Strange Loops
by J. Orlin Grabbe

1: Be Yourself

He watched Billy in admiration. Billy would run with long steps, then just before reaching the sandy depression would yell, “Bombs over Tokyo,” and dive forward, turning slightly so he would land on the back of his right shoulder. Then, continuing the motion, he would roll over face down and fold his arms against his head, waiting for the bombs.

Lynn could contain himself no longer. With a burst of joy he, too, ran forward, diving with a yell, not quite getting it right, but eventually ending up face down.

“Lynn!” His mother was calling him. Maybe she wanted to congratulate him on his dive.

“What was it we talked about, Lynn?”

He thought about it. He couldn’t remember. He hadn’t done anything wrong.

“You were going to be yourself, right? To unfold your own personality and nature, like the little flower you are.”

“Okay,” he said. He didn’t know what she was talking about.

“What were you doing?”

“I was playing Bombs Over Tokyo.”

“You were imitating Billy, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I want you to be yourself. To do what you want to. Not what Billy wants.”

“I was doing what I wanted. I wanted to play the game Billy was playing.”

“No. You have to be yourself and develop your own innate being. You shouldn’t imitate Billy. Just be yourself.”

He went and sat in the swing. For a long time he watched Billy running and diving. Billy called to him, but he was afraid to play while his mother was watching.

2: Salvation

“You mean no matter how hard I try to do what God says, and how many people I serve, I can’t redeem myself?”

“That’s right. You’re saved by grace, not by works. Salvation comes from God’s mercy, not from anything you do. God has mercy because Jesus was sacrificed in your stead. Jesus came to save sinners. Your attempt to save yourself by good works expresses contempt for the sacrifice of Jesus. The greater the sinner that is saved by Jesus, the greater the rejoicing in heaven.”

“The greater the sinner? Then why don’t I go out and raise some hell, stick up a liquor store, get drunk and stoned, and bang a few whores. All to the glory of Jesus, of course.”

“Ah. But once you’ve been saved, you naturally want to go out and do good works. Good works are the manifestation of the grace that is in you.”

“So, you’re saying if I do good works, it shows that I have received the grace of God, and have been saved. But, then, that means I do get something for good works.”

“Not necessarily. If you do good works just to save yourself, you’re spitting on the corpse of Jesus. But if you have grace, you just do good works naturally.”

“Okay. So if I do good works, and I do it because it comes naturally–that is, not to get anything or to save myself–then it shows that I have grace and have been saved. Right?”

“Well. Now you’re forgetting the sin of Job. You can become proud and self- righteous because of your good works, no matter the reason for them. That’s what happened to Job, and look what God did to him. He turned Satan loose to kill his family, take away his wealth, and afflict him with boils. That’s what Job got for his good works.”

“So even if I’m doing everything right, I may not be okay.”

“That’s right. You better keep looking over your shoulder.”

3: Sweet Nothings

She had complained he never brought her flowers, so on his way home from work, Monty stopped at the florist and purchased a dozen roses. He made sure each rose was fresh with the petals still closed.

She looked at the flowers.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“It was nice of you to bring me flowers, but–.”

“But what?”

“I don’t want you doing it just because I asked. I was hoping you would do it because you wanted to.”

“But I did want to. I want to do what makes you happy. I thought you wanted flowers.”

“Yes, but not like this,” she said.

He stewed for a while. Well, she certainly hadn’t mentioned chocolates. If he brought her chocolates, then she couldn’t say he was doing it just because she asked. He waited four days to allow enough time for spontaneity.

“That’s very sweet of you,” she said. “but I’m allergic to chocolates. Besides, they make me fat. Are you trying to make me fat?”

4: Elusive Tale

The next sentence is true. The previous sentence is false.

5: Getting Ahead

The first day the branch manager had been forthright and very clear. “We reward dedicated men,” he said. “We’re looking for hard and loyal workers. And remember: loyalty is a two-way street. All our section managers are hired from within.”

Jerry worked hard and did everything by the rules. He wanted to become a section manager as soon as possible, because he needed the additional money.

“He’s brown-noser,” Jerry’s current section manager wrote in his evaluation file.

“A solid company man, but no vision,” the assistant branch manager said.

“You haven’t shown the qualities it takes to be a leader,” the branch manager explained, when Jerry was passed over for promotion to section manager.

Jerry thought about it for days. Very well, there was no reason not to push for his plan, despite the toes he might step on. For Jerry had discovered a simple but effective way to cut costs by one million dollars per quarter. But it required reorganizing the entire section.

“He’s a troublemaker,” the section manager wrote.

“He’s an idea man,” the assistant branch manager said.

“Creative types can be unstable,” the branch manager explained, when Jerry was again passed over for section manager.

“We need someone faithful and solid to keep fellows like you from going off the deep end.”

6: Market Report

Monday: Bonds soared today as interest rates fell. Stocks, however, dropped. Analysts said stocks declined because investors were pulling money out of stocks and putting it into bonds.

Wednesday: The bond market continued to improve today with a further decline in interest rates. Stocks were unchanged. Analysts explained that the decline in interest rates was fully anticipated, and hence had little affect on stock prices.

Thursday: Today’s rising stock market was attributed by analysts to euphoria over the rising bond market. It was also noted that falling interest rates often make stock dividend yields relatively more attractive, and lead to heavier stock demand.

Friday: Bond prices continued to rise as interest rates fell once again. The stock market, however, was unsettled and took a sharp plunge. Analysts explained that stocks declined because falling interest rates are often a sign of recession and weak corporate profits.

7: The End

The neighbors heard the shot at 9:04 p.m. Mrs. W. H. Glisson was pronounced dead shortly after the police arrived at 10:13 p.m. Neighbors said Mr. Glisson was calm, put up no struggle, and made no attempt to flee.

The couple had decided on a separation, and the hallway was filled with Mrs. Glisson’s packed luggage.

“Why did you kill her?” asked Aileen Pherson, a neighbor, as police lead Mr. Glisson away.

“Because I loved her, you see,” he replied. “And I couldn’t bear the thought of living without her.”

J. Orlin Grabbe is the author of Keys and other short stories located here.

His home page is located at: https://orlingrabbe.com/ .

from The Laissez Faire Electronic Times, Vol 1, No 19, June 24, 2002
Editor: Emile Zola Publisher: Digital Monetary Trust

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Waiting for Gödel
a story by J. Orlin Grabbe

She had a way of ruining the best of moments.

–What are we doing here?

–Having fun, of course. It’s a trendy place. Good food, good service, lots of attractive people. What more could you want?

–You’re right. I don’t know. It’s just an eerie feeling. I mean, what if we’re not here by choice?

–Of course we’re here by choice. Why else would we come here? We’re here because we like it here.

–I know that. It’s our customary routine. We work out, feed the cat, then come here. But what if, say, we were just characters in a story, and had to go where the author made us go, and talk like she made us talk?

–Are you paranoid? We do our own thing, right? Of course we have independence, free will. Anyway, who is to say your author, your hypothetical God, is a she?

–I didn’t say God.

–Religion, literature–what’s the difference? You are postulating someone outside the story, outside the universe, looking in. An external observer in another hierarchy.

–No. Not an observer. Someone in charge.

–Control again. Okay. Suppose someone were in charge. Just for argument’s sake. So what?

–Well. The story is in her hands. What if she is crazy or evil? She may make us do things we don’t want. We may have to lead horrible, disgusting lives.

–Paranoid. Paranoid.

–No. Say she’s just a novelist. Novels thrive on tension and conflict. Man against man. Man against woman. Woman against woman. Woman against herself. Man against nature. There’ll never be any peace.

–Well, nothing wrong with that. Think about it. Imagine the alternative: a world without the tension that arises from contrasts. A world where it is always 68 degrees and sunny. A world with just one sex, or maybe no sexes. People all one color, say light purple. And everyone equal. They all have managerial jobs, earn $50,000 a year, and drive the same model of BMW. Let’s see, what else? Give everyone a restaurant on top of all that. What then?

–What indeed?

–You would never be able to go out to dinner, because no one would work as a waiter. Unless, of course, you just dined at the automat. That’s what all the restaurants would have to be, automats. No one would have anything to talk about. All would have the same job, so you couldn’t ask what kind of day someone had. You would already know. There would be no rich folks whose exploits and tragic lives you could read and gossip about, and feel superior to. Not many possibilities in the romantic sphere.

–And not much literature either. Which is what I said. So you have to introduce distinctions. Different colors. Different sexes. Inequality. Something to strive for. Highs and lows. Pain and suffering. Otherwise it wouldn’t be life, and it would be boring as hell.

–Okay, I’m not going to argue. In the calculus of The Laws of Form, Spencer Brown showed the first logical act required to create a universe was, “Draw a distinction.” That’s just what someone or something did, and here we are. Lucky us.

–Lucky, you say. What if there is some catastrophe, some plot complication, waiting for us just around the corner?

–You’re paranoid and pessimistic. Unnecessarily so. How do you think we ended up here, in this happy, trendy place with good food and good service?

–I don’t know, but something about it bothers me.

She took a pin out of her purse and pressed it into his forearm.

–Ouch! What the–. Why did you do that?

–The devil made me do it.

–What are you saying? You didn’t do that voluntarily? The author, the (capitalized) Author, made you do it? Jesus, you’re possessed.

–Right. Paranoid, pessimistic, and possessed.

She laughed gaily.

–Look. There are rules for figuring this out. Ways to discover the existence of your elusive Author. Let’s just call her, or him, or it, an A-Being.

–What kind of rules? Literary rules?

–Rules of inference.

–Such as?

–Presumably the A-Being is superior in some way. Superior knowledge or superior power. So we can use that fact to detect the A-Being’s presence, through the outcomes of games of strategy.

–What games?

–Games between us and the A-Being. Or between you, me, and the A-Being. The A-Being, through her total or partial omniscience, omnipotence, or immortality will be able to force certain outcomes that would not otherwise occur. This will reveal her presence.

–Can we communicate with the A-Being?

–Obviously if the A-Being exists, we can communicate with her.

–What if she lies, or uses deception?

–That’s a possibility.

–What if one of us is the A-Being?

–That just makes the game more complicated.

More complicated than you suspect.

–And what if I’m wrong and she isn’t in charge? Or I’m not in charge.

–Maybe no one is.

–Then our lives are chaos and there is no way to explain what is happening. All our experiences are ontological Rorschach blots, and inferences from game theory are a futile attempt to impose apparent logic on inherent contradiction and randomness.

–Thus I refute your philosophy, he says, kicking her in the shin.

He kicked her in the shin with the point of his boot.

–Puto! That wasn’t nice at all! Well, I was right. We are under the control of an evil, sadistic Author. And you’re right: she is definitely a he, and has it in for females.

Either that, or she is using deception. Or his actions are meaningless. Who would think this?

–Ah, conspiracy theory. First we establish whether the Author, the A-Being, exists, and only then need we worry whether he or she is good or evil.

–I don’t care if the Author exists unless she’s in charge.

–If she doesn’t exist she’s not in charge.

–We talk therefore we exist. Are we in charge?

–I write therefore I exist.

–That doesn’t make you the A-Being.

He poured mustard over the jello, placed an onion slice over that, and crowned the stack with a toasted bun.

–It’s a sign. Revelation.

–What is?

–The onion. You never had onion on your jello-burger before. The A-Being is attempting to contact us in her own mysterious way.

–That’s ridiculous. I just felt like onion today. A burger is a burger, onion or no onion. Anyway, the A-Being is a he, and he is me.

He had a way of denying the noumenal.

–Tell me about games of strategy.

–We each have our own goals, our own motives, our own methods. All these, however, are interdependent and conflict with each other.

–What goals would the A-Being have?

–Giving her characters motives, for one.

–What are your motives?

–To have a good life. To love a good woman. To have sex with several good women.

–Why are you telling me this?

–I wouldn’t ordinarily, but I am under the control of the A-Being.

–I’m not enough? I don’t satisfy you?

–It was just a joke.

–Now you’re being deceptive.

–No, I’m telling the truth.

–You are now, because the A-Being is forcing you to.

Why is this happening?

–I’m sorry, events are taking this course because of something that took place a couple months ago. We had both had too much to drink. That’s the only way I know how to explain it.

–What are you saying?

–I’m pregnant.

–You’re not.

