ISSUE 13
Letter from the editors, Some rest in peace, and some sleep restlesssly, waking frequently, and rattling the shutters on the house. Some memories lie quietly in the chest under the bed, waiting to be re-opened. Remembrances like gossamer, unstable, and shifting, creep in the cracks between the floorboards and the mismatched edges of the door frames. We have collected for safe keeping the silver traces of memories trapped here in vials and arranged for the pensive among us to decipher. Memorably yours, Bad Jacket
TO SUBMIT TO BAD JACKET SEND YOUR WORK TO BADJACKET94@ GMAIL.COM Subscribe for Bad Jacket zines printed quarterly at patreon.com/badjacketpress Brought to you with love by editors Katryn Dierksen, Clara Stone, and Hart L’Ecuyer. i.
Table of Contents
Hugh Vincent...................................cover Cullen Miller......................................1 Nathan Lessly...................................2,30 RC Patterson.......................................3 Colin Ferguson.....................................5 Colleen Beth/Beef Cromer...........................6 Anna Felixidocious.................................7 Greg Edmondson.....................................8 Hart L’Ecuyer......................................9 Tamar Crump....................................13,20 Vespertine Ipomea ................................14 Kurt Zuver.....................................17,21 Tylr Cailyn.......................................18 Amie Jade Maxwell.................................19 Denmark Laine.....................................22 Kristin J. Thompson...............................26 Anna Wermuth...................................28,29 Jackson Hero Kermit...............................31
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ACAB Cullen Miller 1
Emerge; or: have you ever tried to escape? have you ever wondered what came with you? Nathan Lessly 2
Rope RC Patterson The clouds broke and the light shot down like slatey grey snakes tossed from the cobalt heavens as I strolled down the coal-black funereal street. The sidewalks were haunted by faceless apparitions. Larvated folks. Faceless wretch’s forlorn wandering the streets. I glanced at something dangling from a street light. It swayed in the wind like a log, or a branch. As I approached, dread began to creep up my upper back and shoulders like boney fingers seeking the back of my neck. I glanced upward and I saw him. Swinging in the wind a bag of lost possibilities. The lariat, the riata, encased his neck. So taut was the lanyard that it tore carapace, cleaved, no it fractured his dermis. It divided his skin in to unfluctuating fragmented rolls. When I opened my eyes I saw a wall before me. A wall encased in shadow. I was laying on sheets of indigo and beryl. I closed my eyes again and I saw him dangling. The rope cleaved into his dermis. In his face was my brother’s face, my cousin’s face, my face. We were all dangling over a crowd. A cheering crowd, whooping and hollering, many had tiki torches and polo shirts. The amphitheater was massive. Massive enough for the sport of these people’s venation, And we were the prey. They were seated in the u-shaped chamber but stood as a select few walked up to the stage with torches lit and blazing like a gas explosion. They were coming toward me. I opened my eyes once more and got up from bed. This time the wall I was facing we made of stone. Interlocked blocks with no mortar between them, unless that mortar was shear darkness. My sheets were red as the blood filling the sword of King Sergesssi Begli of Bagirmi. Etched with images of his 1000 battles, after he cut Alauma in two. Across the room was a solid wood wardrobe, or rather a chartreuse closet next to a mullioned window with ornate Mongolian pillars curving in a gothic arch. 3
The sun shined through the window lifting dust and hair as it pressed against the closet door. The door slowly opened as a figure dressed in the same blue jeans as me, wearing the same black Jordan’s; my wide nose and the scar below my right eye; he came toward me. He leapt like some wild spotted feline. His hands met my neck. His digits were like cables wrapped in sand paper. He knocked me on the bed. I was on my back losing consciousness. As I grabbed his face, I ripped off much of it. What looked like skin turned to dusk and floated away. Half of his face was an open crater. I didn’t speak, but in a thought, he told me that the room was his. I felt his grip begin to weaken and I began to rip the rest of him apart. I pulled out his chest and I broke off one of his arms. It all turned to dust. I found myself alone in the room. Then I walked out. I was in a motel. All of the doors on the rooms were black. A golden Prague Steel Dual Swing Driveway Gate was open. I ambulated out of the courtyard and driveway. From there I could see the friezes of the Doric entablature, elegant curved facades decorated with alternating triglyphs and visual emblems, like lions, and acorn finials.
