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Author: Terence Loric
Date: 02-07-10 13:51
Here's the first chapter of my latest book. I need pointers on how to improve my style and I want to know too if the story is of any interest.
Horace Menorah:
“In a nutshell”, the man here says, to say the least to Kurtz Sahab. “In a nutshell, this is the actual iridescent pilgrim’s dovecote”, he goes on after clearing his throat, helping himself to a blurry eyeful of the scaffoldings that stand, like luxuriant metallic trees, along both sides of the hotel.
Still, unrolling itself farther, looming over the rust of the full-blown bushes of gates, a simple pathway, which echoes paradoxically this wintertime sound of gravel crunch underfoot, offers raw perspective of a series of windows and ledges, whose stately bottom an awning garners up. And beside the big green canopy, the façade, freckled grey with dirt, truly tells dreariness. Jazzily bright though, two parallel rainbow-shaped neon signs glitter out front, below which Kurtz suddenly kneels and prays.
“His Iridescence?”, Sahab ventures onto talking. “Shouldn’t there be a band between the two of them?”
Kurtz Sahab’s remark’s definitely frowned upon.
“You know, the dark section of unlit sky hovering between the first and second bows. Alexander’s Dark Band, they call it.”
Unsettled then, the man squats.
“Indeed, I wonder why I put up two rainbows, now that you mention it, Sahab. Never mind. Let’s move on, we’ve got better fish to fry.”
The man treads on the alley. Past it, the entrance, just lying unadorned there, except for a vast brown doormat and pots of withered flowers, conveys lack of lustre almost like purposely, as it duly waived a right to stylishness. No great deal of legwork is needed to reach a gloomy hall that sweeps up the staunch avid traveller in a mad swirling dust of disharmony.
“The English”, banters the man, “couldn’t have done better. Seems they all had a string of bad relationships with interior decorators, and decided to get back at them by ways of flowery paper motives. An entire civilization built on spite. Have a smell and look, Sahab, how this cries for a complete overhaul.”
The odour in fact, some compound assortment of cheap perfume and uncouth aftershave, blends in straightforwardly with the shrubby divans, the coquettish armchairs, the variegated carpets galore. Further headway up to the neat vintage countertop is necessitated; and across behind, the upholstered rounded-base swivel chair, on which a woman swings seated, foretells a boring tale.
“I’m here to see Mr. Setter, dear Madam.”
“Sutter.”
“Really?”
The man, Charles Tremblay, some ancient American Jewish street guru solely known these days as writer Chuck Levine, is just here to close a deal with the Irish current owner of Les Lierres, intending to acquire at low cost that morbid stale hotel located near Versailles to put up disciples, and renovate what will constitute his Parisian spiritual nerve centre, adding in to his already widely adhered New York HQ a European pied-à-terre. Far-flung Paris: a brief-forgotten place for transient sketch artists, or whoever is innocently minded to jabber, over a glassful of Puligny Montrachet, about how Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe and “other things we’ve seen” stand out a mile supreme and old-fashionedly romantic.
“Clean city”, many say too, assuming the new hip Mayor, at the Hôtel de Ville, has achieved his homework and, of course, the lovable birdies which, with their well-known metropolitan sense of duty, have collectively pecked at the tourist’s sandwich leftovers in the Buttes Chaumont, the Parc Monceau or, most surprisingly, in the Luxembourg gardens. Yet flying way overhead, apart from those tiny cute tranquil sparrows (every one of them bound to the lawn-green areas), the ill-famed pigeons have unhealthily upgraded in what our past-centuries horses, by means of odoriferous manure, used to excel, namely refurbishing avenues and boulevards with unsavoury faeces. A faint Marxist guilt though have unconsciously seeped into people’s cruel mind: inclined to reining nags, utilizing other’s labour power, as Karl would fitly state, the culprit human species has eventually forgiven the equine for their whimsical bowel mouvements, everything in spite of that dung’s fearful stains and stenches which were now instead the unique worry of sidewalks and pavements. As for the municipal wayward Columbidae which seem also, before anything else, seasoned experts at impressionist depiction (repainting exteriors by dint of prodigal droppings remaining for them, as might be expected, tantamount to professional hazard) let us not rush so fast: birds have leeway; and no one has ever yoked a pigeon for utilitarian purposes, for fleeing animals are, theoretically speaking, vastly independent and therefore pragmatically unattainable. One has to lure them and tame their natural propensity to freedom and unworldliness, shaking off their inveterate habit of taking wing and breaking unfettered, a feature many playground children, trying excitingly to catch a hold of them, have sourly come across. And thus are dying down hoi polloi’s trains of thought, in as much as they think.
