[CZ 8/10--12/14]
I was singing peacefully to my potatoes, all perfectly lined up,
--Long claws dragging on the floor
Three! Big! Eyes! peeking round the door
Got a Kreeger?
Uh! Uh!
Yeah, I got a Kreeger!
Bonaparte, my cat, sneaked up on me and said something I was not likely to forget too soon.
--Ambition grows on what it fed on.
Well, you may dream of Kreeger, but you still gotta mouth the mollusc.
Bonaparte was talking about yesterday. He saw me, I know he did! He saw
me take the empty bus in front of the shelter in the morning.
I wasn't the only passenger in the bus anymore, after it stopped in front
of the Mars plant. It was quitting time, and a platoon of exhausted young
women in disheveled aprons got on. They sat down silently, flushed and
beat up. An overpowering smell of chocolate filled the bus, with overtones
of sweat and mob gynecology.
I quickly arranged my Weekly Racing Form on my lap. Some of my favorite
camels were running down at the Meadows. I heard a carny-barker voice yelling,
--Kreeger! red-hot cracked Kreeger for sale!
The next stop was labeled Tobermory. A guy wearing only a red
bandanna and khaki shorts ran and jumped on the bus. Behind him,
a fair imitation of Danny Trejo was running and roaring.
--You gotta return what you borrowed---or I break your face!
Bandanna Man hopped into the seat next to mine, twitched and wheezed.
--Phew! That was close!
-Uhhh, this seat is taken, friend.
--Yeah, by me!
His face brightened.
--Going to the races? Great! I'll come along. Some Kreeger they got there.
He sniffed the air, wheezed again, and pulled a rucksack onto his lap.
--My name is Doug. Douglas MacArthur Fitzpatrick!
He stuck out his hand as the bug-eyed vendor tried to smash in the window.
He shouted something in Papiamento, and banged again.
--You gotta return what you borrowed Now!
bellowed the vendor. Doug bellowed back,
--I shall return it, you dick!
He too mumbled something too fast in Papiamento. Then,
--So what is Your name? And what got you interested in these camel races?
Or ... ... it isn't the Kreeger?
He nodded emphatically fewer than a dozen times, definitely.
I closed my eyes and smelled the chocolate, and said nothing. Definitely on the
space aliens' "Do not abduct" list. Really, why shouldn't I kill this fulsome Bosonaka? Really.
Bosonaka. Hank Williams' voice sang "Cool Water" silently to me. My internecine thoughts
drifted on, in their commodious coalition, helpfully; until they finally settled to their customary
rambunctious jamboree, in an episode of relief. I helmed my mind and yawned:
--I'd like you to call me Dan.
--Nifty plan!
He nodded, not too reassuringly. He reached into his rucksack and stuck a pair of USN aviator
sunglasses on his face.
--That's where I keep all these poems I don't understand. Too many of them!
I looked at a sign out the window: "Grundy Medium Security Penitentiary. Do Not pick up hitchhikers."
I got the distinct sense Doug was studying my face from behind his sunglasses.
The bus flew off the road and dove into the canal. It got wet. I left the planet for twenty minutes.
I wish I knew what I was doing these twenty minutes. Sure, I was playing sax at
"Nostalgie de la boue", the best all-girl club of New Orleans. But why?
My aviator shades were sliding down my nose, and my flipflops were slippery.
The audience were shrieking and throwing things at me. Nickels, pickles,
bok choy. My smile wasn't working. The smell of overripe guavas permeated the air.
Demimondal souvenirs, the panties and the stogies rained on me.
I ducked a couple of times, but my bedraggled ascot came loose.
It was soaked in sweat, food stains, and that deep south mustache-ride juice.
I threw it to the sweat-bathing rambunctious audience in return. They yowled.
A buxom smoker in front of my sax was grinning several gold teeth at me.
The button on her frontal expanse read "Bukowski Reader".
She grabbed the stogie and threw it into my sax, hollering "Kreeger!!!"
