Rawlings came to with a plainclothesman holding him down by the shoulders. The side of his head felt cold and wet. Nearby someone was moaning. Siren call grew louder. He tried to make out the plainclothesman nametag so he could order him to let go. The face was familiar. He’d seen it dozens of times, even been no more than two stools away in a company speakeasy. The name was wasn’t just gone but seemed to have never been there in the first place.
“Lemme go, P.C. … uh…uh…”
“Patterson, Sir. Hold still, Sir. Stop moving.”
“What…I’m not…”
Rawlings realized his legs were furiously cycling the air and Patterson was about to drop all decorum and straddle him.
“Keep still, Sir. Neck injuries. Precaution. Stop! Halt!”
Rawlings chuckled at the sideshow of his legs but could not stop them. In the microseconds before he passed out again he realized Seven Foot Slim hadn’t been wearing an over-sized big and tall men’s sweater but an armless standard-sized woman’s sweater dress. An unprecedented wave of profound and articulate sadness had washed over him as he touched the cold, wet spot now spreading over the side of his head. It had been the little sob he let out that made him to pass out.
His right eye was pulled open by a man wearing a yellow helmet.
“Tiger. My dog. Where is he?”
P.C. Patterson had been joined in the huddle above by two firemen whose names he at least couldn’t have forgotten since he’d never known them. Their blurred features were dark but for intermittent green-yellow flashing light. One of them had garlic breath. Patterson stood to give the firemen room to work. He did the talking.
“Taken to Dove Lewis, C.I. Rawlings. Lie still.”
“What happened?”
“No fatalities. Four injuries. Two serious; a woman and your dog.”
“How serious?”
“The woman will live. Your dog…who knows with animals, Sir. Dove Lewis is the best though. My cat Bonzi went there and-”
“Lemme up.”
He tried to swat away the arms of the firemen but was too weak. Looking into the airspace above the firemen he saw the banners pressed tight to Portland Episcopal by a westerly wind. Cold and wet spread down his left hip. The last thing he could remember was buying the curry coconut soup from his Thai local. He worked his hands a little. Neither held a doubled up to-go container of curry coconut soup. He flared his nostrils and sobbed.
“Christ, lemongrass must be the saddest smelling thing in the entire world.”
Patterson rubbed his chin with concern as the firemen attended to the man alternately clutching then patting down their jacket sleeves and sniffling.
“Concussed, boys…must be…forgive me.”
One cradled Rawlings’ head while he mumbled. The other fitted the neck brace.
“Freaking concussed for sure…”
Patterson’s mouth was moving but making no sound. He seemed to be speaking to someone outside the huddle. A now southwesterly wind ripped a banner from Portland Episcopal and buoyed it high into the sparkling and flashing night.
“…who knew it would be such an emotional experience.”
Rawlings’ dorm window is subdivided into 25 glass rectangles. White paint flakes from the water-warped wood between and around. An individual X or O made of blue packing tape occupies each of the bottom twenty rectangles. Rawlings obscures out the top five rectangles into the pre-dawn sky. But for the flashing red beacon lights crowning the civic and university buildings, and the oddfellow lonely glows in the higher floors, this swath of south downtown skyline is ambiently dark. If it were daytime and clear he would see the tip of the snow-tipped East County mountain in spiking through rectangles 4 and 5. He vaguely wonders if, in that cold and distant alpine dark, any likely animals, a fluffy snow-shoe rabbit or snowy fox, say, might be stirring in an anticipation of the dawn as he does. Or are they still burrowed into some warm subterranean clutch? He genuinely hoped for this for them. He wished the rabbit did not have to surface only to suffer the laser-gaze of the blamelessly ruthless predatory hawk. He mumbled a benediction for this hawk. He thought deeply about the fox’s undeservedly sinister reputation…Careful with the sobs again, Rawlings. Dove Lewis said Tiger’d be okay. Still too tender. Inside and out. Duty, Rawlings. Think of your duty.
Below, the dim eco-shimmer of South Parkblock streetlight is reflected back in blue and grey sheen. But for the miniature blue-flashing squad car and the one-man security p.c. detail keeping warm inside, the perimeter would be dark and neglected. Swafford had always been more of a door-to-door man than a clue hoarder. It was another area where budget constraints, in his Major’s brutally smug illogic, vindicated his preferred m.o. “Recycle those specimen jars already, will ya, Rawls. After all: Waste not want not, you derelict asshole, you. Bpff…bpfft buh-Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-harrrr!!! Whooo! ”
He hears gnawing sounds come from Tiger’s corner and before he remembers what happened he turns to look at the empty, fur-weaved mat in the half-kitchen. Must’ve been Barry The Communications Major rolling over in bed, he thinks.
Later…mid-morning…the crows congregated in the swaying oak branches clacking against his window. The first muffled electronic chirps of megaphones start in. Then the bells of Portland Episcopal. Someone pounds on an adjacent wall. Rawlings wakes in his recliner clutching his head. He’d sleep-medicated with whiskey since there’d been no order to the contrary from the e.r. doctor. Concussed or tipsy-doodle, he thought, what’s the freakin’ diff. After all, he’d been a diligent little Patient Rawlings and woken Barry Comm to ask him to pound on the wall on the fifteens ‘til noon to avoid what the e.r. doc had ominously referred to as “Narco-Concussive Syndrome.”
“Here’s some unlicensed to keep ya company, my boy,” Rawlings well into his tipsy by dawn. “I think you’re a big enough boy now to appreciate her…mmm…maturities.” And here Barry was on the dot with a sadistically loud pound-pound-pound and Rawlings’ jelly-armed reply leaving him predictably nauseous. He remembers he hasn’t had a morsel since the few spoonfuls of the bereaved curry-coconut and has to steel himself against another onset of the g-damn Concussive Emotionals.
“Drunk and hungry, Tige. A recipe for…”
But Tiger still isn’t on his mat.
He opens the window a finger and the chants of the dozen or so protesters or electioneers circling the police tape sneak under. The general gist of their call and response neither mourns nor even addresses the explosion or the injuries themselves. Instead, they indict a broad suite of vaguely interconnected abuses, perceived injustices, and zietgeistal happenstances which may as well have forced the bomber to stash and dash in the first place. By inference, it was a substanceless circum-ideology — immanent, viral and ever-advancing — which had crept through the perpetrator’s quiveringly vulnerable and blamelessly passive ear and shanghaied his nervous system into throwing the hapless lad onto the plunger and having him leg it deep into the bowels of Their underground movement.
It was difficult to tell if the protesters (or perhaps electioneers) were upset with the bombing or the hapless p.c. security detail surrounding the, at this point, only symbolically meaningful perimeter. For that matter it was difficult to tell if the sign-wavers were for or against the bombing itself. In fact, there seemed to be factions within the crowd; counter-protesters and affiliated protesters. Electioneering monitors in their pink vests. Police monitors in their yellow vests. All shoving and battling for position. The p.c.’s protecting themselves, the perimeter, and the protesters from each other. They would keep each other warm all morning with barked suggestions, pushing but not quite punching, and brunching on steaming coffees and hyper-vigilance of the p.c.’s nightstick trumpcard. There’s nothing like a little guerilla politics to make the less major concerns just melt away.
Rawlings startles to Barry Comm’s not unzealous pounding. Each impact causes plasmic orange pools to spread over his vision. Comm has the zeal or sadism of a true freshman, Rawlings thinks before lightly knocking his gratitude and shouting at the wall.
“We’re a.o.k. over here, Barry! Cease and desist on the knocking, buddy!”
“You got it Mr. Rawlings, Sir!”
Sincerity or sarcasm: Who could tell anymore and who cares. All that mattered was Young Barry Comm always kept up his end of the conversational bargain. Leave the guesswork in between words to the sensitives, idealists, and trendsetters who have the time to take everything personally. Guessing others’ intentions is about as useful as the traditional slog through the Oaks Bottom fens for the latest Ideaist Suicide. Let it rest, Citizens. They didn’t leap from the Sellwood Bridge to suffer the grappling hook. Their latest and last statement was meant to tangle in the swamp grass and bubble to the surface alongside the methane. The goodbye banner flapping from the bridge ledge is all we need to know. Leave the jumper and the indirect alike to their privacy. All we have each others’ words and actions, Rawlings. Words and actions. On the other hand, when you’re on the job, interpretation is impossible without evidence. You resist drawing conclusions from the banner. For all we know the jumper had overstepped a jealously guarded ideological boundary. We may find the telltale sap dent on the back of the head, provided by one of our city’s homicidally anti-social territorialists unwilling to cede a jot of their carefully fashioned scene to some pretender or poseur. Sure, join our ranks, pal, but leave your banner in the ashcan before knocking. ‘Your retro 99er jersey is quaint in that new-old hippy dippy way and, yeah man, back in the day we were on the same page or at least chapter in terms of agreeing on how broadly things, well, blew, and hey, well, we did a sprinkle of real quantifiable good there, didn’t we, pre-Roy that is, but we had mouths to feed, man, as in the port-side hootenanny may keep the fatcats’ grain elevators dry for a while but, again dude, earnestly need to eat something and so does my wife, best friend, and close neighbor and the only way I could see around was to establish my own brand, man, do a little small business-forward lobbying for myself to the tune of tricked out t-shirts, commie coffee shops, local-produce-only haute cuisine food carts, sustainable distilleries, etc., and co-op and unionize the holy Hell out of them man, let anyone who wants in in, but don’t dilute the brand, man, whatever you do. You’re beautiful, I mean that, but seriously, lose the banner.’ So they spam bomb and hack to protect patents, copyright, domain names, and their overall stylistic m.o. The D-town bombs may not be killing people, may just be a bit of muscle flexing to warn the wannabe’s with Monroe Doctrine egos not to squat too many floors of The Portland Building, not to buy up more food cart space on it’s perimeter, not to funk with our local weekly rag distribution by chaining down your own smear-printed broadside box in competitive perusal range of our own. Stay on your side of the line, man. Don’t think just because you’re getting play on Oregon Public Television’s Art Beat you’re immune from having your ass disappeared until suffering the bite of the grappling hook and coming up all pale and dimpled from the rocks and saps alike, and being unquestionably gill-choked, my man, unquestionably, so, well, you know, lose the jersey is what I’m driving at, yo.
