me, "I have this old college girlfriend in New York. Rose is an artist. She looks like an East European refugee.”

I painted my own portrait from this scanty description.

Dark-hair, thin, feminine.

That Friday night te band drove down in the van. AK took his Firebird. He wanted to impressed Rose.

"It's not a GTO."

"But it is fast."

We crashed at a friend's place in Harlem. AK invited several friends to the show. I knew no one in the city. Rose came up wearing a cotton shift complimenting her southern gracefulness. Her hair was cut short like she might have been a dyke in college. Her accent was Appalachian. She laughed at Ak's stories, until his girlfriend entered the bar unannounced. Terri had smelled a rat. Ex-strippers are sensitive that way.

“Pretend you're with Rose.” AK was plotting to meet her later.

His girlfriend was too smart to fall for such a simple subterfuge and after the gig I accompanied Rose to a late dinner at David’s Pot Belly Restaurant on Christopher Street, where she worked as a waitress. We had omelettes and spoke about art. Mostly I listened about her plans to study at the Sorbonne in Paris.

“Bette Davis’ character wanted to do the same in PETRIFIED FOREST. Lesley Howard has the outlaw shoot him, so she can collect his insurance. I thought it was very noble.”

“Anyone ever tell you that____”

“Tell me what?”

“That you look like an angel____” she struggled for several seconds with the next words.

“______under candlelight.”

"No one has ever said anything like that to me."

"It's true_____."

She apologized for not finishing sentences.

"I have a speech defect too. S_s-s-stuttering."

She smiled at our failings and we went to her place in Brooklyn Heights.

55 Remsen Street.

Her apartment was four flights up one floor above a Chinese whorehouse. A dragon lady in sheer silk stood at the door. I guessed her to be about forty. In red light over the doorway she passed for twenty.

“You want good time?”

“No." I had never paid for sex.

“Maybe sometime you not lucky. Come see me.” She hissed the invitation like a snake slithering through dry grass.

“I hate that____.”

“Woman.” Rose didn’t have to finish off that sentence.

Straight women hated those that aren’t straight. Rose opened the door to her apartment. She shared the two bedroom with a lanky West Virginian. They knew each other from college. He held a pad of paper in front of him on which he scribbled numbers. Rose introduced him as Bix.

He lifted sallow eyes from the scratching pencil point. He didn’t say a word. Rose led me into the bedroom. I tried to be quiet, but she called out my name with each thrust nearing orgasm. Women were echoing other men’s names from the sex den below.

Every time I exited from the bedroom, Bix was at the kitchen table.

An unlit cigarette in his hand.

An empty beer can to the left.

Several piles of paper were scattered about the table. Numbers filled them to the edges. I had been a math major in college. I tried to make sense of the progressions. The numbers were years abstracted out of sequence. None were zero or 1978. "I met Rose in 1970. I reduced the years to prime numbers. When were you born?" "1952." "One year after Roses. I'm two years before." An expression of hurt paralyzed his face. Words were lost in his mouth. Finally on Sunday morning he asked, “How does it feel to fuck another man’s woman?”

"Rose said nothing about a relationship."

"No, she wouldn't, but what can you expect from someone who can't finish sentences?"

"I don't know. I have a stutter."

"So I asked you before." Bix put down the pencil and picked up a knife. He probably used it for sharpening the lead points. He pointed it at me. "How is it fucking someone else's girlfriend?"

“Wait a few minutes and I’ll tell you.”

I locked the door behind me and said to Rose, “Your roommate said____”

“I know what he said. Don’t___” Her hands drew me back into bed to complete her sentence. Her first kiss swallowed my soul. “I love your lips.”

We made love twice more that day and on Sunday Rose escorted me to Penn Station to catch the train to Boston. I had no idea where AK and his girlfriend were. I kissed Rose on the platform and said, “I’ll see you next week.”

“I work on the weekends.”

“I’ll wait until you get out.”

“It will be late.” Hesitation rimmed her reply.

“I can wait.” The train conductor called ‘all aboard’. “After all this is the city that never sleeps.”

Back in Boston AK grilled me about Rose.

"Did you?"

"Did I what?"

"You know."

"The answer is no."

"You're lying?"

"No, nothing happened with us. Besides she has a boyfriend."

"Bix?"

"Yes."

"Bix has been following her around for years. He's a hillbilly from Carolina. I don't know why she lets him do that."

"Me neither."

Thoughts of Rose killed Boston. Its streets were empty after dark. The bars seemed provincial. None of the women possessed the Rose's beauty. The next weekend I trained south to Penn Station and took the subway to the West Village. I stood before David's Pot Belly. Rose waved from inside the restaurant.

The cook Michael served me a Gruyere and mushroom omelette.

Afterward I killed time at the Riviera Bar with a silver-haired jazz impresario. I recited a poem about hitchhiking. James said that I was almost a genius.

“How do you know?”

“I manage Cecil Taylor and Merce Cunningham. They are real geniuses. Not fakes.” He smoked a cigarette like Marlene Dietrich. The Riviera was loaded with gays, bi, straight. It was a middle meeting ground for all types. James was 100% playing for the other team and proud of his sexuality. “I once made it with James Dean.”