–Yes I am.

–You can’t be pregnant because you’re a he.

–Can you be sure of that, at this point?

–You’re using deception.

–Don’t you want to know who the father is?

–What did you say?

–The A-Being said he–, she was pregnant. Either that or she’s complicating the plot..

–Which of us is the A-Being?

–Neither, someone lied.

He kissed her, then, with sincerity and passion.

The A-Being jabbed the fork deep into the back of one hand.

She had a way of ruining the best of moments.

J. Orlin Grabbe ‘s homepage is located at http://www.aci.net/kalliste/homepage.html .

from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 46, November 29, 1999

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The Age of the Feuilleton
a story by J. Orlin Grabbe

The restaurant is called Orfeo. It was named for the Greek superman of music and song. Live music appears nightly at Orfeo.

Orpheus was ripped to pieces by the Maenad followers of Dionysus. Howard, Orfeo’s impresario, does not wish to suffer the same fate. He serves wine as a propitiation to Dionysus. It is not known if either Orpheus or Dionysus ever ate in a public restaurant.

The curved metal roof gives the room perfect acoustics. You can eavesdrop on every conversation. But if everyone speaks at once you need to do Fourier analysis. Fourier analysis gives a way of separating individual signals from their chaotic summation. Charles Fourier was an Egyptologist who accompanied Napoleon in his invasion of that third-world country. Don’t try to keep any secrets at Orfeo.

“Once people get a taste for flowers, they can’t stop eating them.” Chef Michael stands just inside the kitchen, aplombly staring into the TV camera. His experiences as a chef in Miami and his boyhood in Brooklyn were formative ingredients for his neo-American creations in this Manhattan restaurant. Brooklyn is connected to Manhattan by an eponymous bridge. Miami is the capital of Florida where many New Yorkers spend their winters.

The crowd is wishing Michael would shut up and bring out the salads. Will they like eating flowers? They can’t be sure until they see themselves smiling in gustatory satisfaction on Channel 11. Channel 11 is a rival news organization. I am here to spy on their coverage of this event. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but it is impossible to keep secrets at Orfeo.

Randy, in front with the guitar, is starting the second verse of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Randy is a friend of Pete Seeger. Pete Seeger played many folk songs, including the popular “Little Boxes,” about take-out food. Randy seems concerned the camera is back in the kitchen. No. Here comes the camera now. The cameraman positions himself directly in front of Randy, blocking our view. The lens hovers in Randy’s face. He doesn’t mind. Peering around the blockage I can see him smiling sweetly. The crowd gets revenge by singing along slightly off-key.

A photographer is taking pictures of the vase of flowers on the piano. Perhaps she expects someone to eat them also. Our newspaper would never make that mistake. Howard watches all this from behind the bar. He smokes to keep alertly calm. Nicotine is an acetylcholine agonist and stimulates the central nervous system. If they interview him, he has confided to me, he will play Hodding Carter. Howard likes to watch Hodding chastise the media.

But the media senses this and does not talk to him. They are here to film the flower power chef. Howard has worn his Great White Hunter outfit. He should have put a flower on the lapel.

Billy comes in in Levis. He does not look at my face. He cannot see me because I am wearing a suit. In my overt role I am Mr. Luncheoning Businessman. Billy sometimes plays the blues here on an old beat-up guitar. He’s not going to mess with me, because he thinks I am a TV executive. He has never owned a suit.

Now Michael and Franecheska emerge from the open kitchen with plates of flowers. Fish swim on some of the plates. They are called fish in the garden. The fish like edible flowers too. Michael and Franecheska stop so the cameraman can get a shot of them holding a plate in each hand. They smile until the corners of their mouths strain from the tension. I turn and look out the window so my face will not appear on tape. It is a clear, warm day without much chance of rain.

The cameraman needs a culinary close up. He sticks the camera right into one girl’s salad. Can you get AIDS from a TV camera? The Center for Disease Control later informs me they have no statistics on this. Now the cameraman pans back to her attractive face as she masticates petals. Will they edit out the dental work?

I am hoping they will soon run out of tape. I want to eat my own free salad in peace. Once you get a taste for flowers, you have no time for TV. Can we all change channels now?

The editor is looking at me, having read the story thus far. “Is that the best you can do for an ending: Can we all change channels now? And why do you want to call it `Fop Food and the Fourth Estate’?” The editor has two children and likes the Mets.

“I thought it sounded clever.”

“Sometimes being clever can get in the way of reporting the news.” He rings for an assistant. “For tomorrow’s edition,” he tells her. “And have them check that bit about Miami.”

J. Orlin Grabbe ‘s homepage is located at http://www.aci.net/kalliste/homepage.html .

from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 42, October 25, 1999

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Dolphin Man
a story by J. Orlin Grabbe

He had tried everything and wasn’t the slightest bit put off by the strangeness of the ad:

Wanted: Dolphin Man for important
project. If you walk like a dolphin
and talk like a dolphin, you’re it.

He had always been of the opinion the key to successful job-hunting was making the right first impression. After all, once they hired you, employment policy and bureaucratic inertia usually kept even the grossly incompetent from being fired. So, as was his custom, he headed for the library to find a way to up the odds.

After a couple hours combing sources, he was still at a loss. How the hell was a dolphin supposed to walk? He had first taken the phrase “to walk like a dolphin” as some theatrical metaphor, like “to break a leg.” Following a futile search in that direction, he then turned to books about dolphins themselves. Dolphins were air-breathing mammals, weren’t they? Perhaps they came out on the shore and did some sort of strange dance on the sand — hence the phrase “walk like a dolphin.” To talk like a dolphin was even more puzzling. Had scientists succeeded in teaching dolphins to talk?

He had heard about the chimpanzees who had a vocabulary of one or two hundred words. The chimps even learned to make up their own phrases, like the chimp who had combined the signs for “shit” and “scientist” to refer to an attendant she didn’t like.

He came across the name of a person who had done a lot of dolphin research. John Lilly. The best he was able to determine was John Lilly had only talked to the dolphins while floating in an isolation tank after taking ketamine. Should he show up for the job interview on ketamine? He waved away the idea. He wasn’t even sure what ketamine was — some type of anesthetic, apparently. Who knows, it might make him swim across the door sill and wiggle around like a dying guppy.

Another hour and he was feeling totally dejected. He didn’t know any more than when he had started. He was meditating on occupational hazard and social injustice when he was startled by a visage gazing intently into his own.

“What drove you to the dolphins?” she asked. She awaited his answer expectantly. Her intensity made him afraid. He felt any error in his answer would be met by a slap of a ruler on the back of his hand.

“Something made you do this?” she asked again.

“Yes.” He hadn’t had a job for three months.

“I thought so,” she said triumphantly. “You were probably a dolphin in a previous lifetime.”

“Sorry?” he asked cautiously.

“I have a friend who channels dolphins. She lives down at the end of Manhattan near Wall Street, on the water. You know, where the witches used to hang out. Well, she channels dolphins. Maybe she can help you remember who you once were.”

“I’m willing to try anything, if it will help me walk like a dolphin and talk like a dolphin.”

She looked at him curiously and gave him the address without further comment.

“I’m here for the seance,” he told the lady who opened the door.

“It’s not a seance, it’s a healing circle,” she corrected him, “but welcome.”

He looked around at the other people waiting in the living room. Their conversations were a little strange, but otherwise they seemed okay. The channeler had her hair shaved very short. Her head was kind of smooth and dolphin-like.

“First, each of us should state what his or her purpose is in being here,” the channeler said.

“I’m looking for a job,” he said. But, as they went around the circle, most of the others seemed to be “in transition.” He decided he was the only one unemployed.

The dolphins, when they arrived, giggled a lot and talked in a high squeaky voice. They liked to rub their heads against him, and he enjoyed petting them, but he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to get from all this.

Then each person took a turn in the center of the circle, and a spirit, not a dolphin, worked on each one’s problems. The girl sitting to his left had lost the ability to emotionally relate to humans because many years ago in Atlantis, the spirit said, she had been so involved with working with dolphins she had isolated herself from her own species. As the dolphin girl went around the circle hugging each person to reestablish human contact, he began to cry because he realized how much he had missed her.

When the dolphin girl came to him, she said: “I know you, you worked with me then.”

Now the spirit said, Come, dolphin man, and sit in the center of the circle.

Why are your eyes closed? the spirit asked. Open your eyes and raise up your head. He opened his eyes and looked at the channeler and saw her own eyes were closed.

I can see better that way, he said.

See with your heart. Now spread back your hands. Breathe in. How does it feel?

He could feel the warm sea water washing over him. He didn’t know what to say.

It felt free, yes?

Yes.

What? I can’t hear you. Why do you talk into your collar?

Yes, he said louder.

Feel the freedom. Are you willing to choose freedom now?

Why not? he said to himself.

What?

Yes, he almost shouted.

That’s better. When you walk, hold up your head. When you talk, raise up your voice. Let others see your freedom and feel your joy.

The spirit was silent. Then: Breathe in now and give voice to your freedom and your joy.

He turned up his head to breathe in the moist warm air. At first the sound caught in his throat. But then as the spirit gave voice to the tone, his own came out full and clear.

The next day when he went to the job interview he walked with his head held high and talked in his confident dolphin voice, and laughed his dolphin laugh, and in five minutes the job was his.

from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 40, October 11, 1999

-30-

A Hundred Eighty Dollars
a story
by J. Orlin Grabbe

I was leaving the ranch in Texas to spend the summer in Columbus, Ohio, and the bus ride took two to three days. Don’t be pulling out your billfold and flashing a wad of bills, my father said. Put some ones in your front pocket, and when you need some change, just reach in and fish out one of those ones. That way nobody’ll see you’re carrying a lot of money.

I was taking a hundred eighty dollars to pay the stipend for the summer program, the one on mathematics, and had about twenty dollars besides. When the bus laid over in St. Louis for seven hours I decided it had been good advice. I had never seen bums and sharpies just hanging about the place and sleeping on benches before.

It was eleven p.m. when the bus pulled into Columbus, and I had nothing to do until the next morning, when I would go up to the university where the program was for kids like myself. I wasn’t sure there would be much to do at Ohio State and had brought a trunk of books I wanted to read. The trunk weighed about a hundred sixty pounds, so I moved it a few feet at a time to a large coin-operated locker like they still had in those days. Then I went into the coffee shop for some pie and coffee, and after that went out and leaned against the side of the building to watch the street.

Hi, pal. The black man was wearing a beret and peered closely at my face as he walked by.

Hi, I responded, and then ignored him and he walked on. There was traffic on the street, and a number of people on the block hovered like moths under the street lights or just walked around. After a while he came back and asked if my name was Bill. I said it wasn’t and we started talking. Leo was from New York and in the army at a nearby base, and spent his free weekends cruising the streets of Columbus. I had never had a conversation with a black man before, but didn’t tell him that. Then Leo saw Bill, whom he had first mistaken me for, and pointed him out. Bill was shorter than me, and hatchet-faced, and I didn’t think we resembled at all.

I guess all us white boys look alike, I said to Leo. He looked at me in surprise, then he laughed long and hard. It was the only time I saw him laugh. He had an earnest, sad set to his face and didn’t smile much, even though he was friendly.

We had read some of the same books, and we walked the streets and along the river and talked the rest of the night and much of the following morning. I told him about growing up in Texas, and he told me about New York and how he planned to go to City College and become a writer when he got out of the army. His favorite book was Morris West’s The Shoes of the Fisherman. Then he said his current girlfriend was the top woman tennis player in Columbus, and she was white, or rather mulatta–her mother was white and her father black–and he had had another girlfriend before, but before then he had only gone out with guys. That’s what he had been doing at the bus station, a lot of homosexuals hung out there, even young kids, and he was trying to see if he still had any of those tendencies.

I told him I had never met a homosexual and asked him how he got to be one. He said he used to dance in nightclubs starting when he was seven, and one night he had gotten drunk with two men who took him back to their apartment. When he woke in the morning his anus was raw and bleeding. After that he had gone out with a lot of men, but as a teenager he started getting interested in girls, too, but he didn’t know how to talk to them. He hadn’t told his current girlfriend about his past.

