By Stephen Siciliano

The novel is available here.

Here is a review.

Chapter One

Like so many of his time and place, Jordan liked meat.

But he didn’t eat much because, as an American of that time and place, he had bowed before a generalized social disapproval more cosmetic than concrete.

Still, he liked the Argentine steakhouse. The rich and thick cuts of beef, the velvety cream-based deserts were cause enough to drop on occasion more money than he could honestly afford.

But what resolved the quandary of to-dine-or-not-to-dine affirmatively for Jordan was this fact: the restaurant’s decidedly continental owners permitted their clientele to smoke tobacco on most evenings, when it turned late, and the atmosphere was cleared of snitches and self-appointed commissars.

Anyhow it didn’t matter for, on this night, Jordan knew he was going to have to light-up outdoors. He preferred smoking indoors because of a certain easy glamour he felt it projected, no matter what they said.

Bogart, Gable, Bacall, ghosts of a black-and-white America he could not truly know, but was compelled to emulate, had all smoked and looked as Gods doing so. Apart from the unquestionable patina of ’20s, ’30s sophistication it lent his otherwise suburban pedigree, there was the added pleasure of enjoying the everyman’s drug in combination with another which society had not yet turned its teeth on – coffee.

But there would be time – and that is our point here – there would be time.

The temporary lift this purportedly toxic concoction inevitably induced throughout his food-heavy corpus, the earthy accent it lent the meal’s aftertaste, were no less a part of life for him than a hot shower after a good workout.

This is what was good in Jordan and the reason why he is focused upon here. He knew how to live life, suck the giant sphere of all it permitted him, always in sage anticipation of the day when the privilege was withdrawn.

Jordan had never been comfortable with the easy way he fit the nascent century’s model of the middling man, but saw no way out. He’d wished there had been a war to survive, a childhood pockmarked with moments of gruel or a ghetto formation peppered with rough-and-tumble tales of humiliating injustice.

But it was his misfortune to have been lucky.

Jordan’s was a path strewn with justice where the basic social contract had been honored. There were glitches and unpleasant moments. Everybody has those. But mostly he labored and was paid commensurately. He surrendered the appropriate tax deductions and received mostly first world government services in return. He was almost ashamed. This was the particular burden of Jordan’s generation and class: the gnawing desire to complain without having suffered any indignity worth recounting.

There were few lifestyle alternatives; one really, offered in differing shades of gray, unlike when the world had been crazy and food was never secure. There had been a range to existence, often more bad than good, but from Jordan’s blasé standpoint, infinitely more colorful.

That was all over now, save for a few people in quaint places where the new homogeneity was late in arriving.

As the mass of people grew, so did the number of individuals hoping to distinguish themselves from it. And that’s not easy because failure leads, in turn, to an even stronger desire to differentiate, and so on and so on.

None of which was on Jordan’s mind as he sat with acquaintances at the end of a typically sumptuous repast.

For him, smoking tobacco was a great way to thumb his nose at a meddling world; an easy transgression that produced, and only on occasion, mild retribution. And Jordan liked it easy and mild.

And so it was that this important foot soldier in an as-yet undeclared war, announced that he was going “out for a smoke.” He might have said something value-neutral such as he was going out to “get some air,” or to “stretch my legs.” But he could not pass up launching this small barb at the knowledge-working, organic-eating, moneymaking, and spiritually attuned beings from whom he alternately craved approval and sought liberation.

And such are the conflicts available to those in a society where too much food is the problem, rather than too little.

And just as he had expected, the announcement was accompanied by a snicker from the controlling women who lorded over the health and eating habits of Jordan’s old friends. Men with whom he had once roamed the city in a fevered state of perversion.

Beneficiaries of the prosperity and balance good women brought to their lives, the boys were also prone to the darker side of feminine guidance that relieved them of having to ink things out for themselves. And Jordan could see it in their pathetic, evasive countenances advertising a lack of guts to demand the smoke that skirt steak pleaded for.

But that was because he was looking for these things. What he did not see was the admiring look of one young lady, bored with her man, who saw in Jordan’s gesture the signpost of a life with more texture, a signifier of some exhilarating daring-do.

She was wrong of course. Just as she had been in the choosing of her own husband, whose four-wheel-powered ride stirred up sediment from a thousand automobile commercials she’d thought ridiculous, but which implanted deep within an identification of said machines with bumpy river crossings and Moroccan adventures – expensive, exotic experiences she craved.

Having a cigarette with Jordan provided her with multiple utilities on this otherwise uneventful evening; one of vice’s supreme charms.

This time it would serve as her own silent commentary, not unlike Jordan’s, regarding the sterility of life in her adopted country.

Clarisse (that was her name) hailed from Europe; Belgium or France, nobody really knew for sure nor had the slightest curiosity either way.

Wherever it was that she came from, smoking was far from the evil it was locally.

Its communal value, its undeniable use as social monkey grease linked to relaxation and post-work activity, were making this pervasive evil harder to root out over there.

Clarisse loved America because it had, in a sense, hired her. But she grappled always with the Protestant stipulation that she meet a 17th Century Presbyterian definition of clean and healthy. She had no desire to maximize her total, lifetime number of hours worked, she wanted to abbreviate them.

“Everyting in Amureeka,” she was given to observing out loud, “ees eeleegul.” And so smoking afforded her a mild form of protest in the country where she lived and paid taxes, but might never vote.

The second utility to her vice touched on the personal.

Clarisse didn’t know Jordan particularly well, nor did she have any specific designs upon him, because as things stood, she would be the last to realize that her choice of mate was inadequate to the task of satisfying her.

This reality aside, she just then had an indescribable urge to goose her man, Corey (that was his name), and this provided her an excellent opportunity to couple his annoyance over her tobacco addiction to an oral exercise with another guy. Corey, she knew, would watch them from his seat through the restaurant’s showcase window as so much that was not-at-all-innocent could innocently transpire.

The meeting would be pregnant with opportunity: intimate and nocturnal. The druggy stimulation, the inspiration by lit fire; an exciting, mysterious rendezvous made possible by the persecution of smoke and its inhalers.

As she joined Jordan he was wrestling with the fact he liked to roll his own Drum – a woodsy, almost maple-tasting product – into thin Club paper, which he preferred because it did not have adhesive to finish the “stick.” “Stand here, will you?” and he moved her by the small of her back, to block the wind.

She parted her overcoat and revealed her demure, refreshingly natural cleavage. From where Corey was sitting, it just didn’t look right. If Corey did not like the fact his woman smoked, her habit was more than compensated for by the allure of those suggestive breasts and he didn’t see why their influence should be any less persuasive where Jordan was concerned. He loved his wife for features other then her chest, but struggled now to come up with one.

Clarisse knew precisely the effect her coat-spreading gesture was having on both men, because she had spent money on special bras and hours before mirrors working to exact the maximum benefit from that bounty which youth – that cruelest of brokers – had loaned her.

Jordan, for his part, was having enough trouble without the added and sexy distraction. His minimum requirements for doing a passable rolling job – no matter he’d been smoking in excess of ten years – was a small surgical tool-set and table.

These not being at hand he proceeded, half meaning to, half not, to drop the contents of his small project all over that part of Clarisse’s anatomy just discussed, creating spectacle enough to propel Corey from his chair and out to the sidewalk.

“I don’t know,” he lied, “I just feel like a cigarette.” Clarisse knew at once she had overplayed her hand and, that for the time being, whatever lurked inside the smooth shell that was Jordan would remain a mystery.

And Jordan thought it best to abandon the project. As such, he would have to ask Clarisse for a smoke, an act that almost always yielded assent in that fraternal sorority of which a local chapter is being born before our very eyes.

But births are painful things and Jordan knew that by asking Clarisse for a cigarette in front of her man some invisible line of propriety might be crossed. So he was putting his pull with her to the test. And when the request was finally made she said, “Ooh! Off curse, yeh, yeh.”

Of course this tiny chemistry of two was not enough to form a rebel republic newly sprung from a single, addictive practice.

At least five people are required to lend any project, from the building of a tree house, to a campaign for the American presidency, the ballast necessary for launching.

So at this point it could not happen. But destiny was in The Club’s cards because, suddenly and without notice, a blonde woman with long hair, acting very single, materialized. She held her cigarette between two loose, lyrical fingers and her hand was trembling. The thing they call a conspiratorial gleam shone not just from her eyes, but from every pronounced crevice in her body. Without touching, she embraced them completely. “I know somebody here has a light,” she said to nobody in particular.

Description begs dipping into unfamiliar usage here, for the blonde was
a ‘strapping’ gal: a tower of femininity. Jordan and Corey were simultaneously moved by a fear that she’d smite them with lightening if they said something really stupid, and by a synchronized desire to take her upstairs (had there been an upstairs handy).

“Sure,” said Clarisse fishing her pocketbook. Corey felt relieved by Joya’s (that was her name) arrival and Jordan got the feeling his plan for a quiet, meditative cigarette had taken the stage door left.

“You’re cute,” she told her benefactor, “and so are your two boyfriends.” People who say things like that, and come across as meaning them, tend to make a lot of friends.

The boys shucked their shoulders and bobbed their heads in a show of false humility that made them seem more like strutting roosters than less. Her smile was that of a puppeteer having just completed a grand and public performance. Joya relaxed and dropped her guard.

“It’s pathetic isn’t it? We’re persecuted for smoking when the world’s a mess.”

Slight variations on this un-embellishment, this broad stroke against the planet’s gross mismanagement were taken for scripture by (almost) all present. The world was a mess and people were passing laws making benign and personal behaviors illegal.

It was enough to make one smoke.

Corey – feeling an understandable need to highlight his presence before the sultry stand-in – tossed in three-dollars-worth. “What about second-hand smoke?”

Immediately he wanted to kick himself. Arguments of this kind are anathema to smokers who see it as so much thought-control and manipulated science.

“Oh shut up,” the blonde told him and Corey felt as if he had been kissed.

“Are you from New York?” he asked her and she said no, that she was from Colorado.

And he could see her profile in some Colorado, not the real one, but another made up in his mind with years of help from television: standing stout, blue-eyed and windblown, bundled tightly into boot-cut blue jeans, behind her one of those old western-style windmills with a metallic daisy fan madly spinning. It could be no other way. In chapters yet to be spun her partners in history will never ask Joya about Colorado, because she represented all the Colorado they cared to know. In later years, when they heard Colorado, they would think of Joya and not the other way around. And she will never bring it up – her place of origin – because she likes the city she has settled in and does not care to look back.

Clarisse pulled out her pack and finally handed Jordan the butt he’d requested. “I love Lucky Strikes,” said the Coloradoan (Coloradan?) looking at the pack. “My dad smoked ‘em.”

Of course, lots of peoples’ dads smoked Luckys. The pack hasn’t changed for half a century, because it simply cannot be improved upon. You have them, you’re a soldier in the Korean War – a V-day bomber pilot.

And here is a new commercial pitch worth testing: “Lucky Strikes: Your dad smoked ‘em.”

The cowgirl grabbed Clarisse’s wrist, caught her by surprise. She snatched the pack, banged another short-and-stout out, slid over and put it in Corey’s mouth. “Thought

I heard ya say ya wanted one, too.”

“He dusent smoke,” Clarisse injected.

“Uh, sure I do,” Corey responded transparently.

It was a turn of events Clarisse could not have foreseen when heading out the door toward Jordan to satisfy her craving for a butt and put a light under her husband’s butt. Call her deejay double-butt.

Jordan coughed when he hit his (cigarette). Certainly not Drum. Luckys were harsh, everybody knew, because that’s what made their dads so tough. But smoking one was a kind of test for those seeking inclusion in such a club, it was a real smoker’s smoke and you didn’t question its integrity out loud. You just said, no, that you didn’t want one – if you dared.

Still, a deformation, a flaw in The Club’s foundation might have occurred had membership been limited to those assembled thus far. But these specimens were destined to bind themselves into a book with a most saleable title.

And so a “Hello” broke the static moment and everyone turned eastward toward a layer of airborne orange lava tracing the sky to see another subject, dead cigarette clenched between thin lips, his stamped passport to their select company. “Mind if I join you?”

Claire lit the newcomer’s fire, as she had just about everyone else’s, and he nodded that nod which is so much a part of the international smoker’s language, given that their mouths are usually engaged. There was a pause during which a communal exhalation transpired. Enough smoke to fill the restaurant floated over their heads – good a case as any for the prophets of prohibition.

“God that’s good,” said the Coloradan, reaching over to the ashtray left on the windowsill in an effort to limit the Mexican busboy’s burden. “Yeah,” went up a gentle chorus as each mind drifted elsewhere, briefly, before refocusing upon the moment.

“How’s this Argentine place?”

“Great,” Corey, Clarisse, and Jordan said all at once. “Eef you like mit,” added Clarisse.

“Never been,” the new guy added, “can’t afford it.”

Somebody asked him what he did and he answered, “Philosopher,” which says many things and nothing at once. In a kindness both to he and themselves, nobody asked what kind of philosopher or how he lived from it.

Corey decided against mentioning his own plans for acquiring a fortune through information-packaging. For now it was a mere idea without enough juice to reach a great global audience. It would require the help of someone else’s money and someone else’s idea. Meeting those same someones was what had brought most of these smokers to the city.

“What do you call your ‘philosophy’?” Corey asked the guy, followed by, “I’m sorry, what was your name?”

“Randall, and bum philosophy, to answer your questions in the opposite order they were asked.” It took everyone a second to catch up.

“Bum philosophy,” the Coloradan perked up. “What a great idea!” and also in reverse order, “What is it?”

“Bum philosophy,” Randall explained, “is what you learn at the School of Every Day, the universal defeats and paper victories we are all subject to, and their subsequent fruits of wisdom. The lines across your forehead are the diploma, your own heartfelt conclusions, scripture.”

Corey saw no profit in packaging a bum philosophy, so he let it drop. The Coloradan, however, remained curious. “Well, give us an example.”

“Okay,” said Randall, drawing long first. “In the long run we’re all dead.”

This struck almost everyone as uncannily like a true bum’s kind of philosophy. On the one hand there was little that was profound about it. You did not need much more schooling than living life to say it, yet there was an undeniable verity, and just a dash of the profound, which made it philosophic.

“I thought Keynes said that,” Jordan jumped in tentatively, reticent to identify himself as a dying breed of liberally educated, non-specialist stuffed full of dinner companion conversation and no investments.

“That’s right,” said Randall, blanketing his face with red glow as he drew again upon his short and fine-looking cigarette. In the now-almost shut down commercial strip, the weak light and the caucus of coughers created an impression of industrial fireflies flitting about, up and down, on-and-off-orange, emitting exhaust in their circuitous travels.

There was a pause in expectation of elaboration, but none was forthcoming.

“So bum philosophy is a plagiarism of lesser, mostly digestible philosophic platitudes?” Jordan knew he might be blowing any chance of ever sexing it up with the two girls by insisting on demonstrating his surfeit of book knowledge, but chose to forge ahead anyway. Such are the dangers of possessing a natural hunger for knowledge.

“Compendium, not plagiarism,” Randall readily rejoined. “We give credit where credit is due, are proud to point out that bum philosophy and fancy schmanzy philosophy intersect on many planes, usually lower ones.”

“What outlet is going to sell warmed-over philosophy?” Corey finally decided to jump into the fray, revealing both a competitive side and his disappointment at the fact Randall could not help his career.

“Bum philosophy’s just big philosophy made bite-sized for bums: the grand sentiments made pithy and repeated often. We’re not saying anything the Greeks haven’t covered.

We’re just sampling man, grafting thought-sounds onto other thought-sounds.

Collaging from pages of the past. Cutting and pasting a new story, man, giving them the same thing, but making it a little cooler.”

None of which satisfied the requirement of Corey’s question, but stood as proof of the un-elected legislator in Randall.

“You got that down pretty good, huh, hon?” the Coloradan said.

“You ask what it has that’s new? (nobody had) And I ask what’s new? We are sold the same things in the same ways over and over.”

“That’s not too well reasoned, hon,” the blonde interjected in a way that made two of the men’s hearts jump with the possibility she might be also be college educated to no practical end.

“Bum philosophy,” he shrugged at the obviousness of it all, very lazy and bummy.

The answer, coupled with his complete conviction and old-school intellectual charm (he wore horn-rimmed glasses), made Randall very new school and his audience thought he might be onto something, a nicely bound thought system that opened with an apology for its many shortcomings.

Anyhow, it didn’t matter. All cigarettes had been sucked down to their spongy brown filters. Clarisse coiled her arm around Corey’s elbow and signaled retreat to the restaurant’s interior. Randall bid all a good night and waited around for a second, in hopeful anticipation the Coloradoan might be going his way. When the silence finally grew unnatural, he nodded and departed west along the avenue, which was free of traffic and pulsing with the whoosh of speedy autos under an arcade of metrically paced fluorescent lights.

“Civilized stars,” Jordan mumbled to himself. “Not wild and shooting, but static and sure.”

In spite of himself, he had the lovely Joya all to his lonesome and divined that not only had she heard what he said, but had liked it immensely. His stomach felt a bit unsettled by cigarette and big meat. It was opposite the effect he was hoping to induce by his indulgences and Jordan wasn’t up to asking Joya on the date he felt she was waiting for. She lit another stick, blew true and smiled. He thought, “This girl knows how to handle a cigarette,” as her trembling hand hypnotized him. She then tilted her head and switched on the eye-twinkling, only to notice that he was off. The girl reached into her purse and pulled out a shiny card case that reflected the bright night it had suddenly become. She pulled out a paper slice and reached out for his hand and bent it to the contour of his palm. “Ahm Joya. Give me a call,” she said without any excess sexual mystery, friend-like. He nodded and she was gone; her long straight hair swaying to-and-fro under the influence of her clunky cowboy boots marking coconut shell rhythm echoing back to him.

He looked at the card. It was beige with turquoise lettering and announced, Joyas Joya’s. Mentally dulled by wine, beef and nicotine, he reasoned that she was in the business of selling facsimile versions of her self.

“Excellent commerce.”

Chapter Two

Jordan, at the time, worked in a coffee shop. A prior job in the mass media had ended when he’d run afoul of his bosses over moral questions. Although his three-times-a-day smoking breaks in the designated area outdoors were not approved of, the roots of the rift ran deeper. To the larger world, Jordan had an attitude problem. But to his mind, Jordan the battle had been fought over the rights of man and against the lords of the kingdom.

As far as he’d known, his was a nine-to-five job, and with a few exceptions, that was how he chose to approach it. But upon arrival at the appointed hour to his first day’s work, he found his colleagues already into the hard rhythm of office labor, and knew something was amiss. This impression was compounded by the fact that he alone left at the legislated and contractually prescribed termination of his daily duties. He could stay late on occasion if they asked nicely, or come in early once or twice if needed, but absent the legally required overtime pay for such extensions of demand upon his labor, J. wasn’t about to play martyr to the benefit of another, richer man’s company.

The attitude was morally correct where Christian doctrine was concerned and not indefensible. Whether it was assailable is a separate issue, although in Jordan’s case it usually turned out to be so.

This being an employer’s world meant that Jordan was skating on proverbial thin ice. When you signed on with an organization, you were expected to be a team player and help management get done whatever it was that needed doing. And if you didn’t like the arrangement, there was probably somebody younger, dumber, and more willing to render the services you refused. The bosses meanwhile, like most authority figures, were expert where a good swift kick in the ass was concerned.

That is how Jordan ended up in a coffee shop, without the vaguest idea of what he would do next.

And so it was that he, being older and more mature than most of the workers at Java World, was pencilled in for the daily morning shift. It was the busiest time of day.

It was when the best-heeled clients, savages of the corporate corps from which he’d been expunged, dropped upwards of fistfuls of dollars for specialty, caffeine-spiked concoctions and oversized finger cakes.

Morning following the night just recounted, Jordan awoke at 6:30 a.m. and took immediate note of a dull and enduring pain from the night before in the pit of his stomach. He recalled the Argentine restaurant and began to lament both the price and volume of the rich repast. He didn’t feel much like getting out of bed and so reached over – not without difficulty – to the phone on his night table and called Carlos, the Mexican (what else?) barista who mostly ran the place.

“Java Whirl!” Carlos answered and Jordan described his discomfort. The Mexican promised to tell the boss and more graciously intimated how much Jordan would be missed when nothing could have been farther from the truth. Not that Jordan wasn’t quite simply a godsend to Java World’s proprietor; a mature white guy who could connect with the clientele and smooth over the unspoken prejudices that existed between they and the mostly Hispanic staff whom global economics had forced upon him. Otherwise, Jordan was mostly a wash; a too-slow coffee server who had trouble with the cash register, barked at the customers and stared like a dog at the young lovelies who frequented the breezy drinkery.

Presently he lay back in bed, stricken by the persistent hankering at the bottom of his gut. Pills he’d taken prior to retiring clearly had not worked and the thing seemed to be getting worse. It made no sense unless the offending meal had been rancid to the point of qualifying as poisoned food. He got up and, doubled over, lurched into the bathroom for a healthy swig of pink goo sold under the pretense of being able to resolve such abdominal complications to the sufferer’s advantage. He maintained a perpendicular posture during his return to the mattress. He forced himself flat on his back and tried to envision the pink fluid seeping toward his entrails and suffocating the burning coal that seemingly smoldered there. Jordan knew that these things take time, but something told him that this time, there would never be enough time.

The minutes rolled and his prediction regarding the failure of his medical assault on the offending army marching through his midsection was, in effect, born out.

Jordan was really hurting and he repeated the pathetic trek to his medicine cabinet for newer pills, the exact identity of which he was unawares. He was trying anything now. He dropped back into bed, doubled up in an effort to relieve the droning pain that had possessed itself of his body. The sensations were localized, but something else was amiss throughout the whole of his being, his spirit participating in a plaintive plea for relief from a God whose existence his normal outlook denied. As the seriously jeopardized are given to doing, he figured what the heck? And dropped a prayer into the hopper.

The celestial response was perfunctory and unkind. Jordan began to moan and roll in the sheets. He needed help, but like most bachelors, the very fact he was sick prevented him from obtaining the necessary relief. It was the single man’s catch-22 and he knew not what to do. His hand groped for the wallet on his nightstand. He fumbled through it trembling until he pulled out some five-dollar bills, a month’s-worth of automatic teller receipts (habitually unfiled) and a business card, beige with turquoise hieroglyphics.

It was, he reasoned, no time to be reasonable, much less proud, so he punched the appropriate digits into his phone.

“Joya’s Hoyas,” that healthy cornmeal voice he’d become vaguely familiar with the night before pierced his foggy consciousness like a shot of heavenly morphine. “YeahhitsJordan,” he belched.

“Excuse me?”

He grit his teeth and managed to enunciate the three words separate of each other. “Jordan who?” Joya asked.

“We met last night.”

“Oh…my.”

Naturally, the girl was caught off-guard and Jordan had enough strength and vanity to entertain the fact that she thought he was being overly eager.

“I know we just met, but I need your help.”

She immediately judged Jordan to be but another of the countless loopy available men the local female population were condemned to pick over. But this sentiment was interrupted by a moan Joya immediately likened to rare sick cows that had afflicted the ranch where she’d grown up, before it was purchased by a giant agro-biz consortium. It scared her and she agreed to come right over and help him.

“Right over,” as she has put it, seemed to Jordan like a crossing of the Styx as he wrestled with the idea of an early death, regretted a thousand sexual indiscretions and his spotty history of drug-taking. Lots of images, too many images, went through his mind, all distorted through pain’s lens, while waiting for a knock on the door that finally came when he was sure his time had come. Jordan crawled over to the portal and opened it. This made Joya seem even taller than she was. Her lilacs and patchouli and four-leaf clover essence swept life into an apartment where death had taken a spot on the sofa and posted its feet on the ottoman.

“Well gosh!” she said, helping pull him to his feet. “Look atchew!” He wished she didn’t have to, but she did. “Do you wanta go to the hospital?” He managed to croak out a “yes” that wiped all the easy breeze off her face. “Oh my, let’s do it.”

Joya pulled his suit blazer off the chair where Jordan had left it before diving to his mattress. “Do you need any insurance papers?” He didn’t answer because negatives did not seem to be what the situation called for. He needed momentum. “Where do ya work?” she followed up. “Java World,” he told her and Joya, not being from the neighborhood, mistook the name for something out of the wild and zany world of software and computers she did not know.

Bluntly put, her plan was to dump him – with all gentle graces – at the Cedar-Sinai Medical Center in the hands of the best Jewish doctors HMO coverage would allow and then be on her way.

After all, she did not know him well enough to get any more involved than the basic (and deteriorating) rules governing human solidarity dictated.

“There’s a hundred bucks in a purple sock in my top drawer,” he told her, proof some kind of delirium was setting in. Still, he was gaining strength from the fact his battle was no longer a solitary one. Joya went to the dresser with this thought in her mind: “What’s a hundred dollars going to do?” because even those who are the very expression of health know how that and a prayer won’t get you past the front door of most American medical establishments. It was the great profit motive at work and, although she was a small businesswoman who believed in it, the idea struck her in that moment as somehow obscene.

They stepped out the door and walked about ten feet when Jordan, hunched over, turned back toward his apartment. “Where are ya goin’?” she asked, urgency slipping into her voice. He burst in, reached to the side with his right hand and pulled it back with a pouch of Drum grasped firmly within.

“Well for heaven’s sake!” she scoffed.

Next thing he knew they were in the emergency room. A tall, wispy nurse directed them to sit down. “I don’t think– ” Joya began to explain and was cut off by a finger-pointing and posture that Jordan could not help but compare with popular representations of the grim reaper. They obeyed.

There are many things in this story to recommend Jordan’s noble nature; his lack of covetousness, his personal stands on issues of social justice, and his ability to take the long view while absorbing the short hit. And it’s not a question of writing behind his back when addressing his lesser attributes, because J. would be the first to admit that he was a physical coward.

He really couldn’t bear pain, in general, and the amount he was presently enduring had crossed his tolerance threshold clearly, decisively, and early. He now began to toss and writhe in his seat, moan the way he had while at home. Joya, sitting next to him, determined that he was not up to sitting around waiting for help and that neither was she.

“He’s makin’ an awful lotta noise!” she belted in the wispy nurse’s direction. The woman ignored her as nurses are given to doing in such situations, scared sick persons being their stock in trade. So Joya rose to her full Nordic goddess height and walked over to the reception desk, repeating the phrase in a voice as big as her body. The combination of a beautiful cowgirl bellowing at her from close-range and the pathetic moaning of the patient from afar convinced the nurse to dispense with the matter; she picked up the phone and garbled a few indecipherables before hanging up.

She came out from behind the protection of her bulwark, followed Joya over to Jordan, and helped him to his feet. Each taking an arm, they escorted the patient through swinging doors and into the hospital’s entrails. The hundred dollars evaporated.

“Does he have insurance?” the nurse asked.

“He works at a software company or somethin’,” Joya answered. The intimation of something like a real job was sufficient for the moment. Jordan, who had heard and comprehended the brief exchange, decided it was best to get some treatment before getting into the nettlesome details of his coffee shop career.

Some employees in hospital green met the trio and Jordan was slung onto a rolling rack with cool crackling white paper over its surface. Already he felt better. He relaxed. For the time being this was someone else’s problem, too. Rolling toward eventual recovery he was hooked up to an intravenous machine, which fed who knows what into his system. There went the second one hundred dollars, officially plunging
him into a day’s worth of coffeehouse work debt.

The rest was something of a blur for Jordan and, in a nod to the Gods of rhythm, shall be glossed over here. A doctor came in by the name of Singh and among the many wacky and divergent things that went through Jordan’s head were a vision of this man in his native India riding an elephant while studying a clipboard.

He was diagnosed, most tentatively, as having appendicitis, but was subjected to a series of blood tests and other procedures less dignified. More intravenous bags of clear liquid were hooked up and emptied faster than ever into his wrist.

Although she was unaware of the cost, Joya asked at one point, “What is that you’re putting into him?” There was a peremptory response followed by no explanation or detail whatsoever. “Does he need that?” she persisted.

“Not necessarily, but it can’t hurt,” came the response and assessment that would later be clarified to the contrary.

At a number of points in what was becoming a very long day Jordan began to hyperventilate. And so they put a paper bag over his mouth and told him to breathe.

The purpose of this crude exercise amidst so much overpriced technology was to force-feed Jordan’s own carbon dioxide back into his blood and lungs. The actual effect, however, was to make him feel like he would suffocate. He was mortified by the downright primitive nature of the technique. “For chrissakes,” he thought, not being a frequenter of hospitals, “is this the best we can do at this late stage of medical history?” Then out loud, “Get it off! Goddamn it, get it off!”

So they got it off.

“This isn’t going well,” sighed Joya, who remained loyally by the side of a young man she had yet to exchange more than a single cigarette and a handful of words with. They plied him with a sedative while awaiting test results. The nurse figured this lull was good a time as any to get the all-important paper work done.

She approached Joya. “Are you his wife?” Joya, a little tired and more than a hair frightened at this brush with the American health care system shook her head no. “His girlfriend?” Again, a shake of the head and the realization it would not suffice. So…onto the explanation of how she and the patient had only met the prior night, in the street, over a smoke. Jordan’s heart sunk. When finances are being discussed, it’s imperative that an appearance of sobriety be projected. “I see,” said the nurse, as nurses are wont to do. “So how do you know he works for a software company?”

Joya explained that Jordan’s place of employment was called “Java World” and that it seemed to her the name had “something to do with the Internet, or whatever.” The nurse, though sworn off caffeine, was familiar with Java World because it was located near her home. It was at this point that Jordan found it very convenient to lose consciousness.

“Jordan,” Joya shook him a short while later. “Listen, they’re not going to treat you here. You don’t have insurance. They’re going to put you in an ambulance and take you down to county medical okay hon?” He nodded in the affirmative, as he had understood from the very beginning that this might happen, though ignorant as to what form the rejection would take. “Now, I’m gonna let you go because I have to run over to my store. I haven’t been there all day and I can’t afford to be away any longer. It’s late afternoon now. I’ll check in on you tomorrow. Is there anybody you want me to call for you?”

Jordan, like many young and rootless cosmopolitans the world over, was from somewhere else and proximate to no immediate family. He didn’t see the purpose of upsetting his parents when there was little they could do for him other than worry – which was not so much for him as for them, in any case. As far as could be determined, he had appendicitis, although it had been explained to him some time earlier that there was no “full-proof” way of diagnosing that particular ailment with certainty since it did not turn up on X-rays.

He watched her leave, long striding in those blue cowboy boots, and felt terribly alone. “Surely,” he thought, “no one should be forced to go through something like this on their own…without her.”

Chapter Three

Randall was home bum philosophizing. He’d decided that despite his timely answers to Jordan’s question about John Maynard Keynes’ “in the long run we’re all dead,” he’d actually gotten away with one there. A tight linguistic tautology that repulsed all inquiry was not the thing he was after. Slightly older than those other Sidewalk Smokers, he was unfortunately smitten with traces of an earlier idealism, an idealism that did not hamper the rabid upward strivings of generations X, Y, and Zzzzz.

Randall wanted to be remembered after he was gone, but he did not seek a monument built upon greenbacks. He desired, corny though it seemed at such a late date, to make a difference in peoples’ lives – for the good. The distinction is important, he bum philosophized, because Western Civilization – or the mess which passes for it – had grown so twisted, so focused upon a success associated with life in the public’s eye, that outrageous, ignorant, and even criminal behavior had all become legitimate means to notoriety. And notoriety was most cherished. With their images conveyed across the space of flows, mass murderers developed fans and/or immoral athletes gained lucrative endorsement contracts from product peddlers seeking bold or radical spokespeople whom tested well in focus groups of 14-year olds.

He chewed on this and decided to make it bum-friendly: “Bad stuff gets good life.”

Guided by his formulation, idiots seeking to bypass the time-tested, slow, hard path to success through work could use bum philosophy and chart a different course.

“Bad stuff gets good life,” was an immoral nod to the mass market, he admitted to himself, a ploy for popularity and wealth. And yes, as stated above, he wanted to make a difference for the good. But after all – he equivocated away – a thinker’s intentions are not even half the game and folks are going to get what they want from an idea anyway.

Secretly he hoped the deeper moral implications of the “bad stuff gets good life” phenomenon would affect souls properly prepared to absorb them. The brighter lights, propelled by bum philosophy in a different direction, would fight for the better world; conducting themselves according to such antiquated niceties as charity, solidarity, and uncommon sense (bum philosophy holding that sense was not at all a common occurrence).

It was a double-game imposed by the market. “Bad stuff gets good life,” as product to the cynical because a guy’s got to eat. “Bad stuff gets good life,” as a warning and desperate call for decency.

And so, this is what Randall is supposedly about (at this point), decency.
He began to boldly write. “We’ve gotten away from what the dead white men hoped for.

They knew that siccing us on each other had its risks. And they gave us laws that were supposed to teach tolerance and understanding. And they hoped the decency would make us close.

“But the civility is gone,” he scribbled on. “Anything not nailed down is fair game, and people can profit from stealing your mail, your identity, your car’s hood ornament. Every once-open and free space has been closed amen to a covetousness reinforced by the ‘bad stuff gets good life’ principal. Sole responsibility for ourselves has freed us from worrying about others.”

It was all about class clowns and daffy charmers riding the waves of a success so narrowly defined as to curse those it blessed. The humble, the generous, the honest and struggling folks got to sit on the side and watch the brash and brassy enjoy the fruits of labor not theirs.

Randall’s mind was overheating. He dropped his pen. It could not keep pace with the canter of his thoughts, which concluded that favoring ugly winners at the expense of beautiful losers would ultimately rot the very core of the apple that provided the civic body its nutrition. These last thoughts swirled around inside of he, Randall the Good, only to be locked out of his opus. For although it was true, it was decidedly academic and unbum-like.

How he longed to tell it to the world. How uninterested the world seemed (and was).

Randall stepped out to his front sidewalk for a smoke. He inhaled long and the infusion relaxed him for a few moments.

He looked up at the nimbus accumulations unfurl and roll above, unimpeded in their cyclical motion by those things perturbing his spirit.

“The happiest man,” he mused, “lives his life as a floating cloud.”

Chapter Four

Jordan, meanwhile, was floating like a cloud, pushed by a high-speed wind.

The ambulance ride was fun. It was dark and a relief from the bright clinical light under which had cooked for hour after hour at his first stop on the health-care-go-round. The vehicle’s high speed and the lovely anaesthetic each left Jordan with a sense of having escaped the affliction and accompanying nightmare. The attendants were, well, attendant and assured him the doctors at “county” were actually quite good, “because they get so much practice,” which was comforting in its way.

They rolled Jordan in on a Gurney and quickly departed with blessings of life and good luck, which took on a greater meaning and resonance than in more quotidian situations. His innate cultural sensitivity notwithstanding, Jordan noticed how county hospital was rife with people of colors different than his. The emergency room was packed with them, but no wispy nurse to badger. A perfectly nice fellow wearing what looked like a shower cap came along after about an hour and moved the patient into another room more in line with what a military hospital might look like. Six beds against one wall and another six across the opposite one. Another fellow in green scrubs and a shower cap came by a little later and administered more anaesthetic. Jordan was wide-awake, but his pain had become a part of the recent past and he decided, rather redundantly, to lay low.

There was a commotion as they rolled a great whale of a young Latino man into the bay adjacent his own. Jordan could discern from surrounding conversations that the patient had been shot and was in a fight for his life. They did not put a paper bag over his face and tell him to breathe. Rather they stuck an oxygen mask there and began working his chest in a manner that struck Jordan as frighteningly akin to rummaging. Embarrassingly healthy all his life Jordan was, quite simply, shocked at how rudimentary the practice of medicine remained. His idea of the steady handed surgeon with lithe, delicate fingers, aided by all manner of computerphernalia had been put to rest for years to come.

There were, however, elements of hospital emergencies that did correspond to the television-inspired notions cramming his head. For example: the gun-wound-guy was hooked up to the machine that beeped with the beat of his heart, which was, Jordan thought, not feeling very beepey. They took those giant prongs from TV and crammed them into the poor guy’s chest, too. The sound of electronic jolts was just like what he’d heard on the medical dramas, although there was a fleshy wetness that lent it an authenticity the spectacle-makers would be hard-pressed to duplicate.

Jordan was impressed with the sheer number of people trying to save this guy, whom by all appearances was a criminal, and the feverishness with which they worked.

After what seemed like a few hours into this noble, selfless exercise the machine stopped beeping and went monotone. The room’s energy level dropped all at once. Somebody said, “Call homicide.”

This was certainly dispiriting and the rest of the evening was hardly much better.

Ensuing cases included fuzzy drug-heads, confused hysterics, folks who thrived on the attention being sick offered them, and all manner of flotsam and jetsam which Jordan habitually voted to fund and care for, but had little occasion to meet first-hand. Having now done so, he lamented the haughty attitude he’d taken with his latest set of bosses. His access to that kind of white-collar employment was all that had stood between he and these unfortunates; perfectly good folk badgered by senseless violence and stranded in a deadening purgatory.

This is what Jordan’s parents, whose attitudes he’d mocked since the college professors had gotten their paws on his mind, had worked so hard to shield him from.

Born to them, Jordan thought cleanliness, security and access to education were givens. Now he was seeing how, with a simple change in the address of his birthplace, it might easily have been otherwise. Dead as political crowd pleasers, race and class remained big players on the game board of life.

Jordan closed his eyes in the company of no one and fell asleep after God knows how many hours of this Friday night parade, this tale from the crypt, and awoke in a different room that was carpeted, softer and infinitely more placid in atmospherics.

Again, he lay around for a few hours before anybody attended to him. Were he at a restaurant Jordan would be screaming bloody murder, but he wasn’t. These folks weren’t feeding him an expensive meal financed by his good fortune. They were battling a pain in the stomach, a service for which he would feel forever indebted – figuratively and literally – to them.

Finally, and at long last, a man in a white coat, maybe a doctor, maybe not, came by and queried Jordan regarding his readiness for surgery. Given the implicit severity in having a scalpel put to one’s body, he responded with an understandable dose of skeptical consumerism. “Well, do I have appendicitis or not?”

“Well,” the guy in the lab jacket said, “you can’t really tell one hundred percent, but we’re pretty sure.”

Jordan had watched the news magazines, was thoroughly up-to-date on the tragedies visited upon unsuspecting schlumps just like him by under-funded and harried hospital teams.

“Whaddya mean pretty sure?”

The guy looked at his watch in a gesture suggesting impatience and then confirmed it with what he said next. “Look, you saw a little bit of what we went through last night. Tonight’s Saturday and it’s going to be three times as bad. Kids are going to be coming in here shot up and crying for their mothers and you’re not, I’m sorry to say, going to be a priority. Now, you can go home and wait for the anaesthetic to wear off or for your appendix to explode and kill you, or we can go ahead and cut that thing out now, while there’s still time.”

And so, Jordan reluctantly assented to the carving of his loins.

Chapter Five

Things sure had changed since those days when Corey’s parents had paired-off in matrimonial bliss. Just as planned, he’d surpassed them according to standard measurements of achievement. His father had been a union carpenter in Eastern Massachusetts and his mother the member of a once-thriving, but now extinct guild: the stay at home wife.

If Dad had aspirations to be anything else, anything grander or worldlier, he kept them secret. Day in, day out he’d gone to work and brought home a paycheck that grew steadily, if not dramatically, for years. Childhood always seems longer so that the time his father spent with shoulder to grindstone struck Corey as having been an eternity. Despite his being an adult, it seemed so to Dad as well.

Corey knew, however, that it was not. He knew that when Dad was the age he was now, Corey was already fourteen years old. The reality was disquieting. Here he was, at 34, a college graduate (unlike his father), employed in a tony job with an irreverent name and flashy business card, yet without child or real estate.

To his father’s eyes, Corey and Clarisse had opted for a lifestyle that rendered parties an obligation because of the need to make contacts and forward themselves when really, on many nights, they preferred to stay in, rent a movie, and get some rest. He was covered by a patchy health care plan and Clarisse, who made good money as a waitress, was uninsured.

Somehow, highly educated, doubly employed and free of children, the couple was unable to duplicate the modest and steady life Corey’s parents, and for that matter, Clarisse’s parents across the ocean had enjoyed.

Somewhere along the line, Corey felt, wealthy America had wearied of dragging a permanent middle-class around and forgotten the perils of living in a country without one.

He could not help but think that things had somehow been easier and fairer under earlier regimes. It was all a freewheeling scheme that left one independent to improve their credentials, lay down some money and go in for their chances.

If they failed, people were condemned to swim naked with their clothing bundled under an arm, because society was no longer in the business of rescuing its own shipwrecks.

“Treading water,” is what Corey deemed it, in an ocean proffering a beautiful island holding all great things that might happen like a mirage in the distance.

That mirage was an only comfort and the reason-to-be for those living lives filled with more promise than posterity would ever make good on.

Corey, by most standards (save for Dad’s), had worked hard and woven an ingenuity typically touted as the key to success. Starting out but a few years before, while doing medium-well as a salesman for an engineering parts firm back home, Corey perceived the coming of the digital age. He was an acquaintance to many computer aces at work. When upper-level management was suddenly hit by one of the periodic downsizings that convulsed it, Corey saw the handwriting on the wall. He wasn’t too clear on what it said, but instinctively decided to update his skill-set so that the company didn’t shrink his life, too.

He could not afford classes because he went out every night, purchased stacks of stereo equipment, and had a weakness for designer-grown marijuana. So he offered part of the marijuana to some of the office chipheads in exchange for lectures and lessons at the central processing unit.

Note please, the enterprise and motivation Corey demonstrated: he saves money by sharing something he’s already paid for and simultaneously lessens his intake of mild narcotics. Rather than go home to watch football, baseball, hockey or Xtreme-games (there was no end to the permutations on this male-targeted fare and the beer commercials that came with them), he “stays late,” one of the corporate regime’s most treasured employee virtues.

Technologies race and he purchases a high-powered (for a fleeting moment) computer. He quits to hang out his own shingle in the computer services game. His particular skill, at this time, is not crucial to the story and would only serve to date it for future generations of book buyers. But soon enough he is hired by a new technology company, the stated mission of which is to develop (according to a press release) “the next generation packet-based technology enabling us to provide a multi-service environment in which traditional ‘telephony’ and data features are integrated in a packet environment, supporting convergence at the network core.”

Corey is never quite sure what that means, but the base salary will do.

The situation holds for a while, but technological jobs are almost always rendered obsolete by new innovations and Corey finds himself in just such a situation – again. The digital economy morphs along and 18 months later he turns to night classes at a renowned local university for yet another academic retooling; getting a masters degree in the computer science known and in universal use, again, for the fleeting moment.

Rather than consolidate his status, he is exposed to a high-pressure situation requiring groundbreaking (and profitable) ideas to hold position. He moves to his current place of residence where all of this stuff occurs in a natural way, moving along at speeds greater than elsewhere in the world. His degree opens doors for him, gets him desk jobs at self-described “dynamic” new companies, but no relief from accruing student loan debt until he generates that evolutionary innovation.

At this point in his story, employer and wife are still sitting in expectation of them – the innovations. They know he’s bright, they know he’s well prepared, and they also know that it takes a lot of faith whilst living day-to-day in expectation of the big score. The employer will have to wait. Corey has lived too long at the mercy of companies to hand over his heart. He knows that they will not take care of him before they take care of themselves. He is using his present employer, the way it is using him, rooting around for a truffle to couple with his talent and win big – on his own.

All he needs is an idea. It doesn’t even have to be a good one because, through hard work, he’ll sell it anyway.

Clarisse, as has been noted, is a waitress. Like lots of people in town, she does this while waiting for her good fortune to arrive on a very slow boat from China; the country where all the jobs went. When out at one of the endless soirees the couple attend in search of gatekeepers to economic security, fame, and world travel, she always answers “furniture designer” when asked that most American of queries: “What do you do?”

And she is a furniture designer, an avant-garde creator of marvelous pieces capable of altering an entire room – whole houses even – for the better. They are bookcases and shoe racks and storage chests that break the mold people show up to her studio with.

She enjoys, on occasion, an opening at a gallery specializing in such items. Nothing ever comes of it except an increase in the storage bill for her pieces; obligating Clarisse to give them away as gifts. It is an always embittering defeat sweetened only by the notion that at least somebody will see it.

“Somebody” is whom Corey and Clarisse attend the parties in search of: somebody that will offer him scads of money for an idea of his, (yet to be hatched); somebody, maybe a rich heiress who will walk into one of her shows, be thoroughly bowled over, purchase everything she’s made and then spread the word to other heiress friends (heiresses hanging out together as they do) who will backlog her order book for three years. Then, exhausted but exhilarated, she and Corey can purchase a place on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco and live half the year there and half the year in Western Civilization, alternating epochs of escape and creative validation.

Corey’s Dad knows that this is his son’s and his daughter-in-law’s fatal flaw. They don’t know the simple joys, the things that nature can give: a family; home; and the humble struggle to keep them afloat, moving slowly forward through honest labor before selflessly passing on hard-earned and incremental gains to the next generation. He knows that is why they spend enough money on health clubs, workouts and facials (for him!) to raise twice the number of kids he did. No, Corey’s Dad is not fully aware of what it takes to pay for a kid in today’s world, but he’s not far off the mark on his other assertions. For Corey and Clarisse know friends who have made it big in the game, who enjoy stylized houses, maids, broods of children without stress and occasional interviews in glossy magazines from which they evolve their own aesthetics and desires.

And they want all of this, too.

His Dad remembers that in his day Hollywood actors and actresses, the odd novelist or Nobel Prize-winning scientist, and the President of the United States were the only famous people. He recalls how they led their special lives while everybody else watched in fascination. Now anybody could be famous: a designer, home furnisher, car company executive, hotelier, storeowner; the proper mix of money, success, and calculation could elevate them unto the public eye and blessed attainment.

And his Dad thought it was all so much bullshit. For a time he was proud of his son’s outsized ambition and believed it was what he himself had worked for. Now he saw in Corey a big baby boy who didn’t have the guts to deal with the real things; who had trapped himself in an urban situation that was both too expensive and more provincial than his son could see.

And he wanted grandchildren and he wanted to see them in a suburban house so that he might rest assured that, God forbid, if anything happened to grandpa or grandma, there was a place for them to bail in this increasingly unkind world.

And the kid was out all the time at parties, his debt level rising to a point where the big score would be all but a wash and the years beginning with the prefix forty- weighing more heavily than he ever imagined. Young people, the old man fretted, don’t know what getting old means.

Worst of all, his Dad had a presentiment, which he would never admit out loud, that it was his favorite country in the whole entire world that had made his son like this (He certainly wasn’t to blame). It was a country that had offered him (Dad) a square deal in exchange for honest work, but had since pulled out of that handshake across the kitchen table with the common man. In exchange, it had offered his son a small steel ball at the roulette wheel, or (insert the cheap casino metaphor of your choice) a pair of dice bouncing across a green velvet table. It had turned life into a crapshoot in which the common man might get very rich or, more likely, very beaten. And the reason Dad never admitted this presentiment out loud was its similarity to the speech his son had been hiding behind for a couple of years now.

Corey didn’t get it completely. He wanted to dream big and reach for the stars; so much of what he’d been fed had encouraged this. His family, he thought, was seeking to limit his horizons. Life, he bum philosophized (the concept gaining an increasing hold over him), was a risky affair and, properly lived, one faced its peril head-on rather than lying low in a company job, which was, in any case, a thing of the past; little more than a myth with which parents might beat their offspring over the head.

Anyhow it didn’t matter because Clarisse and Corey were out, again, to some pricey eatery they could not really afford to be at, nor afford not to. They justified their presence through a logic born of their own experience that only when things got truly expensive did they find they were getting what they paid for: proof positive the economy had drifted toward servicing the more profitable predilections of the rich.

We join them now at an establishment located on a street boasting a string of similar restaurants catering to a class of ambitious go-getters that comprise city nightlife. As it turned out there did not seem to be many people worth meeting and so they were kind of glad to sit and enjoy their exquisite entrees in peace. Not a lot was being said between them, however. This was not new and had been eating away at the couple for some time. It wasn’t a question of having nothing to discuss. It was just that they had reached a pause in their marriage, a point at which their lives together, however fun, had become something of a rerun.