Leave D-town and Close-In be run by the commuter knights of the civil service and their brother and sisters of the service industry various. Incentivize them up the wazoo. (L.D.M. Roy: We’re going to ‘Feed the Beast’ with our new “Points in the Paint Plan.” Establish low-post position by clicking on the ‘Feed Me’ link and get in while the gettings good.”) Open up the city to those who will have her. Love her if they wish. Let the opportunists, parasites, anarchists, gad-flies, scenester hawks, fin de decadists, radicals and radicals lite, hovel yard saints and their associated reformers and non-profs humble, voyeurs and voyeurs voyeurs, agents, journalists, and all their fellow artists and friends of the Media Core ooze into what nooks, attics, studios, shuttered factories, and itinerant shadows have been neglected, unattended, unregulated, and thereby vulnerable to “Next Big Thing” exposes or very real shrapnel and saturation flyer bombing.* (*If the fat cats can securitize the perimeter around their early last century colonials and pastoral mini-mansions then power too them. Otherwise, hire a crane, a demo-recon team, city archivist, and a tractor trailer team and rent out I-5 North for an hour. Hall your many-eaved and copper down-spouted decahedron over the restless Columbia and wave farewell with a fistful of Fast Break Points.) Let the relentless year-round ideaism that is our singular art be freely punctuated by the ceaseless elections (county, district, city, state, regional, federal) recall drives, referenda, petition drives, and opinion shaping industry that weeded the cracks of our economic ruin. Let mssrs Hales and Smith et madame Brady duke it out every four years for the rite to unseat Non-Lame Duck Mayor Roy and avoid another “Patented Fourth Quarter Comeback.” Nuts to term limits. Us D-towners cut our teeth in the ideaist family theatre. We’ve come to love the players like family pets and crazy cousins. On a par and then some with our local sports mascots and avatars Timber Jim and Blaze The Trailcat. Without family you’ve got nothin’.
Yes, be unapologetic about your D-town love, Inner-Corites. Revel in the dangerous old port days of The Olde Town Shanghai Threat. Whether you secret pocket a sap or a flask the gladhand comes out the same. Take a good hard toke off the wood pulp tang of another blameless poach of a clearcut from the spine of Forest Park. Alternative fuels are the stuff of fatcats and suburban survivalists with mucho foresight and consequent black market empires.* (*Some were reported as holding serious post position in the L.D.M.’s Office. The claim was emphatically rejected by Roy.) Bring on the brinksmanship of competing artisan’s maker’s marks cluttering the tarred telegraph poles; the brinksmanship graffiti of idealist gangs roving the streets for converts and conscripts; the good old fashioned soapbox electioneering with a bottle of artisan hooch in one winter-chilled hand and a fistful of broadsides still warm from the hand-cranked press in the calloused other. Whiling away an afternoon from the window-seat of a licensed speaky-easy , enjoy a good long earful of invective as a Royist wearing the telltale road-red uniform number 7 lays into a Brady-alligned Timberite for his “no-nothing-ist go slow approach” and the latter for the former’s “total lacking in subtlety.” Open the transom and toss in an incendiary bomb of your own* (*“Sports are stupid,” say.) and if the re-direct gets too pointed and they begin rapping on the glass or cursing slogans remove the flask and motion for them to come the Hell inside and set a spell. “Remember boys, each one of us loves our city. Yell all you want, but leave the violence to Them.”
The South Parkblocks below his dorm are dominated by spiritualists, psychics, drug dealers, vagabonds, P.S.U. students, armageddonists, street performers, low-end distillers, unlicensed speakeasies, nervous soccer tourists trawling for parking, prostitutes, and strolling lovers of every stripe.
“Democracy, Tiger. This is as close as it gets.”
A man dressed like a gondolier rolls by in a bicycle two stories tall. Two young men arm-in-arm point at the Old Portland Episcopal Church covered with new Roy campaign banners.* (*Though he has yet to file nor even rescinded the term limit yet again.) Tiger has fallen behind to leverage the bone with his foot.
“Priorities, Tiger my boy. Pry-OR-a-tees.”
Tonight he is even more big-hearted feeling for his fellow D-towners than usual. The Troutdale cover has been such tepid and watery soup to make meal of. This city night is necessary sustenance. He listens to the megaphone electioneering coming from park pulpits, office towers, and campaign vans. The wood awnings of the food carts clap to and wafts from the simmer pots get to hawking in our noses then guts. Crow caw rains down from the city scavengers droozling in sympathy. What we need, he thinks, is a blanketing of snow to go along with and a double-brandy nightcap from the safety of his licensed local.
Despite the cold he is wearing the slipper-shoes he’d so admired in the summertime bocce ball players. They, shoes and man, had such an air of comfort and ease in the world. No amount of D-town b.s. or eking out of a living could change the cush-assed style those leather downers imparted. Not only had Rawlings gotten the maker, model, and purveyor from the sockless and tanned gentlemen, he had become a semi-regular player during the six halcyonic summer weeks on the D-town Brady security detail. Though they were the same shoes that Swafford (chanced in the Parkblocks either sweet-talking or laying a rap on a Parkblocks girl* *Who could tell which.) had been so overjoyed to hap upon him wearing that after he indulged in a little off-the-clock piling on and called them “pretty frankly Euro-feminate” had said the next morning “You’ve grown fat and tan on that frankly pretty goddamn vacation-like Brady detail, Rawlings. Expect to see yourself in the borderlands early next pay period.” He held no grudge with the shoes. In fact, he wore them tonight hoping to roll a few rounds with the all-weather Bocceists who were at least smilingly tolerant during the a-heavy q & a’s blowing Jeff Smith’s job-creation record to Johnny Appleseed proportions. The cold and wet’d winnow some cracks into the leather but Rawlings could give a toss.
“Man needs to put some leisure on doesn’t he? Duty or no.”
He looked down for Tiger’s seconding or mere tolerance but he wasn’t there. Turning around he saw the dog not chewing on his bone but listening to the air. The last thing he would remember was the dog’s black-brindle hackles slowly climbing his spine, south to north, before he bared his teeth and began to growl.
As Rawlings tumbled through the air for a long two seconds he saw only Seven Foot Slim’s maroon sweater vest. It was so oversized Slim had to bunch about a foot’s worth of excess length up at his waist and tuck it under his St. Paul Rodeo Commemorative Belt Buckle. He saw that belt buckle plain as day: A little bronze bronc rider, knees bent and mid-air off the saddle, brandishing his hat in one hand and still holding the rope with the other. Rawlings, unthinking, had an unbidden insight. ‘Holding his hat makes no sense. That’s not something a bronc rider would do.’ His left hip impacted against cold cement just before his head met the corner of an iron park bench. In the timeless span of a micro-second before he passed out he thought ‘Tiger.’
A gaggle of Mount Hood Community girls titter past.
He puts the jab out over the invisible nose of the windy opponent to take the glare off the passenger window of (‘Why not while I’m here.’) the Lincoln; newspapers, lottery tickets, receipts. A thorough job whichever side (false or arranged) of the evidentiary fence. He remembers hearing four car door thuds and looks for a last tittering girl. Instead, he sees a woman old enough to be their mother hunching and frowning against the wind. They meet eyes in the moment he forgets to play the loon and recommence sparring the seemingly indefatigable and invisible avatar of Smokin’ Joe.
“Anyone of them could be the one. Look alert, Rawlings. Could be ordinance in the backpacks. Could be ordinance in their bras.” He shrugs and feints to sing a make-up song.
‘Strangers things are happening.
Stranger things by far.’
He spars his way to the staffroom door retrospectively comparing the students’ unfamiliar faces with the privileged half of his slim memory file on case-specific susps and perps who might resemble them if ingeniously or just affectively disguised. The advent of bob-cuts, Mohawks, and advanced wig technology further complicated matters.