When daylight came we went to a drugstore Leo knew of that opened early, and sat at the counter for coffee and a roll. What do you think of this song, Leo asked, and I listened closely. It was entitled “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” and was by a group called The Rolling Stones. I hadn’t heard it before and thought it was a damned fine song because I hadn’t been able to get much myself, but saw at that moment how satisfied I was, having spent the entire night in a strange city talking about books with a black man who used to be queer.

Leo said his girlfriend Moira had a car, and they could give me and the trunk a ride up to OSU. I went back to the bus station and slept for an hour on one of the benches. Then Leo and Moira came by and we went over to her parent’s house for a Sunday afternoon dinner in the back yard. They talked about Vietnam, Leo defending America being there, and Moira and her father ganging up against him. How do we what government is best for those people? her father asked. I felt sorry for Leo, he seemed so isolated, and I wondered when he was going to tell his girlfriend about his past. I knew he would, because there was confession in his soul.

When night came they drove me and my trunk to the university, to Drackett Tower where the math kids had taken over the tenth floor. I was in room 1035 with three other students, one, Ollie, who had arrived before me. Ollie, smoking, watched us move the trunk inside the room. He wasn’t sure what to make of his Texas roommate, with the black guy from New York and the white girl from Columbus who looked, talked, and moved like the tennis star she was. When they had gone, Ollie identified himself as a Catholic conservative who wanted to go into politics. He had applied for the math program because he wanted to be around intellectuals he could debate current events with.

There was a study room with four desks, a bedroom with four bunk beds, two upper and two lower, and a bathroom. Terry arrived the next day accompanied by his girlfriend Stacy, and his girlfriend’s parents. Stacy was about the most attractive and well-developed teenager I had ever seen, and I saw Ollie staring at her also, and he looked at me and raised his eyebrows. Within the first hour or so, we learned that Terry did not believe in premarital sex, but did believe in mate- swapping after marriage, and he had written a long paper for English class explaining his theory. In the event Stacy finds your beliefs too confining, Ollie told Terry, send her to me.

Even so, we were in awe of Terry because of his girlfriend, and when we found out his parents allowed him to have his own subscription to Playboy we were even more mystified. Finally Ollie said to me, it’s a strategy, see. Because he doesn’t believe in premarital sex, he gets to take her any place he wants. But I knew better: I could tell Terry was serious.

The fourth member of the group was a Jewish kid, Jeff, from Brooklyn who immediately attached himself to me. He was a year younger than most others in the program, and seemed to feel that his age averaged out with my being from Texas and put the two of us on an equal footing. The first thing Jeff said was, do you play chess, and I beat him a couple of games that same day, then I played Ollie, but Terry would only play blindfold chess, which none of us were any good at except him. While we played, Jeff and Terry kept up a running debate about the real words to “Louie, Louie,” and Ollie finally said you guys are crazy and sat down to read The Sorrows of Young Werther, which I had pulled out of the trunk.

The main classes were in number theory and abstract algebra, and the first week some of the other kids kept coming up to ask me what room I was in. It turned out they just wanted to hear me say “room 1035” with a Texas accent. It was the drawn out “5” that clinched it, of course, so I started saying “11 cubed minus 14 squared minus 10 squared,” which was the same thing but took some of the fun out of it the way they saw it.

The program was an experiment to see what would happen if you taught kids who were smart mathematically subjects they normally wouldn’t encounter until the final years of college. To accomplish this, they assigned us various instructors, including an Indian who, the first day I heard him, pointed to something on the blackboard and said, Eat ease a nail ee mint of diggity tree. I asked him if he could please repeat that, and so he said somewhat louder, EAT EASE A NAIL EE MINT OF DIGGITY TREE. I was sitting by Terry and looked at him for help, but he just shrugged. On the other side of Terry was Suzanne, the only really sexy girl in the program. The legend of Terry’s girlfriend had spread quickly and given him territorial rights on certain sexual issues, like who got to sit beside Suzanne. Suzanne was wearing a short skirt, and the kid in the row directly below her in the amphitheater kept looking over his shoulder and between her legs, and I saw her see him looking, and she opened her legs just a touch wider. After class I asked Ollie, but he hadn’t understood anything the instructor had said either, and while we hacked away at the diggity tree, Jeff came up and translated: It is an an element of degree three. And it turned out Jeff had learned to speak Indian in Brooklyn, and so he continued to go to the Indian’s lectures, but not the other three of us who had never been to Brooklyn and preferred an extra hour of sleep after the late night chess and poker games and bull sessions.

There was a curfew to insure everyone got enough sleep, but our room avoided it by tucking towels around the door so the counselors could not see light coming around the door sill. Despite this, they said our room was a den of trouble-makers. But the other kids thought we were cool, and would come down to our place to talk and to look at Terry’s Playboy foldouts which we had hung all over the study area. There was one Irish kid who knew about three hundred nun and priest jokes, about the lock to the gate of heaven, and the key, and Gabriel’s horn, and other jokes like that. People would argue or discuss Vietnam or symbolic logic or evolution or rock music or the latest books. We had to spend hours working the math problem sets, but I always joined in when a bull session was on, because I saw I had really come here to hear kids talk about things that kids back home didn’t know how to talk about.

The reputation of our room was such that one of the counselors came in the study area one day to ask if we knew where there was a whorehouse, and said there ought to be one around since this was a college town. This was news to us, and no one wanted to tell him we were still having premarital sex debates, although it eventually turned out that almost everyone who had no possible opportunity to have any was in favor of it. We also enjoyed bedtime stories, and took turns reading Candy, by Terry Southern, out loud to each other before turning out the lights to fall asleep.

It was important not to miss any of the scheduled meals, since no one had any money, and as the summer progressed and it became harder and harder to make it to the cafeteria before the breakfast line closed, we began to transport all manner of mobile food, like small boxes of cereal, along with bowls, cutlery, salt and pepper shakers and other items, back to the dorm. But occasionally we would go for a limeade or a coke at one place where I always played “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and once we walked five miles to buy twenty-five cent hamburgers at White Castle.

One day I realized I only had a hundred seventy dollars left, of which I supposed to pay OSU a hundred eighty, and I kept hoping they would forget I hadn’t paid, but then a notice was posted on the bulletin board with my name and one other kid’s, saying we hadn’t paid. Jeff told me some researchers at the psychology department were paying five dollars for participation in a two-hour experiment. You had to draw a circle on an etch-a- sketch between two other circles very close together, without touching the borders of the other circles, and while you were doing it the other participants in other rooms would write you notes with suggestions and comments how it was going, and you would write them notes. The researchers said it was an experiment in communication to see if the notes would help people perform better, but we had already found out the real purpose was about group behavior, to see if on average people would claim more successes when the notes–most of which the researchers had made up–seemed to indicate other particpants were having more successes. Since I knew it didn’t make any difference what I wrote, I amused myself by writing the funniest notes I could think of, and collected my money when it was over. But then I promptly spent it, and was no better off than before.

Finally I wrote my father for the ten dollars, and he amazingly sent me thirty-five, so after paying OSU the hundred eighty dollar stipend I went to the bookstore and bought some math books in case I might want to study them back in Texas, but I never did.

Once I called Leo at the number he had given me at the army base, and he said he had confessed to his girlfriend, and they had had a fight and broken up. And he was going to hitch-hike into town and meet me at a place, but when I went there he never showed up because he wasn’t able to get a ride. So I never saw him again, but sometimes think of him when I hear “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” and wonder if he ever found something that made him happy.

On the last day of lectures the instructor kept talking on and on, way past the bell, and I was feeling sick so I got up from the front row, and walked all the way up the steps to the exit door, and then I ran down the hallway and threw up in the men’s room. And I returned to the dorm and went to sleep. When I opened my eyes I saw almost every kid in the program had crowded into the bedroom, and they were talking about what a cool thing it had been that I had walked out on that long-winded instructor, till finally Ollie said can’t you see the man’s sick, and ran them out.

Then I said goodbye to Ollie and Terry and Jeff, and on the bus home I read an article in Esquire about the new slang they were using at colleges, but mostly I just looked out the window. My family was there waiting for me, they said later, when the bus stopped outside the drugstore of a nearby town. But I guess I didn’t recognize them, nor them me, and so I set out to walk the remaining twenty-six miles through a strange countryside I had known all my life, to the house rising abruptedly out of the wind-swept grassland that was no longer home.

from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 2, No 36, Nov. 2, 1998

LF City Times: http://zolatimes.com/

Web Page: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/homepage.html

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Agrarian Life
a story
by J. Orlin Grabbe

Sometimes we would go down to the creek where the root of the mulberry tree grew out of the side of the bank and slunk along the surface before plunging again underground. There was nothing remarkable about the root, except it was the one Teacher Hines said he tripped over when he blew his brother away with a twelve-gauge shotgun.

The unfortunate incident was complicated by the fact the gun Teacher Hines was carrying while he and his brother were hunting only held two shells, or three if one was already pumped into the chamber, and the medical examiner said there had been at least four shots discharged into the body of the deceased. They put Teacher Hines on trial for murder, which caused considerable excitement in the town, and in our family, because Hines was my oldest brother’s agricultural teacher in high school, and Hines’ wife taught my other brother in seventh grade.

At the trial Teacher Hines admitted he had reloaded and shot his brother again, but he said he had only done so to put the poor creature out of his misery. But by then town gossips had come forth to testify that Hines had been doing his brother’s wife on the side, and the wife in question was pregnant. None of us knew what all this meant for a time, and my brother would go to his seventh grade class and join in on the collective scrutiny of the sad lines on the teacher’s face, wondering what she thought about her husband diddling her sister-in-law, and wondering why he hadn’t been diddling her instead.

Gradually we came to understand that Hines had been doing his brother’s wife because his brother hadn’t been, and when she became pregnant they knew it was Teacher Hines’ baby for sure, so Teacher Hines had shot his brother to allow the baby to be born without the brother raising a fuss. Well, everyone said Teacher Hines would get the chair for sure, but then the lawyer put the brother’s wife on the stand, and she told how lonely she was and how awful she had been treated, until some of the jurors decided maybe the son- of-a-bitch needed to be shot anyway, and they only gave Teacher Hines twenty years.

We sometimes talked about Teacher Hines, my brother and I, as we carried our hoes across the pasture and then across the road into my grandfather’s property where Daddy had planted sorghum. There was a stray dog who had come to the house that year, and we had named him Hugo, and he went with us wherever we went. He would run back and forth between the rows of sorghum while we were hoeing weeds, and would chase rabbits, and then return to see how we were getting along. We carried water with us, in mason jars, and when we stopped at the end of a row for a drink in the hot sun, Hugo would come and drink out of the jars with us. My brother and I said Hugo was the best dog and best companion one could have.

Then one day Hugo killed a couple of chickens, and I saw him do it. So we watched him all the time, after that, and when we went away we would tie him up. But sometimes we would forget, and one day when we arrived home in the pickup, Hugo met us with feathers hanging out of his mouth, and the feathers were stuck to blood on his lips. Out in the chicken house there had been a massacre, with about twenty chickens dead. Their bodies lay on the floor, and on the roost, and out on the ground around the chicken yard.

“You better get a rope and tie up Hugo,” Mother said, “or Daddy might shoot him.” So I went and got a rope, and made a loop in one end, and called Hugo over to the fence beside the house. Hugo came running up, friendly and excited, and then I saw Daddy with the .22 rifle. “Stay back,” he said, and he shot Hugo twice in the side of the head.

Blood ran out of the two small holes, and Hugo fell on the ground and twitched for a while. My brother came running around the porch at that moment, laughing and yelling about something, and then he saw Hugo and stopped, standing up straight very suddenly, like he had run into an invisible wall. “Daddy shot Hugo,” I said. And I saw the look on his face as he turned and ran away, and even though I didn’t like my brother much in those days–we had been fighting a lot–I felt sorry for him, maybe even sorrier than I did for Hugo or for myself.

After a while I realized I was still holding the rope. So I went ahead and slipped the one end around the upper part of Hugo’s body, and dropped the rest of it on the ground, because I knew someone would have to drag him off into the pasture. And after that I got tired of having dogs, and never wanted to have them around anymore, or have to put up with a kind of animal that thought nothing of just coming up and slobbering on your face.

Sooner or later Hugo would have been bitten by a rattlesnake, for it was the same year my brother and I were having the big contest, to see who could kill the most rattlers. There was no cheating because you had to display the body for proof, and my brother would cut off all the rattles and put them on a string. But I didn’t because I couldn’t stand the way they sounded, and I hated everything about rattlesnakes.

