Autopsy Presents: CHASING VICTOR

Autopsy Presents is a new feature which brings new stories to light, rather than investigating the inner workings of old stories. The following is in honor of comics week.

June

This story isn't about much of anything. It has a sort of thought process slowing it down so that the whole thing takes place in about five minutes that one might find reminiscent of Nicholson Baker, but not as inventive and often true as Baker. This is sorryforboringyou dot blogspot dot com. (That line is just another ripoff of Warren Ellis...) It's Wednesday afternoon in Seattle if you had any rush to read this (which you didn't). The following is another autopsy.

Ghosts in their early twenties

Yes, "autopsy" was not a one-off crapshoot. Name is an added bonus--I've been trying to come up with something to title with this. Reference to both age (either of the person who died or the ghost...making sense?) and the middle bit of Ghosts I-IV. I'll edit in an afterward with a few keys bits of contention and editing. One of my better efforts for this class, this story came effortlessly, but unfortunately I think it shows; it's all froth and little beverage. Story starts just after the jump...

Tempest

In the fall semester, I took a fiction writing workshop. In the next few weeks (days, months, years?), I am going to retype a few of the stories written for this class. I was in the habit of printing them off without saving them, so this is my punishment. But retyping has always been a bit of an editing/reevaluating process for moi so it's excusable. I've stapled together a little selection & after the jump is the first. They won't appear particularly chronologically probably just as much because I can't remember when I wrote all of them as that I wanted to somewhat switch them up for this process. I'm calling it an "autopsy." Which makes this a tab grouping--I might add more to this in the future, digging through old work and throwing it up on the web. This story I've titled here "Tempest," and a few extremely minor edits are noted after with a touch of afterward. The assignment was to write a story to describe this photo or one very much like it, if I have not found the exact one our professor provided us with.

"See if you can spot this one." (3)

Another piece of fan fiction. This one is tirelessly self-reflexive. A part of the final run, with five posts in one night to finish thirty only a few minutes into July. I offer this because it'll be the reason that this is a bit weird, a bit too complex or not really complex, but confusing. My mind was already fried when I started writing.

"See if you can spot this one." (2)

This turned out quite well. Amazing fun to write, but maybe not so good to read, because you won't know who anyone is or any of the references I'm drawing. Finally finished listening to Imperial Bedrooms tonight so maybe it'll make sense then that there's a few throws to Bret Easton Ellis. (Maybe it already made sense, since his name has been everywhere on this blog for-like-totally-ever.) I'll give away the main stolen stuff at the end. Another influence is Bright Lights, Big City which is written, like this sketch, in the second person. As always there is a piece of boring meta in the middle of this, so just yawn over it, please.

"See if you can spot this one." (1)

The quote that Eric Clapton gives before playing "Layla" on the live album, Unplugged. This is an old idea I've been floating around in my head. A number of fan fictions, possibly all in the same universe, but not hitting you over the head with that. The joke then being the reader needing to figure out who the story was about. I've got the idea for two more of these on the blog, but this one will be by far the easiest to figure out. At least I think so, but they aren't written yet, so who knows? Anyway, hope it's fun. I've never really seriously written strict fan fiction, so this was interesting.

"Pen and Paper" or From "Found" (5/5)

Written, as has been stated, before 4/5. Glad to be done with the sections of "Found" for the blog, because they were troublesome. But writing is always fun or it doesn't get done. At least for me, that seems to hold true most of the time. You have to wait it out. I did and it worked. We'll see if I can make up for days lost. The ideas are there; this is almost the reverse of February, where I ran out of ideas quickly, but was never in danger of falling far behind on poems. I wrote this on the way to visit family in Orlando, with my dad driving. It's a roadtrip segment. It was great to write because it was going again, the story was flowing. Sometimes the way to do that is to break the chronology. And that's about all of your time I should take up. I'll casually disappear and you can enter the world of what some have called the illeist narrator, although I won't admit it yet.

"Tricks of the Trade" or From "Found" (4/5)

Long time, no see. I'm late as hell. I was stuck on the fiction; I have tons of ideas for blog entrys but I painted myself in a hole by putting up that "5" for the the total number of cuts. Still, there are plenty of different ways to get the mind flowing. You stop, you start a few times. Eventually you find it. This scene was actually written after what will amount to tomorrow's post. Both were done long-hand. I think I found it, finally (Pardon the pun on the title.), and I'm moderately proud of what I've written. This scene is basically a dialogue. You'll see. Think everything's pretty self-explanatory except for some references that I figure you can look up, since you're reading this on a computer. Maybe it'll take a while to see who's speaking. But I'm jawing too much. It also has title-headers, because I bloody well felt like it. Click on if you wish.

From "Found" (3/5)

This might be distinctly segmented; I wrote the first part a few days back and finished it now, with "Blinded By the Lights" from The Streets on repeat, my mind going off perhaps a bit too much: it might get a bit too crazy there at the end or for the last five hundred words which would constitute more than just the end, I guess. Not all that much else to say at the moment.