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Demiurge Collection Table Colin Ferguson do yourself a favor - come out of that bag so there are grits for the meal - I gave you a twenty-five dollar gift card - the game is you, you’re a last meeting & a five-cent coin on sunday - for some of you, it has been years they need to tell you to put your money on the dresser - new orleans shrimp were skipping part two of their delicate pencil shavings did you hurt anyone besides your wallet? - sometimes you just don’t get in period - we’re all going thru some motorcycle hulahoops bodies begin to stink, & stink bad the little ghost was a material witness - the judge down here matched wits w/ the family jewels, falling backwards from the cape - little stalks of bamboo getting torn & broken off - anybody can steal a million missing meals turned up in costa rica - there was some sad song singing & flower bringing - within twenty-four hours it was all over but the shouting I’m not that dumb, I really ain’t - they sell cars out there in breckenridge - I’m a riddle whose answer is bullets - an empty room or echo chamber you obviously haven’t been reading your ray bradbury short stories (like the golden apples of the sun, etc.)
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Dining Room Spirit (above) Ghost in the Hallway (below) Colleen/Beth (Beef) Cromer 6
Motherghost Anna Felixadocious My mother has become a ghost again, her skin is pale as watered down milk. Caught in a wreath of cigarette smoke in the kitchen - in the garage - in the car port - in the backyard - in the screened in porch. Something bad has happened and they won’t tell me. A pale Edwardian wisp she floats from room to room. Her feet don’t touch the ground, water drips from her chin, pockets heavy with river stone, she tells me to go mow the damn lawn. On my birthday - “You saved my life, being born, I don’t know what would have happened to me.” At night, when I was close to grown - “I almost died, but I saw your picture & knew I had to live.” I think - then why aren’t you here? I think - I need to show her I am worth being here for. I think - I saved her twice already, I can save her again. My mother sits in the garage & asks me why I can’t cry. I steal a pack of her cigarettes & go for a drive to the river in her car. Along the Mississippi River, right before she meets with the Missouri, the confluence of the two great arteries of North America, I walk a trail along the bank, under tangled green wild grape vines & cotton woods & maple & sycamore & aggressively thriving living things. My eyes are too dry. The water reflects white on white rocks, cutting through the leaves when the trail breaks away into river. I soak my skin in the green of early summer kudzu. I pause in the green floating light refracting through me. 7
A deer raises her head to look at me. She has my mothers eyes. My dad said ghosts aren’t real. I cry.
Laying Old Ghosts to Rest Greg Edmondson 8
Excerpts from The Book of Loosely Connected Fragments Hart L’Ecuyer I began writing this book at a party on 24 January 2021. I finished stanzagraph 56 at approximately 4am two days later. 1 One, two, three, four. 2 Straight ahead, please find the tomb of the famous rockstar. Please do not touch or climb on the sarcophagus. Neither food nor drink are allowed in the tomb of the famous rockstar. Please observe near-total silence out of respect for the genre. Note the illegibility of the epitaph & the vandalized mural. Nobody knows what any of it means; your guess is as good as mine. 3 You are asleep. You are having a sex dream about a lover from a long time ago. When you wake up there will be no one you can tell. You will not want to look ridiculous. The best dreams are impossible to describe anyway. 4 We all Here’s paint. you’re
wear clown makeup in this asylum. We are like that meme. how you put it on. Watch me do it. Take some of this face There you go. Good. Unfortunately, we’re out of wigs, so going to be the only lunatic without one.