‘Can’t even sign off on gender, anymore,’ he chagrinned with a loping series of right hooks followed by one great staving left to the bobbing antenna of Golden Gloves-era Frazier.
What obvious clue could anyone provide at a library? Each action so mundane as to be suspicious therefore. Because isn’t the perfect cover the one which most describes necessity? This room fenestrated with dusty shelves surrounded by tables of computer-gaping zombies; humans making magnificently legitimate, frivolous, and desperate sport here; a social service agency/gaming parlor with that old school waft of academe: What could be more nakedly legitimate? And this was the sort of democratically open floor-planned space that defied secret corners or sly displays. There could be no whispers between stacks, no pass-n-cup of notes. All was yolk-and-white aglow with eco-friendly (but firm) halogen. Mothers could entertain their child’s romp and yowl in a pastelly nurturing corner full of wooden toys splayed on plush carpet. Teens had no compunction about horsing around, yelping, and being stunningly sexual for their years. The rest of the unclean, elderly, and otherwise occupied could hope all the racket at least provided little interstical zones of anonymity to creep into and pull the covers over with an oversize on The History of Military Flight – The Graphic Version or the latest headstone-sized large-print romance with 3D illustrations by Bradford Ann Darlingbird. Today’s public library was mustless, lively, and blatant.
No matter how convincing his cover, he was still the most suspicious person around. Not having a Kingdom address he had to register for and “clearly display” a visitor-worker badge. So there he is inside the plastic badge swinging from his chest with a ponytail version of the cover wig he now wears wild to accentuate his raving (but that is not so different from his, as he puts it, “really just unfathomable” radical 99’er days when his (now very ex-) wife was still showing she loved him by combing his hair with her hands at the door each matrimonial dawn before he blew off class and then work to, as he explained to her later, “tune into some pretty heavy peaceful protesting and networking, man.”) So unless he swaps out the wig and takes some pretty advanced milieu-adjustment steps (e.g.: the shorn, pastel-preppy, card-carrying Eastmoreland Golf and Racquet Club cover of Mssr. Kerwin White L.L.P. or Malcolm Luther Jiminez, the coal-faced would-be black man attempting to disguise he is actually a Troutdale Latino by wearing an outsized and blatantly crooked afro and affecting a ludicrous brand of Latin-tinged b-boy cadence; Rawlings’ poor imitation of each stereotype meeting in a serendipitous middle ground of the generic Moron’s Patois that could be tweaked to meet just about any non-Euro cover) dude will be locally unmistakable to the great majority of Troutdalians and shopper visitors who take advantage of the Kingdom Club Card (which doubles as a visitor badge) and its illusory trumping of Portland’s sales taxlessness via cold hard bill’n’coin payouts at the end of each purchase as if you hitting the number’s going out of style. Just stowing the wig in the glove box and shaving out of the rain bowl he keeps in the truck bed to a good crisp ship-shape won’t take the veteran C.I.’s bedraggle off him. On top of the subtle yellowing of his features and the crow scratch at the corner of his eyes, he blames the sheer man-hours he has spent in the surreptitious element, indoors and out. The chameleon cover has seeped under his skin and caked up around his joints. The pantomimic affectations, limps, twitches, accents, drawls, posturings, and limitless idiosyncratic add-ons have recalibrated his entire nervous system. On the rare occasion he listens to himself talking or catches a glimpse of his reflection in a D-town window he will startle at the strange vessel containing the still familiar down deep of his soul and crux.
But when he got fool nostalgic enough in a booze-down last night he shuffled behind the Safeway and entered the Johnny on the Pot with the hand-sized mirror nailed next to the upkeep log and tried to wade through the meadow fogs of fate and happenstance spanning this strange face and its vaguely remembered predecessor. He removed the loon-wig and tried to primp the salt and pepper mccoy into a semblance of bygone form but quickly gave up. Glum-faced, he reminded himself he is just enough of a sensitive to avoid anything in the ballpark of a wifely comb-down or smoothing. Disgusted, he then barely won the battle to not slate-cleaningly shave the stringy remainder clean off and wear the monk’s dome penitent to at least give himself the liar’s impression of having checked off a long-past chapter. Wigs sitting strangely on shorn heads in the same way the sleep-sagged vehicle appears slightly off.
But he will never be boozed to the point of not remembering himself before exiting the john. The joints will re-calibrate and he’ll put a subtle stagger filtered through intact pride into his gait; boozeville lite being an acceptable variation on the loony-bomb shuffle.
“Duty, Rawlings. Duty.”
And though he knows the only person who should be in Cherry Park at 3:14 a.m. is crane-necked Dmitri over at Babushka’s watching his beloved Dynamo Moscow live via satellite beneath the ceiling corner tube. So he wills little invisible (but palpable) smoke-and-stink signals up from his flats and pits that say ‘I’m a heavy in the lightweight division of loons. Go ahead. Look at me closer. I’m as incongruous as it gets out here in Troutdale Kingdom. I’m living out of a pick-up truck with my dog fer crissakes. I restitute at the library. Look how far I’ve fallen from my sweet embezzled high. Look what McMinnville State will do to a man.’
Any half-competant C.I.’d’ve fingered him for a peer from day one. A state or feddy? Half-possible. An agent of Them? Who knows. For all we know they don’t even have one. Moreover, they probably don’t even need one since all Cherry Park, Troutdaleans seem geniuses of the bland and likely cover. Whereever you turn there they are. Seven Foot Slim the over-patient admin or Rosanna In Excelcis the powdery and pious children’s librarian. The parade of diversely unsuspicious and so type they transcend type types. All blasted the cleaner in this brain-scratching eco-lighting.
It had been har-har to Swafford’s hardy to throw him the blandest cover imaginable. Pastel children’s books, earnest how-to’s and histories, overtly sexual knitting and crochet books, technicolor pop-culture winkfests, little plastic boxes full of the thousands of movies not even tangentially about cuisine, sports, or spying; all in the meat hooks of this indelicate man with raccoon eyes, crosshatched skin, Wildman hair, and an Igor limp gifted from the stray bullet set-up-shop in his scrambled right knee.
“Ew, Sarah? … That library dude…He was staring right at you.”
Whispers through the adjacent aisle from the M.H.C.C. girls.
“Yeah, Sarah. I think he’s in luuuuuuv. He’s gonna stalk you.”
A concordance of furtive giggles.
“Shut up! Stalkers don’t work at the library. Way too obvious.”
‘This Sarah’s no fool,’ he thought. ‘I’m way more subtle.’
The library closes at 6 p.m. Saturday evening. His co-workers flash smiles and drop cordialities all around him. He grunts replies and startles at his co-workers’ voices, his ponytail whipping from shoulder to shoulder. ‘McMinnville does this to a man,’ is his slouching apology. The god-given, life-granted raccoon eyes come in handy for this effect. William Walton is skilled at mediating the divide.
“Good work in the shelves tonight, Mr. Pauling. Do you have plans?”
Pauling sticks to gruff, gravel-voiced monosylabs with traces of resignation and cynicism. He is every bit life’s likely loser, all slouches and resignation. Just the type who may need to let loose about his fringe politics in the bed of his oddly shaped truck once in a cathartic while.
“You know…Grande Ronde. Craps. Slots. Cards. You know… the uzge. Loss. Net damn loss.” Then one long mouth sigh.
The Co-workers go still. Rosanna In Excelses appears stricken. Walton is always quick to kibosh the pall.
“Well, good luck to you, Sir, and to all of us,” swiping the alarm card/door lock “a good night.”
The beeping alarm follows their puffs and foot clicks into the Cherry Park cold.
He has no tails or surveillance planned. Cruising the Kingdom’s three main thoroughfares has been a dead dry gulch. Rolling north down 238th to the Troutdale Interstate Truck Stop and changing in into Martin Luther Jiminez to hustle the cashiers, short-haul drivers, and fellow prostitutes for the slightest morsel of intel on comings and goings, delivery addresses, and any Kingdom newcomers has yielded hollow contradictions, unverifiable claims, and meatless bones. And Christ, no one, male prostitute and C.I. alike, should have to work the truck lanes in nothing but pressed tan slacks, a yellow polo, and a baby blue cardigan in the wind tunneling ice of late-September gorge air. Nor would it do any good to roll back up the hill to Olde Towne to hit one of the three bars to hobnob and flirt, extract the smallest crumb of intrigue out of one of the retail and consignment shop owners, antiquarians, hair dressers, salon workers, popular art gallerists, out-on-the- town truckers, local farmers, or seasonal workers from everyl land north of the prime meridian who’d chosen not to California this fall but stick it out for the rumored bumper apple, pear, sassafrass, hay, pumpkin, cranberry, and holiday tree crops. Blood from a stone and whatnot. Law of diminishing returns. An excuse for a decent meal out and a walkabout in the chaos of his beloved D-town.
