-- @@@@@ @@@@@@ @@@@@@ @@@@ @@@@@@ @@@@@@ @@@@@ @@ @@ @@@@@@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@@@@@ @@@@@@ @@@@@@ @@@@@@ @@ @@ @@ @@@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@@@ @@ @@@ @@ @@ @@ @@@@@@ @@ @@ @@@@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @ @@ @@@@ @@@@@ @@ @@ @@@@ @@ @@@@@@ @@ @@ @@ @ @@ @@@@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@@@@ @@ @@ @@ @@@ @@ @@ @@ @@@@@@ @@@@@@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@@@@@ @@ @@@ @@ @@ @@ @@@@ @@@@@@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@@@@@ @@ @@ @@ @@ dedicated to the art of the written word ================================ POETRY INK 2.07 / ISSN 1091-0999 ================================ **Poetry Ink Electronic Literary Magazine** ~Dedicated to the Art of the Written Word~ Volume 2, Number 7 Issue 14 (December 1996) This file looks best viewed with a 9- or 10-point mono-spaced font. We recommend Monaco or Courier. If you are using a Macintosh, we highly recommend you use ProFont 2.1. This file is coded as setext, a special text coding which embeds section breaks and style codes in a non-obtrusive format. We recommend you view this file with either EasyView 2.6.2 for the Macintosh, EVWin 1.6a for Windows, or sv for Unix. However, this file can still be viewed with any word processor which can import text files. We hope you enjoy POETRY INK, and we urge you to encourage the poets and writers found in these pages by dropping them an eMail. All of the writers featured in POETRY INK invite comments and constructive criticism of their work, so support your local Internet Poet! We accept no advertising, but we will plug stuff we think is cool. If you are interested in having your chapbook, book, CD, magazine, or software reviewed, please either contact us via eMail, or send the item you wish reviewed via snail mail to the mailing address found in our Masthead. If you are interested in submitting work for possible inclusion in POETRY INK, please see the Submission Information and Guidelines at the end of this document. Masthead -------- **Editor & Publisher**.............................Matthew W. Schmeer **Honorary Editor Emeritus**.........................John A. Freemyer **Senior Contributor**................................Wayne Brissette ************************Literary Correspondents********************** Lawrence Revard Phil Pearson Shaun Armour Rick Lupert Calvin Xavier Maybe You?
**Submissions and Other Contact Info** eMail: anonymous FTP access: snail mail: Matthew W. Schmeer, editor POETRY INK PRODUCTIONS 6711-A Mitchell Avenue St. Louis, MO 63139-3647 U.S.A. Legal Stuff ----------- POETRY INK is copyright (c) 1996 by POETRY INK PRODUCTIONS, a wholly owned subsidiary of the imagination of Matthew W. Schmeer. Individual works copyright (c) 1996 their original authors. POETRY INK is published electronically on a bi-monthly basis. Reproduction of this magazine is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold (either by itself or as part of a collection) and the entire text of the issue remains intact. POETRY INK can be freely distributed, provided it is not modified in any way, shape, or form. 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It is very important for you to save the reply for future reference. Please note that you will not receive the latest issue of POETRY INK upon subscribing; however, you will receive the next scheduled issue - and all subsequent issues - upon their release. One final caveat: if you have submitted work for consideration and your work has been accepted, you were automatically assigned a subscription to POETRY INK, and therefore these instructions do not apply to you. From The Editor's Desktop ------------------------- You know, I am getting kind of sick of writing these little intro ditties, but then as the editor and publisher, its my job to keep you up to date on the latest happenings here at POETRY INK Headquarters. As you probably know by now, we had a little mix-up in sending out the last issue of POETRY INK to all our subscribers; for some reason a lot of you received the zine as seven or eight segmented files, and others had strange characters throughout the text, which interfered with the setext formatting. Well, it seems like there was a mix up in our eMail macro, and instead of sending the last issue out as an eMail attachment, the zine was sent out as an eMail message. We have fixed this error and now hopefully everything is fine and dandy. On another note, back issues of POETRY INK are now archived on etext.org's anonymous FTP site. As long-time readers know, the first ten issues of POETRY INK were produced in a format that could only be read on the Macintosh computing platform; now, however, all of those back issues have been translated into setext-enhanced ASCII text files. You can find the archives at: While you are checking out the back issues, check out the file "memetic.hqx"; it's an electronic chapbook of poetry and prose I authored in conjunction with John Freemyer, POETRY INK's Honorary Editor Emeritus (it's a BinHex file, so you will need to have a utility to decode BinHex files). Okay, okay, I had to do a cheap plug for myself there. Jeesh! Anyway, read it and let us know what you think. And while we are on the subject of distribution, I want to let you know that POETRY INK 2.04 and 2.05 have been included on Pacific HiTech's Info-Mac X CD-ROM, which contains the "best of the Internet" programs and zines uploaded to the info-mac Macintosh ftp site. These CD-ROMs are sold to User Groups around the world for placement on private and public Bulletin Board Systems; having POETRY INK on these CDs means a wider distribution for our contributors and a wider viewing audience for the zine itself. (Please note, however, that we receive no money from the distribution of these CD-ROMs, and we consider the inclusion of POETRY INK on these discs as a form of archiving, not subsequent publication.) Not only is POETRY INK going to be included on this CD-ROM, but the above mentioned John Freemyer will have two of his HyperCard multimedia projects on the CD-ROM as well. The projects "Hate The World" and "Are You A Space Alien?" are two segments of an ongoing series of HyperCard projects that promise to change your life in ways you would not otherwise imagine. If you have a Mac, check them out. By the way, "Are You A Space Alien?" will also soon appear on one of the CD-ROMs accompanying "MacAddict" magazine. How's that for distribution and prestige, eh? Congratulations and kudos to John on this achievement. (FYI, you can email John for more info on how to obtain these programs at .) Matthew W. Schmeer, editor and ascii addict Corrections Department ---------------------- No corrections, so no worries! Belles Lettres -------------- A place for reader comments, criticism, and other assorted feedback. Not too many letters with complaints, suggestions, etc. these days, so this section is devoid of any meaningful content besides this little explanation. The Write Thing --------------- (Okay folks, this one is a groaner. But at least it's clean enough to share with your kids.) _The Chicken & The Frog_ A chicken goes into a library and says to the librarian: "Buc buc buc buc buc" (i.e. chicken sounds). The librarian gives the chicken a top-ten novel. On the way out, the chicken meets a frog coming in. The chicken shows the frog the book, saying: "Buc buc buc buc buc." The frog replies: "Reddit reddit reddit." (Hey, I warned you this was a groaner!) Got a good joke, a funny story or a bit of humor pertaining to the literary arts? Send it to POETRY INK with the subject line "SUBMIT WRITE THING". Featured Writer --------------- Stephen R. Ward 3 poems and an essay _Rose_ The rain washes his eyes (I rose before the stars wanted to dim) They suppose that he cries With sadness that his love is not with him But she is always there Who rose before the suns and earths were made (You whom I think most fair) With echoed smiles of joy that will not fade And he is always here Who rose before the stars had walked above Two eyes and one small tear (Why? I would say my spilling fuel is love) *--==--* _Seascape at Night_ a wave winding wide (the passive pulse of you) (a dormant undulation as the moonlight burns its fluent fingers on my siren shore) strokes heavy in sleep and pulls the surf of mating sheets in ebb and flow (the glistening ocean droplets of your suspensive swell) towards the haven of the sinuous sedative beaches of remembered deeps that were described as i who watch the billow of your curling tide (crawling by its deft degrees of sleeping) (advancing unknowing pillowing pride unconscious of my eye also weeping) and the surge in me beats mariners time when the echoing surf and shanties of your wave winding wide (in passive pulses) and surging swells as your seascape brightens as i dreamed the partnership (of soft wave and beckoning beach) and can now paint it *--==--* _Never Having Been_ If I could say in a funny way like Roger McGough that the thing nearest to my mind is what to rip off first: your jumper, dearest, or your jeans: what would you say? (If I would have my way, my funny way, with you, what would you say?) Who would believe that adultery could be so easy? Just a nod and some (although I was never any good at) winking. Don't go thinking 'bout it. Don't tease me either, non-believer. (If