From "Found" (2/5)

I read a few books recently that would mock the way you write--introducing an upcoming event in the narrative, the authors would then skip over such and simply move on to the next idea. One of these was, I think, Girlfriend in a Coma; it actually upsets me that I can't remember the others. Now I'm not sure I'm going to emulate that model in the story I'm writing, but the excerpt for today does that, it skips over a time period that, as a reader, you'd expect me to have talked about. And maybe I will, but this here is, in a way, another form of the story, and here I am skipping around. That said, I'll scram...

From "Found" (1/5)

I'm cheating here, catching two birds with one stone, or rather possibly ten birds with five stones. The next few days will have entries plucked from the short story/novel chapter that I am currently writing called "Found." Today's bit focuses on Eddie and is the introduction scene for him in the story. Also, I'm tearing this unedited out of Word, so it might not read perfectly. If I get around to look through it on blogger then I might make the changes, but they are probably only going to happen in the Word file. Just a disclaimer. And now, I'll give it over to the omniscient narrator...

Leaving them scratching their heads...

It was called the “Magic Bullet,” a name that would actually be coined during the World Series, by some would say “a disgruntled” Jose Canseco, who had obviously wished to see his team play in the Fall Classic, and with good reason, for Oakland appeared to without a doubt be a better team than Boston. The Athletics had in fact won fifteen more games than the Red Sox; Minnesota running behind Oakland had a better record than the BoSox and you had to give up the fact, no matter how much of a New Englander you were, that the Sox had benefited from being in the worse division in ’88.

Of course for Boston the talk of magic being on their side was ironic; dark, dark humor, and Canseco was slammed by many for attempting to upstage the games still to be played. This was a team that knew magic and knew it well, in the form of a seventy-year-old curse that had recently struck again. Just the mention of Buckner in an article still had the same sting in the hearts of most fans; the ball moved through the legs by none other than the Babe’s ghost simply forbidding Billy from getting down to make the play. These were not fans who took to being called lucky particularly well.

And yet the name stuck, simply because the play was horrible and unbelievable, a mix that on a much smaller scale did in fact echo the Kennedy assassination. The 1988 ALCS started as was expected, with an early Canseco home run and some dominating pitching. Things wouldn’t become extraordinary until the bottom of the seventh inning when Dave Stewart pitched a ball to Jim Rice that came back rocketing off the bat. Rice would later say that he felt as if someone else was swinging the bat for him—perhaps a rationalization for all the pain he caused, perhaps not, stranger things have been accepted in the world of sports.

So this ball is absolutely scorched, comes off and Canseco is running up on it immediately, fearing it’ll get by McGwire, which it does, but it the worst way possible: it takes a bad hop and goes straight into his left foot and Mark goes down for the count, further damaging his leg on the fall. And the sparks aren’t over, as this ball keeps going. Rice pauses as he’s rounding first and the ball is scooting out to Canseco, but he has to play the game and it looks like the worst has been done. Of course, as we know, it hasn’t; the ball takes yet another bad hop and flies up on Canseco with speed it probably shouldn’t mathematically have.

José watches as the ball comes up to his face. He would later explain that somehow what he saw was a ball that was speeding up in the air, one that there was no way he could put a glove on, or even get out of the way of. The instantaneous velocity, he would say, appeared to have doubled, from the time he saw it scooting out past McGwire.

Canseco is not an overly reliable source here, though, as he has admitted, and as you most surely know, that ball smacked him so hard in the face that he fell down cold, scaring everyone on the field more than even McGwire’s topple. And with that, we had the “Magic Bullet,” which put out the Bash Brothers for the next two games. Canseco would attempt to come into game four of the series, but he was not the same man for that game.

Boston, able to pull off the win in Game One, a long blistering fourteen inning game, then gathered some steam. McGwire with some broken bones was clearly unheard from, Canseco came back to get a hit in the aforementioned game, but was basically nonexistent as well. And hence the Red Sox got called lucky forcing their way back to the World Series through a sweep of the big bad Athletics. A team that didn’t win ninety games in the regular season.

And if you are a fan of eighties baseball, a simple pop culture historian, or maybe even a physicist, you can tell that the story above isn’t what happened in 1988. In fact, the A’s, as they style their name, I hate the apostrophe myself, swept the Sox, went to the Series and lost to the Dodgers in five games. I was simply writing up an idea that I have for a story called “Stealing Home.” Vonnegut does a bit of this in A Man without a Country, but he isn’t talking about something he’s going to write, but rather something he’s failing to write. The book was called If God Were Alive Today and it would have had aliens from Mars who took over the old racial humor, in that they pee gasoline; Vonnegut jokingly says that they “only eat homeless men, women, and children of all colors,” which he’s saying is a good thing to make light of that viewpoint. It’s a very Vonnegut thing to do.

Of course Kurt, like always, he’s making jokes. I’m not, so perhaps I should place the context of my little attempted trick of history above in the light of a more accurate similarity. You find this in Stephen King’s Blockade Billy (or “Blockade Billy,” if you wish). Here, in this story/novella, King creates a team called the New Jersey Titans, and has them playing 1950s baseball. He’s twisting and tweaking the history of the major leagues. I read the beginning of this book and got a bit of a chill, because I already had my idea for my own changes to history in my story and found the King, the man who’s sold more books than anyone else, doing something along the same lines. That was enough to make the story fun for me.