Rawlings and Tiger are beneath the canopy of the boulevard’s worth of old-growths stretching down The Parkblocks South. Tiger is off-leash and juggling a rawhide bone in his mouth. Rawlings holds a hot pawful of Thai curry-coconut soup in a red-white container decorated with the animals of the Chinese zodiac.* (“Can you double bowl me?” he’d said to the counter jockey. “I’m gonna drink this, not spoon.” The man behind the counter had smiled placidly and obeyed. ‘Such things make a customer loyal,’ Rawlings thought. ‘That and the generous amounts of lemongrass.’ He took a protracted inhalation from the steaming pull-top hole. Tiger looked up with questions and returned to juggling the bone.) The pavement slipped away behind them and the city unfolded before them. To stroll into the bannered and sparkling fall night of an open city at the end of an election year spike in The Bombing Campaign? To have that certain sort of lame duck session joie de vivre. To bask in this interim of oh so heavenly threat! Of romantic redoubt! Of a void violently competed for! Let the threat of blooming fire – rhetorical or actual – color our cloud-pasty faces. Dance down the sidewalks in the un-syncopated tap of the superstitious who would ward off the would-be screaming daemons of pavement clapping debris. Push our bodies in tight in some speakeasy with renegade notions about smoking bans. Would that no one had to suffer to achieve such jet-plummeting closeness. Would that no one had to be unjustly treated in the name of this…happiness. This absolutely un-warlike siege without filed candidates, shadowy proxies, and chameleonic adversaries. And, forgive him, but credit to Them for, however politically expedient, keeping non-combatant casualties impressively low but not so un-lethal as to take the romance out of a good huddling in one of the little safehouses, bunkers, and foxholes of solace and pleasure dotted high and low about D-town, even underground, especially the one’s with like renegade notions about indoor pets. Yes! Let the perfume of catastrophe push D-towners and visitors alike within a plumber’s reach of one another’s pores. Let us be given the chance to have a good down deep whiff of one another again. Stipend and tax-flatter those wanting no part of it to move to Beaverton and The Couv.* (This much Duck-wise Mayor Roy had at least done.) Christ, he’d been in the Kingdom for far too long.
“So we need you to find out what’s what out there, Rawls.” Swafford lifted his sweatsome rump from the damp-ringed desk corner. “Fuel stipend sheets are in your box. I worked out too much this morning to bring them over with me.” He stage-wiped his brow and plieed from his Rawlings cube exeunt. But not twenty seconds later his head was kilroy over the cube wall.
“Oh, one more thing. We got you a cover. You’ll love this. You ready? Okay. You’re just out of McMinnville for a white collar crime. Some fraud game. You’re criminally insane but just borderline social-wise. So, as an ap-oh-po restitution jag you’ll be shelving books for Troutdale Library. Doo-doo decimal and shit. We all know how much you love your fuckin’ books, Rawls.” A snort-guffaw was followed by a long hyena cackle, the last ten seconds of which Swafford banged on the cubicle top like a gleeful monkey with a schadenfreudic tendency learned from a twisted Goodall Jr. “You know, you being such a bookworm and all! Ah-hahahahahahahahaaaaaah! Ha, oh-oh-oh…ahhhhh,” dabbing his head his with a phantom handkerchief from another workout. “My god I love myself sometimes, Rawls. You should look into it.”
The tail-end had been vintage Swaff; the malevolence parading as bonhomie followed by the slightest locking of eyes that said ‘We both know you’ll be addicted to bottom by this cover inside a week. And let’s face it Rawls, this is a ferreting expedition of far juicier meat than the pat-ass security detail you slung on the Brady Campaign.’ And Swaff was right. The muscle memory had snapped to the moment he pulled into Cherry Park. Whatever gripes he had about aimlessness, boredom, and frighteningly sub-standard cuisine he would still be non-boozy drunk on adapting to or even transcending the cover to wring the slightest iota of use that could be made. If They could be had he’d do it. Bitch and moaning about it was just another form of vigilance. ‘This is dull but dullness is a clue of its own.’ Fact is, the living, breathing earth, as long as it was inside the urban growth boundary, is one big fat juicy clue for him. He is one of the rare fortunates whose personal constitution perfectly matches his professional prerogatives. He is a city-curious, city-loving naïve too simple-minded to be bored or jaded in any way. The city is wide open for him. Hell, doing paperwork even scratched a drutherly itch.
So he necessarily abandons the Swaff/administrative conspiracy angle in favor of what is in front of him. This is the simple-mindedness that serves. The booze has him mumbling stage-bittersweet and in-the-gut-earnest.
“They know full well I’d tail the tail of a flatulent ass for this city. For good clean god-loving elections. For freedom to all Portland City Subjects.” The tough-guy cover is run through with deep-down romantic and civic idealism. ‘Paranoia’ is just pejorative for ‘relentlessly curious.’
He looks into the high up firmament, above the massive bizarro holiday tree of the shopping center, beyond the ambient glow from Troutdale airport, I-84, and PDX, high up and beyond to the eastern glow of downtown and into the denser clutch of stars hung there. They were the afterglow encapsulated of this campaign’s first explosions. The little micro-uprisings that had been taking place for months now. The sense that Portland was opening up again, being tilted toward the good old days’ polarity, taking sides, and fighting like badgers. He hated the anti-civicness of it but, admittedly, loved the action.
Sure, there’d be logistical crampings of his conformed bachelor style at first and like always. There’d be no more peaceful porkchops in his smoke-stained corner of Mother’s. No bonus bone for Tiger from the butcher who re-diversifies into stews and soaps every campaign period. And lost his last sympathy and liberality toward in-shop pets after the Rescued Greyhound Suicide Bombing. Bachelordom being far lonelier for Rawlings with his mutt sad-eyed and shivering in another downtown vestibule, boneless while his best friend indulged in rare meats. But it would scratch City Investigator Rawling’s ripest lifelong itch: in the trenches brand of spy and skullduggery with dashes of stagemanship. Public dining with Tiger could still be had al fresco. He’d worn a rump pattern in the park block benches mixing dinner with casing, his unassigned but home-neighborhood beat. His studio refuge in the steel sky. Dead dry useless on this tail. So adjust, Rawlings. Adjust. Hunker into a cover because your long past being able to help yourself and you know it.
Hardship was part of the bargain. He was barred by ordinance from tying Tiger anywhere in Kingdom Publica. So as he dined in one of the ethnic eateries horseshoeing Cherry Park Tiger licked his chops in the rig parked outside. Not sharing meals with his boon beast caused very real pain. If he weren’t trying to insinuate himself into the hearts of the waiters and register jockeys he’d be dining al fresco with Tiger in the truck bed.
Bribes did no good. These poor suckers letter-of-the-law-ed it at profit’s expense because they were baring Downtown’s investigatory brunt for being “possible hotboxes of radicalism.” Anti-anti-immigrationists. Anti-Royists and other soccer-loving anti-b-ballists, Former-Soviet Bloc Leftos Leftier than even that Socialoid Second-runner Apologist Jefferson Smith, and all those who were and could be construed as excessively and unapologetically swarthy or somehow aligned with them. And dining in in East County, much less The Kingdom was, especially in this bloody election cycle, akin to a political statement to Downtown Investigations. After the Roy Tax Purges, the Inner Core Consolidation Project, and the consequent Bracket Extraditions (a legal and very physical brand of foreclosure that made gentrification look like Punch and Judy economics) to even take-out from one of the Outer-Core non-native eateries put you under suspicion from Rawlings’ less simple-minded peers. Hence one of his sub-covers as a devotee of greasy Cherry Park fare. God help him, he ached for some an Inner-Core Indian with the attendant passel of cuisine fashionistas and their presumed voter profile right down the pike of “Sustainably Expensive” Food Barroness Eileen Brady. Or even just a decent falafel from one of the renegade foodcarts dotting the eastern extreme of Inner Core, just barely to the left side of the border and the profile realm of former City Council member Charlie Hales, aka Senor Spanglish, aka Chucky Tightrope, aka John B. Sales. If all the political b.s. had over-soured Rawlings’ pho then Their terror bombs had cocked up his tripe. His Swiss watch metabolism was the stuff of the Samuel Adams Administration.
“So bygone…so bygone. Our culinary peak.” When he sighed his paunch rolled around for an eely three one-thousand. “Duty, Rawlings. Foof. Duty.”
So there is nowhere for Tiger to sit while he gets a good huddle in over Tapatio’s steaming plate of passable asparagus tamales or the “Pork Succulent Bowl Massif” of under-chilied but stout-noodled pad seeuw yeu from Sweet Thai Kitchen. And the fifteen minute dine-in minimum instituted in most restaurant means he won’t even catch half a quarter of the Trailblazers squinting under the grainy television in the corner of the Babushka’s ceiling). If he pushes the time-limit envelope a doleful woman in a smeared apron with an apologetic but nonetheless proprietary stink eye will essentially say ‘Much longer and I’ll have to ask you to leave. Why won’t you just do takeout like everyone else?’