Its wail was muffled for a second, but I arched my back, raised the sax up like a wilted clarion,
and the stogie rolled out. The paddy wagons were quietly parking in an orderly chain outside,
but then the sirens started wailing.
I came to inside a majestic ring of quietly flashing ambulances. A tumid berm of wet female flesh
with strips of clothing and the odd movement all around me. I scratched my bleared buzzing think tank,
temporary mausoleum of stale wits. And all these purposeful emergency creeps, triaging and triaging.
I watched the avid pygmies throwing their javelins at the moon.
How couldn't the Zen master find my impatience logically questionable?
I saw the medics swarming and stretching over the clammy remains of Doug,
like sea-floor crustaceans on a dolphin beached for a week. My eye caught the
vendor staring at them from a distance, like a livid crawfish that's lost his squid
for the day. Doug's flotsam rucksack was pushing against my back. I shook my head.
I leant back, and a crunching noise came out of it. This wasn't hand-picked premium potatoes,
but I wasn't going to look in. I just picked the flotsam swag up and walked away naturally,
shaking my head and trying not to smell the swamp smells. For sure, the vendor didn't see me,
no way; he wasn't staring at me. For sure.
Everything else by the canal was normal. A frog at the water's edge was puffing and staring at
a chubby black-haired woman in a blue dress seated languidly by the bank. She was ever so slowly
reaching for the frog, her lips puckered. She caught my eye right then, and said,
batting her eyelids politely:
--I am Monica. I call him Prince Bubba Bill. And you are...?
She waved her head at the frog disarmingly. But the frog stared at me with mild consternation,
if not disapproval.
--Ret Marut.... No, I mean Dan.
--Not terribly sure?
The frog was positively annoyed, now. Monica said something in sign language to him.
--Dan. Dan. ... Pleased to meet you. Did you see the accident?
--No way it was an accident. But let's put this behind us.
She smiled, toodled her fingers at the toad, and smoothed her dress on herself. She started
walking towards a pagoda-style building half a mile away, tilting her head and twinkling
jazz-hands at me to follow her.
The pagoda asserted itself out of a cluster of sumacs. A raga was wafting out of the door.
Through the door, I could see the golden Buddha. But he wore glasses and was a spitting image
of Murray G-M, feeling his oats and staring at me with a very unbuddhist smile.
Effigies don't talk, but the voice aggressively overpronouncing something to me in Papiamento
was unmistakable. It kept coming back to "achtvoudig" and kept adding, "Don't you agreeee?".
Monica was smoothing her dress repeatedly and not casually at all, and breathed faster.
Gilbert the gargoyle on the left of the door was also staring at me.
--Achtvoudig, achtvoudig, Omega-minus, achtvoudig, dammit!
I snapped at Gilbert, but nothing happened. The eyes of the bespectacled
Murray-Buddha were rolling in disbelief. Monica was shaking her head.
The Buddha-Murray eyes settled on my rucksack.
--You are a dyed-in-the-wool eightfold Kreegereter!
enunciated the presumptuous Buddha. The Dutch word sounded alarming, somehow.
I immediately flashed back to his Wednesday lunch conversation with Dick Feynman:
--I'm told one of the greatest delicacies is a baked litter of puppies.
--Murray! Have you ever eaten dog?
--Well. No.
I smiled to myself, now finding my octal bearings. I thought of thoughts I didn't think.
I heedlessly rubbed my belly too, just like the Buddha---except he had no nifty T-shirt with
"The mindful papayas" stenciled on it, like mine.
Time to show him who owns the Universe now.
My eyes filled with the inward drollery of a genius, I scratched my stubble and turned to the
amphibian "Prince" squatting on Gilbert's head.
--You are no Bubba-Bill, you are Nanzianz the frog!
I nodded at the Buddha, knowingly:
--And the epiphenomenal combinatorics of three quarks barely support a skerrick of
metaphysical revelation, don't you agree?