I should have my way, you say.) If I should would you? Never having been or having seen another's weird attempts under covers, I likely would fumble, not tumble into bed. (He said.) I, a married harried man, but quite naive believe that you, a believer, wouldn't either. (So there.) But at least I would have liked to have pieced together the question aloud to you. Am I allowed to you? (Will you have their funny way with me and us?) Featured Writer Essay --------------------- Stephen R. Ward hails from Lancashire, United Kingdom, where he works in Information Technology (IT). About _Rose_, _Seascape at Night_, and _Never Having Been_, Stephen writes: "The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets." --W.H. Auden, "Poets at Work", 1948 My poetry has always been private -- born of emotion-of-the-moment into a world where I'm afraid to let my offspring wander in case it is harmed, rejected or simply scorned. But we all crave praise for our creations, I suppose, as well as wanting to coddle them -- qualities, which, after six years of being a father, I realise are instinctive in us all. We have to trust not only in our child's ability and right; but in the world, to offer its acceptance. Prior to this semi-reluctant untethering of my poems (to a pride of my "fellow-poets"), then, my audience consisted usually, only, of one: of "the beautiful who go to bed with [me]" -- i.e. my wife -- plus an occasional close friend or two; and it has usually also been the case that my poems were written to, about, for -- or occasioned by -- such companions. I described myself in my submission to POETRY INK, as: A chemical engineer by degree(s) -- a modern romantic by nature -- most of my working life has been spent sitting in front of various Macs, marketing I.T.; writing about I.T.; editing newsletters about I.T., and designing annual reports about I.T.. I only write poetry when I'm sad. (My personal life is happy; but my working life is sad -- which is not to say I only write at work.) And I'd like to be as good a poet as Robert Graves. (One day...) ...which was supposed to make the point that much of my emotion -- and thus my poetry -- stems from antithesis, from conflict: whether flippancy and earnestness, art and science, good and bad, happiness and sadness. (Isn't this the same for all artists?) But, also, to 'warn' that my particular brand of 'lyric poetry' may not be to modern taste. However, having said that, this selection covers three somewhat contrasting and evolutionary styles. _Rose_ I started writing poetry, as many do, I suppose, in an adolescent blur of angst: sometimes for "myopic schoolteachers" and the school literary magazine; but, more often than not, to burgeoning blondes and brunettes who I worshipped, unrequited, and from afar. "Perhaps at fourteen every boy should be in love with some ideal woman to put on a pedestal and worship. As he grows up, of course, he will put her on a pedestal the better to view her legs." --Barry Norman, quoted in "The Listener" magazine, 1978 But real love came much later. And it was only with the pain that comes with the realization that one's love is not always perfect that my poetry also 'matured'. (I hope.) The poem was written in a telephone box in the rain at six o'clock one rainy Saturday morning in Leeds a few years ago. A depression caused by having to 'phone for an ambulance for a neighbour suffering an obvious cardiac arrest; as well as an aching absence. Unusually for me, it (the poem) all originated in my head, waiting for the medics, watching the rain; and I only scribbled it down later, as one of many "pimply young men who eat in cafeterias", eyeing the early-morning buses going by. _Seascape at Night_ Typically: a first line or phrase or weird combination of words comes to me, which -- if I haven't instantly forgotten -- knowing how important, and increasingly infrequent, such flashes of inspiration are -- I may or may not scrawl down on a piece of paper -- which I then lose. Eventually, usually on the same scrap, I end up with so many workings, corrections, crossings-out, insertions, asterisks-marking-substitutions, arrows-pointing-improvements, that it looks like my pet spider has fallen in the ink-pot and suffered a disastrous operatic aria (with accompanying dramatic movements) and consequential, agonizing demise. I then copy this out carefully -- only to find that, often, with careful scrutiny -- my original lines have evolved so many times that they are pretty much the same as they were several hours or days ago. I can't remember the exact situation that prompted this; apart from waking out of both real sleep, and a lack of awareness of many things I perhaps before took for granted. I remember, though, that it did take a lot of writing. _Never Having Been_ "The magic of our first love is our ignorance that it can ever end." --Benjamin Disraeli But real love often dies. Tragically as a spider's web. I admit it. I can't write anything other than 'love' poems. Inspirations such as Gerard Manley Hopkins (who taught at a local Jesuit school), Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas, Graves, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, Brian Patten and Roger McGough have meant that -- as with REM's Michael Stipe -- the rhythm of the words may sometimes feel more important than the words themselves. Poetry is a craft -- whether practised freely or formulaically... -- that is only fully realized with performance (as with music): but I try to make the essential sound as obvious as I can, as detailed as the notes in an Elgar orchestral score. My "first love" faded away (explosively). I was smitten with someone-else. And this is how I felt. No, however flippant it is, there was no adultery -- more through luck than judgment. I wouldn't -- and still don't -- know how to. It all ends/ended happily, anyway. (The magic of my second love is my knowledge that it can never end.) Which is probably why I don't write as much poetry as I used to... Greg Gunn --------- 2 poems _Angst Sandwich_ A hunger in my soul. sleepless nights of tossing, turning to and fro. on the breakfast table an empty bowl. and in my dreams feet burn on sun-baked sand. waves lap, lick, nip gnawing at the land. overhead, birds wheel and cry against the sky stars in shrieking silence burn, fade, and die. think I'll have a ham on rye. *--==--* _Separation, Divorce and a Sense of Mortality_ the days are shorter now and the nights grow cooler. small animals gather with greater urgency. and leaves yellow and brown, scores of them, detach themselves from limbs and flounder to the ground. reminiscent of unspoken words, careless remarks, dried up tatters of ancient parchment, faded ink, unpaid bills, broken promises, unfulfilled destiny, death certificates. the silent screams of leaves, deafening as they tumble to the ground. they are raked in piles, burned to ash, blown away in the wind. a door swings to, lock snaps shut. penetrating echo, a stir of dust. the cobwebs in the corners tremble. dried up husks of insects dark, but bloodless pale, beneath. silent testimony. and even though it's been three months the rooms are still not home. the furniture haphazard, out of place. and piles of books, papers scattered on the floor like leaves. boxes, unpacked, stacked along the walls. pictures not yet hung lean against the walls. up against the wall receding in the distance down the empty hall stifling this life that now stands perfectly still. the impatients bloom all summer red and white and then one still night the frost settles on the low ground penetrating crystals of ice bursting cell walls. The As Of Yet Untitled Column By Rick Lupert -------------------------------------------- by Rick Lupert **This issue's topic: A personal history of reading poetry out loud.** **And Coffee.** I was a senior in high school when I first realized that I could capture the attention of those around me by reading my work out loud. I hadn't had much experience with poetry at all. Oh sure I'd had a an acrostic poem published in my sixth grade poetry anthology. _Pigs_ Pigs are very Piggish Irregularly attached to mud Gosh darn it, pigs are messy But there was no live reading; no chance to really interpret the piece for my sixth grade peers through special intonation and facial expressions. In my twelfth grade Literature class, we were all required to memorize a piece which our teacher assigned to us, for recitation in front of the whole class. Mr. Goulart (who was a good looking young teacher who I imagined that all of my female classmates wanted to sleep with, thus inspiring me to want to be an English teacher some day) had chosen a piece called "Underwear" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti for me. It began "I didn't get much sleep last night, thinking about Underwear..." and then went on to detail all the different kinds of underwear and their various purposes. I had taken the liberty of borrowing a pair of sexy pink panties with black trim from a friend of mine (thanks again Karen if you're reading this) which I planned on pulling out of my pocket at a particular spot in the poem. When I stood in front of the class (consisting of a good portion of the varsity football team) with the panties dangling in the air from my hand, poetry took on a new meaning for all of us. I was so pleased with the response I received that I took