He gets in the rig and Tiger, hangdogging it to the limit like always, looks up from his tangled blanket bed to meet Rawlings’ eye. He tells Rawlings he has been bored and broadly dissatisfied with the rawhide bone his head rests on and the menagerie of chew toys lovingly arranged on the dash for his supposed amusement. Couldn’t he have at least come out for a five minute session of Ball or Walk? Tiger asks these questions knowing full well there is a beef palmenyi or spicy pork bun in the bag concealed behind Rawlings’ back. After he, Tiger, manages to be polite, even just inquisitive about the warm white bag placed on and then held down by his fore-paws, he will daintily tear the paper away with his mouth to reveal a treat (“Oh boy, it is a bun!”) he will be utterly un-self-conscious about plunging his snout into and wolfing away at while Rawlings rubs his scruff and says “I know, buddy. I know. Election’s taking all the damn elegance out of the bachelor pleasures.” Front-loaded as he is by his sensual being and thoroughly ensconced in the absorption of the bun, the emotional end of Tiger will droop back to hangdog as he feels the departure of those scruff-kneading fingers half way into their getting started.
“Sorry, buddy. Duty…duty.”
Rawlings heads back towards the library.
He shadow-boxes with the wind then rope-a-dopes against a Lincoln to stare into an old Saab that hasn’t been moved in three days. Though immaculately clean inside the vehicle has that vague cloudiness and heavy feeling of a lived-in vehicle. There’s something about the redistribution of weight in a slept-in vehicle that throws the shape and scale of such vehicles ever-so-slightly but no less viscerally out of whack. You hustle and cover up in enough lots or moonlight as a mechanic and you’d know it with your eyes closed. Rawlings places is it as a three-month mobile domicile. This is only peculiar insofar as The Kingdom also has heavy anti-‘camping’ ordinance. It’s about the last place you’d want to crashpad if your engine’s still working. So: the Saab is mentally noted but not privileged in his upstairs file cabinet as he is convinced – whether intellectually or paranoically – The Kingdom’s branch of Them is sophisticated enough to have very subtle anti-anti-terrorist measures in place, i.e. dummy stage-cars to throw off D-town surveiling C.I.’s on stage-loon-electioneering jags in the Kingdom’s most densely frequented public space. It’d be too obvious if there were toiletries on the dash, a tangle of clothing in the back seat, and the hip sink of the fetal sleeper. Moreover, you’d be led to believe this was just another addressless border hopper with black market plates and vending licenses to match who’d chosen to ghost the tax grid instead of continue to be impoverished by it; another itinerant Hales supporter who jumped the border as the perceived heat (Inner or Outer) dictated. These were investigative small fry compared to the cold, non-tartared fish sandwich that laid in his investigative lap. Whether this was a roaming serf or some well-executed cover (departmentally aka “milieu transformation”) there could be no proof until he could lapel-shake driver and/or denizen until he squealed something sufficient to justify a fact check on one of the library’s public computers. (Cover dictated that a white-collar ex-con like Rawlings not be allowed sufficient opportunity to test the vulnerabilities of the county-hosted website, aka The Mint.) This distractability or over-curiosity leading to time-clock derelictions called in by the Branch Administrator to the fictional p.o. on belonging to Swafford.
“You tell that abundant a-…ahem…Convict-Citizen Pauling that is to phone the Hell in tonight or I’ll have his ass. Be sure to say that part: “…Have. Stop. His. Stop. Ass. Full stop.” Over and out.”
Rawlings was shouting and no one cared.
Jumping up and down in the truck bed. Gesticulating and frothing. Another election year nut. Shoppers clutched their bags and-or children and hurried on. Rawlings snapped. Another tipless break was almost over.“You’re the Versailles of parking lots, Troutdale! Baroque robots in thrall to secret societies! Any one of you could be one of them!”
Even the magic word couldn’t slow their dogged push through the early evening shoppers’ slog. Rawlings checked his watch and considered a different tack. ‘Make it personal,’ he thought.
“But you’d have to be alive to be one of them! Pay them that respect at least! You’re half-dead, Troutdale! You might not even exist!”
He thought he saw a middle-schooler two rows down glance his way so he pressed an imagined advantage with the cow-faced boy.
“Are you alive?! Ask your mother! Aren’t you both a sham?! Or a figment! A figment of the King’s imagination?! Hell, you’re probably not even registered!”
The boy turned away and scowled into an obscure middle distance of his own. Only the tin rattle of shopping carts answered. Wrinkling bags and squeaking brakes. A muted murmur into the neck of a coat. The distant tinkling of jangled keys. Poor shivered souls with chunks of commute left deserve better than the provocations of another electioneering nut. He didn’t want to overdo the cover. Not to say he didn’t half-believe what he shouted.
“Troutdale! Oh, Dear Troutdale! Do you have election fever?! Are you in a swoon?! Or is this the general aspect of an election-numbed serf?! We should have taken your votes away with the annex, you slobs!”
Four cars down, a woman in a thin, wind-whipped coat shoved bags in the back seat. Rawlings leapt at her with his voice.
“You madame! Question. Why should you vote if you aren’t even alive?!”
“Leave me alone. I’m voting Smith. I don’t care what you say. Leave me alone.”
She lunged into her car, ripped out of her spot, and ran each of the six stops on the way out of lot. She tailgated a sixteen wheeler down the hill of 238th, her brake lights checkered by the second growth thicket lining the sidewalks leading to I-84. Rawlings sucked deep off Troutdale’s snow-ready air and closed his eyes. He saw the fallow gorgeland acreage surrounding the shopping center charge up to the long common wall shared by Double Cavalry Church and Convention Center, Style Nail Salon, Exhibit Hairdressers, Sunset Nail Salon, Troutdale Library, and Tapatio and slam mats of moldering leaves and dead mud patches against the stucco. Wind doubled up on the slop and frosted swampy adobe tight to the center’s northeast boundary until it turned into a nitre-caked fortress wall. Fog rolled down from the slopes of the black mountain to the east and crawled down the gorge. ‘Hemmed in,’ Rawlings. ‘You’re hemmed in here. No one’s for you and everyone’s against you.’ His inner-eyes floated higher, above the valley floor. In the sprawling black to the east, little pinheads of glow crept down rutted farm roads and disappeared. Electioneers hustling for the last kingmaking vote? Or those he was failing miserably to infiltrate? Or at least ferret out. A sub-cell to a sub-cell of the ephemeral but no less destructive them. Even in this moment where he was supposed to be collecting himself before returning to his the cover of this cover he is haunted by the graspless vastness of an enemy who could be hiding in an old-growth stump, a tarpaulin-lined pit, the cellar of another head-shaking Troutdalian farmer, housewife, or fallen 99er. They might bore into any nook in these low-density flatlands shot through by the frigid but still potable Sandy River and spiked about with little buttes and ledgelands of promontory and backing forest full of perfectly good soil to grow in year-round. Or they could squat deep inside one of the warehouses of the abandoned jack-ports strung along the Oregon side of the Columbia from here to The Dalles. They could have dug a hole into the rubbly ruins of The Big Ole Dam itself; the lawless regions even the staties don’t bother spelunking around in anymore. (“A waste of hugely diminished resources,” said Mayor Roy. “There’s only enough minutes to go around.”) Do they begin their day as he does with a Good Hot Joe in hand looking out over their own little quarter of dew-gathered greens and think “This is all mine. This is all good. Nothing can touch me here.” As the downtown sparkle of high-rise dawn turns office glass grey, pink, and purple, winks its confirmation, does his distant enemy twenty miles to the east on the Columbia hear the peeping ascent of the small creatures he shares the Western Willamette Valley with? Does he have the confidence of flora and fauna while Rawlings only feels sure of himself in the rectilinear cells of Downtown? Is it a question of being out of his element? Is that why this cover has been such a relentless failure?
Playing the electioneer or some other affiliated or free-lance nut from the bed of his truck could be the stupidest or best cover possible. He had no idea. Weeks wasted on subtlety and provocation alike. Not a single decent tip as The City’s enemies, the nebulous and effectively disorganized Them – the bombardier squads, the radical deconstructivists, the all-round anarchic douchebags – continued raising Hell within the city limits and – according to tips – set up shop in this unlikeliest of semi-planned ex-urbs; a commuter oasis recently re-branded as The Unincorporated Kingdom of Troutdale. Firmly in the City tax grid but autonomous on all in-border decisions. Self-determined and self-policed. Fashioned to be a lax-lawed and business-friendly fiefdom by King Knight. In other words: A haven for those looking to get lost or hide out. And in an election year no less.
‘And so this dud of all undercovers while all the action’s going on the other side of the border. My hometown blowing straight to Hell up.’
He opened his eyes and the shopping center coalesced around him. The center’s unlikely light show flashed and sparkled underneath the massive valley night. Fat, undulating serpents of exhaust rose into the air. Shopping sounds collectivized into the cooperative hum of commerce. A horn blew, a gravel-voice snarled. He felt a bit of the old warm charge behind his forehead and in his hands. The romance of the city exists even here. It’s why the cover and the cover of the cover were still barely tolerable. Though he hadn’t gotten a damn thing out of these people, taken together, they constituted a force. Their sheer number, bustle, and noise was an urban music; the thing that made Rawlings’ blood beat. He respected them for at least tallying to a crowd of motivation and will; as complex and unfathomable as any other city scene that occurs in the good plain light of shared public space. It was the night valley floor beyond these walls sprinkled with private stars, logging roads, and state parks that scared the holy Hell out of him. The Center was a relative oasis.