I would be shocking feed and pick up a bundle and there would be a rattlesnake, lying coiled, buzzing its tail at me, and it would give me a start, and I would be jumping at things the rest of the day. But I would always be watching, anyway, and when I picked up a bundle I made sure one end stayed on the ground to shield me from what was underneath, and when I walked through the grass, I kept the legs of my levis pulled over the outside of my boots, because rattlers usually went for the lowest piece of exposed cloth.

Each of us worked with a length of stiff rope tied around his waist. The length was about five feet long and had a knot in each end, and it was your snake rope. If the rattlesnake was coiled, you would bother it and tease it, giving it room, until it would straighten out to slither away, then you would whack it across the back with one of the knots, breaking the back. And you would keep doing that, taking care the snake didn’t bite into the rope and cause you to sling the snake back at yourself, until the back was broken in enough places you could step on the snake’s head–right side up–with your boot, and cut off the body with your pocketknife, and bury the head with the fangs and venom underground so some other poor fool wouldn’t step on the fangs by accident. Then you would usually throw the the body into an ant bed, so the ants would quickly strip off the meat and it wouldn’t smell, except that my father would hang the body on a barbed wire fence with its belly up to the sun to make it rain.

That year, though, I had to keep the body as proof of kill, until I showed it to my brother, and as the year went on my brother’s body count began to exceed mine, and I began to go over into a neighbor’s pasture to find rattlesnakes there, too, and to kill them and to bring back the bodies. My brother was angry and said that wasn’t fair, but I pointed out the rules we had agreed on didn’t specify that all the rattlesnakes had to be found on our own property. Still, my brother stayed angry until the day he decided he wanted to catch one alive, to take to school, and needed my help. We took a half-gallon mason jar and a stick and twine each day we went to work in the field, until we came across a rattlesnake of decent size. And it took us a couple hours to get that snake into the jar without injuring it.

My father saw the rattlesnake and said we were damned fools to pull a stunt like that, and he wouldn’t let us keep it overnight in the house, but we sneaked it in anyway. And the next day we walked to the school bus stop, a quarter mile from the house where the railroad track crossed the highway, and my brother stuck the jar under his jacket so the bus driver wouldn’t see it, though later the kids at the back of the bus made such a fuss the driver pulled over and walked back and saw the rattlesnake. We were almost to town then, and there was nothing he could do, but he yelled at my brother and made him come up front and sit on the steps in front of the door, holding the jar between his knees. At school my brother took the snake up to the second floor to the science teacher, who also grumbled and scolded while he got the chloroform out of the cabinet. My brother didn’t mind any of this, because no one had ever brought a live rattler to school before, and he knew he had a perfect specimen, and would get an `A’ on his biology project.

Much as I hated rattlesnakes, I liked them better than pigs. Mother had joined a religious group that in later years I would call Christians for Moses. And Daddy thought it was pure foolishness, intended to make him the laughing stock of the countryside, but my oldest brother sided with Mother, and my brother and I did too, because we always did what our oldest brother did. And we kept all the Jewish holidays, only we called them God’s holidays, and for Passover would make unleavened corn bread, and we observed the Old Testament rules on the clean and unclean meats, and wouldn’t eat pork.

So Daddy decided to butcher a hog, and we had to do it ourselves, as we couldn’t afford to have it done in town. And I knew from the start it was a test to see if us kids would insist on such foolishness after having to work that hard, and when pig meat was the only meat around. So we boiled hot water in an open fire, and hung the scalded hog from a pipe laid between two tall posts, and scraped all the hair off, and butchered it there, and took the pieces to the smoke house to be wrapped in sugar cure. And we took one piece to the house for dinner, which Mother cooked in the skillet she kept aside to cook Daddy’s unclean meat.

Well, my oldest brother and my brother knew what was coming, and didn’t tell me their plan, and when Daddy came in for dinner they said they had already eaten, and so I was stuck with having dinner with him alone, and he forked me a big piece of pork. And I kept trying to talk about what I thought were all Daddy’s favorite subjects, but he kept ignoring the talk, and looking more angry, and saying, “Eat your meat.” So finally, when he was not looking, I took it off my plate and stuck it in my pocket, and Daddy saw that the meat was gone, but I don’t think he believed I had eaten it. So he told Mother she had turned all the kids against him, and poisoned their minds, and shoved her across the kitchen, and he said to us, “If you kids don’t want to eat the food in this household, you can pack up your bags and leave.” And shortly afterward I saw my oldest brother going upstairs, which was a provocative act when there was still work to be done, and I said, “You’re not going upstairs, are you?” And he smiled at me with that ironic, sad smile of his, and said, “My bags are upstairs.”

Well, a few weeks later maggots showed up in all the meat, because the sugar cure hadn’t worked, and Daddy said to my brother and me it was our fault, because we wouldn’t eat the meat. And since my oldest brother had left, my brother and I had to help Daddy pull the calves, and I hated it. We had had a young bull who was kept separate from the rest of the herd, because young bulls went after young heifers, and young heifers who were bred too early would have calves they can’t properly deliver. But the bull had broken through the fence, and bred a lot of young heifers, and the calves being born would stick in the heifers when the calves were only half way out, and there was nothing a heifer could do to push a calf on out, without someone to pull on it and help. Even so, the calf would often die, or have a broken leg, and sometimes the heifer’s womb would turn inside out, and we would have to tuck it back in and sew her up. The worst ones, though, were the ones where there was no way to get the calf out whole without killing the heifer, so it was better to kill the calf and cut it out of her in pieces, and after doing that a couple of times I didn’t care if I ever saw anything being born again.

Other than hunting rattlesnakes the only fun I was having that year was shooting rabbits. I had quit shooting rabbits with a .22 rifle about that time, because I didn’t think it was sporting and didn’t enjoy it anymore. But I was still stalking them with bow and arrow, and on foot because they were mostly cottontails, which had taken over the countryside from the jack rabbits. But one day while I was out riding I came across the biggest jack I had ever seen. And he was a beauty and looked like a small antelope bounding through the yucca. So I went back for my bow, and went out each day for the next several days, and when I spotted him I would follow him on horseback.

Even so he kept out of arrow range, until one day he seemed to think he was hidden and I hadn’t seen him, and I kept the horse headed in a direction that would pass about fifty feet to one side, and kept my eyes looking everywhere but at that jack. Then I stopped the horse, facing east, and drew the bow all the way back, and suddenly turned my body sideways to the north in the saddle looking directly at the jack, and I shot him in the neck. But the elation of the perfect shot lasted only a second before I was already missing him, knowing I would never again see him loping his way through the yucca and past the prickly pears.

I drew out the arrow, and wiped the blade and shaft off on the grass, and stood there for a while. And then I gathered that old jack up in my arms, not minding the blood on my clothes and on the saddle, and I rode with him several miles down to the creek, where I tied the horse and found a sharp stick to dig with. And I buried him there by the mulberry root, the one Teacher Hines said he tripped over when he blew his brother away with a twelve-gauge shotgun.

from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 2, No 35, October 26, 1998

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KEYS
a story
by J. Orlin Grabbe

I had known he was dumb, but I never would have run with him if I had known he was that dumb. And I had never liked him either, before then, cause he was a sissy. He was as big as me, bigger than average, and there weren’t no reason for him to act like a sissy. But that’s the way he was: poor, dumb, and a sissy. Hell, I was as poor as he was, but not dumb and not a sissy. I should have figured he would have squealed in the end. He was too big a sissy not to squeal no matter how afraid he was I might bust him up for it, and he was too dumb to know I could never do it once he had squealed cause it’d look suspicious.

I had never liked that sheriff, either, the one with chewing tobacco juice running out between his teeth and smelling awful.

The girls were skipping rope one day, two of them holding the ends, and the others taking turns kind of sliding in and doing five skips and out. A bunch of us were leaning against the school wall having a good laugh at the way Kathy always jumped stooping over, holding her skirt, afraid the wind would blow it up and show her panties. Anyway it weren’t her panties we were looking to see, it was Ruth Ann’s. So while we were waiting to see if anything was going to happen, I took the keys out of my pocket, about thirty of them all on a long chain, and I thumbed through them looking at each one.

I had read this book told by a safecracker, how he had stole a couple million dollars just breaking into places and opening safes. And I was figuring to do that myself, once I got big, only I wouldn’t make the same dumb mistakes and get caught. Hell, everybody knew I was the smartest kid in the class. Everybody except the ones who wanted to start something cause they said I was putting on airs. The first one who had said that, a few years ago, was my best friend, and he came up to me real mad one day after Mrs. Anderson put all the reading test scores and names on the blackboard, and he said what makes you so smart, and started punching me. Well, I figured he had no cause to act like that, him being my best friend and all, so I really let him have it back, and when it was all over we weren’t friends anymore. And it made me kind of sad cause I liked him. So now when anyone did that I just said don’t you know the trick, and I would tell them the easy way to get the right answers. I would tell them one thing, and then another, and make sure I talked just like them, not putting on no airs, and pretty soon they would be so mixed up they’d forgot what they came for, which was to pick a fight.

Well if I was the smartest, I figure Buford was the dumbest kid in class, his name always coming out at the bottom of the list, and him getting F’s and all. I would have never paid him no mind except his house was kind of run down and dumpy and dirty like mine. Of course he had a TV and could watch Dracula and the Wolfman and stuff whenever he wanted, but it didn’t seem to do him no good, he just stayed about the same level of dumb all the time.

So I was looking at the keys. I had been collecting quite a few from different places, even some I found just laying in the dirt when I was walking around. And I had been studying them, thinking about what kind of locks they might work on, reading books on Houdini and how to unlock any type of lock, and how pickpockets operated, and how to trick people. And I was thinking I could take these keys, and maybe I could just file them a little here and there, and then they would work in brand new locks and I could break into any place I wanted. I wouldn’t leave any fingerprints cause I’d wear gloves, and I would check for alarms and be careful not to make noise or attract attention.

Sometimes I would put on my sneakers and walk up and down the creakiest part of the stairs at home, practicing shifting my weight just right so I could float up and down like a cat or a ghost. Not that you needed to know any of this in my town, on account of there weren’t any office buildings or safes to break into, except for the local bank, or that’s what I thought then, and maybe only one or two stores had a burglar alarm. But those were real dumb ones, just hanging out there on the side of the building where you could cut the electric wires. Of course you had to use rubber gloves to keep all that juice from going through you, and maybe even frying your brains or making your eyes pop out, like when they put people in the electric chair.

So I was looking at my keys and Buford walks up and pulls a wad of keys out of his own pocket. It made me kind of proud to see that, another key collector, and him in my class. He had some good ones too.

“These,” he whispered private-like, “unlock the ice house.”

“How you know that?”

“That’s where I got ’em. The old man was in the back and I jis took ’em out of the drawer of his desk.”

“Hell, they could be anything then. Maybe file keys or something. It don’t mean they open the front door.”

The ice house was the place in town you could go to get fifty- or hundred-pound blocks of ice, which were kept in a big locker all covered with sawdust. And we would go there sometimes in the summer to get ice for the ice-cream maker to make home- made ice cream. And I started to think how much fun it would be, to go in there all alone, not to steal ice, what would be the point of that? And not to steal money, that old man didn’t make nothing, everybody knew that.

Hell, just to steal keys. Add to my collection. And that’s how it came to me–one of the grandest ideas I ever had. People locking up all their doors, protecting their stuff, and somebody breaks in and steals their keys, nothing else. And I started laughing out loud, it was such a grand idea, and some boys jerked up their heads to see who was jumping rope and what they had missed.

So we talked about this and that, me and Buford, and he told me the places he had already broke in. And I asked him if he wore gloves and he said that was just shit they did on TV, no one around here knew about fingerprints and that kind of stuff. And I said you never know, and he started talking big, letting on how he knew it all, and I thought to myself he’s just as dumb doing this as everything else. But I let him brag and didn’t care, cause I was feeling real proud here was another kid who wanted to be a burglar like me.