6 Everybody’s enjoying a tropical vacation but you. They’re rubbing sunscreen on their beach bodies. Later they’ll probably take their swimsuits off & go skinnydipping. At least you don’t have to worry about sharks. If that’s any consolation. 7 I’m your boss. It’s my job to tell you not to waste staples. The company would be doing much better if it weren’t for all the wasted staples. Don’t give me that look, now. Staples don’t grow on trees. 8 My millionaire mindset attracts wealth & abundance in every department of life. I credit the extreme attractiveness of my wife to my millionaire mindset. My millionaire mindset has earned me the respect of learned astronomers. If only my daughter had my millionaire mindset. My daughter has a homeless person mindset. 9 Hey sir may I communicate with you? Man, I’ve been out on the streets since the Reagan administration. I’m just five bucks short of getting my hands on the best dope this side of the Euphrates. If you have it in your heart, please help me get high tonight. Man, I’m a veteran. I seen some serious shit go down. You tell me
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if you know a better way to respond. See, I see you come round with your suit & briefcase, I don’t judge. You’re a cog in the capitalist machine, I’m a bum with an itch to scratch. Sir, may I pray with you? 10 We are, then, fundamentally soiled. Only through the Lord can we become un-soiled. You know, we priests take the seal of confession pretty seriously, so obviously I can’t point to any one specific case as an example, but what I can reveal is big picture trends in sinful behavior. It breaks my heart. Pornography. Adultery. Fornication. Contraception. These are just a few of the evils that we men face in the 21st century. Just offer it up. Take it straight to the foot of the cross. You think I don’t have lustful thoughts about your wives and daughters? You think I never have to clear my browser history? The fact of the matter is that only through the Lord can we clear our browser history. The browser history of our hearts. 11 Your desires say nothing about you because everybody desires the same things. Oh, you want security? Compare to exhibit B, who would prefer a life of volatility & chaos. Sure, one girl’s freedom is another girl’s money. Thing is, nobody, absolutely no one, likes feeling trapped. It is in the interpretation of the universal desires that the individual starts speaking. Amid this plurality, of course, relativism looks pretty sexy. But there is quite a good deal of objective reality to be found in the discrepancy between stated purposes and secret purposes. Between, for instance, “freedom…” and the oilfields of Iraq. 12 I went streaking through a cemetery once kind of. I took my shirt off; the girl I was with took her dress off. We got tired and sat down on a hill that overlooked a busy thoroughfare. It was rush hour. I think she enjoyed flashing traffic. 13 You are at an exhibit at the art museum, enjoying a French nude. Maybe it’s weird that a painting of a model who has been dead for a century and a half is still so sexy. Of course, we harbor elaborate pretensions. This or that manner of brushstroke, such and such aesthetic theory, whatever art movement it’s a part of. But the joy of the naked form of the desired sex is half the point. Presumably the artist could have painted more naked old men and fewer naked young women, yes? Then, just when you have started congratulating yourself on not getting an erection, you overhear an attractive young woman saying something to the effect of “I don’t want to waste my time with someone who doesn’t understand that jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams.” 15 I used to see the world through rose-tinted glasses. I mean I literally wore rose-tinted glasses. Unfortunately, these glasses, which I wore to prevent migraines, tragically broke in a drunken skateboarding accident. Now I’m all like fuck the police & I listen to aggresively depressing rap music.
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16 When I was arrested by police after a standoff with Homeland Security in August 2015’s Moral Monday march to the federal courthouse in downtown St. Louis, my confiscated phone recorded (by criminal accident) a disturbing conversation between Homeland agents & US Marshals. The gist of it was that Homeland had not needed to exercise its surveillance capabilities because the SLMPD “intel guys” had done the spying for them. Using secret technology (such as, I now presume, Stingray) and undercover officers, local cops had spied on the calls & text messages & meetings of activists like Dr. Cornel West, who held forth the next cell down, and Deray McKesson, who was in my cell. Fuck the police. 17 As traffic on the interstate slows on the commute home from your evil job, the sun being wherever it is, depending on the time of year & shit, you catch yourself imagining you are an eel on the ocean floor. The red lights of the cars ahead of you start to look a little like food. You are obviously the bigger fish in this scenario. But which non-player character should you gulp down? The white commercial van that promises a fair price? The black BMW driven by the most basic of grizzled upper-middle class dads? Then the desperately playful illusion is ruined by a hammerhead shark sporting the Wal-Mart logo. 18 Rock bottom was literal for me. On the Ides of March 2018, I overdosed on fentanyl at a dive bar in south city. My friends carried me into a car and drove me to the nearest fire station, where I was revived with Narcan. I woke up on the pavement surrounded by firefighters. That was my fifth & last overdose. So I guess I got a couple lives left to live. 19 I’m only a little bit intrigued by simulation theory. 20 One of my earliest memories remember the exact moment I willfully stop breathing. I like if all a tortured soul breathing.