“Down with King Knight! Hail the Lord of Portland!”
He started back for the library.
Ice-pricked wind raced down the western face of the mountain. Malevolent. ‘Far from impersonal,’ he thought. Stealing through the gnarled and stunted orchards of East Kingdom, pushing the creak and wheeze out of gap-toothed, skeletal barns, it marshaled itself in the stump fields of a clear-cut to shoot the forking Blue-Line tunnels then the paralleling venerable rusts of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe to rejoin in the fields behind Reynolds Senior High to shoot the gap between The Double Calvary Church and Convention Center and the neon-red battlements of the Safeway. Antennae whipped and swayed every which way. One last swift kick from the nowherelands beyond.
“Christ damnit they’re all in on it together aren’t they.”
He looked into sky where the mountain lay hidden. Stomped his feet and gritted a smile. Remembered opponents who, however unjust, were at least admirable in their blatancy; their cold steel knife points brandished not with tendency but prejudicial and overt purpose; a less gray world for fellow city jerks, city investigators, and all their in-boundary brethren to take the proverbial slug to the bad guys in with commensurately non-rhetorical hooks, jabs, and haymakers; a subculture of no-goodnik with balls sufficient to at least have a little of the good ole criminal style for crissakes. Instead, he flailed at signals – phantom and otherwise – pinging from pathetic little phones to the cells towers on Black Mountain and up into the ether to ding off an aluminum satellite to frizzle back to another goddamned disposable phone. He was prey to buzzing, staticcy flies. He shadow-boxed the air around the staff entrance and huffed cold air.
“All in the name of city, Rawlings. C’mon. Giv’em Hell in there.”
He pushed inside straight to a cart of books. The volunteer coordinator followed him for a few strides and began to speak but thought better. Rawlings pushed the cart onto the floor.
While working the truck bed on dinner break a woman stops to listen to Rawlings.
He’s on about Them again. Something about they could be anyone. Neighbor. Friend. Priest. One of the paranoia jags hoping to prod someone’s self-righteous bone. This woman seems game. She folds her arms skeptically. Rawlings changes tack. He will try to recruit her so she can demonstrate disgust. He accesses his inner junk poet, the just-beneath-the-conscience idea sludge he barely believes but cannot disavow since its taken root within. It’s a combination of his street-corner preacher cover and his shelled-out doomsday sayer. He once described it to Tiger on stakeouts as his one “purely honest state of being.” He bends to speak to the woman in a confidential whisper.
“Remember something, Madame. We all have our consolations. We whiskey our damn night-sleeps with it. Our addiction to preferences.” He lunges for her bag and she is too startled to react. He hoists up a can of fava beans as though displaying the severed gorgon head. “Party, help-mate, country, kingdom. We’re all drunk on affiliation.” The woman then gasps when the head of a goofy-eyed and salivating brindle mutt pops over the side the truck and slathers licks all over hand and can.
“Tiger, you’re ruining the show here, buddy.”
Catching Rawlings looking away the woman bashes and scratches at his hand.
“Christ lady!”
Tiger begins barking and scrabbling his claws all over the truck bed and almost falls on his side.
“Lunatic! I’m voting Smith. J.J. Smith! And nothing you say can change my mind.”
Rawlings tackles Tiger before he can go over the side after the jogging woman. The dog takes this for a game and growlingly shakes and rips at Rawlings sleeve. Another shopper wheeling by sees a man and dog on all fours in the bed of a truck growling at one another in a standoff. Rawlings notices then shouts at her retreat.
“Kibble in every pot, Ma’am. Justice for the non-English speakers! Liberate the Troutdale Animal Shelter 12!”
Tiger releases the sleeve and barks at the woman. Rawlings leans over the side and joins in. Sleet begins to fall.
Roaming the lot, ostensibly walking Tiger, he pulls from a flask.
Tipsy enough to be transfixed by the professional voyeurism of looking into other’s vehicles. Hugging vehicles to stare into the still, suspended compartments. The pocket flashlight that can double as a shiv testing the areas under seats. But the little assemblages are painfully mundane. Almost suspiciously uninteresting. He tries to manufacture a feeling of portent, limn some hidden purpose from combinations of in-auto bric-a-brac. Licorice cough drops-ice-scraper-plaid dog blanket; sunglasses-cord of firewood-geometry textbook-Star Magazine; deflated basketball-coffee-ringed mug-an action figure with shield but no sword straddling the rearview mirror. They begin to blur together with swigs and morph into an army. Leave-behinds are silent armies defending the abandoned vehicle. Seats are mined with paper products bombs in origami. Sentry bobble-heads (hula girls, lil devils, over-innocent, upstaring angels, plastic soldiers, dinosaurs, even a vintage Rookie Mayor Roy, his retired Number 7 melted into a 4 or 1) are watching him watch. They’ve got him covered.
“The boozy paranoias,” he lies because the paranoia is professional and the booze is recreational. He wants to let his guard down to the point of irresponsibility and allow his enemies the opportunity to become complacent. It’s the sort of trick a bored and ineffective C.I. can at least feel magnanimously tipsy about.
He indulges in some retrospect. Captain Swafford had flopped that truly portentous ass of his on the corner of his desk in that jovial way of his, had really dangled some hang-time under it so the impact would make Rawlings’ coffee slosh onto his paper work.
“Been talking to the major and he says to me ‘I think Rawlings is getting stale on the Brady beat.’”
Swafford’s addressing the ceiling panels, the little chorus of dots constituting his fawning studio audience.
“‘He’s having more of those fashionable of lunches of his. The Oat Cuisine.’”
Rawlings is blotting the coffee of a report, not looking up.
“‘Oh Hell no,’ says me. ‘Not Ole Rawls. He is a professional. Con-summit. Through and through.’”
Swafford is absolutely beaming at this point. Rawlings knows it and even if he won’t look up Swafford knows he knows.
So he masters himself a bit to become over-serious.
“‘On the other hands,’ says I. ‘Maybe he’s being under- utilized downtown. Maybe he’s, you know, a little shell-shocked just like the rest of us.”
Swafford screws his face into a pained mask of abject sorrow.
“I mean he’s human after all isn’t he? Even our heroic C.I. Rawls.’”
“Just give me the punchline, Maje. Your sweating on my C-9’s.”
“‘What he needs is a good rest. I know. Let’s send him to the country. Good clean air. Shopping housewives. Teenage charmers. Greasy cuisine but honest cuisine, Rawls. Good ole fashioned honest lard-based, mono-gladiate or whatever the fuck quizzin’.’”
“Don’t do it, Maje.”
“‘Let’s send him,’ said I. ‘Let’s send him to the sticks.’”
“Oh no.”
“The Kingdom. Where the action is. A kinda pastural retreat for Ole Rawls. He deserves it.”
“Aw Christ.”
“See if he can stir up some Hell out there. Nab a few terrorists. Maybe even find love.”
Swafford decided not to contain himself anymore.
“Buh-ha- Buh-ha Buh-HAAA-hahahahahaha-haaaaaaa! Woo-eee! Rawls is going down home! Yeeeeee-HAAAAWWW!”
Now was it the boozy retrospectives that made him think even this performance by Swafford lacked its usual…venom. Had it been as it now seemed that there was something self-conscious about his performance? Hadn’t it been an unusually pat? As though he were working himself up through the stages of his needling just to check them off without savoring the schadenfreudic joy that usually bubbled up in the damned jelly gut of his and spurted out his ass for emphasis? (“Oh-oh-oh, excuse me there, Rawls, do.”) Hadn’t this been the third case in four months he’d been pulled off? He wasn’t getting anywhere, sure. But no one was these days. The enemy was too diffuse. Why break up the continuity of his case-building? It was not only bad policy but explicitly against Mayor Roy austerity measures. (“Make every possession count. Keep your turnovers down. Execute. Execute. Execute.”) Swafford filled out the same Economy Reports every manager did. Three case yanks was just plain un-patriotic, on top of stupid for someone to keep up their professional and avocational vindictiveness.
So maybe there were deeper motives. Maybe he should be doing a cover on The Maje. Or whoever gave The Maje his orders. Wasn’t it likely that people knew a lot more than they were saying? Wasn’t it just plain stupid to waste the best C.I. they had so far out of his element? Or were this boozy self-righteousness? Or boozy bitch-pettiness. Maybe the department sent him here for good reasons he wasn’t aware of yet.
Mass Transportation is the second novel by Scott Tienken.
The buildings are literally running amok and a public bus is a harrowed citizenry’s only refuge in Scott Tienken’s futurist-jigsaw-gothic Mass Transportation. Join the citizens of Broken City as they flee from ambulatory buildings, urban ghosts, and each other; all too distracted to realize their only hope may be a mysterious woman known as The Queen.
EXCERPT:
13.
Here is Broken City taking a break from hostilities to go out and play.
Buildings on the lam from other buildings. Buildings kneeling behind other buildings. Big buildings pulling down the edificial trousers of smaller buildings. Buildings throwing rooms at one another. Gamboling about, brandishing lampposts, kicking mailboxes, jumping up and down.