“French left-wingers have apparently cared more for beasts - beasts of burden I meant - than the forthcoming generations, Sahab.”
Metaphysically just a tad askewer, some people could have stated in that theory’s stead that, in bygone times, rainy-day-ish lands like France had had to instruct all townfolks to put up ark-concave umbrellas when the mounts had defecated with merry abandon and the muck-ridden streets had the wind up with sludge.
“In the beginning, God created the clouds, and especially earth.”
Sahab questioned:
“But why the flood, master, why? Why send out from his Ark a dove to check the surroundings? A rainbow had been set in the sky, like a flag precisely. But a banner of what?” Chuck fancied it poured down so hard and often in Éire that the native Celts were the genuine sons of Noah.
“Goyishness, which we’re about to witness, Sahab.”
Chuck sneaks unannounced into Sutter’s lair, entering without a knock.
“I guess it’s everybody else’s house!”, Sutter bawls out angrily from beyond a stifling screen of wavering smoke, a foul-smelling cigarillos billow that blackens the notary’s face who suddenly takes off, pseudo-coughing lungs out. As Chuck barges into the room, obese Sutter sees him and turns halfway round, his yellowish-green teeth shining a rhino lavish grin, his radish-pink visage oozing ludicrously with blush.
“You must be Chuck Levine, the famous great writer, right?”
“And your prepuce must weight at least a pound of flesh? Flood-bait flesh, obviously. How do you do?”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Cut the kippur out, prosciuttone. Tu casa mi casa now. “Beyth” signifies “house” in Hebrew, did you know that?”
“No, sir, I did not know that. And how is that relevant? You’re speaking several languages at a time, I’m confused.”
“That’s how it occurred back in Babylonia.”
“What the hell are you babbling on about?”
“Babel. Gotcha!”
“Listen, we don’t have to read out the deed. Papers are ready for you to sign if you still want this hotel. I, for one, have no time to lose with gibberish, kabbala riddles and whatnot. Good luck with everything you’ve planned on doing and, of course, your sect.”
“The Iridescent.” Sahab observes.
“IRA. Isn’t it a Catholic sect? I mean, you do fight and terrorize people, send trainees down in Muslim Lybia on behalf of Catholicism, right?”
“And what about Jews? You do fight and kill Palestinians on behalf of what? Money!”
All of a sudden, Chuck seizes Sutter’s windpipe and starts to strangle him. “You wanna see some crazy kike, hum?”
“Let go of me now, you lunatic!”
Horace Sutter strikes some irked pose, rises from his chair, then pirouettes off comedically, trying to figure out the swiftest mode of egress.
“Nutcase!”, Chuck and Sahab can eavesdrop, after Sutter’s banged the door shut to attain the lobby and tie himself to the stunned notary’s apron strings.
“Right on! Don’t wear yourself thin, ever!”, shouts Chuck, ensconsing himself on the red-ochre sofa. “Nuts… You do know what a Nux Vomica is, Sahab?”
Kurtz seems away. Sutter’s place looks out onto a garden. “It’s a tree whose poisonous seeds make you yawn a rainbow. Are you paying attention to me?”
Sahab stares at the panes.
“His Iridescence? Wasn’t it all a prophecy? I mean those walnuts blooming out there, that collection of hotel rooms resembling pigeonholes, sir?”
“Dovecote, Sahab. Dovecote.”
As a youngster, Charles Tremblay had built a wooden hut in his backyard’s oak tree, so that his gimp father, unable de facto to climb up, would cease to hit him perpetually. Up there in his loneliness for months, he had seemed to attract and fascinate like San Francesco d’Assisi a numerous swarm of white pigeons that he rapidly managed to domesticate, accommodating them in a self-made built-in dovecote.
“What particularly drew my attention about my fresh winged companions is that they never tried to escape from their homely compartments, which took uncannily after some weird game of chess. Birds had embedded themselves willingly. They were free to go, these pawns. They could have as well been playing hopscotch like schoolgirls on a sidewalk. I remember now listening to Messian’s piano pieces to acquaint myself with birdsongs and, naturally, with Christian theology, a discipline to which my philistine father or even my well-read Jewish mother were absolute strangers, Sahab.”