the opportunity in several succeeding classes to read a few of the things out loud whenever Mr. Goulart gave me the chance. I always had the rapt attention of the class, even amidst high school love ditties and feeble attempts at humor. About a year later (1987) my friend Daniel (who I met during my thirteen month tenure as a McDonald's crew member) told me about this coffee bar in Pasadena where there was an open mike. night for poetry. I suggested that we go even though we were both nervous about the prospect of getting up in front of strangers in this pretentious (ie: bohemian and cool but we were too naive to understand it) atmosphere. We went. I read a few things I had written at work. (this was the post McDonald's era; I was working as an Engineer at a local radio station) I had the kind of job where I sat around and did nothing so there was plenty of time to write: _What Not Indublah_ What not indublah with my magnitude Under the foo foo bush where the gopher dost frolick Hinging on the thread that being to hold up Manny's Lizard Crossing over the valley of dull scissors that eateth of the greenish residue What not indublah with my magnitude (a masterpiece, no?) The crowd at the cafe received my work well. I went back the following week. This second week, the crowd did not receive my work well. I figured the first time was a fluke and didn't read again until 1993. I had taken up writing on a more consistent basis, actually making a point of taking a small journal with me wherever I went so I wouldn't lose all these thoughts which came to me. I found a listing of readings in the LA Weekly (local liberal/alternative press) including one at the now defunct Iguana Cafe called the poetry circle in which people were invited to show up, share a poem with the group, and then listen to critiques of your work. I hadn't really shared anything of my recently written so-called-serious work and I figured this would be a good place to do so. I would learn if any of it could be taken seriously or if I was just on the wrong track all together and should focus more on becoming a dentist, or something. When it was my turn, I read this piece: _Dirty Coffee_ I hate drinking coffee in the morning Because coffee is a dirty drink. I hate getting dirty in the morning. The night is for dirt. I like being dirty at night. Sitting in the dirty dark, Surrounded by dirty people, Thinking dirty thoughts, Drinking dirty coffee. I like being dirty at night. In the morning, I'd rather have an orange. The room really loved this piece. They gave me the impression that I had just breathed fresh air into their otherwise bleak existences. I was pleased. Perhaps there was some validity to what I was doing after all. I didn't realize the full extent of this endorsement for some time as I learned in my subsequent experiences in the Los Angeles Poetry community I learned that the Iguana was one of the major centers for poetry in the city and many prominent LA poets were at this open poetry circle. I had the opportunity to read a second piece that afternoon: _I Want To Fuck Art_ I want to Fuck Art. I want Mona Lisa to give me head. OH! I'd Make Her Smile! Yes Indeed. I want to lie naked in the Haystacks With the Waterlillies raining down upon my body. Furthermore, I want my jiism to be regarded as an impressionistic painting. It will hang on the walls of every major museum, And be the highlight of several private collections. Each jiism Splattered on a canvas With a date and the name of the person it was meant for, Or just the label ALONE. I want to Fuck Art, And by god by tomorrow I'll be at the Venus de Milo With a condom and a chisel. I'll have my own collection of marble breasts to do with as I please. Night after night, Stone tits, Always firm, No bra required. My palette is foreplay, My painting is intercourse, And what YOU see is orgasm. I want to Fuck Art, For Fucking Art's sake. God bless America. The reaction to this piece was a bit overwhelming. I'm not sure they had heard anything like it before. Though Matthew Niblock (often published poet and co-publisher of Sacred Beverage Press) did comment that the whole ending "didn't work." "I Want To Fuck Art" eventually won me a poetry slam which gave me the opportunity to read on the third stage at Lollapalooza and Matthew later went on to base a short film around this poem. So I started to go to readings around Los Angeles. Magazines started publishing my work. People began asking me to read as a feature at their venue, and in the spring of 1994 I began to host a weekly open reading at a coffee house in the San Fernando Valley, which I have done ever since. People ask me how I got this gig hosting the reading...the previous host had been running the show for about two years. He always made it clear that he was only doing this so eventually MTV would come in and discover him and make him a V.J. Apparently this had happened to someone else in Los Angeles and so here he was hosting this reading, although he had no actual interest in poetry himself. (He began every reading by reading selections from Justine Bateman's poetry collection. When I took over, this was the first thing to go.) One day he announced that this would be his last evening hosting. I immediately went up to the owner of the place and asked if he was looking for a replacement. He said that he was and if I wanted the job I could have it. I've been hosting ever since. The pay...there is no pay. I do get free coffee whenever I'm there though. That's pretty good for a poet. _Coffee Is Not a Drink For Pussies_ Coffee is not a drink for pussies It's a serious beverage commitment Dark Dirty Bad for your teeth Bad for your brain Coffee is not a drink for pussies one drop will stain your shirt Forever Coffee is not a drink for pussies I'm sure it causes cancer Leprosy Male pattern baldness Female pattern baldness Premature ejaculation Under-cooked omelettes Coffee is not a drink for pussies It is hot like the Equator Bitter like four year old milk Black like Nigeria When you drink coffee It's like you're drinking Nigeria Coffee is not a drink for pussies Don't talk to me about Lattes Mother Fucker About the Columnist ******************* Rick Lupert lives and writes in Los Angeles except when he writes elsewhere. Like in Paris for example. He has also written in Pittsburgh, but that was just the airport. He has written in other airports as well. He has hosted a weekly open reading at a coffee house in Los Angeles for two and a half years and has had poems published in "Caffeine Magazine", "51%", "Blue Satellite", and "The Los Angeles Times". He is the author of "Paris: It's The Cheese". Rick Lupert is a short, vegetarian, guitar playing Jew who recently suffered the loss of two of four of his goldfish. Send no flowers. Money only. Visit the everunderconstrucion world of Rick Lupert at http://www.wavenet.com/~rickpoet. Calvin Xavier -------------
2 poems _Lipstick on My Joystick_ The new computer games are so flashy and so sleek but so is dog shit wrapped in a- lu- min- um foil. *--==--* _Found Poem for Henry Miller_ ~found as a scrap of a tattered letter~ I used to drive past his house in the Pacific Palisades every day while driving a truck for a living. Sometimes I parked in front of his house and smoked a cigarette. I knew his lawn well. I watched his windows. I never saw the shades move. When he died, I realized I should have knocked on his door the first time I saw the house. He never noticed me sitting in front of his house in my truck. It wouldn't have made a difference if he had. Allison Eir Jenks ----------------- 3 poems _Fabric of a Kiss_ Young boy tattooed himself To my velvet temper My untamed parade. Slapped him with melody, he choked and smiled in my hedonistic web. Coma in my lane, he swam for my height, Thinking that was all that kept him from me. On a day any heifer would do, When an obscure light was leaking from his eyes, Like some buttery monster, I granted him a minute on that vinyl couch. His dizzy feet came at me With a swollen breeze All I saw were chaotic scraps of light and stray, red knots My counterfeit kiss peeled him to the skull. Nine years of him Packed in a kiss. He heard parachutes of violins; Swan beaks insisting love. I saw a drowsy sow. Still, my lips tugged him to oblivion *--==--* _No Longer_ All seems safe in my little box. Invisible drapes tie my eyes. Simple words glue my teeth. Everything I can picture in my mind, exists. On some other side, hearts shoot through careless floods, Undetected eyes float, Phantoms crawl through heavy dust. Rebellious sleepwalkers sing a universal chorus. Serene mornings are disturbed by foul-handed wolves. Creatures move through hidden parts of the moon Birds speak their marble language. The drinking mind is the universe. Here, heroes take their stations. Murderers dress in suits. Crazy animals are devoured. Profiles of death chase. I will add to the collection of sleeping fields; Graveyards with names and names. Who are they? Who were they? Who will I be? Years bring attics of deteriorating photos. Not all are equipped for fame. Ancient signs in the stars are dormant. We've forgotten how to cross borders. Facts limit us from our own endurance. The disturbed howls from the underground are blocked by grass. I can no longer let every day be close to the same, Confining smiles to certain places. *--==--* _Fox River_ Fenced in at