I swear I saw the glasses jump. The Buddha looked quite unbuddhist now.
--Oh! They must all but exhaust these matters at high table at Grundy, I suppose!
he squealed.
--"All but blind/ In his chambered hole/ Gropes for worms/ The four-clawed Mole."
I snapped back, in budget debt to the daffy poet.
The pagoda gargoyles, most of them looking like Freeman Dyson, showered me with bright-eyed,
tight-lipped, quizzical smiles. Their ears cast odd shadows.
Nanzianz the frog bug-eyed me and started chanting, in a deep smoker's voice, implausible for an amphibian:
--"Hater of the light, lover and companion of the night;
Who rejoicest in the baying of hounds and in purple blood,
Who dost stalk among corpses and the tombs of the dead.
Thirsty for blood, who bringest fear to mortals;
Gorgo and Mormo and Mene and many-formed one.
Come thou propitious to our libations..."
No good, a voice in me whispered, it didn't feel right. Is this me?, I wondered.
I saw the owls swooping at me from the rafters. I smelled the flutter.
--"May a moody baby doom a yam?"
I blurted out a desperate palindrome to stall them. Thinking of Ken GWs untimely demise,
I bolted out the pagoda door, pursued by a swarm of Papiamento curses. Not a moment too soon.
The whole thing collapsed like a stucco movie prop, or a Vegas casino in the 8.5 quake.
Go figure. There was a story there, or what? Owls? I started walking along the adjoining strip mall and
marveled at the shoddiness of the construction. Inexpensive garlicky Chinese takeout smells wafted
from the ramshackle store next to the range. Kreeger... I almost thought as I walked into the indoors archery range, real determined to get the lowdown from my usual ornithologist sources.
The ornithologists, wild-eyed and, to a frisky minority, criminally insane, were slouching round the table,
rearranging the words of the book of Mormon into alphabetical order.
Pynchon, visibly agitated, purple, no less, gurgled noises and twitched. He ripped pages off the book,
throwing them behind his back, glaring at nobody specific.
--Tom never liked books, I don't think....,
explained the owlish superintendent, staring at me apologetically.
--This is unreadable!
protested Tom.
--Opinionated....
sighed the superintendent, looking at his bad green socks.
I tried to perk him up by blurting out Hunter/Garcia's St Stephen:
--"Saint Stephen with a rose,
in and out of the garden he goes,
Country garden in the wind and the rain,
Wherever he goes the people all complain.
Stephen prospered in his time,
well he may and he may decline.
Did it matter, does it now?
Stephen would answer if he only knew how.
Wishing well with a golden bell,
bucket hanging clear to hell,
Hell halfway twixt now and then,
Stephen fill it up and lower down and lower down again.
Lady finger, dipped in moonlight,
writing "What for?" across the morning sky.
Sunlight splatters, dawn with answer,
darkness shrugs and bids the day goodbye.
Speeding arrow, sharp and narrow,
What a lot of fleeting matters you have spurned.
Several seasons with their treasons,
Wrap the babe in scarlet colors, call it your own.
Did he doubt or did he try?
Answers aplenty in the bye and bye,
Talk about your plenty, talk about your ills,
One man gathers what another man spills.
Saint Stephen will remain,
all he's lost he shall regain,
Seashore washed by the suds and foam.
Been here so long, he's got to calling it home.
Fortune comes a crawlin', calliope woman,
spinnin' that curious sense of your own.
Can you answer? Yes I can..."
--"But what would be the answer to the answer man?"
he concluded triumphantly, flashing me a thumbs-up and looking cheerful now.
A changed man. We should all be grateful to dead Gerry now. He picked a toast out of the
six-slice-toaster on the table and took a huge bite, beaming. If he said "usable" more than half
a dozen times, I didn't notice. He stared at my backpack and grinned:
--The owls next door sure don't know from Kreeger, do they? Wise boids.
I felt hot under the collar again. The ornithologists were all studying me with technical interest.