is from preschool, circa 1997. I discovered that it was possible to wonder what the world would look had to do to die was decide to stop
21 I had a roommate in college who killed himself. I prefer not to use the phrase “committed suicide.” He was the son of highachieving Korean immigrants. He was pious; his statuette of Our Lady contrasted violently with my proud atheist scrolls in red ink. I always thought it was funny that he was addicted to scratchers because he was a mathematics major. Most of what neurotypicals take seriously I thought was funny, & that’s probably part of what made me popular. This poor guy was having the opposite experience. While I was out cavorting with girls & doing drugs on the beach or in alleys, he was alone in our room flunking. If I could go back & redo anything, it would be the way I treated him. He hanged himself on 5 April 2012.
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22 When I liken myself to Pac-Man, I am immediately moved to despair that I do not possess the same will to survive, to get that bread, to gobble those white dots, that most people have. It isn’t because I don’t see any allure in white dots. I’m just existentially lazy. 23 Do you ever get white line syndrome on road trips? I don’t. Is it because I prefer hotels to homes? The journey to the destination? Surely there is a spiritual element to travel. Folks long to go on pilgrimages. 24 Chicago has a special grip on my soul (throat?) but I’m strongly considering relocation to Berkeley. I was thinking Boulder for a while but with as little money as I have one wants a warmer climate. I want to move to a college town where I can learn by proximity & osmosis. Chicago scares me. Even the queers are cold there. It’s a bad place to have nothing. 25 Of course, nobody has nothing, but there’ve been times when I felt damn close. I slept on a park bench in Queens for several weeks & it humbled me crucially. Eventually I met a friendly older gay man, a talented artist who drove me over the Brooklyn Bridge on a scooter, & he took me in for a while. He lived in a crowded basement in Bed Stuy. If every man in America had to live off the kindness of strangers &/or the fat of the land for a summer, the nation would be unrecognizable. 33 I think poets need to do with poetry what diamond mines did with diamonds. The Diamonds Are Forever campaign. We need to manufacture a need where none exists. What, you got hitched & forgot to commission a poem to mark the occasion? STANZAS ARE FOREVER, BITCH. 34 Poetry books=horcruxes. Prove me wrong! 38 Expire has to be the dankest term for croaking. Yeah, dude expired last night, it’s hella sad. I like the idea that we are all just salad dressing & yogurt in the refrigerator of life. 39 Interactive stanzagraph alert. I want you to write in the margin the name, superpower, nemesis, &, for extra credit, origin story of your own shitty comic book hero or villain. 41 I’m a sucker for a good blaze. If you’ve never watched a house burn down, you don’t know what you’re missing. When I hear that a nearby house is burning down, I grab some pretzel chips & hummus & go check it out. Every fire is different. Some have daring rescues; some they just give up on. There’s always a crowd gathered outside a burning house but you can usually still find a good spot.