I was running the show then, the one in town, on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. I got paid three dollars each of the two days, and it didn’t make no difference if it was a four- reeler like Cowboy or a twelve-reeler like The Ten Commandments. Each reel had about two thousand feet of film, and lasted about eighteen minutes, so a five-reeler would run about an hour and a half for each show, not counting the comedy or coming attractions, and we generally had two shows. The first time Buford and me went out was on a Sunday afternoon after I got done showing Dunkirk, which Mrs. Caves, the wife of the man who owned the movie house, kept calling dern kick. And I would laugh every time she said it, and she would wonder what got into me but never asked cause she thought I was Einstein or somebody, being only eleven and being the projectionist, and she would tell everybody I was a child progeny, which made me laugh even more.

So Buford came by after the show, and we walked over to the ice house, it being closed like everything else on Sunday except for the movie house. We were throwing a ball back and forth, all innocent-like, just like two kids playing, and I threw it over Buford’s head and behind the ice house. There weren’t any alley behind it, just a niche off the street, so you could get to the wooden stairs that ran up to the second story of another building facing the other way.

I put on my gloves first and Buford scoffed and said I didn’t need to do that and I said you do it your way and I’ll do it mine, and he was too dumb to think it would just be his prints all over everything. I looked at the padlock on the back door and he pulled out his keys like he was going to find one that fit it, but it was only a spring lock, the spring holding the bolt down cause it fit into a flat place on the side, so I had it picked open by the time he got his keys out.

When you went in the door it was like a stables or something that ran along side the ice locker and the front office and it was filled with barrels of stuff the old man had just dumped. There wasn’t a door to the office, just a square hole half way up the wall that looked like it had been knocked out with a hammer. And Buford grabs hold of it with both hands to climb through and says to me I always tear it bigger when I climb through here, and I say don’t do that, he’ll know for sure somebody was in here, and Buford said naw that old man don’t notice nothing. Well we looked through the desk some, and found another set of keys, besides the one Buford had already took, and we split them, and then we looked in the ice locker and chipped off a piece to suck on. And then I was ready to go, and when we climbed through the hole Buford stopped to kick at the sides of it to show me how tough he was, and I reckon I was kind of impressed, him being so dumb you couldn’t help admiring it, and we went out the back and I relocked the door.

Well, I was kind of excited and I said, hell, let’s go in somewhere else, and we walked over behind the laundry, where some of the women in town went to wash their clothes, and there was a pin tumbler lock on the back that I couldn’t do anything with, but it was stuck on a hasp that had the screws just showing face up, so all I had to do was unscrew them with my knife. And boy we made a haul there, must have been ten keys, five for each of us, but none of them fit the vending machines that sold soap and candy and other things. And after that we must have gone to a couple other places, and I was real proud that my key collection was growing by leaps and bounds.

Well the next week at school one day Buford says to me those Mexicans got a safe in the old Chevrolet house, and there’s a couple thousand dollars in there. And I say how you know that, and he says I seen it, I go over there to the dances all the time. And what he was talking about was in the fall the Mexicans came from across the border to pick cotton, and they stayed in buildings by the cotton gin, and Mr. Caves who had the movie house loved them because they came every night to the show, and so he opened the movie house every night just for that part of the year, and we showed Spanish movies mostly, and the regular movies on Saturday and Sunday. And the Mexicans all came to the movie on Saturday night, too, and then went over to the top of the old Chevrolet house where they danced for hours and hours, and sometimes we would go over and watch them after the show.

“Well if it’s a safe there’s no way we’re going to get that kind of thing open, and besides we’re just taking keys, there’ll be hell to pay if we take money.”

“Naw, no one cares if you take money from Mexicans.”

“I’m not taking no money from no Mexicans.”

“You’re just a Mexican lover.”

“It don’t make no difference, anyhow, there’s no way we’re going to get the safe open.”

“I’ve got a key to it,” he said, pointing to a new key on his ring, one I hadn’t seen before. “That’s it, right there.” And I looked at it, it didn’t look like a safe key to me, but I hadn’t seen that safe and couldn’t say different.

“How do you know it opens that safe?”

“I tried it.”

“Hell, if you tried why didn’t you go ahead and take the money?”

“I heard somebody, so I had to hide. I shut the safe door real fast, and then I ran away after that.”

“So maybe they saw you, and took the money out.”

“Naw. Nobody seen me.”

Well, I got to thinking. You could get two candy bars for a dime. So that was about fifty cents a week, if you had two every day not counting weekends. Which would cost you about twenty- five dollars in a year. Hell, I could just take a hundred dollars, and that would be four years of candy bars.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll go with you. But we’re just going to take a hundred dollars each.”

“Naw, we’ll take it all.”

“Hell, how you going to tell people where you got all that money?”

“I’ll just tell them an uncle died and left it to me.”

“And what are you going to say when they ask your brother, and he says you didn’t have no uncle that died?”

“I’ll give him some of the money, and he’ll say the same as me.”

“You going to tell your brother we stole this money?”

And we talked like that some, him being so dumb he couldn’t see we couldn’t take all the money. And then I got to worrying that maybe he was going to lose the key before we got over there and got any of it.

“You better give me that key, so you don’t lose it.”

“Naw. I ain’t going to lose it.” He thought a minute. “But I’ll get you a copy of it, then we don’t have to worry.”

“Where you going to get a copy? There ain’t nobody that makes keys in this town.”

Anyway we decided to go check out that safe after the next weekend, when it would be full of money after the Saturday dance and all, and I told Buford it’s better to not be walking around town like we did that last Sunday, and we would just go over there during lunch hour at school, and so the next Monday Buford came up to me real proud and hands me a copy of the key. And I looked at it, real surprised-like, and said where did you get this, and he said I had it made, and I asked him where.

“The sheriff made it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, I asked around a few stores, and they said ain’t nobody got a key machine around here but the sheriff, and so I went over to the court house and he drilled it for me.”

I was so mad I could hardly speak, and I called him a dumb shit and some other things, and then I said, so what’d you tell the sheriff, we needed two keys to break into the Mexican safe?

“Naw. I just told him it was for Mrs. Anderson’s husband, and he sweated and cussed and drilled for about an hour, and didn’t charge me nothing for it.”

Well, after a crazy stunt like that, I knew we better get over to that safe right away, so we went over during the lunch recess, and I put on my gloves, and we climbed through a broken window in the back. And the bottom of that old Chevrolet house was filled with all kinds of stuff that had just set there for years, all covered with dust, and then we went up front where the safe was, and it was sitting there pretty as you please with a big combination lock built in the door. And I looked at Buford and said you never had no key to no safe, and Buford pulls out his key and looks at it, and pretends to be puzzled, and says they must have changed the lock. And I said you dumb shit this lock is part of the safe, and he said don’t call me no dumb shit, and there was nothing to be done, so we went up the stairs to the dance hall to look around, to see if there was any money laying around up there, but we didn’t find nothing.

So later in the week Buford is standing by the school wall, keeping to himself, and I walk over and right away he says, we’re in trouble, the sheriff’s asking me all these questions, but I ain’t going to squeal on you, cause you’re my pal. And he keeps saying it again and again, that he was my pal and he wouldn’t squeal on me, and finally I tell him to shut up and tell me how the sheriff found out, and Buford says the sheriff called Mrs. Anderson’s husband to see if he got the key, and Mrs. Anderson’s husband said he don’t know anything about it.

“Yeah,” I say, “and then what?”

“And then the sheriff comes to see me, and asks what I wanted the key for, and I said I just wanted one to give to another kid at school because we collected keys, and then the sheriff starts asking me questions about places being broke into and people missing keys, and I said I didn’t know nothing about that.”

So I listened to this for a while, and then I tell Buford you better not squeal on me, and he said I’d never do that cause you’re my pal.

Well, the next Sunday afternoon, my dad drove me to the movie house in the pickup, so I could run the projector, and we were sitting there parked. And I looked out the window of the pickup and I saw the sheriff coming over, walking across the street from the direction of the court house, and it gave me a little start but not too much cause he and my dad liked to chew the fat now and then. But then he came right up to the pickup and instead of leaning in and talking across me to my dad, he opened the door and crowded right in, so I had to scoot over and was wedged in between them in front of the gear shift. And my dad says hi Johnny real glad-like cause he thought if the sheriff was getting in he was going to hang around and chew the fat and not have to rush off, but I knew something was up.

And he says hi Carman and leans over and starts talking to me right away, saying well you know I been talking to the McGavock boy, Buford, on account of some folks in town are having break-ins, and are missing some keys, and Buford tells me you and him did it, how you been going around and breaking into places and taking their keys. And right away I said, just blurting it out, not thinking:

“Well, he gave me some keys.”

“He just gave ’em to you. You didn’t go in with him and get ’em?” He was leaning right over in my face, so I could see all the tobacco on his teeth, and see the juice squeezing out between his lower teeth and overflowing on his lip, and I would have told you I was downright disgusted to have to look at something like that at a time when there was trouble.

“We was talking one day and it turned out we both collected keys. So I would give him some of mine and he would give me some of his. That’s all it was.”

“I was talking to Mr. May the other day and he said he had seen you two boys together, out at some place.”

“Sure, we run around a lot. Just playing and talking about keys and stuff.”

“And Buford never said nothing about any of those keys being stolen?”

“Well, he may of let on how a couple of ’em he got at this place or that place. But I figured he was just talking big, telling stories like he always does. Everybody knows you don’t believe nothing Buford says.”

So it goes on this way for a while, and we drive home, me and my dad, and I have to give him all my keys, all the ones on the chain, not just the ones I tell him Buford gave me, and he takes them to give to the sheriff, and tells me if the story is true he’s going to beat me with a rope, and I get mad as hell cause he would think of believing a dumb liar like Buford, and cause most of the keys I had had before, and even though I knew it would look better that only a few of the keys were the missing ones, I was real sore at losing the whole collection, cause they kept them all as evidence, saying maybe these were keys missing from nearby towns or something.

Well, I didn’t figure that it made any difference what Buford said about me, cause he already lied to the sheriff before about who the key was for, the one the sheriff made thinking it was for Mrs. Anderson’s husband, and cause no one had seen us breaking in or the sheriff would have already known that, and because I hadn’t left any fingerprints or anything dumb like that.

And it was a lesson to me how you should never lie, you should always tell the truth, because no one would ever believe a liar who told the truth, but if you always told the truth they had to believe you when you lied.

And I never did nothing to Buford, or talked to him after that, I just ignored him except one time at school when he got in my way in the hall and I shoved him aside and he fell down, but he didn’t make nothing of it, on account of being a sissy and all. The sheriff got him a job at the barber shop, shining shoes, so he could make some pocket change. And I would have felt kind of sorry for him, him being that dumb, if he hadn’t of squealed on me, and lied to me, saying he would never do nothing like that.

But it got me to thinking, cause I had read about lie detectors and stuff they had in other towns and in the big cities, and it got me real worried that no matter how careful you were, they could just hook you up to a machine and be able to tell where you had broke in and what you had done. And I was stumped until one day I read a story about a man who could fool lie detectors because he had been to the Orient and he could concentrate his mind. So I wrote away for some books on yoga and stuff, so I could get this problem licked, and learn to shut up my mind like a steel vault door which no one but me would have the keys to, and no machine could tell what was going on inside. And in the meantime I had to start my key collection all over again.

from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 2, No 34, October 19, 1998

-30-

Cover Girl
a story
by J. Orlin Grabbe

Manhattan had changed when I got back from the West Coast. The heat had suddenly dissipated, getting ready for fall, and an occasional breeze found its way down Second Avenue. The post-summer pickup had brought with it a patina of melancholy and a longing for revision and transcendence.

I had presciently, if innocently, removed Salomon Brothers from the cover of my textbook on international finance. Their trading room had adorned the first edition, and the second–with its gentler, though not adactylous, cover–was just making its presence known along Park Avenue and Wall Street when whispers of indiscretion in the auction of government bonds turned to headline hurly-burly. “So what’s the story of the girl?” a woman trader of foreign exchange in one of the local banks asked a friend of mine, studying the new cover with a female critical eye. “Is she his girlfriend, or what?”

There really was no story, other than I liked the photograph of the involved, attractive lady standing in a chaotic sea of computer and display terminals, a slightly out-of-focus shot which gave the surrounding room a yellowed air of late night smoke, as if manned by muted traders who filled in forex tickets and softly called out, Where’s your Swissie?, while sipping Buds and chalking cue sticks around a pool table.