From here on, if you know Red Sox history before 2004, you’ll probably be able to guess I somehow have them dropping the World Series in “Stealing Home.” And if you have a moderate knowledge of the game, you can probably figure out how I would have that happening. But what I’ve written here is backstory, even the World Series of 1988 as I’ve imagined it, even this is just the background for the story. It takes place in 1998ish, maybe later than that. Which is why I thought I could give you the tale above, which I might as well source to a journalist in my fictional universe: if it was good thank Paul Kuberg; if bad then always blame me. And sorry for boring you, if I have done that again.

You can force it but it will not come...

is the opening line to "Planet Telex," and no matter what I've already said on this blog about writing no matter whether you can or not, forcing fiction is a very hard thing for me to do without ideas. I intend to do something of a "Fiction Friday," at least for the month. I did get an idea on Friday for a story to write, but as Warren Ellis once said, writing is something that can take a while. His actual quote was something along the lines of staring at a "project" (I think that was the word) from the 2PM to 2AM (as I've already said, I think that was the quote, so please don't quote me quoting him...) I plan on editing in my fiction piece for Friday once it's done and hopefully I can get a little bit ahead on this thing and be able to write these things to post live at the time I've stated. Hopefully. I've already somewhat amazed myself here and felt like I was writing quite badly (and sometimes at the same time), so we'll see. Rays won tonight/last night/Saturday in Seattle. I liked watching the Seattle games last year, perhaps the only series I can distinctly remember watching, due to the late start times. So, until I update here with a story, I guess that's about it. See I would try to run it out right now, but I think I should do today's/yesterday's/(from the perspective of the last finished piece) tomorrow's little rant, which I'm thinking is going to be about throwing baseballs at batters.

And on that matter I think I'll note that I know a lot of my ... metaphors? ... tangents, I guess, are actually these weird little ruts I get into, like always quoting from the same person or referencing baseball (which I would right now blame on the fact that it is the only major American team sport to be in season), and I guess I apologize for that. And out--

1:48AM EST 8/09/09

LEVERAGE [heh heh, the title of the show I'm listening to as I stare at the computer while typing this]

I am spreading the peanut butter out on your sandwich for today, something I never foresaw for myself, and something that might continue now for some time. I know that when I was a little girl going to school, I never really knew where my lunches were coming from. This was early on, maybe the first three years of classes, and I don’t really recall most of my thoughts back then, they’ve become as insubstantial as ghosts or dreams, but I’ve talked to Martin about what we expect from your first day. Neither of us could really say anything authoritatively about today’s schools, shucks, we’ve spent how many hours just seeing where you should head off to kindergarten and so our conversation soon derived into stories of our own first few years’ worth of school experience. It wouldn’t be the first time that Martin and I have talked about times like this—I’m sure if you ever read this that you’ll know what it’s like to have a spouse, sometimes you just assume you know everything about a person, even though you have nothing to back up this belief. I think that conversation helped to break this assumption in ourselves, became somewhat a turning point in our marriage. Of course I don’t know anything about the future right now…I probably shouldn’t predict. And, right, back to the fragment I’ve left, Martin and I had talked about our childhoods before, but only rarely and brokenly, we both came from…not bad homes, but places we wanted to leave behind. I would hope that although you may be able to understand this thought, that, if you do read this, you wouldn’t have experienced the same as us, but sometimes I fear that our parents had similar wishes. Sometimes I think that are no bad people in the world, there are only mistakes, misunderstandings, and that bloody thing called mortality, and this scares me as well. But right now I’d assume you don’t think anything can scare me, scare us, Martin and I, your daddy and mum, your godly parents. I haven’t really put an enormous amount of studying into this whole thing, I don’t know when the average child learns that his (or her as it could’ve been if your father’s genes went differently) parents aren’t infallible. I’m deep in these thoughts when I reach in the refrigerator for the jelly.

Ordinarily my daydreams are not spawned by such direct thought processes as these, but the glass I pull from the fridge makes me remember how I first saw your father, probably something like you see the man that greets you whenever he can, whenever his schedule permits. I surely thought he was a man who could not make any mistakes. I surely thought he was the perfect gentleman, but not the one for me.

We were out at the beach for the weekend before school started up again in the fall, I was going to be a senior, can you believe it?, I would whisper to myself time and time again, because, I for one, could not believe it. I still felt like the freshman I’d been three years before. Still gawky, still unnoticeable to the majority of students, the sort of character in a novel that gets named once every hundred pages for the readers to say in their heads, who?

Still, somehow, I’d gotten myself amongst a group of kids for the summer that year, we’d all worked together at the drive-in, and we were all happy to be rid of our jobs for the time being. It was a Sunday, I remember that because I’d skipped church, knowing my mother wouldn’t be happy about it, but also knowing that since I’d gotten my own car, there was very little chance of a terrible reaction from the woman. I’d driven down with two girls, Jenny and Lacy weren’t their names, but in the years past, I can only really recall their likenesses, names just won’t come, and I must’ve left my yearbooks behind in one of the house I’ve moved out of in the years since.