“The movie star? I heard that he had been with Sal Mineo."

“He went with anyone. You care for a drink?”

"Yeah, why not?"

James and I drank too much, but I arrived at David’s Pot Belly at closing.

"I'm exhausted. Let's go back to my place."

There was no traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge.

I paid the taxi fare. We climbed the stairs. The dragon lady smiled at my passage.

“You lucky man.”

“Yeah, tell me about it.”

"This one never go home same man. You must be special."

"I'm an angel____"

Rose slapped my hand. She didn’t want me socializing with her downstairs neighbor. She opened her apartment door. The wall clock said 3:16. Bix sat at the table. Once more an unlit cigarette in his hand. The pages of numbers spread to the walls. None of them were equations. Only numbers and now not years, but five-digit prime numbers.

Rose and I retreated to her bedroom. She wasn’t in the mood for sex.

“I’ve had a long day______at work.”

“What’s with Bix and the numbers?”

“He feels as if he can find the right number maybe he can reverse the hands of time and win back my heart.”

“And do you know the right number?” I had loved the poetry of math until LSD warped my perceptions of dimensions. Then words became my math.

“No, and neither will Bix. He’s crazy and that’s why I______stopped being with him,” she whispered from bed. We kissed under the sheets. She murmured with a cuddle, “I love your lips. Go to_____sleep.”

“All right.”

I fell asleep reading Henry Miller's TROPIC OF CAPRICORN. The profane writer had spent his childhood in Williamsburg. Brooklyn Heights was more for successful artists such as W. H. Auden, Truman Capote, Hart Crane, Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, Carson McCullers, Arthur Miller, Walt Whitman, and Mary Tyler Moore. I woke to the screams of a Chinese woman fighting a man.

Not everyone was as happy as me in Brooklyn Heights.

The next day we brunched on Montague Street. Rose had to be a work at 4. We made love quickly on her bed. I liked her tongue more than her lips. She liked oral better than penetration. I let her have her way with me.

“That was better than good.”

"I can only try to do my best."

Saturday night was a repeat of Friday night. Dinner at the Potbelly and drinking at the Riviera. Ro was off on Sunday. We went dancing at the Limelight on 7th Avenue. James Spicer came along with us. He bought drinks and we shared a taxi back to Brooklyn. His apartment was in Park Slope.

“You ever need a place to stay call me.” James blew me a kiss, as the taxi disappeared into Brooklyn.

“You know what______he wants?”

“Same thing as everyone. A little love.”

I didn’t even notice the dragon lady or Bix or the cries of pleasure from below. Ro and I were the only two people in the world. I wrote several poems. Ro had me read them to her. They may have made more sense than Bix’s numbers.

On Monday morning ate in the city. I went to the train by myself, telling her that I would be back in two weeks.

She smiled and said, “I’d like______that.”

Throughout that fall and winter I commuted between Boston and New York. I’d phone during the week. Ro rarely answered the phone. She was either at art school or work. She told me that Bix never picked up the phone. He was even deeper into his numbers. His scrawlings infected the hallways.

Friday nights the dragon lady greeted me. Her name was Lee.

She asked Bix for numbers.

He handed her a sheet of paper.

“If I like number. I make bet. Win big money.” Lee followed the twisting cortex of numbers for a lottery winner. “Open restaurant. Sell food. No pussy.”

I plotted a strategy to quit teaching in June and collect unemployment through the summer. I informed Rose about this plan on several occasions.

"This apartment is small."

"Bix could leave."

"No, it's his place."

"We can get another apartment."

Obviously Rose was stalling, but I didn’t care, because I no longer wanted to live in Boston.

My parents were sad to hear about my departure. I didnt say why.

AK said I should thank him for introducing Ro. “You owe me.”

"I'm not sure how to pay you back."

"I'll think of a way."

Hilde's car thief boyfriend arranged a job driving a gas-guzzler to New York. The owner paid me $300 to ditch the Oldsmobile to collect the insurance, claiming the car stolen.

"It's easy," her boyfriend explained. "Once in New York park the car by the Hudson, throw the plates in the river, and leave the keys in the ignition. Joyriders will steal the car within minutes.

That Friday morning I phoned Rose several times. No one answered the phone.

After packing my bag in the Olds Hilde's two-family commune stood at the door and waved good-bye.

It was a little after noon.

“You be careful.” Hilde was a little teary-eyed.

"Don't break any laws," cautioned her boyfriend. He was glad to see me go.

I drove down the highway at 55. Everyone else was hitting 65 or better, but I didn't need a state trooper stopping me.

The trip from Brookline to the West Side Highway lasted four hours. It took five minutes to unscrew the license plates and toss them into the black water flowing upstream past the desolate docks. I walked to her restaurant. I had $300 plus my savings in my pocket. A new life awaited me and I entered the restaurant with a smile.

"Where's Rose.

"She quit yesterday," said Michael the cook.

“She say why?”

“No.”

Brooklyn Heights was a couple of subway stops away from Christopher Street. On the way I reflected on the unanswered phone and her quitting her job. That one and one didn’t add up to two, but a myriad of possibilities. Too many to count. Numbers and more numbers.