Fox River. Committing nonsense; splitting worms, tossing berries. Twisted within candy trees. Wedged under your callused chest, chanting with the bark of the starved coyotes. You lie to me. I bite your shoulders. We cut down a tree and licked the roots. A bullet of snow snaked its way down my chest. You left it there, smirking with pleasure, diving at the chilled spot. You paved my fingers. Placed granite rocks under my head. My eyes were stained glass windows. Over there, on the side of the foot bridge, beer signs sit on the river like fishing lure. A curly, red-haired boy blows a wreath of bubbles off the bridge. They rise by the protruding brick cross. I think of when I met you by Mr. Crayton's grocery store With lollipop stains, your blue tongue flagged me down. Thomas Dunnam ------------- 1 poem _Holidays and Local Sketches_ A coral-red, raw silk-jacketed simulacra of a blond airlines reservation clerk's fist Lazily arches across the plywood structure constituting his check-in station as a Result of getting no answer to the smoking/no smoking query; nailing a garish and Mewling social service worker on hiatus squarely on the left temple of her figleaf Bifocals, but vacations on the cheap are. A sourly homicidal and dementedly greedy Cincinnati travel agent wacks a retired Soda jerk in the back of the head with a lead pipe wrapped in duct tape and throws His limp and gullible old carcass out the back door of his 'office' and consequently Down a levee and into the swiftly flowing waters on the now infamous $100 Ohio River Cruise. The holiday sea shines blue below the sky, Or sea holidays below a blue sky, Er, see holidays below: An outraged and paradoxically humbled 40 year-old 'college student' is lynched in the Paris summer backyard garden of an unregistered youth hostel by a nation of 15 Sub-teenage gypsy pickpockets -- having been just previously convicted in a faux Trial interminably interrupted by motions to sniff more glue of the crime of not having Had much money to steal. The court-appointed counsel for the defense constantly Playing the not-guilty-by-reason-of-I-forget card to no effect. Black weather makes for a sweet holiday in the forest, Though black leather makes sweat for us, Or weather makes life sweet in the black forest, Oh sweet forest! Sweet for us! Sweat for us, sweet holiday forest!, er A UN 'peacekeeper' on leave shoots up a forced-prostitution 'tavern' in the mountains Of I-can't-remember; a tourist from Guatemala dressed in his national outfit races Across the ice that seasonally connects the Aleutians to Siberia; an occult Scotch Wizard crashes his purplish hang glider into the garden balcony of a narco-lawyer's 21st floor Caracas condominium. All these last ones taken from newspaper clips. Notes From the Workshop Gulag ----------------------------- by Lawrence Revard Lawrence Revard is currently on sabbatical from his columnist duties. He will return in Poetry Ink 2.08 (February 1997). About the Columnist ******************* Lawrence Revard is a graduate student at the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop for Poetry. He welcomes comments regarding his writings for POETRY INK. He can be reached at the eMail address at the beginning of this column. (Okay, you lazy bum, here it is: ) Rebecca E. Hays --------------- 1 poem _To See the Stars_ (for Andrew) Black is the night between. Not velvet. Not a material curtain of darkness or phantom artist's canvas. For that depiction implies texture, form, solidity, and not this, this eccentric emptiness of eye-deceiving Nothing which stares back at us without pity or hope but only a promise of ~Something~... Mysterious Nothing tugs at baffled eyes, compelling one to seek ever further into hollow void... ever deeper into impossible shadows of ink too ebon to see... The writing upon Heaven's page, too dimly scribed. But there, suddenly, ~there~ at the most oblique angle, in the startled corner of one's vision, ~Light~! Colors, so subtle as to make one question one's perceptions, glimmer, glow, transform, becoming nameless shiftings of ultimate perfection... Hiding fiery identities behind masks of glorious alteration, these constantly deviating uncounted willow-the-wisps fade and flush, beamingly set into the indignant darkness like pixie torch-fire... Reborn again this night - ~Let there be stars.~ June Hayes-Light ---------------- 1 poem _Echoes of petals..._ Echoes of petals filled the room... a white room, bright with grief. Thoughts lingered around the lamp... like moths around a flame. Echoes of many, mourning the few... on dark roads, wet with fear. Memories of falling, clutching at straws... I am innocent and shoulder the blame, whilst Echoes of passion are fearful and tame. Echoes of petals, borne on the breeze... a far away window, framing the sky. Voices for faces, drifting away... down years of recalling Echoes of children, running free... down fields of endeavour into the void Touching by listening to silence unfold... curling down corridors escaping from me, those Echoes of longing for what cannot be. Echoes of petals starting to fade... doubting, remembering if I ever was me While a stranger invades a familiar face... and traitorous limbs to defection succumb. Echoes of maybes fall to the floor... to mingle with promise's dust. Sweep up the past in giant hands and... scatter its ashes for others to find where Echoes of sorrows in silence are blind. Echoes of metal down darkened halls... figures in white, a ballet of blades Touche & riposte in challenge we die... salute the conqueror, honour the mask. Echoes of scoring, counting & moving... through foil-sharp sunlight into the realms Of empty space, staring at time's kaleidoscope diary, missing a day and Echoes of petals, dying away. World Wide Words ---------------- by Phil Pearson Book Review _On the Island_ by Josephine Jacobsen Ontario Review Press 256 pages **Part 1: "...the other translation, from letters to matter"** Josephine Jacobsen's relatively unheralded collection of new and selected stories, "On the Island", delivered in evocative prose and set in exotic locales, offers up to her readers a rich fictional world of overloaded symbolism and jagged time. In fact, the narrative line of her stories in the first half of the book thrives on a non sequitur approach. White space for scene breaks is relatively rare. Memory, flashbacks, and the present collate and coexist in a tricky relationship, as Jacobsen has a human-rights investigator wonder "how the past hours, the present minute, would show in memory's tricky records" at the end of "The Inner Path" (69). Again and again in the first nine stories, reality exists as a false reality, often realized with epiphanic violence. In the first story entitled "The Mango Community," an expatriated American painter (most of Jacobsen's characters are artists of some sort) concludes that she has never really "seen snow" before (8). In the story "Nel Bagno," a writer, Mrs. Glessner, reaches a similar epiphany when trapped overnight in a bathroom: "For the first time, ever, she became conscious of what she knew. In her non-fiction, she never described things truly; not ever as truly as she could (53-54). Jacobsen's ultimate violent epiphany of false reality reaches its culminating point in the magical realist piece "Sound of Shadows." With tongue in philosophic cheek, Jacobsen begs questions--chillingly playfully to the reader--in a short introductory paragraph while the second paragraph gets cheekier in its wordplay: "It is one room wide--a long dark living room, a narrow dark bedroom, a dark narrow kitchen; a long narrow back yard between high, board fences, and on the alley end, a wire fence with a toothed gate" (21). Even the fence takes on a false anthropomorphic role. Jacobsen, at times a logical positivist philosopher par excellence, probes with Wittgenstein-like vigor the falseness of language too. In "Nel Bagno," Mrs. Glessner thinks, "But what was the actual connection between the letters and the porcelain objects close upon her? The translation from English to Italian was nothing to the other translation, from letters to matter" (53). Later on, she mentally notes that a "dictionary's uses anticipate neither biology nor crime" (55). Revising her analysis and perception of language, Mrs. Glessner now sees language as antecedent to experience. Existence in all its real qualities precedes essence, the abstractness of language. Ms. Jacobsen would make a good Sartrean existentialist. These philosophic concerns with the inherent falsity of reality and language carry over into Jacobsen's own painterly writer's eye and concentration on detail. For example, color needs translating, offers new insight, allows for reseeing (6): "On this tiny island she [Jane Megan] remained amazed at the progressive detail of her own sight: new shades of purple and rose appeared in the noon sea. She was stunned by the varieties of green: the serious glossy green of the breadfruit, the translucent green of the fringed plantain blades, the trembling play of the flame trees, the palms' hard glitter. Green, what on earth was it!" Green is, and is not, green. More the latter, for Jacobsen. Appallingly though, sight can become monotonous; its immediacy can be lost. Caddy, in "The Edge of the Sea," becomes obsessed with the falsity of eyes. She knows that, "The eyes looked through everything, and everything