“So,” said Clarisse, mock innocence in her voice, “when are we going to haf a bayby?” Corey sighed aloud, frustrated. She inevitably took this as a sign that he did not want to have a baby, which was not true.

“Why you do sigh?” she asked. “You don want to haf a baby?”

“We’ve been over this. I do. I just don’t know how to go about it.” Thusly did the rerun always begin and then Clarisse would uniformly respond, “Well, why we don jus do eet? Look at de Mexeecans. They don worry about money. They haf tree or four chilren. And I want a cat and you won let me haf a cat!”

To which he invariably would answer, “Mexicans live in the worst parts of town. If you want to get a prefabricated place with cottage cheese ceilings east of Western Avenue, let’s do it.” There was more than a grain of truth to this, which shut Clarisse up, but left her totally unsatisfied. So Corey would break the unhappy silence with, “I know I don’t make a lot, but you can quit your job and we can somehow make it. We can move out to the exburbs or get a smaller place (although they’d be growing) and make it work.”

“What about my career?” she would say, plaintively.

“You’ll have to give it up…for a while.”

From this point the conversation would inevitably degenerate into a revelation of how Clarisse wanted it both ways: to strive for fame and a distinct, elevated social identity, and to enjoy the warm rigors of motherhood all at a time. Briefly, and pointlessly, she would ask, “Why you don give up you job?” which was a perfectly legitimate question save for the fact men don’t give up their jobs for babies. Women have made much headway, but not quite so much as to convince the masculine half that it should fully engage the business of child rearing (see: “diaper changing”), and Clarisse and every woman in her position knew it.

And this was their quandary, just as Corey’s father perceived it. They could have a kid and risk being run out of Bigtown – surrendering their cheap champagne lifestyle – for a slot, maybe, in a tinny suburbia or pass on the baby, roll those dice, and wait around for dimming prospects of wealth and celebrity to pay off.

It was an utterly distasteful deductive process that always left them disheartened and always led to Clarisse expressing the desire to go outside for a moment and smoke a cigarette.

And this is, in fact, what she did.

Chapter Six

The anaesthetic wore off and Jordan opened his eyes to the sight of a ceiling not his own. The misadventure had been lost in the compression and stretching of the hospital patient’s consciousness. With time, however, the overall plot slowly came back into focus: He’d (maybe) been stricken with appendicitis and shipped down to the poor folks’ hospital thanks to no-health-insurance.

Jordan sighed. Rather than move forward with his life, it would now take a number of weeks, months even, just to get back to where he was the night of his last tranquil cigarette.

“Hey,” came a smooth voice that rounded to a rasp at the very end. Jordan sat up; a sharp pain cut the movement short and slammed him back to the mattress. “Take it easy,” he heard as Joya’s head moved into frame on high. He felt life flow afresh through him.

“Why Joya’s Joyas?”

“Joya’s my name and that’s how Spanish people back home spell jewels – except it’s pronounced like an H so that it’s ‘Joya’s Hoya’s,’ except no one says it that way. Joya’s Joyas they call it. It’s my store.”

“Okay,” Jordan said satisfied with the explanation, which neatly fit the logic of trendy metropolitan retailing as he understood it. There was a pause. “So how’s business?” he asked, and she laughed in answer, which was also to his satisfaction.

“I guess we don’t really know each other very well.”

“No, but I’m grateful. I just grabbed the card you gave me from the night before because I was practically delirious. And now, you’re the first – maybe the only – person to visit me.”

With neither having much to say Joya left shortly thereafter.

Jordan thought that he’d never felt so lonely in all his life, except when she’d left him at the first hospital two nights (was that all?) ago. He’d have preferred to get away from that girl, from the way she kept leaving him feeling so alone, but she had turned out to be all he had. Jordan smiled to himself, for the fear is always worse than the thing itself and the thing itself was upon him.

He took measure of the surroundings and his confidence absorbed a glancing blow. The hospital was a product of the thirties or forties, two decades Jordan thought he would have loved to experience, so long as he could get 21st century technology when the situation called for it. Directly across from him was a young Latino with shaved head. He’d always been scornful of people who made sweeping racial and cultural generalizations, but he couldn’t help but deduce – influenced by a messy wound to the guy’s groin – that here was yet another gangbanger bent on wasting his life away through senseless violence.

The roommate’s condition obligated the elevation of his pelvis by pillows to facilitate healing and observation and this is what Jordan was observing. After a while the roommate’s family arrived, very distraught over the unfortunate condition in which they found him. There were young guys under shiny smooth pates exchanging embellished handshakes with the victim (if the noun applies). And his mother was there, in tears, and his grandmother in the very same condition. Their distress mystified Jordan who thought his roommate had gone looking for trouble and found it.

He thought (without the slightest notion of what had really happened) the guy’s misfortune was not misfortune at all, rather stupidity, before waves of guilt and counter-heretical sentiment overwhelmed and corrected him.

A young orderly came by to check on Jordan. He was kind and attentive and boy did that make a difference. He lifted the patient’s tie-it-in-the-back standard hospital-issue nightgown to check the stitches. Jordan was surprised to see that they were actually metal staples. “Finally, a medical innovation,” he hoped.

The fellow asked Jordan how he felt and received the response, “Fine.” The orderly told Jordan that he was on painkillers that would eventually wear off and that it was incumbent upon him to push the little button – and he showed him the little button – to call for more, or he’d get an idea of, “just what really happens to your body when somebody takes a knife to it.” J. could have done without the crime novel prosody but appreciated the intent behind it, sensing a male camaraderie in the gory, tough-guy way the information was imparted. The orderly asked Jordan if he’d “passed gas” yet and the patient explained how he’d just awoken to a beautiful woman hovering over him and no, he hadn’t. “Try,” said the orderly, “once that happens you’ll be on your way.”

The guy then produced a plastic item that, when blown into, propelled a Ping-Pong ball in an air chamber to float on the force of the channeled current. He told Jordan to blow into it as much as he could and went on his way. The roommate was sitting up, already provoking the papery orb’s suspension and Jordan reflected on the desire for survival, the visceral will-to-life in this guy who was much worse off than him, but seemingly less affected by his misfortune.

Jordan was waiting for someone to throw a penalty flag against the world for his rough treatment, and to award him a 15-yard advance in the territorial battle for survival and comfort. The gangmember wasn’t interested in any such assistance, which unlike Jordan, he knew has never been forthcoming and never will be.

The Latino pulled Jordan into his sphere with a look. He smiled. “I’m sayin’” he said and shrugged.

“Not much,” thought Jordan, exhausted by the operation, which (though not considered major) represented an extraordinary departure from his daily routine of morning coffee house and an afternoon-hour scowling at the mainstream media. He lingered on the vision of somebody he’d never met rooting around his insides with the plan to remove a piece. Such intimacy! Who was this guy? (let it be a guy!)

These were the things badgering Jordan in that gauzy region between waking and dreaming that drug-assisted hospital stays produce. He drifted away from the world of work and dates and bills, mind stumbling around an unfamiliar with the universe of bare necessity. He did not like what he saw. It was lonely and cold and he could not divine where any of the paths led except toward the darkness awaiting each of us. He shuddered, dreading an end in the trailer park of abandonment.

“To not be a three-legged table,” he prayed, “left to the side of a desert road. Not a tumbleweed rolling through scrap-heap, pushed by a large whispering, indecipherable, addictive.”

Soon, a dinner was served which, for all its intentional mediocrity, struck Jordan as fare fit for an inhabitant of Olympus.

“Thas’ good,” said the black nurse, “you hungry and you eatin’.” Jordan marveled still at the kindness of the employees at this medicine factory. Was it all an act, a professional requirement? Or were they still driven by the need to help people written about in eighth-grade Career Day essays?

More drifting in and out of sleep. Once he stirred and looked beyond the bloody crotch of his roommate to catch the guy looking at him with a sweet face. Go figure.

Jordan nodded slightly in that direction and he got a second smile in return. Jordan never met a second smile he didn’t return and suddenly he wasn’t so alone anymore.

He went under yet again and in the gray of very early morning awoke to a pain more indicative of a knife incision than any of his post-operational agonies thus far. He fumbled for the button and a fat white lady came. She was, needless to say, very kind. The kindness ran across cultures and classes here – a lesson for all the world. The painkiller administered, Jordan fell into a woozy bliss during which he dreamed of calling the nurse for another dose. Hospital life, he found, was very cyclical and tended to limit the variety and size of one’s aspirations.

Chapter Seven

There were about ten people outside the restaurant looking great and smoking away, shooting glances across the streetscape, tapping quick, desirous feet, tapping their tobacco butts clean. These impromptu gatherings not only evoked a warm commune of the persecuted, but also gave off a sense of where the real conversation was happening. Sidewalk smokers invariably evoke a body language of release, of suddenly being disentangled, and it made them more animated, freer, and, like all free and rebellious things, more attractive.

There were a few clusters of smokers, but as Clarisse exited the restaurant, she trained her eyes upon a beautiful, authentically full-bodied young woman, dressed with all the laws of style scrupulously obeyed, and clearly enjoying a long Virginia Slim. Clarisse could not bare such smokers’ candy, but never passed judgement based on that criteria. That a person smoked was always a first step. She approached the woman under the pretense of needing some fire.

Absorbing Clarisse’s request the woman performed a glancing radar-read from the corner of her eye. Enjoying the pleasing face with dark red lipstick, the black bob cut, sensible shirt, flat espadrilles, and continental accent, Yvonne (that is the new character’s appellation) smiled and said, “Sure.” In a practiced nanosecond her chrome lighter was out and firing off in Clarisse’s face. Lips occupied, she made that smoker’s nod of gratitude already remarked upon in the accounting of things out front of the Argentine restaurant.

They talked. Yvonne’s initial line of questioning ruled out Clarisse’s being a lesbian and this put her more at ease. Clarisse’s quiz determined that Yvonne was too beautiful and too successful for her own good; that if they could only blend personalities, they’d make a perfect mate for somebody.

Yvonne thrived as a caterer of smashing events. She had an almost coffee complexion while being a standard issue white girl with turned-up nose, her own home, and a desire to hook up with a man and mate that she was not shy in spelling out. Clarisse (though not overtly sexy) did, on the other hand, have a guy. And she, too, had the desire to make babies. Knowing what she knew about such things (a lot), Clarisse concluded that Yvonne was too choosy, on top of being too beautiful and too successful for her own good.

She was too everything.

Yvonne, in the time it took for them to smoke a cigarette revealed as much in dismissing her recent and myriad lovers as, “too straight,” “too tennis,” “too golf-ish,” “too feminine,” and, frequently, “too old.” Again, knowing what she knew about such things, Clarisse guessed that Yvonne was into her late thirties, but was so sexy as to command the attention of the many and mostly ineligible young beaux striving for fortune via their good looks. Initially engaged, then inevitably dissatisfied with what the lads had to offer the remaining twenty-three hours of each day, she’d trope towards somebody in a matching life phase with a strong wallet. But these men had paid the price of their fortunes with burgeoning bellies and receding hairlines and, while younger girls were willing to look beyond these flaws, Yvonne’s economic independence spared her the compromise. Which is why she was alone.

Clarisse thought Yvonne knew little or nothing at all about men.

The cycle was repetitious and Yvonne – invariably bored by her brief bouts with somber adult discussion – would again yield to the call of the wild, initiating yet another round of romantic frustration with youth.

In less kind moments friends would remind her of how all the good ones had been pulled off the shelf. Then she’d drive her fancy ride home embittered by lonely night and the price she had paid for all her belongings, not only in hard work, but in a life without intimacy.

Clarisse, an delightful and well-bred person, wasn’t going to say anything of the kind to her new acquaintance. She was steering the conversation toward less consequential and infinitely more delicious matters when Yvonne focused her black-eyed-pea brown eyes on something in the near distance, blew out a full lung of Virginia Slim liquid-like silk and said, “Look at this one!”

She turned her gaze in the direction staked out by Yvonne’s smoke signal and came upon a rangy silhouette that struck her as familiar. Clarisse, who wore corrective lenses, was confirmed in her first impressions as the coco shell-clamping of cowboy boots filled the street and the rangy silhouette came into full focus.

Only Jordan knows Joya’s name yet so Clarisse said, “Hey! You!” as the girl passed, focused on some point of ambition much farther along in the night. Joya turned and immediately noticed the girl from an evening or two past. “Oh hi hon,” and gave her a big kiss on the lips which made the Belgian/French girl blush and Yvonne blanch. “Fancy meetin’ you out here! Smoking a cigarette of course,” she said to brief fits of laughter from the other two. “Don’t you know that will give you cancer?” and more laughs to this most overdone of sidewalk-smoking-circle-jokes.

“Listen,” she went on, sing-songy, “it’s funny I should run into you – gimme a light will ya – because your friend, what his name? Works in a coffee shop?”

“Jordan?” asked Clarisse as she produced the same fire she’d asked Yvonne for just moments before, causing Yvonne to smile the knowing smile of the beautiful.

“Yeah, that’s him. Hon, he’s sick. Got appendicitis. He called me out of the blue moanin’ in agony and asken for help.”

“He called jou? Jou just met.”

“I know, that’s what I thought,” Joya rejoined, “but I suppose he had his reasons.”

“I wonder what those might have been,” said Yvonne and the Colorado girl took it for the compliment it was. And because she was used to such things, Joya did not preen or make a fuss, and damn it if Yvonne didn’t fall in love with her just like that, which was not how she was used to it going down.

From inside the restaurant Corey saw the assembled vaginal caucus as inviting and decided to join them. Heading out he noticed that somewhere deep inside him rumbled a low and persistent hum. Was it at the back of his mind? In his chest? His soul?

Science still does not know where the wellsprings of tobacco love are hidden, for if it did, the passion would be dead by now – a thing of olden times.

“Yvonne, this is my husband Corey.”

Doctors, especially oculists, will tell you no evidence exists supporting the existence of voluntary manipulation of eye shimmering. They will say, in no uncertain terms, that nothing in physiology (as currently constituted) even remotely suggests a process leading to eye shimmer.

And Corey would refute this, because that is what Yvonne did to him. She eye-shimmered him. It is what is known as sex and temptation. They pop up at the most uncertain and/or unexpected times and almost always come attached to a crushing dilemma. If science needs proof perhaps the numbed stupor on Corey’s face might satisfy the requirement – or the fact that he agreed to smoke one of her Virginia Slims – the girly cigarette.

Yvonne, as it turned out, was not actually enjoying her fag (as the Brits like to call it) mid-meal, but rather waiting for the valet to bring her car around in a final stanza to an early evening for all involved.

Chapter Eight

By the second or third day (Jordan wasn’t sure) he had a routine of eating, sleeping, smiling at his roommate and calling for the painkiller that comforted.

With some cheerier décor, he thought, you could get used it. At around two o’clock, Corey and Clarisse made something of a surprise visit, given that the trio had not been quite so close in the past. They presented him with a pouch of Drum tobacco.

Jordan surprised them, in turn; by pulling out the pouch he’d grabbed on the morning his excellent misadventure began. He had ushered it through the entire ordeal with a solid second nature. He hoped they didn’t mind but said he’d finish his first, that the tobacco gets worked over and softer with repeated handling and shake; that the smokes at the bottom of the pouch were grainy, easy to roll and resonated.
Corey found the lecture edifying.

Anyhow, the couple explained Clarisse’s run-in with Joya outside the restaurant and he could envision it all and transport himself from the present dreariness: The sex in the air, the mysterious impulses of the food, the sacramental smoke reaching back to ancestors. The chemical mist under streetlights and night sky. The girls. The possibility that anything might happen and the certainty that it wouldn’t. The girls.

It was agreed that Joya had really come through and that everyone really liked her.

It was further agreed that as soon as Jordan got better they’d all go out to dinner again and just the thought made him crave a cigarette.

It was also agreed that Jordan would call Clarisse and Corey when it was time for his release and that they would take him home and set-up his little convalescence.

And so he truly was not alone. He had more than a woman he hardly knew to depend on. There were other people he hardly knew he could depend on, too. This would help his recovery and J. was in no condition to decline the kindness.

And then, later that evening, Jordan committed a murder.

He hailed from the school which held that health begins in the spirit and the boost he’d received from his friends earlier in the day left Jordan feeling much improved and ready to deliver on his urge to grab a smoke. He thought the best way to carry the mission out was to move over as wide an area of the hospital as possible, never retracing steps. In this way the smoke dispersion would be decentralized and the initial source would be hard to divine. It also widened the potential list of suspects to a size that made him feel good about his chances.

He’d received a visit from a financial officer informing Jordan that he represented a 100 percent financial loss to the county’s coffers, that they’d been glad to help, and that it was time for him to get out. Jordan reasoned that the walk (if not the cigarette) would hasten his recovery and limit the public’s financial exposure.

Jordan puffed and casually hid the cigarette behind his back as he ambled. An orderly rushing past ordered him to put the butt out. He responded with a smile and nod of acquiescence, turned a corner, and took a nice hit before moving on. He ducked into linen rooms and the john when people were being rolled here and trundled there on Gurneys, intravenous tubes flowing down from clear patches of fluid. He thought that a hospital was not unlike a garage. In the best cases, you came in with something they knew how to take out and/or replace, patched things up, and pushed you back into the lifestream. In the worst cases...never mind. The rudimentary nature of modern medicine, it cannot be overemphasized, continued to shock Jordan, clashing as it did with the silicon and hygienic world of commercials for the Sunday morning political talk shows.

Anyhow, these wanderings led him into the geriatric ward. The old people lay there, quiet carcasses being pumped full of expensive drugs, hearts prodded to thumping, armies of ailments kept at bay. From one of the rooms he heard a tussle and the plaintive voice of an elderly woman, with an accent, saying, “Why don’t you just let me die? I don’t want to live anymore. Why are you doing this to me?” Jordan stuck his head into what turned out to be a fray between an old lady and three orderlies finishing the job of rigging up some sustenance-giving apparatus or other (it’s all very technical and you need a background, which Jordan did not have). One orderly, a handsome black guy with a mustache and exotic high-set cheeks of oriental Africa, saw Jordan watching and turned on him. He could not tell what the face was trying to convey. Agony over what he was doing? Over Jordan having seen what he did to pay his bills or some combination of the two? J. was shaken.

Later he lay in bed under a light that conjured up bad heavens. There was illumination, but nothing like sunshine. Not while Jordan lay stunned at the sight of old people being force-fed an existence. He was unable to wrap his mind around it; a gray area of gray people beyond his experience (although his time would come).

This is what some called ‘culture of life,’ as defined by mechanical circumstances: the beating of a heart or the presence of electrical impulses.

Jordan decided to forego his dose of painkiller because he wanted to be clear-minded in dealing with the new information. He felt the difference in the dead of morning, twisting to his right and crumbling his body structure into many shattered pieces.

As dawn crept, machines glumly hummed and he lowered himself, once more, to the floor. Reaching into the nightstand he took out a pre-rolled. He stalked gingerly (if such a thing is possible) down the hallway and perhaps dodged an errant nurse or two; it doesn’t matter, because Jordan made it back to the geriatric ward. Observing more thoroughly, the horror of the carcass farm gripped him anew. He had not been wrong. Something must be done. Like Yvonne, he possessed too much for the situation to hold. He was too young, too healthy and he had no tools for absorbing the logic of medicine nor the cruelties of time.

Puffing blithely away, Jordan ducked into the room of the lady who had asked to be left alone so that she could die. He watched her with infinite mercy, a little dimming ball of energy, indistinguishable from others of her kind on-tap, dwarfed by machine-juice pulsing throughout. Mercy is what he felt. Not pity. Pity is powerlessness to alter a painful situation. But this was mercy. Hieroglyphs of pain were scribbled in a frightening symmetry across her face. Jordan read in those hieroglyphs how the suffering had been complete, had been quite enough, thank you.

He fiddled with the cables and wires leading here and there and found ways to disconnect them at different points. He pulled patches from her arm that was sinewy and wooden at the same time, a piece of pale jerky. The reaction came quickly and he watched as the old lady rattled and settled into her eternity without looking back.

He made a feeble attempt to reconnect things, which was a move more cool than efficient given that it did nothing to silence the fit of soft noise-making that had begun to fill the room.

It was good a time as any to bail and he told himself this. His flight was hampered by a renewed and excruciating pain in the place where his appendix used to be. He was, of course, himself a walking wound and that is how people like their heroes – even smokers.

He was taking all of two stairs at a time, leaving a trail of airborne particulate matter behind, returning to bed in a blistering seven minutes: long enough to be caught on a number of occasions, but with his fortune and (he truly believed) the old lady’s holding firm.

The next day, while readying for departure, Jordan’s eyes met with those of the orderly who’d seen J. see him force-feed the victim. He smiled, but Jordan could not tell what the smile intimated. He returned it, not intimating much himself.

Packing the two pouches of tobacco for leaving, he said goodbye to the gang guy who was doing remarkably well under the circumstances. “I’m sayin’,” they both shrugged.

Corey and Clarisse arrived and they helped Jordan down to the discard area. A heavyset black lady who was very nice asked if Jordan had any money. He said he did not and wondered if the left-hospital-arm knew what the right-hospital-arm was doing, given that the same conversation had already taken place upstairs. She asked him if he had any stocks, bonds, mutual funds, “or anythin’ like that.” He said that he didn’t, which he didn’t. She looped a series of four or five zeroes through the form in front of her and then handed it over for Jordan to sign. He did and gave it back to her.

He sat around while she went through a drawer. After some time she looked up, surprised to see him. “You can go now sir.”

Somewhere inside burned the expectation that she might ask if he had any information relative to an old woman’s death or if he at least knew that some such thing had happened at the hospital. But she did not. Jordan, though still in pain, grabbed Corey and Clarisse by their respective elbows and rammed them out the hospital door lest the black lady recall any questions that might have gone unasked.

Jordan had heard a lot of things about health care and people not being able to get it, and he didn’t doubt for a second that it was all true. In any case, his experience had turned out to be something quite different.

“She called me ‘sir’,” he said to quizzical Clarisse and Corey as they got into the black truck Corey terrorized the town with.

Chapter Nine

Things happened for Joya in the moment she needed them to and so, for those observing, it seemed they happened easily, which they didn’t.

Excising rotting relationships, jobs that didn’t work out, and ill-fated romances from the tale, Joya’s road winds from a starting point of making some jewelry in her off-hours to opening a store for purposes of selling it at what the vernacular dubs a “handsome” profit.

It had started without plan and in innocence as the most desirable projects often do. First some friends purchased one-time samples of her wares and later she brought treats to nightclubs simultaneously festooning her own often-admired person with them. Sales were done on the spot. It was tax-free pocket money and she relished the exercise in the way Randall did the burnishing of common knowledge(s). Her southwestern essence pervaded the jewelry. It was heavy in turquoise, a stone which survived all the storms of fashion, at moments terribly chic, most of the time not, but always holding fond favor with a solid constituency. Within certain design guidelines – she was decidedly more refined than bulky – Joya had enough talent and accumulated culture to succeed in a variety of markets. For the ghoul after-hours crowd – a staple of the local fun tribes – there were little skeletons with turquoise eyes, Druid crosses with embellishments of the special Indian blue, and Mexican virgins with crowns of smooth and pleasing pebbles. For the hippie crowd there were American Indian and cowboy themes, cowboy hats (pink ones), horses, Hopi-inspired earrings, all of which sold very well. For the picky palates of upper-crusters she had designed a very specific series. These were bits of borderline fine jewelry with the turquoise burnished and chemically treated so as to decode its surreptitious spectrum and crease its surface with burned-orange-pinks and spidery black streaks. These she played with. These she dreamed with and convinced clients were worth considerably more than the cost of making them.

But to merely riff-off the qualities of her business is to fall into that trap which made her life’s progress – which indeed it was – seem effortless.

The truth was quite a different matter, for Joya believed success was more than a question of targeting many markets. She had to know about those markets, see them and live them. And so in dressing the Gothic set, she applied experience gained in running with the vampires over a number of years. If she understood the hippie sensibility, it was because a part of her Colorado schooling had exposed her to final traces of the original hippies. If Joya knew what the rich liked, it was because she’d catered to many a temperamental diva since arriving in that city she now called home. In addition to those entertaining the deception that hers was a life touched by the Gods, were those assuming it was a natural aristocracy that informed her stylistic guesswork.

Not so. American girl, she learned and burned and earned it all before crows ever tread the corners of her eyes. It was a success bred from a cornpone ambition, devoid of maliciousness, rooted in an honesty and enthusiasm about work still particular to the nation.

Joya’s Joyas – the store – fell just outside the boundary line of a wealthier local municipality and that provided her with a nameplate location at just a fraction of the cost of being within it. She secured a bank account at an institution inside the border so that her checks boasted the glitzy locale’s name. She was active in a group of area merchants and, it could be said, was probably its most dynamic member – although she was not conscious of the fact others held her in such high professional esteem.

These are some of the particulars and some of the virtues of Joya. Others have been demonstrated in the way she took care of a young man who was a complete stranger, and still others have been left for later weaving into the longer account. And that is because we will need Joya for the entirety of the piece to keep things lively and sympathetic (along with a host of other qualities most useful to moving a post-modern novel along its merry way).

But here is one more thing about her, before we attend to the development of other important characters: she did not have a boyfriend.

Chapter Ten

And whether Joya had a boyfired was on Yvonne’s mind as she headed to a gathering of Jordan and friends for the purpose of celebrating his medical discharge in almost one piece.

Physically, he was almost fine, but finance, as usual, was another matter.Having been set free by the black lady with the forms, Jordan was able to put his mind at ease where monies were concerned. He had not reckoned, however, on the kind of damage his brief dalliance with the first hospital had wrought.

Before returning to Yvonne and her thoughts about Joya let it be recorded that Jordan had been hit to the tune of thousands of dollars from a hospital that had refused to treat him. The bottles of liquid poured into his arm were exorbitantly priced; x-rays they took – but which were not appropriate to detecting the suspected ailment – cost a princely sum and his first glance at the total price caused him to search for a chair to sit in and gather his wits. The expense associated with temperature readings by stand-up machines featuring three-inch red digital indicators added up to a Virgin Islands vacation stay.

Not that Jordan had any such adventure on tap before his body betrayed him. He was working in a coffee shop and even that wasn’t so solid any more. No, underachievement in a college-educated, white American male was something so foreign to the culture (so much had been given) as to raise suspicion about Jordan’s true motives for working at Java World. Nobody believed he was there because he needed to be and the local capacity for perception provided only two possible interpretations: 1) drug dealer using the place as cover and/or point of distribution, 2) writing a screenplay about Mexicans and/or Central Americans in the restaurant industry.

Subtly, his boss asked to see Jordan’s stitches for he very much doubted Jordan’s accounting of the surgery.

Yvonne, meanwhile, was busy wrestling with Joya-feelings, which she had never experienced (except once or twice) with regard to any woman, and was not fully conscious of them at the moment. She lied to herself in this way often. It made life easier in as much as she got to her problems when she was good and ready, which is a fine strategy if you can get to your problems before they get to you.

Yvonne was a midwestern girl done good and niceness was the most common quality ascribed to her (followed closely by her persistence). She had a cool car. Her house was cozy-canyon and offered mysterious mossy views into a weepy garden of flowers and sculpture found or invented. She was talented with her mind, with her hands, and with her smile, which seemed to have more teeth than normal smiles. Her dog was long and floppy with a sweet face and tectonic slabs of muscle, and she took him on sweaty walks through winding country-like roads with sharp corners bordered by white-painted wooden fences.

There were no cesspools in Yvonne’s world. She simply assumed that shit disappeared when flushed. There were no fetuses in dumpsters out back of abortion clinics. The sea was not laced with strings of semen. Garbage dumps occupied a parallel universe and were administered by ambitious people who knew about rewards at the end of the rainbow.

She thought if blacks and Latinos and Armenians were going to make little clubs for themselves, then people of European descent should do the same; rejected the notion that those of European descent essentially ran the big factory as their private club.

It was a measure of democratic capitalism’s triumph that, even while believing such things, her own specialized talents were sufficient to gain a healthy material success.

And – it must be re-stated – that she was nice, which inclined people to shrug off the occasional and odd stupidity that Yvonne belched when the conversation went beyond her depth. Not that she was a purely material being. Like many of her time and place, Yvonne had cooked up an elaborate spiritual life to match the other storyline she’d moved out of Kansas to write for herself. It was the stock positive cosmology so very popular with her contemporaries. It went something like this: if you think positive thoughts (usually related to money and career) and you tell them to yourself often enough, couple them with incessant hard work and a cheery outlook, then good things will happen. For example, being fired was not unemployment. It was an opportunity to run around looking for intriguing spaces to rent, from where she would launch her future empire. People would just be warming up to the idea of feeling sorry for her when they’d get a call from her “new life” in practice. It was an important trick. Yvonne did not sweat things; she had fun with them.

And she was a convert to this religion because of the wonders it had worked for her.
And then Joya had caused the ground to shift beneath her; the way it did under the city every four or five years, creating a new opportunity to rebuild and reinvent itself in a burst of unified civic industriousness.

All of which sets the table for this evening’s dinner as Yvonne pulls up to the Mexican valet out front of the Argentine restaurant, wherein things play themselves out in ways that render reading through the next chapter, to get to next one after, a worthwhile exertion.


Chapter Eleven

Oscar Diaz was something closer to what Corey’s Dad might have hoped from his son. The young men were of proximate age, but Diaz’s life was more in line with traditions the elder thought he’d bequeathed his son – whom instead fled, putting a continent between them.

Oscar was harnessed to a cart and pulling with all his might. He had two children to whom his every effort in life was dedicated. He was married to a woman with whom he got along, more or less, for nigh on a decade. He had not gone to college and so carried around quite a chip on his shoulder about it. The irony would not have escaped Corey’s Dad because having not attended himself, sending his son became the driving motor behind all his and the wife’s actions throughout the spoiled youngster’s life. And yet it was there, in academe, that his son developed a disdain for everything great in this great country. He took a summer in France. He came back funny. He liked it more than his own nation. Go figure. And once it happened, there was nothing a summer at home, under Dad’s tutelage, could do to turn him around. The boy was lost to the father and his way of thinking. And the father knowing, still, that this is the best damn country there is.

Oscar, meanwhile, had taken a job working in the oil fields out of high school. The hourly rate, for a kid, sounded like a king’s ransom and although it wasn’t, the young man became hooked on the consumer heroine that a steady, sustaining paycheck offers. It got him a car that was cooler than anything his contemporaries scraping their way through university could afford. And darned if it didn’t draw some of the more attractive honeys from that very same early epoch in which no one knew what the hell they were doing. From there things developed as they have for generations with Oscar knocking his girlfriend up. Duty-bound and unfamiliar with a wider world of wacky liberating ideas the college boys were twisting on, he agreed to marry and father the little guy. Home and job security necessarily followed. Oscar went through the rather rigorous motions of those seeking entry to the profession of firefighters and the lucrative unions safeguarding their financial stability. It was no sure thing, but now he was set. He could pay the bills on the new house and the newer truck (practicality playing a role here) by lowering his head, his eyes and expectations (if he’d really had any) and report to the same place year in and year out.

Our sarcastic tone masquerades a general respect for people who accept responsibility the way they accept free tickets to a baseball game, a respect for the simple timepiece quality of such lives; laid out as evenly as a set of keys on a piano, each step the same distance as the one before.

And there was satisfaction in Oscar’s work. It was a labor of undeniable utility to the community and his service, at times, had Oscar touch the ceiling of glory. He had saved lives and been recognized for it; had become a source of pride and joy to his parents, his wife and other family members both nuclear and extended.

But it was, in the end, a job that leaned heavily upon the physical prowess of the man who held it and the years had begun to take a toll. In recognition of this the fire department had, some two years prior, promoted him right out of his thrilling perch at the back of a fire truck and into an inspector’s stuffy office. Not that
Oscar was ungrateful. He knew firefighting was not child’s play. And he knew his trick knee – source of a significant workers compensation settlement he used to buy motorbikes – could betray him in a crucial moment. There was, too, a tendonitis affecting the left shoulder making his job an increasingly miserable affair and he barely brushing the mid-thirties.

But what they’d gone and done was appointed him to a very important job, one that involved a new law – The Smoke-Free Workplace Act – and its enforcement – all of it.

For our own purposes we must identify him parochially for what he was – a natural enemy to smokers everywhere. That’s right, it was Oscar’s job, along with his partner Joseph Thorpe, a white guy with an identical pedigree, to run around town responding to calls or cooking up their own cases of Smoke-Free Workplace Act violations. He was a tobacco narc, a cigarette cop, a smoker snitch and roving petty bureaucrat. It was enough to make one smoke, and Oscar and his partner Joe knew it as they revved up and drove off each evening in search of fat quarry to skewer on behalf of the city’s empty coffers.

But back to the dinner, the table for which was set a chapter ago.

Chapter Twelve

The Dinner.

Jordan was looking pale, gaunt, and just a little scared.

Clarisse was there, Corey, and a new addition to the first loose nucleus, Randall, who’d run into Clarisse when outside a coffee shop where he’d stationed himself for a smoke. Fighting off thoughts of Joya through active conversation, Yvonne was laying out her happy religion to a skeptical Jordan. He claimed to have been as positive a believer in himself as the next guy, only to come up a month and many thousands of dollars short. “Well, that means it’s your fault,” Yvonne echoed the distinctly national tradition which views the victim as root cause of his/her own discomfort.

The company assembled was urbane and high-minded enough to moan at this – even if they knew it to be true in Jordan’s case given his inability to tolerate orders, bosses, or what his spoiled contemporaries knew as “structure,” and what his parents called “a job.”

Yvonne clumsily withdrew when confronted with the disapprobation of her latest acquaintances; acquaintances she must meet and know so as to run into Joya once again. The retreat promptly executed, she paused to reflect upon her disappointment that Joya was not as yet a full-fledged member of what she did not know to be the future political bureau of an important social front. “You’ll see,” she regressed into a ditsy girl voice that matched her outfit, “you’ll get your stitches out (he’d shown them to her, too) and gain some weight, and get strong and things will begin to go right for you if only you want them to.”

“I want them to,” Jordan [emphasis his] assured Yvonne.

“If that’s true you’ll see how fast everything goes your way,” she repeated in case he hadn’t gotten it the first time. She all but promised it with a sweet and earnest face lit up by black-lit eye-lanterns seemingly nailed at the center with bright pinheads of joy juice – if such a substance existed.

“The only thing that goes fast,” the prophet of bum philosophy jumped in, “is money.”

A novelty addition, Randall arrived with nothing less than a plan to transform this group from the assault on the stomach it was, to something more high-minded, purposeful.

“Isn’t your friend Joya going to join us?” Yvonne tried.

Joya was not yet a friend, except to Jordan, and a responding shrug on the part of all, except Jordan, was followed by Randall’s observation that, “something fishy happened at County Hospital while you were there Jordan.”

Jordan’s heart verily dropped into the hole his appendix had occupied a week earlier. “Yeah man. Seems,” Randall went on, “somebody pulled the plug on an old lady and she got a trip to heavenly land. Police are investigating.” Jordan’s gut began to feel not unlike the way it had at the last steakhouse gathering. But this time it wasn’t his appendix that was on the grill – it was his life.

“Dey shud save de money,” said Clarisse. “Maybe some one in heer family deed it.”

“Says here the family is devastated and plans to sue the hospital.”

“It’s more likely that they’ll sue than that they’re devastated,” Corey chimed in.

“That’s cynical,” Yvonne said, sparking a speech.

“If they were so dedicated she’d have been in a room upstairs at home instead of clamped to a bunch of machines at county,” Corey countered. “They’ve probably been hoping she’d kick-off for a long time and now that the hospital has screwed up, they can cash in at the same time.”

“I can’t believe you can think things like that,” Yvonne voiced her discomfort at such plain talk regarding the darker notions that often inform peoples’ actions.

Randall, for his part, was enjoying the seedling of debate unfolding, privately nurturing expectations for the mental development of his stylish new friends. “Having just been there,” he turned to Jordan, “what do you think?”

Jordan, meanwhile, had been suffering the antagonisms of someone forced to be other than whom they truly are. He would have liked to observe out loud how keeping people artificially alive by pumping them full of things alien to their organism was an immoral practice for generating expensive fees based upon unneeded services; how life, without quality, was not life at all. But that, he felt, would have made him suspicious of murder in their eyes (which, of course it would not have) and such are the workings of the guilty, homicidal mind.

“Who cares about some old sacka bones that’s already dead?” he weakly dissimulated his intimate relation to the affair.

“I can’t believe you would say something like that,” Yvonne cried once again, the ugliness of the discussion chasing celestial visions of Joya’s ass from her mind.

Tension was clearly rising as they all considered their plates smeared with greasy swirls and the odd piece of unworthy viand; a cigarette popped into each mind simultaneously.

As one they arose in perfect concert, heads high, cardboard packs gently tapped against fingertips, lest the reason for this decamping be lost in the clean cut of their clothes. And why not? The Smokers were lively, chatty, otherwise (almost) respectable people who should naturally draw attention.

Outside, Clarisse pulled out your father’s cigarettes, while Yvonne pulled out yo’ momma’s maybe. Jordan retrieved his Drum pouch while Randall turned out to be a partisan of the Export-A, a fancy little Canadian offering that came in a flat box at something like thrice the normal pack’s price. They were short-cut, filterless, and the paper was of a silken quality. The taste hinted at a world of the privileged gentleman gone by, something far superior to the mass productions of our own lowbrow systemic configuration.

Corey had once again followed them all out, but not over any insecurity he felt about Clarisse. “I think I’ll have a smoke, too,” he said, just as he had a week earlier in the same place, only this time with meaning. It happens that fast. Such are the realities of drugs, and dependence develops quickly. He was beginning to appreciate the relief a good cigarette brought to a body stuffed with the specialty foods one went to restaurants for. He began to sense the rhythm affecting smokers’ lives, the nervous cadence, the syncopated beat that involved heading outside for a quick butt and some fragmented conversation. It became one with a dinner ritual that included showering, getting dressed, valet parking, cocktail, appetizer (if it didn’t kill one’s meal), and entrée. The outdoor feature broke this sequence of thicknesses, extended both the evening and one’s ability to endure some more time at the table over coffee, dessert, perhaps an apéritif and more importantly, more conversation, more possibilities. Using your life minutes and stealing some fun.

Randall, who aspired to the life of a young 19th century English dandy, knew, or had read about, some of grace’s finer points. With a polished gesture, contrasting only slightly with his worn attire, he opened the box of Export-A’s to Corey, who accepted them with an equally polished and gracious nod of the head.

“Ideas man, huh?”

Randall nodded in the affirmative.

“Bum philosophy, huh?”

“Interrogator, huh?”

“What if I helped you get it out to bum subscribers?”

“Find the bums?” Randall was aroused.

“Sure. There are ways of doing that from home on a decent computer.”

Randall was taken aback. Arrogant of posture, he suffered from the insecurity particular to thinkers who are not being thought over by anybody but themselves.

“God that’s good!” Corey held the Export-A at arm’s length and glowingly admired it. “Makes those American things taste like piss.”

“Many American cigarettes are infused with a small quantity of urea, the reason for which I remain ignorant of,” Randall informed.

“Urea!”

“Yeah and anyway I’m flattered, but no-can do,” the philosopher feigned disinterest.
Corey slumped just a bit at the shoulders and Randall’s powers of bum perception picked up on it. This guy actually believed in him. “The bum philosophy has no brand-name recognition and it would cost more to develop than you can probably afford. No, let it be stated in a less equivocal fashion. It would cost more to develop than you can afford. To put it in bum philosophy terms – and everywhere they know it and say it: ‘You need money to make money’.”

Corey drew deep on the airy substance that was the Export-A’s special offering. He knew, even before Randall, that he was in for a sampling of his co-smoker’s work in progress. Having already decided bum philosophy was the meal ticket, his interest was heated to a burning-bright white intensity. We have no reason to doubt, either, that the cigarette hastened the comity developing between them.

“The situation might be otherwise if the ‘Randall’ brand-name enjoyed an element of familiarity,” he continued, “but it does not. Nobody cares who I am.”

“Brand-name,” that was the expression that excited Corey, and Randall had used it twice. Standing before him, he surmised, was a polished artist, exhausted from the polishing and ready to compromise with commerce.

“I’ve played my cards wrong up to now,” Randall confirmed his thoughts, “but had no choice. Development of a philosophical system is a mean task and goes beyond the full-time, into the overtime of demands upon one’s energies. You’ve got to learn many other systems to really understand what makes them what they are. You’ve got to out-adventure the adventurers; you’ve got to be more interesting than the interesting. You’ve got to live more than the living.”

Out of this Corey deciphered a discipline and firm belief in doing the time instead of the crime. “That’s good,” Corey said out loud.

“What’s good?” asked Randall whose rhythm was easily thrown off.

“You’re good,” Corey answered.

Randall loved it. “So that is where all my time has gone, into the thing itself, whereas the ‘who’ of who I am has languished from lack of love and attention. It was un-philosophically bumly of me to expect that excellence and thoroughness of thought would sell themselves. You have to have done something or your thoughts mean nothing. Experience in the spectacle is the only spectacle anymore.”

“And the only experience,” Corey added.

Randall, no more free of stylish calculations than any of the show horses around him, yanked his shiny silver box of sticks and offered Corey another. He declined, as might be expected of someone in their apprenticeship to the ancient guild of pedestrian puffers.

“Something, anything. Even bad, especially if it’s bad, but please elevate yourself to the level of wide attentions,” Randall prodded things forward. “Only then will they care.”

“Who are ‘they’?” Corey tried.

“I don’t know,” Randall confessed, “but they love a good comeback story for example.

Singers and actors are great at them. There is nothing quite like sinking into obscurity and then rising anew with tales from the black hole of sensual excesses to spark sympathy and imagination in the general television-viewing populace. They never tire of hearing the gruesome details of one’s self-initiated sloth as long as it’s wrapped in the born again baby’s blanket of redemption. A nation of Christian origins, our payoff is the defeat of Satan’s evil pull into the liminal utopias beyond discipline.”

He would get better at it, but for now at the dawn of things, Corey could absorb no more. That this guy could fill so much air time and sound so good doing it only reconfirmed a belief that Randall – with a sanding of his rough edges – represented passage to financing a baby and restoring his life to a balance not known since bachelorhood.

“Comeback, huh?” said Corey.

“Celebrities provoke less envy when they’ve been through the ringer. They behave worse than us, mostly because they can afford to. What falls to us is developing a way of misbehaving that is a lot cheaper, but just as loud.”

“Who’s us?” asked Corey.

Randall shrugged, “Ah, I don’t know,” but permitted himself the luxury of a quick glance at those smoking and chatting amiably all around him.

“What about an addiction for Randall?” Corey proposed.

“What?”

“Yeah, you get hooked on heroin or something.”

Randall tapped the frame of his glasses at the temple. He twirled the finger around and around.

“Okay, then fake it,” Corey insisted in the correctness of his notion, “but do something. The high road is closed. Sometimes it’s the low road or nothing at all.”

Randall took out a small notebook that had been bulging his blazer down in the lower left-hand pocket, “Sometimes it’s the low road or nothing at all.” He looked up, eyes awash with shine, “that’s good. That’s very good.” Randall was frozen by the idea’s brilliance – however twisted – and was, for once, at a loss for words.

Clarisse had clustered up to Yvonne and Jordan. Watching Corey light up she was subject to a pair of emotions flowing in different directions – at counter-purposes deep inside her. There was, first, a relief that what she was doing ceased to be a matter of disapproval. Smoking was no small matter where the question of harmony between them (and all couples) was concerned. Still, she could not deny that something personal was being usurped, something that had been exclusively hers in a life otherwise shared almost completely. Her cigarette break was exactly that, in the truest sense of the word – a break – and Clarisse would miss it should Corey make a habit of his own sidewalk smokings.

The others began to coalesce around them. Yvonne mentioned, “your friend Joya,” one more time and once too often. Her companions-in-smoking said that, yes, everybody was in agreement that Joya was wonderful and, that like her, they hoped she would deign to make them a part of her own wide city circle. Until that time, Yvonne would have to make do with the mere mortals presently assembled.

Yvonne blushed and smiled in a way that was simply too charming and authentic in its pure embarrassment to not evince a wave of unanimous simpatico. All was forgotten, sort of.

Clarisse held forth on the virtues of an occasional clove cigarette. Most of the gathered had been through that phase and her discourse failed to excite until she finished by saying “dey turn my tongue into a flowerbed,” and nostalgia overwhelmed each.

As the conversation wound down in rhythm to the depletion in tobacco supply, into discussions of money and pets and career breaks (for they all thought they were moving inexorably upward), Jordan was traipsing a more prosaic world wherein he waited, terrorized, for someone to bring up the old lady at the hospital again.

For that was not yesterday’s papers at all.

Chapter Thirteen

Fire inspectors Diaz and Thorpe were exiting a local French restaurant where the owner had been issued yet another citation in a long history of them. Never mind that her mostly continental clientele wanted to smoke and that most of her waiters and bartenders (okay, all of them) partook on the job. She was in violation of the Smoke-Free Workplace Act and her obstinate flouting made the eatery a regular stop on the officers’ nightly tour of duty.

Not only did the French place permit its clientele and workforce to smoke; it sold separate cigarettes sitting in an oversized cognac sifter on the bar to any and all takers. And it did so at a handsome profit because drugs, as anyone who went to college and did a basic econ class knows, have what is called a very ‘elastic’ demand. A bum philosopher might say that wild horses couldn’t keep their users away.

Actually, the phenomena revealed more than this already known tidbit about vice. It said something about the economics of freedoms, liberties, rights and other high-flying concepts our Swiss-cheese democracy is purportedly based upon. Every time a law such as the Smoke-Free Workplace measure is passed and codified, a cadre of individualists will come out of their satellite-dished bunkers to complain about how our freedoms are being taken away.

The fact is that freedoms come at a price, and we’re not talking death on a foreign battlefield. We’re talking cash. The Constitution is silent on the specific question whilst the culture is louder than a set of stacked Marshall amplifiers. To emphasize, freedoms aren’t eliminated with parking ordinances, dog-curbing laws, and other niggling legalities with which city councilpeople, county commissioners, congresspersons, and presidents occupy their time.

They simply get a little (or a lot) more expensive, for such are the realities in a country that is run like a business with a preference for the bottom line. And if pricing freedoms upward left some folks out in the cold, the issue was a non-starter because, not only do we not give a twig for the poor, the poor themselves would rather not be identified as such.

And so this is what you had: A French restaurant that catered to the Epicurean tastes of its clientele, passing on the cost of smoking fines to them. The price of escargot and martinis would rise incrementally without truly affecting business because, for the amoral among us, escargot and martinis fall in the same classification of earthly delights that cigarettes do. Free-market-magic.

Fines accumulated by the proprietress under the Smoke-Free Workplace Act were merely a cost of doing business; no different than the license fees, property assessments, zoning changes and other levies, hidden and otherwise, she was required to pony-up for annually, quarterly, weekly.

Anyway, Diaz and Thorpe had cited the woman, a former fashion designer, who smiled cordially and then invited them to a drink. Believing that a restaurateur’s duty was to be on good terms with everyone who entered her calculated little eaters/drinkers/smokers/cocaine-sniffers-in-the-bathroom paradise, she stuck to the role of good hostess. The inspectors, of course, were denied by conditions of their employment to drink alcohol while on the job. They might have stayed all night and stared at the ephemeral beauties present, but they expected no common ground with those gathered, only a sense of being slighted in a subtle, better-than-thou way. In short, due to a series of factors both shallow and deep, and not timely enough to discuss here, Diaz and Thorpe felt inferior and out of place.

By dint of good fortune, hard work, and the inevitable deterioration of the aging process, their appointment as inspectors had run them smack into the same snooty kids from high school that’d gone on to college – or reasonable facsimiles of them.