Just like Bix.

I arrived at 55 Remsen at 5. I rang the doorbell a number of times without success. I tried the buzzer for the whorehouse. The door clicked open. I climbed the stairway. The dragon lady waited under the red light.

“Today I lucky. Find good number.” She pointed to a scrawled number on the wall. “Tomorrow no work. You come back. Have good time. Okay.”

"I'm here to see Rose."

"Oh, yes, you." All Americans looked the same to Lee. "She not home."

"Not home. You ask Bix. He know."

The door to the apartment was open.

Bix sat at the table.

A burning cigarette in his hand.

Not a number anywhere other than the walls.

“You know that Hitler was anti-smoking. So was Rose. When Hitler killed himself in the bunker, the first thing the Nazis did was light up a cigarette,” Bix inhaled deeply and then said, “Rose’s gone. Left this afternoon.”

“To where?"

“Off to Paris to study at the Sorbonne.”

“I thought it was just talk."

“I know. I was surprised too.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, but you’ll have to go to France to find out what it’s like to see another guy fucking your girlfriend. Not me. I already know.”

It was a shitty thing to say and I probably should have hit him, but I had said the same thing several months earlier, so I figured us even.

“You know she never kissed me.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“How was it?”

“Good.” I had no reason to lie.

“I thought so.” Bix took out a pencil and paper. The numbers were his friends. I walked out of the apartment with my bag. On the stairs the dragon lady said me, “Look you not lucky no more.”

“No, not lucky.” Fucked was a better word, except that word had only one meaning in Lee’s bordello.

I wandered onto Remsen Street.

A plane flew east overhead and I imagined Rose looking down from an Air France 747.

From that height people were not visible.

Somehow I had ceased to exist for her. I couldn’t say why.

I went to the corner telephone and called James Spicer. He answered on the first ring. I told him that I needed a place to stay.

“I thought you’d call me one day.” He sounded drunk.

“Why?” I wanted drunk too.

“Because that girl had heartbreak written on her face. More hers than yours. Get in a taxi and I’ll tell you more.”

“Okay.” I glanced back over my shoulder at 55 Remsen. A taxi came down Montague. I waved it down. Like Rose I was gone and I wasn’t coming back either.

I ran into Bix two months later. He was living on the street. I got him a job as a carpenter. He stayed about two weeks.

That winter the police found him dead below Brooklyn Heights.

Starved to death.

A burnt cigarette in his hand.

His ragged clothing was stuffed with paper.

No numbers on any of them.

He had buried that demon in the peace of his death, as I had tempted to excommunicate my pain by writing the same poem to Rose about a hundred times. Each ended as a crumpled paper. James Spicer called the pile of rejects 'the hill of THE END'. I didn't laugh at his joke. After that I stopped writing poetry. The words were simply letters, not magic.

Rose and I met each other years later. We had another affair.

Very brief. She was working at a fish restaurant. Her paintings were of fish. They were very good.

I mentioned Bix. She said that she had heard about his death.

"There was no helping him."

"None?"

“None____.”

I waited for her to say more.

Rose was a woman of few words and I couldn’t bring myself to ask why she had left me or why she never kissed Bix, but then I had always known the answer.

It was in the movie PETRIFIED FOREST.

Art was more powerful than poetry and numbers. Only life was stronger, although sadly not for everyone and Bix knew that better than most.

I’m only glad not to discover the same yet. Maybe one day, but not now.

ps I am still friends with Rose. She paints me on occassion. I like her work, especially the nudes.

Flying Phone 1979

Two days ago I had visited Professor Bertell Ollman at Bellevue. He was lively. Happy too. It was good to get out of the house. He remains a swalwart comrade true to the revolution.

I left and headed over to catch the M15 downtown. It was fezzing. I had good winter gear. I hadn't been afoot in Kip's Bay in ages. At the corner of Second Ave and 25th Street I looked up at a building in 1978 or 1979. I had been hired for Mark Amitin as an assistant for the ALBEE DIRECTS ALBEE tour. I met the playwright several times. Gentle and polite. The complete opposite of his producer. A constant screaming storm of chaos. One warm Spring morning he exploded into a shouting argument with an Ohio theater owner. Mark's monologue was 90% or more searing. Five minutes non-stop. He looked at me and said, "And what?"

I knew better to say a word, but shrugged.

He slammed down the receiver and tore the phone out of the wall. Ten seconds later he threw it out the open window from 22nd floor.

"I'm going to lunch."

No explanation.

When I returned from the pizza shop, two precnct cops were in the apartment. They had the samshed telephone. It has narrowly missed a taxi. Someone called 911. They traced the phone to this apartment. Mark slipped them $100 and that was the end of that. Except I had to get a new phone.

Took all afternoon.

A madman.

I haven't heard from him in over a year.

I caught the bus to Chinatwon for a bowl of Pho at Pho Grand.

ALMOST A DEAD MAN - CHAPTER 2

Howling sirens drove the panicked East Villagers into the Astor Place Subway. Most failed to pierce the scrum at the head of the stairs to the station and they raised their eyes to the speck falling to Earth. A white flash vaporized New York into the ionosphere.

“DOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNAAAAAAA."

The subhuman scream ping-ponged up the canyon of East 10th Street tenements. Inside the third-floor railroad flat’s bedroom a man’s naked body twitched on the floor futon. An arm over his face failed to block out the madman's wail and the thirty year-old tossed off the damp sheet to jump out of the bed. The blood drained from his skull and he collapsed toward the window. The temperature was climbing into the 90s. All June had been hot since his return from Paris. Outside a middle-aged Polish woman fled down the sidewalk from a dope-sick junkie mauling a parked car with an iron pipe. Sparkling fragments flew in the sunlight. Sean’s motorcycle was a single car-length from this psycho-storm. Down below the madman arched his face to the broiling sun and emptied the ashes of his soul.

"DOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNAAAAAAA."

No woman answered his two-syllable aria. A cop car rounded the corner. The madman stood erect and waved to the officers. His good posture masked his mania Nothing short of an 'officer-down' call was extricating the policemen from their air-con cruiser. With the cruiser out of sight the junkie demolished another windshield.

His Yamaha 650XS was on deck for batting practice. Sean rushed to fill a trash bag with water from the brimming tub in his kitchen to save his motorcycle. Quickly aiming, he heaved the heavy plastic sack out the window. Liquid beads sprayed from its rupturing seams. Ten pounds of water accelerated from forty feet and the impact leveled his target to the sidewalk.

The torn plastic shroud flapped over the flattened man. Water dropped from that height could be fatal. Sean reached for the phone to call 911. As the phone rang, the madman staggered to his feet off in the directions of Tompkins Square Park. It was hard to kill junkies. There were no witnesses on the street. He hung up the phone.

Sean flopped on the living room couch. The floor fan pushed sullen air around the living room. Sweat ran down his body like he was a martyred saint’s miraculous weeping statue. The madman had only been a menace to property and his Yamaha XS 650 wasn’t worth a life. Every psychiatrist and girlfriend had blamed his violent streak on his childhood. His parents had provided him everything necessary to be normal and he tried to examine his past for the millionth time to discover what set him apart from everyone else. Dyslexia, bullying, and speech impediments were clue to a mystery not yet solved and now these dreams of nuclear destruction.

He lay on the battered sofa. Seconds swelled to minutes and the hours thickened until a tainted breeze from the distant Hudson stirred heat-swollen air. Sheet lightning crackled across the sky and the thunder echoed the rumbling of the nine-pin balls from Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Nobody read him anymore.

The WINS radio reported not a hint rain ahead to relieve the overheated city. He shut off the radio and slipped into the tub in the kitchen. It had been full for several days.The water wrapped around his body like a discharged placenta.

After the murder at the Continental in the winter of 1982 Sean had fled New York. Lisa had sworn to meet him in Paris. A week later heard from a friend that she had gone to LA to get into the movies. He didn’t blame her for not coming to France, but she was always on his mind. His fingers wrinkled after twenty minutes. They were ready to become thirty. The ringing of the telephone broke his trance. He leaped from the bath and grabbed the phone on the third ring.

It was an oversea call. Lisa wasn’t on the other end. A German was.

"This is Kurt Oster. You remember me?" A man's voice crackled over trans-Atlantic connection.

"Who can forget Paris?" The German possessed a jet set life of multiple-city dwellings, cars, and beautiful women. Sean had translated some documents for his teletype business in his second-story house on Rue Des Deux Pont. Kurt liked when asked if he needed anything Sean had requested champagne. He served him Moet. It was 10am. They had done drugs together more than a few times. The two of them were acquaintances more than friends.

“Sure, I remember you.”

A puddle of water spread beyond his bare feet. He wrapped a towel around his waist and sat on a kitchen chair. Outside in the alley the willow branches were still in the breathless heat.

"New York in the summer. Hell, no?"

"Pretty close to it. Only me, the poor, the depraved, and the dying."

"You speak a little German, yes."

His high school class had ridiculed Sean’s reading of Kafka's DAS URTEIL, until the warty Bavarian teacher had snubbed out his Pall Mall.

"Herr Coll's accent is better than the rest of you hairdressers."

Sean had a lisp and a stutter as a young man. He didn’t even speak English well. "Ein bissen."

"You are Irish, yes?" This was an interview.

"Irish and American." That nation had granted second-generation blood citizenship in both Ireland and the EEC.

"Good, because you need papers to work at my new club in Hamburg. Your friend, Bertram Bellepas, will be the DJ. You know him.”

“Yes.” They had worked together in Paris.He was almost a friend. As much a ny junkie can be a friend.

“The city is beautiful in the summer. The women more so. It’s the summer solstice and the days are long. I will pay you a thousand Deutschmarks a week, plus a one and a half percentage of the gross, which I figure about two-thousand marks a month. If you agree, a ticket will be waiting at Lufthansa. I will meet you at the Hamburg airport. It will be summertime and the living is sleazy.”