they looked through came apart. Nothing held.... When the eyes looked at people, at cosmetics, at billboards, at speedometers, at blackboards, these objects came apart like wet tissue" (97). For Jacobsen, perception, like "memory's tricky records," is subject to inherent falsity. The very act of perceiving can deceive. Characters deceive left and right in Jacobsen's stories as well, and one's perception of identity is manifestly and symbolically precarious. Along with Jacobsen's preoccupation with the falseness of appearances exists a concomitant apparent notion of an absence of any unified, discrete identity, which is instead "tricky records" of memories, feelings, sounds, and lights. Dan's hauntingly chilling past, piecemeal, tinged in a romantic light by Caddy's own untrustworthy memories, opens up with wicked revelation. Facts seem to be repetitious by Mrs. Brounlow's remembrances. Gina and Dan have married, by Dan's dark machinations, and Caddy "does not know...who they are" at the end of the story (109). Other thoughts of doubt crop up. Is Mrs. Bart's switchblade-yielding girl fact or fiction? And George? One of the Company, he is "neither in nor out of the living" (78). Ironically, a character puffs that George was a "real person," further blurring the real and false line of identity (80). All of Jacobsen's first nine stories deal with the deep question of identity. And, for her, ultimately, identity equals gesture, equals action. More broadly, gestures free us from the falsity of language. They are prelanguage truths. As Anabel Avon muses, "Gestures were the real language, the ancient one. The sculptor, the dancer, the priest understood this. Actions, too, were gestures, deeper, simpler, than they seemed" (116). An artist constantly on the lookout for them, she becomes obsessed by gestures: "...each of these made its own, translated as a line, a blocking out of space, an arrested motion. She found that its magnetism was as much the isolation as the view--the smell of dusty sun and some crushed aromatic plant; the pulse in a lizard's throat; the shield of light on the water, that corroded to bronze, to copper, to lilac as the sun focused itself into a huge ball, round as a blood orange, touched the sea's rim in one sensual gesture and slid--slid actually as the eye watched--below the world (116). In the cryptically titled story, "The Inner Path," a human-rights investigator/writer loses two-thirds of a finger in a bloody and gross gesture. Here the action quite literally matches the "other translation, from letters to matter." Many of Josephine Jacobsen's finely plotted stories tantalize the reader with open-ended denouements rich in possibility. One such arresting story she entitles "Season's End." This reader's fine-toothed comb worked overtime between, around, and up and down lines trying to desnarl the text. A plausible and psychologically revealing interpretation follows, hinging on Mr. Gains being gay. One cannot help wonder if his name is a tip-off to the reader and a bit of wordplay on Jacobsen's part. Or is it a Freudian slip? Unwitting? Does some latent homosexuality prefigure in her art and psyche? At the least, this possible interpretation adds a much richer dimension to the last page. And regardless if Mr. Gains is a closet pederast, an unwitting homosexual, or an openly gay man, his overt admiration of Chico and his dissembling treatment of Arthur is suspect on a few levels. "Season's End" comes across as a sort of male menopause story. "Season's End" means the loss of sexuality, the assuming of an asexual nature. At the very end, when Mr. Gains says aloud, "Yes, I can ask at Thurston's," and then adds, "I could," one feels that he will innocently rationalize Chico's theft of the watch, his sexual proclivity inherently compromising himself somehow (92). Whether or not this is how Jacobsen envisioned a reading of the story, her unresolved ending leaves an alert reader much room for multiple speculations. On the whole, the first nine short stories in Ms. Jacobsen's collection, "On the Island", offer up well-imagined fictional worlds, along with a richly textured prose style. She has a textual sensuousness that reminds one of Durrell, and her world at times strikingly resembles Graham Greene's Greeneland in its stark, isolating nihilism. In fact, a Jacobsenland steeped in isolation and the Hitchcock premise of placing an ordinary person in a highly unordinary situation can be found at the core of most of her fiction and sets off her writings with recognizable landmarks. A few caveats remain though. Her foreshadowing and symbolism come across as a bit overloaded and cliche-ridden at times. Do we really need both a lame dog and a lame boy in the first story? And the symbolic rainy ending of "The Inner Path" inappropriately suffers from ill-chosen, bathetic symbolism. Sometimes this overdoing passes across into her writing, so we get overwritten lines such as "She sat up in an agony of stiffness, the full, ludicrous, unbelievable, locked misery drowning her" (56). Strike up the violins! In like fashion, she runs words together with the result being a clogged syntax of odd rhythms, seemingly revealing a rather lax ear on her behalf. For example, she writes: "The fatigue was a sudden accumulation, mental and emotional even more than physical; the wearing and tearing of tiny teeth; indignation, frustration, endless effort; the initial effort of clearing himself from instant imagination; the slow, dangerous, laborious attempt at the winning of confidence, the hoarding of facts" (59). Equally irritating is her bad habit of unwitting alliteration. Far too many overall literative sentences abound. One shall suffice. "in this past month he had fed the typewriter keys doggedly, persistently, feeling his own fiery frustrations faintly eased by the lines that would express them" (62). But these are relatively minor quibbles. Jacobsen's painterly eye is deft and vivid, fully transcribing for us, her privileged readers, those gestures from that "other translation, from letters to matter." **Part 2: In the Mind of the Eye's Storm of Josephine Jacobsen** Eyes, yes human eyes, are truth-bearing, truth throwing, truth registering physical organs for Josephine Jacobsen in the second-half of her collection, "On the Island", and all of her last eleven stories function, some with vivid moralistic and messianic zeal, in bringing, first to her own characters and then, by implication, to her readers as well, the import of the eye's out- and intake. Jacobsen champions the eye. By the eye's own compass she swings us into the jungle and garden alike, happy, many times, to pinpoint her fictional needle to just that line between jungle and garden too. In the heavily pun-titled story, "Late Fall," a young priest, Father Consadine, secretly speculates with frequency upon the mystery of the presence of God, especially how this presence penetrates circumstance and flesh. His mind's eye drawn to the symbol of the lion, the gladiator lions of the historic Roman Coliseum, majestic, terror-striking, brute, dangerous, inescapable, he wonders (130) if "at the last moment, did anyone believe, so confronted? Yes. But--and here was the crux--did they, could they, know they believed? Facing that hot maw and the impersonal ravening gaze, could they hold that thread?" Inwardly satirical and irascible, rebellious, mired in a state of seemingly noncommunion with God, Father Consadine, at story's end, two miles out in the village's Dump, looks down over its (138) chaotic brilliance "into that abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet; in this case, the raw remains of the once-possessed, the shards of personality. It was disintegration, visible. 'Jesus, Mary, Joseph!'" Truth becomes finally "visible" and communes with the eyes. From another pun-titled story, "Help," Jacobsen depicts the world of a black maid named Violet set inside the white, bigoted world of her stomach-troubled employer Mrs. Harker. Considerably sympathetic, at first, in the opening pages to Mrs. Harker and her marital situation, Violet's good nature soon fills with furious contempt as Mrs. Harker reveals herself to be a thief who steals eighteen dollars from a wool glove in her purse to cover petty card losses incurred while playing bridge. Very early on, Jacobsen writes, "Violet knew a mean man [Mr. Harker] when she saw one. She had met shame in Mrs. Harker's eye. Shame was something Violet knew about, from a former period" (141). Again, truth becomes visible and communicates to the eyes. Without Violet's clear perception of Mrs. Harker's situation, physically abused and nervous to the point of having an ulcer, the reader could not make sense of Violet's contemptuously kind decision to drop, unanticipated and unexpected, the matter of the theft altogether. What one sees, how one reads a person correctly, for Jacobsen, determines just what motivates a person, how they act, or how they react. Mrs. Curtis notes a curious jolt of dislike--ridiculous she wonders?