So they passed on the drinks and walked around issuing seven citations to the most attractive or obviously rich diners, for in their hands was held the ace of absolute state power. And although the clientele’s dress was designed to intimate achievement and polish, the confrontations revealed more brusque natures beneath the Italian-cut outfits. In the early days of enforcement, the savage responses of the wealthy would leave them taken aback; now it heightened the pleasure. The inspectors willingly sought out the insults as proof that, in the end, these folks squatted daily and squeezed out the same offal the peasants they fancied themselves so superior to did.

Citations issued, smiling adieu exchanged, they drove by the Argentine restaurant where an irregular situation had been developing. To wit: sometimes a veritable delegation of sidewalk smokers caucused before the wooden and gold glow of its picture windows and other times, later usually, there were none at all. When you’re a smoking inspector, there are certain things to look for and read into. It’s a specialized field of enforcement. To the extent that more egregious offenders on their beat had been fined into submission, Diaz and Thorpe were now closer to locking-in on the subtler patterns of behavior unfolding at the popular nightspot.

The inspectors concluded that those outdoors smokers had to go somewhere, and that was probably inside where they obviously closed down the joint, smoking, because that is what they do – smokers.

They found our friends meeting in the full-fledged flurry we just left behind. The very size of the gathering (there were other people lighting up, too) shocked and discouraged the inspectors who’d given the better part of themselves to the French restaurant raid. Since they drove around in a marked car and wore uniforms, there was a problem of secret approach difficult to resolve. They opted for the only strategy available, which involved parking their red-and-white ride on a side street and walking past the Argentine restaurant via the sidewalk opposite. They felt a curious desire to observe the chatty group of attractive semi-young people assembled and could think of no other way to camouflage their presence than to light up a pair of cigarettes, a box of which they kept in the glove compartment as rather effective props.

They were Marlboro Lights, a very popular brand and, their mass distribution aside, rather enjoyable smokes: light as advertised, quick burning. It was all in the service of a larger cause and so they smoked – with little pleasure.

It is a mystery to nonsmokers how someone would willfully, at times frantically, do such a thing to themselves, but smoking is the ultimate acquired taste since it doesn’t taste good in the way, say, that French fries do. But when there is a craving pleasant to quell, all things related to the act are gilded with the same glow the quieted addiction is.

Diaz and Thorpe watched for a while and could conclude little more than the fact that Yvonne was “one hot looking bitch” and that one of them would love, “to stuff her.” Not pretty or correct, sure, but these are working-class stiffs speaking on the sly; assuming they cannot be heard by those who might be offended.

Let it be noted that the detectives marked The Club members’ faces in their memories and promised to keep an eye on that sidewalk, to pounce on its indoor smokers the day it was found to be empty.

Chapter Fourteen

Some time later, Jordan stood at the supermarket check-out line for what seemed an eternity. J. was feeling sorry for himself. Before entering the store, a shadowy intimidating drifter of a man had hit him up for money. He gave over four bits. In gratitude the beneficiary of his openness dashed the coins against the showcase window to the store and slinked away snarling.

The encounter had stoked in him a sense of foreboding that was, oddly enough, buttressed by the magazines Jordan was forced to peruse while people purchased shave cream with credit cards. These magazines covered the vanity fair of party life and sexy activities every American who did not shop in specialty stores had to consider while waiting to pony up for their basics. It was a world in which every cover girl – and they were mostly girls – looked great and promised to hold forth inside on their last devastating love, on vacation spots, and on God. These accounts usually involved the identical experience of climbers up the narrow tree to stage and broadcast glory – which is to say not much experience at all. Some went deep into the lives of these girls and the boys whom they invited to abuse and exploit them in exchange for riches. Very old story. There were society parties in New York featuring statuette females photographed with their name and the designer of their dress printed below. There were exotic ocean islands and many figured contract agreements for lush period pieces shot on location in ancient and unscathed environs. How they lived is how everyone wanted to live.

Jordan certainly did not live it. To be sure, his life was not at all bad when compared, say, with the habitual starving-man-in-the-third-world measuring stick. He partied, yes, and he traveled, if not to hotspots, then to lukewarm ones and sort of made money along the way. His was, he thought just then, a pale edition of what supermarket stars in full bloom enjoyed. The inescapable truth was that nothing in the tangible future suggested, despite J.’s hopes and energetic efforts, such an existence wasn’t slipping away forever as he sloppily flopped around from one pesky crisis to another.

An attractive girl behind him smiled as Jordan, in full debate with his self, waved away a thought with a chop of his open right hand.

Finally paid up, he exited the store and looked both ways for the panhandler and saw him slithering along the parking lot’s perimeter. But Jordan did not quicken his pace to the car, rather pulled up and yanked a ready-made from his shirt pocket.

Such jackals could smell fear from across a city space and when they did, one was done for. There are few better ways to confront a potential crisis of confidence, or to at least disguise the approach of one, than through performance of the nonchalant cigarette lighting ritual. For, in addition to the cosmetic adjustment, the chemical payoff served to buck one up (however artificially).

In short, Jordan lit a cigarette to convey coolness and feel coolness. We can assume that it worked since that particular and potential peril petered. He wondered how the great and tremendous men, the Caesars and Ghengises, dealt with things before the birth of cool, which, after all was not even a century young.

As he was getting to his car a swarthy man of indeterminate ethnicity pulled out his large one and began to piss just a yard beyond the hood. He shot – among other things – a sidelong glance that sent a shiver up Jordan’s spine. Like many of his time and place, J. was thoroughly secular and nonbelieving. And although he did not pray at the right hand of the father, he avoided making any definitive stance on the existence of spirits since such things are not truly verifiable – in any scientific way – with the tools of perception currently at our disposal.

Put differently Jordan wasn’t so smart that he couldn’t believe in devils.

He cranked the ignition and guided his hunk of steel, glass, grease and synthetics out of the lot, leaving behind a small oil stain destined to become part of the region’s drinking-water table.

None of which was on Jordan’s mind. He had hit the brakes at the exit when a cranky homeless man walked unconsciously into his path and shook a fist at the driver over this one of many indignities his economic situation exposed him to.

“Devils,” Jordan whispered to himself, fighting off a growing desire to wrap himself in a woolen blanket.

He waited at the freeway turn-on, marveling at the messy air and car cavalcade. How anyone of note might conclude such a configuration represented human progress was beyond his ability to comprehend, and he shrugged, since ultimately, nobody ever asked his opinion when it came to such weighty matters.

He was given the green arrow to turn left, but upon lowering his foot lightly onto the accelerator, he saw a black balloon of a Mercedes Benz float from the right into what was, by law, his intersection. The driver stared directly into his face with black eyes and a scowl. “Devils,” Jordan thought again. The Benz seemed to accelerate through the crossway for a brief moment and Jordan hit the gas only to note a sudden and complete halt in the Mercedes’ progress. J-man’s mind ordered his foot to step on the brake, but in one of those inexplicable occurrences that are as much a part of life as lurking inexplicable devils, the foot, for reasons only it knows, chose the gas pedal instead. The car bucked into the black beast. The damage was to the left rear quarter-panel and of tiny dimension.

All of this was accompanied by the attendant burning rubber screech and k-thunk of fender-benders the world over. “Dammit,’ Jordan yelled out as he looked down at his right foot in disbelief at the cruel betrayal. Initial sentiments were concerned with his lack of auto insurance coverage because if they ticket you for that, you can’t get traffic school. They don’t offer it. It was a consideration calibrated to the goings-on of everyday life, but alas, this moment was not to be run-of-the-mill in any sense for this chapter’s ill-starred subject.

Jordan looked up in time to see three sinister sprites bound toward him in a way particular to the truly young. Their raiment corresponded to current kidswear and was calculated to frighten the bejeezus out of nice and orderly people. Not that Jordan was either, but he was still scared. His window was open and gave the driver a clear line to his head, which he (the driver) took, hitting it with considerable force at the temple. It was the kind of blow that might kill a person; just not this time.

J. was, of course, stunned. The usual slow-motion sense of unreality or hyper-reality, which are part and parcel of such moments, kicked-in so that the empty plastic soft-drink bottle with which another of the thugs was blasting him, seemed like a flee.

Back at the driver’s window, the first tormentor launched a blow toward his chin, but a slight evasion resulted in its landing at the throat, which turned out to be an improvement on the aggressor’s original intent.

Out the corner of his eye Jordan could see a third player in this drama jumping up and down on the hood of his ride, wreaking considerable damage as he did so. People all around were honking horns, although no one dared step out and set some remedy to the matter.

It was the white American’s worst nightmare: being caught on the nation’s byways in some disabled fashion that evened-out (somewhat anyway) the economic advantages held over envious minorities. Thugs of superior physicality and violent tendencies had Jordan where they wanted him and that was not good. This was one of many thoughts racing through his mind as his head, back, neck and car hood were made depositories of an unfathomable rage. Jordan contorted himself enough to stick a foot into the driver’s chest – which qualified as something of a miscue – permitting as it did his nemesis to grab hold and twist him so that his head was vulnerable to the onslaught of what turned out to be a Gatorade bludgeon.

Still, and through a process he could never fully explain to the satisfaction of anyone, Jordan was able to get out of the car and lurch and hop around the crash site a few moments until the immediate peril was seemingly neutralized.

Upon closer inspection, and with a little time to breathe, Jordan was able to affix his attackers to the local Armenian community thanks to the t-shirt of one, which boasted the name of a familiar, ethnically based street gang. He was not heartened.

They were, it seemed, very upset that he would deign to engage them in a car accident, as if choice had anything to do with it. J. inspected his body for bruises, of which there were many, while they barked on about the car being a “motherfuckin’ Mercedes man,” invoking some apparent waiver from roadway accidents not extended to lesser models and makes.

Jordan’s stream of “what the fucks?” and “are you guys crazys?” had slowed to a trickle when the Armenian Power gang (that was their name) realized they’d created a scene, a traffic jam, and ensured a visit by the police sure to do them in.

The driver looked at Jordan with an expression unmistakable for anything but what it was: antagonism by ethnicity. When whites discriminate and brutalize minorities, it is done with arrogance, an unconsciousness even, rooted in a sense of superiority, inherited legal advantage, stupidity, and more than a dash of fear. When a member of a minority returns the favor, it is the expression of a deep-rooted sense of being wronged. It is, in short, more vengeful than fearful and Jordan got a taste of this fucking privileged white guy sentiment when the driver suddenly busted his nose into a bloody fountain that speckled the snowy t-shirts of his attackers.

J. had never been punched in the nose before and was ill-prepared to ward off the blow since, even with everything that had happened up up to then, he didn’t suspect humanity capable of such antagonism (towards him personally).

The sight of blood everywhere – though mostly on Jordan’s face and soaked t-shirt – seemed to have a calming affect upon the assailants. Perhaps their lust had been sated. Perhaps it snapped them out of a manic state. Perhaps the reality was different from the violent records and films that had help shape and inform their reaction to the fender-bender.

As the traffic simmered and the horns moaned with impatience and a businessman flashed his cell phone at Jordan from a Cadillac, the kids would have had to be even stupider than they appeared to not realize how big the hole they’d been digging had grown. It was hot. The tar baked. A crowd of onlookers gathered. There was not a tree, a forgiving green lawn, a drop of softness in the whole scenario to soothe Jordan’s sense of just how harsh the world was at that moment. Despite being the obvious victim, he thought the situation all his doing. He deduced that through careless, imperceptible, yet incremental steps, he’d lowered himself out of the financial position his parents had worked so hard to put him in. His cash shortage was the root to which the entire lousy circumstance could be traced. Disdainful of authority and fiduciary matters all his adult life, Jordan now felt for himself the value of money his parents were always talking about it and which he dismissed so arrogantly, because they’d provided him with so much easy access to it. In short, and in that moment, he wanted his mommy and daddy.

“Shit,” one of the gang kids said examining his own bloody t-shirt. “muthafucka givin’ me AIDS and shit.”

A pair of security guards from a nearby hamburger stand arrived and from that moment the worst was over. A Latina woman in a white nurse’s uniform stepped down out of her minivan like an archangel from a B movie, bearing a white cloth which she handed to Jordan with the sentiment that she felt, “so sorry for jou.”

And that helped. A moment later a police cruiser rolled onto the scene. Jordan usually considered the police department as more an occupying army of mustachioed suburbanites than anything else, but was still glad to see them.

What the police saw was a bloody-faced and inoffensive looking white guy with a sheet to his nose and a bunch of rough-looking toughs from the neighborhood sitting coolly on a black Mercedes. It was discrimination time and with good reason. The cops tarried not a moment with Jordan as they bore in on the Armenian Power group – some of whom they probably recognized and probably needed an offense such as this to jail them. The kids were hardly afraid of the officers and rebuffed their initial queries with wise-guy shrugs and smart-aleck answers.

But there are far too many ways of getting arrested in America for such cool detachment to be of much use except in a movie about coolly detached wise-guys and smart-alecks. And that made it simple for the men in blue.

“License,” one of the sun-glassed policemen demanded. When nobody could produce what had been asked for he barked out, “Driving without a license. Cuff ‘em. Call the
towing service and tell ‘em to come get daddy’s car.”

These boys had been cruising their own ethnic turf, keeping it pure from others of different background and as such found themselves with a lot of friends surrounding the cordoned-off accident site. A helicopter had stationed itself overhead so that everything said was said at a high volume. – yelled out if you will – which only infused the situation with greater tension. An angry middle-aged man stepped into the fray, informing the police that these handcuffed boys had acted in self-defense.

The cops looked at a forlorn Jordan for only the second time since stumbling into this mess and, although they weren’t buying it, were compelled by prior humiliations at the hands of good defense lawyers to record the man’s testimony.

A female officer handled the duty of interrogating Jordan who presented her with an account most faithful to everything written above. The dreaded question about auto insurance popped up.

“No.”

Under normal circumstances, a heavy-handed citation would have been issued, followed by years of increased fees from his actuarial. But, mercifully, the lady officer moved onto the question of whether he needed an ambulance or not. With everything going on, Jordan still remembered the expensive ride he’d taken to county medical not too many days before and – although he had a desire to be obliging – answered “No” for the second time in as many questions.

A third cop asked the man who’d defended the boys for identification and soon determined that he was the Mercedes driver’s father. “Get the hell outta here before I arrest you, too.”

The crowd was growing surlier at the increasingly one-sided nature of this curbside justice and the cops decided to wrap things up downtown, as it were. “Get lost,” the lady officer told Jordan, who could have sworn it almost came out tenderly. J. went back to his car and settled behind the wheel. “Devils.” The plastic bottle lay there on the floor. He grabbed it and stepped out. Approaching the rather chastened trio leaning handcuffed against their beloved Mercedes Benz, he waved the bottle in its owner’s face. In response he got a question. “What are you gonna do about the Mercedes man?” Jordan, with the full complicity of law enforcement, slammed it bottom-down onto the hood, leaving further memento of their unfortunate rendezvous. “You don’t do this to people over a stupid car,” he screamed above the helicopter din. “It’s steel and glass, not bones and blood. Think about that while you’re sitting in jail,” he finished, fairly certain the porous epidermal layer of the local criminal justice system would perspire these rats back onto the streets in a matter of hours.

“Devils.”

Chapter Fifteen

Randall would one day declare “no business is an easy business,” and Joya would agree for the business of selling jewelry to the city’s rich or aspiring-to-be-so was not an easy one.Her tools were a series of ready-made chitchats and asides, which she adjusted to the ever-evolving story of American language in a hyper-historical city where yesterday’s papers seemed a lot older than just yesterday. To the casual observer, the use of ghetto slang and hippisms by a blonde cowgirl on the well-heeled ladies she hoped to seduce money out of might seem strange, but that’s what happens in a world where almost everybody is reduced to selling useless things. “Oh, those look absolutely franzy upon you,” she’d invent an expression in that second. Sometimes it took; usually it didn’t – like most of her creations; like those of most creators.

“Hon, those earrings look festive,” was a favorite for her; festivities being an important local preoccupation.

Crazy ring? “It’s not outlandish at all! It’s just reflectin’ a more lavish, sensual Mediterranean intelligence. It’s not Protestant or anything like that, hon.”
Or, “Ah don’t know who he is, but he’s gonna like it and you more than he already does when he gets a gander.”

“Gander.” Customers were left with a sense that their old Aunt Minnie from back east was advising them, except that Aunt Minnie was wearing a mini-skirt that left you curious about the rest of the package.

And that was the game; to make friends with these people who knew she wanted their money. Joya’s point of departure was that each entered in search of seduction; personal, financial, what have you. There were obstacles of a very personal kind to consumer spending and it was her job to help customers overcome them (or undo them herself). She was a micro-economist, a true (if untitled) scholar of the marketplace; expert both in theory and praxis.

Anyway, she was selling a rose-gold ring set in two pieces, that kissed each other when worn on adjoining fingers. It was the kind of design she specialized in. So simple that other, lesser designers wanted to slap themselves on the forehead for not having come up with it. One that grabbed the ever-precious attention of shell-shocked shoppers bombarded by imagery and novelty all along the commercial strip where she rented.

Joya was working a time-tested, “Every one of those skinny little fingers needs a jewel…” when Jordan burst into the store looking like something out of a horror movie entitled, let’s say, Mutant Dawn.

The delicate customer Joya was pummeling gave a gentle “eeek” when she saw him. The ring kiss was broken and fell from her shaking hands. A handful of other girls present, including Joya’s Indian (as in Bombay) shop girl, gasped. Joya lost her cool for a moment because she had lost the sale also. But she quickly regained composure. “Hon! I’m not going to even ask what happened.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Well what on Earth?”

“Could you take me to the doctor? My car’s covered in blood and I’m a little shook up.”

“Well of course you are!” Joya said while imagining how Jordan, in another moment of desperation, had reached into his wallet and come up with her card (which she was beginning to regret having given him), again.

“But hon, I’m kinda runnin’ a store right now, but I guess…alright, gimme a minute.”

And she announced to the three or four disgusted women in her establishment that they should come back with the cards she was handing out to them for a 15 percent discount on all merchandise as an apology for the ghastly interlude to which Jordan had subjected them.

The ladies left with a decent story to tell at lunch. Joya dismissed her shop girl upon whom later discussion will be showered. She flitted here and there, closing the cash register, setting the alarm system and other tasks particular to the running of a small retail outlet. All the while, Jordan bled on her floor, on her counter, and on her patience. Joya was forthright as she fretted. “Ya know hon, I don’t mind helping folks out, but you’re becoming a bit of a pain in my ass.”

This had the opposite effect than she intended as Jordan laughed rather heartily.

Maybe it was the absurdity of the situation, or of his life, or perhaps the deleterious affects of too much adrenaline, but he laughed and laughed as she grabbed a bloody limb and guided him outside before locking the door behind her.

They walked toward her car and he laughed some more until, rather imperceptibly, and without announcement, the gasps of laughter became tears and she stopped to stroke his hair, touched by the emotion of it all. “Motherfuckers,” he blurted. “Goddamn Armenian, gang-banging motherfuckers. I kill ‘em.” He tried pulling himself together. “You’re a brave person so you won’t be needin’ ta kill anybody,” she said then, and noticing the slightest hitch in her voice, he looked up to see her barely weeping. She smiled at him with watery eyes that took on the aspect of wavy indigo banners of many messages. “Well what do you expect?” she said and kissed him on the bloody nose.

Joya walked up to a red convertible Cortina built in a time before their own memories. Precious moments were spent as they pulled the manual top down. Things were taking so long that Jordan thought he was going to die from blood loss, which of course he wasn’t.

They got in and the car showed its age with an exceptionally laborious ignition while Joya smiled bashfully. Soon they were into the slow, but ultimately progressing, stream of traffic. When stopped at a red light, Joya turned to her ward for a more detailed inspection of the mess. “Wow, it looks like that’s broken.”

“Yeah.”

“Well do me a favor,” and she rubbed his leg, “when ya get it fixed, have ‘em put it back just how it was ‘cause it was very handsome.”

“Jesus Christ,” echoed across the chambers of his mind, “was ever a more perfect woman put on the planet?”

At this point (and you hopefully knew this was coming) Jordan decided that he desperately needed a smoke. It was clearly a medical situation and medicine of the personal kind was definitely in order. “Got a ciggy-boo?” he asked his savior.

“Dja think ya should?”

With his face he said, “C’mon man.”

“Well alright,” and she banged the glove compartment, which contained no gloves, but many other items important to feminine survival, and a box of cigarettes that Joya handed to Jordan. “What the hell are these?” he said more delighted than anything else.

“You got hit in the nose, not the eye. Read.”

It was a tiny yellow box with a sunset behind a dome of religious and oriental aspect. “Dãrshãn,” the box read, “Classic Bidis Filter Cigarettes, Vanilla Flavored, Bombay-Los Angeles.”

Vanilla.

He asked the creamy girl, “Where did you hear about these?”

“Sadina, my gal at the shop turned me onto ‘em. They’re from India, like her.” And since he was naturally curious about tobacco product and not in the mood to be choosy, Jordan helped himself to a sampling.

What he came upon was a rough, almost cardboard stick, the color of shipping box carton. It was rolled thinner at one end than at the other and tied closed at the filter with tiny white thread.

It did indeed smell of vanilla, spiked with clove. Jordan thought that vanilla from India should be spiked.

It hit very mildly and affected the lungs not at all. The vanilla was strong on the lips, which he felt compelled to lick after each drag. It calmed him just like his own stuff did, or anyone else’s for that matter, save for Capri, which he was convinced, contained no tobacco at all.

He liked it.

Resting in the Coloradoan’s comforting aura Jordan’s presence of mind was mostly restored. “Listen,” he interrupted the calming silence she imposed. “I’d rather not go to the poor peoples’ hospital. I’ve got a new credit card I can ruin.”

“Oh and ahm not takin’ you there. After I saw that place I did a little research for the day when something happens to my appendix.” Jordan asked her if she didn’t have medical insurance. “Hon, nobody in America has medical insurance. It’s the ultimate expression of our rugged individualism. We don’t pay taxes and we try not to get hurt.”

We don’t pay taxes and we try not to get hurt. J. thought Randall could use Joya’s help in formulating his own overwrought thought.

“Ah found a medical center that takes outpatients with a little up-front money and I signed promise to pay the rest, and there’s two hundred dollars I can lend you.”

They rolled on for a moment before Joya broke in again.

“Heck, we don’t want you going to county, they kill old ladies there.”

Jordan felt like vomiting and though he was loath to let her see him doing something quite so unappealing, he had Joya pull over so he could do just that. “You must be in a little shock,” she posited once he was done and he nodded that, yes, he was.

Stabilized anew, Jordan considered her loan and decided the advantages of indebtedness to Joya would far outstrip those to be got with some pernicious and impersonal multinational bank. He thought her generosity to be of an uncommon kind and, as was often the case when in Joya’s presence, found himself at a loss for words during the remainder of the ride.

Chapter Sixteen

Clarisse and Corey were at it again about the baby. She had just come home from another grueling shift of “waitressing” as she called it, and was lying on her back with feet pressed to the wall, legs bent at 90-degree angles, in an effort to get the blood circulating. It was a trick of the trade, the ultimate effect of which remained inscrutable. The lady was in a particularly foul mood because of an invitation she had received. It was to an exposition of her primary rival in the wacky-looking furniture game – Trixie Marie.

The enterprising Trixie was climbing the ladder with astonishing efficacy. Clarisse was stuck somewhere between the second and third rung of the very same ladder. The invitation – sent in all good grace – just about put Clarisse through the roof. She wanted a show, she wanted to stop waitressing yet she couldn’t seem to do a thing about it.

The cause of the present argument between Corey and Clarisse, was not the usual one: the male’s reticence to enthusiastically embrace fatherhood. No. Corey, without malice or manipulation, had suddenly concluded that now was good a time as any. Life was happening. Clarisse’s familiar argument that poor Mexicans had lots of babies without concern for the financial ramifications had made inroads.

This turned out to be a revelation more profound and disturbing than she cared to admit. To wit: their childlessness had little to do with his reticence.

For once Corey had relented in this two-year fertility battle, the possibility of having a baby improved not a lick. To be sure, they were healthy amorous creatures with all their parts screwed on correctly. They liked sex with each other and practiced it with near religiosity.

He wanted the kid! He wanted to make her happy and begin the family as soon as circumstances permitted, which circumstances did not since they still couldn’t pay for the kid.

The lovely apartment in a great neighborhood filled with restaurants they labored day and night to maintain, two cars, clothes to match them, all conspired against the idea. Which was nothing new. What was new, was the fact these considerations had now become Clarisse’s. She wanted the baby, but not the outlying suburb peopled in polyester salesmen that might come with it.

Still, Corey knew a grinding disappointment in his abilities as white-knight-in-shining-armor was beginning to take very deep root in her and this frustrated him.

He was just a guy and nothing like a knight at all.

There are many essay-form books dealing with the emasculation of American men and Corey, if he read more, would have been a fan. Gone were the days, he would agree, when life presented heavy lifting, hunting, and warfare in distant lands against which a man’s mettle might be measured. The challenge of making enough money to give their women a celebrity’s life without celebrity was the source of much anxiety.

Standards were high and pretty tough to meet without being to the manner born. The generation at the controls was talented, prodigious, and so numerous that mere preparation and hard work played less a hand in the affairs of young couples than ever before. Those who had not been simply lucky were, well, shit out of luck.

These thoughts were running through Corey’s mind as Clarisse carped, when they were interrupted by a phone call. So great was the tension that the couple jumped at the shrill mechanized twittering. “Shit,” Corey said, “remember when they rang like sweet bells?”

She could not for she was just that much younger than him.

Corey answered. “It’s me Randall,” slithered across the fiberoptica.

“Randall…oh, hey! The bum philosopher.”

“Yes, and the world must know it.”

“What’s up?”

“I’ve got a comeback idea to try out on you.”

Corey looked back at his dour-faced wife and turned away. “I’m all ears. I’d love to hear about the addiction you’ve chosen to be felled by, only to rise Phoenix-Arizona-like from the ashes.”

“It’s smoking.”

“Smoking?”

There was a pause and it is a measure of just how much hardware there is in the world these days, and of how little intelligence there is to drive it, that Corey didn’t hang up. “Care to elaborate?”

“Meet me at the Argentine place. Let’s celebrate with a dinner.”

Corey glanced back at his wife and returned to the phone. “See you in an hour.”

Chapter Seventeen

At the medical clinic, Jordan signed the promise paper maybe to be used against him in court at some future date. Joya handed over ten crisp Andrew Jacksons. The bloody mess he was merited prompt attention. They took him down a hall to one of those rooms where you’re told to sit on an elevated, cot-style furnishing and quickly abandoned. This he did and not too much later a nurse came in with an intravenous bag that she hung on a steel pole above his head before grabbing an arm, which he promptly pulled back. “Don’t want it,” he said.

“Sir, it’s just a special solution to stabil-”

“Never felt more stable. I just want my nose checked.”

This threw the nurse for a mild loop, although Jordan was left with the impression that such medical shopping was not unheard of in these days of technologically driven, overpriced treatment. The nurse proceeded to a bank of drawers and pulled out a syringe. “What’s that for?” he asked.

“I’m going to give you a tetanus shot,” she responded.

“Don’t want it.”

She explained, somewhat testily, that he was bleeding from an open wound and that to be safe-

“How much is it?” he cut to the chase yet again.

“Well…I’m not sure,” she said, “I give care, I don’t set the prices,” and then she gave him a ballpark figure.

“Forget it. I’ll take my chances.” She shrugged an “it’s-your-life” shrug, returned the syringe to the place from whence it came and left without further attempts to pad Jordan’s bill.

He’d always accepted as rote that whatever was done to him in such situations was necessary and for his own good, yet here was this woman responding to his negatives with the obedience of a drug store clerk. He had rights. He had power!

Minutes passed, another nurse came in. The wait had not been long at all. Jordan mused that they’d deemed him a low-profit endeavor and were moving him through to make room for the richer injured. The second nurse directed him to follow her – and he did – down yet another hallway to what was unmistakably the x-ray facility.

She left him sitting on another elevated cot with crackle-y white paper and shortly thereafter a man in green scrubs and the, by now, all too familiar shower-cap-like hat entered. “We’re going to take a few x-rays,” he stated the obvious to Jordan who, up until that moment, had not considered what capturing irradiated images of his nose would entail. The technical assistant – as he remembered such people being called – moved him over into a dark, adjacent cubby and told him to lie down on his stomach. He covered the patient with a very heavy, body-length blanket which J. knew only too well was designed to protect him from the perils of certifiably dangerous levels of radioactivity. Near his head was what struck him to be the camera lens and he was directed to stick his chin out so that the contraption could get a good shot at his proboscis. This he did. “Raise your head just a little more so the nose protrudes,” ordered the orderly and this he also did, not without thinking how ridiculous he looked and (again) how undignified medical treatment was in general.

There was a loud noise akin to a freight elevator arriving and halting at a loading dock, and then a click. The technical assistant approached, moved some kind of plate around in the machine’s entrails and, with both hands, tilted Jordan’s head a bit and went back to take another shot. When this was done Jordan, somewhat laboriously under the weight of the anti-radiation blanket, rose to his feet. “Where are you going?” said the guy in the shower cap. “I’m not done.”

“Sure you are,” said Jordan, thinking back to his stay at the hospital that ultimately would not treat him and what it charged for the x-rays, which were known to be inconclusive where appendicitis was concerned. “I’ve got eight more to take,” Jordan was told by a voice that shrunk as he departed. “Not at these prices you don’t. I just want to be sure the nose is broken. It looks broken. It feels broken and you’ve got two shots to confirm it. If you can’t, call me in for one or two more.”

There was no response. Jordan came out to the waiting room because he was tired of waiting and informed the nurse of his decision. She said if he could wait a bit longer Doctor Singh would have a look at the x-rays and the nose itself. “Another Dr. Singh?” he wondered to himself and looked at Joya who waved her box of Dãrshãn and smiled contentedly. “You doin’ okay hon?”

“Just peaches.”

So Jordan, feeling rather in command of things despite his continuous run of bad luck, returned to the first room and sat back atop the crackle-y white paper. After a while, an affable doctor of subcontinental origins entered, put some rubber gloves on and pressed the nose in question for a bit.

The upshot was this: Jordan had been lucky. No deviated septum and no broken blood vessels. He was able to breathe and that was always good. Cosmetically he would be left with a little bump as trophy and testament to his survival. It would not dramatically alter, as Joya had worried, the landscape of his face. Jordan asked about nose jobs, a topic for which he possessed no information, and was informed that they were expensive and involved a “clean” re-breaking of the nose followed by a resetting of the same. This business of intentionally breaking bones deepened his concern about the wisdom of certain accepted medical practices.

Under the circumstances, the doctor said, “I rec-o-mmend yu just go awn with yaw life and fowgit abowd it.”

Jordan shrugged and reflected on how neither would be easy. Still, he liked the idea of having come out of the whole disaster with the minimum physical damage.

Psychically, J. knew he’d be screwed up in some way. But that was a concern for the future. Presently, he looked forward to a pleasant ride home with his lovely new guardian angel. “Do you smoke Dãrshãn?” he then asked the doctor.

“I dunt smooke it oil,” the man answered via the sing-songy accent into which his tongue stretched and twisted the English tongue. “It’s nut good faw yu.”

What a difference a few hours can make. Not too long before, Jordan verily feared for his life at the hands of savage gargoyles straight from the underworlds. Now he was heading home in the cool twilight, wrapped in a big woolen blanket long enough to link him with the lovely Joya, whose curves and strong jaw and soft accent were all for his private (visual) delectation. She emptied the last Dãrshãns, one for him and one for her (he thought warmly inside). The hills to their right twinkled with low-lying galaxies of home lights. “What a shame,” he thought to himself, “that houses cannot be fired by starlight.” He lit up and did the same for Joya – always an intimate gesture between boys and girls of a certain age. He decided to take advantage of the strategic position into which the beating had thrust him. “Indian cigarettes, Indian doctor, Indian shop girl…looks like Indian is the day’s theme.”

Joya knew she liked Jordan and things had worked out okay, but hanging around him had given her a true sense of just how dangerous the city – life even – could be and it upset her. These sentiments she synthesized into the following response: “I should think beatin’ was the day’s theme.”

Her copilot thought this remark rather out of character. He decided that you’ve got to take a little bad with the mostly good and let it pass. “So how’d you end up hiring the Indian girl, what’s her name? – Sadina?” Jordan excavated, remembering how sexy he’d found her, and thereby did a little prep work, just in case, for the future. Joya knew where this was going and, as was just said, knew she liked Jordan, but had pretty much had her fill for the day. “I hired her because she works cheap.”

“Really,” he dug himself in a little deeper, “and why’s that?”

“Because I let her lick my pussy when she asks.”

Jordan, to cover up the awkwardness that had fallen upon them like the plush velvety night itself, took a long draw on the cigarette only to conclude that Dãrshãns didn’t have nearly enough kick to them.

They hardly talked after that. Joya dropped Jordan off at his car, which sat in front of her store with a parking ticket stuck to the windshield.

Chapter Eighteen

Inspectors Diaz and Thorpe had worked themselves into a nasty mood by striking up a conversation about how dreary it could be making monogamous love to the first woman they had ever bedded down.

Not that they were two-timers. Nope, even if they had wanted to, neither could afford the high cost of maintaining a mistress, nor find a crack of time in the solid wall of responsibility their dutifully adopted lifestyles presented them with.

They were simply wrestling with the overstimulation of sexual desire that both genders are subjected to, through an infinite number of techniques both surreptitious and obvious, every single damn day of their lives. Stringy sandy-haired models with honeyflows pitched intimate clothing, stunning actresses shed their clothes on giant screens, pop pornography, underdressed and well-nourished thirteen-year olds and God-knows-what-else had them in a perpetual state of agitation.

Anyhow, it didn’t matter. The inspectors were married and that was all that could be said as far as the foul mood was concerned.

Meantime they had been making their way to a Korean restaurant where the folks mostly adhered to a self-imposed code of behavior rooted in home country mores.

These Koreans resented local authorities disrupting their timeless proclivities and were not civil when confronted.

Diaz drove carefully because, “certain people that are Koreans in Koreatown don’t drive very well,” which was expressed in this roundabout fashion thanks to his run through diversity classes. The business in the crosshairs of their enforcement efforts had behaved similarly to the French restaurant crosstown. It too had regularly flouted the Smoke-Free Workplace Act and chosen to pay the incrementally growing citations promptly and without grumbling. Unfortunately for Diaz and Thorpe, the proprietress was out on the sidewalk doing nothing in particular when she saw their familiar (and unmistakable) red-and-white cruiser turn onto her street. They saw that she saw them and saw that she ran inside her place to warn all smokers of the coming raid. The big catch to this Smoke-Free Workplace Act, the bête noir of the inspectors’ existence, was that a citation could only be issued if and when a smoker was caught in the act. As such, Diaz and Thorpe more often than not walked into a room with a healthy weave of tobacco byproduct pushing at the ceiling and no one beneath it bearing the slightest evidence of guilt. The most popular techniques of subterfuge were the flat ashtray under the dinner plate, the extinguished butt in the palm-sized tin mint (curiously effective) box, and the vomit-inducing cigarette-and-wet-napkin combo.

So they blew off the Korean establishment and decided to hit another regular scofflaw up the block a bit. What they could not know was that the proprietress who had successfully sussed out their approach was going to call and alert her competitors – six restaurants and/or bars in all – but Diaz and Thorpe soon found out and threw up their hands.

You can pass all the laws in the world, but if you don’t pay someone to ensure they are obeyed, you’ve done nothing at all.

The fact is that these two gentlemen represented the entirety of local efforts for bringing profligate enterprises to heel. The absurdity of this pair chasing smokers throughout a city with thousands of bars and restaurants was lost on them, its obviousness aside.

Much was made of the law when passed by its sponsor on the City Council and those whose support he’d horse-traded for. There was a big to-do with media and fact-sheets and speeches about the health of the commonweal.

Months later, however, during grueling negotiations in the budget committee, nobody remembered any of it and the act’s enforcement was funded with crumbs. But it takes man-hours, equipment, training, uniforms, administrative support – an entire little company – to get such a job done.

And so Thorpe and Diaz where the extent of the law’s expression. And they had just been mocked by a group of businesspeople normally at odds with one another. And to this date they had been successfully thwarted in their efforts to see the letter of the law satisfied to its fullest extent.

They continued driving through the seemingly endless streets; Thorpe, at one point, requesting that Diaz lighten up on the particulars of what went on in bed between he and the little woman, who was barely either thing anymore.

Chapter Nineteen

Corey found Randall brimming with energy and excitement although, as a counterpart in this dubious venture, he himself was more circumspect. “Let me get this straight.

You’re going to make a comeback from smoking. It’s going to be a brave story that will get all kinds of public attention and lend celebrity to you and, hence, the bum philosophy concept.”

“And then you’ll find ways to distribute it through the great information revolution and your knowledge of its tools.”

Corey sighed, “I need a cigarette.”

It was late, the crowd was thin with a few Spanish-speaking patrons, and so this subcommittee of the larger incorporation of co-smokers was permitted to sort out its affairs indoors. Although his wife was a smoker, Corey had hidden from her the extent of his Marlboros crush. There is an instinctive impulse in a wife to keep a husband healthy as possible so as to promote the achievement of their mutual success (as she envisions it). And so Corey was terrified Clarisse should learn of his new addiction/pleasure despite the unadorned truth she herself was a militant puffer.

His choice of tobacco product could be attributed wholly to marketing. The famed cowboys upon which Marlboro had staked its sales for what seemed like centuries hit Corey right where he hurt; in that place which told him there was something thoroughly inauthentic about his life.

It was part and parcel of a profound respect he and others from his generation had for an earlier edition of men who worked with their hands branding cows, beating sheet metal, and similar activities emblematic of a rough-and-tumble American life gone by.

Corey wished he were a cowboy and, well, what with all those giant billboards of Western folk in ten-gallon hats grimly gripping the stick between taught lips, Marlboro seemed like the next best thing.

It was a beginner’s smoke to be sure. In time, he’d move on to making something of a more personal statement with his choice of poison, just like his wife who, as we know, enjoyed daddy’s cigarettes – fucky stripes.

“It’s a beaut of an idea…how the hell did you come up with it?”

“Such are the rigors of bum philosophy. Sitting around, man, smoking and thinking, taking part in these dying arts. Realizing that the American leviathan, with tacit approval of the sacred majority has turned its fury upon smokers despite its earlier commiseration with the nicotine peddlers.”

“That’s true,” Corey concurred. “Used to be that big tobacco had a free hand in a hoodwinking and, I guess, murdering its customers.”

“Correct man, correct. Not to mention the invaluable aid of an addictive product and a lot of sexy salespeople. But that’s all over now you see. It’s gone the way of the epic national struggle, the forced departure for foreign borders, the escape by train to a renegade state’s protection.”

Randall clearly suffered from the same nostalgia for more adventurous, hands-on times Corey and Jordan did. “Now, the prior generation – a generation that largely enjoyed its fit of bacchic living – has decided its children will not. Theirs is the parsimony of reformed rakes and government at all levels is rife with the type; folks freaked out by the fact their lives have turned out just like everyone else’s before them.”

While Randall spoke, Corey stared at the cigarette, his hot new God, and marveled at the way it burned so quickly and evenly down the ivory shaft. “Yeah,” he jumped in, focused on the smoke lilting lightly, lifting. “They’re bummed that all the easy sex and rock music and banner-waving politics hasn’t saved them from the eternal stuff – marriage and mortgages. They’re just like everyone else has ever been.”

“Same as it ever was,” Randall chimed in for pop poetic effect. “The world has changed them more so than the other way around, which they had promised themselves would not happen. Now, man, you’ve got doctors of medicine, opinion-brokers, loquacious senators, attention-starved state attorneys general, commanders-in-chief fond of easy victories – and God knows who else man – joined in a rare display of public comity. That it isolates a minority for extinction never crosses their minds nor the minds of those suffering its consequences.

Much to his surprise, Corey was thoroughly enjoying the evening. The second cigarette – the one following the meal – was the first he had truly savored, ever; a sign his addiction was kicking-in nicely. The very fact of his smoking twisted him into a harmonic convergence with the hyper-thoughtful Randall and this exercise of chewing over (what seemed to him) certain larger questions afoot in the land was so rare as to be a form a flattery. He’d always been a safe citizen and never dreamed that trading off bits of his health would gain him access to the coolness of bohemia.

But wait. Thinking back on junior high school it all crystallized. Sure he could have. On any day Corey might have endured a few awkward moments of initiation by approaching the scruffy, long-haired, denim-wearing kids at the schoolyard baseball backstop and become a part of this time-honored western tradition. Then again, considering the strict nature of his parents, maybe not.

Anyhow it didn’t matter. The smoke was soothing, the conversation engaging, and his budding relationship with Randall evolving into an almost sensible proposition.

“So smokers,” the philosopher pressed on, “are subject to a strange ostracizing, especially when you consider that what they do is legal.”

“For now,” said Corey, which pleased Randall because they were in agreement on a fundamental point – that things were getting worse.

“That’s right man,” answered Randall, never one to let the conversation run too far out of his control. “And all of this that we’re saying would give my comeback a socially useful, progressive subtext where individual liberties are concerned.”

Corey was having so much fun that he pulled the conversation right back into his own mouth. “Sure, smoking’s unhealthy, but talk to me about how dangerous merely driving a car us. They won’t make that illegal.”

Establishing the protocol for what was to be a healthy partitioning of tasks between them, Randall tugged things back to his end of the table. “The anti-smoking campaign is marked by something less than reason and more like repression, man. A witch hunt!

Corey deeply admired Randall’s ability to tie up an argument with such aphorisms and it was at the root of his faith in the dandy’s ability to create an idea people would pay for.

Randall’s conclusion lent the meeting an air of historic importance. There they were, two insignificant thinkers at the outset of a crusade which, commercial pretensions aside, might set right a wrong visited upon American society by itself.

It was a nifty turn, this marriage of market device to things warm-and-soulful, and it probably wouldn’t work. Like most concepts put forth by braying young turks, it was an old one that had proven more elegant on paper than in practice.

Still, Corey reasoned mightily that, even if they were to fail financially, their career trajectories might actually gain a kind of historic arc.

He was beginning to think like an artist in his craving for the attention of unknown persons, which is what usually happens. In fact, one of two things can occur in such couplings of head and heart (from different bodies). Either the logical man is thoroughly undermined by the texture of an artistic life, or the logical man crushes the delicate disorder of the artist’s existence. It cannot be otherwise, the power of one being spiritual and intangible, that of the other, material, tactile, and rooted in real-time.

Perhaps such thoughts occupied each man as the restaurant was slowly enveloped in the ghosts of the Tango King, Gardel. It was dark and golden brown and wooden. The dinner was accented with almonds and capers, seared beef and beads of reflected candlelight shivering to burst from the mirrors constraining them.

There was a melancholy violin being played by a fellow with a beard, drawing his bow across diners’ flaccid heartstrings, his face accenting the feelings he presented.

He was accompanied by a man on a keyboard that made more sounds than it was fair for a legitimate musical instrument to do, but who, in any case, ably performed the task of providing brooding backdrops to the violinist’s circles of sadness. The other customers were also absorbed in the amber energy. Some watched the players, some the drifting strains of their cigarettes’ death. Others reflected into the deep purple pleadings of their glasses of medium-priced Cabernet. A woman burned the tips on a lock of her hair in a candle. And all of it was the good alchemy that almost always affects love and food and war and poesy.

“It’s all in the mix,” Randall bum-philosophized, “and the mix is very much luck. A little bit of this and a bittle lit of that.”

Clearly not the cigarette talking. Corey thought it best to pull Randall in if he could and get to the point. “But what the hell is it that you plan to do? I mean, how are you going to make it all work?”

“I’m still sorting it out, but basically I’m going to almost ruin myself with smoking. I’m going to smoke and smoke and smoke until I hit a tailspin. You, meanwhile, will be drawing peoples’ attention to it. You’re the plumber kiddo, the salesman; exaggerating the drama as much as possible. We’ll create a storyline of personal tragedy that people can witness, watch me wallow, pilloried by the same forces that will eventually trumpet my comeback.”

You need a plan in life. The wine, the smoke, the heavy meat, the need to find a way of succeeding all served to mute Corey’s skepticism regarding how Randall would achieve such dramatic results with something quite so subtle as a cigarette. But he asked, “It’s not heroine you know, cigarette smoke. You’re talking a lot of smoking and you still might be fine for a long time.”

“I’m still working that out, too,” Randall admitted. “You must remember, Corey, the great ideas only look solid and unimpeachable in hindsight. There was no map for them and the zany trips of painful discovery their creators took through the carnival of the world.”

Corey noticed how the place had emptied out and he extinguished a Marlboro that should have been put to death at least two minutes earlier. Randall took the signal and wound down his discourse. “We need people we don’t even know. How’s that for cruelty?”

Corey was no philosopher, but the evening had kick-started sleeping parts of his brain to strenuous exertion. “Maybe it’s not cruelty at all. Maybe that’s what brings people together.”

And in saying so he demonstrated the positive outlook of the business-inclined person with a beat on where the money is, and for whom the question of death is to be dealt with at a much later date.

Chapter Twenty

Jordan was driving and ruminating on the news Joya had shocked him with regarding her (as they say) sexual proclivities. He was thinking about how all the guys in the little group (and God knows who else) were falling head over for this gal who, odds had it, would never be interested in any them.

All of which was kind of common around town, for Joya was what they called a Lipstick Lesbian. Without wandering too far through the minefield that gay culture can be for the moderately indoctrinated, let stand the observation that this thriving local fauna (The Lipsticks, that is) struck some observers as representing a step up (or forward) in the social evolution of female homosexuality. The ladies’ predecessors, thrust into the role of trailblazing rebels, projected a necessary surfeit of anger as response to those who disapproved of the way they satisfied themselves between the sheets, or wherever. Which is to say they had a lot of attitude. They wore their sexuality on their sleeves, made it speak in political strophes, and this yielded some very catchy slogans.

But that was all over (for the most part). Blessed with the space carved out for them by these more graceless antecedents, Joya’s class of girl-girl lovers was of a completely different public profile. Cosmetically, the toughness had been excised and style lines settled along the standard pretty girl requirements. They came awfully close to a lesbianism injected into the male psyche by certain magazines that cooked up exciting visual scenarios of delicate young women pleasuring each other.

Jordan was thinking all of this stuff when he noticed a low-set car with four heads bobbing in it. Fearfully, he slowed down, lamenting the proliferation of Armenian gang members throughout the city.

In the abject, terror-filled aftermath of his beating, the immediate effect on Jordan’s world view resulted in a blanket condemnation, hatred even, for Armenians and everything they touched. This was heightened by the fact that his story, despite the helicopter overhead and the traffic jam that had inconvenienced thousands, had never been picked up by local news outlets. His sense of injustice, already inflamed at the hammering itself, had been piqued to a fine-tuning. Jordan believed he had been the product of a reverse discrimination; that had it been an Armenian pounded into hamburger meat by three suburban college grads, the news would have burned across the prairie in minutes.

He returned to more pleasant thoughts on The Lipsticks and of how they had confidently stepped out of the sexual ghettoes to move assuredly through the alcoholic watering holes and gastronomic grazing places frequented by the larger population of crossfuckers.

And, to get to the point, you couldn’t tell they were lesbians. They didn’t make a big show of kissing or holding hands. They were very relaxed.

Uninterested in men, The Lipsticks were not threatened by them, either. Instead, they interacted openly and frankly. The duller sex, in the dark, was drawn to their sexiness and too surprised at their engaging, fun-loving ways to be suspicious.

Other women, such as Yvonne, not picking up lesbian signals, were left vulnerable to the marvelous flavor that laced the air around these exotics.

The low-riding car with four heads was moving so slow as to cause Jordan’s car to cough for lack of gas as he insisted upon a healthy distance between them.

None of the above (and certainly not the Armenian material) is meant to suggest that Joya – delightful and unaffected as she was – was so innocent as to be unaware of the affect her novelty sexuality was having upon those around her.

She was quite aware, and what’s more, thought nothing of finding advantage in it.