Sean had seen the city in Wim Wenders AMERICAN FRIEND, the film-noir 1977 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s RIPLEY’S GAME. It looked dangerous, but the name also conjured up the Beatles at the Star Club, a vast harbor on the North Sea, and sex trade on the Reeperbahn. Working six months came to roughly fifty thousand marks or roughly $30,000.

"Ich musste uber es zu denken."

“What’s there to think about?”

Sean’s savings from working the winter at a Paris nightclub were down to a couple of hundred dollars. Rent was due on the first of July. There was only one reason to stay here and Lisa had been gone over six months, still Sean answered, "I'll tell you tomorrow."

"You'd be making a big mistake not to come. Here’s my number.”

Sean wrote it down. “Tschus.”

Sean said the same. It was more familiar than Auf Siedersehen. The line went dead.

He had not expected fate to provide a salvation in Hamburg. At worst Bruder Karl had to be smiling in heaven at the prospect of his worst student working in Germany. Hopefully his classmates were destined for hell. They all had been Tyrannen or bullies, except for the one black student in the class. For some reason they left him alone, which was inexplicable in a Boston suburb. The long summer's day surrendered to night without any temperature drop. It was the solstice and the was setting at the western terminus of 10th Street.Sean got on the Yahama and drove up 1st Avenue to East 77th Street. He parked the bike on the corner and walked halfway down the block. The windows of the third-floor apartment across the street were dark. Lisa's name remained on the mailbox and last week the building super had said her rent had been paid in full for three months. She had to show up some time. A bottle whistled by his head.

"Bastard. Man. Bastard."

A wizened woman in shredded plastic bags searched the garbage for another missile.

"I'm the only crazy on this block. You're not crazy. You're only in love with a woman who left you for another man and she’s never coming back. You don't think I see you, because I'm nobody, but I've seen you and your whore. You didn’t lose your girlfriend. Just your turn. She was fucking that Russian and everyone else. All you bastards want is for us to be whores, and when we’re not your mothers, then you throw us out on the street.”

He had seen the old woman many times. He sometimes gave her a dollar. Her name was Estelle. She never told her story and never had a kind word for anyone. He expected no less. The old woman tore apart her plastic sheath. Her skin was caked with rivulets of sweat. He returned to his motorcycle. The kickstart ignited the 650cc engine with a flaming backfire. Dogs barking joined the howl of car alarms. He revved the motor and raced up the block to 2nd Avenue.

Only one thing was capable of erasing the old woman’s accusations. He burned the next red light. A newspaper truck missed him by inches. It was just a question of time, until an impact with steel car exorcised his obsession with Lisa.

At 23rd Street he broke free of the traffic flow and shifted into fifth gear. At this speed any crash was fatal. At 14th a redhead the same height as Lisa was getting into a taxi. Sean braked and swerved to a halt. A man in a suit ran up and lifted the young redhead’s skirt. She laughed, while he forced her into a taxi.

The yellow Checker pulled away from the curb. Sean blasted through the red light in pursuit. A siren whooped behind him. The redhead turned and Lisa's mirage dissolved into another woman’s face. No cop in the New York would believe his having seen his ex-girlfriend’s double, but running from the police was always a bad idea, unless he had a few day’s head start.

Sean veered to a stop at the curb and pulled off his helmet. Two car doors slammed and cop shoes flapped against the pavement. A flashlight beam blinded his vision. A gruff voice ordered, "Get off the bike."

"What's the problem, officers?” Sean balanced his bike on the kickstand and lifted his hands.

"You see what I see, Kev?"

"I can't friggin' believe my eyes. Sean Coll in the flesh."

"I told you that was his bike, but you said, "Naw, Seano's out of town.” Guess you were wrong," the tobacco-harsh voice commented with the pleasure of being right.

The flashlight shut off and Sean blinked away the sunbursts. The two NYPD officers grinned like drunken hunters discovering a snared animal. Kevin Driscoll was thinner than his partner, but still had forty pounds and a few inches on Sean. Neither cop was shy about tossing around their weight.

They were the pride of the 9th Precinct. The setting for the TV show KOJAK. Nothing on that show snitched out these two cops’ crimes.

"Welcome back, Seano." deRocco took off his perforated summer-weight cap and scratched his balding head. “We heard you were in Paris. You shoulda stayed out of town."

"I'm leaving as soon as I can." Sean had not counted on deRocco and Driscoll. They were as lucky as he was unhappy that they were still in uniform.

"You believe that, Kev?" deRocco was the brains of the pair.

"Nah, it's bullshit." Kevin Driscoll waved on the gawking drivers and deRocco stepped closer. The whiskey heavy on his breath never a good sign in hot weather. "Drop yer fuckin' hands. This ain't no arrest. We just wanna talk with you."

"I haven't talked to no one about the night Johnny Fats was killed."

"Why should we believe you?" Driscoll slapped the flashlight into his palm.

One thin dime changed this balance of power.

"If I had ratted you out, would I be here now?”

“No, you would be in a grave.”

“A cop in jail isn't a pretty sight."

"You threatenin’ us?" Driscoll dropped his hand to his .38. The citations above his badge attested to multiple cold-blooded shootings in line of duty to the NYPD.

"Not at all.”

