tabletop caesura. lchristopher.

Half a league, half a league,Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death, Rode the six hundred.Not though the soldier knew/Someone had blundered/Theirs not to make reply,Theirs not to

~author photograph taken off the coast of South Florida by The Duck, Stardate Zero.

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I always knew that little blonde would lead me back to the love that drove me to pull dandelion weeds from the cracks in the sidewalk, a lover's triangle, but only once simultaneous. From three people who could never communicate worth a damn. We should have formed a society. A club for those that appreciated things. They're women and could fix to make a living on such prowess, I was cursed with less. She told me three years, which meant five on the outside. And I expected change. But it was the seven hundredth and eighty fifth day when I got the call. I did what men do when the phone rings hard, when someone's died, when a buddy's got himself liquored up to the point where he ain't getting out of stir without at least a ten percent bond laid out on his head like some kind of monetary halo. Invisible and constructed of earthly desires. Money was invented by man. She ain't like that. Sometimes I figured that Sally Forth Rothschild would direct me back. She was a compass coiffed in blonde flax that she dyed only when she bothered to remember how much time had passed. She dressed up only for the ladies or when she was fixing a dinner party. She had a muff in the late nineteen-nineties when most what it took to be a self-starter and how best to serve their community and wonder just how long it would be before they could start pawning off cookies on the unsuspecting populace. I was always a sucker for the mint ones. Cliché, my ass. Those fuckers were good. I was on relief for the second time in a year and barely holding onto my gaff in Jersey City, New Jersey, which is about as close as one can come to spitting in Hell's toilet without having to pay taxes on that particular bedroom community. I had gone from two cats to one, and gave up drinking and smoking years The latter for the expense, and the former because there weren't too many liquor retailers left that would sell to me. I had already been banned from half the bars in lower Manhattan, from Canal Street down to where you could stick your big toe in a bronze bull's ass. Wall Street. Never wanted to know much about that side of t h e fence. My father had dreams of me becoming a page there once. That was before Silicone Alley and sixteen year old boys running around with expense accounts and company limousines. That was before the youth owned the world, again. It happens, legitimately, so rarely. You have to pay attention to these things. MCSE's paved the way for it all, and fell to the ground, defeated, months later I've not taken many planes in my life. I was out the Northwest once before. I had a job then, a good one working for a Law School in Manhattan, NYC. I never had much use for the law. You do what you do, and you keep your head down and your nose clean, and usually the squares and the straights will brush right by you. So long as you're not hurting children or burning crosses on the niggers front lawns, I say go for it. I sat down to dinner. Most of my meals came from cans, were boiled. I ate good, but no one ever called me a gourmet. All of my vegetables were frozen. The cat, Studebaker, sings when she can. 

My friend, my friend. I know not what to do. I inherit this hotel from my father. For twenty-seven years my wife sets a store by the profit it will someday make. The third day I am open, a pimp comes to me and tells me that he must put three whores in the bar during the weeknights, and five on the weekends - all day, or there will be trouble. I know nothing of these affairs. He says he has been working with my father for over a decade. My father, how can this be? He is a man not afraid of anything. He grew up first-generation. Not like today. No desire, no drive. Blinded by this "dream" that your politicians pull out whenever they find it convenient, for the history books, for the speeches, as your countries finest dreamers are left to rot in tenement hotels and housing projects, Michelangelo's taught to flip burgers at 4.15 an hour if only they can just make the quarter-line. I am from the old school. I do not believe in these things. But I am also a peaceful man. This man produces pictures of my wife, my children. He takes these things from my own billfold! In front of my hotel manager, the cleaning girls - even the cook. He walks through my kitchen dipping his fingers in my souppans and saucepans and drops his lit cigarette on the floor like he owns the place. I ask my wife, what should I do? She will not speak to me. She tells me that it is a man's issue. That I am wearing the dress. I sleep on the couch of the home I built for her and my four children after coming to this country, 1932. She tells me that she married an infant, a man without the determination left to do what is right. */a pause; wired for sound, tape clicks over, bzzingrewind noise, stop, record GO.*

-I ask you, Thomas, what do I do? 
-This man, his name is Heiffer... 
-He is German, then. 
-Yes. 
-Go on. 
When I was a man of thirty-five I beat five men so badly they thought their mothers must have miscarried them. Even still they served me with a handicap - two had knives, one a length of plumber's lead. I was ten years their senior but still I won with nothing more than a long scratch on my cheek, a scratch that barely bled, and there was no scar. I have never felt this...powerless. A man feels he is strong, but after sixty years it becomes an illusion. We only have those with honor respecting our good names, our older years. Those who do not possess this...blindness, they come in, they take what they want. 
-Ishmael, do not. 
-You can say this, Thomas. 
-You are still young. 
-I believe you, my friend. 
-Finish your story. 

      He signals the counterman, coffee is poured, thick and stout. Black, like lager. I can smell the starch or his collar and the oil he has used to comb his hair. His eyes are tired, but they do not miss a customer. I remember sixteen years of age, he taught me how to fire a pistol. It was a small caliber, a Ruger .22. A gentleman's gun. A government weapon. It is funny, Jacobs thinks, how the times change. One day, round is in. Then stickly-thin. Then drab. Then colorful. It is like the camptown rabbit, running its dance in circles, cutting through the fields before it. And all these women (and some men too) followed its pattern, its dance. Like the media and their Dance of the Seven Veils. In my home country, such a thing was avarice. This was a new world.     

FIN - lchristopher. Tuesday, May 21st, 2026; 11:01AM, Fort George, Manhattan Island, NYC.

~desert hospice; santa fe, new mexico or the haunting of hill house; apologies to shirley jackson