Savvy, she skirted the line between flirtation and outright provocation so perfectly that she was rarely accused of romantic betrayal (although Jordan could not help but feel just a bit stung). More common was the sense of slight to the fact that Joya had refused to fuck them, physically. For we must never forget the extent to which perfectly normal-appearing people are damaged and twisted in ways strange enough to invite their own misery as satisfaction. The lanky blonde knew this, too. One time, upon being informed an admirer was crying over her untimely exit, she matter-of-factly responded: “That’s what girls do.” Lipsticks could say things like this about women (publicly and for the record) that men were no longer permitted, and this honesty restored a lost balance to the running commentary on the sexes, their relations with opposites, and between themselves.

With his car practically stalling from fuel deprivation and the driver behind prodding him with less-than-polite taps of the horn, Jordan decided to make a break for it and blast by the four heads in that low-riding death machine. That his vehicle was ill-suited to such feats of speed and braggadocio became all too clear and J., not given to material covetousness, again considered the myth of a well-paying corporate job as his wreck labored past the haunting automotive specter.

Among the things he did not know yet was that her barley-and-oats-beauty notwithstanding, Joya was as afraid as the next girl. There was fear of her situation as a gay woman in a world unfriendly enough as it was to females who were not gay.

Generous, her fear was for all beings, four-legged, black-skinned or even – and in this she was radical – the white guy. Yes, the world could be, no, was a cold and unforgiving place and she, a spawning salmon of ideas, must needs swim upstream to where an edge could be taken.

Joya was a survivor. Yet she survived in the most natural of ways, without any unseemly scratching and clawing.

She never confessed her age and possessed a certain bouquet of womanliness signifying a vintage ranging anywhere from 20 to 40 and which was no help in unlocking any of the many secrets that floated around this woman like a full-bodied halo, burned off by vanilla bean and jungle spice.

The racing sentiments caused Jordan to ramp-up to a respectable 65-miles-per-hour clip and he drew even with the low-riding car. He could not resist stealing a glance at the cancerous samplings of Armenian ganghood and prepared the appropriate scowl before turning. What he saw were four smiling elderly people cruising an old Dodge Dart in dire need of new suspension at a speed folks in their age group are known to torment the rest of the populace with.

Chapter Twenty-one

It was a tech mixer. Yvonne casually ran her catering crew through its well-trained and disciplined paces.

As it is for so many of us, the thing Yvonne made her money doing was insufficient to engaging the full level of her intelligence. On this day she was bored and more in search of a man than anything else. The question of why was one she would not have been able to answer.

And anyhow it didn’t matter, for she was at the mixer and the mixer is the matter under observation.

When it comes to questions of class, men find themselves willing to transcend all barriers (downward) where women are concerned. By her own self-critical standards Yvonne considered herself something of a server of people, underemployed, no matter how many times her acumen as a broker of tastes and small business person was lauded. She felt a server because she was made to by her clients. Compounding this annoyance was the fact she was a pretty server, which triggered all manner of dark impulses in others. And so powerful men might lower themselves to talk with her, but she was not a prep school girl and was ever-mindful of the reasons why.

The attendees were coifed, current men of industry, such as it was, and able to talk movies and certain popular books. They were largely of a common generation, save for a few patrician septuagenarians doddering about, still airing-out their avarice. A typical conversation between herself and men of this gauge was limited to three or four forms, at least two of them being about money. They were way too much like one another and Yvonne shivered. The grown-up world was just like high school with everyone fearful of the terrible swelling sea of ideas, hiding in each other’s shadow.

She decided to step outside the hotel at which this compendium was being held for a smoke.

Corey, also on hand, although proactively in search of contacts and information, was running his own critical commentary on the mixer through his own mind.

For him the gathering was made up of a generation that had been a spoiled and, paradoxically, ambitious one. The big trucks they drove, the cut-cool suits, the perfect blend of tempered maturity coupled with a waggish, insistent youthful presence were all hallmarks. It was an envied and criticized generation, selfishness being the primary accusation. But in their defense it should be noted that the prerogatives they were jealous of were prerogatives granted by the same elders now so outspoken in their desire to revoke them.

Corey, who was working his way through unconscious meets and greets at the side of the room opposite Yvonne, decided he, too, wanted a cigarette. And so, through the shared burdens of pleasure and addiction, a unique alliance was formed within the intense political workings that were the primary substance of this club of smokers.

Her immediate response was a wide and bright smile so spontaneous and genuine that it served to remind the worst curmudgeon of how beguiling humanity can be and – despite everything – worthy of our love.

“Hey,” Corey smiled under her irresistible warmth. He snapped his fingers for effect and said, “Yvonne, right?” She was used to being remembered and dismissed the finger-snap as evidence that he found her cute and was hiding the fact (which he was).

It was mentioned earlier that, in addition to this empowering self-belief, Yvonne possessed a trait crucial to success in the velvet jungle our cast of players moved about in – persistence.

When her fortune depended upon the graces of another, as they do for all of us, that person became the object of an onslaught so relentless as to reduce their reticence to empty essence. She called and visited and sent flowers in such a shameful way that her actions became transparent, which made them seem honest and (almost) alright. She eliminated the element of judgment from the gatekeeper’s decision-making process. She eliminated, in fact, the whole process. She was 100 percent confident of her eventual, total success. In such a hurry was she that obstacles were embraced and anticipated, because they clearly represented the next step.

Yvonne lived like a violent and speedy video game in which you must quickly process a few options before deciding which of the fast-approaching ghouls to blow away.

And since this drive towards all things she wanted career-wise was usually successful, Yvonne had never gotten it into her head that the same approach does not always work when it comes to love. That, in fact, such an approach is actually antipathetic to the intertwining of two erotic forces.

But back to the couple. “How are yous” were exchanged and niceties before the conversation moved into deeper realms of interest.

“So,” she asked pretty-as-you-please, “how’s your little club?”

“Club?”

“Yeah, all those people you hang out with on the sidewalk outside restaurants smoking cigarettes. Your sidewalk smoking club.”

Let it be recorded how the name – the finished idea – was born with Yvonne (following a tiny adjustment) and also that Corey’s passion for her began, in earnest, with the sharing of a cigarette.

Chapter Twenty-two

Jordan had a parking ticket and a loan he wanted to pay quickly so that Joya didn’t think he was turned-off by the fact she was lesbian (which she was not at all worried about). He asked for extra hours at Java World and was surprised to learn how such graces were not so easily granted. His boss had some doubts about J.’s appearance, which was presently marred by a shiner under each eye from the Armenian fist his face had run into. Again, the victim is getting the blame. In Jordan’s case it was a subtle thing. Obviously he’d been the object of some very rough treatment and this somehow stained him with the darkness of his tormentors. He begged and cajoled without going into the financial difficulties, correctly reckoning that it could only further diminish his stature in the employer’s eyes.

The boss finally gave in so that Jordan, making just below what we call a “living wage,” was now working some 12 hours a day – minus time for cigarette breaks – foaming up cappuccinos, tossing Caesar salads, and running to the refrigerator for soy milk in cases where the regular stuff ran afoul of the dairy repellent whom, in turn, ran afoul of everyone else.

The long hours tested his patience, for retail is a very, as they say “people-oriented” business, and people – even when your heart bursts with warmth for humanity as does J.’s – can be a real pain in the ass.

“Choice,” Jordan learned again and again, is a highly valued consumer commodity and no amount of choice can satiate the desire for more choice. Filling the vast hole that exists in modern life is an endless variety of the same products.

At Java World, there were 43 different kinds of “drinks” (as such concoctions were dubbed in the little coffeehouse universe). In addition to the standard latte, cappuccino, and house-blend – all of which could be had with the aforementioned soy milk, no-fat, or low-fat, or fatty milk – were a variety of pure espresso servings in accelerating doses up to four shots, the effect of which was just this side a line of cocaine.

There was a “Raspberry Chocolate Truffle,” combining sugar from chocolate and sugar from raspberry syrup and sugar from the whipped crème over a base of black tar squeezed out from the imported Italian coffeemaker. There was, too, the “Supreme Orange Dream,” bane of the American Diabetes Association; a complicated labor requiring an orange invariably ordered up by three daughters of a local business luminary in the middle of the Sunday morning crush – and nobody else.

Did the boss need to cater in such a way to one small family? If they came 52 Sundays a year he did.

“Fifty-two weeks a year times three Supreme Orange Dreams, Jordan,” the boss barked. “Do the math.” Ah the math. Learn the math kiddies.

The rare person who came into the coffee shop and asked for a “coffee” always caused the staff to turn toward the counter in surprise. There was never a shortage of people asking for something not offered on the multi-colored chalkboard behind the baristas; people who exasperated Jordan to no end so that things did not always go smoothly on his shift. One workout queen asked for a no-fat, de-caff latte without foam and he presented her with an empty cup. The sly humor escaped her. Two other young ladies drove him crazy with nearly ten minutes of personal requests until he let the term “Barbies” slip from his lips at the cash register.

For these infractions of the-customer-is-always-right golden rule he was mildly upbraided by his employer who – despite a vested interest in the clientele’s temporary happiness – was not too far-removed from Jordan’s opinions after years of serving folks food and libations.

Jordan’s job was made much easier by the presence of Carlos. This transplant of Zacatecas state had the place wired. He was the first to arrive in the morning. In his possession would be a giant bag of fresh bagels picked up on the way in and a single small bag with a garlic bagel, for a particular customer who requested the same thing every day.

Which brings up another matter. Until he had been reduced to working at the coffee shop, Jordan had never fully understood the extent to which certain people are creatures of grinding, never-changing habit.

But back to Carlos. He was trusted with opening the cash register, while Jordan was relegated to setting up the plastic tables and chairs outdoors and whipping the heavy crème with sugar. Whereas Jordan often grew flustered and walked away when the rush of people needing a fix became overwhelming, Carlos was an island of calm.

Alternately coaxing patience from the clientele and cranking out quality drinks at breakneck pace, he simultaneously directed other staffers in the toasting of bagels and slicing of tomatoes until the consumer-produced panic had finally subsided.

Indispensable to the business he was paid a minimum wage, which did not permit him to feed a family and pay his bills, as reward. He did not, however, complain about such things.

Rather inversely, something in the Zacatecan sowed a seed of pity for the misplaced, almost middle-aged white guy with no wife and no kids, and made sure little harm or stress ever flowed Jordan’s way. He did it for Jordan and he did it for himself, mindful of the fact his boss was truly glad to have someone who wasn’t Mexican serving his overwhelmingly white clientele. There are enclaves; places made up of particular kinds of people, sometimes called communities, other times cultures, more times cliques. And every time a customer asked that he or one of the other Mexicans employed at Java World not prepare their food, Carlos knew he was in an enclave, a community, a clique not his own.

Anyhow, when Carlos saw the condition of Jordan’s face he knew the score exactly.

There are almost too many ways to damage one’s visage, but he recognized a good beating by fist when he saw one. If Jordan had been in a car accident and smashed his face into the windshield he might not have projected the pungent residue of sheer fear which washed over Carlos like bandwaves from a radio tower. “Jou got beet up, eh?”

“How could you tell?”

“Fuck up jou nose pretty good anh?”

“Do ya have to restate the obvious?”

Carlos loved the erudition Jordan offered up in his simple, machine-gun-fast rejoinders. It was an English he was not accustomed to hearing and the Zacatecan listened closely to each and every droll muttering. For unlike those mostly spoiled members of The Sidewalk Smokers Club, Carlos possessed the newly arrived immigrant’s gut understanding that America was, with a little self-improvement, essentially out there for whomever wanted it. That there were things for the taking. That thrift, hard work, and other of the old church-girl virtues were held in a higher estimation than any kind of altruistic, communal sense of belonging, or caring, or what have you. That you dreamed for yourself and so he wanted to learn.

“Gang?”

“Armenian Power.”

Carlos laughed. Pitched in a daily struggle to survive, subject of an entirely anti-intellectual dominion, he was not held to the standards of universal harmony and political oversight the college-educated were. As such, his reaction was a pure and unfettered racial one. “Chinga los Armenios,” he said with a recoiled smirk for spitting. In fact, he had to step outside and relieve his mouth of the sour saliva summonsed from his glands by mere thoughts of Armenian gang members. Stepping back in, Carlos inquired as to the particulars of the assault, which clearly fascinated him, all the while nodding familiarly. Jordan got the sense his coworker was something of an expert in the varieties and techniques utilized by different criminal cells across the region: a kind of military scientist to the gang world.

Something in him felt comforted by this sharing with a colleague – such as he was.

His own crew did not want to be darkened by his misfortune. He made them think about their problems and Randall believed that when you think about your problems, they become problems. Carlos, by contrast, took Jordan’s recounting in stride, mindful of what such violence means, but aware that Jordan had been spared any tangible tragedy. This is what comforted Jordan, the expert opinion which, without saying a thing, made clear that all was well and that such threats hang over those less fortunate than himself – woman, child, the flowering and fading alike – all the time in the places where people like Carlos lived. He was grateful to know Carlos in that moment and he returned his mind to the hospital bed for a moment, filled with a deeper comprehension for his roommate there and the obvious agony felt by those family members who came to see him motivated by love and concern.

Carlos’ fellow-feeling got the best of him and he transcended a barrier common to whites and their minority servants by confiding in Jordan. “I have un cuerno de chivo in my car.” J. did not possess the linguistic tools to grasp what this meant, and so he shrugged in the same confidential and knowing way Carlos had done to that point. “Jou wann see?”

It was early, the shop had been promptly and efficiently appointed for the morning’s rush. Their boss had not yet arrived to gum up the works with his requisite hour of personal engagement with the customers. Jordan didn’t know what he was agreeing to, but was also caught up in the deeper level of camaraderie that suddenly existed between the men. Now they had two things in common.

So they went out to Carlos’ car, an extremely well cared-for El Camino (there are grains of truth to stereotypes) with attendant embellishments particular to Mexican-American culture, which will not be described here in deference to the etiquette which frowns upon the highlighting of such idiosyncracies by someone of distinct origin.

The flatbed contained a lockbox chained up to the rear of the cab. Carlos opened it and there, unadorned before Jordan’s eyes lie an AK-47 rapid fire rifle – in all its gleaming muscularity.

“That’s a machine gun,” Jordan said with a tone normally saved for utterance before great works of art or slain persons. Carlos nodded. “Jou know I’m a very well known cholo in Inglewood.” Jordan nodded in the affirmative although he had not known anything of the kind. Carlos read his thoughts. “Jeh, I teld you it once already.”

“So,” Jordan moved on, “why do you call it that?”

“Cuerno de chivo?”

“Right, cuerno de chivo,” Jordan was able to roll his “rrrrr’ in cuerno thanks to a trick once taught him by a short-lived relationship with a Latina girlfriend. Carlos was not impressed. He wiped his hand across the curved magazine of the firearm. “Goat’s Horn,” he smiled, a happy pirate.

“Ah,” was the best J. could do.

There was a pause as they admired the instrument of death. It was, Jordan thought, an advertisement for good killing. It lay upon a delicate piece of chamois, which Carlos pulled free and used it to erase smudges with a tenderness usually reserved by a mother for her child. He shook it fluffy and placed it underneath the gun anew.

He turned the lid down and secured the lockbox. “So, I’m telleen jou now, eef jou eber wantto get dose guys, jou tell me and cuerno de chivo is for dem.” Jordan wasn’t sure if Carlos was offering to lend him the gun. This would have been of little use since he hadn’t the first idea of how such a thing worked, although if pressed in a pinch he’d start with the trigger. His comrade in street fighting once again read his mind. “I am fast with these. Jou wanto get dem, I go with jou.”

So fresh in his mind was the adrenaline-pumped fear and anger which Jordan had felt just two days before that he almost set a date and time by which he and Carlos would cruise neighborhoods surrounding the scene of the crime (as it were) and lay bloody waste to the three assholes who had made his sleep a difficult a place to be. But his desire for a return to the normal and grinding life he’d once known got the best of him and he responded with a simple, but heartfelt, “Thanks Carlos. I’ll let you know if it comes to that.”

Chapter Twenty-three

Randall was working on a new installation to his signature work seeking that elusive and common link between all humans.

“Our problems makes us one,” was the root idea. He was presently working out the related premise that money was a social dissolvent because (according to bum philosophy): “When you have money, you don’t need people.”

He was talking about eliminating the trading-off of one’s emotional self in exchange for help (with whatever). When you had money you just paid for help and dispensed with professions of camaraderie or promises to return the favor. Money pushed people away from one another.

It was a bitter bum philosophy, for Randall, it must be pointed out (again), was broke and stagnated in his dream by the lack of money his philosophical investigations had produced. And he was harsh against the rich for not sharing more with the literary community in particular.

Meanwhile, he had just purchased a series of different tobacco products with which he planned to plunge his person into perdition. And he was doing it alone, not unlike a crackhead or heroine junky too far-gone to be joined in the trip by someone close.

The radio was running and an ambitious city attorney with his eye on the mayoralty was conducting a press conference regarding an investigation into the cruel death of the old lady at county hospital. It was now widely suspected that her demise had been at the hands of a monster the papers had begun to call the “Angel Without Mercy” supposedly lurking in the hospital’s halls for some time now. The hospital denied this was the case, but the city attorney claimed to have in his possession information to the contrary and, given the hospital’s size and wealth, the public seemed inclined to believe him, even as he concealed this proof under the guise of an “ongoing investigation.”

“And war is peace,” Randall muttered, taking issue with the appellation “Angel Without Mercy.” In his view, plug-pullers were fountains of mercy and that their prosecution would, ultimately, be rendered anachronistic. Someday, helping those who wanted to die do so would evolve from an illegal exercise into a very normal procedure. He did not think that so crude a modus operandi as that employed by the Angel possessed dignity, but what choice was there?

The Angel’s sin lay in the fact the act was illegal and nothing more. Randall began to think about laws and quickly concluded them to be very dangerous things. He mused over all the people throughout history who had been pilloried, jailed, or killed for breaking laws later wiped off the books as being awful or irrelevant. There were some good laws, to be sure, but they were hardly ever put to use in creating the justice they promised.

“There are,” he scribbled, “good laws, but nobody uses them.”

He thought about smoking laws. And he reasoned that twisting justice to please the person at the other end of a room from a cigarette was a dishonest representation and well, an injustice to the idea of justice.

Then he went and got the mail, put all the bills aside for a much later date when he was famous, and was left with a “Private Policy” statement from his automobile insurance company which the legislature had forced him into a business relationship with.

A law had required the actuary to issue the privacy statement and a considerable number of trees were made to suffer as a result. It was the same law that allowed the company to operate in the financial arena, something that had been prohibited some 70 years or so ago when the arrangement had gotten a lot of people, innocent and otherwise, into a lot of trouble. Few remembered and those that did were not permitted much say in this arcane matter affecting the lives of countless, blissful millions.

“Dear Randall,” it said, “We take your personal privacy seriously,” and went on to explain, briefly, the law which obligated the company to take his privacy seriously, hinted at future fiduciary pitches and closed with a reminder that, “privacy has always been important to us.” Some authoritative-sounding words like “organizational,” “digital,” and “safeguards” had been sprinkled throughout.

These were to ease the minds of those who feared the insurer would share information about their drunk driving record with the person who was deciding whether to dole out a 30-year mortgage to them. There was another sentence and one after that with the word “computer” in it to drive home the point that Randall’s information was safe, never mind the fact it was precisely the computer that threatened to compromise it.

He realized that if he kept on in this vein, the world would dissolve itself on his tongue like wisps of cotton candy. It could do that, big as it was. And so he stopped himself because he wanted bum philosophy to reach and activate the many bums living lives presently isolated from a creed that would make them the most happy. He wanted the thing to be practical and accessible; primary criteria at the retail level.

And this was bum philosophy’s greatest virtue; that it aspired to so little.

He was a long way from any organized essay on the tenet regarding money and the manner in which it does away with the necessity for dealing with people, but that was okay too, because beyond the initial utterance, there wasn’t much to say. It spoke to itself and invited the most lazy of minds to chew on something very much in the mix. He lit up again. There was a sandpaper feel to the back of his throat, a mere scratch on the skin of his robust constitution. He would, tomorrow, consider upping the dosage or lowering the quality of his smoke so as to hasten disaster along.

Chapter Twenty-four

Clarisse was still sitting around brooding over the Trixie Marie show.

She had not gone, of course, to the opening night party. And, of course, nobody had noticed, least of all Trixie Marie, but Clarisse was hardly free from the antiquated prejudices of her homeland and rested assured that her rival had taken offense at her absence.

Within the 19th Century rules Clarisse adhered to, when you absented yourself from a social gathering, you were saying something to the hostess, mostly that you were withholding enthusiastic approval. In the 21st Century city in which she was presently residing, where the gallery event was characterized by wine in plastic cups and a clientele interested as much in the potential for some dirty sex as the art, the gesture amounted to less than an Indian head nickel. If Trixie Marie had noticed the snub at all, it would have been in a new world way, not an old world one.

Anyhow it didn’t matter. Clarisse's house of clouds was no less wispy than those constructed by any of us so that we might get through the day.

She’d gone to the gallery at midday, in between lunch and dinner shifts. Like a furniture world Garbo, Clarisse wore sunglasses and dressed down so as not to draw attention, but then scotched her anonymity by lighting up a Lucky Strike inside the gallery. The owner cast a half-hearted glance of disapproval over in Clarisse’s direction, but was unwilling to fulfill her duty as an auxiliary police person in the war on smoke. Clarisse after all, might be a potential customer and there was no reason to cut things short before they even got started.

She was crestfallen. Trixie Marie’s show was astounding. Clarisse’s trained eye saw the leaps in growth made since the prior exhibit, which she had not liked at all. She admitted with stunned horror that it was a breakout collection bound to garner its creator both critical acclaim and financial reward. Clarisse knew it because this was the kind of ensemble she had dreamed of putting together for what had become, unfortunately, years now.

These are life’s realities, the ones that have nothing to do with movies and television shows where adversity is battled in a series of rapid-fire montage shots and triumph is just a romantic relationship away from becoming a crowning reality.

Yvonne’s happy rules don’t apply here. This is where the person with more talent or more connections or more luck or more of all three takes the lead. The person who does not have these advantages at their disposal gets hit with the reality like a two-by-four to the cranium. She stared admiringly at the pieces before her and took a lesson in construction from a woman she’d long considered her lesser, a woman who, through a quiet and steadfast industriousness, had imposed her vision upon the community. Clarisse, by contrast, barely got to her studio for a cleanup job and some idea-sketches let alone morph into the human wood-and-glue-assembling machine her rival had.

Her shoulders slumped. Clarisse knew that somewhere, between tending to her failing marriage, serving tables, and waiting around for the sun to shine upon her for no particular reason other than that she wanted it to, a lot of time had been wasted.

Time her rival had demonstrated could, in fact, be put to good use.

The gallery owner, with little else to do, had interpreted the visitor’s body language and come to certain conclusions about the purpose of the visit. Each vocation being a world of limited players, she felt the sad and mysterious girl in her establishment seemed familiar. Clarisse reached mechanically for another Lucky Strike and struck a match only to be shaken out of her self-pity by the lofty mid-Atlantic accent of the gallerykeeper who said, “Miss, I’m going to have to ask you to smoke that outside.”

Clarisse really wasn’t in the mood for anybody’s shit and said it this way: “Escuse me?” with an arch to her eyebrows that expressed much more than the utterance itself. Recognizing the intemperate nature of an unconsecrated artist, the gallery keeper recovered her superior form. “You’ll have to smoke that outside. This is, after all, a furniture gallery and there is much in it that is flammable.”

“You sound like de author of thees book,” Clarisse responded and, when this failed to alter the narrative’s course, lit the cigarette, puffed fully, released completely, and strode past. “Fock you,” she said, egged-on by the requirements of drama to establish a new layer of personality with this rather uncharacteristic utterance.

She stepped out to the corner of the street. Her angularity, her svelte package, the clean cut of her clothes, the high-nose of her lowlands pedigree and, yes, her cigarette, made her the object of much desire in the few men who passed in the next moments. They dreamed of her as some kind of ideal – someone who might shake their lives of lethargy and infuse them with adventure – and as we know could not have been farther off the mark.

One of those men was a short Mexican with a white, straw cowboy hat and boots like Joya’s on his way to work as a leaf-blower for a landscaper. The other was an old guy, bald on top, alone in life, who’d purposely lost the capacity to appreciate something quite so divine as Clarisse so as not to suffer the kind of longings she was provoking. It didn’t work. If Clarisse’s potent sexuality has not been dwelled upon to this point, it is because it was never quite so apparent as in this moment when the best of her nature caused a defiant back-arching as response to the raw adversity confronting her, a courageous nonchalance in her savoring that thing sticking out of her mouth.

All of which was running through Randall’s mind as he sat at an outdoor café, just across the street from the gallery (these two types of establishments tending to cluster near one another as they do), savoring Clarisse in a manner not much different than she was applying to her smoke.

It was only lunchtime, but it had been a big day for Randall. He’d worked his way through half a pack of his special Canadian-cut butts – more than double his daily intake – and was discovering that not only did he feel great, but that he looked it.

Adding historical weight to these more personal concerns, it should be noted that he had purchased a magazine but an hour before and… on second thought, let’s get to that a little further on. He left his seat at the café marked by his belongings from alien incursion. He approached Clarisse who, in her distraction, never saw him coming. “Great show, huh?” The remark was made, not in innocence, but in complete calculation. He knew something of her ambitions, had seen the show, and comprehended the undertow dragging her through a private hell. His intention was to clarify her own thoughts about the challenge ahead because that, in the end, is what friends are for.

“Yes,” she smiled in a tepid way.

“Experience in the spectacle is the only spectacle anymore.”

Well, it’s a sexy thing when a guy can read right through your feelings and then help you justify them.

“Boom philosophy,” she tried to sneer.

“Too good for that,” he countered.

And it’s another sexy thing when a guy can make a little joke of himself and disarm a woman of the most potent tool at her disposal. Which is to say Randall had shut her up.

“Okay look,” he ventured, “I don’t want to shortcut your self-absorption man, but I’ve got something that will definitely mark this day as an interesting one. C’mon, lemme buy you a latte.”

She had no reason to resist, had been teased by the dramatist’s simple presentation of the as-yet-undisclosed matter, and followed him back to his table with a simple shrug. He took off his sunglasses and arched his eyebrows for fun and suspense and sat. He reached down and threw a glossy magazine on the table. Its texture and composition immediately tipped Clarisse off to the fact it was filled with pictures of naked women and she wondered if a mistake had not been made in following Randall who, for all she knew, might be some kind of murderous pervert. Not having the best eyes, and having attended Trixie Marie’s show without her contact lenses, Clarisse looked at the magazine without processing. She shrugged.

“Look closer,” he said and stabbed the cover with his forefinger. “Who does that remind you of?”

The girl on the cover wore a polka dot bikini and was pulling at its elastic. When Clarisse got to the face, which took some time given the monumental body her eyes had to climb, she thought that it reminded her of Yvonne – a little younger – but Yvonne.

“Eet remind me of Eevonne.”

“Look closer.”

“Eet still remind me of Eevonne.”

“It is Yvonne.”

She stared at him long and hard before saying, “non.” He slapped it open to the centerfold. She saw the girl that looked like Eevonne in a very prone posture. He turned two pages back to someone that looked like Eevonne surrendering herself and her intimacy with a smile as wide as the quarter moon. He flipped to the other side of the centerfold. There were pictures of certain parts of someone that looked liked Eevonne’s body, but not the whole Eevonne.

“It is Eevonne,” Clarisse echoed him, reached for the Lucky Strikes, offered one to Randall (which he took) and shook her head in disbelief.

Just like that, life’s sometimes unpredictable and engaging forces swept her out of a powerful funk and back into the maelstrom of events that rarely afford curious people the time necessary to destroy themselves with their own exalted expectations.

Chapter Twenty-five

Even in cities where social convention, discretion, and restraint are common and deep-rooted (this not being one of them), Yvonne’s exposé was something that couldn’t help but set the satellites humming.

At this point, The Sidewalk Smokers Club is just emerging from the incubation stage and they’ve gathered formally but once in the more structured gathering around Randall’s table at the Argentine restaurant – where you could smoke inside on occasion – so that to the casual observer, nothing more than a playful meeting of friends was transpiring. And this is what casual observers have always concluded upon witnessing a gathering of raffish undesirables: that something less than a revolution was occurring over there with that crowd, when precisely the opposite was true.

Or as one of Randall’s favorite bum philosophy tenets held: Great movements don’t look like great movements in the beginning.

Corey and Randall had debated this for a while. Corey had liked, “Great movements are always born of unsuspecting bum philosophers,” but Randall resisted it as being self-referential. Furthermore, he was dead-set against the use of the word “always” in the text of his growing manifesto, even if it enjoyed frequent usage in the parlance of bums and hoboes.

Anyhow, like most things in the long run, it didn’t matter a lick. The point is that Yvonne’s having dropped her pants publicly provided the impetus for a series of phone calls betwixt these people, the affect of which was to weave them together through the inescapable electronic spiderwebery that today connects from Antarctica to Hudson Bay, from Guayaquil to distant St. Petersburg, from Bakersfield to nearby Tehachapi.

Yvonne’s action represented a crucible for Randall’s table, which became the forum in which it was taken up. She could not have timed things better if, in fact, she had any hand at all in their timing, for Joya was there like a shot. And that was good. She found Randall sitting alone, nursing a scotch and counting his cigarettes.

The sight of her was, as usual, one of immense pleasure. Her obvious physical attraction aside, Randall thought Joya lent a prestige that flowed from the strange mix of aloofness and openness she projected. Once you accessed her, she was great, but, as Yvonne knew, you had to access her. And, well, to the extent Randall held court at the Argentine restaurant, Joya’s presence there meant he had accessed something of her, if not all.

“She’s gorgeous,” was the first thing Joya hit Randall with and so revealed her having viewed the goods. He noted a lack of the biscuits-and-gravy ease he had liked so much in her voice. She was all business.

“In bits and pieces, and as a totality.”

Joya frowned and scolded him for this frat boy patter of which she would hear more. “Can you believe?” she followed up.

“No,” he said as earnestly as possible, “but at certain moments life can be kind.”
Corey and Clarisse were next to arrive. Like Joya and Randall, they were on time for the late-evening confab. It was a Friday night and the place was more crowded than usual, less conducive to the shifty-eyed, whispery conversation Yvonne’s layout invited. All the tables were filled and the volume of conversation not so readily absorbed by the restaurant’s velvety interior. Some business folks unwound at the bar. The violinist and keyboard man were on duty, but reduced to background ambiance, biding their time until the later hours when the smokers, lushes, lonely lifers, and violin fans clustered to absorb the things they meant to convey (or unreasonable facsimiles of them). Corey and Clarisse saw Joya and Randall sort of hunched forward across the table verbally sparring with each other. Clarisse did not move toward them with the same relish her husband did. The day had been a tough one spiritually and the naked vision of a woman whom she knew personally, to which the rest of humanity had been treated, had left her out of sorts (as it had much the rest of humanity). Adding to her reticence was the fact Corey hadn’t seen the pictures yet and his highly calculated facade of coolness could not hide from his wife the general enthusiasm with which he’d infused their evening preparations.

Clarisse kissed Randall and Joya. Joya kissed Corey and Clarisse etc. They sat down purposefully, although the first moments were rather uncomfortable with silence. In the end, even with all our desensitized and secular detachment, what was being discussed here, in bum philosophy phraseology, was a dirty magazine. To see the pictures somebody had to buy the thing and what a holier-than-thou guy like Randall was doing with the magazine never came up, although it was on everyone’s mind.

In order that Yvonne’s wares could be viewed, an expression of interest was required. And so all involved would have to surrender a little bit of their sexually guarded selves and (just as Randall had) admit to a touch of perversity or curiosity where naked, posing bodies were concerned. And such an admission always serves to deepen friendship and fellow-feeling between, well, fellows.

“Okay, who’s got the rag?” Corey sought to break things down to a lowest common denominator. A cool draft passed over the table. The quartet looked up and out toward the door to see Jordan come bounding in, cigarette tucked behind his ear for just the right touch of rake. Some girls in the restaurant turned to consider him briefly. What they concluded was of no interest to J. They’d looked and that was good enough. Nobody rose to greet him with any formality. Randall had already taken the magazine, rolled up in hand, out of the leather bag he’d brought for the expressed purpose of safeguarding it from born-agains, militia types, and other fauna noxious to the Bill of Writes. Jordan, who had not seen the pictures yet, nodded to Joya who had contacted him, being more familiar with the coffeehouse barista than she was with the rest of the gang.

Randall looked around the restaurant and back over his shoulder. Something kept him from opening the thing up straight away and it was probably the fact four people would immediately lurch forth to sample the interior, thereby rendering modest attempts at concealment pointless. But there was no way out of it, and he didn’t mind another look himself, and so he opened the layout’s first page wherein Yvonne still had her clothes on. Things unfolded pretty much to form with Jordan and Corey leaning over like dogs at their just-filled bowl of kibble. Joya and Clarisse were permitted the lady’s grace of remaining seated because they had already seen the pictures.

“Oh,” said Corey, which seemed to be all the situation permitted, although to Clarisse’s ears it wasn’t quite as understated as it seemed. Internally, each was wrestling with the desire to make love with Yvonne at the first opportunity that presented itself. That is, should it present itself, the odds of which had dimmed since the upshot was that she had made herself a sex symbol and sex symbols, as we all know, are very difficult to have sex with.

The waiter appeared and Randall shut the magazine not quite in time. The entire table was drenched in an air of up-to-no-good, in the act of concealment, in a feverishness for which a simple eatery could provide no outlet. And in that way, The Club struggled through dinner without insight, reduced to blabbering about the fact that Yvonne did look good, and questioning again and again the “why?” of her having done this revealing thing.

The crowed thinned, the smokers stayed, and soon enough they were lighting up whilst giving into the violinist’s sway. Randall, freed somewhat by the scotch, found the chutzpah necessary to present the magazine – the 300-pound gorilla in the room – anew. Correctness, maintaining yet a shadow of presence, required that the publication sit there unattended for a few moments while everyone pretended immersion in deep existential ruminations and sad, rheumy-eyed reminiscence. But as luck would have it, Joya and Clarisse both reached for the magazine at the same time, annihilating all the courtly feigning, returning the mood to a more appropriate, edgy discomfort. Clarisse, being French or Belgian (and heterosexual) conceded possession to Joya who masked her visual hunger by opening the layout to its first frame where the girl still has her clothes on. But the door opened and blew that cobweb of pretense away by flipping the pages quickly to the centerfold, again. They all looked up to see whom it was that had shot a cool blast of air on the whole suffocating and steamy scene. And, as the requirements of drama would have things, they saw Sister Steam herself, Yvonne, standing before them, a thin Virginia Slim dangling from her mouth, one hand to hip like the cowgirl one of them was fantasizing her to be at that moment.

There was yet another pause, but to call it uncomfortable would be overstating the thing. It’s just that there were so many uncommon thoughts and feelings flowing about that it took more than the normal split seconds to process, collate and work out responses to them.

The magazine was out on the table and, upon seeing it, Yvonne decided to break the ice, which is a thoroughly inappropriate metaphor given the rising room temperature.

“I guess you’ve all seen that!” she said in a not very humiliated way. They stumbled over a murky unburdening of compliments about “the beauty,” the “hot” nature of what she’d done (or undone, as it were). “Well, like, I was just…you know, like you know and you are all like saying that whatever, so I guess that’s all I can say.” And then she stopped and smiled.

That they all understood perfectly what she meant to convey was testimony both to the linkage occurring between The Sidewalk Smokers – for there was really no need of explanation – and to the deterioration of linguistic usage in our culture which began, perhaps, many years ago with the advent of television.

Anyhow it didn’t matter because protestations that the photos had been taken when she was young and needed money or some such drub were unnecessary where her fast-coalescing allies were concerned.

And that’s because they liked what she had done.

It’s tough to break away anymore in this world. There are no wild countries to settle in for a time and cleanse one’s soul of modernity and automatic dishwashers.

Everyone everywhere eats from the same meal ticket now, works for the same things the planet over; an apartment in a thriving capital and some other place where that capital can be forgotten during lengthy vacations primed with domestic help, for example.

But that has all been said. The point is that such a glaring affront to the rules of a game in which life had placed her, and so brazen a move for survival as publicly exploiting her sexuality (and the gusto with which she’d done so), meant that Yvonne had gone someplace in life foreign to most of our members. She enjoyed the status of a politician who has gone to war, fought, survived and come home to rebuild their lives: however perverse the drawn parallel may appear.

She’d risen, or perhaps sunk, out of the anonymity to which the giant numbers and prodigious talents of her generation had originally relegated her. At least that’s what the raw minds of The Sidewalk Smokers Club were unanimously churning out along with the conclusion that they were more than willing to be participants in any organization counting Yvonne as a member.

Randall confirmed, under his breath, that “the only spectacle anymore is being in the spectacle,” which was not exactly what had been said the first time, but he was drunk, and it served his immediate purposes.

The men were forced to take the gentlemanly road and avoid staring at Yvonne with a clearer perception of what was going on under the little bare-shouldered Chiffon camisole and those soft brown leather pants. The ladies, on the other hand, took every advantage an outdated code of behavior permitted them and stared fiercely at the lower registers of Yvonne’s cachet. Joya shuffled her seat over to the left and pointed the star into an adjacent chair. “C’mon hon, sit down and have a drink.”

We know how Yvonne had been knocked out of joint by her first meeting with Joya and since then had been doing her best to hook up. And now that the moment was nigh her strengthened hand in things sexual provided perspective. So she accepted Joya’s overture with the awareness of a yellow-furred spring chick doddering side-to-side through a fox den.

The group kept working toward earnest discussion, but there just wasn’t much to be said that hadn’t been in the first few exchanges. She’d provided an excuse; they’d rejected the roles of judges and jury because their respective senses of adventure had been pricked. It had already been commented that she looked great, that she was gutsy or insane depending, and the thing was done.

So Clarisse suggested a cigarette, and despite the fact they sat in liberated territory, the group were driven somehow to the sidewalk. The conversational continuum broken, the change of venue from indoor to outdoor, and the natural curiosity of those who like to simultaneously smoke and chat, invited a new topic much to Jordan’s dismay. Something which had happened that morning.

Chapter Twenty-six

That whatever it was they discussed was to Jordan’s dismay is an obvious tip-off to the fact the old lady’s passing at county health hotel had refused to take its rightful place in the parade of insignificant news stories.

The city attorney who’d posted the calculated gamble of converting her into a cause célèbre was, in fact winning both the wager and the electoral race as tracked by the polls. They were showing dramatic improvement in his standing and a marked separation from the larger pack of similarly ambitious folk bent upon acquiring the massive headaches of running a large and unruly city. What the bump in numbers meant was anybody’s guess and anybody could guess it was related to the easy victory associated with taking on the cause of a murdered old woman at the hands of a careless, big, heartless hospital – “public” hospital. He – the city attorney – had yet to present any governing proposal different from the vagaries of good schools for our kids (whether you had them or not) and a further unraveling of the city’s communal fabric by way of tax cuts to his most potent and well-heeled campaign contributors. Turning to the formidable machinery of information and opinion-making at his disposal, the city attorney had no trouble quashing anything that might have invited opponents to say that what had happened to the old lady wasn’t wrong – a de facto approval of murder – and let it be known he’d take it from there. This is known as good politics and is the process by which those who rule us rise. Opponents wisely passed on the challenge and returned to more familiar territory marked out by high-priced consultants, trying to outdo each other’s zeal for better schools for our kids and tax reform. And so the polls had to be a result of “the old lady thing,” as his harried aides called the canard in closed-door conferences.

The police chief was a well-meaning man trying to direct the well-equipped army in his charge against well-run Mafias of global crime settled in the wealthy burg under his purview. There were pernicious gangs comprised of heartless, soulless teenagers with no hope for anything but an early death and a possible championship by the excessively paid local basketball team. There were multiple, stupid deaths every day; each of which had to be catalogued, investigated and prosecuted. There were children who’d gone out for an ice cream that never returned home and their desperate, agonizing parents accusing the chief of not caring for the little people – the nobodies.

So he really could have cared less about the old lady who had died quite in her time, give or take a half-year of overpriced medical ministration. And although nobody else in the busy machine of urban living cared, the city attorney was the city attorney. He was leading in polls measuring the race to become the police chief’s new boss and could not be ignored. The storyline itself was one that reporters could follow and develop while avoiding the dangerous job of exposing corporate crooks and angering their own publishers’ stockholders.

Oh, hope. Everyone was playing it safe, taking the path of least resistance embodied in the exploitation of an old lady’s death.

Which brings us to what The Smokers were talking about that had Jordan so upset: The latest development in the investigation of his murder had been a police sketch of the suspect drawn with the help of a certain hospital orderly. And Jordan had a pretty good idea of which hospital orderly.

The drawing suggested a Latino man, which is not at all surprising given the good/bad biases afoot in the land. Jordan was of a definite European/Anglo/American stock, but skin pigment aside, the sketch nonetheless echoed his true appearance.

The Sidewalk Smokers had seen the artist’s rendering, but none made any link between the murderer and the guy smoking a hand-rolled Drum tobacco cigarette in the street with them. And that was a good thing, for him.

Randall ruminated at the margins of the jabbering bunch, alone, about how Yvonne had merely shed her clothes in order to become a minor somebody whom somebody who wanted to be a big somebody could launch from.

It wasn’t all bad for women. If he shed his clothes for a magazine, not too many would really be interested in buying that magazine. Actually, he admitted, nobody would. And here he was, racing along like a nervous swallow hepped-up on increasing quantities of caffeine and other things mixed into tobacco product, out of sorts with the nature around him, but far from any kind of suffering that might draw attention to his efforts as a thinker. And after all, was that fair?

Jordan, too, was thinking about how nobody would want to see him naked in a magazine, and about how he’d done something very bold and courageous. He’d acted upon an ideal, a simple humanist principle picked up God knows where, that there should be a little leeway regarding how much suffering one had to endure in dying and that, furthermore, states and/or financial institutions should be denied any power in setting the threshold. And that act was now keeping him up nights. That act was seasoning his innards and toughening his skin, yet he could not for the life of him talk about it.

“Oh God, let the old lady go,” Joya trilled at Yvonne, their faces very close and embellished with big smiles. “Especially if she’s already let go herself. Why should she suffer? And her family, too!” the sex star said of the victim. Jordan was listening and heartened that they were in rough accord with his own platform for action – what with the press giving his side no play at all.

But the heartening went only so far. After years of laboring in obscurity and trying to set his ship’s course straight, Jordan was already wincing at the creeping Klieg lights. For the moment he remained an unknown quantity, but his fear was palpable.

The idea that he might suddenly become a media star in his own hanging was blowing him adrift of his moorings.

What to do? Enjoy life for the moment. The meal was covered. There was wine and smokes, and the day had been an eventful one. Speaking of which, Jordan decided to look over his shoulder and give Yvonne the visual shakedown she had been demanding since he first got wind of her naked sensation.

Randall was doing cell work, organizing, as Corey stood looking over his shoulder like a supportive personal trainer, mostly at Yvonne, but some at Joya, too (and a little less at his own wife). “Let us pretend for a moment that the tyranny we smokers suffer is a just one, that our behavior merits it. The question begging to be asked then is who chooses to take issue with it? Who knows what forces are behind this assault, what certain powers in certain places want us all to be or do?”

“Sure, but there’s nothin’ new to say on it, hon. It’s all been said, even what you’re saying.”

“And that is bum philosophy man: The things that are known by all, but must be said simply because the mundane truths beg repeating to each new generation. And I’m the guy who is codifying it. A new Aristotle.”

Corey chimed in: “While there may be nothing new to say on this, we can find new ways of saying it. What we need to do as smokers is avoid pouting. Focus instead on that nervous ease to smoking and the way it fits the energy required by our times.

We don’t want to push too hard in our demand to spew cancer-causing smoke into others’ faces. There’s a larger trend of being attacked for doing just about anything that most other people don’t do. It’s a tyranny of the majority; a concept requiring revival.”

Randall declaimed the tenet: “We’re not giving it to people newer. We’re giving it to them cooler.”

Clarisse was stunned by this little discourse. She did not know Corey to be capable of such clarity and (!) attitude. Up to now she’d likened all this business with Randall to a buddy poker game and now the two of them had one another sold on the idea.

And two nuts can do a lot more damage than one.

Worse, her husband was actually growing. And personal growth is one of the more dangerous things matrimony must confront. Especially when one-half of that matrimony is stagnating.

And Clarisse was stagnating.

Yvonne, for her part, simply liked what she was hearing and seemed pleased to be relieved of the sensation of standing naked in front of some people she still hardly knew, but was fond of.

Naturally, her relief was without foundation, for Corey was seeing her naked. He took the tiniest step back, yielding an invisible podium to Randall, and looked away as if deep in thought, lest his wife be monitoring his attentions to Yvonne, which she was. These are slick city people, The Sidewalk Smokers. They are in the land of smart vying to be the smartest. Nothing is taken at face value and involuntary gestures count for more than anything a player is consciously staging. And speaking of staging, Randall closed, “It’s about battling the culture of prohibition. It says a person has a right to drink a beer in the park at the company softball game. It says that if we’d wanted Aunt Millie to run things, we would have elected her.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

To recap. We have one person trying to smoke himself into illness and notoriety whilst developing an updated and applicable charter for personal choice and communal rights. It was (the philosophy), in spite of his intentions, turning out to be more a policy or series of apolitical pronouncements, propositions, defensive parries.

But that was the practical aspect of the thing. Practical, Corey and Randall felt, meant profit and so they seized it with an old-time religious zeal (Randall).

Anyhow, it didn’t matter for, as Randall will eventually note, an author’s intentions mean next to nothing.

We have another person trying to avoid notoriety because it could pave the way to a lifetime jail sentence – or worse – but which seems to be bearing down on him with the speed of a steam-spewing locomotive. And let it be recorded that in the gap of time which unfolded between chapters Twenty-six and Twenty-seven, he went out and got his hair changed to an older, if equally unPresidential, looking thing. He even had gold highlights brushed in. It was very not Latino (guess who).

We have a third person with a sudden and smashing notoriety who could therefore take it or leave it. She had followed a familiar recipe of isolating what her talent was, willfully overcoming social convention and the opinions of others, and finally breaking out of the iron circle her life had become – that all our lives become (Yvonne).

There’s yet another guy in search of someone noteworthy from whose efforts he can skim profit and provide his wife with the life of notoriety and quiet family activity she paradoxically craves.

We have a Tabasco Western Girl who doesn’t need notoriety because she is notoriety incarnate. She behaves like a star because she is one and audience size passes not even for a trifle with her. Nothing she possesses is certified or defined by the self-appointed opinion-makers. Erudite in style, but vulgar in thought, she is prone to religion and the secret, unexpressed belief that the Gods are out there and that if you favor them, they favor you right back. Her seemingly effortless success stands as a terrible defeat for the little atheist in all of us (guess again).

All of the above is just in case anything occurring to this point had been lost on you.

Yes, you!

Chapter Twenty-eight

Yvonne called Randall on the phone, which otherwise never or almost (remember how Randall hates absolutes) never rang. Now, what with the small bumps of money and designer weed Corey was floating him, and beautiful naked magazine women calling, things had certainly taken a turn for the better.

What he did not know was that the naked magazine women aspect of his recent good fortune was an artifact of Corey’s manipulations. For it was Corey who’d advised Yvonne to check-in with Randall.

There were uncomfortable aspects to her contacting him, but she realized such would be the situation for many years until all the magazines disappeared or her body sagged, whichever came first. He suggested they get together. They did.

“I need your help,” she spoke to him after the initial trading of pleasantries, all of which were genuine on his side. It was a phrase Randall was unaccustomed to hearing given the fact help was something he was rarely in a position to give.

He’d chosen the bohemian path as an offering before the altar of revolution. But residency in bohemia left him at the mercy of the least appetizing people. And the pursuit of creative glory had turned out to be not very revolutionary at all.