A woman among them took off her sunglasses and her serious eyes bugged at me like
Nina Van Pallandt's.
--You know, Dilly Knox's Epitaph on Matapan to Mussolini remained classified until 1978...
she started saying. She evidently got it about the nasty naval ambush off Cape Matapan in '41.
And the Taenarite owls of the Cape (Bubo bubo), guardians of the doubtful entry to the
netherworld that jinxed Theseus.
This was now more than Pynchon could bear. He crushed the toast he was holding, stared at me,
nodding with blissful intensity, and positively bellowed it,
--"These have knelled your fall and ruin, but your ears were far away,
English lassies rustling papers through the sodden Bletchley day."
I thought of the 2300 sailors of the Regia Marina at the bottom of the sea, protein sustenance for crustaceans.
Tom reached out and started feeling my backpack, nodding to himself and muttering "usable... usable".
He turned to the woman and made an odd hooting owl call. Too many ornithologists for comfort stood up. Some put their glasses on, and some grabbed binoculars. They all stared at my backpack now.
I noticed the arrows stuck on the exit door.
There comes a time when composure is a deadly strategy. I bolted.
Owl hoots still rang in my ears, even a couple of blocks away. Tom Pynchon raced by on a ruinous bicycle, hooting,
without taking notice of me. I looked up at the forlorn BPOE building and saw the Kreeger vendor sitting on a chair in the middle
of the sidewalk, grinning at me, backlit by the setting sun. A suited corpulent guy in a beret, with a cigar in
his mouth, his brightest days safely behind him, was nodding at me persistently and giving me a thumbs up.
He was wearing a patch with "Nederlandse alpinistenvereniging" on it.
--Wanna play a game of toe-tac-tic?
he asked dyslexically. A flourish of about two dozen flugelhorns in perfect harmony almost blasted
out the windows. The Kreeger vendor glared at me full of insight and pointed at the empty chair
in the middle of of the sidewalk. I sensed the familiar karmic lapse of judgment slithering at me.
As I moved diffidently to sit, he grabbed my backpack and grinned half a mouthful of gold,
super-warmly.
--Sounds like a mule called Midnight stepped on it.
he muttered, shaking the backpack gently.
I felt a presence behind me, and Monica was standing behind my chair, with Nanzianz on her shoulder.
The flugelhorns ensemble in the upstairs of the building were now wailing Casta Diva from Norma
like a regiment in rambunctious mourning.
The Kreeger vendor peeked into the rucksack and turned purple, his vexed eyes bugging worse than
when he was chasing our bus.
--You switched it, slimy shrimp!
he barked, adding
--Ba hode!
in Papiamento profanity.
--Back off! Carpe cunnum! Don't you dare!
croaked Nanzianz, like a drunk Tom Waits.
The suited beret guy lunged at me, but Monica yanked me back, and he fell down.
She lifted her blue dress and did a gorgeous diving elbow drop on him with a determined holler,
as Nanzianz grabbed his cigar from his mouth---I have no idea how.
The exophthalmic vendor let out an indeterminate bellow, turned deep purple,
lunged at me now, and had a stroke. The flugelhorns above us hit
"pace che regnar tu fai nel ciel".
I grabbed the backpack, and peeked at the crushed crabshells in it. Aw shucks.
I flung it helpfully on the gasping beret guy's face on the ground, and ran to the bus stop.
A fierce owl fluttered by, carrying Nanzianz the squawker, cigar and all.
Nobody in the quiet bus returned my keen stare. Nobody. They all looked melancholy.
I sneezed and nobody said "Gesundheit". The Rondo of the Haffner Serenade paid me
an ear-worm visit in mixolydian garb. The bus took me back to the shelter.
Bonaparte looked asleep, purring at the Austerlitz of his dreams. Nifty. Nothing to
explain to anyone tomorrow. As I fell asleep, I flashed back at the neon sign
I glimpsed as I was jumping on the bus: "The Kreeger Lounge".
Tomorrow might quite well be another day. []