Seven months ago on a snowy evening Sean had discovered the precinct's bagman in the Caddy parked behind their after-hour club on East 14th Street. A single bullet hole perforated Johnny Fat’s left temple. A gun in his left hand. Johnny Fats was right-handed. Somehow a Grand Jury ruled it 'death by misadventure'. The ensuing IAU investigation suspended fifteen cops from the Twentieth Precinct. Two were in upstate prisons serving long term for various crimes. None of them murder. No one had all the answers to the whys and whos. Sean possessed more than most.

“Just I saw you leave with Johnny Fats.”

"We weren’t involved with his death." Driscoll protested, not knowing what if anything the bagman had said to Sean.

"Shut up, Kev." deRocco's eyes were blank of emotion. “We came back before he was offed."

"Sgt. Ferguson thinks that piece of timing is a little off." The IAU sergeant had plenty of theories, mostly of them unprovable hunches on the money.

"That cocksucker." deRocco spat out the words.

Sean smirked, having heard the precinct cops gossip about deRocco's sexual leaning. They had once been staking out of dope drop on East 4th Street. Te gang member made them and approached the unmarked car. They discovered two men engaged in a sexual act. Queer had saved both their lives.

"What you smilin' about?"

"Nothing." Cops had a hard job in New York City, however these two were well past redemption. AS lucky as they had been, bad luck was waiting for the, but not tonight. “Today I got a phone call today from Germany. They offered a job at a nightclub there. Maybe I should go?” “And stay away for a while too.” deRocco lit a cigarette. "You're a lucky fuckin' Mick, Seano."

"You want to contribute to my bon-voyage fund?"

Driscoll feigned a punch and Sean ducked to his right.

“Don’t push it, Seano. Consider yourself another asshole from Boston who lived in New York too long. Just get the fuck out of town. You have three days.”

"Sure, I'll send you a postcard. Ich liebe dich.” The two officers returned to their blue-and-white cruiser, and then u-turned across 14th Street into the Ninth Precinct. Sean had to face the truth that he had come back to the scenes of the crimes, because of his love for Lisa. Thousands of other women lived in this city. Falling in love with one seemed cursed by his obsession with Lisa. She was not coming back any time soon. Of this he was sure.

Sean obeying all the lights back to his apartment.

By the time he reached East 10th Street, he thanked deRocco and Driscoll for forcing him to accept Kurt's offer. Maybe a life a few thousand miles away from New York might free his soul. Something had to someday.

Photo (th Precinct Investigation Unit 1979

Almost A Dead Man - Chapter 1

ONE

The damp scurry of claws across the floor startled the woman on the battered chair and she lifted her black stiletto heels in horror. Rats were the least of her problems. Over the phone her lover had suggested a nocturnal rendezvous in Hamburg’s harbor district. The woman had expected rough sex. Instead two men had been waiting in the disused warehouse. Now in a damp basement she pleaded, “Please let me go, I haven’t done anything wrong?”

"Nothing wrong?” The black man in the spotless jogging suit circled the chair. Aviator sunglasses hid his eyes. He swatted the 40-watt bulb dangling from the rafter, then tapped the woman’s gaunt face.

“Are you a saint?”

“No, I am far from a saint.” The expensive wig flopped onto a folded lap.

“These are very arty.” The muscled interrogator slapped a set of grainy photos. “I can’t see that you are a man and your friend’s skin almost is as white as ivory in black and white. Very good composition.”

“They are only souvenirs.” The thirty-two year old banker shivered in the slick plastic dress. He had dressed for sex, not an interrogation by Hamburg’s most notorious pimp.

“Expensive souvenirs, nicht war?” A private collector might pay $20 for the explicit photos. They were worth much more to the right people.

“Yes, they are.” The wicked weekend in a St. Pauli hotel had cost over 2000 Deutschmarks or half his monthly salary. The photos’ cheap thrill had failed to satisfy his desires and Hans had raided various accounts within the bank to supplement his perversions for the past two months. He had yet to add up how much.

“And now you are in trouble.” The black man was as tired as his vicious role as any actor performing Hamlet for the ten-thousandth time. Still his audience flinched on cue, when he dropped the lurid snapshots on the man's skirted lap.

“You know who I am, yes?”

"You are Cali Nordstrum." The newspapers regularly featured stories about the pimps. Only last week he had escaped a murder attempt. The police had no leads on the identity of the failed assassin. The list of suspects ran into the hundreds.

"Stop your sniffling. Some of my best friends are Transvestis and Schwules.” Cali backed away and his scarred black face melted into the gloom. “We are not here to hurt you or blackmail you, but because my best hustler has fallen for you."

"Es tut mir lied." The transvestite buried his veiny hands in the fake hair like a muff. "All I want is to protect Willi. I can pay you."

"I am not running a marriage service for the Huren or Husen of the Reeperbahn.” Cali lunged forward like a cobra and the man on the stool toppled backwards. The pimp caught his arm. "Maybe I'll send Willi away.”

"Not that." A high heel slipped off his foot. "I will do whatever you ask.”

“Whatever?” Cali kicked the shoe into the corner.