Selling made-and-impractical things (however evocative) left him spending too much time on the balls of his heels to be any kind of pro-activist. “Art makes you a beggar,” would become classic bum philosophy as the refined, “Being an artist means being a beggar.” And it became one of Randall’s favorites because it reiterated, for those considering a life of fame and glory as creators, the mundane logic of a gas station attendant who could at least afford life’s essentials.

He was wrong, of course, for money was never the point. A better tenet, if not very bummy, might have been: You don’t live from your passion. You live for it (or her, or him and them). For artists not-to-the-manner-born have always been poor and that is what has set them apart from the rest of the worker bees and been the source of much antagonism between them.

The opposing lifestyles, he’d observed, meted out exactly what they promised: peril and pleasures for one, luxuries and tedium for the other.

Randall, like many of his time and place, thought he was owed two simple blessings: to work at his passion, and the grace of paying his modest bills. But it turned out to be asking quite a lot, a pass on the fray as it were, when the fray’s the thing.

He acted smarter than everybody else and then expected everybody else to pay for his progress, which, of course, wasn’t going to happen.

As such, Randall’s creed was that of a long, if not very hallowed tradition. None of which he was about to let Yvonne in on; all of which she knew anyway because, despite what men think, women are not stupider than they.

Yvonne, now infamous in her way, knew some things about Randall that his childhood friends, parents, and the idiots who had surrounded and stifled his progress for years did not. And this was that he would be fine. His discipline and hewing to a determined path, his desire to make sacrifices based upon his ideals had molded him into a certifiable type, congealed his character and varnished the personality. That is an achievement, even at low wages, and always has been.

He was not the hot and sexy model-type Yvonne had ruined her prospects of marriage and family waiting for, but he was certainly useful in ways that no man she knew could be.

What Yvonne wanted was to ask him about squeezing some money out of her naked picture situation. She had taken some pay, very little, at the time of the shoot and when the pictures never appeared, thought as little (as possible) about them. Now, given her embarrassment, she felt entitled to more and wanted to know if there wasn’t something – not legal, because she knew there wasn’t – ideal-like, something justice-driven she could beat her exploiters over the head with until she was offered further recompense.

“What about residuals?” Randall offered blandly after she’d presented her situation to him. Yvonne shrugged and said she’d already thought of that, but felt it was too simple. Of course, with bum philosophy increasingly marking his mind’s boundaries, Randall was becoming a big fan of simple. That was why his first offering was so lacking in originality. Why strain the brain for something with less of a success rate than the tried and true? Why swim against the current? He’d done that for years and mostly gotten tired. It was the first thing that came to mind. It could come from the mouth of some pizza man who was leagues ahead of Randall in the moneymaking department, a common man’s winner with an insight to the obvious.

“Don’t be so quick to dismiss,” he said more assertively. Yvonne inhaled a Virginia Slim and her eyes filled with either smoke or intense interest. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

“That’s how the reproduction of image has been handled around here,” he continued. “You make a commercial, a film, a whatever and you get paid every time it turns up someplace. Why not demand a specified sum for each reproduction in print?”

“Every issue?”

“Blow the works!”

“They’d say she doesn’t have a contract that says anything like that. And they would say publishing doesn’t work that way.” Her voice was low and each word was uttered with the same intonation as that before it. He thought she was a tough broad, but avoided uttering either the thought or phraseology.

“With a little help, here please smoke one of these” – he tossed her an Export-A –
“with a little help, people might be convinced the current system exploits rather innocent girls who don’t always know what they’re getting into.”

Yvonne said that young or not, you do know what you’re getting into. That there is flattery involved and other lures surrounding. That if you take your clothes off in front of a camera under lights, lenses, filters and so forth, you know what you’re getting into.

“You know what you know,” he answered, “but you don’t know what you don’t know,” and he pulled out a notebook and recorded the gem to see if it sounded quite so good later on. “No offense man, but for many girls, this kind of exposure, um (he caught himself too late), is a one-time shot. A moment to be exploited, um (again), taken advantage of considering the short-lived flowering of one’s sexuality. The future must be considered.”

“No offense taken,” she answered, not very convincingly. He thought how there are many pitfalls to working with women who appear naked in magazines.

“What say you? We write up a press release, send it out to some ambitious lawyers and see who’s sleazy enough to jump on this thing because of the screen time it could mean for them.”

“Sounds like a bit of a circus,” Yvonne said. She then turned her wrist to view the cigarette she’d been smoking, made a distasteful face and put it out. “I like Vagina Slims more,” she said, brand loyal, proving how smokers are hardly the monolithic bunch they are portrayed to be. “It’s a circus man,” he agreed, “but if you want your satisfaction, center ring awaits. The only way to mount pressure is to produce a show and you’d better decide whether you’re going to ride that train into the station or not.”

It was when she then pointed out that he’d mixed metaphors that Yvonne won him over to her cause, although he was not quite aware of this.

“So what do you say man?” He sounded either impatient or testy.

There was a pause while she lit her pleasure, a pause that grew as she inhaled, and became almost permanent once she blew out and focused her eyes on him. “Don’t be intimidated by the fact I can dissect your language.”

He took a deep breath. She wasn’t at all stupid. (As we said) She was smarter than he was.

“What we do,” he said rolling perfectly with reality, “is call up and find out what the distribution is, in terms of numbers right now, maybe call some bigger newsstands to determine what the pick-up rate is-”

“Pick-up rate?”

“When they come to refill what’s been sold, or pick up what hasn’t. Then we call a press conference, file suit, feed the media who” – he was going to say “whore themselves” and thought better of it – “run with the story about how many magazines have been reordered from the same place afterward. We’ll demonstrate just how rich you are making them.”

“You’re assuming they’re going to sell a lot,” she correctly pointed out.

“I am.”

“I need a little time to think things over,” she said, “but I’m mostly on board.” Puff. “All the damage has been done anyway.” Puff. She smiled and kissed him. It was a peck on the cheek and it was hers for the taking. Puff. It affected him in a way that could hardly be altered by the fact she’d been in a girly magazine. She told Randall that she liked him and dropped a check on the table between them before exiting. Puff.

Without a doubt, The Sidewalk Smokers Club ladies section have demonstrated a nobility of character the guys are taking their sweet time in matching. And that is because boys are permitted to develop slowly into men while women are seemingly made in a moment.

Puff.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Yvonne didn’t need too much time to think about it. She was riding high in her black sports utility truck vehicle across the urban terrain in complete security unless she hit a train track or something and the thing tumbled over on its side. It had become a truck-driving society and for those not up to affording the trend, road visibility had become a luxury out of reach. She slaked her nicotine thirst with another Slim – Virginia that is – and the jolt lubricated her thought processes and animated her in a way that left little room for doubt. She was going in. Head first.

As far as Yvonne could see, girls like her had a “right” to some of the spoils baring their produce produced. The cost of everyone you know being familiar with what was beneath was certainly high enough. And “rights” were always privy to a certain popular sympathy. “Rights” just sound right. In fact, rights-making was an industry. There were so many movements for the right to do this, that and the other thing that really, what you had was a veritable traffic jam of rights – a downright bottleneck where the rights one person was pushing could not help but run smack into the rights of another, in turn spawning the need for further rights. It was a Pandora’s Box really and probably nothing like the great guys who’d gotten the whole rights thing rolling had envisioned.

Not that anyone was thinking such things at this point in the story, but they are no less important to the proceedings.

Randall, for example, was running into this problem as he sought to weave a Smokers’ Rights Manifesto seamlessly, and without being obvious, into the larger bum philosophy. He’d found that the nonsmokers had beaten him to the punch by many years and that in asserting the rights of smokers he was infringing upon the well-entrenched protections of those who did not. He discovered further that raising hackles against nonsmokers was not quite the same as it was against the landed gentry or whatever you had when the rights game was in its infancy.

But enough. What people want to know about is the pretty, naked girl Yvonne.

Her nascent movement would necessarily run up against the rights (treasured ones) of publishers, who got into the rights business very early on. And they enjoyed the support of people whose opinions and labors were of much account largely because they drew a living from publishing itself. It was a particularly well-armed machine that could turn to the use of, well, the reproduction of images and words to make its case. So it was going to be something of a cockfight, but if any group was up to the challenge, naked pretty women were. And if they could not win it, they might shoot for the stars – represented in a core claim to the increased control of their own images – and at least land on the moon to scoop up scads of money, publicity and even credit that would accrue to them for a fight well-fought.

Oh hope. That lowest common denominator was kicking-in again. And a powerful kick it was because once Yvonne decided she had nothing to lose – and she didn’t – there was no doubt as to the course she would take.

Chapter Thirty

The city attorney had announced that the ongoing investigation of the old lady’s brutal murder would be deepened and widened. He’d begun slipping in the “brutal murder” bit around the time a lesbian city councilwoman began cutting into his poll margin with appealing and impolitic positions.

He dedicated a press conference to explaining how hospital records would be combed for the names and addresses of folks interned at county medical on that night of infamy and unconscionable horror.

Jordan, who read about this event, got to thinking about how the fact he wasn’t Latino wouldn’t help him a lick when interrogators saw the similarity between himself and the guy in the police composite. “What am I talking about, ‘the guy’? It’s me!” he said to himself, grimly, and decided that from here on he would decline the offers of high quality dope floating from Corey to Randall to himself. “I don’t care if it’s free, it’s driving me nuts,” and upon realizing that he was talking to himself, Jordan decided not to forego his medicine after all. It was too perilous a time for going it alone. There would be better times, times of repose, when the adjustment might be achieved.

So he took a drive over to Joya’s Joyas. Jordan did not think he would be entirely unwelcome. Unannounced though he was, no blood or urgent surgical procedures were involved with this visit. And besides, since Joya had revealed her sexuality to him, there would be less, check that, no sexual tension because she knew that he knew and what the heck was the point of getting all worked up over nothing?

(fat chance)

Jordan had underestimated himself. That people tended to like and give him the benefit of the doubt never became an article of his personal faith. He would not let it become so. But Joya did like him and coupled with the fact that there was no blood or urgent surgical procedure in the offing, she was pleased as pink pussy to see him. It was also through-and-through true that since she’d blown all the hot air out of his male ego the atmosphere around them was cooler, more relaxed.

Taking into account what had been endured together they were practically old friends. So when Jordan asked, “What are you doing?” it was not some lame entree to conversation, but a genuine query for which she could provide answers spiced with recent and interesting goings-on.

What she was doing, in fact, was planning a benefit at Joya’s Joyas on behalf of Yvonne and “that suit,” as she referred to the pending civil complaint Randall had already concocted.

He had provided Jordan with a sketching of what was planned, but J. did not realize how far along things were. An attorney laboring on behalf of the lesbian city councilmember running for mayor was willing to take the case on a pro bono basis.

“What’s that?” Yvonne had rasped between agile puffs of Virginia Slim (elsewhere).

“Free,” Randall bum-broke it down for her (elsewhere).

Anyway, Joya broke out her bidis and began to explain how the media gathering would be held jointly with the benefit; that they were to be one and the same thing. Not aware of the press pack’s freeloading habits and low pay, Joya imagined she might fleece some as they worked.

“It’s a class-action suit,” she explained to Jordan, “it could become huge.”

“Class-action?” Jordan punctuated her body driven discourse.

“Class-action,” she echoed him. “All the girls in all the magazines for the past five years are named, and that makes for an enormous group.” Enormous wasn’t the word that came immediately to Jordan’s mind, but he kept it to himself in exchange for the more intimate, “Plus some of them might lick your pussy!”

“That too!” she laughed and the whole damn thing with the magazine and Yvonne and Joya having a benefit and the class of magazine girls was just too exciting for J. to bear, but bore it he did. Joya was gushing patchouli or China Rain from her mouth and he wondered how in the hell she did that and did this girl have to be lesbian?

It was bad enough the way she soared physically, lithe of body and bony faced. Did she have to be an in-the-flesh-girl-on-girl-fantasy, too?

He wondered what in the heck had happened to his life. He did not have the benefit of this mapped-out narrative to isolate for him the way in which a harmless decision to go out and have a smoke back during the first pages had changed its direction.

So don’t say smoking is bad for you; at least not always.

Jordan’s mental euphoria was short-lived because Joya, not just out of courtesy either, asked him, “What’s goin’ on?” He came dropping to earth like a skydiver whose first and emergency chutes have failed to open. Literature has covered, often, exactly how heavy the burden of murder can press upon a lucid and less-than-criminal soul/mind. So that territory will not be broached here. Suffice it to say Jordan thought about the old lady, and related investigation, much more than the few aforementioned instances recorded thus far. Really, it was driving him nuts and there was that four-leaf clover essence to Joya, which just seemed to suggest it would be okay if he told her. She was a solid, paid-up lesbian member of society who acquitted her debts and kept close confidences. But she was also something of an outlaw and sexual iconoclast who, no matter how well-adjusted, surely had suffered during the course of her own development. She was bad and she was good, light and dark, sun and moon, bad girl–good girl, cigarettes and beautiful breath. In his next life he wanted to come back as her and so he said, “You know that thing about the old lady who was killed in the hospital that the city attorney is getting all hot and bothered about?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I, uh, did it.”

She knew what he meant, but the gravity of the admission begged confirmation.

“Ya did what hon?”

“Do you have to make me say it?”

“No, maybe ya shouldn’t.” She blew out a gust of scented smoke and leaned back against the showcase window. “Jeeezus, hon. What in the – I mean for the luv of – wow!”

Again, it was a measure of just how well and quickly The Sidewalk Smokers Club had clicked that Jordan was able to decipher her verbal Morse code. It has been written (Emerson) that where the understanding is perfect between two parties, no discussion is required on either side. But that would wreak hell on the lives of novelists concerned with the inner life and so, for the purposes of good reading, the clubbers’ synchronicity will never completely their exclude discourse.

She looked up into his eyes and said, “You sure know how to keep a gal entertained dontcha!”

In this instance J. simply shrugged and Joya agreed, as she had before she knew it was he who had done it, that there was much in the act that made sense. “And that city attorney really is trying to make a big deal about the old bag ain’t he?”
Jordan responded that he would not put it exactly that way, but, “Yes, he is. And I’m in big trouble.”

“Not yet,” she reminded and then stood up, stared at him, swivelled her hips three times and said, “Is ‘at why ya cut your hair that way and put the little blond streaks in?”

Jordan nodded that it was.

“It’s really cute,” she verily erupted. Jordan was amazed to what length a woman’s interest in cosmetics will lead her afield.

“I mean, ya look the same, but it’s really cute.”

Chapter Thirty-one

“You know what you know, but you don’t know what you don’t know,” Randall read to Corey who was making love with one of his partner’s Export-As.

“Great!” Corey said.

Randall smiled. “I know. It’s the essence of bum philosophy, isn’t it?”

“I was talking about the cigarette. My God, it reminds me of when I sold my Nissan and bought a used BMW.”

“The effect of the cigarettes on your health will be as ruinous as the Beamer was to your finances,” Randall assured him.

“Don’t get surly,” Corey cut back. “I was just kidding. It is the essence of bum philosophy. It’s simple, which makes it bummy, but you have to go back and read it a few times, which makes it philosophy.”

After a few cigarettes and a review of what had been recorded to date, the boys decided that while “simple” could be perceived as bummy, there had to be a stronger element of bumness in their invention. The point was Corey’s and Randall was inclined to agree. He reached for his notebook that was open on the table and scrawled away, reciting in simultaneity, “Never question the dollars-and-cents judgments of business people,” before looking up and asking, “But what do we put?”

“I don’t know,” answered Corey, “a Ten Commandments of laziness, of bum-like behavior. Something to guide those who maybe have bum tendencies, but need the philosophy to guide their actions.”

“Or inactions.”

“Yeah, ten commandments of inaction.”

“Nine commandments, less biblical,” said Randall, a rabid secular.

“And,” Corey said, “less work.”

“Right. Good.” Randall’s one functioning lung (he was unaware the other had gone on strike) pulled deep on an Export-A. “Okay, we can still keep it simple. How about, ‘Love your bed as you would love yourself’.”

“Oh, that’s great!” said Corey and Randall invited him to try it.

“Me?”

Randall answered, yes, him. Corey asked for another Export-A and fired up. The inspiration came almost immediately. “If you see someone resting, stop to help them.” Randall nodded in mild approval. “It’s not a practical measure, but it says something important and, I think, is pretty funny.” He hit his cigarette again, mashed it to death and thought for a moment. “Actually, I like what you’ve done more than at first. Let’s keep it going in that vein. ‘If work is sacred, don’t touch it’.”

Corey yipped like a cowboy. “I’ve always been terrified of creativity. I never knew it could be so much fun!”

Randall replied, “Why do you think it pays so poorly man?”

That wiped the smile off Corey’s face.

“Let me try again,” his partner said as he enthused his own cigarette practically out of existence. “We are born tired and live to rest.” Randall wasn’t crazy about that one, but let it slide. They did, after all, need nine and he was, furthermore, a big fan of letting things lie for a while and returning later to see how they played. “How’s about, ‘When you feel the urge to work, sit for a moment and wait for it to pass’.”

To say Corey’s response was hysterical is to discredit the man’s temperament, so we won’t. Randall thought he was going overboard, but appreciated his friend’s introduction to the old-time creativity in a way dating a 20-year-old reawakened distant carnal joys for a man of 54. “‘If work is good for you, let the sick do it’.”

“Give me another smoke!” cheered Corey. They lit up anew and he said, “Okay, okay I’m ready with one. ‘Rest all day so that you can sleep well at night’.” Randall noticed a diminishing quality to Corey’s contribution, but it would do as a weaker link in the exquisite corpse they were cooking. “That’s not too bad,” he said, “but it will do as a weaker link in the exquisite corpse we’re concocting.”

The touch of sweetener failed to drown the bitter and, of course, Corey got a little hurt.

Randall’s correction of Corey represented a virtue-as-flaw, for there was little of the bullshitter in him. He had chosen, for reasons he could not recall, to remain honest to his feelings and express them nakedly. It’s a rotten strategy for living modern life, which requires upward mobility aided by unsavory schemes and unspoken plans, and that may be why he was sitting in a dreary, smoke-infested apartment grafting silly-isms onto his ONE GREAT IDEA.

“Lemme do another one,” Corey said, and Randall took immediate heart, because his partner was demonstrating tenacity, aggression, persistence and a host of other qualities he himself had neglected to groom in the pursuit of a meditative life. “‘Work as little as possible, and what you must get done, let someone else do’.”

Randall thought the string was certainly run out, for both of them. So rather than lie that it was good or slash his happy partner twice in a row, he did some simple math and said, “Number nine, drum-roll please! ‘Calm yourself, nobody ever died from resting’.”

They smiled and blew smoke in each other’s face.

There was no doubt about it, the guys were on the same page and working together in a way that often spells success for those engaged in joint ventures.

Chapter Thirty-two

Across town, however, that delectable convergence of business and the philosophy of futility was producing something quite different where Clarisse and Corey were concerned.

She was miserable. The stunning originality of Trixie Marie’s furniture show had paralyzed what remained of her creativity. Her husband, on the other hand, was excited and engaged with a project, to which her sole contribution was the occasional sharing of sidewalk smoking conversation. It was a place of secondary importance and Clarisse was not interested in a life of secondary importance. So she was hostile toward him, angry at his independence and frustrated he could (would?) not help her assume a greater role in things.

She acted as if The Sidewalk Smokers Club were a company with offices and well-defined career ladders for the proper recruits. Already disjointed as a couple, things had twisted them into opposite directions, resulting in greater tension around the house.

He’d become a smoker and lost weight. She’d surprised herself in pointing out to him the brief and passing nature of this early benefit to the habit.

From this heresy it was just a short walk over to the other side. She stopped smoking and, as is often the case, substituted nicotine with protein and carbohydrates. Corey had noticed how his baby wasn’t fittin’ into her jeans of late and his baby had noticed that hers had taken – like everyone else in town – to looking at Yvonne whenever she was around.

When Clarisse went out Corey always had Yvonne’s layout as recourse to loneliness.

It was, in its way, a powerful little advertisement, and for Corey, Yvonne’s lack of shame was the most exciting thing about her.

Clarisse absorbed, learned. She concluded dignity was not worth the indignity it produced; that dignity should no longer stand in the way of her designs. You get things done anyway you can. Shamelessly. As penance, she promised to be philanthropic in her own coming halcyon days.

But one other thing about the magazine: Clarisse, naturally, grew frustrated at always seeing it strewn about the house, not as a girly magazine, but as a piece of intellectual fascination for those who came and went. She was being assaulted, yes assaulted, by successful women and needed to get her bearings. So she threw it out, only to find that he’d replaced it shortly thereafter, without saying a word. And so go the silent wars that couples out of love can wage.

So, while Corey and Randall stimulated each other’s intellects, she decided to go and visit someone else who hated his job and seemed a little out of sorts lately – Jordan. That she found him cute was established in the genesis and now his underemployment could be added to the plus column as a condition common to each.

At Java World, Jordan was scowling his way through another brutal 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. shift. He had volunteered for this particular time frame because the tips were better and it permitted him to eat a breakfast upon entering and a lunch just before punching out; and two paid meals are two paid meals. He thought about passing this pearl onto Randall and Corey, but decided that any person who could not produce such a conclusion independently was unlikely to reach for a book on philosophy, bummy though it may be.

Clarisse was only trying to escape her life for a moment, but the coffee shop’s disarray dismayed and oppressed her. The usually stalwart Carlos had sunk into a funk resulting in something of slowdown; a strike being out of the question given the number of dependents he’d burdened himself with. The cash register had not been balancing out correctly the past few mornings and Carlos, being the only Mexican in the place to have transcended busboy status, made the most convenient suspect. He knew it, the boss knew it, Jordan knew it and, being the shop’s top employee, it really bugged Carlos for reasons requiring no explanation.

Jordan snapped out of his morning morass at the sight of Clarisse. That she was a little heavier had escaped no one, but to J.’s peepers, the rounding out (to this point) worked to her advantage. He turned to Carlos and asked if it were alright to take a little breather. Carlos could have cared less.

Clarisse suggested they have a smoke out on the sidewalk and Jordan reached into the back closet and pulled his Drum from a coat pocket.

“Don’ you ever smoke anytheeng else?” she asked as each settled into a plastic chair.

“Sure.”

He lit her up. “So what’s going on?” which it was his to ask given the novelty of the French/Belgian girl’s visit.

“You know perfectly well what’s going on,” she fired back. He didn’t. He had an inkling that she had been unhappy and that now it had grown to a rushing torrent of rage, but was ignorant of the details or what it had to do with him. He groped.

“You’re unhappy, huh?”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

Again, he did not know, since her specific ailment remained a mystery. He narrowed down the possibilities, or lack thereof, that her life might present and fired away. “Bummed about your furniture career, huh?”

“Do you haf to says ‘huh?’?”

Jordan wondered if Clarisse hadn’t dropped by just to make his life as miserable as hers, but kept in mind how she and Corey were among the single-digit few who had come to visit him at county hospital. “Sorry,” he sheepishly replied.

“Of course eet’s not my designing. Well eet is, but eet’s more dan dat, too.”

“Corey?” And he stifled a rising “huh?”

“He ees wid dat Randall all de time cooking up dat stoopid bum philosophie.”

“I should think that would make you happy. After all, they may be on to something there. It’s an idea, they’re developing it, and if they find a market you’ll be able to design all the furniture you want after you leave your baby off with the nanny he’s paid for.”

And there it was.

Clarisse was both flattered and furious that a casual acquaintance could quantify her condition so succinctly, but she needed to get her issue out. “He will be paying for Yvonne’s baby, not mine.”

“C’mon, that’s crazy!” he asserted without a single argument to back it up.

“No, you c’mon. What do you mean ‘c’mon’? He likeded her de first time he saw her.”

“So did I. It doesn’t mean a thing. You’re married for chrissakes.”

“Dat doesn’t mean a thing,” she hissed.

Jordan was convinced that counseling an embittered Clarisse was the worst way to spend a precious coffee break at the coffee house. His Drum beat sour. He felt gray in the face. But he was fascinated by her admission, which he found particularly damning, and pretended not to be as impressed as he actually was. “Why would you say that?”

“He has dat magazine with the peectures of her.”

“So do I..”

“You are no married!” she bleated at something near the top of her lungs.

“You just said that doesn’t matter!” he whispered rather loudly.

Folks both inside and outside the restaurant directed glances their way. Clarisse lived up to her new pledge of shamelessness and shook off their attentions – the attentions of others. Jordan was mildly thankful for the advertisement of being in a heated exchange involving a curvaceous continental.

“You’ve got to get a hold of yourself,” he changed tracks. “You’re making way too much of all this,” but it was too late and she was crying softly and he found the soft femininity hard to resist because it had become so rare. He shimmied his chair across the concrete, put his arm around her and said, “Listen, I get off at one. Go shop around town for an hour and meet me back here and we’ll go somewhere and talk about things.”

He pulled out a handkerchief and Clarisse blew her nose into it and smiled. She nodded and promised that she would return, but when Jordan punched out, he had to roll and smoke two of his special Drumsticks at the same table outside before giving up and heading home for a much-deserved nap.

Chapter Thirty-three

Corey and Randall were working at a feverish pace. Their collaboration was reaching a mystical level, driven mostly by the fact Randall had truly warmed up to the project and Corey was able to stay out of his way as the torrent of ideas rushed on.

Their creation was growing by leaps and bounds.

“Value is what you don’t find lying loose out on the sidewalk,” Randall launched.

Corey liked it, although we would be hard-pressed to agree given our title and choice of subject matter. “I like it, but listen, what about your health?”

However burnished the gems he was producing, both remained convinced that without a marked decline in Randall’s health, there was no good news.

“I went to the doctor the other day. The good news is I most definitely have a rasp to my voice.”

“I noticed. But I thought it was from talking so much.”

Randall ignored this, and such was his comfort in the role of martyred, sanctified seer. Achieving this status meant rising above the petty feelings of lesser lights.

He let the place grow pregnant with pause. “What did he say?” Corey was forced to follow up.

“He said I should stop smoking.”

“Or?” Corey egged him on.

“That’s what I said, ‘or?’ and he said, ‘or your cough will get worse.’ ‘You mean I won’t die?’ I asked him then, and he said, ‘not for decades’.”

Corey threw his pen across the table in a gesture of mild fatigue mixed with frustration. “Dammit! You’ll never get sick enough to make this work.”

Randall then informed Corey of his pending date with Yvonne to talk about the progress of her campaign on behalf of the rights of naked girls and that it was time to trash the tryst.

“Can I come along?”

Randall realized then that, although married, Corey was hot for Yvonne and that he really couldn’t find any reason to blame him other than that Corey was married. That he had his own copy of her layout, and was pleased as punch about Yvonne’s company, alerted him to certain sentiments roiling his own insides. Eyes on the prize he shrugged them off. “For lesser lights,” he scolded himself.

“Of course you can,” Randall smiled nobly, without calculation, because it felt good to be kind and generous with his friend.

Before going they pulled out the magazine and discussed their favorite shots of Yvonne – and parts of Yvonne therein. Then they closed it up and left for a meeting with her.

“Where’s the meeting?” Corey asked as they stepped into Randall’s devastated German sport/compact, proximity being no reason to walk in the city they called home.

“At the Argentine place, but we’re not going in. We’re just going to smoke and chat out on the sidewalk.”

(!)

The Sidewalk Smokers Club was/were divorcing their homonymous practice from any prior exercise whatsoever; shrinking the ritual, stripping it buck-naked and to the bare essentials, making it Yvonne.

Smoking on the sidewalk was, in this instance, not to be an extension of some stuffy meal, but a light and airy thing unto itself – an acquired taste.

They arrived a few moments later. Yvonne was already there, in all her scrumptiousness, sharing a cigarette with Joya. Jordan, ever discreet, had not yet informed his fellow gorillas that the Coloradoan was cut from a different cloth than they thought (or hoped), but something in the fact she was present irked Corey.

The ladies were puffing furiously as the boys approached. Yvonne was enjoying one of Joya’s treats so that a vanilla dusty Milky Way encompassed the sidewalk leading up to them.

“Well, hey!” said Joya, “look at you two Foxy Browns.” Of course her little verbal invention worked at a number of levels, and pulled smiles from both men. Like two gunslingers of the Old West, Randall and Corey drew their cig-paks and tapped them with free hands in perfect synchronicity. Placing pleasure to their mouths, both leaned into Yvonne’s awaiting chrome lighter and achieved complete satisfaction.

Fshwwwwwwwwwww, they blew out, breathing the urban atmosphere back in, invisible, hardly cleaner than the cig itself.

“What brings you here?” Randall nodded in the cowgirl’s direction.

“I’m helpin’ put on the press conference at my place, as you know.”

Randall nodded that he knew.

“And, well, me and little Miss Muffin are gettin’ to know each other some.”

The boys needed to recover from the less than oblique allusion to Yvonne’s anatomy. “Sumthin’ happened today, which changes things a little, and Yvonne called to tell me about it, and I said I’d help, but maybe she should tell you, too.”

“You’re involved and so is your store,” Randall anticipated her.

“Hon, you’re so smart you actually save time.” Joya’s voice jumped a few rungs in the pitch scale.

Randall knew Joya’s engagement with The Club was an important development for now there was infrastructure, a place from which to launch quality presentations.

“So what happened?” Corey jumped in, not only to make himself an indispensable part of the proceedings, but also to expedite the revelation.

“My clients are dumping me,” Yvonne said with a grimace. Randall tilted his head in a way that urged a further detailing of the fact. “You know, the pictures,” she surrendered, “the pictures and, you know, most of them are corporations and they have to lie low, too, because, you know, they know they’re not perfect. They can find another caterer.”

“Man that is…great!” Randall said, forgetting how he naturally thought a few steps ahead of those around him, drawing faces of confused anger from his partners. “That ups the ante,” he heightened his own voice into Joya’s tone field, seeking to recover their good graces. “The suit is going to be worth more to our attorney. Our case is going to be stronger if we can prove that not only should you be entitled to money for posing, but that you continue to pay the price for posing long after they stopped paying you.”

He did not know what legal story might be concocted to give his little notion wings, but unto the lawyer what belongs to the lawyer. His message was directed at a different court. The one where public opinion sits on puffy sofas, eating bad food, an ever-attentive jury.

“Ya think hon?”

His shrug was less than convincing. There were no guarantees. “It could drum up enough bad publicity to force a pre-trial settlement.”

A pre-trial settlement was not the same as launching some powerful current of transforming thought, but it was something. And the plan was so much pleasure to the girls who went on to explain the preparations being made for the press conference, which sounded increasingly more like a party than an informational gathering for professional media. Joya announced that a lesbian city councilperson in the race for mayor was going to be joining and that should, she said, add some official heft and a progressive patina to the affair. “Ya need mucky-mucks,” she explained.

“Yes you do,” Randall stamped her before pulling out his notebook and pen.

Joya’s hands trembled as she smoked and spoke, softening her body just enough to mix something of the opposite natures in her. The enhancement a little weakness had on her appeal was obvious and besides (she thought), in the end, you want to be as many things as you can for as many people as possible. And that’s retail, from purses to politics.

The word she’d said before “city councilperson” (lesbian) struck an unused key in Corey and some vague idea began to travel upward from his crotch to the brain – always a discouraging progression where the matters of women and desire intersect.

Yvonne reported from her end (of the project). She was using contacts with photographers and party publicists and other caterers to track down more girls who had posed over the years. Her go-getterism and persistence-mania had netted the assistance of one bona fide star and one up-and-coming starlet; both willing to admit they’d posed nude in the past and been exploited accordingly. Their promise to attend, she told Randall, had to be included in his press release and he was loathe to disagree, and so did not.

Just at that moment, a red-and-white fire department car cruised slowly past the quartet as they emitted, jointly, enough smoke to compensate for the decades-long decline of heavy industry locally. A powerful light was focused on them briefly and Randall flicked a finger in return, disdainful of that particular agency’s power to mute his First Amendment privileges.

(The First Amendment, ratified effective December 15, 1791 reads as follows: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof: or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for redress of grievances.”)

The quartet fought off an urge for some wine in the restaurant, their smoke together having been pleasure enough and their plans discussed sufficiently.

They parted ways, Randall asking Joya for a few vanilla smokes to abet his quest for sickness. Corey looked over his shoulder for one last gander at Yvonne’s ass and saw Joya’s hand on it.

“The day,” he muttered, “started out with such promise.” Randall didn’t know why he said that, but he nodded, a little glum, before turning away, enlisting in the commercial drift that pulls each of us along to wherever it has been decided we are going.

Chapter Thirty-four

Jordan was upset about Clarisse’s having stiffed him, but soothed by his cigarette and the understanding that the lady was in something of a confusion.That he understood women to be confused most of the time did not deprive her of his empathy.

She was having trouble, walking about like a coyote that has chewed its leg free of a steel-clamp trap. And J. decided that so long as she wasn’t rabid he wasn’t averse to absorbing a little abuse on her behalf.

He sat at the table in his apartment and admired the neighbor’s garden for a second.

He plugged in some piano-driven jazz that for him was classical music just like any symphony produced by some 19th century German master. And besides, jazz was growing old.

Anyway with the music and some nicotine his spirits rose, just a tick or two above the depression into which recent events had driven him.

He followed the piano notes up and down the keyboard, absorbing the 18-wheel highway rumble of the bass notes and licking his lips with treble, shivering a bit at the suspension, at the open question mark of the endings. It was enough to make one smoke and he decided to fire up another, this time touched with a pinch of marijuana. It was a mixture he’d picked up on one of his many two-week jaunts to Europe (there had never been time for more). Tokin’ buddies of his past would have deemed it sacrilege and Jordan wouldn’t have given a hoot. He wouldn’t have wasted his time explaining the memories of gray cobblestones and late-night streets echoing with the joy of people sharing life’s easy pickings together. He refused to sound like an idiot, like some poor man’s Kipling. He knew from youthful attempts to convey the sense of his adventures that people (for the most part) don’t give a shit about where you’ve been and care even less about what you learned while you were there.

The phone rang. The cardboard filter he’d fashioned and the leafy mixture of green and rust brown slid from the joint he was patiently and peacefully fashioning. We know by when the phone rings for us why it does so and, because of these first two clues, also who’s calling. Without these clues, odd hybrids of fear and expectation will seize all but the hardiest, or stupidest among us. Jordan hadn’t entered any contests of late nor was he waiting for good news from anyone at all. He shuddered and slowly lifted the receiver.

“Hullo.”

“You Jordan?”

“Yes,” he admitted fatalistically.

“My name’s Dumburton. I’m a detective.”

During the ensuing series of questions and revelations Dumburton sounded just the way his name did. J. wondered what it was about cops that they seemed to naturally fit into the few, narrow stereotypes of overly serious, sunglass-wearing, donut-chomping, mustachioed fascists they were made out to be in films both friendly or unflattering in their portrayal. “It’s the uniform,” he mumbled to himself as Dumburton tried to squeeze a date for a meeting and a few questions.

“What’s that?” the detective verily growled.

“Um, nothing Dumb-burden.”

“BurTON. Officer. What about Thursday?”

Thursday was the day after the day upon which this was all transpiring and Jordan had affixed it in his mind with the loyalty befitting a founding member of The Sidewalk Smokers Club. It was the day of the press conference/benefit at Joya’s on behalf of Yvonne’s sexy naked girls and he had no intention of missing it.

He knew the average policeman’s aversion to reporters had much to do with the fact they were often up to no good and didn’t want to find their illicit deeds in print.

And so he mentioned it.

“Um, looks like I’m busy,” Jordan said and went on to explain how he had a press conference to attend.

“Press conference!” Dumburton hissed predictably and cut himself off from asking what kind of press conference, for there was no such thing as a good one. Free speech rights were a pain in the ass and public relations worse. Police work – the collaring of monsters like the Angel Without Mercy – more often than not required a skirting of the law and such transgressions were (or had been at one time) to a journalist what blood is to a Balkans mercenary. So the detective passed and cornered Jordan into meeting him a day after the press conference because what a cop wants, a cop gets, at least until the lawyers arrive.

“Can I ask what this is about?” Jordan asked politely enough.

“You heard a tha Angel Without Mercy case?”

“No,” Jordan lied, seeking to grab every advantage for himself in throwing this bloodhound off his scent. It was the first of many such ruses to come.

“You been livin’ on the moon?” Dumburton curtly queried.

“Yeah,” said Jordan, thereby eliminating whatever edge had been gained by his denial, effectively placing himself in the category of “uncooperative suspect,” (read: punk) according to the detective’s standards.

“You stayed at county hospital on such and such dates?” Dumburton persisted.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Jordan fenced.

“Friday, 2 p.m. at the station house, mister. You jes’ be there.”

Jordan just about shit his pants. He decided to pass on his tobacco/weed confection.

He was not given to long bouts of paranoia immediately following his indulgences, just short ones that his strength of character and sense of security beat back in avoidance of the darker considerations. But he was not ready for even a short spell following the unannounced grilling he’d just undergone. His adrenal glands were, once again, pumping at a furious pace and Jordan didn’t need to be any faster or higher or anything other than what he was in that moment.

The phone rang again. Jordan was calm. Even with the luck he’d been having, two treacherous phone calls seemed unlikely. After all, he’d only murdered once.

It was Corey who, after a few tepid attempts at casual conversation, clumsily, but mercifully arrived at a reason for the inconvenience. “How much do you know about that girl Joya?”

“Why do you ask?” Jordan responded wearily, up to his eyeballs with interrogatories for the evening.

“You seem to hang out with her more than the rest of us.” By “us” he meant the ever-tightening class of sidewalk smokers.

“Yeah, so?”

“She a dyke?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I thought so. They just looked odd together, the two of ‘em and then Joya said something about a lesbian city councilwoman showing up and…”

“Cleared up for ya, huh?”

“About Joya, yeah. I was pretty sure, but what about Yvonne?”

Having his mind occupied with a lot of weighty matters, Jordan was slow to notice how both halves of the same troubled couple had been in contact with him the same day and when he did, it was enough for some conclusions of his own.

“You got the hots for Yvonne?”

“I didn’t say that. Why does everybody say that?”

“Who’s everybody?”

“Never mind. Gotta go,” and with that, Corey hung up.

On second thought, Jordan returned to the construction of his half-tobacco, half-marijuana joint, which he coupled with a repeat of the musky backstreets jazz he’d begun what had started out as such a pleasant evening with, and got lilted like the open question mark in a compositional ending.

Chapter Thirty-five

It was the day of the benefit/press cattle call. Randall’s press release had been sent by mail, faxed, and transmitted through mysterious channels across a vast infrastructure of invisibility to various media outlets. He was helped by Jordan who had been fired from or walked out of a goodly portion of them. Some twenty reporters had confirmed attendance; no mean trick when that industry’s consolidation is factored into the equation. Of course, the element of titillation is what led their editors to forswear the habitual aversion to topics upsetting to the established order.

Joya had pressed her shop girl Sadina into service for the store’s proper preparation. Clarisse who, in between the time she stood Jordan up and called Joya to help, had added to her friends’ effort a smashingly odd looking table behind which the press conference was to be held. Joya loved it. “Hon, that has to be the biggest and coolest thing since the great glaciers!” And she wasn’t just piling it on. The table was truly franzy and, as is the case with all good artistry, seemed to whisper its purveyor’s very name as one stared at it. “Clarisse,” said Sadina in a tone that made the object of her address shift from one foot to the other and back again, “it really is something.” What with Corey and Clarisse mostly on the outs and their relationship decaying daily, they were not given to confidences of late, and yet without his input she had a good idea that Sadina was a girl who liked girls. She looked over at Joya who was smiling at her, too, and made the connection. It didn’t change her attitude toward either of them a wit and she shrugged under the rain of compliments they were wetting her with. “You can haf it,” she told Joya in a state happier than the normal resignation with which she made such concessions. “At least someone weell gets to see it.”

“Sugar plum,” said Joya, “people are gonna see it and we’re gonna find you some clients who make big bangs.” Clarisse already felt better about enlisting in what she deemed an elaborate charade. The recent buffeting she’d undergone had inclined her toward postures of retreat and anger, but that was not how the great heroines in the books she admired acted. And now her mimicking the nobility of made-up people living in a very different world might well pay in spades. She was not going down or giving up or anything. She was going to persevere and this minor first step demonstrated to Clarisse just how important it is to keep fighting the good fight.

She had a little epiphany as she watched her friends prepare to make battle in a clash not winnable. “To keep fighting the good fight is the sole purpose of the fight,” (with accent) was the lesson and she promised herself to pass it onto Corey and his partner.

Yvonne came sashaying in shortly thereafter. Her outfit was a lean fitting blue business suit without a hint of exposed skin, for she had learned that the consecrated sex symbol no longer needs to flaunt her wares. As a caterer without any work, she took it upon herself to deal with the “benefit” aspect of the affair.

Seconds after her entry, two attractive college girls in French maid-style outfits walked in with some trays of food. Joya frowned. “Oh my, there go my sales,” and she permitted the girls, for the good of the cause, to begin piling finger sandwiches and pink/orange melon balls wrapped in prosciutto – among other culinary niceties – onto one of her glass display cases. That is, of course, once Sadina had put some appropriate looking material down over the top to prevent scratches.

But, back to Yvonne.

She looked fantastic, which is something that should never be taken for granted with anyone, for beauty is feckless toward its possessor. She was glittery with the attention about to be received and there was a moment of silence as the three ladies-in-waiting drooled up and down her before moving in for a rapacious session of hugging. Joya got something that looked like a kiss on the lips and Clarisse turned to see Sadina watching her response to it. Clarisse’s response was a smile and that was replicated by one from the Indian girl who then turned and shot a smile at one of the French maids.

“Oh, look at that table!” Yvonne declared and another round of attendant ego stroking on Clarisse’s behalf was quickly commenced and concluded. Then the girls kind of stood around wondering what to do, as it was the boys who controlled the actual agenda. “What’s next?” Joya said as she pulled out a broom and handed it to Sadina. “Well,” Yvonne answered, “Randall and Corey are going to bring all the cables for the press lighting. My girls have the food under control. The actresses should be here later than anyone else and, of course, the lawyer’s gonna tell us what we can and can’t say.”

“What’s the lawyer’s name, hon?” Joya asked as she flitted, devising the most ingenious modes of display for her jewelry, which (she felt) was as much on show as Yvonne, the actresses, bum philosophy or Clarisse’s table.

“I think his name is DeConcini,” said Yvonne.

“Oh hon, you didn’t get a Jew?”

Then Jordan walked in. He had been preoccupied. Nobody was quite sure with what, so that The Sidewalk Smokers Club (except for Randall) had almost forgotten about him in the excitement. He was dressed sensibly, but semi-formally, lest those bursting into their little world take The Sidewalk Smokers Club for some kind of shabby, two-bit outfit. It had not escaped him either, even with an interrogation planned in the Angel Without Mercy case, that this was something of a coming out for each particular member of the spontaneous formation, that never had any of them been quite so close to garnering this kind of attention before.

Oh hope (attention, attention, attention!).

“Jordan!” Joya effused with her normal high-octane enthusiasm, “come in shoogy,” and just like that he felt right at home. Yvonne winked at him, all subtlety now. He caught a glimpse of Sadina and worked his way up and down the little body to make her feel uncomfortable, for sport. He gobbled at a prosciutto-melon ball as Clarisse approached and gave him the biggest hug she ever had.

“Your new hair is cute.”

Jordan turned around surprised to discover the remark was Yvonne’s, but it was a pleasant imbalance that affected him and, rather than work to set things right, he reached for a cucumber and pesto-paste sandwich w/ garlic alioli and decided to walk around and savor the tipsy hormonal state into which the ladies had stirred him.

The reason for this blow-by-blow of pitter-patter is to demonstrate just how hard it was becoming to tell whether someone liked boys, girls, or both; just how much things had broken down and increased the sense of options, and confusion confronted by all.

Randall came in next, an important looking folio in his hands, horn-rimmed glasses and oversized tweed blazer lending the event a much-needed dose of dressed-down seriousness. It was entertainment (as all spectacle is), but it wasn’t. Corey was dressed similarly and carrying a wooden crate with thick cables and extensions and multi-socketed terminals to mount the media bordello required to make this thing work. It was a sartorial adjustment, a conscious decision the partners had made on their own, right down to the fake lens horn-rimmed glasses he also sported. Clarisse hardly recognized him and was knocked further off rail by the fact she found him more attractive than she had in a while.

“Okay, okay listen up man!” Yvonne’s media chief bellowed, “This is how it’s going to unfold.” And then Corey began going through the press conference script whilst simultaneously assisting Randall in the electrical complications that come with the medium-scale electronic happening.

The lawyer, DeConcini, arrived shortly thereafter. He was a handsome, blonde-haired and blue-eyed Italian with thick luscious hair and, why not, horn-rimmed glasses. DeConcini looked like a fresh baseball boy on a summer field. His eyes burned with innocent ambition and held no reasons for complaint or unhappiness. His presence helped complete that balance of sexy frivolity (Joya, Sadina, Clarisse, Yvonne) with somber thought-laden post-academia (Randall, DeConcini, Corey) and just a dash of the everyman from Jordan’s updated, yet classical/contemporary dudewear.

He chatted with Randall and Corey, stiff, professional, without any fraternal sense of the task. Randall pointed outside at a thickening crowd drawn by what passed for hoopla, and DeConcini turned and grabbed Joya by the arm and pulled her aside.

Although they had never met, their mutual grasp of the plan secreted an air of things being well prepared. This pumped them up as it did each member of the club so that a supreme confidence began to pervade the store and environs.

Joya was trying to discretely cram some rings and things from the food-covered showcase to another display still available when Jordan approached and whispered in her ear: “The cops are on to me.”

She straightened up, shaking her silky strands in one sweeping motion over a single shoulder. “No!” she said conspiratorially.

“Yeah!” he matched her excited tone (without the excitement), “some detective named Dumburden is going to question me tomorrow.” She thought on it, perused the room and said, “Let’s get through this and we’ll come up with something.” He couldn’t imagine what she might come up with, but grew encouraged until she added, “if we can,” before bouncing off, cowboy boots clip-clopping over the sound of everything else going on in the busy hive her store had become.

Joya saw Clarisse standing by herself watching Jordan as he spoke with her. She turned around, retraced her steps, and told J. to try and make himself useful and he went out to the sidewalk in an effort to stay clear of the rising commotion. The Angel Without Mercy properly dispatched, Joya approached Clarisse and said, “Hon, why don’t you help your husband with all that wiring he’s tied up in?”

He looked so good that Clarisse’s response to the effect that, “he can manage by himself,” didn’t come out quite so aggressively as she had intended. Espying Jordan out on the sidewalk, she decided to join him. Leaving, she noticed how Corey failed to notice; his eyes focused all-too-obviously upon Yvonne and her ever-increasing mystique unattainable. Outside, Clarisse tapped Jordan on the shoulder and he reacted a little more violently than normal. “Yes she’s lesbian!”

“Who?” Clarisse asked, although she was pretty sure he was talking about Joya given her own reconnaissance. He offered her a ready-rolled Drumstick, but she declined. “Luckys or nuthin’ huh?” he said and she informed him that cigarettes were no longer a part of her repertoire. “You quit that easily?” Jordan followed up and Clarisse responded that, yes, she had. Then she asked him what was up after the press conference – if he had any plans. Jordan had already interpreted Corey’s interest in Joya and/or Yvonne as proof positive something irremediable had occurred between the couple and saw no harm in providing her with a little company. Besides, he needed some himself and told her this before adding, “Just don’t stand me up this time.”

She skirted the issue of her rudeness and informality by pointing out that, “de table in dare ees mine.”

“It’s beautiful,” he said, and meant it, the positive nature of Joya’s verbal generosities having infected him (and all of them) completely.

Inside, the Coloradan’s attempt to keep Corey occupied went belly-up and now he’d joined Yvonne for some chitty-chat focusing mostly upon her solid appearance and the sudden rush of optimism they were experiencing. The first television crew stormed in with an attractive, pushy blonde reporter in a faux Chanel skirt-suit leading the way. She scanned the room knowing what she wanted and honed-in on Yvonne. “That’s the girl,” she said without any attempt to mute her voice or intentions.