Anti-semite and alcoholic Eugene Tremblay had begun, before becoming warden of the nearby state penitentiary, at the rung of the ladder.
“Jacob do have, in his dream, set down the fallen angel at the foot of his steps. Before Rock Bottom, Sahab.”
First eking out an income by systematically abusing Attica prisoners as a Correctional Officer, he had always slapped his son around. Everyday, it was either the leather belt’s buckle, either the wrench or screwdriver, sometimes plain bare-handed punishment. Father Eugene had applied every little sadistic trick of his own invention, deriving skill from his jailhouse violent background, all to humiliate Chuck whom he loathed profoundly, some hatred deep-rooted in the fact that baby Charles was born a Jew and no Catholic as the devout Tremblay grandparents had ingenuously expected. At the Massapequa’s hospital, whenever stitches to his swollen, bleeding face were required, Chuck lied to doctors and nurses.
“I’d fib, without flinching, that the banisters were greasy and that I’d tumbled down the stairs.”
Obstinate, traditionalist Charlotte Tremblay, born Levine, had an early fall-out with her husband about their only child’s faith. Breton Eugene did not attend Charlie’s bris, which was performed secretly under a rabbi’s pop supervision, and nobody, except for the Levine folks, had been the wiser of that little cunning scam they’d pulled. In addition to his actual unawareness as to his kid’s phallic statute, Eugene had never changed Charlie’s diapers and never given him bath, a reassuring state of affairs for Charlotte, who had fetishly kept as a souvenir in a flask full of Formol little Charles Tremblay’s prepuce. The beating stopped short the blessed day Eugene ran out of perverted schemes. Nonetheless, from this period on, psychological torture had become quotidian drill at home. Once, he surprised his son stark naked in the bathroom after shower, suddenly becoming informed of his concealed circumcision. Hysterically searching the foreskin’s whereabouts, apprised from the get-go of his wife’s superstitious manias, he had bludgeonned her almost to death, so as to recover the hidden item of barbaric sacrifice. Scrambling up the stairs to the attic, he had laid his hands at last on the toppered flacon containing the puny piece of genital hide. He then convoked Charlie to what would be his terminal demise parlour.
“He ordered at gunpoint: ”Chew on it, kike!”, after easing off the bottle’s tip and handing me the prepuce. “Swallow it, or by God, I’ll make you eat bullets!”, my father threatened, Kurtz.”
Tears roll down Chuck’s cheeks now, just as they did when the terrified boy caved, as Eugene pinched his nose and grabbed his jaw to make him gulp it down his throbbing, rebellious throat, force-feeding him the symbol of the divine Covenant.
“I have never thrown up since, ever. Beats me why. My father enquired if the thing was tasteful. “Quite a trauma it must be to eat oneself up? You’ve been mutilated in your childhood, kiddo. How could I make it up to you, if not by returning your own flesh to its rightful proprietor?” That’s the way my father tried to explain his awful gesture away.” It was the first time Chuck Levine called his comrade by his real name.
“You must pull yourself together before the journalists air, master.”
Kurtz and Chuck skedaddled without lowering to mandatory adieu mumbo-jumbos, and hopped into a cab that quickly drove away.
Paris west suburbia: some insipid hideout for the Gospels vulture, the tartan skirt hairband housewife, the private-school runny-nose snot, the middle-management paterfamilias who seems to exert himself to ape François Bayrou’s TV fool tone, thumbs through Le Figaro’s latest dumb print or croons Xmas anthems on a Bois de Boulogne transvestite’s lap…
A whole brethren of churchy-fartsy stuck-up gawks and damsels stroll smirking by as the car pulls up, camouflaging a tick the main road’s emptiness that Chuck whiffs pleasantly away as he steps out to look at the village.
“We’ll take the train all the way to St-Lazare now, Sahab and, for old times’ sake, we won’t be paying a dime. Thank you, sayyid, for letting us ruin your time. But you didn’t put the meter on. Keep the change anyway.”
Awaiting on the platform, Sahab is told the subsequences of Chuck’s Milah-related incident. Charles Tremblay had prattled like a child for a long time. Sometimes he plainly sank into sheer catatonia or talked in a few foreign languages at the same time.
“A case of glossolalia among other cases, Sahab.”