Lacy’s brother was named Spencer and we always called him a square, but I think we knew this was a misnomer, since we were the ones who never really got high, tried to skirt that ecosystem as we jogged through adolescence, or at least I did. It occurs to me now how much of what I remember is colored by who I am now, and so much of what I characterize as the three of us, a tight little trio for one summer, maybe even a little ways into September. Well, Spencer’s girlfriend used to be with your father, and we all knew this from junior, when I’d played a part in spreading a rumor, that she would spread them for any man, much like the peanut butter I just spread on this bread.

The first time I’d ever been introduced to your father, I was walking away from my friends, up the beach, my eyes on the surf, thinking about all the time I’d wasted idling, doing absolutely nothing, and how little time I could have left. Your…great-uncle…I guess, Nathan, he’d just passed at the age of forty, in a car accident, and automobiles were still a new thing to me then, something both dangerous and exciting, deadly, but soon enough I couldn’t get through life without a car. When I look over it now, it was like my thought process was what summed him up from all the inequalities that had formed my relationships with boys, with men as they were becoming ever so quickly, in those years.

He was sitting on a rock and looking out at the sun as if he’d stared at since it had come up and planned to see it down. I stopped and looked to him and he said, “You’re Doris, aren’t you?” which I guess somewhat floored me, that someone like him—like anyone really, since he didn’t have extreme social status or anything, but was someone I’d never spoken to—could know my name, and I momentarily lost my train of thought, which he took for lack of recognition. “I’m Martin,” he said, and hopped down from the rock to take my hand. “I used to be Natalie’s boyfriend, I guess maybe we never directly met…?” I think I smiled dumbly and he continued, “If you were planning on walking down the rest of the way, I’d have to caution you to turn around. This is jellyfish country and they can sting out water too, the sand up there is peppered with them and here you are, walking off alone and barefoot.” I looked down at my feet as if I was surprised to find them naked, mumbled a thank you and turned around.

As I walked off, he called my name again and I turned around. “Hey, Doris, look,” he started, looking me in the face again, searching for my eyes behind sunglasses I’d just bought the week before, “it must be weird to see me here…I’d assume you came with your friend…whatsername, Lacy? And her brother’s here. I…Natalie calls me and invites me out here just to show me how much of a bitch she is. First person I see here is her new man, Spencer without Fear and I started running back here to get away. Climbed yonder cliff,” here he pointed off to the point that I think we both knew was the highest in town and also the local version of lover’s lane. I wondered vaguely if he’d ever taken Natalie up there, or if Spencer had ever been there, before I caught myself and looked back at him. “And then I chickened out and came back here and sat this here rock.”

When he’d finished with that, he scooted off the level place where he’d been and left what was effectively a seat for me to sit in. He took a few more steps and picked a rock up off the boulder and tossed it into the water. As I sat down I watched it skip in the water once, twice, three times, and then I looked into the water where it went in and I saw a jellyfish.

Now, opening my eyes, I’d squeezed them shut in concentration, I look down at the jelly side of your sandwich as an almost afterimage of that water jelly in my past. And as for how your father and I became anything more than that one afternoon’s worth of acquaintances, well, Fred, I think you’ll have to ask him about any of that.

Heh, you know what the funny thing is? Other than seeing what I thought was one in the water, I have no more evidence that anything Martin said to me that day—about jellyfish and about anything else—was even close to true. Sometimes life is like that, I think. Truth is perhaps the most elusive thing there ever was.

11:20PM EST Wed 8/12/09 Back on track, seriously?!

This is another story...

Just wrote this, it's quite a bit shorter than the last one. (Can you spot The Dark Knight quote?)