I had, to be sure, alleged that the cover’s real purpose was to bug the Japanese (with whom the book was especially popular), to administer visual cognitive dissonance at the level of bank training programs, it being a private hypothesis of my own that the work environment segregation of sexes provided the underlying passion for the consumption of whiskey in such surprisingly copious quantities in financial areas of Tokyo. Those of that occupation could afford it, it was true, and, true, there was no social stigma attached to public drunkenness, but it was also true, I felt, that the hostess bars, arenas of social flirtation with strictly delimited rules, provided a poor substitute for the ever-present potential of sober or intoxicated fornication with a co-worker of equal and opposite sex, such as enjoyed in the rest of the world. My own forays into inebriation in that same environment had, of course, stemmed from another source entirely: namely, my protracted inability to supply even genus classification to the flora or fauna my chopsticks found floating in the iron pots of the ten- course meals graciously provided by respectful hosts, which inevitably lead to more whiskey while tests of identification were made, waiting for the olfactory and gustatory analysts to return with the recurring and reassuring message that it all tasted like Jameson.

This I explained to my friend, as we sat in my apartment in the safer, if less cozy, culinary environs of Manhattan, whereupon he countered with an overly inquisitive, but crushingly devastating, “What’s her name?”

I shamefully confessed I did not know.

I, who had aspired to broad, but detailed knowledge of my field, to the esoterica of cross- currency swaps, lookback options, and Rembrandt bonds, to the history of the European Monetary System and the politics of the IMF, could not make delivery of the first name, much less phone number, marital status, and investment habits of this elusive siren who enticed passing readers to direct their course toward the Scylla and Charybdis of divergence indicators and exchange for physicals. No, I thought later, after the departure of my friend and only a small taste of Jameson, as I studied the once familiar, but now increasingly mysterious photograph, this lady does not merely grace the cover, she does so with faith and long- suffering, bearing the good news to those fallen from the law, that they may be fructified in good works, and it would behoove one to girt loins, shod feet, grasp sword, and set forth to make known her mystery.

“We had a general cut-back, and she wasn’t considered essential personnel,” relayed a voice from the swap sales group. “You’re saying she’s gone,” I deduced. “Gone, departed, flown away, swapped out for a Korean programmer to work on back office.” She was lost but her name, Helena Maria Rachael Cirius, was found. What kind of name was that? I wondered, thinking Helena could be Greek; Maria, Spanish; Rachael, Jewish or Southern; and Cirius, well, are you serious? Clearly, not much was to be learned in the genealogical realm, there being, after all, certain men and women who made professional careers out of naming babies in an excessively creative and Gothicly ornate fashion; and, at any rate, the vision of Greek captives carried into Spain with the Moslem invasion, who had then married among Sephardic Jews, the offspring of which became marranos in the inquisitional persecution of 1492, and years afterward set off for New Spain, their ships guided by the dog-star Sirius, was too improbable to be given serious consideration. On the other hand, there was only one Cirius, HMR, listed in the White Pages, which prompted a quick call to the accompanying number, and yielded the annoying and disappointing information, delivered in an acoustically offensive voice, that such did not exist in this area code, which left only an intriguing, if disquieting, street address in the East Village. That she had moved was a possibility more likely than a simple, but fatal, fatigue of phone calls, or peremptory action on the part of New York Telephone, so it appeared the remaining, necessarily corporeal, course was to conduct personal interviews among those undoubted Vandals and Visigoths, whom the naive and excessively polite often grouped under the more affectionate euphemism, Neighbors.

A week later, having put my affairs in order and arranged for time off work, I made the long trek down Second Avenue to the East Village. In other rare forays into the forbidden zone, I had found the relentless energy and the hideous but somehow grotesquely magnetic caricature of ordinary life as terrifying as the stench of death and as invigorating as the smell of moist pudenda. On this occasion, however, a restless coolness was in the streets, an icy intimidation and sense of foreboding which melted off the metal bars surrounding Tompkins Park and flowed out into the streets to be picked up and spread by passing automobiles.

She had lived on Avenue B: a boundary, a border, a frontier, which, were it to separate Texas and Mexico, would be termed el poso del mundo, but in the present case was, perhaps, more properly designated as el mundo de los posos. The gentleman drinking out of the brown paper sack was already tilting beyond the zenith of gravity’s rainbow, and it was only coincidence that he fell forward on his face, muttering, “My name is Snake, stay outa my way, I’ll bite you good,” as I approached the siren’s erstwhile apartment entrance. Carefully watching my ankles, I looked over the somewhat legible names posted beside the rusty metal door. Helena Maria was not among them, and after pushing each of the four buzzers, one by one, to no observable effect, and making a careful survey of the customs of the block, I entered a nearby convenience store, purchased a can of Budweiser, and sat down against a wall which proclaimed It’s not over hasta el finito to await promising building traffic.

“No biting,” I admonished Snake, who had decided to join me in my repose, and he looked at me scornfully, if blearily, and waved his arm toward the street, intoning, “Those that be bitten be dead,” after which there was little need for further conversation. Daylight was rolling into shadows before a scurrying figure, a waif of a girl toting knapsack and rolled poster made a sudden darting assault on the door with a shiny key.

“Excuse me,” I said, springing up, “I’m an acquaintance of the fair Helena Maria Rachael Cirius, and I was wondering if she had perhaps changed her domicile, and if you knew her, or could tell me where she had gone.”

“Yeah, I knew her and she moved. Try the Mars Bar,” she said, slamming the door behind her. “The Mars Bar?” I asked Snake. “Ain’t no Milky Way,” he observed unhelpfully. Well, what you seek, you find, was a law of the universe I often relied upon in the course of research, knowing that the seriousness of intent caused books containing relevant information to fall off library shelves into one’s path, and total strangers to converse on helpful topics at adjoining restaurant tables; so it was that over the next three or four days (it is difficult to be precise), during which I afforded myself the musical luxury of every selection on the Mars Bar jukebox, I also traversed the streets of the East Village, beginning at 14th and Fourth Avenue, working my way down to Avenue B, then back up 13th Street to Fourth, and so on to 1st Street, a process that terminated at the Mars Bar, whereupon I would return along Bowery and Fourth to start the process all over again, expecting at any moment she would come blasting out of a doorway, bearing, perhaps in a plain brown wrapper, perhaps in an autumnal kaleidoscope, an itemized index to the secrets of the universe.

Sometimes in this or that place, upon inquiry as to occupation, I would explain that as Odysseus sought the Golden Fleece, so did I seek the most beguiling of the Helens, and I would produce the book with her picture from the rucksack, and expound on her virtues while the inquirer flipped through the text, read the title, and eyed my torn jeans and faded T-shirt, and often, with surprising humanity, bought me a drink and attempted to direct my attention to some other maiden across the room, or to reassure me the book would bring a dollar down at the flea market. Hours flowed into days, days into nights, and nights into almost places where each waitress was almost an actress, and each bartender almost a poet or a composer. As is often the case, the end was contained in the beginning, for I finally found her in the wee hours of the morning as I wearily collapsed onto a Mars Bar stool next to the Neo- Thulite, the Sound Man, and the Chef, as well as others with whom I had not broken brew.

And there she was, sipping cranberry juice and vodka.

“This is you,” I said, showing her the girl on the cover. “No, that’s me,” she replied, pointing to the skull on the wall with the mousetrap nailed to its forehead. “I’ve just lost my job and my boyfriend, in that order.”

Some of the fatigue departed in a burst of Schadenfreude. “How very tragic,” I said. “About the job, I mean.”

She looked me over. “Where did you get this?”

“I am the author.”

“And I’m the mother of God,” she responded in a tone that did not incline one to dispute it.

I tried a change of tack. “It’s okay. I would never judge a cover girl by her book,” I said.

“I was definitely a gypsy in yaksha-yuppie clothing.”

A moment of silence while Lou Reed invited us to take a walk on the wild side.

“What are we to do, now that we have discovered low finance?” I asked. “Is this the bar at the end of the universe? The new world order? Skull and bones and applied principles of rat psychology?”

“The gift of penetrating vision is denied to the uninitiated,” she responded. “It is first necessary to undergo symbolic death and resurrection, to cast off the old creature, and to make room for the new.”

“Another drink?”

“I had in mind something more dramatic, like an auto-da-fe of my image and your alleged oeuvre.”

We walked hand-in-hand to 5th Street, to her walk- up apartment, where we opened a bottle of wine, and carefully laid the book on a cross-thatch of phosphorous matches in a baking tin. We shared a glass, and uttered silent prayers, and ignited one corner.

The flames hovered around the edges of the book, until the outer pages began to curl and roll up one by one, slowly turning to ashes like years of the past decade. I was burning up inside, and removed my clothes and lay on the futon, the sweat running off my forehead and shoulders and thighs.

And we stayed like that, for a while, staring into the dying flames, while the shadows crept back around us, and the late-night chill reentered the air, and the passing footsteps became the muffled sound of leaves scattered by the wind. And then she stood to remove her own clothing, and to sigh, and to shake out her hair.

“As of yet there’s no sign of life,” she said, listlessly straddling the corpse. And I realized, then, that I had failed to detect the slow fading of her visage.

from The Laissez Faire City Times, November 1997

-30-

Feed the Children
a story
by J. Orlin Grabbe

Lithgow first met Karen at The Delphic Oracle, a cafe-bar in the East Village, where she had listened to the bartender’s tape: the one made an earlier night when the performer, a folk singer, had stayed on after closing time, and a few of the regular customers had had a sing-along, and–moved by the mood and the wine– Lithgow had given an economic diatribe in the style of a Southern preacher. Something like:

Well, brethren, I have called this Council together because there is evil in the land, and we’ve got to root it out. Now there are those who talk about their multiple regressions. And econometric transgressions. But I want to tell you, I looked at the housing market, and–brother–I saw sin!

Oh, I say we got to get those interest rates down! Say Amen!

Oh, I say we got to get those interest rates down! Say Optimal! . . .

Something like that. A few days later Lithgow came in and saw a woman sitting across the corner of the bar. She stared at him and he said hello.

What do you do? he asked.

Guerrilla theater, she replied.

He sipped his wine, wondering what that meant.

I’m an unemployed actress, she said. I type 120 wpm and live in Indianapolis. My name is Karen.

I’m Lithgow. What brings you to New York?

Who is this guy? she asked the bartender.

He did the sermon on the tape, the bartender replied.

Umm, she said. I’m here looking for a job. I used to be with the Larouche organization, and we were trying to feed the starving children, before I was fucked over by some of the top people. Do you know anything about his theories?

Unfortunately, Lithgow said. Larouche is a fascist.

She looked at the bartender. Is he for real?

I think he’s for real.

Okay, I guess I’ll listen to what you have to say then.

She came around the edge of the bar and sat beside Lithgow.

What do you do? she asked.

I’m trying to write a play, but I do research to make a living. I took economics in school.

She looked at him with an open gaze that in another context he would have interpreted as a sign of sexual interest.

We need to have a discussion about what to do about the housing situation, and the homeless, and how we were going to feed the hungry of the world, she said. Do you know that six million children will die of starvation this year alone?

He didn’t answer. He hadn’t come to the bar to talk about global problems he could do nothing about.

Before you came in, the bartender related to Lithgow, Karen was having dinner with this social worker. And there were three Englishmen who had come in, and Karen says in a loud voice to the social worker that she had had no money the previous night and had to give someone a five dollar blow-job for cabfare.

Lithgow looked at Karen. She didn’t seem to mind that the bartender was relating the story in front of her.

So the social worker starts yelling, the bartender continued, that she had promised to be decent in public and stomped out saying he would call her later.

What did the Englishmen say?

Two of the three Englishmen were having a good time, but felt inhibited in front of their boss. But they all turned to listen when Karen started talking about blow-jobs.

Karen looked at Lithgow with pride. I’m very good, she said.

Lithgow didn’t know what to say. Are you always this way? he eventually asked.

As long as I’ve known her, she’s always been Crazy Karen, the bartender said.

I’m crazy as my lord is insane. I’ve been fucked over a lot. Once I was grabbed by the Secret Service at a Dukakis rally. I had a sign, and I started yelling at him, asking him what he was going to do to feed the children, and the SS grabbed me and threw me in a car.

What happened then? Lithgow asked. But her attention was already elsewhere, and she began to talk to another person who had sat at the bar. A stranger, apparently.