He no longer shinned up his oak to join in on the birdy assembly, holing up in his small bedroom where he indulged in scarifications of all kinds. He had developed all the characteristics of the suicidal individual, and that is how, one day, Charlotte found her son bathing in a pool of blood. “I had cut my wrists, Sahab. My mother called the hospital on the spot and decided to commit me at a private loony bin for a few weeks.”
Psychiatrists there believed Charles Tremblay to be schizophrenic.
“According to doctors, all patients who attempt suicide are, without exception, mentally ill, Sahab. Can you believe that?”
Chuck bought the diagnosis without asking further questions, notwithstanding the fact that the schizophrenic are known to lose gradually elementary intelligence which, on the contrary, was not his case at all. Back from the clinic where he had paled up with a few depressive inmates, he had stayed perched alone in his arboreal monument until his father, exasperated, moved out of the house, allowing his son finally to go down and rejoin this limp-wristed, liberal mother of his who was rather happy to get Charles back in-house.
Arsonist Charlotte Tremblay agonized in burn ward because of a taste for dim lightings and corny soap operas. Before falling asleep inebriated, she used to line up candles around her bed without imagining she could set herself and her whole place on fire. Mother Tremblay thus had no roof left for her son after her death, just smouldering rubbles of secrets uncovering why Father Tremblay had walked out on her, jealously accusing her of aiding and abetting a deadbeat teenage Chuck, who had dropped out of school and was at that time silently fighting against dawning schizophrenia. Or so had decreed the shrinks back at the funny farm, for Chuck, as a matter of fact, had been speaking again in unfathomable idioms, and had mostly begun to rave deliriously about how populations generally suffered from dysaulia, a sort of phobia of outdoors that civilisation had allegedly instituted throughout history, depriving man of his hunter-gatherer primary instinct of dwelling outside. Luck would have it that Chuck chose streets as an orphanage and changed into a bum, free to quit residing indoors, which he considered a prison, a fad probably due to Father Eugene’s occupation at the correctional facility. Although leading a hobo’s existence, he had hypocritically kept on reading books at the New York City Library on rainy days, departing already from his total outdoor policy, and that’s how he became more familiar with Don Quixote de la Mancha, whose main hero represented for him the schizophrenic patient par excellence; sometime even, over a parapet, when smokes of the evening sky turn pinkish and fade away to form moonless dampish nights, Chuck spotted a fishing pole floating above the river and set out to jump head first in water to pick it up.
“The Fisher King drowned”, he explained later.
“A modernish caballero, I sought out from that moment every circumstances where I could flaunt my favourite hobby: reunite words and things, literally experience literature rather than peruse or write it down. I was a self-learned classical Hebrew student at the time. I would burn the midnight oil deciphering the linguistical conundrums of the Bible, that giant table of consonants ready to be vocalised by the layman in quest of multiple cabalistic interpretations. As a young devotee, I believed to have perceived a sign of God, whom I thought to have dispatched this skein of pigeons in order to remind me that Noah, from his Ark, had sent out a dove and that a rainbow had been drawn in the sky, establishing a second covenant, the one between God and all creature thriving upon the earth. The doves I’d been petting had come from the outside, and the outer space, for that reason, should be equivalent to an ultimate Ark and, by implication, a finite, indestructible construction which would be the real House of God, unlike man-made secular residences which are at any time much likely to weather or merely crumble down. Do you understand Sahab? My home, as a believer, was outdoors from then on, the genuine Temple, in the form of the Ark of the Covenant itself whose I had discovered the puzzling location - my previous decision of settling up on trees being an indication of a God-given influence on my ongoing undertakings: I would byronically kid that the tree of knowledge was now that of life, putting an end to this mythical gap between knowledge and aliveness. בּ, the Hebrew symbol for “house” is how the Torah starts out. I was convinced that, because the Bible opened with that letter Beyth, and that houses were essentially limited volume sections, the cosmos was himself restricted, maybe by some vault of heaven or something more complicated, involving time dimensions and other spatial entanglements. The Shekinah, or divine presence, signifies primarily “dwelling”; and seeing that I was confident that God was basically everywhere, it enforced my vision that the Temple (related symbolically to the concept of both inward and outward bodies) was the space-time itself. Cosmology was to be my next passion, along with divination – Iranian Hafez Shirazi turning out to be one of my best-loved divinatory poet - which sorted out for me many unsolved temporal problems.”