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Untitled Tamar Crump 13
Fond glimpses of a world pre 2020 Vespertine Ipomea I miss going to shows the big concerts, tiny local bands. I miss watching the crowds moving in the strobe lights, ever present scents of cheap alcohol, sweat, and vape. Taking a break from crowds in the biting winter air, underdressed. Forming strange, one night, fleeting friendships, declining hits of acid. I miss my blissful naiveté trusting people to be good. Being innocent and unknowing is dangerous, to be sure, but I still miss it. Many of those shows I’d now avoid, knowing just how many abusers find shelter. I used to be so optimistic when it came to people. I miss coffee shops with their gentle clamour, places to make a new friend, meet an old one, get to know that girl you met just last week. Create imaginary friends in that book you live in, 14
or in the scene you write, flowing, brain to fingertips, tickling and tingling with excitement to see your world come into being. Coffee shops always have the most comforting of aromas let your nose lead you into this enchanted place. I miss the city bus, the cross section of humanity crowded into one small space for a minute or an hour until they return to their individual habitats. I miss eavesdropping on the phone calls, the conversations; breakups and declarations of true love. A mother returning home, a friendship being forged, lifelong enemies meeting, the whole world around knows. A man dropped his phone I hand it back to him he offers me weed, and I tell him I’m staying sober. The sacrifices I made for someone worthless, will always minorly irk me.
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I miss cherokee street take a sample of the city, throw it together, add art, and you’ve got the street that captured my heart the first time I visited an anarchist hippie punk bakery. It smelled of heaven, and the reading lounge was thought provoking to say the very least. Old diner tables and slipping on ice, laughing. Small punk show I was technically too young for, make friends with venue owners. Dancing with my little sister, in the middle of a parade. Carrot juice and open mics, Three am and silence only shattered by shots. Painting chairs in gardens, weirdos of different breeds congregating on this road, running away from the cops with a group of people who for no understandable reason followed the lead I took, after screaming from pickup trucks.
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Untitled Kurt Zuver 17
Empty Homes Tylr Cailyn 18
Spooky-ooky specter Amie Jade Maxwell
Misplace the coiled mortality Become a Spooky-Ooky Specter! Flicker the lights, creak the boards. You know the show, so, Howl, ooze, bark and moan ghost fun, no sun, haunt the home. Scratch, gnash, cry and bone Haunt the home, haunt the home -fuck. A body, not too cold, Dust it off, scrape the mold. Touch skin, touch hair, take hold. Slime and time, no longer Rhyme. Bye spooky, bye ooky. I don’t want to be a specter.
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Untitled Tamar Crump 20
Untitled Kurt Zuver 21
The Wind in My Hair is My Crown by Denmark Laine swift one of the woody glen guide to thy warren of beast and men dancer wild on the verdant hills fleet-footed coney in wanton thrill three hares entwine both moon and soul I am rod to thy thicket nest in thy knoll clover paw beneath the olive tree our does our daughters lain with thee dimpled dappled spring-shaded I anointed with dew on thorny thigh thy kingdom’s pasture afar from towns naked the wind in my hair is my crown green desire bedded-bramble raised let my mouth be ever wet with praise Author Unknown “What is a god?” I grimaced. I should have expected some half-assed attempt at the profound. He answered himself. “Power with personality.” I was earning my interdisciplinary master’s in religious studies at the time so I wasn’t surprised when my friend Quaid, who teaches comparative mythology at the college, phoned with a major breakthrough. In his spare time Quaid was a leading researcher of Etruscan folklore. He knew I’d been reading Frazer’s The Golden Bough when he called from Italy to say he’d discovered an obscure reference to a nature god that seemed to predate the Iron Age, Villanovan culture. “The name ‘Tullus’ or ‘Tullum’ was found on mosaics below Vatican City with an image of three rabbits connected by their ears. In the necropolis under St. Peter’s Basilica, the foundations of what was once the Temple to Cybele, among the Egyptian obelisks and tombs 22
of deceased Popes, this emblem is identical to one found beneath the Church of Mary Magdalene in France’s Rennesle-Château. The motif of three hares, a precursor to the Celtic triquetra, is a common depiction of the ‘triple deity’ worshiped in various forms throughout pagan Europe (Maiden-Mother-Crone), Asia (Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva) and the Christian Trinity. Tullus is described as a merry god of the forest. Any mention of him exists in a protoIndo-European language of which we’ve only been able to partially interpret based on Etruscan cognates. The strange thing is, we have no idea who worshiped him. We assume an agro-pastoral society. Possibly the Picts once they migrated west from Scythia before the 1st Century, which connects Tullus to later Celtic ‘green man’ or sacred grove traditions. Except Tullus does not appear in any Italian pantheon. There are close equivalents: Sylvanus, Vertumnus and Faunus, for example. However, no Latin historian mentions him in their biographies of the region. Rabbits as fertility symbols made from bone or ivory are found throughout the Mediterranean in parts of Turkey, Algeria, Lebanon, Bulgaria, Morocco and Pakistan. The linguistic root of the name ‘Tul’ may be another loanword from any number of Afro-Asiatic languages meaning either ‘earthenware’ or ‘to carry.’ His exact culture of origin remains unclear but his mystery cult obviously once enjoyed a wide following. Tul reappears centuries later in the chivalric romances of the High Medieval period. A poem brought back from the Crusades, Hymn to Tully, recorded in the 1400s by Landaeus of Constantinople is a Christianized version of this same Tullus, reduced now from godhood to a harvest figure such as jack o’ the green, the apple tree man, May king or John Barleycorn-type spirit of the grain field, which confirms that Tully found his way from the Near East to Gaul and the British Isles before the Romans where he’d already been adopted by the Druids.”