Two months ago his best rentboy had mentioned a cross-dressing client bragging about paying for sex with pilfering funds from a leading bank. The pimp related the Kalbflesch's story to his partner in crime, who suggested that the hustler discover his lover’s actual position in the bank. Several days later Willi Stief learned Hans Roth oversaw money transfers throughout the Europe. Cali advised the hustler to fall in love with the banker. A month of delightful deceit led Hans Roth to this basement. There was only one way out and Cali crouched by the chair. "Do you have an open mind?"

For ten years Hans had protected his name, job, and family from disgrace. Liaisons with street boys lasted one night. Sex with Willi had incarnated his true persona and he asked hopefully, "Why?"

"First, you are woman trapped in a man's body. Second, Willi is too expensive for your salary,” Cali explained, because most people required more than one motive to cross the line from good to bad.

“Finally you have been stealing money you can never repay to the bank."

“Willi told you everything.” Tears seeped from Han’s eyes.

"Only because we can help each other." Cali mapped out his scheme with the persuasiveness of an airline ticket salesman selling the last helicopter seat at the Fall of Saigon. “This is a chance to get enough money for you and Willi. No one will think of searching for you in Thailand. Not as a woman. Were you lying about your commitment to Willi?"

"No." The man’s Adam’s apple gulped in hope. The desperate always bet on long shots.

"Your first name is Hans, yes?"

"I prefer Greta."

"Greta, I am a better friend than enemy. You can contact me at this number in an emergency. Tell Willi nothing. This is 'our' secret." He handed the banker a wad of 100-DM notes. "Give him this slowly. It will come out of your cut later."

“I’ll follow your every command.” His hand reached for the money and Cali snatched the man’s ear so hard that the cartilage partially snapped from the skull. A butcher at the city slaughterhouse had taught him the trick. The ear staying on Hans’ head was not a sign of weakness. This had only been a warning.

"Greta, you understand there's no backing out?"

"Yes," Hans said through watery eyes and Cali released him.

“What else?"

"Thank you.” The young man arranged his wig. He had started wearing dresses after playing with his sister’s dolls. The material was softer than his trousers and shirts. Lingerie on a man was not a sin. Only a forbidden nocturnal pleasures with Willi.

"Thank me, when this is all over." Cali nodded and his friend opened the basement door for a young black leather angel with bleached white hair. Willi was pretty, although heroin had got the better of his youth. The black pimp hated drugs. They cut into productivity. His associates became sloppy. Mistakes cost time, money, and lives in his business.

The banker was blind to Willi’s deterioration. They embraced as man and woman. They boith had earned privacy.

“Let’s leave the lovers alone.”

Neither his friend nor he needed to witness the hustler’s performance. On the stairway Kurt Oster pulled out a cigarette. The flame from a gold lighter illuminated a rugged face.

"Are we really going to cut him in?”

"Just because we are criminals doesn't mean we have to be dishonest." In the beginning it was always luckier to believe no one was going to get hurt. “Everyone will get what they deserve. I’ll see to that.”

He climbed from the basement. He hated the the smoke. Cigarettes killed thousands of people every year. The police never arrested the manufacturers. Persecuting the pimps made better headlines. Sex and crime sold well for the Hamburger Morgenblatt.

From the warehouse loading dock he surveyed the street. Only three cars were in sight. None were running and no one sat behind the wheel. It was a hot night for June.

“Anything wrong?” Kurt flicked the cigarette at his shadow on the cobblestones.

“Someone is out there.” He felt eyes on him everywhere.

“No one comes to the harbor at night.”

The two walked to Cali’s 1982 Mercedes-Benz 380SL.

“We did.”

Cali’s premonitions were his early radar warning.

“And we haven’t done anything wrong.”

Kurt’s reddish hair had been cut two days ago in Milan. The jean jacket came from World’s End, a punk s on the King’s Road and the gold-buckled loafers were from GUcci in Milan. Only one shop in Paris carried 501 jeans. Kurt drove a 1961 Thunderbird. He had purchased after seeing Wim Wender’s AMERICAN FRIEND. He had expensive tastes in women too.

“Yet?” Cali spoke German, ate sausages, liked Schlager rock. His black skin condemned that he was an Auslander to nearly every German, except one person and that person wasn’t his mother. Kurt and he had been friends from a tough childhood on Hafenstrasse by the Elbe.

“Which is why I have an American for the Sonderboch.” German police loved arresting international criminals. “Someone from Hamburg might suspect something, but the American nothing.”

“Is he stupid?” A sucker to hold the bag might buy them a few hours’ head start, if things went bad.

"No, worse. Broken-hearted."

"Ach." Nothing blinded a man more completely than love. Kurt added another missing ingredient.

"Plus Petra will act as the lure."

"Are you mad? She is dangerous.”

"The greater the risk, the greater the gain.”

"Just once I would like someone to lie to me." Cali held no illusion about this enterprise ending in failure. The State severely punished bank robbery. His associates imposed the death penalty.

“I’ve never lied to you.”

“Not once?” His Swiss bank account he’d enough to finance flight, but not in Europe.

“Not about anything important.” Kurt was overextended to several loansharks. The money from this robbery was all he needed to get the woman of his dreams and she had been chosen from the stars.