Blond-haired hunk itinerant preacher Charlie had, moreover, too well-proportioned a mug to sail through a commoner’s life and croak without being ever noticed by peeps. A few of his Jewish friends – met hither and thither or through religious solidarity - had become captivated by his staggering personality and eccentric ideas on how the Verb fondationed reality; and those then enchanted pilgrims had gathered quixotically around him like a flock to create what would be later on a group of off-the-wall literary vagabonds that Chuck would baptize much accordingly the New York street-level society of the Poet Trippers.
“How much do you recall, master?”
Nothing much calls to Chuck Levine’s mind, actually. The era, anyway, of what the Poet Trippers had religiously christened the Season of Roses is not far off these days from facing extinction. Worse, fundamental values have bit by bit gone downhill into oblivion. Be that as it may, one thing was sure: sobriety was what the Poet Trippers used to be all about. Sobriety, indeed, for a pact had been concluded between the twelve members, a drinking-abstinence promise, an oath taken before almighty Chuck when the friendly company had come together Midtown at the break of dawn on March 1987, guided by what preacher Charles saw as a first step in consulting oracles – opening one of the three sacred Books and picking out a phrase or verse which would fill them in on how to seek advice from God. Chuck selected the Qur’an for practical motives, the Arabic text being more evidently peppered with astronomical leads. Verses were jotted down on pieces of paper that the participants mixed up in a huge glass bowl. A blindfolded Chuck pulled out a card and recited out loud:
قُلْ أَعُوذُ بِرَبِّ الْفَلَقِ
“It means that we should search for some sort of protection from the Lord of the Split literally, that is to say the Lord of dawn”, Chuck interpreted roughly, recognizing Lucifer or more properly Venus, because that planet is the first one to rise in the morning and can be clearly made out before all others in an unclouded sky.
Each Shaliah, or nearly Apostle, was to congregate in Times Square just before dark to interrogate Hafez on what would be their future line of guidance. They were able there to see the Great Bear - the Waggon, glow its starry paws above them. And like for the precedent oracular intervention, Chuck unfolded the tome of Ghazaliyat. Then, taken aback, he stumbled upon the beginning of a poem named Mowsem-e Gol, which says:
حاشا که من به موسم گل ترک می کنم
“God forbid me, in the Season of Roses, shall I abandon wine ?”
The twelve Jewish vagrants, who were after that to be known as the Rosy Apostles, agreed on this interpretation: Thou shalt not drink and shalt worship the Flower. They were now, as they said, tripping on the Waggon.
“There’s no harm in sipping now and then, is there, master? I, for one, have a yen for absinthe.”
“Universe is like a flower, Sahab, a “Gol” in the language of modern Persia. It grows and withers, the Ark in the end imploding to grow back again, in harmony with periodical natural time slots, just like our tripper alliance crumbled about twenty years ago and is likely to be reinstated now. Booze is Eden, a wanton uninhibitedness of nudity and chaotic sensations – much like for a backwood drunk satyr. A foetus where the Tree of Life caters all necessary food, except the forbidden knowledge fruit – an apple. The simple fact that I lived in what has been coined the Big Apple is a sign. The Temple of God or the body of universe sits right out there, Sahab: New York’s macadam is knowledgeable. Thou shalt not drink, Sahab, if you ever want to know instead of vegetate in the afterbirth forever, and embrace the flower-flexible cosmos.”
“What’s with Iran, master? Aren’t they supposed to hate Jews?”
“Achaemenid Persia used the Aramaean language as a Lingua Franca, and Jews were well-treated and occupied many high functions in the ancient Empire.”
Chuck Levine remembers clearly that, back from the homeless shelter, the Poet Trippers turned audaciously into church organ players, avid coffee drinkers. They tended to nest wherever a kettle was boiling, for tea alleviated angst fairly more than any vile staple. ‘Life alfresco advantages the Bard’, Charles Tremblay was aware then, yet planning nowadays on aging quietly in a wooden shack among ranges of pine trees in Minnesota…
A walking, self-cultivated paradox, that Chuck, Kurtz Sahab is meditating.