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Quaid said he first read about Tully in the works of Landaeus of Constantinople found in the Vatican’s archive (which, confidentially, he told me holds the largest collection of historical pornography). Landaeus was a Muslim-born bishop in the Byzantine Church from 1383 to 1462 who documented the art and practice of Balkan folk religions. Landaeus’ monastic scripts contain the earliest version of the Tully poem, translated from Punic to Church Slavonic, as well as curious sketches of women dancing with rabbit-headed men. Landaeus comments that Tully’s worship seems to predate any civilized society and evokes Neolithic superstition where distinction between human and animal is not clearly delineated, before the domestication of beasts when man shared equal kinship with the things he ate, as Tully is god of both. “ONCE IS NOTHING, TWICE IS CREATION, THE THIRD IS UNBEARABLE” wrote Landaeus. To this day no one is quite sure what this passage meant. A week after he returned from Italy Quaid said he’d almost finished translating a copy of Hymn to Tully into English and invited me to his house that evening to read the final product. On my drive over I thought about the significance of the number three: Pythagoras’ triangle, past-presentfuture, Christ’s temptations and days entombed, Peter’s denials, comedy’s rule, a sonata, Hermes “thrice-great” or Thoth “trismegistus”, a genie’s wishes, the lunar cycle, water’s two hydrogen/one oxygen, the three act structure, The Third Man, the Three Secrets of Fátima, one, two, three, go! A lucky number like a rabbit’s foot. Rabbits in various legends were believed to consort with witchgoddesses, warrior-queens and faeries including Artemis, Holda and Eostre (from where we get the word “Easter”) as creatures connected to birth, spring and eternal recurrence. The “Man in the Moon” to Westerners would be the “Hare in the Moon” to people in China. Pliny the Elder recommended hare meat as a cure for sterility. Humorous Ojibwe tales are told about Nanabozho, a trickster cousin 24
to Br’er Rabbit and Compère Lapin. The March Hare. Peter Cottontail. Bugs Bunny. I pulled up the driveway to Quaid’s house to find the sliding screen door to his back porch left halfway open. A strong smell thick in the air as soon as I stepped out of my car. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant so much as overpowering. I recognized this damp, earthy aroma from my childhood days in the country driving past richly tilled fields. As I climbed the steps to the porch I was astonished to find patches of grass and clover had overgrown the carpet like an indoor lawn, thick and dewy green. “Quaid?” I called out, risking a cautious step across the threshold. The living room had become, literally, a living room. Weeds and vines crept up the mantlepiece. Bees hummed from the vents. Sunlight streamed through cracks in the walls. What sounded like a waterfall trickled from the bathroom faucet. I gasped as I watched a dragonfly alight on what I realized was the body of a deer, her head and legs twisted among dandelion tufts, her ribs bare from where something fed on her remains. The couch, almost unrecognizable under a layer of moss, was covered in bird droppings and scads of molting fur. I gazed up at an olive tree grown up through the coffee table, its roots ruptured the grassy floor beneath, its branches stooping down from the ceiling fan under the weight of its leafy drupes ripe for picking. And there was Quaid. What was left of him. He lay naked, the tree trunk growing up through his torso, splitting his body open into a hollow cavity like a dried gourd. Huddled in the gaping hole of his stomach lay three newborn rabbits. No snow-white, ruby-eyed, pointy-eared kits. They quivered in the nest of his entrails like pink, naked larva as his lifeless eyes stared upward, unblinking, into the green canopy. 25
Untitled Kristin J. Thompson 26
Lester Samuelson Quintet Unknown 27
The Melody of Memory Anna Wermuth we are not simply survivors. we have inherited more than shame, more than pain. I have inherited joy. I was borne of a shared love of beautiful sounds, music which sparks my soul perennially. I sing; I embody. I play his favorite golden tunes, I feel him in the room. here with me, always. yesterday once more. timelessly, we travel side by side to places we never could before. the melody of my memory is an uncensored lament, instinctively resolving in bliss. when the dense blanket of nostalgia is put to rest, my aching heart knows only this.