We try to run with the former élan, as if it this too were the most natural thing in the world. But we are too trippingly inward and self-conscious. Our reflexes are shot. We haven’t been sleeping. Haven’t been getting along with our new families. Been unjust. We fall to the ground weeping. The sky fills with massive shuttlecocks, boomerangs, and medicine balls. We beg our new families for forgiveness.
When playtime is over the battles, reversals, demolitions, and removals are resumed. Massive shadows shoot into the spot-lit clouds all through the night. Distant explosions kick up drafts in our sealed chambers. We turn off the lights and pull the covers over our new loved ones. The lights are turned back on. We blindfold each other. Turn the white noise machines up. Sleep even less. Are constantly on edge.
The buildings learn to move silently. We station guards with megaphones outside. They listen and feel for the slightest vibration. A pebble falls. “She’s on the move! She’s on the move! She’s on the move!” The guard presses the warning siren on the megaphone. “Get ready! Get ready! Get ready!” Initiates a series of shotgun blasts to boot. But it’s too late. The ground floor is flashing the office manager’s desk lamp to signal and slips in alongside the other building traffic easing down Northeast ______ Avenue. We roll over in bed and try to go back to sleep. Where else would we go anyway?
We wake in a different part of town…no. We only dreamt we did. The ghost of the threat has shaped our dreams. Still, our bodies have that rocking feeling of having recently swam in the ocean. We vomit out the window.
We try to shake it off. Stretch our cramped muscles. Put the coffee on. Sing a popular inspirational song in the shower. Try not to lay out too much of the day in our imagination since to do so is folly. Try to go no further than anticipating the consolation of a crisply fwumping, standard-issue, industrial-grade plastic umbrella snapping tautly into place. Fwump! There: Another apparatus. We consider taking voice or dance lessons. We are so grateful for having made it through the night that, despite all logic to the contrary, we feel optimistic. Picture ourselves vehemently differing with someone who would deign to speak ill of our still fair city. Sing another inspirational.
‘Ohhhhhhhhhhhh, Jack.
Bro-ken Ci-teeeeeeeee’s……
rearin’-for-a-comeback
rearin’-for-a-comeback,
rearin’ for a comeback-Ohhhhhh.
Ohhhhhhhhhhhh, Jill!’
(repeat)
We temporarily fall in love with this sweet relief, this gifted respite from the bully’s ire. We relax a little and anticipate holding a good hot paper cup of coffee in our cold wet hands. Weapons come in many forms.
Reportedly, the above is the telltale behavior of someone about to make a run for it. A spouse will say ‘He seemed fine this morning. Happy even.’ Then the last place he or his vehicle will be seen is somewhere close to the tip of the peninsula or maybe skulking around the southwest marina. A vessel will be missing. We will never know if he has made it or not. The only evidence is a logjam of empty boats, paddles, boxes of provisions, weapons, ordinance, lifejackets, and assorted keepsakes at the confluence. No one has the heart to make much of a search beyond that.
The rest of us remain. Either out of fear, habit, no better alternative, or the amalgam of these known as ‘our choice.’ We hold out hope for a future ‘return to normalcy.’ Compare ourselves to others. ‘This must be similar to what it is like for those living in…say…the arctic regions. What with the confinement. The threat on the other side of the door. We’re not so strange. Well, alright, we are. But that doesn’t mean we have to sit here and take it.’ And Broken City, in a now familiar, ominous hands-off manner, allows us to once again begin building. We have groundbreaking ceremonies, ribbon cuttings, grand openings. We tiptoe into shining lobbies. Mentally note the points of egress. Take the stairs. ‘No, no. I’ll meet you up there. I need the exercise.’
The buildings even cease hostilities with each another. We wonder how long the new détente will last. Wonder what we did to deserve this. Drop any self-consciousness about believing in the power of our superstitions. Think maybe we are getting through to Broken City. Carry two shotguns. Create more involved tap routines. Buy cordless microphones for our chanting. Serenade Broken City. Perform increasingly obscure mantras using terms we hope Broken City might understand. Turn them into still more obscure serenades. A few samples:
Here I am!- out on __th
(Three quick claps)
Here I am!- up on Parapet
(Three more)
Let me cross o’er to the wheel-house
(Shotgun shot)
Here’s my engine for your noise (Mimic of revved engine, man steering himself down the street with invisible wheel)
Another:
Down with ________ , Down with ________
She was vacant any-WAY.
Down on ____, Down on _________
Surely he was in-SURED.
Not ole ____, Not ole ____
I’ve got the rite-a-way. (Clap)
I’ve got the rite-a-way. (Clap)
I’ve got the HIIIIIIDE-away. (Clap-clap-clap)
(Man making a turtle shell around him with the domes of two totable umbrellas)
And this:
(Sung threateningly, defiantly by a young woman wearing hiking boots with tap-inserts while standing in the middle of a ruin)
Crack-back (one hard tap)
gonna be a BACK lash (mimic of cracking a whip)
We live in the age of earthquakes!
(furiously, wildly jumping up and down, arhythmically cup-clapping, kuh-BRRRMMM!-ing with her mouth – all presumably to embody an earthquake)
Crack-back (two taps)
gonna be a BACK-lash (two cracks of whip)
We live in the age of hurri-CANES!
(blowing as hard as she can, arms at sides, spinning and swaying like a top)
Crack-back (three taps)
gonna be a BACK-lash (three cracks of whip)
We live in the age of (screaming as high and loud as she can) FLOOOOOOOD! (and passing water for an impressively long period of time)
The fool-lucky, open-air tour guides pull the bus alongside and push the button on their megaphone. “Listen to what these songs say, ladies and gentlemen. Are they not truly bizarre? But please (finger wagging): Don’t judge them too harshly, my friends. Remember: This could be your city some day. Your _______ ! Or your _____ _____ ! Any one of our cities could be a Broken City in waiting!”
▫ ▫ ▫ ▫ ▫
The streets become so strangely crowded during The New Confidence many of us choose to become nocturnal so we have more breathing room.
Then most of us go nocturnal. (Our attitudes shift this quickly.) You see us running our errands at night. Peeking around the corner of our hedge. Running to the curb with our cans of waste, running back to the garage, jumping in a vehicle, pressing a button to raise the door, and peeling out of the driveway to speed to the supermarket. Sprinting from the parking lot to the obliging doors and jogging through the blaring aisles of halogen realizing we are still in our bathrobe. Seeing others also in their bathrobes and still others in nothing but underwear and flip flops. Approximately thinking ‘This is the attenuated world I have chosen. At least it isn’t crowded here.’ Wondering if we will forget where we have parked…what our vehicle looks like.
We white-knuckle the wheel and wade through the mist-curtained streets. We part the shear fabrics of halogen hung night. We think we see ghosts inside a cloud-sunken intersection. We think better of it but are followed home by the possibility.
We make it back without any serious complication. We are grateful. We touch the faces of our loved ones. This is our magnanimous interval. We are at our most considerate. We take an inventory of our opt-outs small and large. Consider the personal style in which we have been glossing this latest transitional period. ‘Is my adaptation helping? Am I hurting anyone in the process? Am I still patient and kind to my loved ones? Am I cruel to my fellow citizens? Unfair? How deep a pit might I throw myself down in order to be over-generous to my fellow man? It’s not as dramatic as all that is it? I must simply try harder. Do better. I truly want to do better. We’re not all bad after all. Only…I feel so…uneasy. Things are calm now but Broken City could turn on us at any moment. I have no…leverage.’
This may not be exactly what we’re thinking but I damn well bet its in the ballpark.
These silent efforts mean nothing to Broken City, though. They see the same bunch of loon-ritualists, sprinters and skulkers, and would-be citizens of an increasingly unvaried stripe. Our attitudes toward them change not at all. We are unspeakably dull. The blandly insane, nocturnal company we provide is answered with animal howls and metallic groans. Perhaps they mourn their losses. Blame the fighting on such a petty thing as man. Ventilation systems join in with a chorus of sighs. Fire hydrants and dormant fountains rocket tears into the air.
Are they capable of forgiving us? Do they want to? Or will they aggressively forget us. Either way, terrible consequences seem imminent. An odor like burning fills the city air. And that slight smokiness (in odor and aspect) that moved in when we first began breaking for good? It is now sulfur-yellow. Broken City resembles old, water-stained newsprint. The typeface is jumbled and smeared. The citizenry are mannequins posing in the penny ads.
They decide to keep every street light illuminated throughout the night. Every glaring iota of city-space now blares with funhouse threat. The shadows are livid with menace. Every halogen-blasted corner seems the source of their roaring hurt. They terrify us without moving. And so we chant like mad, blast away through the spy hole in the plywood ‘window,’ overstep the prescribed sleeping pill dosage; anything to ride out the night of sirens and shadows…and the ghost-sounds of the threats of these things.
We are issued black eye-masks, black light bulbs, even more powerful sleeping agents.