I knew Trisha for three years before I ever made the move and then, even after that, it was all uncommitted. You wanna study at the food court on Saturday? I think I’m going to fail this physics test! I was always so envious of her determination. She would tell me she wasn’t anymore smarter than I am and sometimes she would yell at me about wasted potential, but I would just quote my Meatloaf to her and there’s only so many times that you can say “A wasted youth is better by far than a wise and productive old age,” before someone absolutely forbids him- or herself from baiting you into it again. But she was a friend and a caring one at that, who would push her morals to the breaking points to get me out of a bind. Sometimes it felt bad, lying to her about why I didn’t do my math homework, I fell asleep right after I got home from work, just not used to balancing it all, you know?, or only skimmed three pages of the first chapter of a book we were being tested on, I ordered the book online, it’s in the mail, and once in a while I would nearly come clean. Mid-way through my senior year, it was; when I decided that I wasn’t going to lean on her any longer, and tried to make my own way. This did, however, take its toll, and it got to be where without my three cups of coffee in the morning, I couldn’t let myself drive, even if it was my day for the car pool. My friends, Billy, Sean, Tate, you know the crowd, they were surprisingly understanding, perhaps because of the change in my appearance and mentality. It seemed as if it was every other day someone who I’d never said more than three words to was like, “Damn, Jake, you look like shit,” and I’d say thank you and move on. I brought my grades up, because I was doing schoolwork in my dreams; fighting off numbers with a calculator, reading book reports in front of the class in the nude, and drilling it all into my head. I was becoming more distant, would stand Trisha up on weekends when we were supposed to meet, because any time I was free was spent making up for all the lack of sleep and she got really angry with me this one time, when I totally blew her off in the hallway. So I said that I’d take her to some party or other, don’t really remember what it was, and she got moderately excited, because we were both on the very outskirts of popularity and we’d never actually done anything together, which I’ll admit was a leading reason I relented in the fashion that I did, because I knew it would be the quickest way to get her off my back. And when we were there, I let myself go a little too much, found the right people, got drunk, and we started talking and it was like the first time we’d spoken in two or three weeks, but I wasn’t paying enough attention and so picked a bad moment to make my pass at her, attempting to steal second before I’d even seen a pitch. So she jumped away and said some things I didn’t catch and I called her a prude and gave up on trying to work anything out, even though I’ll admit now, it probably wouldn’t have been too hard. Maybe it was because I felt like my masculinity had somehow been threatened, it would probably have not taken much, since I’d never fucked before, and I felt that everyone thought I was a loser; a part of my relationship with Trisha was that I could place her under me on the social scale, a terrible thing I know, and for a woman like her to deny someone like me? It broke down all the walls I’d built up over the years to deal with life. I think…I think I was still rational enough to ask her if she could get a ride home, but I don’t recall any kind of response from her, all I do remember is gathering up my amigos, getting behind the wheel of (I think it was) Bruce’s car, and driving off into traffic. I don’t even know where I was driving, because the accident occurred nowhere near any of our houses, but rather somewhere out in the country and there wasn’t even another car involved, I just turned a corner going too fast and crashed into…something…I mean, here, my memories, they get vague. I moved out of the house, left my family behind, and moved into a new place that was very small, which didn’t help at all with my claustrophobia. I mean, the new digs, they weren’t terrible, I was closer to my friends, and all these people came by to say hey, which I truly appreciated. So you know, I fell into this new life for a few months, think it was about three, before the epidemic hit. It was kind of an overnight thing, I didn’t hear a thing about it, and all of a sudden, I’m infected-like, all of us in this part of town are coming down with the damn disease. And maybe it’s just a rationalization, but I start off to her house, because I’m afraid I’ll never get to see her again, and she does mean something to me, even if I did give up on us. When I get to her house, it’s dark, I don’t have a watch to check the time, and I walk up to the door and just kind of shove myself against it. When Trisha opens it, she gasps. “Jake?” she says, “But you and your friends are dead!”

And I say, “Brains!”

As good a place as any...

This is as good a place as any to begin.

I wrote this:

“Pancake Men” by Pandrio Androtti

EPIGRAPH: “Don’t think they understand/How much cake the pancake man had”

(Kevin Federline, “Crazy,” Playing With Fire)

Franz was a man of his word back a long time ago, before even Heath Ledger had made it such a fancy thing to be. He owned quite the underground empire, although it’s one you’ve never heard of. This is very materialistic world we live in and, according to such, rich people are often only known by what it is that made them that way. Bill Gates is always Microsoft and Steve Jobs is always Macintosh, even if they switch companies, because that’s what made them so full of it.

Franz, then, obviously, is relatively unknown due to the fact that his trade is discreet. Franz might employ a large number of workers, but none of them are allowed to speak of his business, they have all signed these waivers saying just that. Actually, the only reason I can even talk about this now is that Franz is dead. A handful of people came to his funeral, which made it easier for me to attach myself to his wife for the evening.

Let me excuse myself for any misunderstanding here. My wife is no Lisa Marie Presley, I’m no Nicolas Cage (that guy reads more comics than even I); I love the woman dearly. But to be frank, the first thing that attracted me to her was the possibility, no, the probability that she had a tale to tell that you could see in her eyes at that funeral. Being a writer, well, I think we’re always looking for some kind of story, and when I saw her that day…There’s definitely a story I plan to tell here.

The story, of course, is not about Franz, my wife’s first husband. She’s told me all about him, but to speak of a man like Franz, one would easily need a whole book to get any sort of story told in its complete form. This is because, the kind of man Franz was, there’s only really one story about him; one that can’t be imagined any other way than under that title (Franz) and written by the estimable James Michener, who I’m sad to say, is also not around today.

(Is it possible then, that in some sort of afterlife, Michener is doing just that? Writing the life story of our friend Franz? Now wouldn’t that be poetic!)

No, this is not about Franz, but he’s most definitely involved. His presence can easily be felt, if you know anything at all about the man. The only problem then being that not all that many people know much of him, but like I say, Franz is not the character of study here.

The hero of this story is, as it must be, a man named Kurt.


1

Kurt, like any teenager growing up in the time and with the family that he did, faced one major decision that would affect his life forevermore. Once he had made his choice, there would not be another time in his life more apt for a filmmaker to make a short study of, in the fashion of something quite like Sliding Doors, which is only mentioned to reiterate the impact of said selection.

(Please stop me if I boring you. As I write this now, I don’t think anything really cool is going to happen until 3 or 4, so you could just skip down to that, if you’re the kind of person who decided not to see The Matrix Reloaded because the paper said that nothing really went down in that film and to wait till Revolutions.)

Either Kurt could continue his life as an upstanding citizen, watching repeats of Two and a Half Men whenever they were on, which translated to always, and living with his terrible sister who failed out of college and his brother who hated him, or he could go to the street.