--from the gaze of Dr. Brade in "Vocation." All alone, powerless, relying on the congeniality of strangers as a patient, she is rudely awakened and frightened by Dr. Brade on the eve of a tricky five-hour operation. After Dr. Brade has left her, Mrs. Curtis, outraged, confused, knows "why Dr. Brades's eyes were familiar. She had seen them, late at night, in a great railroad station" (153). A guard patrolling the station sadistically rousts a very old, dirty man from a bench with a merciless smack of his nightstick against the pitted soles of his shoes. And nearly two years gone by, and this sadism has never totally left Mrs. Curtis' mind, for "the eyes of the man in the tan uniform seemed not to fade" (156). Appalled at the loose abuse of uniform and the visceral sadism to hurt another, to instill deep fear, Mrs. Curtis sees that "suddenly all over the world, eyes shone at her, steady in their useless, cureless, idiot priesthood" (157). These eyes come before her "steadfast, unsmiling[,] ancient" (158). In "The Night the Playoffs Were Rained Out," these eyes come from Tribes, Clans, and Borders. For Mrs. Plessy, Mrs. Gombrecht's bright ceramic blue eyes shine at her "with a fixed, china hostility" (167). Showing us, her readers, the primitive, prelanguage truths free of the falsity of language, the world of gesture that occupied her concern in the earlier stories, here, visual gestures being the focus, Jacobsen imaginatively glorifies, with the gusto and meticulousness of a finely plotted detective story, a philosophy of the eye. In "A Walk with Raschid," she has James Cantry say, "The truth...can't make me free if I don't know it" (180). And to know the truth, for Jacobsen, involves "seeing" it. Not until a taxi driver stares (on the last page of the story) into James' eyes and reveals to him his wife's deception does he suddenly put two and two together. Deceptions become machinations: "under a djellabah hood, dark eyes, now turned a light, steadfast blue, raced away raced away" (181). Jacobsen narrates in another story, that "cause and effect, lovely as graph lines and as clear, operated below all things" (245). Cause: Tracy, James current wife. Effect: the rejection of James by Oliver, his inarticulate, ten-year-old son, the same age as Raschid, in favor of Louise, Oliver's biological mom and James' first wife, through the manipulative lies against James as told by Tracy to Oliver. Interested not only with just imaginatively delineating deception in its many guises but also its twin, truth, in all its masks, Jacobsen explores the theme of friendship within the looking glass of fiction in her story, "The Friends." At the end, thirty years of friendship between Mrs. Perkins and Rosie O'Shaugnessy, employer and employee, comes down to one final message, a final gesture: "deep from Rosie's eyes, Rosie looked at her. 'Missus Perkins,' she said, 'I've got a pain.' 'Rosie,' said Mrs. Perkins" (195). Moments later, Mrs. Perkins smothers Rosie, in the terminal stage of cancer, with a pillow, suffocating her. From this unexpected gesture of euthanasia, Susan is bathed in a great sense of peace. Later that day, she says to herself that why she did it was "to feel better" (197). Yet, picking up her handsome silver sugar bowl and seeing over its faint mist of tarnish, "her face flashed back at her, through stretched and broken, into mysterious patches (197). So, like Father Consadine, Mrs. Perkins' eyes receive the mysterious "shards of personality." Similarly, the ending of the first-person story, "The Wreath," has the unnamed narrator noticing a big wreath being hung on a cord from a window of an institution of mental health: "It had a huge bow; it swung a little; then the arms withdrew and it hung still. The bars quartered its bright green-and-red circle. And by some queer sudden movement, as though the ground beneath the station wagon had shifted, altering every proportion just a little, its broken circle seemed to me beautiful and strong and appropriate" (228). Beautiful, strong, appropriate, the broken circle altered by her bald encounter with a delusive female patient, Jacobsen shows just how much emotions color what or how one perceives the world around them. Nowhere is this emotional coloring more so the case than at the end of the story entitled "Motion of the Heart." Jacobsen writes, "At this exact moment, and without any preparation at all, Milly saw what she intended to do--saw it before her....There would be no Larry. Though she failed to believe it, she knew it" (209). Here, deceived by a lover's face that "was constantly in change--looks passed over it; it was in shadow of light; it melted and sharpened," Milly's motions of the heart create motions of the eyes (198). In this process, which one might call "eye-bridging," for lack of a better term," a sort of crude dialectic that proceeds from emotion to eye, and so on to a greater emotion, or vice versa, constantly takes place. For Jacobsen and her philosophy of the eye, a counterbalance continuum of in- and out-seeing always is at work within one's self. Jacobsen fictionally captures this dialectic of mind's eye and eye's mind in the story of "The Jungle of Lord Lion." Caught in the undergrowth of rigid social convention and her own happy, personal peace, in the recurring terrible beauty of Boundinian jungle, of Mrs. Chubb's vile racism, and Mrs. Heatherby's subsequent buckling under to Mrs. Chubb's social blackmail, one surmises that Mrs. Pomeroy at story's end "somewhere within her knowledge...had understood the terrible components of joy" (220). Likewise, for Mrs. Mary Driscoll, in "On the Island," fantasy of beauty and real green jungle violently coagulate, her husband bloodily decapitated by a machete blade, a victim of mistaken identity. Finally, from the story "Jack Frost," Jacobsen defends the perceptive truth of the external eye through Mrs. Travis, a ninety-three-year-old gardener who has "a belief in the physical, a conviction of the open-ended mystery of matter" (233). Fearing the loss of her wild cosmos and her garden proper, which, in her own mind, she created out of nothing, she engages in a defiant battle against Jack Frost for the life of her flowers. Physically unfit to wage much of a battle, she finally triumphs, surviving an ankle sprain and teeth-biting cold. With a lyrical panegyric championing the visual eye, Jacobsen's narrator sees "a dozen shapes and colors blazed before her eyes, and a great tearing breath came up inside her like an explosion. Mrs. Travis lifted her head, and the whole wave of summer, advancing obedient and glorious, in a crest of color and warmth and fragrance broke right over her" (240). World Wide Words Special Features --------------------------------- by Phil Pearson 1 poem, 1 short story _The All-Night Cafe_ ~Arles, September 1888~ It's 1:15 AM: An empty pocket of a night Two peasants, Crumpled up like old accordions, Zero in the throat, Face down in the barking of their minds. Two lovers, Hearts full of wine, Take in the pink bouquet's sweet fragrance, The halo effect of three gas lamps, Oblivious to the time of clocks. And the waiter, With the motheaten eyes, In need of a clean shave, Ramrod stiff in posture, Stares vacuously out into space. A painter Dreams of soft Louis XV greens and malachite Of sunflower yellow and hard blue greens Of a devil's furnace and starry nights. It's 1:15 AM: An empty pocket of a night. *--==--* _Crawdads_ On his hour-long lunch break Mr. Hooker went to Nanci's Baby Boutique at the mall. First, he circled the perimeter, eyes browsing over bootie socks, layette sets, Baby's Little Engine That Could Book, a Beatrix Potter Baby Book, My First Football, baby shoes, New Kid On The Block dolls, "My First Paddington PLEASE look after this Bear. THANK YOU," Little Slugger caps, Baby's First Headband, Baby's First Barrette, before finally deciding on a Fisher-Price 3-in-1 Travel Tender, and a surprise gift. Mr. Hooker requested that the Travel Tender on display be collapsed and packed up in its own tote. The salesclerk complied, pointing out the 3-in-1 bassinet-crib-playpen, its soft foam floor, with padded side rails too, the fabric durable and washable nylon. He said nothing, smoothing a body hair back down on one of his wrists. A CPA, young, well-groomed, he nodded his approval of the demonstration when completed, an inhibited smile oddly playing across his lips beneath a thin mustache. They moved back to the counter. Teasing the nap of his mustache, Mr. Hooker waited while his bill was totaled. He read the liquid crystal readout above the store register and paid in cash. The salesclerk made small talk about his cute surprise gift as she wrapped it up for him. Having received his change, Mr. Hooker meticulously turned back the dogeared corners of three one dollar bills and righted each one face forward before placing them back in his wallet. Then with a sufficing thank you he carried away his purchases. -==- On his lakefront property that evening, Mr. Hooker was casting for sand bass off of his dock. A cordless phone lay nearby. His wife, expectant any day now, was resting in bed with more new lower back pain. The last week or so she had been experiencing short, irregular contractions their doctor had called "Braxton Hicks" contractions. "Par for the course," the old doctor had told them. Behind around the back side of Mr. Hooker's ice fishing house, up on cement blocks just off the shore rocks, a young girl's muffled "ouch" carried out into the autumn air. She wrung her hand first as if it was on fire, next squeezed it under an armpit before sucking on the offended finger in her mouth. Mr. Hooker came upon her sucking on her index finger. An empty Ziploc bag lay at her feet, and he was curious to