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Watching Erin Bode Anna Wermuth 29
Collapse; or: what is the opposite of unfurling? I can’t seem to stop falling in on myself Nathan Lessly 30
Masculinity, CA Jackson Hero Kermit The heart surgeons, Hollywood executives and litigators who live in the Los Angeles suburb of Palos Verdes sometimes talk--late at night, when everyone is drunk and the kids are in bed--of the crazy man, called Franco, who lives in his dead godfather’s sprawling villa. His reputation was spoken of more freely in the past, but when the man’s suffering became perturbing the subject of his behavior was relegated to taboo. Charlie Van Voerbbels leaned back in his chair, glancing at the back of his wife’s head as she disappeared into a guest bedroom with an associate of an associate, and decided to bring up crazy Franco. In response to the glassy look his friend cast across the sitting room, amid the din of the old dub record, he mentioned Franco’s recent incident. “I know a little about that,” said Genie Landers, eyeing the Van Voerbbel humidor. Namima Van Voerbbels opened a drawer in a wardrobe in the guest bedroom, pushing aside folded clothes out of season in search of something smooth and hard. The man-forgettably handsome but memorably endowed--was dancing stupidly to music they could barely hear. On the sofa, Charlie slouched toward Genie, considering her slight sway through a smog of cigar smoke, he fumed at his stick again and exhaled “The only funny thing about Franco’s injury is that he gave it to himself.” “I have to disagree,” said Genie coyly from her gigantic glass of chardonnay. Namima retrieved the bronze cast figurine, careful to avoid its shabby ballet costume, and showed it to the sluggish man who stank of scotch and sweat, “If you have the cash, I won’t tell him.” “Do I…” he said, slurring, “...look like a man who doesn’t?” 31
Charlie laughed, “He well deserved it, nonetheless!” “My point is the rabbi was very persuasive,” said Genie in a voice that made Charlie cringe. “Do you have the cash?” Namima’s voice cut with slight annoyance. “Yeah,” he said, “But I have an… additional desire. Yeah.” Charlie’s stomach lurched in sudden repulsion, “Well that’s the least funny part, what the rabbi told him. Not that anyone could have said a fucking helpful thing to Franco.” Namima turned her head sharply as she overhead Genie yell, “The fucking rabbi planted the seed, and that seed bloomed into the most disgusting public circumcision I have ever fucking seen.” “You’re exceptionally uncreative,” Namima sighed, then closed her mouth and began grinding her teeth. “Did you know I’m not circumcised?” said the man. Charlie erupted in laughter, coughing and sputtering, “You were there, oh I see, you--oh god--.” Genie glanced down the hall, cocking her head at the sound of Namima saying rather loudly, “for fuck’s sake--,” and something less audible. “--put the cash on the boudoir and take this thing,” Namima said in a hushed snarl. The figurine--the female form in ancient caricature, breasts like little pyramids and eyes massive, gaping and haunting--seemed to speak, in a whisper, the following words: Value is predicated. The man takes the statue from her hands and leaves the room. There is no cash on the boudoir.
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