Any real reason Kurt had for making the latter decision was pure rationalization to be sure, but that does not change the fact that one summer vacation, it might have been going on his junior year, he packed a bag with what he thought he would need to live on his own, bought some condoms to humor himself, combed his hair for maybe the seventh time in his life, and got on the first Greyhound out of whatever geographic distance it was that constituted his life.

This was all a defense mechanism, as you well know. Kurt felt unloved, and wished to gather his relatives’ sympathy by suddenly disappearing from their lives, and then to return to them, voilà, the true spoiled baby of the family that he thought he should be. This is all good and well, probably happens everyday, but in this case it didn’t go according to plan.

On the Greyhound, Kurt met his cousin Vinny (who wasn’t his cousin or named Vinny. He was the kind of character that Vonnegut would call a Blue Fairy Godmother.), who we’ve possibly previously spoken of. I assume this also happens everyday, considering the overflowing ranks of your average illegal organization that your average cousin Vinny is bound to be the head of.

And so Kurt went to the street, possibly against his best wishes, making his decision all the more permanent. So good for us, for me, this is, because that is where the real story lies, but for Kurt it was regrettably less fortunate.

(Sometimes I wonder if today Kurt is like you and me, or if he has gone the way of Franz and Michener. This story, the one I’ve pieced together from my wife, his family, all sorts of people, is ambiguous there. But you’ll see that soon enough.)

As a journalist, as a writer, I will now try to explain what it was that happened to Kurt, why he became the person he was, and what he did as such, but to do so, I feel surely that I must fictionalize this story, for I am not Kurt, I have no right to speak of the man as if I know what he is thinking, and so any real truth ends at this point in our narrative.

(As if any of this really happened anyway. As if I’m even a real person myself.)


2

The pancake men are obviously very easy to spot if you know where to look and you know what you are doing. That’s why, unless you are a pancake man, knowledge of the above constitutes a death sentence. You will not see your assassin coming because the pancake men never do any of their own executions and their contracted killers, their hit men, are more commonly than not ninjas.

Pancake men frequent many eating establishments, none more often than the apparent IHOP. (The Lapins are virtually worshipped by pancake men through bizarre rituals that it is best we not discuss.) On any Saturday morning you could easily run into a half dozen in any one International House.

Saturday is their biggest day of business because it is the easiest for all members to attend to a long breakfast. Deals can only go down when the occupants of the restaurant are at least eighty percent pancake men. All pancake men are trained to acknowledge the precise shift in patrons that allows them to begin their transactions. (This is done through hours of study of videotape mostly, and is the characteristic of which most pancake men are quite proud.)

When one considers him- or herself to be just one of five not engaging in certain actions, chances become very good that he or she will not do anything, for fear of being an outsider. This is a localization of “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” same principal, enacted on a smaller stage.

Pancake men trade in all sorts of crop: smack, hash, x, sky diamonds, cake, and anything hot. The majority of them are elderly gentlemen, because there is so much involved in becoming a member of this elite club, there are generally few young upstarts on their own. There is very little subtlety with which deals are done. You have two standard types of pancake men: the supplier and the dealer. If one is able to actually watch one of their club meetings in progress, it’s easy enough to see who’s who. Of course all the specs vary greatly, but your standard play out has the dealers, if they order anything, getting a plate with eggs. Your growers, makers, thieves, all your first man grifters, they have the hard job of figuring out their topping. Perhaps the most obvious message to the middle man is powder sugar, which means the guy is packing cake, which is pretty much just common sense. But they change it up; very rarely do you find such obvious clues from pancake men these days.

Franz, he was a man who dealt in cake, and, in so being, established our friend Kurt as someone pushing powder. Starting in the game so young, our hero would most definitely turn an eye or two if he was actually out there throwing it down with all the rest of the crowd, so he worked as a disintermediator, getting rid of any product that needed to be pushed quick, or for some reason wasn’t getting picked up by the circuit.

There was this one time back when Kurt was still new to the game when he went to work with his cousin Vinny on one Saturday morning. That day our hero met all kinds of names, saw all kinds of faces; all these things being mainly detrimental to him in the long haul. When it comes to mafias, gangs, mobs, any kind of illegal club, you’ll probably find that knowledge is most definitely not power.


3

Let’s take a step back now, since, for all I know, you all might be lost already. We’re on the bus with Kurt, he has a bag with his life in it, and sure, his parents have taught him never to speak to strangers, but this is his rebellion phase, and were he to listen to them now, he wouldn’t be able to see himself as much of a rebel. I’m not making excuses for him, but this whole story is a rationalization in a way. When I talked to anyone who knew Kurt back before he embarked on this journey, they all had the same sort of response that you’ve heard all your life from people in this situation: “Would never have expected this from Kurt, he was such a nice kid?” (And obviously all variations on this, since you don’t even talk in the same language when you move from a kid’s parents to his friends.)

His cousin Vinny takes a look at him and says, “You’re running away, aren’t you kid?” and the first thing that Kurt thinks to respond is “Is it that obvious?” but he cuts that off in his head and sort of brushes the creepy old man off, even though his cousin Vinny, he’s not a man that you ignore.