After a while she turned back toward him.

Harry meet Lithgow. Lithgow is an economist. I don’t know much about economics, but one thing I do know is when money cancels out debt, there will no longer be an excuse not to feed the hungry. Lithgow, would you be so good as to explain to Harry what MV = PT means?

Startled, Lithgow attempted a quick explanation, then felt foolish. He did not know why he felt a need to answer, or why Harry should care, or why an explanation was relevant.

What do you think, Karen asked Lithgow, if we had the Concord fly over Africa and drop tons of Wonder Bread?

He looked at her carefully. He decided she meant it as a serious question.

I don’t know. I don’t think it will work. Anyway, I’m not interested in solving social problems.

You’re already on record! she screamed at him, slamming her fist on top of the bar.

Lithgow buried his attention in his wine glass.

How old do you think I am? she asked calmly.

Her age was indeterminate. Somewhere in the thirties, he decided. Early thirties.

I’m forty, she said. You know, it’s getting past time for me to have a child. I want to have the first child born on the moon. Or conceived on the moon and born on Mars.

They then talked for a while in a manner that Lithgow found distressingly desultory. To have a conversation with this woman, he thought, I’ll have to find a way to condense anything I have to say about any particular topic into a single sentence. That’s all I get before the subject changes.

When he was ready to leave the bar, he told her he lived in midtown, and she said she was staying with a friend in the nineties. She asked if he would walk her by the cash machine on Second Avenue. They walked to the automatic teller near St. Marks, where her hometown bank balance stood at twelve dollars after withdrawing thirty in cash.

Why don’t you come uptown and play pool with me, she asked. There’s a table in a bar near where I’m staying. We can stop at your place on the way, if you want.

He shrugged consent and waved down a cab. She introduced herself to the cab driver, and asked him how he was doing. The driver complained there was no money in driving a cab all day.

This is Lithgow, an economist, she said. Perhaps the two of you should discuss the labor situation in this country.

Lithgow nodded at the driver but didn’t say anything, and was grateful to receive silence in return. After a time, he put his arm around Karen. He wasn’t sure why. It seemed natural and cozy.

She looked at him. Do you want to make love to me?

Maybe, he said. He didn’t know if he did or not. He was embarrassed by the cabdriver’s attention to the conversation.

You must, you have your arm around me, she said.

When they got out of the cab, he stopped on the sidewalk and kissed her with sudden passion. She felt his erection with her hand. Do you like oral sex? she asked. I’m not using any birth control.

I don’t have any either, Lithgow thought to himself. He didn’t do this often.

They walked along the sidewalk.

You know this may only happen once, she said, just this time.

I know that.

When they reached the lobby of his apartment building she looked around and said You must be rich.

I’m not rich, but I’m not poor.

This is just between me and you, right? she asked in the elevator. You aren’t going to tell anyone?

He shook his head. He didn’t know why she was so concerned. When they entered the apartment, he left the lights out, and they went out on the balcony and looked at the city. He kissed her again and she said Feel how wet you are making me. He felt her through her dress and she said No, put your hand inside my panties. Then she asked Do you want to make love now, and he said Yes and pulled off her panties, and then said Let’s go inside. In the bedroom she said No, don’t make me come, I want to be hot like this for the rest of the night.

Sometime later she said: I want you inside of me. Lithgow thought about the lack of birth control, and the people she might have been with, and then he entered her and didn’t think about it anymore.

There was a full moon shining through the bedroom window. She said Oh I’m coming, and then lay strangely still. She lay inertly, without emotion.

There is nothing for you to do but come now, she said.

I came the same time you did.

She turned her face toward him. You shouldn’t have done that. I told you I wasn’t using any birth control.

It’s a dangerous game, he said.

But you would support the child, she said, looking into his face and seeming to find something reassuring.

They took a shower together, and he soaped the blemishes on her back, and she wanted to know if she should put on makeup and he said he didn’t care. She tuned in a rock station on the stereo, and then borrowed his hairdryer. He didn’t like the station, and after a minute turned it off and put on a CD by the Doors. Then he watched her try to smoke the tail end of a joint using scissors as a roach clip. He decided it was futile, and rolled some pot of his own, and they both smoked it rapidly.

Why don’t you give me a job, she said. You can dictate your plays to me, and I can type them.

I’m sorry, I can’t work that way. I write and edit them directly on a word processor. It’s the only way I know how to work.

They took a cab to the bar near where she was staying, and she ordered a sweet drink with tequila and madeira. The bartender was a big man, and fat, and wore a beret, and she knew him. When he was closing he stood beside them pressing his stomach into them like a barricade, and said It’s time to go now. Lithgow was annoyed.

They decided to walk on down the street to another bar which was still open, as they hadn’t had a chance to play pool. On the way there she said We could go back to your place and make love. He didn’t respond because he wanted more time to think about it, and he was feeling very drunk. At the bar Karen ordered White Castle hamburgers, which were available for a dollar each, and he got a martini. At one point he ran his hand up her skirt and she said angrily Will you stop it.

Sorry, he said, taken aback by her shift in mood.

The fat bartender from the previous bar came in, and the familiar way he acted with Karen made Lithgow wonder if he was the recipient of the five-dollar blow-job of the previous night. Another man, a dancer in his early twenties came in also, and Karen started talking to him, and then the four of them paid for a pool table. But Lithgow was so drunk he decided to walk home.

I leave Karen in your capable hands, he said to the dancer.

The dancer followed Lithgow to the door. Who is the big guy? he asked. Is she with him?

Don’t worry about him, Lithgow said. He’s just a bartender from up the street.

Then Karen came to the door, and asked Lithgow if he would be all right.

I think so.

Will I see you again?

At the cafe.

I do want to get together for a serious discussion of economics, she said.

She’s crazy, you know, the bartender at The Delphic Oracle told him the following night. I knew her when I was staying in Rome, and one night after she had come to visit, she ran naked through the streets and tried to hijack a bus.

Lithgow thought about his conversation with Karen, and then he realized the problem. The economic diatribe that the bartender had recorded and then played for her was actually an excerpt of a skit Lithgow had written a previous year. But– listening to the tape–Karen had interpreted Lithgow’s sermon as a spontaneous visionary possession, which made him a performance artist like herself: an agent for geo-political change through public scenes in establishments for eating and drinking. What was it she had said? One random statement without context: Draw people into the scene so they are at first unaware of what is really going on.

The bartender answered the phone and then handed Lithgow a note with a phone number. Call Karen at Samuel’s apartment, it said.

Who’s Samuel?

Samuel is the social worker who was here with Karen the other night. He’s a friend of hers.

Lithgow called the number and a man’s voice answered.

I have a note to call Karen, Lithgow said.

Well you can’t call her at this number, the voice responded firmly, and then in the background, before the receiver clicked, he heard the same voice screaming: You have your lovers call here! After the way I loved you!

Lithgow returned to the bar.

What did Karen have to say? the bartender asked.

Samuel answered and said I couldn’t call her there.

Well, that’s Samuel. The bartender looked at Lithgow. Are you okay?

Lithgow was thinking about the previous night. It’s just between you and me, she had said.

Would Karen set me up like this? he asked the bartender. Have me call her at Samuel’s, just so some man would be calling her there when Samuel answered the phone?

No, I don’t think so, the bartender replied. She doesn’t want to deal with that.

Lithgow, preoccupied, forgot to ask him what it was she didn’t want to deal with.

The following evening Lithgow found Karen sitting at the bar at The Delphic Oracle with a haggard, indifferently dressed man in his late thirties.

Lithgow, this is Samuel, Karen said.

Samuel didn’t appear to recognize him as the person who had called the previous night.

I’m a psychologist, Samuel said. I’m working to prevent psychiatric abuse.

Like with Karen? Lithgow asked.

Karen is the Harry Houdini of institutions, Samuel said. She gets in or out whenever she wants.

I’m doing better, aren’t I? Karen asked Samuel.

You’re not crazy, Lithgow told her.

Thanks, she responded. How much sorrow has to be endured before you can say it is finished?

Two gay men, apparently friends of Karen, came in, and she went and sat with them at a table across the room.

Samuel looked at Lithgow. I was one of the first people Karen asked to marry, Samuel said. Did she say anything about that? Samuel searched Lithgow’s face.

She didn’t mentioned it to me, Lithgow said. Samuel looked relieved.

I guess you know I’ve had a thing for Karen for a couple of years, Samuel said. But now I’ve met this 21-year old Yugoslavian girl with long blonde hair who is helping me get over her.

That’s good, Lithgow responded.

Karen told me you were her lover.

Lithgow shook his head at the question, thinking It’s none of your business. He saw Samuel looking at him. Let him interpret the gesture however he wants, he thought.

She tells everyone that everyone is her lover, Lithgow said.

He saw Samuel was pleased with the response, a reaction that puzzled him for a moment. Then he realized that Samuel had probably never slept with Karen.

A pale woman in a flowered dress came in and sat by Samuel. She was one of Samuel’s colleagues.

Lithgow knows Karen, Samuel said to the pale woman.

The problem with Karen, the woman said, is her praxis. For example, Karen is concerned about world hunger, but she still eats meat.

Hmm, Lithgow answered. He looked at both of them with distaste. There is a whole industry of problem solvers, he thought. Politicians, bureaucrats, demagogues, counselors, and charity workers who have found the way to power, fame, and wealth lies in championing lost causes and mucking about in other people’s lives. They’re really just parasites and vampires who are healthy only when others are sick, whose well-being increases in direct proportion to other people’s misery, and whose chief occupation is giving the appearance of working on the problems of others.

What is your play about? the woman asked Lithgow, when he told her what he was doing.

It’s a drama based on the Gnostic Gospels, Lithgow said.

Karen came back to the bar with the two gay men.

We’re going out, she said to Lithgow. Will you still be here later?

Probably.

Where are you going? Samuel asked. He looked distressed.

We’re going down the street to play pool, Karen said. Why don’t you stay here and talk to Lithgow? Lithgow is an economist, you know.

We were talking about the Gnostic Gospels, Lithgow said.

Why hasn’t God forgiven Satan? Karen asked. His prodigal son? She turned toward the door without waiting for an answer.

Samuel watched them leave. I’m afraid she’ll stop in every bar, he said to Lithgow. No telling what kind of trouble she’ll get into.

Why don’t we go to Blimpie on Sixth Avenue? the pale woman asked Samuel.

Lithgow stayed at The Delphic Oracle until closing, but Karen did not return.

The next morning was Saturday, and Lithgow slept until noon when he was awakened by the phone. It was Karen.

What are you doing? he asked.

There is nothing to do but make a joyful noise. I was calling because Samuel and I are going to have dinner at Cozy on Amsterdam at 5:45. Why don’t you join us? Afterward maybe we can go to The Delphic Oracle and have Rolling Rocks or whatever.

Okay, he said, where are you now?

I am currently at the Helmsley Hotel with Freddy, she said.

Who is Freddy?

He is a rock singer who has several gold records. I sang for him. He says I have a pretty good singing voice, but it needs some work. Last night we made a tour of the drug scene in Harlem.

You’ve been up all night?

I want to experience what the children are experiencing. If they’re shooting up, I want to shoot up. If they’re smoking crack, I want to smoke crack.

Be careful, Lithgow said. It was the only thing he could think of to say.

How can anyone be careful when there is death all around? She hung up.

Lithgow showered and dressed and was making coffee when Karen called again.

Something’s come up, she said. Samuel and I won’t be going to Cozy after all. I apologize. Will you be at The Delphic Oracle later? I just want to spend time with cool cats who know how to hang out and stay calm and have a good time. Do you know what I mean?

Maybe I’ll see you there, Lithgow said.

Karen came in to The Delphic Oracle at eight. She was wearing a Cleveland Indians T-shirt and baseball cap. Her face was covered with red makeup and she was wearing dark glasses. She said she had been doing coke all night with Freddy.

And I didn’t sleep with him, she said vehemently.

I didn’t ask, Lithgow thought. Why is she telling me this?

I’m just trying to get the rock music industry to focus on the starving children, she said. Live Aid–what was that? One day, one week. That isn’t shit.

Come, and I’ll introduce you to my friends, Lithgow said.

Later, she said. I have to go out. But I will come back and we can have dinner.