We cling to our loved ones one last time before running to our transit machines. We drive like lunatics and think every pedestrian insane. When we return home from the day’s accumulations, evasions, short-cuts, and insufficient consolations we must work very hard not to project this complex accumulation of upset (which we crudely refer to as ‘anxiety’) onto those we share shelter with. It is a testament to our devotions, our vouchsafed kernels of love, perhaps even our capacity for justice, that we remain kind to those who matter most and don’t pursue a self-destructive catharsis. We sublimate our violence by ultra-chanting, ultra-shouting, and taking sledgehammers to little sacrificial hills of debris in the building’s basement. We dispose of the pebble and dust as discreetly as possible.
But, inevitably, unavoidably, we are forced out of doors again. The days pound away at us like this. No amount of quickening, machinery, or love can remotely inure us from the assault of a public realm out to scare the wits out of us. We continue moving, parcel by smile-cracked parcel, despite ourselves. Blanching, muttering, shaking.
It’s common knowledge that curating is becoming a dominant art form in the 21st century, which only makes sense as we’re entering the era that Patton Oswalt calls Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever. All over the internet people are trying to sort through infinity, and others are stepping up to help them out. That’s where Network Awesome comes in. The site is pure curation. Digital diving in the galaxy-sized dumpster of video that is You Tube.
Aside from an international touring, recording, label-owner and DJing career, Jason Forrest aka Donna Summer is the founder of Network Awesome. I first “cyber-met” Jason Forrest when he was hosting a radio show on WFMU called AD&D. I was totally unfamiliar with the styles of music he was playing IDM, Breakcore, Electroclash… I dunno know, I guess that’s what you’d call it, but it inspired the hell out of me. Anyway, I sent him some writing I did while listening to his show and it became a weekly collaboration that he’d post on his website. (The story was called “Billy Hubris” and is archived here.)
We’ve kept in touch over the last decade and this past year Network Awesome has been blowing my mind. Mr. Forrest has never been comfortable with self promotion so I’m honored to have him answer some of my questions.
Hey Jason,
Some questions for you:
-The easiest way to hook someone on Network Awesome is sit ‘em in front of a computer when they’re over my house drinking beers. All those suckers who won’t click the damn links I send ‘em. (The last time I did this involved a behind the scenes Muppet Show documentary.) How would you describe Network Awesome to someone who may be wary to just check it out for themselves?
It’s funny that people are so wary of discovering new things and spending even a moment on an unfamiliar site when we all spend a large % of our time on computers “looking for cool stuff”. Maybe that’s the paradox of our era.
But anyway, Network Awesome is a place where we present interesting and entertaining media from all eras and present it to the viewer in as clear and fun a way as possible. Our goal is to entertain as well as inform and we consider Network Awesome to be a bit like a living cultural museum.
Additionally we realized that we could collect groups of videos to make our own shows such as The Live Music Show (live music clips), Trailer Trash (movie trailers based on themes such as Japanese Horror or The Sex Pistols), Talk Show (Interviews with interesting people, like Gary Winogrand), Variety Show (a meta-Variety Show really), and then Collections focused on a common theme – like Malcolm X or Jim Henson Commercials from the 50′s.
But I disagree with Patton Oswalt, as there are quite a lot of things that are not on the Internet. That’s why we started a digital magazine to comment on and explain some of our content. Network Awesome Magazine publishes in-depth articles about 10 times a week from a variety of writers of all disciplines.
I’m curious about the behind the scenes aspects, I hope you don’t mind sharing.
Not at all, I’m an open book…
-How many people actively work on Network Awesome team, and what is your role? Sometimes I see you listed as founder, other times as co-founder.
Network Awesome is growing literally every day! We have 7 of us who are working on various aspects of the business or management of the site, with an additional 8 video curators and then over 50 writers who contribute to the magazine!
As for me, I conceived of Network Awesome largely by myself last summer then connected with my co-founder in Greg Sadetsky in November 2010. Together we had an amazing 6 week sprint where the idea of Network Awesome came into full bloom and we launched the site Jan 1, 2011. I’m currently the CEO and Creative Director.
-This is an enormous labor of love. You’re not just combing You Tube you’ve created your own aesthetic shell to house the videos, your own commercials and all the promotion. There is obviously a lot of time spent. About how much time do you spend on it, say weekly?
A LOT of time! haha! We actually all do a bunch of other stuff too (I run 2 record labels and work as a musician most weekends) but that said, I spend more and more time on Network Awesome. Maybe 50 hours a week?
I will say that being so “busy” has only really meant that I have less time for doing things twice. I make all the N.A. videos you see on the site, and most of them are done very quickly. haha
-How many days, or weeks of programming do you have ready in advance?
As of June 27th, we have shown 1,062 shows since Jan 1st and we have more than 456 shows ready to go but we get more and more great content every day!
-I’m all for art for art’s sake, but I feel like at some point monetization may appear. Am I right? If so how would that work? If not well hot damn!
It will. We are working on it now and expect advertising to start happening in a more visible way in the next few months. We have lots of ideas about how to incorporate Ads and Sponsorship but still keep the site focused on the user. It’s a real concern for us.
-Do you watch every single minute of content on Network Awesome? (a leading question as the interviewer is curious if he watched all of the Live Music program he contributed.)
I watch a great deal of it but I miss stuff every day though.
-We’re about the same age, and definitely grew up watching the same TV. A big part of Network Awesome is the nostalgia factor. Old cartoons, talk shows and commercials from decades past. Do you have anything to add to this thought?
At first Network Awesome was going to exclusively be nostalgic content, but then we realized that broadcast TV does such a bad job these days our scope opened. There appears to be a great need for good content and it appears that the mainstream broadcasting companies choose to focus on this less and less. We’re more than happy to bridge the gap!
-There are tons of creative people who are regulars at this blog, how would they go about contributing to Network Awesome? Are there types of content you’re especially looking for?
We fully understand that diversity of opinion and inclusivity only help to strengthen every aspect of what we do. We need people in almost every capacity from video curators to writers for the magazine to accountants to advertising folks and interns.
We are also producing original shows too – but maybe I’ll get back to you more on that later. Oh, we’re also starting a Tshirt series soon, so visual artists are always encouraged to get in touch!
Oh -and poets! We like you!
So again: Everyone – do you want to get involved?
It’s fun! hit me: info@networkawesome.com
Maybe it turns into a real job… -Finally, I’d love for you to get meta-curatorial (mega-curatorial? micro-curatorial?) on our ass and chose your current favorite episode of each Network Awesome Feature (so far!)
My pleasure!!!
Live Music Show
Best of Beat Club (1)
Talk Show
Talk Show: Aldous Huxley, Syd Mead
Documentary
Doc – “Muhammad Ali – When We Were Kings”
Collection
Collection: Michael Clark – Excerpts from “Hail the New Puritan”
Cartoon
Captain America: “The Return Of Captain America”
Movie
Movie – Demon Seed
Old TV Show
What’s My Line? – Elizabeth Taylor
Commercial
Trailer
Thanks Jason! I love Network Awesome! I’ll finish off with the Live Music Show I put together for NA… it was so much fun to do.
On the Passage of a few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1956-1972 A video documentary combining exhibition footage of the Situationist International exhibitions with film footage of the 1968 Paris student uprising, and graffiti and slogans based on the ideas of Guy Debord (one of the foremost spokesmen of the Situationist International movement). Also includes commentary by leading art critics Greil Marcus, Thomas Levine, and artists Malcolm Mac Laren and Jamie Reid. Branka Bogdanov, Director and producer. NTSC-VHS 22 min. 1989
Wetdream radiators hiss through the slum
room I sublet deep in the dispositions of dilate;
flags I shoplift from the United Nations Building
drape each icky splinter of my lap; lame ledgers
caress me; every inventory of reality ends up
xerox; my overdue rent has Croesus nervous,
defunded as regularly as ash-trojans and assass-
ination rumors—how routinely I lie, my lips
rent by hyena-starved laughter; my warts want
to go public; poop-pills slither me slower than
sandpaper eels; this ennui confers no libration
final enough to accord yours; adolescence n’est
ce pas; hot savior bullseye bait, another giant rind
of nose tongue; all futures rinse away unless they
use atrophy shampoo; icicles clutching at pigtails
fall past phone-thin panes; my navel’s diarrhea
chops my wig off: pincer earpods pierce home.
Thanks Bill.
“[Bill Knott's] poems are so naive that the question of their
poetic quality hardly arises. . . . Mr. Knott practices a dead
language.” —Denis Donoghue, New York Review of Books,
May 7, 1970
[Bill Knott's poems are] typically mindless. . . . He produces
only the prototaxis of idiocy. . . . Rumor has it that Knott’s
habit of giving his birth and terminal dates together originated
when he realized he could no longer face the horror of a poetry
reading he was scheduled to give.” —Charles Molesworth,
Poetry (Chicago) Magazine, May 1972
“[Bill Knott is] malignant . . .”—Christopher Ricks, The
Massachusetts Review, Spring 1970
“[Bill Knott's work] consists almost entirely of pointless poems,
that say disgusting things. . . . [His poetry is] tasteless . . . and
brainless.” —Michael Heffernan, Midwest Quarterly, Summer
1973