“Hey kid,” he says, “Look at me, kid. Look at me!” Finishing with force, they have to believe you’ll actually hurt them, someone once said. When Kurt actually does turn, drawn by some delusional force of habit brought on by his life moving from classroom to classroom, his cousin continues, “See, I bet you’re trying to get away from your family, make’em notice your absence, ayuh?” To this Kurt gives what maybe could be perceived of as a nod. “But how about this, kid, you come back and suddenly they miss your absence, eh? Look, why’d you leave? They’re not showing you any care, now are they? They don’t even know you’re alive. Kid, look, when you go back, it’s gonna be all the same, nothing ever changes when you go back to the same status quo. You have to shake things up like. All you’re doing now, it’s just kitschy, everyone’s done it.”

And Kurt doesn’t really know what is going on here. “This is all I can do,” he’s saying, “I put a lot of thought into this, and all I could come up with was…” He knows if he keeps speaking he’s going to start crying, so he lets his voice trail off, but that doesn’t really make him feel any better about himself.

“I had a vision of this town once, when I was a young lad like yourself; I thought I knew everything going on here, hell, I thought I knew the whole world like the back of my hand. Then one day I fall off the side of the map, I sail my boat over the flat earth, and I land on the underside.

“Look kid, if you’re looking for some kind of sure thing here, you ain’t going to get it going back to that house of yours. You’ll get the sympathy ‘you okay?’ from everyone you know and in a week they are going to forget about you all again. World I live in, it’s different from yours. Everyone has notoriety there, if you know them, then they most definitely know you. I’ve got this idea, see, let’s take a stroll on the underside of the map, huh? We’ll see the inside of the globe. That’s the only place you’re going to make a name for yourself. But, I’ll admit, it’s a hard place to live, kid. Thing is,” he coughs for a moment, like a cigarette smoker close to death, suddenly this seems like a different film entirely, before he goes on, “Thing is, you work under me, you’re safe, and you’ll have all kinds of dough.

“Hey kid, look at me, you want some kind of certainty in your life? You want to know that maybe you meant something to someone in this life? I know of only one sure way to get any of that.”

The bus stops. Kurt’s cousin Vinny, our cousin Vinny, this man gets up to leave; walking away he turns his head back and assures, “Kid, this is a deal. I’m a man of my word.” He gets off and maybe you’re wondering where he went, so I’ll give you my best guess, which is nowhere.

At the next stop, Kurt got off and hiked his way back up to the last drop off and when he got there his cousin was sitting on the bench reading a newspaper. He looked up and smiled. “Next bus,” he said, “in about ten minutes now.”

“Mister,” Kurt said, “What the hell is this you think you got to show me?”

And, as they say, the rest is history.


4

So, look, lives make long stories and I could tell you all about how Kurt fell in love with that one girl you’ve seen before and you probably knew was turning tricks, or how he started winning off the street gambler that dealt his cards across the street from the apartment that he would share with whoever he was sharing his life with at that time, but you don’t really have the time for all that, do you? (I know I don’t.) And I still fear that the more I say, the more this is just a useless collection of images that do not truly respect any true story. (Like The Perfect Storm.) With that aside, long story short, Kurt got himself a name for sure, but perhaps not the best kind.

Nothing spreads quicker than fame, but infamy, so even though he ingratiated with praise throughout his own little circle, these were just ripples going out through the pond, and what it came down to was the fact that the woman Kurt lusted after and the busker that he often took cash away from were both employed by the same big wig who was no friend of our cousin Vinny. More like our drunken uncle Dan, this guy was very much the loose cannon who didn’t care what happened to others.

And if this was any solid swashbuckling adventure, I’m sure that Kurt and this man Dan, which isn’t his name, would have run into each other on any number of occasions. But, unfortunately, there is no final problem for a face off with Moriarty, there are no works to look on and face Ozymandias in this tale.

I don’t think they ever even met each other. They knew of each other, because, the world they lived in, knowledge of another person was a reflexive thing, a two-way street, but meetings face to face between brooding forces? Let’s just say that if they were more common, unstoppable forces would be meeting immovable objects all day long.

Problem with being on someone’s black list when you’re under the skin of civilization is how fragile your life really is. Everyone has their marks and if you actually look in the books that don’t exist, you’ll see that these incestuous organizations don’t like their own members much. Or, if you want, there’s an awful lot of friendly fire going around.

So, look, you got to give the boy credit, he never turned pigeon himself. He just pissed off people in the wrong places. The problem with, some would say the only good thing about, pigeons is that they’ve already finked one way, which makes them easy to pick up cheap as long as your job helps the feds out somewhat. Like I’ve said, the underground has it’s own problems with itself, and you find every now and then that the law is happy to play enemy of my enemy is my friend and overlook what ever is actually going on behind specific tables.

Dan the man, the arch villain, he engineers this fairly simple plan of greasing the hands of your everyday undercover team, get them sending out buyers to the right corners to pick up the dealers, especially one in particular. This in itself allows him to put his own men across town, so it’s a win-win.

He is absolutely delighted about this over breakfast, which, any pancake man will tell you, is the most important meal of the day. Blubbering down the wires—it was perhaps the worst quality of a man with many bad traits to speak long and loudly about anything and everything—in one IHOP, he put word out on the circuit, but it was much too late.