“You don’t want to do this, I understand.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Last week Cali had exited from Cuneo,a Italian restaurant off the Reeperbahn. A 5-DM coin lay in the gutter. He had been raised poor and bent over to pick up the Sechser. An unseen gunman pumped five shots over his head from a BMW. He saw the face in the car. Cali had never seen before seen the man. He had many enemies.

The next day he had ordered a Jurnfernstieg jeweler to dip the lucky piece in gold for a medallion. The preceding King of the Reeperbahn had died in his bed, because a rival had stabbed him in the heart. He had been thirty-six. Leaving a good-looking corpse was the goal of a fool.

“I could use a long holiday and stealing millions isn’t any different from stealing an apple. The trick is not getting caught.”

"At least not by the wrong people." Neither were worried about the police. A score like this one attracted another kind of trouble.

Kurt’s daydream upset Cali. His friend should have been concentrating on the job ahead, instead of another man’s wife. He popped open the trunk of the Benz. Cali loved the new car smell. He reached into the trunk's secret compartment and handed over a manila envelope.

“That enough money?”

"For now it is.” The thickness was more than enough to open an account in Switzerland. Within one month it will grow into several million Deutschmarks. One plus one sometimes equal more than two, but that equation needed a few more people.

“Never.” Kurt tucked the envelope inside his jacket. People feared them, but no one offered them respect. Millions changed their opinions.

Cali was placing his life in his friend’s hand again. They had grown up on the docks. Neither of them had known their fathers. Maybe Kurt might now pass for Mittel-Klasse, but pimps and whores were Cali’s life. Few of his fellow 'Zuhalterei' had completed high school.

SS Tommy, his right-hand man, oversaw their control of half Hamburg's prostitutes with violence. The bodybuilder had paid cash for his Ferrari 308 GTSI. Mack 'Die Alte’, his enforcer, beat the rival pimps into submission. His recent investment in Pattaya’s go-go bars had earned him a fortune.

Cali’s fellow pimps understood the extreme measures necessary to control Hamburg's streetwalkers, part-time call girls, gay rent-boys, and underage 'Strichmadchens'. Fear was his greatest defense against their turning on the illegitimate son of a black US Army sergeant was an 'Auslander'. That and no mercy.

“This is me and you.”

“Against the world.”

“As always.” They shook hands to seal their childhood pact once again. He walked to his electric-blue 1960 T-bird, lost in the dream of a better world to come. Cali checked the street again. No one was there. No one he could see, but it paid to act, as if someone was there, because that way the unexpected came as no surprise.

A Little Brando Maybe

From 201o

Last week I was playing pool at the Abbey. Maz was in town from Alaska. THe jewelry salesman was leaving for the islands on Wednesday. His time in the Far North had not effected his hand and eye coordination and the bald-headed genji ruled the table for several games. I lost to him on a double-miss on a game-ending corner shot on the 8-ball.

While awaiting my next shot at the champ, I watched the popular bar on Driggs Avenue filled with young people. I spoke to several sci-fi fans about RESIDENT EVIL and a BBC correspondent about the current BBC sex scandal. We agreed that Jimmy Sevillem the TV announcer was an unpentent child molester, but he argued that Jimmy Savile was the only person involved during the decades of under-age sex at the media center in London.

"Not bloody likely."

He dropped his quarters in the slot and Maz offered him the break.

His pool cue was missing the tip from the ferule.

"Your stick's accent is 100% Cambridge." It was a good guess and he admitted to having graduated from that prestigious university. "Playing pool well is the sign of a misspent youth."

His blonde girlfriend thought that was funny. She was a literary agent.

"I handle mostly non-fiction." She was young and smart with long legs. She would have been beautiful in any bar in New York. Her unnaturally curly hair discounted her tale about working only with the truth. Her friend lost to Maz and after they left he asked me, "Would you slept with her?"

"No." I am faithful to Fenway's mom.

"No." Maz is astounded by my self-imposed celibacy.

"She's not my type."

No one believes my restraint, since my reputation as a ladies man had once been world-wide. I looked around the bar. The women in the Abbey were laughing with the freedom of youth. None of them had eyes for a man my age. I had once looked like an Irish Brando. Probably still do but more like his appearance in APOCALYPSE NOW plus thitty years. I'm overweight, but he was a giant in that film. More like he had transformed into Orson Wellles. I dropped four coins into the pool table slot.

"Not a single woman in here is my type.

"I don't worry about types." Maz was a free agent as was I at his age.

I was forty years old twenty years ago.

I accepted the truth of my ruin and racked the fifteen balls tight. After Maz's break I ran the table with a series of combos and bank shots. The next player was a black girl in her 20s. She was wearing a short black skirt.

"Nice shooting."

"Thanks."

I lost once more on the last shot, which was always better than the first.

Down to the Sea - Gloucester

Events & Programs About Us Poetry Magazine January/February 2025 Subscribe Subscribe January/February 2025Dec2024 cover RGB Search by Poem or Poet Search Sea-Fever By John Masefield Share I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by; And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking. I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied; And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying. I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.