“The girl,” you see.

This was followed by an equally insufferable focusing of blinding camera light on a rather surprised Yvonne, followed by the intrusion of a microphone into her face space. She could come to grips with the fact her father had seen the magazine layout, that guys she was working with knew the contours of her physiognomy to the inch, that lesbians she was carrying a mild torch for had pored over the gems in her jewelbox. But she could not bare, um, bear the idea that perfect strangers whom rubbed her the wrong way at first sight had done the same.

Corey to the rescue. He stepped in front of his charge, blocking the camera’s view (its lifeline) entirely. “You can ask your questions during the press conference.

That’s what it’s for.” He pushed the camera lens down with a protective hand and then shoved the reporter out of the way with a brusqueness only a television journalist could not be offended by. “Randall will help you set up,” and just like that, his partner stepped into the breach and began positioning reporter and crew in a place marked by masking tape with their station affiliation scribbled in ink marker. Joya watched it all unfold and traipsed up to Randall. “Hey, you got this all wired don’t ya?” Randall pointed at the cables snaking across her shop floor and she got the little joke. “I’m impressed,” she said (and so was he).

It was clear that Randall and Corey were two bright lads who’d been waiting too long for their break, blokes put on the shelf to acquire the right seasoning. Their moment had come when they least expected, over the most unlikely of causes, and they were out ahead of the pack because they’d left the starting gate years ago.

Things began to move quickly. Another crew and yet another showed brandishing the same bombastic fanfare associated with the electronic media. Each reporter, the next more handsome than the last, made the attempt at mugging Yvonne and Corey repelled every unseemly advance, deflecting their energy toward Randall who enmeshed them in a vernacular so superior that it consistently brought the jackals to heel.

Three more crews showed and then individual reporter celebrities from the serious papers looking for a quirky tale speckled with local color. There was an attractive looking feminist Latina-styled gal from the Spanish-speaking daily and a tall, artsy gal with wire-rimmed glasses and attitude from the local edgy liberal/left bulletin.

Also a team from a Korean television channel wandered in, presumably drawn from another assignment by the assembly of rakes inside and out.

With those who spoke his language Randall employed years of wide reading and travel in dispensing tidbits that entertained with wit and aplomb, or humiliated with subtle yet vicious turns of phrase, depending on whether the reporter came armed or in peace. Corey looked over his shoulder during an attempt to shield Yvonne from one of the raptors The Club had so earnestly sought out, and smiled at his partner.

Randall hoped he wasn’t doing things too well. Shepherd to the mass media was not a job he’d meant to groom himself for. He was a genius and did not want the fact to be lost on anyone present.

One of the major actresses that had signed onto the effort arrived. She was an A-list performer, currently appearing in a racy, top-rated show, although she’d also had success on the big screen. With fame secure and her own offending pictures effectively buried by well-paid minions, joining this crusade was a perfect chance to embrace something mildly scandalous. Something that could layer her reputation with street credibility and proof there was a mind in there, a mind supple enough to grapple with matters of ethics and economics. As the star of her own show she was seen perpetually smoking, although in real life she was never much given to the behavior. Out in the public now, exercising the grand sweeping entrances so important to her craft, the cameras firing away at AK-47 pace, she pulled out a cigarette (brand name undetermined) and began to puff for the benefit of her legions. Joya might have preferred that nobody smoke inside so as to avoid the smell permeating the furnishings, area rugs and garments that made up the store’s “story” as Clarisse referred to decor. But she was way too smart a businesswoman and underground socialite to ever reproach so international a luminary as the one standing in Joya’s Joyas dispersing illicit driftings into the air. Instead she addressed the actress, introduced herself, and asked for a smoke.

Corey, Jordan and Randall saw, but did not hear, and thought to themselves, “Oh no!”

But it was not what they thought. They had underestimated Joya’s natural ken for racing up and down rungs of the social ladder. As luck would have it the actress was nice. Smiles crackled between them. The star was, in fact, truly encouraged by Yvonne’s pluckiness in defending the rights of pretty young girls so long abused.

The less-than-starlets, let’s call them comets – those girls who’d posed in the magazines and made up the larger class of plaintiffs – were filling up the place fast. And with the Gypsies comes the dance. Some were classy and elegant and clearly engaged in pursuits that no longer required so obvious an exploitation of their bodies. Others were not quite so classy, and a little bit roughed-up, as if they were exploiting their sexuality as a last gasp and to little positive effect. And although they did not, all of them, add to the cutting edge sense of fashion and thought The Sidewalk Smokers were hoping to evince, these troubled women were exactly the ones the lawsuit, in its earnestness, had been drafted to protect. And it was they whom the attorney DeConcini seemed to spend the most time addressing, questioning and prodding to confession.

Jordan, still observing (still smoking), thought the lawyer a wonderful addiction, um addition, to the effort and had, what with all the fine people milling about, forgotten his personal nightmare.

Still other girls were stars from the adult film industry and the overall effect of their presence was to round out the selection so that it provided a very nice profile of urban American womanhood which, in turn, had reporters reaching for their cellular phones in search of back-up.

The second actress of note entered, the starlet, hoping to play the old, late-arrival card, but things were so electric, the crowd gathered so hepped-up on itself, that she almost went unnoticed. Jordan pointed her out to Clarisse who, characteristic of her mind state at this point, observed, “She doesn’t looks so hot,” and then, “she’s very skinny.”

Jordan would have begged to differ with the first part of this commentary, but the second was hard to contest. “You know,” he said in return, “sometimes it’s just a matter of them looking very good on camera, but not in real life.”

“Hmmph,” Clarisse answered, “and sumtimes eet’s just a matter of one pretty girl being luckier dan all de rest.” The positive strength of things was pulling Jordan out of Clarisse’s rather depressing orbit. He asked her to excuse him for a second and rushed back inside toward a cool, but very occupied Randall to whisper in his ear: “Sometimes it’s just a matter of one pretty girl being luckier than all the other pretty girls,” and Randall turned to him in mid-conversation.

“Would you repeat that?”

J. obliged. Randall nodded and returned to sparring with a reporter trying to bully his way into a front row spot that wasn’t really there. This left him ill-positioned to handle the lesbian city councilwoman’s sudden arrival. And sauntering in she came with an entourage of women young, old and betwixt. The lead vixen had a remote mini-microphone curved sexily around her neck, ending at the mouth, into which she whispered terribly important stratagems for moving her liege.

The councilwoman (councilperson) – was heavy-set, sporting a felt boater-style hat with a (fake) duck feather in its band, not attractive in any prescribed or popular sense. She fit the bill for a lesbian as Jordan and Corey and Randall understood it before Joya cloppity-clopped into their lives in those cowboy boots. Her level of achievement placed the woman in an age group somewhat older than that of Joya and Sadina, so nobody could be sure of what she’d looked like in the past. All of which was very important to those involved in and following the story.

Joya saw Jordan staring oddly at the overweight politician as all the attention in the room turned from the flowering girlhood present to this rather masculine specimen of the feminine and whispered things in his ear to set the record straight. “She’s a legend, hon. If you’re one of life’s throwaways, not pretty, middle-aged and fat, one-eyed, one-legged, a stray cat, battered broad, or queer, she’s a friend and that’s why she is where she is.”

Fair enough, Jordan thought.

In that special way the outrageous among us like to upend the demure, the savvy lesbian pol ditched the girl with remote wire and stratagems and waded toward the A-list actress and a wonderful photo-op. Randall was still trapped behind a bulky cameraman and groping after her. He stopped and held his breath before discerning exactly where the arch of her trajectory would land the influential one and came up with yet another spontaneous bum maxim: “Even at your own party you can’t control everything.”

The actress was melting someone with a smile and didn’t have much time to react as this coarse woman, whom she thankfully recognized as some minor star in the media constellation, bore down upon her with the force of a cannonball unleashed by friendly fire. She gathered herself up and absorbed a two-second-long kiss on the lips that was captured by all those who’d been enlisted to transmit whatever it was that took place. Randall exhaled with relief. The actress had played her part. “Sometimes it’s better not to control everything at your own party,” he amended his work-in-progress.

Soon the store was packed. The lady reporters, regardless of political ilk or status on the journalistic ladder, were unanimously interested in Joya’s jewelry and in Joya, too. The Sidewalk Smokers, a rare collective effort in a country obsessed with the individual mystique, was humming along as a well-oiled machine during what amounted to a maiden launch.

And it was just this moment when officers Thorpe and Diaz were strolling by, one of whom was in that part of town to break the old wallet over some bauble his wife had pointed out to him. As firemen it was only natural the sardine can Joya’s Joyas had become would catch their trained eyes so that as they passed the store, the sight of what they had just seen took a moment to sink in, and they went back for a second gander. Of course, it was not fire safety that had initially pricked their curiosity so much as something that had made their pricks curious. This was the overabundance of attractive women on hand and the vaguely familiar silhouette of someone smoking a cigarette whom they seemed to recognize from somewhere.

There were a number faces that struck chords of familiarity, but the actress of the hot television series with her oft-photographed, oft-disseminated image could not escape their keen inspectors’ instincts. Diaz (he was the one shopping for his wife) immediately thought how nice it would be to surprise her (his wife) with an autograph of the star along with the gift. In that way he would not be reduced to filling out an espousal purchase order and could enjoy the spoils of having proven himself to be thoughtful in the truest sense.

Then Thorpe said, “She’s smoking. We need to stop it.”

“But she’s a famous actress,’ Diaz sagely observed, “what do you want to do, get your picture all over television and the newspapers as the guy who told her to put it out?”

For men like Thorpe and Diaz, men of and for the corps, lessons are learned slowly but completely, and Diaz had learned to stay away from large groups of smoking, disobedient people sprinkled with stardust. “You have to pick your battles,” he added.

“Yes,” said Thorpe, sounding wiser still.

Diaz got the drift, though not sure he agreed entirely with his partner’s assuredness. Celebrities were touchy. It would not be their first run-in with a silver deity and things had gone both ways in the past. Sometimes their superiors lauded the inspectors for an even-handed application of the law. Other times their common sense had been questioned given that they’d put the department in a ridiculous light with an overzealous to-the-letter enforcement approach. The duo would usually point out the ambiguities in the law they were hired to apply; criticizing its drafting as unworkable, if not exactly in those words. It went like this (Diaz): “Lots of people are against public smoking. Not all of them think writing expensive tickets is the best way to stop it.” And he should have known, because he had to write those tickets.

Anyhow, it didn’t matter at present. Other were smoking, too, and trained to think on their feet, and given to favoring the law and their charge to enforce it in tricky situations with franzy people, the officers looked into one another’s eyes and saw the mutual hunger to enter the store and set things right. “Besides,” Thorpe read his partner’s mind, “they could all die tragically.”

Done. For nothing trumps public safety and/or national security. They sauntered in and the absence of stylisms, their standard-issue haircuts and unease at the tuggings and teasings of so many attractive women marked the two men as members of a distinct and probably unfriendly clan. People turned toward them in anticipation of some unpleasant business or other and that’s what they witnessed as the officers pulled out their badges, shoved them in the actress’s face and advised her she needed to put out her cigarette.

The star, of course, seemed pretty sure they couldn’t pull it off without making her just a little more famous and besides, there was a city councilwoman standing next to her. But the big woman remained mum on the matter, retreated into the background even; for while cavorting with sexy and rebellious artists might sharpen the public image (in some quarters) openly flouting laws she had supported was an altogether different matter. Joya abetted her escape by paving a wide way toward Yvonne’s catered finger foods.

The actress, meanwhile, despite the aforementioned fact that she did not smoke of her own free will, but rather in pro of her image, informed them of a disinclination to heed their order. Diaz and Thorpe may not have been up to speed on the mores and folkways of this particular flirt factory, but they were certainly no strangers to the obstinacy of celebrities. The investigators knew they enjoyed the state’s absolute monopoly on force somewhere (way) behind them and were glad of it. The press of personalities in the store stymied them and the men were convinced a stern application of the law that left no room for discourse, no give for some take, was in order.

“Who’s the proprietor?” Thorpe asked in an authoritative voice he practiced each morning on his unruly children. Reporters began to thrust microphones in the officers’ faces. Lights were trained upon the actress coolly puffing away, blowing second-hand smoke at her oppressors.

“That would be me, hon!” Joya worked her way through the parting crowd. The officers smiled immediately upon meeting eyes with hers. She was a number of good things, but damned if she didn’t come across as nice, too. “What is it I can do for you guys?”

Diaz waived his badge yet again.

“You’re cops?” she asked.

“No ma’am. FD. Fire Department. You can’t have people smoking in here. It’s a violation of the Smoke-Free Workplace Act.”

“Oh, I see. I’m so sorry. I thought that since it was kind of a party and I don’t have anybody, you know, to pay and well…” she lost her train of thought as the necessary prose grew thicker.

“It’s a press conference,” Diaz countered. “Press are working, for example. It’s a workplace. Just not the one you normally run.”

In the background, Randall and Corey writhed at this departure from the script and at their inability to do anything about it.

“Well then,” Joya said turning full circle in a sweeping move to address the entire pack. “Do you all object to putting out your cigarettes so that we can go ahead and have this press conference?” There was mild applause as folks dropped their butts to the floor and stamped them out, drawing a grimace from the proprietress who’d only just dispatched with Jordan’s bloodstains. She turned back to the investigators with that smile. “Is ‘at okay hons?”

“No ma’am,” Diaz pointed with his chin in the A-lister’s direction. “The young lady’s going to have to follow suit.” Both men smiled. They couldn’t help themselves, but it was clear that they were firm on the point and the actress smiled back and said, “Not a chance. Write me a ticket.”

Thorpe knew when someone was upping the ante on him and so he saw the actress and raised her one. “I’ll have to shut down the venue and have the proprietor arrested,” which wasn’t at all true or even possible. Joya suspected this, but when she scanned the proceedings looking for DeConcini, she located him outside talking up one of the comets. Citycouncilwoman, for her part, shrunk behind some cameras wanting no part of the mushrooming mess. Joya was in a bind. It was now hers to insist that the celebrity do something she did not want to, a task not unlike standing before a medieval queen of absolute dominion and calling her a whore.

And besides, it would have been ungrateful.

Randall came to the rescue. “Okay, let’s do it outside!”

Joya grabbed the line he was throwing her. “Great! Let’s do it outside. One big Sidewalk Smokers Club!” A tiny cheer rose up from the actual membership and through the force of their will and energy, Joya and Randall, with some authoritative prodding from the councilmember, managed to move the mass slowly out the door. “C’mon! A free cigarette for everybody,” Joya trilled as she gestured Sadina towards the backroom of her shop where, presumably, a carton of Dãrshãns was kept in case of an emergency not exactly like this, but an emergency just the same.

There was some grumbling from the press corps about the logistics of powering lighting and the like, but a general momentum toward the sidewalk had won the moment. Clarisse grimaced at the loss of protagonism her table was to suffer with the move, but folks who dream of being great learn to swallow such setbacks both with equanimity and frequency.

Outside people began to light up because when you talk a lot about something, you help bring it into existence. Some of the local media’s most attractive, up-and-coming hood ornaments allowed themselves to be photographed in the compromising activity.

Smoking.

A rare turn of ability these Sidewalk Smokers possessed; making or generating fun.

Cameramen and still-photographers reacted like water molecules over fire as things moseyed along to exactly where, nobody knew. The ending, unlike the endless parade of staged and stale events they were condemned to document, was completely in doubt and boy was this exciting!

Clarisse quickly overcame her initial disappointment and was now pushing Jordan – who as an off-duty barista had no real inclination to move furniture – for help in getting her table onto the sidewalk. “C’mon, c’mon,” she urged, “you do dees at de coffee chop don’t you?” These were not the best words for prodding him to action, but it seemed that the press conference’s soaring moment might suddenly falter without some focal point of attention for reporters and their helpers to train upon.

The thing (the table) weighed a ton and because it had a Plaster of Paris-kind of lumpy finish on top (practicality not being Clarisse’s strong suit) it was exceedingly difficult to grab at the edges. Struggling in fits and starts Clarisse and Jordan asked Randall to help as he alternated between outdoors and in, trying to get the whole thing going in the necessary direction. He huffed and twisted the features behind his glasses, but was of little help until he turned to Diaz and Thorpe and enlisted them in the effort. They assented. It was part of the job – written into the Smoke-Free Workplace Act in fact – to facilitate the configuration of safe surroundings and, what with the whole thing having been moved at their instigation, the two officers intended it as a tendered olive branch. The cameras whirred. The investigators sweated. As the quintet shimmied through the door, led by the bulky former firemen, the crowd cheered them.

“Bill,” the first reporteress squealed into her microphone while facing her hairy cameraman’s lens, “We’re here in front of Joya’s Joyas on a familiar and trendy stretch of commercial real estate where a most curious event is taking shape…”
And taking shape it was as Randall pushed both actresses, Yvonne, DeConcini, councilwoman, and one of the cuter magazine victims behind the most curious table.

The picture window filled with Joya’s jewels served as a nice backdrop – at least from the proprietress’s point of view.

“Listen up!” Randall managed to ratchet his voice above the crowd’s shambling volume, “Listen up man!” The din dulled a bit as everyone turned toward the table and the event suddenly took on the form of a traditional press conference. “We’re here,” and he had to say it again a little louder so as to beat the vocal stragglers into the herd of listeners and recorders he was aiming for. “We’re here today to announce the filing of a lawsuit by Yvonne,” and he raised an outstretched arm in his subject’s direction. She curtsied demurely and some of the rougher media backbenchers – mostly technicians and Teamsters – unleashed a series of catcalls that produced an abashed smile from Yvonne, which set off a chorus of delighted laughter in which everyone participated. Everyone, that is, save for DeConcini, whose job it was to project the severity of a juris doctor, and Thorpe and Diaz, for whom sobriety was also a job requirement.

Randall forged ahead, forgetting to laugh with the rest, intent upon making a point. “It’s a lawsuit which establishes her as the lead in a class of plaintiffs covering many of the young women you see here.” He then ill advisedly gestured to the actresses, comets, and gaggle of magazine girls he’d placed off to the side of the table so as to separate them from the media and growing collection of onlookers.

Once again, a cheer went up. The gaggle giggled, excited at being celebrated and the crowed guffawed in return. It was at this moment when Randall realized exactly what dynamics he had unleashed and therefore decided that humor, informality, delay and other nontraditional techniques would be the most effective in guiding this happening to a proper climax and denouement.

“All of whom at different and difficult moments in their lives have posed naked for any number of the magazines contained in the list you have before you.” A fluttering of papers ensued and those who’d joined the street spectacle looked over the shoulders of reporters to see exactly what it was he was talking about. The air was, by now, thick with vanilla smoke from Joya’s freely dispensed carton, and the situation – the girls, the list of dirty magazines, the Dãrshãns – were all adding up to a heady aphrodisia that nearly scared the fire department investigators out of their pants. Given that such an event would be highly inappropriate for two members of a venerable and highly respected institution to be attending, Diaz and Thorpe decided to leave, glancing nervously over their shoulders at the growing amoeba of people they were largely responsible for having created.

And their timing couldn’t have been better for as they slunk away, a black limousine rolled up, forcing the crowd spilling off the curb either further into the street or onto the already congested sidewalk. A brash, fresh-faced white boy with a remote wire close to his lips leapt out saying very important things into it. A tall handsome black guy in a suit followed him and then a white guy in another suit who was obviously the Prince corresponding to the courtiers.

Jordan froze. The city councilwoman narrowed her eyes in distrust. “The city attorney,” Randall muttered to himself, and figured that news of another mayoral candidate’s presence at the event – the city councilwoman – had reached the earphone of a young aide and forced an imperative to crash the proceedings. “Ignore him,” the councilwoman hissed in his ear. Randall figured a deal was a deal and undertook to comply with her directive.

Jordan took off in the same direction as Thorpe and Diaz, unwilling to abet his own capture and prosecution for a mercy killing the gods had deigned just.

“Before I turn over the press conference to those with a story to tell,” Randall soldiered, suddenly overcome with fatigue, “let me conclude by saying this case is about the exploitation of young women who oftentimes did not know any better or could not help themselves. The profits gained by those who traffic in photography of the flesh far outstrip those who provide the raw materials needed to do their business.” It was an unfortunate choice of words and Randall had carefully chosen them for just that reason. A silly, adolescent, “woowoo” went up from the gathered.

DeConcini leaned over and garbled into Randall’s ear, “Look, I’ll file the suit, but I don’t really need this kind of screen time. It’s too much. Too dangerous.”

Dangerous! Randall, a rock thrower and traffic stopper if ever there were one, sensed a hot burst of triumph race from his solar plexus, through his heart to pierce the brain, and smiled.

“What do you say to the fact many former employers wouldn’t recommend you for a job?” came a rude outburst from the herd.

“I have no former employers,” Randall sought to set the record straight.

“How do you live then?” came the follow up.

“I’m still trying to answer that question,” Randall confessed and then switched. “Esquire Dennis DeConcini, who is generously lending his expertise on a free-of-charge basis, says it would be best not to bore you with legal mumbo-jumbo when Yvonne is the best person to articulate what it is these girls go through, blah-blah-BLAH-blah-blah,” he threw in for a touch of lackadaisical irreverence.

“Could you repeat the last part?” the girl from the liberal/left rag asked.

“Esquire Dennis DeConcini says it would –”

“No the part after that,” she said cutely and coyly.

“Oh. Blah-blah-BLAH-blah-blah.”

The print reporters earnestly recorded his every “blah.”

“Thank you,” she said, to sustained background chuckling and general gaiety. DeConcini rolled his eyes. Randall summoned Yvonne to center spot looking over the smoke-addled crowd that had begun disrupting traffic. Horns were blowing now and Yvonne, along with her interrogators, had to yell over them so as to be heard. “I just wanna say that, um, you know, it’s wrong for somebody to make these kinds of profits – profits that sometimes run thousands of times more than what was paid to the model who-”

“Did you sleep with the photographer?” one of the local entertainment reporters asked what was on everyone else’s mind.

“Um- ”

“I don’t see,” Randall interrupted, “what that has to do with the fact that an important economic lawsuit with potential ramifications in the area of intellectual property -” It was, again, a terrible choice of words, this time not planned and which led to a further lightening of what he’d envisioned as an epic affair.

“Quite frankly it is a -” and a car horn interrupted him for a moment, “STUPID,” he yelled out of necessity, “question.”

“Blah-blah-BLAH-blah-blah,” one of the media joshed him to more, greater, sustained laughter now rolling in waves between the yellow dividing lines out in the middle of the street and Clarisse’s curious table.

Randall moved from center stage aware that his last volley had gone out of bounds, but content that he was stoking the spectacle to maximum effect, sometimes knowingly, other times not. He pulled out a bandana and wiped his brow in a move that was interpreted by those who’d come for a show as theatrics, but which was simple relief to him.

Yvonne, for her part, was doing as well as might be expected for someone who ran a catering service and hadn’t spoken in public since her 11th grade English class required an oral presentation.

“Every time a single magazine issue sells,” she read from a prepared statement penned by Randall, “a hundred advertisements are launched and the positive results of those advertisements bring in more sales and revenues to the magazine. But the model sometimes only gets the shoot fee a freelance photographer pays her before signing a release that makes the pictures his property.” Despite the calculation behind the whole crazy thing, there was something plaintive in Yvonne’s voice that seemed to win her a better part of the crowd’s sympathy. And who with a heart could deny that there is merit in both her arguments and the equitable goal of the lawsuit itself?

“How did it feel to you when the pictures first came out?” asked a rival to the first entertainment reporter’s celebrity news magazine. Yvonne turned to Randall who again moved center. “Don’t any of the serious outlets have questions?”

He might as well have been looking for Ice-Aged fossils. “I mean, we have this brave woman up here bringing to light the kind of abuse young innocents are often subjected to when they arrive in the big city.” Like the best White House spin-doctor, Randall was taking advantage of every chance to define the suit’s raison d’être. As the cameras recorded and the scribes scribbled, he was confident the weightier points would eventually be expressed in spite of the circus atmosphere he’d cooked up. “Man, the only things you people seem interested in are the more lurid-” Security being what it was – nonexistent – some clown sneaked in behind Yvonne with her magazine layout open to a provocative page and smilingly waved it over her head to the howls of tribal excitement and groans of moral disapproval. The liberal feminist reporter huffed, rolled her eyes at Randall (who smiled bashfully), and departed.

“How much did you get paid?” asked a reporter.

“Does it turn you on to see the pictures of yourself on the newsstands?” screeched another. A tear rolled down Yvonne’s cheek and she stepped off to the side and hugged Corey – a gesture that did not escape Clarisse’s or anyone else’s eye.

“Is that your boyfriend?” another reporter asked with an exquisitely bad taste and timing it had taken him years to cultivate and for which his bosses prized (and paid) him exceedingly well. The A-list actress was dripping with feeling and understanding for Yvonne who had clearly bitten off more than she could chew. With all the self-possession and power to dominate a gathering the acting craft had imbued her with, she assumed Yvonne’s place behind the crazy table. The motion, in and of itself, served to calm the raucous crowd somewhat. It was Bernhardt, it was Dunaway, Leigh. It was the ghost of a dozen icy silver-screen love goddesses rising up before the reverent – until she opened her mouth. “What’s wrong with you people?” she screamed, although it should be noted that it did come in a controlled fashion, rooted in her diaphragm as it was. “Are you all fucking idiots or what?”

Despite the obvious insult, the media pool gravitated closer to the table like cosmic debris to a black hole in space, for nothing trumps celebrity (except national security), however undeserved. In ten minutes they could all take the rest of the week off with the bounty this once seemingly harmless event was hurling at them. The A-lister, for her part, was buffeted with lurid queries in a free-for-all fashion.

“Have you ever filmed yourself making love?” “Would you perform oral sex before the camera for the right sum of money?” “What’s the right sum of money?” and so on so that the overall affect of her interjection was to discredit those whose fortunes she sought to enhance.

Sensing her moment, the lesbian citycouncilperson stepped to the fore and Randall returned to announce her, as the actress, fuming, stepped back and, yes, lit a cigarette – a vanilla one – to restore her calm. Two factors, the councilperson’s weight and her lack of beauty, lent the press conference an immediate gravitas none of the pretty girls whom preceded her could summons. She took up a goodly portion of the dais and seemed to reduce the media pool’s size just by standing there. “I think we need to focus on some of the important issues introduced into public debate by the filing of this important suit.” Her primary strategy was to use the word “important” a lot and see what happened.

The city attorney, there to steal his opponent’s moment in the limelight and simultaneously align himself with decency and family values, was instead being ignored, and that was not good. So he used his influence to pry a handful of reporters from the otherwise enthralled press pack. These were city beat hacks he knew and traded capital with in a symbiotic relationship between covered and coverers that assured neither did their job properly. When he suggested they listen to what he had to say, implicit was the promise that on some slow news day, or very eventful one for that matter, he could be counted on for news; but only if they might bail him out presently. Just as the city councilperson paused, he could be heard in the back sound-biting her moment saying, “I think the suit is incoherent and ill-conceived.”

Which, of course it was. The point of the thing was the girls, the publicity they were generating, and the use of it to ransom some concession out of the publishers in exchange for a little peace in their business of exploiting the young and vulnerable.

The lesbian legislator could hardly be expected to be outdone. As Joya had already informed Jordan, she was an advocate for the city’s throwaways, miscreants, and social maladroits, which was a job that required a lot of energy and a bullhorn the size of...the size of something very big. Her strategy in such an instances (it was not the first time bigger fish had made a bigger splash in a pond she considered her own) was to forge straight ahead with what she was saying at twice the volume she had been saying it prior. Of course, what with the presence of the city attorney, her political position needed to slide just a little bit over to the conservative side, but the councilwoman was swimming in a pond she knew well. “Now!” she bellowed, “I’m not here to say that what the ladies have done in the past is to serve as some kind of illuminated path for youth – far from it. What is important is to point out the importance of corporate greed here.”

The day had long passed when such an appeal to the lesser-class instinct drew a blood curdling response against the rich above, largely because everybody in attendance had a shabby scheme for moving up into those ranks themselves. But hers was a safe council seat and so she kept it up.

“We know who the magazine’s parent company is (a biennial contributor to her own campaigns) so we don’t have to name names.” Which of course she didn’t want to do.

“Immoral,” slipped in between the cracks of her discourse from over in the city attorney’s corner.

“It’s important that we understand that they have enough money to, to- ” and then she looked around for some kind of prop and Joya produced a pack of vanilla cigarettes. The citycouncilwoman was not particularly keen on the idea of using exotic and imported smokes as a public speaking aid, but was sage enough to consider her audience for a moment.

She took the pack, opened it, dumped the contents out onto Clarisse’s table and proceeded – quickly for obvious reasons – to use them in the construction of a ragged metaphor for just how much money the parent company had and how easy it would be to actually pay the girls a gainful wage (two Dãrshãns) and a small pension benefit (one Dãrshãn), too.

“So don’t tell me this is the only way to treat workers who are important to our society!” she thundered and waved her way through the thickening cloud of smoke over the sidewalk. This was her stock stump speech and she had twisted herself like a baseball stadium pretzel to weave the naked girls and The Smokers into it.

Anyway, that was the bulk of what Randall had scripted. There came, in that moment, a realization that he’d never developed an exit plan because he’d never thought the thing was going to reach such a (relatively) gosh darn successful conclusion.

If Jordan had stuck around for this not-quite-ending he would have noted accents of the beating he took at the hand of the Armenian Power gang in the air. Traffic was jammed, people were milling about as the star, starlets and comets began to break up and/or get picked off by the audience that had swelled the press pack’s size to five times the original list of invitees. The city attorney, for his part, wasn’t finished. He seemed to lose sensitivity in his political antennae; possessed by the drive to, in some way, mark the fact he was present. Perhaps his plan was to conjure as nefarious an image possible under the rather light-hearted circumstances and somehow connect them to the lesbiancitycouncilpersonwoman. She, by this time, had beaten a quiet retreat after mulling over sentiments best described as mixed where the wisdom of attending a press conference held by a Sidewalk Smokers Club she’d never heard of was concerned.

No matter. The shabby Randall would serve the city attorney’s purposes in a pinch. “So,” he bellowed prompting everyone present to turn in concert and see what had gotten up his nose, “the fine specimens here gathered are your class of plaintiffs and their loyal constituency?”

Randall appreciated the help in defining The Club’s mission. “Do you think sarcasm is becoming of so exalted a city official?”

“Don’t answer a question with a question,” the candidate parried, cameras engraving every glib utterance in some digital container or recorder.
Like all stagemasters, Randall thought his job done at this point and resented the insertion of new material.

“We’re a nation of mutts,” he said finally, coughing, “although we dress ourselves very well to hide the fact.”

The city attorney should have known better. For Bohemians reason, if they do at all, at different levels of consciousness and understanding than “serious” people. And yet they are just as smart: a fact that makes them deadly dangerous if and when they decide to engage the larger world around.

Maybe at a clearer place, after nursing a tumbler of scotch before a chimney fire, his eminence might have been able to respond in some long and circuitous way.

Instead, he let pass a long silence which left in evidence his search for words to all observers. The aide with the mouthpiece cringed. Finally, desperately, he blurted, “If mutts are what you consider yourselves, fine, but don’t paint the entire nation with the same brush.” Which wasn’t too bad a rejoinder, especially if you erase the time he took to come up with it and the fact he was a famous and semi-powerful man, while Randall was the mutt.

The aide with the headset decided to douse this brush fire before it spread, pushing his boss toward the limousine, which was parked illegally, but not subject to the surveillance cars belonging to mere mortals were. The candidate seemed more than willing to oblige, retreating with sentiments best described as mixed where the wisdom of attending a press conference held by a Sidewalk Smokers Club he’d never heard of was concerned.

“Good riddance,” Randall murmured as one city-attorney-leg stuck itself in the limo.

But Joya suddenly materialized out of what seemed thin air and immediately drew a smile from the candidate, who pulled the leg back onto the sidewalk. Randall could not imagine what it was Joya was up to, but he knew she was up to something as her long muscular arm snaked itself through the city attorney’s elbow and guided him inside.

Randall was snapped out of his observations by the A-list actress who announced her departure, but left him with her publicist’s number and an invitation to a party at her place coming up very soon. He had enough presence of mind to say he’d check and see if the date was open when what he wanted was to drop to his knees and lick her wherever she asked.

Guys off the street grazed what was left of the catered food and the gutsy ones tried to wrangle dates out of the comets. Some left with them walking down the street sharing vanilla cigarettes. The roughest looking girls went away with the least appealing men and Randall wondered if they were rough because of the men they’d picked over the years, or if these were the men they were sentenced to entertain by the cruel court of declining charms. He saw Clarisse also exchange particulars with the secondary starlet who turned and left her after they kissed each other on both cheeks. He watched Clarisse watch Corey work with Yvonne for a second and then watched her watch Randall. Clarisse strode toward Randall who decided to stand tall and take whatever it was the sour face she was wearing had in store.

“So,” she said grudgingly, “you ware gret today.”

“You know what they say,” he said. “If you can’t actually be great, fake it.”

An utterly dishonest response in as much as Randall believed he was destined to greatness and felt he’d just taken a tremendous stride towards constructing such a perception, in his own eyes, and in those of the world as well.

Chapter Thirty-six

Jordan met with Detective Dumburton outside Java World following his 6.a.m. to 1 p.m. shift. He was averse to the officer’s suggestion when first proposed, but now, sitting out on the plastic café tables and chairs devouring his free lunch, J. took satisfaction at the general impression the rendezvous made when the boss cruised in for a little personal involvement with the clientele. Dumburton fit the bill completely. He was square-jawed, solidly built, and well dressed with shoes subjected to a military-style spit-shine. Jordan was rarely seen – scratch that – was never seen with such characters and he knew that in the twisted minds of certain community pillars his appearance with the cop would accrue to his credit. Of course, that was because none suspected him of being the Angel Without Mercy.

Dumburton was pulling no punches. “You see this?” he shoved the aforementioned police sketch in Jordan’s face. “You see this?’

Jordan nodded that, yes, he did see it.

“Well, waddaya think of it?”

“I think its purveyor should try his hand at a more conceptual kind of art. His skill at drawing renders little that is eye-pleasing or thought-provoking.”

“It’s not pleasing to the eye because it’s the sketch of a murderer, of the Angel Without Mercy,” Dumburton told him.

“Good for him,” said Jordan of the artist.

Dumburton was used to smart alecks. “Who does it remind you of?”

Jordan shrugged in an intimation of the fudged fact it reminded him of no one.

“It reminds you of you, ya son-of-a-bitch,” the detective could hardly contain his rage at Jordan’s coy routine. “I think it’s you and I’m going to nail your ass and good.”

Jordan informed the detective that his cooperation was merely a courtesy of sorts and that he would never have agreed to this questioning without a subpoena had he known Dumburton was going to be so rude. He quite understood, he continued, that the police sketch looked like something of a Latin take on himself, but was not confessing to any murders without mercy – a caveat his tormentor failed to pick up on.

“Alright,” Dumburton pulled the picture across the table toward himself, “I’m gonna do it by the book, but this is you and I’m going to prove it.”

“It’s not me,” said Jordan, “it’s a Latino guy.”

“It was dark and the orderly who described you is prejudiced against Mexicans,” the detective countered. “He thinks they’re takin’ all the jobs from the-” he stopped himself.

Jordan was sure Dumburton had intended to say “the blacks,” (or worse) because he knew precisely which orderly was spilling the beans and because it’s something blacks say. “The only crime worth committing,” he bum philosophized inside, “is the perfect crime,” which, of course, he would pass onto Randall when the opportunity presented itself. And that was because, he reasoned with the seasoning of a serial killer, “If you make one mistake, it will hang you.”

But wait! He had bigger fish to fry. “Takin’ all the jobs from who, officer?”

“I think you have an idea of which orderly identified you.”

This guy was good focusing on “which” like that. “Which didn’t turn shit on me,” Jordan snapped back, “because I didn’t commit any murder.” J. was surprised at the zest with which he found himself lying.

“Is ‘at right?” Dumburton flipped Jordan on his grill. “Well I got a little something on ya. You wanna know what it is?”

Jordan wagged his head in the negative. Dumburton could not have cared less.

“It’s smoke. Ya like to smoke dontcha?”

“On occasion.”

“Occasion my ass!” and then Dumburton pulled out a press clipping from the big city daily – the newspaper of record. “Looks to me like you fancy yourself one of this groupa nuts that calls ‘imselves The Sidewalk Smokers Club.” And there, in fact, was a rather lengthy article about the benefit/press conference under a significant looking headline that read: “Sidewalk Smokers Club Meets,” followed by the subhead, “Defense of Nude Models Tops Agenda.”

Someone had either a mordant wit or a keen understanding of how to sell papers. And there they all were: Joya, Yvonne, Clarisse, Jordan, the two ringleaders, and a jaunty supporting cast of associate-members-for-a-day on the sidewalk out in front of Joya’s Joyas, puffing away and making good use of a free and public space.

“It’s a social movement. It’s harmless.”

“I find it dangerous and I can prove it.”

“You like proving things don’t you?” said Jordan, vexed at the confirmation of his fear that the notoriety would bite him right in the ass. Retreating in spirit, if not tone, Jordan decided against throwing down unnecessary gauntlets even though the detective seemed decided as to the question of his quarry’s guilt.

“So what?” he followed-up, his discretion proving the better part of his valor.

“So there was the scent of smoke in the halls, a certain kind of smoke that a certain patient is willing to identify once I find out what it is you like to kill your lungs with.”

He played on. “Who, the gang guy across from me?”

“No. He won’t talk. The bangas never do.”

The banga’s generosity caused Jordan to shudder. He knew there was something noble in the gang mentality, the thing that bound them to one another through life and death and (still more) death, and he was now eternally grateful a criminal had been his roommate in adversity, rather than a trembling supplicant to the laws of stupid people. “I’m going to be honest with ya Dumburden-”

“It’s burTON. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re trying to do. I heard that stuff all the way through high school. I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now.”

“High school, huh?”

If Jordan had missed pushing any buttons in the antagonism of this antagonist, they are likely to be unworthy of selection and comment. His wiseacre college boy routine – which was not so much a routine as a genuine essence – was something Dumburton was no less familiar with than inspectors Diaz and Thorpe. “The detective told Jordan as much. “Ya think I’m not familiar with your wiseayker routine?”

“I don’t care,” J. told him right back. “I didn’t kill anyone. I’m not Latino like this guy, and you’re not going to use the fact I’m a smoker to hang me. That’s a double hanging. It smelled like smoke in there because I needed a smoke and the only way was to have a little walk when the hospital was quiet.”

Here was a confession of sorts: that he’d been smoking and breaking the law at the same time. From there to murder was a hopscotch of faith in Dumburton’s mind, which fed on gristle only.

“A little walk,” the detective said and then was finished with him – for the moment.

He got up from his seat and told Jordan to “stick around town, don’t go anywhere.”

J. sort of frowned at the thought of his indebtedness to Joya, his crappy job and now this, the arrival of Dumburton into his life. Taken together they seemed an awesome kind of awful.

Chapter Thirty-seven

To say the inevitable end to Corey and Clarisse’s marriage was going smoother than a unanimous congressional resolution asserting that America is a great country, is to draw an almost perfect analogy (allowing for Randall’s prejudice against absolutes).

Never had two people so simultaneously lost fascination with one another. Even jealousy seemed out of the question. Much in jealousy involves passion and this little item was conspicuously absent where the pair was concerned.

Each was bewildered by the way the other had pretty much become, outside the relationship, what their mate had expected of them inside it. Corey was now possessed of an idea, driven to working late hours and, although the economics of the whole thing were far from being resolved, the stench of success began sticking to him like mildew to a wet wool gabardine.

We know Trixie Marie had affected the social climber in Clarisse, but failed to note how this had overwhelmed the wannabe mother completely. And Corey saw this happening, and saw that it was what made their separation so effortless. Each was on a completely distinctive set of rails traveling in directions away from the other.

When Corey was at Randall’s working the day through, Claire had overcome some inconsequential bickering to raise a makeshift-drafting studio in the living room.

And unlike lots of others who take this initial step with such gusto, she sat down and began to draft – a lot. When Corey headed home, Clarisse did waitressing at the restaurant where the boss was pleased as so much party punch with her new attitude. She was chatty, light-footed, service-oriented, and hell-bent on making as much tip money as possible.

Which means it might have worked between them. He could have been the successful go-getter had Clarisse been Yvonne and infused him with some special purpose, if she had only imperiled herself and cried out for him to rescue her. Clarisse would have been able to stay home and have the kid. In her latest incarnation, Corey would have been relieved of the pressure to breed that had cost her so much energy in pressing, and he that much more in resisting.

And that is how things go. Clarisse could have been bothered by the fact Corey seemed to have at least a connection with Yvonne, but she was, actually, an artiste and too involved with what she was doing, now that she was doing it, to fuss over so minor a distraction as some feminine rival for a man she’d lost interest in.

And things were working out. The up-and-coming starlet whom Clarisse had been seen exchanging numbers with at the benefit/press conference turned out to be a real benefit as the art-patron-saint Clarisse had seen in her own enraptured dreams. Her name was Vindaloo Baxley which, like many theatrical names, suggests a lot and reveals naught. She was a very determined girl. A real Vinda lu-lu. One glance at Clarisse’s table (we’re back at the benefit/press conference) and her mind was made up. Of course, that piece had been Clarisse’s gift to Joya, but when Vindaloo was informed that it was not to be hers she made such outrageous offers of money that even Joya – with her keen eye for style – was willing to let Clarisse take it back. “I mean if it’s for Vindaloo Baxley...”

The deal, of course, could not be consummated without a promise from Clarisse to restore Joya’s loss with an equally sumptuous (and free) creation on a date soon thereafter. A conscientious businesswoman, Joya could see that by surrendering one piece of no actual value other than the cost of materials – givens in art – to the actress, the next piece would carry a price worth waiting for.

Just as Clarisse had fantasized, Vindaloo contracted her to fill sweeping swathes of her not inconsiderable tract of urban floorspace with original one-of-a-kind furniture at a premium rate. She then went from party to party and shoot to shoot talking Clarisse up so as to increase the value of her own investment.

Just a few weeks after her devastating epiphany at Trixie Marie’s exhibition, the French/Belgian girl had a name of her own. Now she need only prepare herself for the challenge of so much fine art being examined under so bright a critical light by folks of very fickle constitutions.

And this left her very little time for Corey who, as we have seen, had very little time for her.

Chapter Thirty-eight

Corey, Randall, and Yvonne were holding a club subcommittee meeting at the Argentine restaurant. Jordan was not present, but hiding out in terror, ignoring his phone.

Clarisse, following some rather hard-knuckled negotiating, was taking a piece she’d given another friend over to Vindaloo Baxley’s. Joya, unbeknownst to all, was on a date with the city attorney.

Nothing quite so wicked as betrayal was going on, but natural rifts were beginning to develop in the group before the clay had even settled in the mold that had formed it. That is how such things work in a dynamic and ever-changing universe. No sooner does a movement find self-definition then it falls from the tree like an overripe fruit, initiating the process of becoming something even newer. Which is not to say The Sidewalk Smokers Club was finished. No. Such a process is long and drawn out (yet worthy of dramatization!), the inner tensions pushing and pulling at individual or allied members, providing kinetic energy manifesting itself in explosive action and creative…creative…creative something or other.

Anyway, they were gloating – at least two of them – over the headlines their clever (or inadvertent) labors had produced. Yvonne was slated for a whole series of radio interviews as well as some final and last-minute segments on some local crack-of-dawn TV magazine shows whose job it was to titillate viewers into waking consciousness. She had considerable offers from magazines competing with the true source of her renown, but she wanted to break out of that naked girl type-cast. Some other actresses, seeing how smoothly the A-list television star had turned her risky appearance into the rebellious, street capital she’d angled for, were now owning up to their own naked chapters. The numbers involved were really a little shocking.

The lesbian city councilperson had enjoyed not only a bump (up) in the mayoral sweepstakes polls, but her public appearances were baths of minor multitudes. It was the heroin of cool press at work on her doughty image.

Anyway, the point is that the whole Yvonne phenomenon was becoming downright respectable. Still, Yvonne herself could not help but be a little uncomfortable at the whole idea of having sculpted an identity for herself in this way.

They toasted with a bottle of wine, but her heart did not seem in it. Then Corey informed her that the magazine had republished copies of the infamous layout.

“Guess that’s their response, huh?” she responded, blankly sipping on a Cabernet normally too refined for their palates and wallets.

“Sure it is, man!” Randall trilled with characteristic insensitivity to the slower reasoning processes of those around him. “And it’s what we wanted. Proof you’re the object, I mean the person who actually drives their profits, and proof of your sustained appeal. You are a magazine girl, but not of the magazine girls.”

“I’m thrilled,” she said, lemon juice on her lips and tongue. “But I thought we already knew that.”

“Yes, but we wanted, needed really, to dramatize it,” he rightly responded.

“We did?”

“Of course we did,” Corey said softly, throwing a warm arm around her back for emphasis. She liked it; needed comforting, attention, and assurances. That these favors were not so hard to gain for her, did not make them any less satisfying.

“Why?” she asked.

“Listen,” Randall leaned into her, crowding, “you’re conscience is growing with your renown man. When the magazine was out on the newsstands, just another in the middle of a lot of magazines, you were less upset.”

“That was before men introduced themselves by staring at my pussy.”

“They always did that. You just didn’t mind at the time because you were not a universally recognized symbol of hip fertility. You’re suffering from a surfeit of attention.”

“Thank you doctor.”

“You wanted it. We all do. Now you got it. You don’t need more conscience now. You need less. The battle has been struck. We must add this simple byte to bum philosophy: that once blood is drawn, you must play to win. If you do and succeed, nobody will care about how you got where you did.”

“Man,” she finished his diatribe for him herself. Yvonne hadn’t seen any blood anywhere and she thought he sounded like a person who spent a lot of time on what other people might be thinking. “I’m glad you’re involved,” she told him.

And Randall was getting quickly acclimated to hearing great things said about him to his face, but she made him shiver with the appreciation. “You know, if we lose, you’ll feel even more vulnerable than you do now.”

Yvonne was not brave of heart in her reactions. Instead she complained a little more about how personal it was getting, and how ugly people you didn’t even know were capable of being…

He let her run the string out and put a period to her long sentence. “What can I tell you?”

It was easy for Randall to say these things for they were sharing the same fame, but not the same treatment. She was being cast as public art, as public tart, and her business, which she’d built in small steps with sharp decisions and love had gone under. He was, suddenly, “a thinker.”

Randall was gaining a certain distinction while Yvonne was being cast out of society, proper and otherwise.

Yvonne had a growing sense that the more she suffered, the stronger The Smokers got.

Randall and Corey were exploiting her situation, but their cool under pressure, their cutting intelligence, and the fact she’d initiated the collaboration prevented her from going over to the dark side where her opinion of them was concerned. They might be sipping from a heady brew only she had made possible, but they were good guys and, one of them, perhaps a lot more than that.

“So what do we do next?” she queried her handlers.

“I’m going to make sure DeConcini hasn’t really jumped ship since the press conference.”

“He did seem a little put off,” Corey observed.

“Not happy,” Yvonne made it a consensus.

“Then (Randall had not really stopped) we press ahead with the public relations campaign and exploit it for maximum gain.”

Despite his chosen vocation, when Randall was around Yvonne his ear became tinny and his selection of words grated against the sentiments holding her in their sway at that given moment.

“What do you mean ‘exploit’?” she jumped him.

“But Lady Jane,” Randall mocked her delicacy, “that’s what we’re doing – exploiting things.”

“Randall and I have been talking,” Corey jumped in, the desire for a cigarette stoking a relentless shaking of his leg beneath the table. “Now that we’ve got you booked onto the merry-go-round we want to raise the price of your appearances.”

“Even though we already agreed on them?”

“Yeah,” Randall said, “we miscalculated. You’re in much more demand than we thought and we’ve got to strike while the iron is hot.” She watched him closely; his eyes remained focused on hers, too.

“But I want people to think I’m a nice person, even if you have to peddle me like a whore.”