One Sunday morning Pete the Worm comes up to Kurt for a fix, playing the part well, he’s been a fake addict for longer than he ever was real, and Kurt’s ready with the cake and the money’s exchanged and then the whole thing goes miles up shit creek for one side of the transaction.

When they roll Kurt, they bring him in to bring down the whole gang, because that’s the whole point to this. As low down as Kurt is, he’s really no worse than a mark or a john, and they have this new upshot detective in town with a penchant for taking on the machine.

So they bring the boy in. Kurt, hardened by a year in a half on the street, is still just a kid really, and he’s more than happy to throw out some names of heads. This detective, Jack, he’s trying to rewrite the books a little bit. The main question is how gang empires are built: rather than a building, the foundations are at the top, the higher you get, the harder it is to bring down an individual column, and it begs to wonder if you are actually affecting anything on the street level by taking on the real people responsible.

Gang wars kill leaders all the time and all it does is change the sides for your rosters, leaving you with all the same players, so the effects of throwing big wigs in jail are sometimes questioned, but this guy, Jack, he’s not listening to any of that; he knows he’s only getting one side of the box from this kid, but he thinks maybe he can flip the industry on its side, making it all the more easily attacked.

Kurt, by now the boy’s quite angry, and throwing names of everyone who’s made his list, who’s list he’s on. Pancake men, they keep two different kinds of everything; when it comes to lists, they have the ones they hand over to their hit men, and they have the ones they keep to themselves. It is an unwritten rule that a pancake man not take out a contract on another pancake man’s life, so there are less direct ways taken to end lives. Since list one is death by proxy, list two becomes death by proxy by proxy.

There was an understanding back not too long ago, between the pancake men and all kinds of law; you see, these guys like Jack, they’re nothing more than kids like Kurt, following this mythical archetype that’s sprung up in literature for a couple generations now: The Cop, puts his work before his life, neglects his wife, drinks himself to death, and always bites off more than he can chew. So, sure, things have changed big time when it comes to who is scratching whose back these days.

And this is how it comes to be that an unsuspecting Dan brought about his own demise. And how a detective like Jack made a name for himself in knocking off an empire.


5

Like the Japanese, looking back on their baiting of the most irrational beasts in the form of the atomic bomb, it is possible that before he went down for all kinds of illegal actions, our man Dan looked on his future, like a deer stuck in the headlights, and envisioned what life would be like after such a cataclysmic event as the one he saw in his future.

This guy Jack turned himself into a household in the parts where this all happened when he brought in five crime bosses and actually put three behind bars for a solid amount of time. Course it didn’t hurt that the upstart was also solving quadruple murders and going through all kinds of past cases, but you talk to the people who live in that town today, the old ones, as Lovecraft would have them, and they’ll tell you this was the one that put him on the map. It was this kind of good that would keep people from looking down on Jack, because his talents sure unearthed all kinds of evil in what looked like clean soils.

Chances are low that Dan ever did anything like repent, but he sure did try to take vengeance for himself. Locked away in a cage, it didn’t take him long to find his connection to the outside and send out all kinds of red flags on this Kurt, all kinds of warrants for death by proxy squared.

You roll around in the mud long enough, you’re bound to get dirty, and there was plenty a reason for different people to want Kurt whacked; none more than Dan himself, but with him supplying the cash, suddenly the business seemed all the more profitable, and there were a lot of people involved in the trade.

Kurt, first thing he did, was get rid of all the stash he had on him, got as clean as he could, killing whatever habit he’d picked up from eighteen months dealing the stuff, and got as much hard money as he possibly could. He didn’t know about all the cake being spread around by his cousin Vinny, all the different places being greased, giving him enough time to get out, before he got dead.

Course it would have been so much easier if it hadn’t been for the woman. (Some would have it that this is always true, but then some are misogynist.) The thing was whatever strings it was that Kurt actually had, the girl he loved looked like a marionette when compared. He sprinkled the faces of dead presidents everywhere he could, Benjamins everywhere else, and tried to get her out of there as soon as possible.

Flying the coop, they made it look easy, but then things get sketchy, like the edges of an unfinished drawing. The problem really being the sheer amount of territory that the pancake men cover. It doesn’t really matter where they got to, because if they got found out wherever they were, they’d be dead today. Plenty of people would have been there to take out Kurt, and yes, if they ever got him, like Claus von Stauffenberg, they’d be after his girl, his woman, his wife, whichever it be.

The way I like to think, he found himself a nice little village and is still living out his day; the boy’s maybe half my age, he sure does deserve more than the life I’ve gotten. He probably works at a library and has been reading through the beats ever so slowly since he got there up until whenever it is that now is.


6

As for Franz, all this was a long time ago, years before the funeral, before I met my wife. You see, Franz had a way with him, he could make enemies of everyone, could harbor a damn traitor to his own way of life and still he could work things out, fix problems, and get back in the game.

I think the reason for all this was the sheer amount of crop that Franz could come up with. We still get people contacting us with a habit, looking for a fix, to this day, and sometimes I wonder if maybe I’m only a strongman for my wife, helping her to leave this life behind.

Franz could always get back into the business because no one really understood how much of the ice on the market was his. A winter without him, mayhap you might not even notice it snowing.

You see I don’t think they ever understood how much cake that pancake man had.