“The Season of Roses consists”, Chuck goes on clarifying, “in living outside, feeling sheltered by the wide-open space, waiting for the giant Rose that is cosmos to shrivel.” Inspiring himself of the Rosicrucians and their principal symbol, specifically a Temple on wheels, he had succeeded into justifying the goal he had set to his tripper intimates: reconciling, with the help of Biblical day-to-day poetry, empty words and reality, reconstructing for the Jewish faithful the roaming Temple’s walls which, blood-tainted by two consecutive spiritual conquests, call for a final wash-down - all that programme fatally bound to taking place in the Big Apple whose checkerboard map was for Chuck a matrix just like the Bible, just like the sleazy hotel he purchased a short time ago, just like his beloved dovecote that God had made him build in order to notify him of the true position of the Temple’s Ark: outdoors. The Washington Arch in Greenwich Village was to be the emblem, like a starlit vault of heaven, of the sacred relationship between trippers – their Ark of the Covenant, so to speak - a sort of landmark in New York each time a tripper came to be missing or was in trouble and where one could find help, a holy site where they used to mount guard alternatively, a powerful reminder too of the Ten Commandments.
“Let’s walk by the Synagogue rue de la Victoire on the way over. We’ll take the Rue Caumartin first, then cross rue Lafitte that leads down to Notre Dame de Lorette.”
A rabbi with a curly black beard dripping with disturbing saliva pops out of the woodwork. A defiant Chuck pockets out a handkerchief and waves it compassionately to the master of the Torah.
“Here you are!”
“Do you know who you’re offering this noserag to?”
“I’m sorry, Rabbi. But seeing you mouth-watering at the church like that, it kinda, you know, automatically poked the little yid within if you know what I mean.”
“I’m sorry. Rabbi, you just called me?”
“Well, where do you worship then?”
“The question’s rather what.”
“And what could that be, Rabbi? Whoops, I’m sorry, huh…Gentleman-with-a-ridiculous-hat.”
“The rose, evidently.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. Are you rooting for them mother****ing socialists? Given the graveyard-tanned fellow that you seem to be, you might as well come out of one dead lefty’s burial ceremony and, in that eventual case, I am grateful: a lefty’s worth a mass.”
‘You always had a potty mouth on you, Charles.”
“Gedeon?... Can’t be you. It’s been yonks since…and I mistook you for a Rav?”
“Well, Chuck, actually I am a rabbi.”
“Whoopsy again. Congratulations though, you must be, hum, really proud.”
Yet, for Gedeon Kahn, unlimited wisdom has never been of the essence, despite having assumed, as a Kohen, the position of the priest whenever the sinful trippers, after having irreligiously purloined, sacrificed, in accordance with the forgiveness rituals portrayed in Leviticus, two pigeons whose appetite for avian feed was first whetted by attractive Charles, strewing the seeds in the Park and tying up the net. Bethesda Fountain was to be their altar upon the side of which they used to sprinkle the sin-offering pigeon’s blood, and at its base the burnt-offering one’s gore. However, the quirky replacement state where the trippers had not made a good haul and unoiled, frankincense-free flour was to be brought for atonement instead had not arisen so far. Quixotism was expressed that way: why bother, indeed, sustaining worldly texts rather than the Text? And they breathed in agreement with the Bible, interpreting every magic fantasy word and trying to match them up with every mundane events.
“Come on up, I live here. We’ll catch up. It’s been almost twenty years now.”
“Your choice or your wife’s ?”, asks Gedeon Kahn about the apartment, too well conscious of Chuck Levine’s way of sticking it to the Rav, viz by setting up home near the fake-gold counterfeit Arks.
When the two ancient trippers trudge up the salmon-red mottled staircase rue de Châteaudun, Chuck Levine’s timber front door (some brown lacquered handiwork as inside a few Parisian ashlar structures) does sway ajar by a nudge. Quickly, the broad threshold delivers sight of the wardrobe-furnished parquet-floor vestibule, subtlety illuminated by Chinese paper lanterns. The living-room’s elevated carved ceiling provides, from on high, solemn pictures of four benches with sculptured lions atop, all sharply aligned like rows of Babylonian statues. Chuck’s roomy den, a motley shrine of wine-coloured roses and venetian blinds, crouches wearily under idleness today, as little Suzanne struts around in her brand-new clothes, disappearing into a mist of thick childish sunlight. Magnetically drawn at her left to the open curtains which partially unveil the Sacré Coeur’s bare dome to her strong emerald eyes, she mutters “Paname” several times with the pukka French accent, that city dad’s set foot in permanently for his cycles of street-smart seminars. “How to get by on Skid Row during cultural & financial crisis” is the topic; and, after all, daddy Chuck has made a bundle back in New York out of lecturing on serendipity to enthusiast crowds of white-collars and students, sending suitcase yuppie trainees out on the street in order to toughen their character, an assistance of potential bums all on the verge of losing leases and jobs, allured within the fangs of a collapsing world, a contemporary universe that inevitably falls down, “whose modern urge for suck-sex”, he once thought up out of the clear blue sky, “irrevocably peters out”.