“People like whores. They don’t love them, but they like them and that’s why you find them everywhere.”

Yvonne was not sure if they meant to flatter her, but further discussion promised more insult than resolution and so she cut the yarn. In any case, the current state of delirium could not detach the boys from their own middle-class values and, though unexpressed, each felt twinges of guilt where their strategy was concerned.

Suckers. They had to remain firm. They were going to need all the money they could get.

There was a lull. Things in the restaurant had died down somewhat. They ordered another bottle of wine. A noisy table of elegant, Spanish-speaking people was whooping it up over in the corner by the picture window. The owner approached The Smokers’ table, arms akimbo, smiling face. “Ayyyyyyyy. Mya faboride Sidewalk eSmokers. I saw you in de newzpapare. You are faymus?” he asked in that way only foreigners can invert affirmative statements.

Randall and Corey tried not to beam. Yvonne looked away, not out of shame, but in conformity with role they’d written for her.

The restaurateur’s heightened sensibility to the mood of his clients warned him off mining the vein any deeper. These newly famous were just like others of a more conventional notoriety in the worlds of stage and screen in that they didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want to confront it while they were out to dinner trying to forget themselves for a while.

“So, do jou mind if dese costomers of mines smokes?” An educated man and cultured man, his English barely improved upon the dialect Carlos brewed down at Java Whirl.

Anyway, it was a rhetorical question and a joke, and it was taken as such by The Smokers, who seemed to genuinely enjoy it.

“Not if they don’t mind sharing with us,” Randall said, seeking to push things a bit, try yet another cigarette brand, and impress Yvonne with the extra chutzpah he’d been developing lately.

“I will take care off eeet.” And he scurried away full of nervous energy and glee.

He returned before the trio’s conversation could begin again with three Marlboro Lights, which always go down fairly easy with smokers of different brands. A lady in jewels nodded at them and winked. They smiled back with real smiles.

This is one of the great mysteries to (nonscientific) members of the nonsmoking community; the way something designed, in such a sinister way, to be a stimulant has such a soothing affect upon those who indulge it.

The trio felt a little more relaxed about their venture and about themselves. They continued to drink from the recipes of a variety of vintners, rolling hints of black cherry, leather, and melon around on their tongues until the conversation melded into something much more carefree and incidental.

Chapter Thirty-nine

Outside and down the street a bit, officers Thorpe and Diaz trawled the urban landscape of billboard signs, bus stop advertisements, and traffic lights, two white knights of city administration. Their charge? To protect the peoples’ right to not have smoke in the public air around them; to uphold the sanctity of the Smoke-Free Workplace Act.

They had left the department’s headquarters somewhat off balance following a surprise meeting called by higher-ups who’d noticed all the hubbub about those smokers.

Thorpe and Diaz did not deny procedures and regulations had been broken, ignored, forgotten the day of the press conference/benefit. But they’d busted up a crowd concentration problem and avoided a massive violation of the Smoke-Free Workplace Act.

“We could not let the act be mocked,” Thorpe defended.

They’d also unleashed a hellish traffic jam that was felt some 20 miles away – society being the complicated piece of machinery it is these days. And that couldn’t be good because people in-close and from afar were irate.

The officers’ conduct stunk, but the cause was just from an enforcement perspective, because The Smokers had started it all.

Thorpe and Diaz had not, to be sure, been reprimanded in any official way. They had not been scolded in any less-than-official way, either. Something strange had happened. They got a sense the brass was pleased as punch with what they’d done and that, for purposes relating purely to the institution (and in the name of vertical command structures everywhere), the bosses made a show of putting the duo through the ringer.

Mindful of how close the call had been, Diaz and Thorpe decided (without exchanging a word) to avoid such quagmires in the future and stick to the small and painstaking tasks that were their peculiar domain.

And so they were heading toward the Argentine restaurant in the secret hope of finding Yvonne outside to ogle her some. Such, as she was learning, were the unexpected perils of celebrity. People had pictures of her on the walls of their homes, on the walls of their minds. They could focus on her all day; make her into something she wasn’t.

The men drove past the restaurant quickly and noticed that there were, in fact, no Sidewalk Smokers and it could only mean one thing: there was smoking going on inside that place with the amber burn that had beckoned on so many cool nights out in the street nursing coffee in cardboard cups. They turned to each other and nodded knowingly, in the manner of so many tough-guy television portrayals from years past.

They were going in.

What they could not know was that the owner of a stylish Thai eatery – with an A for healthy standing purchased at top dollar hanging in the front door – had seen them slowly crawl by and given the Argentine restaurateur a courteous heads-up.

The Argentine received the warning with commensurate gratitude and extended an invitation to the Thai proprietor he was sure would never be accepted (and which made it all the more profitable from the small business owner’s perspective).

The Argentine hurried onto the floor and informed all clientele vulnerable to having a chunk of their ass bitten off by the gremlins of over-regulation that the smoke-out was over. All of which was regular rebellion of the old-time variety. The only thing that was missing was marijuana and teams of ragged music fans.

In any case, Yvonne, Randall and Corey didn’t blink at the news. The Argentine smiled as they rose from their seats and made their way toward the door. “Of course, jou are de Sidewalk Smokers!” and then laughed merrily now that the rats were sprung from the trap.

Out on the sidewalk, the smokers puffed long and hardy, smiling finally, at the oh-so-deserved fun part of being (in)famous. Seconds later Thorpe and Diaz came barreling around the corner from a side street where they’d hidden their car in an attempt at surprise. The SW Smokers were a little surprised, pleased even, to see the two officers who had so contributed to their well-known-ness.

The detectives, upon seeing the fashion-puffers, knew they had been stooplefeathered yet again by an ungrateful business community that couldn’t understand how they were simply doing their job making workplaces safe for workers.

The Smokers smiled at the dumbfounded duo, who managed to recuperate admirably; for it must be remembered they were working stiffs with a certain common dignity and resilience.

Thorpe smiled as suavely as his rank permitted and sauntered past them, nodding in pleasant greeting. “Evnin’,” he said in a quiet westerner kind of way.

Diaz, a little more intimidated, followed his partner’s footsteps as, together, they proceeded to put their noses to the picture window like puppies.

What they saw made blood rush to their brains. Swirling in and out of the violin player’s notes and the synthetic orchestrations of his keyboardist were ribbons of illicit smoke seeking a home at the ceiling. They looked at each other and did that shrug. They looked at the smiling Sidewalk Smokers. “Didn’t I see you in that magazine?” Thorpe groped, coarsely, verbally ripping at Yvonne. And she was deeply affected, but damned if anybody would find out: “It’s refreshing to know our public servants read the press of the day.”

It was a cut at many levels and the fireman had it coming. He looked at her long and hard. They were not done, his expression said, it was a big town that was very small, and just as they had run into each other twice in as many days, he’d be watching and (he knew) she’d be smoking.

Chapter Forty

Joya was downtown where penniless painters, homeless people, and municipal employees with overstated titles spent their days.

It was a part of the city not without charm if you liked grime or cigarette butts smashed black and rust into dead concrete. Connoisseurs of the past could find a brass spittoon and trolley track residue there with a lustrous patina of soot to boot.

During the day it had the ol’ hustle-n-bustle. Short, brown and hook-nosed garment workers filled the buildings of its historic core and packed its streets and buses at dusk. At night, skulking shadows of discarded and lonely spirits hung like cutouts on the Devil’s Christmas tree.

Not that folks hadn’t tried to improve the described state of affairs. Quite the contrary. Downtown was a veritable test-tube of urban experimentation. Billions had been poured into it over the years in an effort to combat the passion of the populace for a front lawn and/or backyard. It had not worked and probably never would, but there were pockets of improvement and these were utilized by the banking class, a smattering of industrialists, and the indefatigable lions of City Hall who never tired of trying to make the city center something other than what it was, something like it had once been.

Naturally, not a single plan for renovation ever proposed even mentioned the unfortunate who lived there. Instead their focus was on where to put a superior breed pulled in from outlying areas by the promise of boutiques and coffee shops.

Joya was riding around in a fancy car that a city attorney had no business owning, loving the whole strange visit. It was like parachuting into another country or a movie set where people lived in cities they no longer live in. She made icky faces at the sight of canker sores on the bare feet of those not as fortunate to enjoy a pair of coconut-clunking big boots. She wondered at the reaching buildings and at what it might be like to live boxed-off, up in the sky. The city attorney was pointing out triumphs of architecture and style that she would have never noticed because the oppressive misery matrix overwhelmed whatever pockets of beauty enduring.

She found him to be enthusiastic about efforts to change things and the role he played, or claimed to play, in them. Driving with one hand, city attorney used the alternate appendage to enumerate with manicured fingertips the monies to be sprung for the renewal of opera houses, art museums and other such stuff attended, however lamentably, by a handful of people with time for specialized tastes and refinement.

She looked around her and had mostly sad sightings. She thought how there probably wasn’t a thing that could be done to revive a place that everyone had run from.

Joya said, “Well hell! Before the opera house they ought to put up a few portable toilets so they don’t do their business in the street.”

“Already have,” he said assuredly, “but the prostitutes use them for places to entertain their johns.”

“They use the john for the johns!”

She found this funny, but he was permitted, under no circumstances whatsoever, to laugh at something like that. He played it serious and it was quite beyond Joya how this man, dedicated to public service, found the strength to carry on with so much evidence as to the utter hopelessness of it all. Still, she couldn’t help but admire his ability to carry on the good fight.

Of course, the good fight was, in the end, all about career and the upward helium drift of the ambitious politician. He stood as yet another example of undeniable wisdom in the modern master-plan for harnessing a person’s selfishness to the (hopefully) commonweal’s benefit.

“See these buildings?” And he waved his free arm all around them. “During the day they’re filled with sweatshops; long, sweeping, street-long loft spaces packed with hundreds of Mexican girls and boys sewing the clothes you and your fashion-frenzied friends pay so much money for.”

Joya thought that was something of an odd thing to come from the mouth of the city’s chief enforcer of laws and she said so. “Aren’t sweatshops illegal?”

“Of course,” he said in apparent mirth.

“Well why don’t you do something about it then?”

“What can I do? That’s an imposed reality, from on-high.”

“What about the lesbian city councilwoman?”

“Ha!” and he chuckled. “She has even less power than I do.” Joya wasn’t rock-solid informed on the hierarchy of city officeholders so it was all good information.

“What if she became mayor?” She was curious.

“Then she’d be a weak mayor.”

“We couldn’t have that,” she tried to sound cynical.

He shrugged. “Depends on just how much bidding you’d like the mayor to do on your behalf. On what you’d actually like to get done.”

“What if I wanted to get a lot done?”

“I wouldn’t expect much from a lesbian.”

(Ooops)

Joya was enjoying a little game people with alternative sexual tendencies like to play which is not available to, let’s say, Black people who can never dissimulate their skin tone. It was not fair either, and was beneath Joya, but the gambit did not go too far because the city attorney suddenly began a winded endorsement of the lesbiancitycouncilperson: “Nothing’s been handed to her. This game is hard enough without having to be scorned by a good many of your fellow citizens. She’s alright, I like her.”

He pulled up to a valet station in front of a well-lit and beautifully designed restaurant located at the bottom of a tall building on an otherwise abandoned street. Slumping, disjointed collections of dirty laundry rumbled close in only to be chased away by the security guard. “That’s alright, that’s alright,” said City Attorney (as Joya liked to call him), “let ‘em come here.” And he ripped some bills from a roll and handed them to three different beggars.

“Hey City Attorney, those are twenty-dollar bills!” Joya jumped at his showboating.

“Ah, if you’re going to give them something, give them a meal.”

Where Joya came from, City Attorney was what they called a liberal, but he didn’t seem half-bad.

The restaurant itself was all exquisiteness and fine service. Joya was no novice, no innocent country girl (though she could play the part) and this was no introduction to a better world. She knew how to behave and knew how to enjoy and once they stopped talking about politics some equilibrium was restored to the power balance between them. She matched his city bigwig aura with her own qualities of certified glossy girl and fancy piece of sex; a creature that commands vast privileges when her gifts are properly marshaled.

Cautious as he was about public image, and leery as she was about losing control in the company of a powerful man, they both got a little tipsy on martini juice. He called it ‘mind syrup’ and she laughed at the way he was able to stimulate her. He never made the clumsy move and his brilliance bathed in halo light things that would have seemed uncouth in others. “He is,” she kept saying to herself, “not a prick.”

And oh, how she had wanted him to be one for there was business at hand and skinning a skunk is easier than skinning an otter.

The place was winding down, the dinner was inflating with pauses both pregnant and sterile, and Joya asked the waiter if it were alright to have a smoke.

This made City Attorney uncomfortable for two reasons; the first being more obvious than the second. He didn’t want to be involved in breaking a law given it was his job to enforce it. But when he protested on this count, Joya slyly brought up the matter of sweatshops.

He’d always thought he desired a girl interested in the issues, but wasn’t so sure now, for he had a politically correct answer that would prove unsatisfactory to this rather unique specimen.

Second, and more unsettling, was the fact he felt she was wielding his power. After all, why would the waiter or restaurateur deign to piss-off the city attorney by telling his date she couldn’t smoke a silly cigarette?

And like all powerful people, he decided not to let it happen. City Attorney took a deep breath and resorted to his first reason with a sweetener thrown in to avoid the comebacker he was anticipating. He said it was against the law, that it wasn’t right for him to be seen breaking it, and that he’d be glad to stand with her, even share the cigarette if she would only “please” agree to do so outside. She thought it over. The evening’s success hung in the balance when he suddenly threw in the clincher, thrilled as he was to be hanging with a woman at once so attractive, cool, yet up to his speed: “I’ll be an associate member of The Sidewalk Smokers Club...for a minute.”

A big wide smile cracked across her face at the reminder of her new friends and the notoriety they had achieved.

Oh hope. The motives of everyone’s favorite person/character in this screed were not so pure, even if they were devoted to the benefit of another.

“Alright,” Joya shimmied to her feet with just enough booty action to catch his eye.

Outside she warmed to her purpose; began to work on him about the city ordinance against smoking indoors. City Attorney briefly yearned for one of the many bubbleheads who’d dated him without an inkling of what it was he actually did. “I wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole,” he said. “There’s nothing to be gained from it, politically speaking.”

“City Attorney, you have a ten-foot pole?”

“Yes.”

“You could get us our freedom back,” she countered.

“Who?”

“The Sidewalk Smokers Club, hon!” and with that she gave him a peck on the cheek.

His jaw dropped. She stuck the cigarette in his mouth. He instinctively scanned the area, without moving his head, to register whom was watching the scandalous act and all he saw was a Latino valet who was probably unregistered to vote, if not illegal altogether. The Latino vote was going, in any case, to another candidate. So he relaxed and drew upon it – the cigarette. There was that slight hitch in the chest endemic to nonsmokers who choose to break their golden rule on some special occasion and he made the proper adjustment before pulling twice.

It hit just right. His taste buds came alive with the memory of his meal (extending its pleasure-time) and the brown-leaf alchemy combined. It returned him to another time, long ago, underneath the bleachers in a wintery place where the cold beer adjusted his body temperature to the surroundings and rosy-cheeked girls promised unfathomable ecstasies in the dark.

“I’m really having fun being in your club,” he told her and Joya realized that something had gone terribly wrong. First, she found herself liking this a lot, and that was not supposed to happen. She’d gone undercover and let the role overtake her. Second, the night had grown so pleasant and glowing that her further plan for talking some soft sense into City Attorney about his pursuit of the Angel Without Mercy now seemed inappropriate.

Instead, he drove her home. They sat quietly. This cultured man and his well-stacked stereo system delivered a layered piece of orchestral musings that framed perfectly Joya’s interrupted night. She wanted sex. Any kind of sex. They sealed things off with a kiss and a promise to meet again.

She clip-clopped to her house, swaying this way and that; a tall building in a growing swirl of wind and energy.

Chapter Forty-one

Jordan had no idea of Joya’s plot to save him (by sleeping with City Attorney, and more) so that he could be neither warmed by the gesture nor disappointed by the failure of the first attempt. Of course, like all of us, J. had more than one problem and the morning after the night of Joya’s date, he was in court for the arraignment of his Armenian nemeses.

And things were not going well. If American justice seemed to be functioning fine in its pursuit of him, it was not performing nearly half as well in nailing these obvious thugs to the criminal cross.

To say he had mixed feelings about seeing the man who’d beaten his face would be to understate the thing. Jordan tossed and turned over his decision to press charges.

Anyone who knew him was adamant on the point. “Don’t let them get away with it,” friends crowed, but they were not the ones who would have to see the thing through to the end, which was nowhere in sight really. Every horror story the American criminal justice system had ever produced seemed to run through his head the night before he was to tell the prosecutor whether he was predisposed to pursue a just outcome (or not). This wheel of recurring scenarios included the gang members going to jail, only to manipulate a violent taking of his life from the comforts of that very same prison. He envisioned himself walking up to his doorway a few years hence, someone stepping out from the shadows or bushes or whatever might conceal them in this future home in his mind, and stab Jordan deep in the stomach many times. Then, as he lay there, blood fast leaving his bluing body, the Armenian Power gang would taunt him for a while, laughing with knowledge that were any retribution to be visited upon them, Jordan would never have the pleasure of savoring it.

And he wasn’t being ridiculous. Such things happened a lot. For if the law’s arm was quite as long as legend had it, Jordan would never have been beaten up in the first place. In fact, there are gaps between the time something terrible begins to happen to someone at the hands of someone else and when (if) the police get there. Often, the gap is sufficient for the irreparable to occur.

The thing is that justice – naught but revenge with pretensions of civility – won’t let you sleep. Jordan was afraid of what might happen if he saw the idiots prosecuted to the fullest extent, but he thought he would never be able to look himself in the mirror if he did not. Because, although he was a fellow of happy disposition, J. had a hard time forgetting what had been done to him and when he remembered it, got mad. But at four a.m., when even the insomniac finds little left in the mind mill to churn, the morning paper was dropped on the stairway snapping him from the vicious cycle of frightful ruminations. “Fuck ‘em,” Jordan decided. “Off to jail.” And he closed his eyes to fall asleep for a mere two hours after which Carlos and the plastic chairs awaited.

Now, as he stood in the courtroom, J.'s anticipation level was set high. Two of the guys who had participated in his thrashing had been dropped from the case. The lady prosecutor explained, from a legal viewpoint, the technicalities that prevented their having to face music they had help compose and these were not satisfactory to Jordan. And anyhow it didn’t matter. They could do things her way or drop the case altogether. Justice, he thought, works in the same makeshift manner county hospital does. Everyone knew how busy and overworked the prosecutors were, which didn’t keep them from bringing it up all the time, and so Jordan acquiesced.

This being the situation, the only guy he had a real chance to get was the one who punched him in the face. That seemed, at least, to make some, if not complete, sense. When the lad in question entered, his eyes were demonic in the same way they had been that godawful day. The hair had grown in so as to avoid any associations between defendant and the anti-social organization through which he lived his life.

He wore a suit and a tie, was accompanied by a lawyer, his dad, his sweet and suffering mom, and little sister.

But devil-eyes do not lie.

The lady prosecutor, a second-rate litigator purchased by the city’s low salary scale, opened the proceedings and did a serviceable job of enumerating and explaining the charges. The defendant’s attorney, polished and sharp as a platinum razor, rose slowly for effect, addressed the judge in collegial, almost intimate terms, and explained how his client had acted in self-defense and that it was Jordan who should be on trial. J. made a hiccupping kind of noise in response to the tactic’s pure audacity which, in fact, was standard criminal law fare. The lady prosecutor instinctively looked over her shoulder to hush him for the reaction, which was so common to those who did not spend their lives in court and could not understand the strange rules of the game played there. This is what defense attorneys do: point the finger back, try to blow some holes in the claimant’s recounting of the affair, as well as his character, make the judge weary, and successfully eke out a one-month sentence of community service cleaning graffiti.

But none of this was normal for Jordan and it infuriated him that he must needs be forced to sit and participate in the charade. Still, it was the best system anybody to date had been able to cook up and once the “not guilty” plea had been set and the contending parties escorted out through separate doors, the lady prosecutor explained that it was just as well. “This takes a long time and he’s scared to hell of returning to jail. It will be like being grilled slowly over a barbecue.”

Jordan thought a barbecue, a real one, not a metaphorical one, was just what the situation called for, but he went along with the metaphorical one. A second court date was set for some time much later in the future and he would try to be patient.

Meantime, the hearing had produced two negative responses in Jordan. The first was that it stirred up a lot of sediment lying loose at the bottom of his soul, sediment that made him fearful of things again. Second, it had renewed his utter detestation of all Armenians, young, old, or crippled. He saw them as savages from an ancient land who didn’t know how to behave and, instead, conformed to petrified traditions of family bonding regardless of whether one among them had done wrong or not.

Indulging in a time-honored American reaction, he purged from memory the fact of his own immigrant beginnings and wished that these Armenians would just all go straight back to where they came from.

Chapter Forty-two

Now for a bit of housekeeping.

The event at Joya’s Joyas has been repeatedly referred to as the press benefit/press conference. It must be recorded that there were brisk sales to reporter girls of rings and things, from which Joya contributed a percentage of the proceeds to Jordan; no questions asked. Of course, the real benefit was to be reaped from the collected business cards, promises of help, and planned parties with newfound friends the event had yielded. In days following that seminal event, Yvonne, Corey, Randall, and Joya all helped in tracking down leads and asking for help with the lawsuit and related legal expenses. The response had been overwhelming; further testimony to the fact Yvonne’s situation had tapped into some heretofore hidden vein of public sentiment.

She herself felt trapped by the situation confected, walking in a direction that no longer held draw, pulled at both arms by likeable people whom were giving the help she’d asked of them.

But this chapter is not about Yvonne. It’s about Randall and the aforementioned housekeeping was necessary to the explanation of how he became financially self-sufficient without doing a short and clumsy installation covering his monetary wherewithal(s) first.

Generous as Joya, Yvonne had offered, without prompting, to pay he and Corey from the benefit proceeds something out of her own legal fund. Randall accepted. Corey courteously declined, happy to wait and harvest untold riches following the propagation of bum philosophy across the system of flows.

Randall was solvent for the first time in how many years he could not even say and, although the cushion was marginal, it was thrilling for him. He noticed how much easier it was to do well by people, be a cool guy even, when his wallet was stuffed with salad and credit cards were sources of money – juice – rather than persecution.

He could leave that little extra tip which would accumulate interest with the recipient in record time. He could pay off old debts to good friends and do so over a nice meal at his favorite Argentine restaurant. He could toss somebody a joint and make his or her day. And all this accrued to his benefit, rolled over, even. The paid debt came back as a hedge on future financial complications, the meal became an invitation out, the joint came back grown into a full bag of happy grass.

The same way being broke meant bounced checks and bank-initiated punishment, which then marked Randall’s file for the next round of trouble, so it was that when things began rolling his way there was only more good to be gotten.

There was, by way of concrete example, that invitation to the A-list actress’s party. It hovered over him like a bright Moroccan sun of fortune. When stuck in traffic or waiting on an endless line at the supermarket, he thought about this wide-open door to a new world and all was well again. It colored his entire perception of life, which is beautiful under such circumstances if we only let it be so. Randall did.

And this complicated his goal of self-destruction by tobacco. In the same way a rabble-rousing union organizer gets a desk job or a revolutionary quietly recedes from the scene upon finding love and making a baby, Randall grew content so that almost (no absolutes!) every fiber in his body went against the proposed smoke-out of his health.

He expressed this thought to Corey who was the plumber in their partnership.
“You’re invited to that party because of your own master plan,” Corey pointed out. “Every element of it is important and if you don’t see each to the end, we’ll – you’ll – be right back where you started.”

He was 100 percent correct in this. Both statement and example are here injected to demonstrate just how much more effective two people working enthusiastically toward a goal can be than one.

The party itself began for Randall well before his arrival at the star’s house. He had dropped by one of the city’s few surviving humidors to squander his newfound wealth on some overpriced cigars he knew nothing about. And then he pulled off at a discount drug emporium to buy some mouthwash. He drove up into the rich, Spanish-accented hills and marveled at how such different atmospheres as this and the rough surface streets he normally roamed came under the rubric of the same city. Randall did not particularly enjoy the cigar he lit for the journey, but he got a warm sense of satisfaction he’d once believed only possible in the final version of a well-articulated thought, knowing that another constructive step toward the destruction of his health had been taken.

He accidentally passed the A-list actress’s house once in the expectation of something bigger. Next, R. backtracked and located the residence and then had to turn around again to park his vehicle along the woodsy incline. In what is second nature to all urban dwellers, he looked up in search of a sign proscribing his right to leave a car unattended and saw nothing.

He felt a little nervous and was forced to take a deep breath before sauntering up the walkway with the tin of expensive (for him) cigars under his arm.

Randall rang the bell and was half-surprised to see the A-list actress open the door all on her lonesome. Stripped of so much stage setting she could have been any other of the ravishing muses in the world. Out a corner of his eye – the rest of it being occupied with her – he caught a glimpse of at least three A-list actors and actresses whom were daily fare on the covers of magazines in supermarkets across the land. He opted for a cool play and stumbled a little on the intricate Persian rug that covered the floor of A-girl’s anteroom. The stars didn’t mind; they were used to that kind of thing. They’d read the accounts and viewed the telereports of the benefit/press conference for Yvonne. They were totally behind her in the battle against an exploitative media megamonster because, rich as they were, it was to a large degree their fight, too.

He dumped the cigars on his hostess who then escorted him up to a pair of well-known buddy actors and introduced him thusly: “Here’s the leader of The Sidewalk Smokers Club!” The two handsome, thin, utterly charismatic young blades smiled kindly and gave manly pats on the shoulders. She smoothed over her departure with a primer on where the booze and food might be found and then shimmied away leaving a bit of heaven lingering behind.

Randall struck the egalitarian note by pointing out that he was not, in fact, the leader of The Sidewalk Smokers Club, a non-hierarchical organization in which the creative impulses of its ever-changing ranks were never oppressed by someone’s weightier status. Randall had forgotten that those in whose company he now found himself were very dependent upon repeated recognition of their weightier status, but unwittingly recovered when he said, “As bum philosophy holds, he who leads sometimes dies first.”

Bum philosophy did not, up until that moment, hold any such thing, but it would thereafter, for the system was an elastic one that shrank and grew with the necessities of its creators.

And besides, he was playing a role. He was invited as a bum philosopher and by gosh he’d better bum philosophize if he wanted a return trip to this little Eden.

It took him a few minutes to get his bearings. After all, it could have been a dream. Everybody present was young and famous and it rather rattled him to think such people actually hung out together, unbeknownst to him. The guys, with a few colorful exceptions, were good-looking and practiced in the small gestures of the feigned or real boredom that say C.O.O.L. None were quite as original as Randall, just excellent in meeting a pre-established and (almost) universal standard of manhood. The girls were of course beautiful, some less so than on screen and others beyond compare in person. They were not guarded, for they were among their own guild of the gilded and Randall almost fooled himself into thinking their openness had to do with his good looks or beastly magnetism.

He felt a bit the dancing bear. But in the end there was empathy and admiration, for what were any of them but dancing bears of one sort or another?

His hostess, the A-list actress – had invited him in that moment when her social antennae informed that the event at Joya’s was a dirty, nasty, funky hit and the people who had pulled it off were comers. Everyone there wanted to know about Randall’s friends, about the sexy girl who had showed up in the magazine and was stealing all their air time with her gutsy story of taking on the same concentrated media companies in whose hands their bank accounts resided.

In short, The Sidewalk Smokers Club was doing the dirty work everyone present fantasized over, but were too compromised by personal pleasures and possession to act on. Having been summonsed to the head of the class like good little students, each fearfully awaited the day of summary dismissal.

Anyhow it didn’t matter. Not at the moment. The party was raucous. Fabulous stringy, sandy-haired, honey-voiced, loosey-goosey girls grabbed him by the hand and took him from magic room to magic room where it is best to let mystery sprinkle its own insinuations rather than deflate the imagination with demystifying, clinical detail.

One or two of them suggested he stop smoking, but Randall was a delegate from the other world, carrying a banner, and these were the people whom he wanted under that banner. They didn’t know this. They did. They cared. They didn’t. They were taken aback and admiring of the fact he would deign to tell sirens such as they “no” (much as it killed him).

He maxim-ized in his mind: “Saying no to a beautiful woman will get you either nowhere or everywhere,” and promised to do his best to remember it “morning next” as the British refer to the morrow.

R. was having a blast, flirting with drunken effusiveness, but in the end too keen of purpose to blow it with giddiness. And besides, things turned out to be rather natural. One star turned out to be a delicate guitarist, accompanied by the surprisingly heartfelt vocal stylings of what Randall had thought was a rather meretricious comedian. A sit-com silly-girl danced like a crystal nymph with another feature-length actress of higher status, and he was stunned to learn that they were not fakes.

No, these people were special, finely honed instruments. Their having been reduced to commodities for sale was but the ransom for a life of riches. They were worth more, it seemed to him, than the sum total of things they were known for. They were deeper than their tabloid dimensions. So, mindful of their reduction and massification, and given his long past of disdainful rebellion against such things, why did Randall want to be involved?

Because he did.

Rebellion, he’d decided, was stupid if nobody knew who you were or why you were doing it. The only revolution worth its salt was that acted out upon the stage of conformity. Doomed to failure, it at least provided those with free-spirited temperaments a distinctive role in the battle for success.

The actor Hat Midone, who’d been subjected to this particular discourse, agreed wholeheartedly. Randall gave Hat his card. Hat gave Randall his publicist’s.

R. chose a moment just after the party had peaked – when the A-list actress had opened a pantry revealing case after case of a quality tequila – to depart and, with his head held high lest everyone who was anyone be watching, rejected all pleas and temptations that he stay.

Heading out, the hostess caught up and intimated that this was not the last of it, that there would be more. He kissed her goodbye and coughed roughly enough for those in proximity to notice. Nonchalantly sweeping the room before exiting (stage left as it were) Randall saw that all the cigars he’d brought had been put to use.

Sometimes the world comes around to us.

Chapter Forty-three

Corey lay around the carpenter’s den Clarisse had made of what was once his living room, feeling out of sorts.

That the women in his life were confused about whether they wanted careers or family, girls or boys, gods or girls, should not serve to raise his plight above everyone else’s. Save for the touched-by-the-hand-of-God two percent who enjoy the pleasures and tortures of beautiful women falling at their feet, most men are driven to vertigo-inducing heights by the most uncomplicated maidens.

This is because men and women, despite legislation to make equal their pursuit of happiness as it is currently understood ($), are very, very different.

He opened up Yvonne’s now nearly world-famous spread in the magazine to drive the point home. It was a maxim not worth passing onto Randall for inclusion in their mutual (at times) brainchild, because anybody who didn’t know of this difference between genders was far beyond a mere bum. They were retarded.

Anyhow, it didn’t matter. He was flopping about, weighing Yvonne’s numerous and subtle advances against the odd little intimacies, pecks, whisperings, and caresses he’d witnessed between she and Joya. Somebody in another time, place, or culture might be repulsed by what he’d seen, but Corey just got hot. He understood completely the desire to do such things with the wonderful Joya, particularly because he was not a woman. He started to return the way from whence he came (Yvonne’s advances upon him), but realized this would only land him in the same place. So he decided to go outside and have a cigarette, since his wife forbade it inside the apartment each was tied to until a cataclysm could be forced by something, somewhere, somehow.

He had stashed a vanilla cigarette from the benefit/press conference that was sure to remind him of the woman he could not love – Joya – because he didn’t and, anyway, she wouldn’t, and was looking forward to sucking on it in lieu of her.

As he placed his hand upon the doorknob the phone rang. Corey, for a self-styled businessman, had rather uncommon, if very healthy attitudes about telephony. He felt in no way compelled to answer every time the technology beckoned. Telemarketing, a failing marriage, an extremely hot client, and a dissolute partner had all helped to deepen his conviction that, just because the phone rang, one was not necessarily obligated to pick it up.

At first blush this doesn’t sound exactly world reordering, but upon deeper consideration we are forced to recognize how it represents an intelligent urge to place a price on one’s access if not a damper upon their immediate prospects. And that was where Corey had changed in the past year or two; he no longer believed in fast opportunities, striking lightning, overnight success, faeries or hobbits. Luck was, indeed, something you made or placed yourself in a position to harvest and by the time something good happened to you, there was usually no shock, no jumping around for joy and drinks-all-around. Only the dull sense that a newer, farther-reaching challenge had come to occupy one’s horizon of desire.

That said, he had the poor judgment to turn around and answer. This in spite of the fact there was nothing he either wanted or needed from anybody else in the world at the moment. Just the opposite. To Corey, each ring of the phone meant he’d accumulated another task to crowd his already hectic days.

“How da hell ah ya?

It was his father and the utterance translates thusly (just this one time): “How the hell are you?”

“Hey Dad!” Corey responded as he always did to this towering, middling figure of withheld approval who affected his sense of self so much.

“I gaht your staff” (okay, once more) he referred to the fact he was in receipt of some stuff about the benefit/press conference which Corey’d mailed like some anxious cheerleader with an “A” affixed to her report card.

“Yeah?” he queried expectantly, boyish.

“What the fahk ah you up ta?” And in that moment Corey’s heart sunk in a way Clarisse, Yvonne nor Joya could never make it do. He said nothing because there was nothing to say. The judgment was in.

Typically, Corey would have said he was doing the best he could, but the question of course, was not one of effort, rather if the effort was focused upon the right things.

“Yah call this a jahb?”

Something snapped. It was not a big snap, for Corey would never break the ties that bound, but a snap nonetheless.

“I’m not interested in a fucking job. When are you going to learn that?” Corey scolded the dumbstruck patriarch. Dumbstruck not because there was any revelation in what his son had said. He had always suspected as much. Dumbstruck rather that his son knew it himself and had the pure and unadulterated balls to admit before God-the-Father with the spicy addition of an expletive he’d never uttered in his presence.

“Didjew just say fahk”?”

“Are ya deaf dad?”

But then Corey reverted to an (much) earlier edition of himself and regained composure, pulled in the horns. Enough damage to wreck the next ten years had just come out of his mouth, which had been driven not by reason, but passion. Reason feels good in soft and fleeting ways, as do most things we know to be correct and good for us. But passion is a heavy meal that satisfies and clogs the arteries in one same act.

Dad knew the forces of planetary energy had swung his way, as did his “boy,” so that the former took a sip of water while the latter sat down to take the tongue lashing the whistle whetting signified.

“Ah spent my life making things. Ah worked with my hands and at the end a each day we hahd sumtin to show four it. We were brahthers, the men ah did these things with and we ahl did it fuh something besides ahselves. Look at these people yah hanging owt wid, this cunt, who showd huh cunt in a magazine and wants money like doin’ sum such thing was wort anything. And it’s my boy who’s makin’ the case four huh. What? Shud ah show this to ya mahtha?”

Well, clearly Yvonne was not the kind of girl you brought home to mother (or father) – at least not as a possible candidate for continuing the family name. It would be tantamount to being sprung from thieves and whores in his dad’s mind.

Worse, viewed from the old man’s distant and distinctive perspective, Corey had to admit the point. What the hell was he doing? “Surviving,” he muttered to himself, unhappy with the lack of grace it echoed.

“Wha was zaht?” his father pierced his rumination.

“Nothin’ Dad, Nothin’.

“Damn right nahthin. Bum philosophy. Sum case! You proud-a that?”

Just as he’d done from the time he was old enough to talk, Corey refused to.

There was an uneasy silence, as there had been in so many countless conversations between them. Corey’s dad knew he’d made his point, too well in fact, and tried to backtrack.

And backtrack he did, right into an even bigger pile of quicksand-mixed-with-shit.
“Now howz that lahveley French girl yah mahrried?”

Chapter Forty-four

Jordan awoke at 6 a.m. with the residue of a dream about Joya flavoring his morning the unmistakable lightness of vanilla.

In this dream she was but a teenager and my God how beautiful to contemplate the downy colt with wispy thighs and soft face minus the stamp of big city life that now marked it. The exact circumstances were naturally foggy, but they involved other young people of Joya’s suddenly reduced age doing things people that age do. It was all happening around J., who seemed, if not the very same age he was at present, perhaps even older. He could not keep up with these sprites of silken hair and hippie wear. He could not bear the exclusivity of their world, which was so beautiful, but they did not know because they had been born into it and never left yet. He could not hide the agony of desire before the little-girl-Joya who could not understand and could only be fearful of all the love J. had in his heart and could not hide, either. They were in a retail mall, an outdoor retail mall, that had an upstairs and downstairs and yet somehow there was a moment with sweet baby-build-Joya upon a bed which she sat, knees up to her chin terrified, doe-eyed, before Jordan, denying him and negating. He awoke with a broken heart.

Jordan immediately rolled a Drumstick with a pepper sprinkling of weed to calm things inside. It was, he told himself (like billions before him), only a dream, but there was no denying that his heart was broken; his feet anchored to the beer-sticky kitchen floor. How could a dream break a man’s heart? It was impossible, but then again, so was a broken heart. It had all happened in the same domain of spirit and shadow and murky movements deep beneath the human mess, the human mass for which there is no obvious explanation or indicator. He was scared to death about what to do. In love with a lesbian, in love with a young lesbian who existed only in traces of the lesbian that occupied the same real-time as he.

Jordan tried to clear his mind with some music, but as is the case with all broken hearts, each song – each note even – was an arrow launched successfully into the afflicted region of his self. To top it off, he had to go to work.

He crossed the street and saw the ocean in the distance and yearned to be the same: overwhelming in the force of its physics, in the awesome fact that it could not be tamed; impassive and deadly active, beckoning like a blue marble hell to be loved, like genies in a dream, from a distance only.

It was throwing off great gusts of coolness and J. wrapped his army-issue jacket close to the form all his misery held. Carlos was already inside the coffee shop and Jordan could see one warm light burning through the receding cobalt, inviting enough that he might burn his fingers upon contact with it. At the beginning – in the morning – all seems fraught with danger.

He walked in. The musky rainforest smell of espresso grinds and mocha mix did not comfort him as it had in the first few days after hiring-on at Java World. Now it only sickened him with the reminder of low-wage labor, the hectoring of too-choosy clients, and the mechanical thunk of the punch clock.

Carlos was a good guy and he liked Jordan, but at such an ungodly hour his own demons had yet to recede and he issued the subtlest of nods in greeting. Crack, he opened a roll of nickels that rushed into their slot in the cash register. “Four-thousand years of civilization,” Jordan thought, assured in some odd way, “and still coins.”

The coffee machine belched and coughed as Carlos coaxed it into action with the help of electrical charges driven by the silky fluid mixed remains of giant lizards from another time. A time before adolescent Joya had knocked Jordan’s insignificant world right off its axis.

J. mechanically set to grabbing the plastic tables and chairs stacked in the now gray light, which served as beacon for addicted locals, and took them outside. Back and forth he went each of four laps incrementally accelerating the flow of his blood. There was a heavy wooden bench that stood just inside the door, in front of the cash register that confronted those entering. Without a single utterance, Carlos mashed a collection of pennies into their designated space in the register before grabbing one end as Jordan gripped the other.

It was too heavy, but together they could move it outside. There was something soothing in this mediocre ballet of cooperation the two struggling men performed between them on coffee shop mornings, but not today.

Today, the world was coming to an end.

Carlos continued with the more strategically important chores as Jordan took some Windex and sprayed the display counter that would soon hold all the muffins, cakes, turnovers and sticky-buns upon which the establishment’s fame rested. He felt gypped, like a child, when the aquamarine blue fluid atomized into an evanescent ammonia-smelling mist suitable only for war with smudges of oil.

He poured heavy cream into a metal bowl, poured sugar-like microscopic diamonds atop the velvety accepting surface before plunging the electric mixer into deep and inviting peace. It slowly thickened and J. remembered how thrilled he’d been to learn such a thing an how enthralling it was to possess the knowledge of whipped cream.

As was routine, the calm he and his colleague knew for ten odd minutes after everything was almost in place – before the baker showed up with his warm puffy treasures – broke with the arrival of a bubbly young blonde woman heading off to work at a fitness club. It was always a treat to see her in the black leotard, which spoke clearly of her own warm and sinewy treasures. Her voice was raspy and a splash of cold water to their spider-webbed awareness. Her order was born of a routine that early risers all possessed: double latte, toasted bagel with a little plastic container of Neûfchatel cheese. They could have had it waiting for her and once she even asked why they didn’t, but there was no answer forthcoming. The boys were shy in their way and if they had told her what a pleasure it was to have her stay just that little bit longer, she might have told them what a pleasure it was to oblige them.

The next arrival was a quiet and pleasant man appropriately named Sam who always ordered the always changing special flavored coffee of the day. He was a model of adventurous taste in a straightjacket of rhythm that made passing final judgment on his true nature impossible. One day, when the especially accented coffee was accidentally repeated from the day before, Sam left without breakfast.

This morning’s flavor was Belgian chocolate, which made J. smile and Sam too as he asked for a toasted bagel already prepared for him and then retreated into a quiet corner by the window where he read the paper with a nuclear physicist’s intensity.

Jordan was almost calm when the screen door screamed with the agony of some spring being twisted in a pain beyond its ability to quietly endure.

Looking up to serve, J.’s eyes met those of Detective Dumburton.

Carlos headed for the back door where a newfound concern with upkeep and maintenance drove him to performing the busboy’s duties.

Jordan played it cool. It kept surprising him, this capacity for icy behavior that he had never demonstrated during less serious, but somehow equally nerve-wracking experiences in his life.

“How ya doin’ punk?” Dumburton didn’t really ask.

“Broken heart,” J. retorted.

“You’re a real smart-guy aren’t ya?” Dumburton didn’t really ask (again).

“Yeah,” Jordan answered in a real smart-guy way and shook his head at how two people could physically occupy the same space and time, yet utterly different continuum of understanding.

The detective looked up at the pastel covered chalkboard for a moment. “Gimme a Shotgun,” he demanded.

The Shotgun was a drink offered up for delectation to only the sickest and unstable of souls in the community. There were surfers come in from hours of night riding who asked for a Shotgun, there was a strung-out Russian girl who asked for hers on credit and didn’t come back again until they’d forgotten how she’d never paid for it, and order another. There were many Shotgun victims, almost forgettable as they moved toward their quiet, speedy, and self-inflicted immolation.

“Why dontcha just buy yourself a line or two of cocaine?” Jordan didn’t really ask.

“Because I don’t do drugs,” his nemesis snarled, “they’re against the law.”

An uncomfortable moment passed (was another kind possible?) between them and Jordan looked back to catch Carlos craning his neck whilst planted on the last rung of the wooden stairway to the broom and mop storage area. The Mexican was terrified. He could smell cop through a hundred cups of espresso and Chai tea and the manifold sins committed over years of desperate, junkyard dog survival could not help but lead him to believe that, when the scent wafted through, atonement time had come.

Somebody else walked into Java World and Jordan made an expression with two bug-eyes in a plea to his colleague for some assistance. Carlos did not budge. Jordan did it again, the second time being the charm. Carlos returned and Jordan told him, “This whey wants a Shotgun.”

Carlos nodded submissively, retreating into the roll of dumb and pleased-to-satisfy-you Mexican that served him so well when the white man’s world turned threatening.
Jordan tried to hide somewhere in the four-by-four area allotted the three (the bus boy’s coming) coffee workers – without success.

“So,” the hunter spit, “I understand you hate Armenians.” Squeezing a trickle of black muck out of the cast-iron machine in front of him Carlos turned an attentive ear while keeping his eyes clear of Dumburton’s.

“Spare me the crossword puzzle Dumburden. It’s too early in the morning.”

“Burton. Alright asshole, I’ve been doing a little checking and learned about how you got your clock cleaned by the Armenian Power gang a little while back.”

“You gonna prosecute me for that?” Jordan didn’t really ask.

“No, but the crone you offed at county was Armenian.”

(!)

It is moments such as these that do the amateur murderer in and it was only by the grace of the God he did not believe in that Jordan realized something. “I never offed anybody and I do believe I got beaten up after the poor woman croaked and by the way, where the fuck were you when those guys were pounding on me? Having a coffee?”

Carlos stepped away from the machine and plunked Dumburton’s Shotgun on the glass case. Jordan looked back and saw the machine was still pumping black tar into the grill beneath the spigot; a clear sign his colleague had short-circuited the concocting of a full Shotgun for a sawed-off version before Jordan responded himself right into jail. For Carlos knew (from experience) that legal language was different than regular language and rigged by legislators and bureaucrats so that the normal and correct answers were what got you into trouble.

You had a beer and got pulled over for making a bad turn. The cop asks if you’ve been drinking. You say “yes, one beer,” because it is true and because one beer does not get you drunk. But the cop’s directions are to pull you out of the car because once you’ve admitted to drinking, you’ve given him probable cause to believe you are drunk. This is because in the skewed eyes of the law one cannot drink without getting drunk since drinkers don’t make the laws about drinking when, really, they’re the experts.

But back to the sword fight.

“Anyway,” Jordan added despite Carlos’ savvy efforts, “that’s too bad for Armenia.”

“What’s too bad for Armenia?” Dumburton wanted to know.

“That the old lady died.”

“So you don’t deny it?”

“Deny what?” Jordan asked, for real, intent upon making Dumburton work every step down his path to condemnation.

“That you hate Armenians.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“I wouldn’t do anything you would.”

“That’s why you’re having a Shotgun.” Carlos laughed and Dumburton scowled the smirk right off the Mexican’s face and then Jordan told him the price and requested he pay up and move on, that there was work to do.

“I don’t pay,” Dumburton explained.

“I think you do,” Jordan explained.

“Call the cops,” Dumburton suggested and turned to leave. But then he came back and put a roll of bills (to be sorted out and quantified later) in the tip jar that was the lifeblood of both baristas.

There is somewhat the thug in many a copper. Their passion for the mean streets and the steel-hard erection of a gun barrel speak of just how close they are to the men and women with whom they routinely do battle.

It wasn’t that Dumburton wanted to tip Jordan (or even Carlos whom he vaguely recognized). No, he only wanted to get away with what he was supposed to, which is how many honorable crooks approach things.

The detective left Java World after having sat around a while for the simple purpose of torturing Jordan and the Mexican guy who was clearly up to no good. Carlos was beginning to break a sweat and when Dumburton finally departed he heaved a shot-putter’s sigh of relief.

“Relax,” Jordan said, “he’s not here for you.”

“Relaz? Wadju mean relaz?”

“I know you think the cop is here for you. He’s not.”

“Hees here for ebrybody.”

Jordan had never looked at it in that way before.

“I know dees cop. Detectif Dumboorting.”

“I thought you seemed a little fearful.”

“No feefor! Careful. Jou know, I am a famish cholo around Eenglewood.”

“Yeah,” Jordan said, “you’ve told me a couple of hundred times already.”

“Wash out for dat fucker. Hees good!”

Jordan was beginning to get just that idea and the thought terrified him. Surely it was only a matter of time before he was caught. What would Dumburton have to do? Get a warrant for his arrest, take him in for some fingerprinting, match his with those on the machines Jordan had unplugged, put him in a police line-up for the orderly to identify? It didn’t have to be hard, but he’d make it so, go kicking and screaming all the way to the big house.

These and other thoughts on the unstable nature of all existence were interrupted by the baker’s arrival. His name was Martin – another Mexican. That meant that Jordan had to call him “Marteen,” which was the proper pronunciation. He was a marvelous artist in his way, each day bringing the obligatory blueberry muffins, cinnamon rolls and other treats in an arsenal that was varied and a threat to all wasteline watchers. He rolled in, blustery, his eyes weighed down by the sleeplessness with which his life of 4 a.m. wake-up calls burdened him. “Ay whey,” he applied the Latino vernacular to Jordan.

“Whey hey,” Jordan mangled their language the way they mangled his. His eyes grew wide at the sticky buns and the white chocolate-chip muffins Marteen had cooked up for the morning.