It was a hour or two later before Karen returned. The cap and dark glasses were gone, and she had changed her T-shirt. All that remained of the Cleveland Indians outfit was the red makeup still smeared over her face.

She slammed a manila folder down on the counter twice. This city is filled with nothing but hypocrites, faggots, and whores, she said to the bartender–the one she had visited in Rome.

The bartender looked at Lithgow. Sounds pretty accurate to me, the bartender said.

Lithgow opened the folder. Inside was a letter to George Bush. It was about world hunger.

What do you think of Karen’s crusade? the bartender asked Lithgow.

I don’t believe in crusades. My first responsibility is to take care of myself, so I won’t be a burden to other people.

Can the children take care of themselves? Karen asked.

I don’t believe in fighting evil. The universe disposes of its own evil. I think I read that in Dr. Sax.

It’s disposing of the children. Are they evil?

You are controlled by what you love and what you hate. But hate is the stronger emotion. Those who fight evil take on the characteristics of the enemy and become evil themselves.

Would you just read the fucking letter? Karen demanded. Read it out loud so everyone can hear.

Lithgow read the letter silently and then replaced it in the folder. Someone was playing Streets of London on the piano.

Would you like to dance? he asked Karen.

No, she said. But after a moment she changed her mind.

Aren’t I a good follower? she asked.

Yes.

Isn’t anyone going to cut in? I want to be had by all the men at the bar.

Lithgow looked at the bar. Anyone in particular? he asked.

That one, she said, pointing to a man with a long blond ponytail.

They returned to the bar, but the man with the ponytail was not interested in talking to Karen.

Lithgow was at The Delphic Oracle the following evening when the bartender passed him the phone. Karen seemed to be speaking with her head turned.

Ready to go? The brothers are ready? They want to see the children fed?

Now the voice came through distinctly.

We’re having a demonstration. A midnight vigil before the UN. Food riots are happening all over the world. We’re going to hold all things in common. You want to come to 42nd Street and join us?

He didn’t. But what he said was: Maybe.

Is regurgitation biodegradable? she asked, and hung up.

After a while Lithgow walked up Second Avenue to 42nd Street and over to the UN building. There was a group of six or seven people on the sidewalk. They were watching Karen, who was in the middle of the street arguing with a policeman. The policeman put his hands on her shoulders and began pushing her back in the direction of the sidewalk. At the last moment she jerked away, then tripped over the curb and fell into a police barricade.

She sat up and Lithgow came and sat beside her.

Do you think there are politics in the Kingdom of God? she asked Lithgow. She seemed to be all right.

He knew what he wanted to tell her.

The universe is basically indifferent to human joys or suffering, he would say. What happens just happens. It doesn’t warrant labels of “good” or “bad”, or human reactions of sympathy or hatred. Effort to control or alter the course of events is wasted. One should cultivate detachment and learn to go with the flow. Because the sage strives not, no man may contend against him. He who attracts to himself all that is under Heaven does so without effort. He who makes effort is not able to attract it.

He wanted to say all these things, but he didn’t. He didn’t say anything.

Kill me or let me have my freedom, Karen said.

After a while she looked at Lithgow: Did I ever tell you I had an abortion? The doctor so fucking butchered me I’ll never be able to have children.

Can I take you somewhere in a cab? Lithgow asked.

No, I have to stay here. I’m the only one who cares.

Lithgow did not see Karen at The Delphic Oracle the following night. But when he returned home there were two messages from her on his answering machine.

The first one said: I’m at Penn station. Amtrak fucked me over. The police fucked me over. The next stop is bus stop. I’d like to fly home United tonight. Tonight! In the flesh I’d like to kick up my heels. Tonight!

The final message was shorter: This city has defeated me. I’ve done all I could. Now it’s up to you.

from Liberty, May 1995

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Karma Accountant
a story
by J. Orlin Grabbe

The karma accountant was sitting at a table having a cappuccino when I arrived at the cafe. We often brooded together about the spiritual equilibrium of the universe.

“Café au lait.” He grimaced. The milk hadn’t steamed right.

“Do you note that down?” I asked. “Does someone get bad marks for bad coffee?”

He reflected. “Depends on the intent. Not for a pure mechanical failure, no. But suppose the waiter flubbed it because he was hostile to a customer. Or was just being negligent in general. Those are different matters.”

The concept of karma seemed simple enough to me. Bad deeds built up karma (bad stuff) and good deeds cancelled it out. Once you got rid of all your karma you got to stop reincarnating and go to heaven or enter nirvana or something nice like that.

“What have you got so far?” I asked.

“See that couple sitting over there. The girl facing us is having the summer salad.”

I looked at the girl with the pale face and dark eyes that would animate for a fraction of a second before settling back into comfortable moroseness.

“They’re both having problems at the moment, but the one with his back to us is a Yugoslavian immigrant who is working in his brother’s cloth business. He’s about 17 percent happier and more positive than the girl, who is flunking out of her third semester at NYU. So he’s chalking up a lot of credit transferring his energy and enthusiasm to her.”

“How do you measure that exactly?” He had tried to explain the method before–very patiently actually–but I was still somewhat confused.

He sighed. “Well, unfortunately, it’s up in the air. There’s been a great debate and organizational upheaval and we’re moving to a new system. It’ll be centuries, maybe millennia before we get the bugs out.

“We used to used the KAU,” he continued, “or Karma Unit of Account. It was based on a simple weighted average of the karmas of all souls, physically incarnated or not. So, in the case of that couple, I would take the ratio of the two karmas–that’s his karma of KAU 4,790,241 divided by her karma of KAU 2,566,337,644,935–and credit him with 17 percent of that amount.”

“Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You mean he gets 17 percent of 4 million over 2 trillion, something like that.”

“Yes.”

“Which doesn’t reduce his karma by very much.”

“Well. I don’t know why you think that. If he reduced it by that equivalent amount every day, in only 8,634 years he would be a soul with no karma.”

I guess you don’t rush things in this business, I thought. “But if the girl only had a karma of, say, 2 thousand, the amount of karma reduction would be a billion times as much.”

“True. But you’re overlooking the essential reality. It’s extremely hard for a person of high karma to make a positive energy transfer to a person of low karma. So the equation recognizes the basic fact that the ease of transfer from A (him, in this case) to B (her) is directly proportional to the karma of B, and hence credit to A is given inversely to B’s karma to adjust for the lower effort involved.”

“So what you are saying is if I had a karma of KAU 10 and another person had a karma of KAU 1, I could technically get rid of all my karma in less than six days–that is, 17 percent per day–but the probability of doing so would be small because I would find it extremely difficult to make a positive energy transfer to a person with KAU 1.”

“No. No. No.”

“Why no? Why not?”

“First, your karma is some exponential order of magnitude larger than KAU 10.”

“I’m speaking hypothetically.”

“Second, you would be doing good to work on any margin higher than 6 percent–that’s the maximum reduction the average person is able to manage. Third, your math is wrong. If each day you reduced your karma by 17 percent of the amount remaining, at the end of six days the amount of karma left would be 10 x (1-.17)^6 = 3.269.”

What?

“That sounds like a rigged game. You get never get to zero that way.”

“Not if the percentage reduction is constant. You have to increase the percentage reduction each day in order to maintain the same absolute level of negation.”

He paused to jot down notes. I looked around, but didn’t see what he saw. Just the cafe’s impresario smoking behind the bar, and a girl with short dark hair conversing with the chef. I motioned to the waiter and ordered a hamburger.

“So what’s the new system all about?” I asked when he was finished.

He signed again, as though just the effort of thought pained him.

“It all started with a debate over the intertemporal karma cancellation problem. You know about that?”

I didn’t.

“I suppose not. Maybe an example will help. Hmmm. Suppose an Arkansas boy in 1933 in the depth of the Depression robs $10 from his grandmother’s cookie jar and spends it before being found out. Later he gets run over by a bus. He reincarnates as a girl in a middle- class New Jersey family, goes to the University of Pennsylvania, and gets a job on Wall Street. He– she–gets a raise one day and in her euphoria gives $10 to a street person. So, and this is the classic question, does the $10 donation cancel out the $10 theft, karmically speaking?”

The hamburger arrived and I cut into it, but there was still some pink in the middle, so I sent it back to be cooked until it was done.

“So what’s the answer, do they cancel out,” I asked once the waiter had left.

“That’s the rub. Think of the issues. The dollar in 1933 buys about ten times more goods than in 1985, so the magnitude of the two incidents are different in real terms. Next we have to adjust for the environment. What does it mean in 1933 for a young boy to steal $10 from his grandmother, as opposed to a young professional woman to give $10 to a street person in 1985? For example, there was one school of thought on the Karma Policy Committee that no one should be credited karma cancellation for acts in eras where there is social pressure to perform them out of political correctness. Can trendiness be equated with good karma? Then there is the issue of individual motivation. What if the boy stole the $10 to pay a vet to save his dog, an animal he loved more than anything in the world? On the other hand, one subset of the Karma Policy Committee considered the whole issue of individual motivation irrelevant, sort of on “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” principle. Suppose the street person used the girl’s $10 to get drunk, wandered out into traffic, and caused a truck to veer into a crowded sidewalk filled with women and children.”

“I see what you mean.” The sheer magnitude of the problem was making me depressed. I consoled myself with an extra dollop of catsup.

“Okay. So one day the Council of All Souls petitions the Karma Policy Committee. The solution is simple, they argued. We create a market where those desirous of exchanging 1933 Arkansas bad karma for 1985 Wall Street good karma (that is, karma cancellation) can do so at an exchange rate that will be determined minute by minute in the intertemporal market place. Good karma buyers will get the lowest available price, while bad karma sellers will get the highest price.”

“And that solved your karma valuation problem?”

“In some respects. Now we have markets for everything. Every karma type is priced relative to every other. Of course you need a numeraire. We arbitrarily took 1/10,000,000,000 of the total karma from the earliest building period at Catalhüyük in Asia Minor as equal to 1.0, and the magnitude of every other price is determined by reference to that. For example, yesterday’s closing exchange rate against 5th century karma from Attila the Hun’s invasion of Gaul was 436,784 units of the latter to 1 unit of the former, because of all the bad karma being dumped on the market from the Attila period.”

“Does it pay well? Your job, I mean. All this paperwork.”

He cocked his head. “We get 6 percent karma reduction per century.”

“Doesn’t seem like much, does it?”

“But it’s safe. There’s no danger of our karma getting any bigger while we’re doing this. It’s like buying a bond. The interest may not seem much, but at least you can always count on it being greater than zero. Accountants are like that, you know. We like to take the safe course.”

“But you can’t rid of all your karma that way,” I said. “Your 6 percent is like the 17 percent we talked about earlier. Taking away 6 percent of the remainder every year will never remove it all.”

“No,” he said sadly. “There will always be a residual, and there’s nothing to do about it except to reincarnate and earn the final reduction the old-fashioned way.”

“And to do that you’re taking the risk it might get bigger.”

“Yes, although now that we have gone to the new system, there are karma futures markets, where you can hedge your risk by going long or short karma of a particular type. Suppose you’re going to undertake a particularly risky incarnation, say in a real soul-selling place like Hollywood. Well, you go short a certain number of 1990s Hollywood karma futures. That way if you build up more bad karma than you anticipated, you just deliver the excess into the expiring futures contracts. Of course, like any hedge, it works both ways. If you acquire less bad karma than anticipated, you’ll have to buy back some of the contracts, and so end up with more karma than you would have without the hedge. But at least you know what your exposure is before you incarnate.”

What a bunch of wimpy souls, I thought. “What kind of spiritual coward would do something like that? What’s the point if you don’t take risks?”

He gazed quietly at me for a moment, and then laughed. He laughed and laughed. I felt embarrassed and looked around the room. The couple had stopped eating and turned to stare. Even the chef had taken note of us.

I was getting angry now. “What’s so funny?” I demanded to know.

“You. You . . .,” he paused to restrain his filthy mirth. “You should talk. You shorted the first 50 contracts.”

He was still laughing when I stalked out of the cafe and slammed the door. You pay the check, I thought. Jerk. I know this place. Go ahead, pull out your Universal Credit Card here. Try and explain that to them. They’ll bust your chops for sure.

I walked on down the street.

As for me, well, I’m hedged, aren’t I?

from Liberty, August 1993

-30-