“I’m certain you engaged in a booze-streak commitment all because your father was an alcoholic. I know you hate that.”
“Don’t talk foolish! He would have bashed me anyway. He’s the one that set my mother on drinking in the first place, which led her to burning hell and death. She used to be so sloshed that she had no clue of how Eugene treated me as a boy, torturing me. Besides, I opened the volume at random, not ringing a bell?”
Gedeon reflects for an instant that underhanded Charles Tremblay might have brought a book filled with the same poem at each page. Kahn resolves to keep that assumption a secret.
Back in 1987, the Poet Trippers – or ad libitum the Rosy Apostles - had made a vow of utter poverty, just as stated by Chuck in his theory on dysaulia: “You must get rid of everything a hunter-gatherer primate doesn’t need, even a roof under your heads.” And it ended up always with thundering applause, the entire bunch of the Rosy Apostles getting up and clapping their hands in sign of fervent admiration. No wonder Chuck became a cocky, smugly satisfied character after meetings like these, which usually occurred in Central Park West where they all slept aground, “where pigeons starve and die everyday on account of this spiritually and morally bankrupted City of ours.” How they survived on Skid row is another facet of what they considered being serendipitous: at the outset, they became expert at recycling dumpster refuse. Next, shop-lifting at big department stores, then receiving the resulting treasure trove had been, overall, a major source of profit until the New York Police Department cracked down on the sticky-fingered little posse.
After a line-up displaying twelve long-haired bohemians to irate witnesses and a grilling session, a bargain had been initiated between the policemen at the Station and the befuddled Poet Trippers, on the one condition that the pack of friends became stoolies - stool pigeons, for their widespread pull on the streets was to be an appreciated and very much prized asset for the slippery Narcs, and could enable them also to connect with the drug-selling mob, along with all sorts of pimps and smugglers.
“Stool pigeons. Coincidental, isn’t it ?” Chuck observed all abashed.
“Shut your trap, you disgraceful bum! You’re under orders now.’ insisted Lieutenant Goldberg, punching on the table. ‘I may be Jewish but I despise your ways. I’m a cop and no headcases like you. Bear that in mind, I’m no friend of you, bums!”
“Back off, you impious copper!”, Chuck answered back. “You’re in my face!”, he replied, reminiscing about his father’s close-talking manner of telling him off.
The Poet Trippers had no choice of turning down the offer. It was either ratting out dangerous criminals or turning up jailbirds, a role they could not afford to play because of this above-mentioned custom precisely inhering in staying unshackled and roofless. Chuck could not have allowed himself to happen upon his warden father once trapped in the lock-up if, by any chance, the wrongful bandwagon was to finish its ashamed procession at Eugene Tremblay’s detention centre.
Kurtz Sahab is presently sitting cross-legged on a Persian rug, fondling a cat. Something buddhistical shines about him. The super comes in with a cardboard packet that a greeting Chuck rushes to undo now. Inside of it, lies some odd container and a letter.
“Le Tombeau de Charles Tremblay”, Sahab says its title aloud, putting the parcel on a table beside. “This is about your tomb, sir.”
“I wasn’t waiting for anything today. That’s strange.”
“Hey, come on, Chuck. Everybody loves a package!”
A careful Kahn levels its lid and leans on it. His clueless, untaught nose gets a sniff of what appears at first sight to be potpourri scattered in a pearly black box.
Chuck tears the envelope open, whose content he declaims:
“Il allume hagard un immortel pubis
Dont le vol selon le révèrbère découche
Quel feuillage séché dans les cités sans soir
Votif pourra bénir comme elle se rasseoir
Contre le marbre vainement de Chuck Levine”
Mallarmé’s poetical parody hits Chuck as a death threat, immediately.
“Don’t touch! They’re leaves, you know. Fragrant leaves made out of pubic hair… A swastika’s doodled at the bottom of the page too.”
Kahn recoils in disgust and sweeps aside the gruesome receptacle…
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