find out what was going on. As she sat, one knee kept quivering so much that she was forced to hold it down with her free hand. The little girl, calling him "Mister," asked him if he could please help her catch some crawdads. She said she was afraid to catch them; she feared getting pinched again; and she just had to have lots of them. Mr. Hooker's stomach fell as the girl snuffed back a flow of snot, followed by a sleeve wipe. Two red small round burns, oozing pus, were spied on a wrist. He asked her if she was from the trailer park up the road. She nodded warily. He asked if she had a momma and a daddy. Yes. Did she like her momma? Yes. Her daddy? She mumbled something about crawdads. And her name was? Mandy. Mandy who? Duke. He said he was Nicholas Hooker II. A wince of pain showed as she picked up the Ziploc bag. "Saint Nick" he was, said Mr. Hooker. "Jolly Saint Nick," he said solemnly. We'll catch you lots and lots of crawdads, he told her, but first he had to make a couple of quick phone calls and then he would be right back. On the dock, Mr. Hooker dialed directory assistance and got a phone number for a Duke living in the Regency Mobile Home Park. He dialed. -==- Upstairs, in the master bedroom, Mr. Hooker lay in bed watching the ten o'clock news on TV. He had the sound muted all the way down because his wife had fallen asleep after a lower back rub. While gently massaging her sore back, he had mentioned the encounter with the young girl. His wife hadn't liked the sound of it either. She said it was best if they kept their noses out of it. She was glad he had notified the police. She had rolled over next, and they had done a fetal kick count together. She was eight days past her due date. Suddenly the doorbell was buzzing and then the bed was wet. Mr. Hooker wondered who that could be at this late hour while cinching his robe and going downstairs. He was a man who hated surprises. One headlight of a white car could be seen burning dully in his driveway as he pulled aside the curtains. His wife was yelling his name and the cat was mewling like a baby as he pulled open the door. The cat catapulted out. "Yes?" he said. A large woman wearing an odd loose-looped sweater with a high tight o-ringed neckline said, "I'm Mrs. Duke, the one you hung up on on the phone earlier tonight--Mandy's momma." "My wife's yelling for me. I think her bag of waters has broken. I have to call my doctor right away. I'm sorry. Please move your car. We have to go to the hospital right now. What do you want? I have to go," Mr. Hooker said. "Listen," the woman said, "You'd better stay out of this if you know what's best for you. With Ken Ray's drinking and all. You shouldn't have called the cops. I gotta get back. The police are coming back tomorrow to talk to him when he is more sober." "It's your problem, lady. Look, I gotta go. I'm sorry. The police will deal with it and help your husband if he has a problem." "You don't understand," she said. "No, you don't understand. We're having a baby. Now! Please move your car. Goodbye," Mr. Hooker said and closed the door. Upstairs, Mr. Hooker's wife had just called the doctor. The telephone rang. She picked it up. "Is that bitch, Maggie, there?" a man said. She said, "You must have the wrong number. Sorry." "Sorry, my ass. You're the one who's gonna be sorry, lady. Fuck off, " the man said. Mrs. Hooker hung up. The telephone was left ringing as they rushed out the door to the hospital. -==- Four hours later, the old doctor told the Hooker's they were in the early stages of labor. He was giving Mr. Hooker's wife the painkiller Demerol to help her relax. Mr. Hooker stood by the bedside, holding her hand. "You'd better sit down, Nicholas," said the old doctor. "It's going to be a while. No use wearing out rubber yet." "Everything's okay?" asked Mr. Hooker. "Yes. No preeclampsia problems. No intrauterine growth retardation. Normal blood pressure. Normal on the urine. Normal prepartum cervix changes at Mindy's last checkup," said the old doctor. "And her water breaking?" Mr. Hooker said. "Nicholas," his wife said, squeezing his hand. "Impending delivery is progressing, Nicholas. You can tell a contraction is significant when the uterus becomes so hard that you can't indent it with your finger for 60 seconds. If need be, with the help of Pitocin, we can speed up Mindy's labor. Okay? You'll have a beautiful bouncing baby any hour now." An orderly entered bearing clean sheets and towels. Dr. Boettcher's name sounded over the hospital's intercom system, and the old doctor excused himself. The telephone rang once and stopped before Mr. Hooker could pick it up. He dragged over a hardback wooden chair from a corner and sat down next to the bed. "Scared?" said Mr. Hooker. "A bit," said Mrs. Hooker. "Love ya, ya Munchkin," said Mr. Hooker. He scootched back in the chair, the legs squeaking across the linoleum floor. The orderly glanced his way leaving the room. His wife said, "I know you do. I feel like a seasick walrus. I sure could use a barf bag right now." Mr. Hooker got up saying he needed a milk or some hot tea. He pressed the nurse's aide button knotted round the cold chrome bed rail. -==- In the maternity ward, through smudged plate glass, red, round, small puckered-up faces cried in chorus as Mr. Hooker looked on. Their little o-ring mouths yawning wide, the red, round, small uvulaes, like little Sweet Pea and that wavering uvula in those idiotic Popeye cartoons, he thought. All black holes, the mouths. -==- His nostrils flared passing a stationary cleaning cart after rounding the corner back to his wife's hospital room. Mr. Hooker, crushing a milk carton, its air squishing out, milk bubbling inside, frisbeed the flattened pint into the cart's wastebasket. A policewoman was sitting on the hard-back wooden chair, waiting, when he opened the door. "Mr. Hooker, sir?" said the policewoman. "Yes, officer?" he said. He motioned her towards the other bed area nearest the window, giving the wraparound curtain a few sharp tugs. "You guys, or shall I say gals, sure do take the cake, you know that?" Mr. Hooker said, dropping down on the bed. "Where do you get off barging in here? My God, my wife'll be in labor any minute here and the last thing we need right now is you parking your pretty little catbird seat right here in the midst of us all." The policewoman was black and heavyset. Her shoes were shiny and her hair cornrowed. She was in dress blues, tie and tie bar, billyclub by the side, walkie-talkie hugging the hips. Mrs. Hooker said, "Officer Perry was very courteous and professional. She has a four-year-old baby boy. I'm the one who offered her a seat. She wanted to wait outside." "I just need a little follow-up information, Mr. Hooker," said the policewoman, pulling out a notepad and pen. "Shoot," he said deadpan. The policewoman said, "Do you know a Ken Ray Duke?" Mr. Hooker said "No." He looked at a dirty streak on the window. "What exactly was exchanged between you and Mrs. Duke at your residence earlier tonight?" said the policewoman. "Let's step outside," said Mr. Hooker. -==- By six o'clock that morning Mrs. Hooker labor had only progressed slightly. A new doctor came in and administered a shot of Pitocin. A nurse came, felt Mrs. Hooker's stomach for sixty seconds, and went. Mr. Hooker was spreadeagled on the other bed, his face sideways on a pillow. Another nurse dropped off a floral arrangement and a big red helium balloon that read "Congratulations on Your First Baby!" and departed. There was no note with the flowers. Mr. Hooker was feeling decidedly down in the mouth. He had been humiliated and embarrassed by his wife in front of that policewoman. He'd have his say in due time. "Nicholas, I think it's time," said Mrs. Hooker. "Please ring a nurse for me." Feeling uncomfortable, Mrs. Hooker asked for an epidural to numb feeling from her waist down. -==- Finally, at nine-thirty Friday morning, with significant contractions starting, Dr. Boettcher moved Mrs. Hooker to a delivery room. Contractions were coming every ninety seconds. "She's almost fully dilated. Things are cooking," said the old doctor to Mr. Hooker when he left the room. Mr. Hooker said, "Good luck!" worrying about his rumpled pants. Mrs. Hooker said, "Oh, God." Mr. Hooker said, "I think the cat was left out," as they wheeled her away. Leaving the room, a nurse gave a thumb's-up sign to Mr. Hooker. The orderly stared at him momentarily, then the door was swinging back and forth. -==- And for three hours delivery went on. By 1:30 pm the baby had moved far enough along the birth canal that the old doctor could see the hair on its head. But then it stopped moving any further. On inspection the obstetrician noticed fecal matter within the amniotic fluid and was alarmed. An emergency C-section was decided upon. With the old doctor by Mrs. Hooker's side, they wheeled her into a nearby operating room and administered general anesthesia. If the baby had aspirated the fecal matter, this result could potentially be dangerous and possibly fatal because of the lung damage. Surgery was over in half an hour. -==- The old doctor shuffled into the room. Two small round stains could be seen on his hospital gown at each armpit. A surgical mask, its cloth ties trailing on the ground, was in one hand, a skullcap in the other. He said, "Your wife's okay, but the baby didn't make it. Nicholas?" Mr. Hooker