As noted earlier, part of the employee deal at Java World was free food and most mornings presented such dilemmas for Jordan. “I maked eet hart for jou to choose, eh?” Marteen smiled as Jordan cooed over the gooey dough bombs and crumbly cakes and tried to decide which it would be, sticky bun or white chocolate-chip muffin, white chocolate-chip muffin, or sticky bun?

Carlos and Marteen exchanged familiarities in Spanish, none of which their American counterpart was intended to, nor could, understand. Jordan did hear the name “Dumbooorting,” rear its ugly head through their spirited jabber followed by Carlos jutting his lightly bearded chin over in his direction. Marteen smiled. “El choto wants jou, eh?”

Jordan smiled back. There was fun in seeming dangerous in the company of dangerous people. “Wha you did?”

“I killed an old lady.”

Once again, the stressful yet stimulating circumstances of being a suspected and actual criminal got the best (or the worst) of Jordan as he made a confession that might easily have earned him an injection of heart-stilling chemicals.

Both Mexicans stared at him dumbfounded.

Jordan smiled sheepishly. “No I didn’t. I’m having a little problem with some stocks
I sold a year or so ago.”

The Mexicans seemed to buy it, which was a pretty good sign that they had not bought it. These were not greenhorns to the criminal justice system. They knew that matters of financial and/or white-collar crimes – white people crimes – were handled by pansy agencies like the Securities Exchange Commission – not hard-asses like Dumboorting. And they knew a confession born of the need to let loose some incredible tension when they heard one.

Chapter Forty-five


“Hon, I’m a lesbian,” Joya told the city attorney on their second date.

“What do you mean you’re a lesbian?”

Joya did not know how she might respond to a query so idiotic and, alas, so demonstrative of the fact that, no matter how eminent or well-prepared one can be, streaks of stupidity run through (practically) all of us.

Though no great practitioner of bum philosophy, Joya made a mental note that she should make this contribution (No matter how well-prepared, streaks of stupidity run through practically all of us) to Randall’s creed.

But we must arrest the forward progress of things for a second and recap precisely how we got to a crazy point of confidence whereby Jordan is confessing murder and Joya is confessing her sexual preference before a mid- to high-ranking elected official.

That she was conflicted about City Attorney has been explained. Like her cohorts, Joya, in spite of her down-to-earth, no-nonsense personality, was somewhat taken with the fact so elevated a personage was taken with her. That she was lesbian did not mean Joya had never been with a man or was completely immune to a particularly debonair specimen of the gender. It merely meant she was more prone to feminine charms and things feminine; a weakness she shared with a little bit more or less than the entire human race.

The Smokers were completely au courant with what passed for café society in the city. That Vindaloo Baxley was buying Clarisse’s suddenly prodigious output was already news along the art gallery circuit. That Randall’s intellectual demeanor was being lionized by the performance-and-bright-lights crowd was almost as important as the rapacious attacks his tiny effort had garnered from the keepers of tradition and everyone else’s property. That considerable klatches of men and women city-wide were having recurrent sexual fantasies about Yvonne became tangible through the support she enjoyed in her bid to scalp the magazine industry of the money it had scalped from her.

The upshot was that The Sidewalk Smokers Club phenomena had taken hold among the all-important and trend-abiding class that cut across large swathes of different demographic sets. As such, sidewalk smoking became something of the thing to be seen doing – a cheap and ready-made glamour of which everybody could partake.

One such clustering was occurring on the commercial strip out in front of Joya’s Joyas and, unfortunately for her, stores adjacent to it. And, as is common with a lot of anti-social behavior for which young people are responsible, there was no immediate profit to be had by proprietors other than Joya, who was a famed member of the club proper.

Envy, being both the easy emotion and recourse it is, soon popped up amongst Joya’s neighbors-in-commerce and during a monthly meeting of the area business improvement district, known locally and colloquially as the BID – of which she was a second vice president or something – the matter came up. Actually, it did more than come up. The members, in spite of Joya’s charm and sweetness (perhaps because of them), passed a motion directing the bicycle-bound security guards in the BID’s employ to use their considerable bulk and move the little smoking darlings on their way.

The reasons for this action were clear as day, even if the air on the sidewalk was not: they were creating a health hazard for passers by. In addition, so great was the concentration of smoke that it often drifted into the stores, leaving them smelling like a Greyhound bus station circa 1966. While these retailers were in the business of drawing the coolest of the cool kids – the researchers and spontaneous creators of evolutionary looks, all this smoking was turning out to be much better for bum philosophy than for selling expensive, recycled clothing from 40 years ago.
At least that’s what the merchants said.

Joya had been one of those pooh-poohing the neighborhood’s civil libertarians who took exception to a police force not remunerated at the public trough and accountable only to a bunch of (mostly) ladies with prissy sensibilities. To be sure, the security team had been effective in moving the once-prominent underclass of transients, bead-threaders, rejected musicians, and persistent dancers along to less organized districts of the city and Joya had naught but thanks and hallelujahs for its efforts.

But the arguments of gadflies and cranks had taken on new meaning for her and so, partly because she found City Attorney attractive, and partly because she might need his help, Joya had called him and proposed they meet again over drinks.
Ill-advisedly, she opted for the Argentine restaurant as point of rendezvous.

Joya contacted the proprietor to provide advance notice that she would be showing up with the city attorney. The Argentine was still on the phone when ideas for exploiting such a notable presence to the establishment’s benefit started churning through his mind-factory. Joya – being a small businessperson herself – sensed this and explained that all smoking would best be done out on the sidewalk, for his own good.

“Ob course!” the owner exclaimed and she imagined him slapping his own forehead at the realization. No sooner had she hung up then he began anew to ruminate on The Sidewalk Smokers Club, the special juice their presence had brought to his establishment, and on possible ways to continue this unique and useful relationship.

So, following a rich and sumptuous meal, City Attorney, loose with two bottles of red wine, began to tease Joya in a stupid, roundabout way he would ultimately come to regret.

“So how is the sidewalk smoking game?”

Joya, always well-meaning, but possessing of a lynx’s shrewdness lunged at the throat of the thing. “Well the BID is upset with all the people smoking out on the sidewalk since the day of the benefit/press conference and they want security to clear them out.”

“So?” City Attorney responded in the inimitable fashion of public officials everywhere, trying to enjoy their power without having to use it for some positive or generous end.

“So?” Joya snapped, “those sidewalk smokers don’t want to go.”

“Take them into your club then.”

“Hey City Attorney, I’m being serious,” Joya huffed and City Attorney huffed at his own miscalculation that she, because of her beauty and vocational choice, was the type of woman who would not bother with serious things.

So he got serious.

“Did the BID make a final decision on this?” She nodded that it had. “So, if the smokers don’t want to go you know what will happen don’t you?”

“Of course I know what’ll happen. They’ll remove ‘em by force.”

“And you wanted to use the occasion of your second date with the city attorney to press the case for your scruffy allies.”

“You brought it up hon.”

That was true and City Attorney regretted having done so, but like most people of pull and influence, had not disabused himself of the notion that Joya was in some way seeking to use him. And thus do we arrive at the question that produced the answer that opened this chapter – Chapter Forty-five.

He was a hard-boiled man, used to dealing with other hard-boiled types, calling their bluffs, drawing them out, muscling them for an advantage in the mostly extreme sport that is politics.

It is the nature of modern American democracy that those who run it are largely removed from those who must live-out the effects of the high-flown and arcane legalese they employ. And so City Attorney had failed to grasp, after some six or seven hours total in Joya’s company, that she was a small businessperson, sensitive if driven, and honest in her conversation with folks when he made the following pronouncement (obviously off-the-record and far-from-the-press): “So if you let me finger the family jewels, there might be some mild pressure out of the city attorney’s office to sway the BID from its misguided ways?”

Joya was hurt, as any scheming lady of high self-esteem might be, but the remark amounted to a knife jab and naturally spattered its author with blood he had himself drawn.

“Hon, “I’m a lesbian,” she said.

“What do you mean you’re a lesbian?” the city attorney responded.

As noted above, Joya did not know how she might respond to a query so idiotic and, alas, so demonstrative of the fact that, no matter how eminent or well-prepared one can be, streaks of stupidity run through (almost) all of us.

So she said nothing at all; the point made in any case. Joya was, she realized in that moment, not trading pussy for influence. Wasn’t trading at all, in fact. She wanted his influence all on its lonesome, because it was right and correct. “City Attorney, if you think what the BID plans to do is in line with whatever the city and its laws stand for, that’s fine, hon. You should be able ta deal with whatever pressure results from the whole thing.”

“So now, instead of offering sex, you’re threatening me,” City Attorney smiled wearily.

“My actions are legal and I, for one, don’t appreciate the word threat.” Joya breezily responded. “Especially if you think you’re carrying out the duties of your office in a correct way...hon.”

He wanted to tell her that something could be legal and political and still be certifiably threatening, but felt if he needed to explain that, he’d need to explain a lot more basic stuff first. So he passed.

Let the pretty girl ride, you see.

City Attorney was about to ask for the check and sweep Joya and the whole damn affair under the table when things took a turn most uncomfortable for him, but delightful for the purposes of our story.

“No, no, noooo!” the proprietor of the restaurant half yelled and half whispered as Randall swooped gallantly into the restaurant blowing a rather erect Prince Edward cigar at all who were breathing.

Which raises the question of what on earth the proprietor had been thinking when he personally invited The Sidewalk Smokers Club, en toto, to his restaurant only moments after slapping his forehead at the realization that indoor puffing would definitely be out of the question, what with Joya bringing the city attorney along.

Possessed by a celebrity mania many small businesspeople are prone to where the issues of promotion and marketing are concerned, the Argentine had decided to summon his most glamorous group of regulars and notify certain friends of friends of paparazzi regarding the veritable starburst providence had directed his way. His metier was meat. Promotion – handled by special departments in larger and richer organizations – was not. And so he’d failed to make the not-too-subtle connection between Joya’s warning and the outcome that inviting a class of social rebels on the rise ultimately pointed to.

Randall’s sucksex, his hanging out with stars, and the promising possibility of further media coverage at Yvonne’s upcoming court hearing, all led him to wave the Argentine’s protests away with a flippant hand. Unwilling to offend an important regular, the restaurateur fretted and frothed, looked back and forth between City Attorney and the human chimney and opted for the courageous path into the kitchen and out of the way.

Randall saw Joya and casually approached, kissing her on both cheeks in the continental way before pulling up a nearby chair to join City Attorney – with whom he’d already had one public exchange.

“Funny,” said CA, “we were just talking about you.”

“Me!”

“Well, your club actually.”

“The Sidewalk Smokers is,” he repeated what he’d said at the A-list actress’s party, “a loosely affiliated group of tobacco connoisseurs that has no actual leaders and functions without a vertical command structure.”

“That’s quaint,” is what City Attorney thought to himself. “Well enough,” is what he said, kicking himself under the table for the original sin of permitting the pretty Coloradoan to buttonhole him at an event he should have never attended in the first place.

With City Attorney having said nothing to him about Randall’s smoking, the Argentine grew emboldened and proposed the party move to a large table set right smack in the center of the floor arrangement.

Swept along by a fatalistic current inexplicably stronger than his usually formidable will to resist, City Attorney consented, along with his tablemates, to the suggestion, which was designed by the proprietor to accommodate the full compliment of photographers he’d arranged for.

Randall, though still far from death, was making headway in the plan for ruining his health. He had a persistent hacking cough and a voice quite raspy. “So, hugcffck, what are you guys talking about?”

“We’re talking about the BID’s plan to move smokers off my block by force.”

“If they have to,” CA interjected.

Randall coughed again as he would do throughout what remains to be recounted of the evening. Further mention will be limited to a tag toward this chapter’s end. “And what are you going to do about that Mr. City Attorney?”

Mr. City Attorney frowned. There was nothing to be gained from any of this. With news the beautiful Joya was a lesbian, even getting laid was out of the question and getting laid is one of the few things politicians in the post-ideological world will go out on a limb for. “Listen,” he said, adopting a tone more in line with his public persona than with the intimate one he’d been treating Joya to. “I know we’ve already had a rather caustic exchange, but if you could stretch your capacity for deference just a bit more, I’ll extend the same courtesy.”

“You need that? Deference?”

Randall had gone most of his life without receiving anything like respect and a sudden novelty dosage of it wasn’t about to keep him from this chance at rubbing significant power the wrong way.

City Attorney ducked. “That cigar is rancid. And listen to the way you’re coughing.”

“I know, finally.”

“And your voice is raspy,” City Attorney barreled ahead, not at all registering the response just lobbed at him like some absurdist grenade. “What are you trying to do, wreck your health?”

Randall sheepishly admitted to the madness of his designs. “Yeah.”

City Attorney’s impassive facade was about to crack when another cool breeze blew over the place and the Argentine burst into an “Oooug” that, in turn, caused everybody in the restaurant to look up and utter a collective gasp at the standard-setting frame of Yvonne sashaying through the door in a bumptious way that suggested a return to the groove.

It took but a second for City Attorney to recognize what was, at the moment, the municipality’s most recognizable body politic. “Great,” he grimaced.

“Hey!” she smiled to each and each followed Joya’s lead in getting up to kiss her.

Of course, the balance of sexual energy had shifted between the two ladies with Yvonne now holding the Royal Straight Flush and Joya the red lust blush.

City Attorney could not help but be attracted to Yvonne and the chemistry grew even stronger when she planted something beyond the customary cheek peck and mashed Joya’s lips. But that would be getting ahead of himself; something he’d never been guilty of (up to now). “Take courage,” his personal narrator bucked him up in honeyed tones, “succeed and you will know greatness.”

They knew (City Attorney and his narrator) that being seen in the company of lesbians and violators of the Smoke-Free Workplace Act would run him afoul of the city’s civic fathers and mothers whose support was absolutely indispensable to his bid for the mayoralty. But meekly bailing out on the moment’s coolest crowd would surely set a painful rumor about his own clamminess running through the marginal hipster class he needed for votes and that certain something: a variety that lent his candidacy the true coalition’s sense of grandeur and inevitability.

These were the thoughts, which had nearly pulled him out of their orbit when Yvonne snapped at him. “Stop staring at my pussy.”

A man with a track record, he could not imagine ever having been confronted in such a manner by so sexy a girl-thing before and made a face to match the sentiment. His thoughts might have been on politics, but his eyes were indeed focused, as Yvonne accused, on her pussy and there were no two ways about it.

City Attorney stopped staring and with as much aplomb as could be mustered in this fast-decaying political situation, suggested they all sit down.

“What are you guys talking about?” Yvonne wanted to know. Randall and Joya replayed what had been discussed to that point.

“Well, what do you have to say?” Yvonne turned to City Attorney.

“I say people elect representatives to speak for them and interpret their wishes in law. What do you think?” he asked Yvonne, careful to look straight at her eyes, and only her eyes.

Randall interrupted, sensing the moment was a collective one and that it was his to speak for the group: “That the smoking law is a totalitarian slice of American reality and that those effected either don’t know or don’t care.”

“I was talking to Yvonne,” City Attorney said, comfortable the exchange was deteriorating into rhetoric; a form of discussion he excelled at.

“We’re The Sidewalk Smokers Club, in case you hadn’t heard,” Randall practically declaimed. “I’m our spokesman and chief theorist, purveyor of The Bum Philosophy.”

“The Bum Philo-”

“You’re talking about the old stewardship theory of representation,” Yvonne elbowed her way in. Of course, we know by now how she is no dope. Still, Yvonne resides in the very pretty girl’s prison so that for every demonstration of having listened to her high school tutors, surprise results.

“And,” she persisted in having a role in policy, “it’s a poor remedy compared to the more direct actions of our Club.”

Yvonne’s recent incursion into the world of serious had seasoned her language to sound something like a lawyer’s, and City Attorney liked it. “We’re the only true outlaws left,” she rolled on, “except for bankers and drug lords, but we think smokers have more appeal and are less dangerous.”

They had thought about these things, he could see, and was further intrigued by the inexorable pull of their true ingenuity and energy.

“You know who hon,” Joya picked up the thread. “All those people in the corner whisperin’ to one another, showin’ solidarity to one another. Protecting the tradition of doin’ whatever the hell it is ya want.”

She was talking about the whole free country thing and The Smokers were suggesting it was a bust, that it had been abandoned in atrocities like the Smoke-Free Workplace Act. CA found a younger version of himself quietly agreeing and slammed that person back behind the door to the past; for thoughts like that are luxuries of youth. They do not consider the grey men with plumed pedigrees and hands on the levers; the men City Attorney had to go to when he needed things.

“I think you’re pumping yourselves up,” he tried.

“No,” Randall rejoined, “we’re being pumped up by people.”

“And you like it don’t you?”

“Same way you’re asking for votes to be everyone’s mayor. Like it’d be a really big favor,” Randall sought to link their methods.

City Attorney was giving up on the glib and difficult approach. He was being pulled back to distant days of all-night student council meetings and congresses of protest. He was rediscovering his curiosity about society lying beneath layer upon layer of political necessity accumulated over the years.
Randall coughed.

Folks at surrounding tables had taken notice of the gathered luminaries. In one corner the patrons had reserved their table for the evening in hopes The Sidewalk Smokers Club would actually show up. To meet them might be of tremendous utility.
The Smokers, meanwhile, had moved onto the question of alternatives (to tobacco).

“Cocaine,” Yvonne trilled enthusiastically enough. City Attorney thought that somehow, some way, everything she said and did could lead him down a happy path to destruction.

“Legally, you’re better off being a murderer than getting caught with it,” Randall chimed. “Leads you straight into the merciless maw of the American criminal justice system.”

“A death silent, poisonous and slow,” Yvonne said.

The American legal system they all so clearly disdained just happened to be City Attorney’s bread and butter. And that was bad because what they were saying made perfect sense to him. He’d stopped hanging out, long ago, with anyone who thought anything like them – like people out on the sidewalk with cigarettes in their mouths.

“And marijuana?” Joya joined, “not like what it was back in the day. You know, that kind a free-floatin’ bluegrassy thing. That’s all over now. It’s just weed and it’s harmless except for the laws against it. They can get you killed. The little hippy farmers are all gone and now the worst kind of violent people are in charge of meeting the demand.”

“Which happens to be incredible,” Yvonne added for emphasis.

“Incredible,” City Attorney sighed, thinking of how many perfectly good lives the law had obligated him to ruin in the discharge of his duties.

At this point another “Ooooog” punctuated the atmosphere and those present no longer bothered to look at the restaurateur, turning immediately to the door instead. There they saw Corey and Clarisse making their way in. It was a bittersweet sight, for everyone knew what was going on (or not) between them. And yet there was a residue of behavior natural to a couple as they waltzed up to the table and were introduced to City Attorney. Clarisse shoved herself in between Joya and Yvonne. Corey went over to his mentor who had the city attorney immediately next to him.

“Anyhow it doesn’t matter man,” Randall picked up what passed for a thread in this game of verbal dodge-ball. “Connecting the dots on three or four related thoughts such as these is something now beyond the reach of our people, not because they are stupid, but because it is no longer required of them.”

“I don’t see your point,” CA prodded, failing (in a second malfunction of his political antennae) to notice the two scruffy-headed photographers peering through the front window every now and again, “maybe I got lost with the arrival of your two friends.”

“The point is that we are to avoid imperiling our health at all costs. And the point hurts if that’s not where your interests lie.”

Corey caught Randall’s beat. “Obedient for one reason; to help make a machine that works fairly well continue to do so.”

City Attorney had a feeling he was part of a tag-team-wrestling match without the benefit of an equalizing partner. Outgunned, he was forced to listen.

“And then we’re free – for minimal stretches of time – to choose the electronic diversion of our choice,” Corey closed the movement.

“You guys have practiced this haven’t you?” the candidate said slyly.

“It’s the smoking part of the Bum Philosophy,” Yvonne pitched-in.
City Attorney wanted to remark on how this seemed the most developed part of the Bum Philosophy, but things were crackling. “You’re in on this, too?” he asked her in return.

“Well, I pick it up when we get together to talk about my lawsuit,’ she told his two eyes firmly trained upon hers.

“And then she passed it onto me and I passed it onto another smoker,” Joya added, which was more or less true if a tad overstated, as was much of what they said.

For The Smokers were in the business of cultivating their own legend now, their own cottage industry, and excess was part and parcel to the task at hand. And to avoid breaking down their every rapid-fire interjection, again in the name of expeditious narration, we beg your admission that they were all on the same page where smoking and the rights necessary to indulge the vice are concerned. In this way we may lay out what was left of their lecture to City Attorney in the author’s shimmering and forthright prosody.

“You know,” Yvonne asserted, “in all those papers, the Constitution, and Declaration there must be a plan for protecting people who don’t act like everyone else.”

Yvonne’s point is fundamental to what The Club was all about. Majorities get their rights; the out-manned get trouble. The Smokers were adopted the philosophy they could afford.

By now each had fired up (a smoke) in the presence of his eminence. The violinist’s golden melancholia made the situation more serious, but less fierce than it sounds.

“I think Hamilton and Jefferson and Madison, and alla them would be for the smokers,” Joya stated, her cigaretted hand waving a small circle with each embalmed leader. “(Swoop) Hamilton, (swoop) Jefferson, (swoop) Madison, and (swoop-swoop) alla them…”

“And probably Ethan Allen and Paine,” Randall worked to control the image and its content.

“Yeah, and dats what cool ees,” Clarisse added on. “And that’s why people likes cool.”

“So that all those men of radically different political stripes were concerned about was cool?” City Attorney tried to ground things in what passed for reality, but their definition of radical and his own were not the same.

“They’re blessed in that way,” Corey said.

“Who?” City Attorney was lost because he’d been ignored and that was new for him.

“The anti-social, the cynical, the health unconscious, the baby-haters, and frantic fornicators,” Randall enumerated for him. “Man, we flatter them all with our attention.”

“And they admire The Smokers,” Yvonne said in husky, prepared voice, “because smoking is a middle-finger to the world.”

“And?” City Attorney sat rather flabbergasted.

“And the rest have the same middle-finger tucked away. They’re scared.”

“And The Sidewalk Smokers are not scared?” City Attorney was hoping for a certain answer.

“Sure we are hon. We just don’t let on s’all.”

And that was it.

Randall stepped in to finish the job. “For no matter how much the new century’s overlords try to reduce all freedoms to mere obedience, there will persist a genuine human urge to vice and release.”

“People will always pollute themselves for pleasure,” Corey bum-philosophized.
Randall beamed.

In the end, it was all really quite invigorating to City Attorney. He was won over completely. To live in truth! These Smokers were speaking to the higher (if still middling) calling of politicians, philosophers, and artists through the prism of a filthy, smelly, perilous habit.

“I’ve got to pee,” he blurted rather out of character for a fellow of his stature, but presently The Smokers recognized something of a kindred spirit in him, someone who could follow the train of their thoughts and empathize without smoking.

With that he got up and went back to the bathroom. A slice, a twinkle of light filled the restaurant for an instant causing everybody to look out at the sidewalk save for City Attorney who, in a third failure of his political radar, had not seen it.

“Photographers! Oh, nooo,” cried Yvonne who’d seen enough of the breed to last a lifetime.

“Okay,” Clarisse turned to Joya, “what you are doing wid dat ceetty atterny?”

Everyone else turned toward the Coloradoan with an identical hunger for the same information.

“You’re asking me to lie,” she said, “and I won’t do that,” which came from nowhere and made them all feel a little queer.

Meanwhile, City Attorney was evolving. Having relieved what was, by then, considerable pressure on his bladder, the candidate splashed some water around, stared into the mirror and meditated over his natural born politician’s face. Then he thought about how folks in the restaurant had been staring at The Sidewalk Smokers, smiling, wanting to be with them or like them, understanding them. He marveled at how he’d sat there as they openly flouted the law. And he thought they were right about what was behind their success and he went beyond their own justifications to observe more (he flattered himself) deeply still.

“What’s cool?” City Attorney played it cool upon returning. “Elvis? The days of lost innocence? Working-class boys in leather jackets? Hot rods? A pack of Luckys rolled up in a white shirt sleeve?”

“That’s a start,” said Yvonne.

“But there’s so much more, hon.”

“You guys,” he told them, “are right in the mainstream with your retroactivity. You mirror perfectly a people too afraid of future challenges.”

The Smokers were correct in feeling stung by the criticism about fear and the future. Weren’t they being brave?

“You gotta have balls to go it alone,” was the best Corey could add to the progression of things.

“There is the matter of our celebrity,” Yvonne pointed out.

City Attorney smiled. You would have, too. “What you mean to say is that you’re selling well.”

She nodded and blew smoke at him.

“Market performance as ultimate arbiter?” he was in hot pursuit, he thought.

“Not for me, but others are impressed.”

“You guys are the desire of those working too hard to play. They chose their slavery and they delight in you, unlikely examples of our rugged individualism– city style, I suppose. I congratulate you for being natural outlaws who have made smoking a good kind of bad again.”

His lower lip had drooped ever so slightly. He’d grown effusive, shown his heart damn it. And he had to pee again. His system was reacting to the modest abuse The Smokers subjected themselves to on a daily basis. He was afraid he could not run with the big dogs anymore, or at least the hot dogs.

Anyhow it didn’t matter. Good kind of bad or not, smoking was still smoking – indoors at that – and no sooner had City Attorney returned to the restroom than Thorpe and Diaz verily stormed their way through the door and up to The Sidewalk Smokers Club’s table.

The Argentine had received warning, but chose not to act because he thought City Attorney’s presence would immunize his establishment from any danger. He thought, because exceptional people were dining in his establishment, he would be the beneficiary of exceptional treatment. And he was right, but failed to consider the possibility of his legal shield absenting himself in the moment of truth.

The inspectors made a B-line for Yvonne and told her she was in violation of The Smoke-Free Workplace Act, and that they were going to fine her. She pointed out those around her, all of them smoking, and asked, “Well, um, how come me?”

Because she was the pretty girl in the naked magazine was how come. Everyone knew this, but nobody was going to say it. Yvonne, not unlike CA and the rest, had been marking a brisk pace where the consumption of wine was concerned and the usual deleterious effects had taken hold. Which is how things get interesting and why you can’t knock booze too hard. Thorpe handed her a citation off his clipboard and she told him to place it in a not-very-public part of his anatomy.

In the kitchen the Argentine had his chef pour him a glass of the cooking sherry kept over the searing stove for just such instances.

“Ma’am, we can talk about it outside,” Thorpe deadpanned Yvonne.

“Ma’am!” Talk about an affront. Remember that Yvonne had been through quite a bit of late, what with the layout and the lawsuit and Joya’s scrambling of her radar and it is understandable, or at least explainable, how she reached back and gave Thorpe a slap he would remember with exquisite pleasure for years thereafter.

The inspector grabbed Yvonne and wrenched her by the wrist into a bear hug with him.

Another slicing of the dark with a sliver of silver. The camera lights imposed their staccato sequencing. “Get some police back-up,” Thorpe told Diaz who was not enthusiastic about having to run out while his partner got to wrestle with Yvonne. “I’m having you arrested for striking a public official,” Thorpe said, hopeful there was a law of that kind on the books.

That no one had intervened or even sought to comment on a young woman’s being apprehended by firemen for smoking a cigarette, or something like that, stuck in Randall’s craw. He stood up, coughed and, in yet another attempt at climbing into the elusive public eye, said, “Hey, take me. I was smoking, too.” Thorpe could not have cared less if Randall smoked a firecracker in the restaurant. But for the sake of appearances, he explained to Randall that it was the slap which had gotten Yvonne in the real trouble, not the smoking.

“So that if smoking were okay, none of this would be happening?” Randall scored.

This, Thorpe wisely concluded, was a conversation for legislators, which he was not.

So he tried to end it. “Like I said. You didn’t hit nobody. You can’t be arrested.”

So Randall hit him. Sliver-Slice.

When the pretty girl hits you, she must be apprehended in a public and officious manner, because you want her in your clutches as long as possible. When some goofy guy in glasses hits you, it’s more between guys and so Diaz lent his partner a hand by using a common wrestling move which brought Randall harmlessly, if clumsily to the ground. Silver strobe. Silver strobe. Stop. Go. Stop.

Puppies chained to their chairs, the diners groaned in disapproval for there was all this unseemly injustice unfolding in the middle of their repast.

Thorpe’s instincts told him to get out before he had another sidewalk rebellion on his hands and this he did. But not without securing Yvonne as close to his person as legal propriety permitted (which is pretty close).

She, of course, was ravishing with an over-the-shoulder look, a soft-peril masking.

He wrenched her wrist into a pieta of distress. Silver-sliver-silver-sliver. No sooner had Thorpe removed her to the sidewalk than a black-and-white pulled up and with nary a howdy-do she was whisked away into the dark entrails of the city criminal justice system. Sliver.

City Attorney came out at this point as Corey helped a rumpled Randall to his feet. “I missed something didn’t I?”

Silver-sliver-sliver-silver.

Chapter Forty-six

Jordan, of course, was missing from this tectonic occurrence in the goings-on of his cohorts, for when one has profound personal problems the ability for public interaction becomes limited.

And this was precisely Jordan’s predicament. Due to a redundant sense of worry, he’d been staying in, avoiding the white glare that seemingly followed The Smokers everywhere now, making preparations to meet the dark clouds gathering just off his horizon.

But to no avail really, for the morning after Chapter Forty-five had taken place, while Jordan enjoyed his first coffee and cigarette, Dumburton dropped by with a piece of paper requiring that Jordan follow him down to the police station for questioning.

J. was in pajamas, bathrobe and slippers and so he asked Dumburton for a minute to dress. The detective said sure and proceeded to step into Jordan’s space when the door was slammed in his face.

“What are ya doing?” the detective snarled through the cheap slab of wood separating them.

“Getting dressed man,” Jordan snarled back, “Your paper doesn’t say ya get to come into my bedroom, too.”

This was not spontaneous, but by design. J. had engaged in some research and preparation for what he now felt to be an inevitable confrontation with the gargoyles of public order. This prep consisted exclusively of delving through his local entertainment outlet’s collection of film noir classics and a similar raiding of the local bookstore for the works of Mickey Spillane, Dashiel Hammett, and Jordan’s favorite, Ray Chandler.

In this search for an edge he’d decided upon a technique, whereby he battled, parried, dodged, and slipped his tormentors; creating every step of the way, brick by brick, a case for whatever lawyer would be stuck with the job of defending Jordan from charges that were, in fact, true.

What he harvested were thirty or forty hours of delightful entertainment (and suspense) capped-off by a collection of wiseacre lines, some borrowed and some original, the latter coming to Jordan as he slowly became imbued with the spirit of the mid-century gumshoe.

And so, he met Dumburton outside his place in a tuxedo.

Those who are pulling for Jordan, and wondering how it was he chose what would appear to be a not-very-helpful strategy for breaking clear of the law’s claws, must admit that he’s taking things like a man and having a good time during what may be his last hours of freedom.

It was an attitude pumped from the bum philosophy’s bowels, a rebel-may-care stance that otherwise cooperative people are forced to affect when the fact they smoke pushes them out and away (which is somewhat the point of this story).

Dumburton, cold and worldly as he was, did a well-pronounced double-take to the pure satisfaction of the murderer.

It was in this moment the idea truly impressed itself upon Jordan. He was a murderer. Laws and lore held it to be so. The realization transformed him further than his black-and-white mug repertoire. He was no longer, and could never again be, a regular guy. He was something distinct, had done something of note.

“Asshole,” Dumburton responded in a way that was becoming customary to Jordan and therefore less intimidating than at first. “You don’t have any respect for the law or the system.”

“I’m dressed formally,” Jordan pointed out. “How much more respect you want?”

Dumburton drove a muscular car that was ostensibly unmarked save for the fact only non-uniform cops drove gas-guzzling behemoths built prior to the first energy crisis.

The detective got in on the driver’s side while Jordan stationed himself, hands on hips, at the opposite rear door. “What are you doing?” Dumburton sounded frustrated.

“Ain’t you gonna ‘cuff me?”

“No, I’m not gonna ‘cuff you. What are you gonna do to me?”

“You’re accusing me of murder, ain’t ya?”

“An old lady.”

“If I were you I’d put the ‘cuffs on.”

“You’re not me, but if it makes you happy…” Dumburton spit, slammed the door and stomped around the rear end of the car and gruffly ‘cuffed J.

He then stuck his hand on the top of Jordan’s head in the way people of his ilk do and pushed the suspect down into the back seat.

“Christ!” He shook his paw and made the facial expression of some frivolous girl who’s just seen a spider. “What the hell’s in your hair?”

“I don’t share beauty secrets,” Jordan told the buzz-cut detective.

“You have enough in there to last an eternity,” Dumburton barked while making his way back around to the driver’s side so that Jordan might hear him.

“Ya never know when a little grease might come in handy down at the big house,” Jordan nonchalanted him.

Dumburton looked in the rearview mirror. His eyes locked onto J.’s whose own locked onto the detective’s, just like he’d seen in the movies. “You’re drivin’ me fucking nuts!” the lawman acceded before getting back out of the car, walking back around the trunk end, opening Jordan’s door, grabbing his hair, losing grip from the grease as he tried to pull him back out of the vehicle. “Aggh.” And he looked for a place to rub his hand dry. “Get outta the car!”

Jordan casually obeyed, fully understanding the ebb and flow of his relationship with this man who’d crashed into his life some weeks before with neither invitation nor departure date.

Dumburton took the handcuffs off. “Get in the front, the games are over.”
Jordan got in understanding full well that the games were over when he decided they were.

Early in their little road trip, Dumburton’s car was passed on the right by an eye-catching woman in the passenger seat of a racy convertible handled by a gentleman neither he or Jordan bothered to look at.

“In this world,” Dumburton turned to a surprised Jordan, “there are a lot of whores.”

It was a crude observation and certainly not novel, but underneath it Jordan detected a strain of humanity, something which he had suspected of Dumburton from the first.

They rolled through neighborhoods of decreasing realty value for a few minutes more when Dumburton turned again to Jordan and said, “I just want you to know that I don’t think what you did was morally wrong. I am, you know, enforcing the laws, not makin’ ‘em.”

“Nice try. Mind if I smoke?”

“Yes.”

“Tough shit.”

We are placed on this earth to deal with one another. Argue to the contrary all you want, we are forging ahead. Those who accept this fact have a much better time of it and are able to penetrate situations otherwise impermeable. Jordan accepted it and therefore understood that Dumburton’s job – in its basest incarnation – was to round up murderers. But he also knew it to be a means toward many ends: earn money; make a wife happy; climb the career ladder, and garner positive press for a perpetually beleaguered police department. So, to a reasonable degree, Dumburton actually needed Jordan. “Doctor needs sick people, cop needs criminals,” he thought and promised to pass this along to Randall when the opportunity presented itself.

And to the extent the democracy rattles along with a few rights and guarantees still hanging to its twisted chassis, the situation required a modicum of cooperation on the suspect’s part or the whole thing would get nasty and defeat the purpose of neatly bringing to justice the murderer of an old woman.

The cigarette was sprinkled lightly with marijuana. Almost all of Jordan’s cigarettes had been pre-rolled in this way of late. He had a lot on his mind and it helped him relax. Pure and simple. That Dumburton was coming to take him away had not crossed Jordan’s mind two nights earlier when he had rolled ten or twelve to help navigate the next few days.

The detective, whose job provided ample exposure to all the worldly vices, only needed a whiff to determine something wasn’t right. “You smokin’ weed?”

“What’re you gonna do? Arrest me?”

Dumburton looked at his captive for the first time with something that approximated grudging admiration. He asked Jordan if he had a smoke without the weed and, in a moment of softness towards the hard bastard, J. provided him a pre-rolled. Dumburton smoked a little, coughed, and put it out.

“Real tough guy,” Jordan mumbled.

They arrived at the station and Dumburton told his prize to sit for a second while he went to do something or other, which he then proceeded to do.

Jordan looked like, and was, a fish out of water. For the enterprise that is American criminal justice runs on the fuel of minorities and hard-luck losers bitter at buying into a dream not their own. His status as killer notwithstanding, Jordan looked too white, too polished, too coherent, and too harmless to have much of anything to do with the miserable souls present and waiting for their legal skewering.

It was, really, very much like his night in the emergency room in county hospital, which when he thought it twice over, was how he became associated with this whole other class of countrymen in the first place. For if Jordan had not gotten sick without health insurance he would never have been forced to take treatment with people other than his own. And he certainly would not have been wandering around a hellhole of the misbegotten at three a.m. or whatever time it was he got it into his head to do a mercy killing.

Anyhow it didn’t matter because there he was sitting in a tuxedo. Once again J. monitored the poor speaking skills of the suspects, the faux bravado that only served to dig their holes a little deeper, the inability to connect at any level with their keepers, and the complete lack of development that stood at the root of their present trouble.

Dumburton came back seemingly glad to see Jordan who was a class act where criminals were concerned; a less bumpy ride yet more challenging. And the public nature of the case in which J. was about to be named suspect meant grand things for the detective.

Suffice it to say Jordan’s sentiments were not made of the same stuff.

“Alright, I’m gonna put you in a room for questioning, just like on television.

We’re waiting for somebody from the city attorney’s office to get here and then we’ll do the interrogation.”

“You tryin’ to get me excited?”

“No, I’m trying to scare you.”

Jordan contemplated spitting to mark his disdain, but his sense of cleanliness got the better of him, which is why he was a cop like Dumburton’s favorite kind of suspect.

The detective locked him in a new room, which was, as promised, just like the kind seen on television cop dramas. In front of him there was a long glass panel that Jordan pegged for one of those one-way viewing things whereby enforcers of the law could see him, but through which he could not return the favor. Then he waited and waited, which is a part of the game. He’d have smoked another cigarette/joint, but a cute lady in uniform with a giant gun and her hair in a bun had divested Jordan of his particulars.

He waited and waited some more. An hour went by. Another half an hour went by; at least so it seemed. Jordan had to avoid his favorite pastime, sexual fantasy, for lack of a place to let off steam should his imagination prove particularly fertile.

Finally Dumburton returned, crestfallen. Jordan could see it and this was because he was becoming familiar with the professional part of the officer’s personality; beyond which he did not suspect there to be much else.

“Okay, you’re free,” he practically whimpered and threw a folded newspaper at him.

Jordan unfolded it. He saw pictures of his friends in a scuffle with what looked like the guys who’d shown up to make such a mess of the benefit/press conference.

And then another with City Attorney in very proximate environs to where all of this happened, which, if he wasn’t mistaken, was the Argentine restaurant.

“The city attorney’s been photographed at a restaurant with The Sidewalk Smokers Club. The whole office is in a war room mentality. Can’t get a deputy city attorney down here to help me with you.”

“And so who, I ask, is there to defend the sanctity of our system?”

“Alright, get outta here,” Dumburton recuperated form and growled, “but don’t think this is the last of it because it’s not.”

And that was probably true. Jordan thought about a come-backer, but survival instincts took hold and he chose to depart the station house lest somebody change their mind. As things were going, he did not find it at all odd that the lady with gun and bun would return his pre-rolleds with his wallet and keys and a comely wink.

It was not every day the station played host to a tuxedo guest.

Bereft of mobile communications capacity on principle, Jordan now found himself paying the price for that principle as he stood stuck in a neighborhood that left a little to be desired. He reflected upon how it is the nature of police stations to be in lousy neighborhoods, “more customers, in a manner of speaking.”

He pulled out a plastic calling card that had been in his wallet since the New Deal.

J. never used it and, given the transforming bias of telecommunications, was not even sure the company that had issued it existed anymore. He had wisely attached a little clipping of paper explaining just how the device was to be employed. He went to punch the numbers in on the payphone and it was then Jordan noticed that it had been torched and smashed into uselessness. So he moved on, approaching broken payphones in his tuxedo until on a fourth try, next to a liquor store fortified with more bars than the jailhouse itself, he found an operable one.

Slowly the odd ritual performed between himself, the recorded voice of a woman who seemed to be in the employ of telephony companies the world over, and an interminable number of digits, yielded a dial-tone.

He thought it better not to importune poor Joya yet again. So he dialed Corey’s number, which landed him Clarisse’s voice.

It wasn’t the clearest connection in the world. “Who eet is?” she chirped and he answered that eet was Jordan and then explained how he was actually trying to reach Corey. “Oh. Well he doesn’t stay so much at dee apartment anymore and I have all de mess-ahge come to my phone.” There was a pause since J. could not really understand what it was she had said. “So what jou are doing?”

“I’m down at the police station. I’ve had a little trouble, but they let me out. I need somebody to come and get me.” There was another pause followed by some gurgling voices. Clarisse, he was sure, had covered the phone with her hand in order to explain his situation to whom he was not quite sure. Surprisingly, a squeal of delight wove its way through her knuckles and bounced off a satellite into his ear.

“Okay,” she said, “ we are coming down to get you.” And with that she hung up not having permitted Jordan to tell her exactly which station he was at.

No matter, a few panhandlers and violent threats later, a red convertible GTO roared down the street to the delight of street punks, drunks, and law enforcement types alike. As the car pulled up, it became clear the driver was that starlet from the benefit/press conference. He did not recognize her from the show for which she was known, but her glasses and floppy hat and other accessories that Clarisse had taken to mimicking gave the thing away.

It made quite the picture and the ladies’ incongruity to the surrounding neighborhood affected them not at all. And why should it have? All available gods were obviously keeping an eye out for the do-ette. And why shouldn’t they? Everybody else within eyeshot was, too.

Jordan, whose recent circumstances had sharpened his capacity for reflection, began reflecting anew as he sat his tuxedo-self in the back seat behind the two beauties, lit a tobacco/marijuana smoke, and settled in. He thought that, when the strings of control that keep a normal life normal are cut, for whatever reason, a person’s range of experience, ie; the depths to which they can sink and the heights to which they might soar, is given to greater oscillations. At least that was how his day, which had started with captivity and had morphed straight into any blade’s definition of fun, had run.

The actress looked back at him and smiled widely and whitely. Clarisse introduced her formally as Vindaloo Baxley whom he’d heard of. Clarisse introduced him as Jordan and he gave thanks Baxley had not yet heard of him given Dumburton’s efforts to make his name a household brand.

Although he could not quite connect Baxley’s face to her work, the name was one of those attached of late to must-know things and people. She was cute, no check that, she was really hotly scrumptious and the fact Jordan had too much on his mind to really concentrate very well on her lit Baxley’s fire of attraction for him: proof positive there is nothing more enticing to a woman than a man with large enough a life to inoculate himself from the universal effects of beauty. He carelessly asked her if Vindaloo Baxley was truly her name and she said, “Of course not!” while mistaking his distraction for the lack of respect she inwardly felt deserving of, but could not have thanks to her rank, station, and upturned nose.

J. had learned of late not to ask where things were leading. There was no longer any scheme or order to his life and, by egocentric extension, the universe in general.

The exercise of worrying about immediate details had dropped from his repertoire. He was suspected of murder no matter where he was and as long as that had not been confirmed in a court of law, every day was Christmas Day, every night New Year’s Eve.

When the GTO stopped at a light Vindaloo got a whiff of what Jordan was working in the back. “Are you getting high?” she trilled with a joy-element in her voice that was contagious as malaria in the Spanish-American War.

“Yeah,” Jordan answered in a way he might have were she Officer Dumburton. His demeanor had changed. The tough-guy, gumshoe rehearsals had only served to varnish a nature already deformed by the rock of Sisyphus he’d been pushing these many pages.

His gruffness caused Vindaloo to cast a sidelong glance at Clarisse who read it as, “God he’s cute.”

It would be helpful, at this point, to remember that when Clarisse hit her now dissipated crisis, it was Jordan, rather than her fading husband, whom she had turned to for solace. With the approval of her patron stamped all over his dour countenance, Clarisse’s tepid interest in Jordan was rekindled.

“So,” the actress looked over her shoulder with complete disregard for the unfolding traffic situation ahead, “do you mind if I ask what you got picked up for?”

“Yes,” Jordan yelled into the wind, “I do.”

“Great,” said Vindaloo, “so what were you picked up for?”

This made Jordan smile and he was tempted, as he had not been for quite some time, to regale her with the truth. “Smoking,” he uttered, keeping on message and demonstrating a discipline that would increasingly serve him in trials to come.

“Oh, you Sidewalk Smokers are the most!” she cheered. “It’s a veritable revolution.

Like you were everywhere pressing the advantage. I have to ask: Was it all planned?”

Jordan would have liked to answer that, yes, it was, but he wanted to know what had happened the prior night at the Argentine restaurant. And so, with the heightened ability to shift perspectives, compose alibis, avoid answers, and respond to questions with questions he’d developed in his dealings with Dumburton, J. directed things in a direction more pleasing.

“No, it’s more a spontaneous uprising of oppressed habitues citywide.”

She squealed with the childlike delight of those lucky enough to spend their life bathing beneath the golden sun of good fortune. It was all so much fun for her, so much spectacle.

“So Clarisse,” he probed, “what happened last night at the Argentine place?”

“Well, de things got out of hand from all de smoke.”

“Yeah, the newspaper told me as much. Got anything else? Like, say, how the city attorney ended up embroiled in the affair?”

“Shee’s hafing an affair with that city man.”

“Who?”

“Joya. Who else?”

“I thought Joya was a lesbian,” he labored through the interrogation.

“Yeah,” said Clarisse in so useless a manner for the purposes of information gathering that Jordan threw his hands up, resigned to waiting for a more specific accounting from Randall himself.

Whatever had happened, it was clearly to his benefit and Jordan leaned back in the hope this was a sign his fortunes had finally taken a turn for the better.

Stopped at another light, Vindaloo Baxley turned to Clarisse and said in a barely audible voice, “Should we share him?”

And Jordan smiled as a feeling of warmth that began somewhere in his solar plexus, moved convincingly through his chest, up his neck, and into his head where it exploded in a starburst the likes of which he had never known before.
He shivered, but not from the cold.

Chapter Forty-seven

Randall and Corey drove the latter’s SUV toward a different police station where Yvonne was waiting to be bailed out after an evening in the cooler.

“You’ve been coughing a lot,” Corey said as Randall sucked and chewed on a treacle-gooey Sir Edward cigarillo without much gusto at all.

“I know... I hung out smoking with Hat Midone after the ruckus last night,” Randall
confided.

“Hat Midone the actor?”

“No, Hat Midone the bus driver.”

Corey wondered aloud why it was that everyone but him was getting an actor out of all the hubbub. “Who else got an actor?” Randall wanted to know.

“Clarisse has hooked up, profitably I might add, with Vindaloo Baxley, the actress.”

Randall was secretly disappointed he didn’t get the actress and Clarisse the actor, but instead said, “We’ve got a better actress. An actress on the largest stage of all – reality.”

Corey nodded. “For my money she’s the true ‘it’ girl right now.”

This line of discussion resulted in a rare moment of quiet between them. Corey felt close to Yvonne and was worried about the drama she was presently enduring. Randall had a vested interest in her well being, too, and was mindful of the fact the poor girl had handled plenty, and with aplomb.

“You think we’re putting her through too much?” Corey broke the silence.

“Doesn’t matter now,” Randall replied. “If she thinks forging ahead is costly, she should see the price of falling back.”

They discussed the media at the restaurant and glumly realized that there would be more of the same as Yvonne left the station house. They discussed how much it would cost them to free her and also DeConcini’s dropping the case, leaving them up a creek.

“He told me his practice can’t stand the publicity,” Corey smirked, a true believer that all publicity was good. “He said Yvonne is not someone who can be looked up to.”

“Although looking down is always a pleasure,” Randall permitted himself, because fun is important, even when it comes at a friend’s expense.

“Can it,” Corey exercised his veto power over Randall, who enjoyed the same option, “and tell me about Hat Midone.” His partner said in no uncertain terms that the late hours spent with Hat Midone were so extraordinary – meaning not very ordinary – that he feared the effect of the pleasures on his long-term health and the guilt upon his fragile conscience.

“How’d you end up going out after everything that happened? I was spent.”

“That’s when he called. Those people don’t live like…never mind.”

“That crazy huh? Would you repeat?”

“Most definitely.”

They pulled up to the police station and sure enough, a flock of photographers and other parasites had gathered in the hunt for Yvonne’s hide, both figuratively and literally.

Randall went inside to take care of bu