looked away, watching the red helium balloon twist around on its blue ribbon. "Yes?" he said. "I'm sorry," the old doctor said. "Yes," said Mr. Hooker. "Fecal matter in the amniotic sac was fatally aspirated by the baby. It was a girl," the old doctor said. "I see," said Mr. Hooker. "Your wife's lost some blood. We'll be keeping her for observation overnight," the old doctor said. "I see," said Mr. Hooker. The old doctor squeezed Mr. Hooker's wrist and shuffled out of the room. -==- Mr. Hooker stared hard, watching the red helium balloon twirl around and around on its blue ribbon, twirl around and around and he was suddenly twirling his little girl, around and around on a carrousel, a merry-go-round, merry-go-round, feet running, lungs aspirating, aspirating, circling around and round and round, laughing, clapping, pirouetting, little girl's horse rocking, bobbing up and down, up and down, the music callioping and callioping and galloping, stalls, quiet, and then he is watching the red helium balloon twirl around and around on its blue ribbon. -==- "Nicholas?" said Mrs. Hooker. "Yeah?" he said. "Would you check the room and make sure we haven't left anything?" Mrs. Hooker said. He did not reply. He went into the lavatory. Teasing the nap of his mustache in the mirror first, he then gazed at himself, and now in the mirror he was brushing his little girl's hair for church. He turned on the faucet. Wave after wave swept up upon the cold shore rocks. A gull flapped into a stiff headwind. A driftwood stump was cobwebbed with old fishing line. Hooker ambled on by. Two brown ground squirrels played tag. Their tails flicking up and back, resembling question marks, he watched them busily bury acorns. He listened to the raspy filing of the leaves in the treetops. Fishermen were mini-jigging for perch with silver wigglers in the weed beds of raccoon's tail out on the lake. Hooker came upon a crawdad skeleton bleaching in the afternoon sun. Lifting it up gently, fuzzed flaky legs, he tore off a pincer, scrutinizing the green-blue orange-tipped arm and the white china underside as smooth as pearl, worked the hinge three times till it dry-as-dust crumbled away and said to his daughter, "Jenny, now you stay away from those wet rocks or you're going to fall and hurt yourself." "Oh, Daddy!" the little girl said, "Look at the bird." A gull flapped into a stiff headwind. The girl sat down upon a driftwood stump cobwebbed with old fishing line. Hooker ambled on by. The little girl sang, "Row row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream." Then she said, "Oh, Daddy, look two squirrels." Two brown ground squirrels played tag. Their tails flicking up and back, resembling questions marks, she watched them busily bury acorns. She listened to the raspy filing of the leaves in the treetops. Fishermen were mini-jigging for perch with silver wigglers in the weed beds of raccoon's tail out on the lake. Jenny came upon a crawdad skeleton bleaching in the afternoon sun. Lifting it up gently, fuzzed flaky legs, she tore off a pincer, scrutinizing the green-blue orange-tipped arm and the white china underside as smooth as pearl, worked the hinge three times till it dry-as-dust crumbled away down to the flint brown sand, flint brown soil, Jenny as brown as soil, brown ground squirrel, brown ground squirrel, brown ground, Jenny now scampers out away beyond Hooker's--he faltered, clasping the brown handicapped bars on the walls. He straightened a washcloth on a towel rack and pocketed a wrappered soap bar. Mrs. Hooker said, "Is everything okay in there?" "Nothing here," Mr. Hooker said. He came out of the bathroom. He settled his wife into her wheelchair and released the brake. Going out the door, he flicked the light switch off and the telephone rang. He left his wife in the corridor and went back in and picked up the phone. A voice said, "Hooker? That you? You son of a bitch, Hooker. You and your heroic crawdads and Mandy. Jesus." Mr. Hooker hung up. The phone rang again and he ripped the cord out of the wall. He came back out, shrugged, said it was a wrong number, and moved his wife down the corridor to the elevator station. -==- A white car gunned down alongside the curb, grinding to a halt in front of the Hooker's residence. A man ratcheted the handbrake up slowly. He tossed a burning cigarette out the driver's side window onto the lawn. Two boys on roller-skates clattered past over the sidewalk. Upstairs, Mrs. Hooker lay sleeping comfortably on the bed. Downstairs, Mr. Hooker, on leave from work for a brief respite, was reading a novel. The doorbell buzzed. He got up from his La-Z-Boy and absent-minded answered the doorbell. "Guess who's coming to dinner, Hooker? Your ol' buddy, Kenny Ray!" the man said. Hooker slammed the door shut and dead-bolted it. "Here comes Kenny," the man said through the door. Hooker went and sat back down in the La-Z-Boy. Pounding reverberated throughout the entire house. Hooker got up and said, "Jenny! Jenny! Your daddy's going crawdad hunting, Jenny. We must go crawdad hunting! Let's go crawdad hunting on the shore rocks, Jenny. Jenny? Jenny?" The cat, startled by the noise, had become snagged in the carpet and was mewing frantically, its caught back leg doing wild crazy eights. About the Columnist ******************* Phil Pearson hails from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he's involved in higher education and enjoys fiddling around with multimedia projects. A Mac aficionado, Editor-in-Chief of the popular "MacSurfer's Headline News" website, he maintains a keen interest in twentieth-century poetry and fiction. In his quieter moments, he can often be found fishing for yellow perch and the elusive walleye. Ben Ohmart [1] -------------- 1-act play (editor's note: this section is divided in two 32k sections for better viewing with EasyView) _A Gorilla Suit, A Judge's Wig and a Little Blue Cap_ CAST OF CHARACTERS ARLEEN - A woman in her thirties who is in love with pain. It kills her to admit it but she can't live without it. ARMONT - ARLEEN's husband, and a gorilla. He's tried to succumb to the world of Man, and has pretty much adapted. But he can get very violent. KIEV - ARLEEN's friend and one time co-worker. A woman of about the same age. She doesn't like ARLEEN's preference of pain, but tries to be as good a friend as she can without overstepping bounds. FRANK - Frankenstein's Monster. A gentle creature who wants love, but still doesn't know his own strength or role in the world of today. BOBBY - A date KIEV picked up. Played by ARMONT. WAITRESS - At a bar. Played by KIEV. WOMEN - Who sells papers; another at at a bar. Played by KIEV. BAILIFF - In court. Played by KIEV. VOICES - Played by all the members of the cast, in the dark. SETTING An apartment, a few bars, which can be altered from one another just by furniture rearranging, and various places in the city. TIME Now. (It's a middle-class apt. Much of it looks like a cage in a zoo: some furniture is torn, magazines scattered, banana peels in dark corners. But ARLEEN, an attractive woman in her thirties, who enters, tries to keep the place livable. She's not happy with her life, but content as can be. She wishes she could be more satisfied with herself. She takes a small garbage can by the hallway, as normal practice, and breaths in a sigh to begin the work of picking up, etc. She smells something and looks around to discover it; it's in the garbage can. She takes a bigger sniff to make sure and comes back scowling. She goes off to get a plastic bag from the kitchen, comes back and starts the arduous task of putting the mouth of the plastic over the can. Just then ARMONT, a gorilla, enters, flinging his keys down. He's a real gorilla who's managed to repress a lot of natural desires and anger, and so a lot of times takes it out on ARLEEN. He tries to act like a man mostly, but many times his bruteness escapes him. Except this time he's happy, and is a little quicker with his natural actions, such as swinging his arms low, grunting, climbing over the furniture, but all in moderation. He should act more like a man than a gorilla, for the most part. When ARLEEN sees him, she gives a copious smile and moves to the end table which contains the mail) ARLEEN. Morning..cold...I suppose it's still on snow. (ARMONT is beside himself and can't speak for a moment. He climbs on the couch) Well! Did you hear already or something or...(Stops; concerned) You didn't attack the mailman...like in the summ...(Shakes it off) There is a new color in the spectrum, lover. And it is a kind of bullion of white, kind of white. Yes? (She holds up envelope for him to see, then underlines the return address with her fingernail and a wide teethless smile. This calms him somewhat) ARMONT. It came - through the mail. ARLEEN. (Concerned about his lack of enthusiasm) What? You place the stamp, you let it go in the blue box, what does a - (ARMONT begins to grow violent, and she backs away to do the cleaning) The next time you have me write it out for you, make sure you want it. ARMONT. Can I tell you what happened to me today? Would you mind if I started in on what my life means to me at this very moment in time? ARLEEN. Por favor. Did you wipe them? (This makes ARMONT jump up and down until he comes close to her) Kiev called and I think I'm going to lunch. Since last week...I think she wants to pay. ARMONT. I love you, Arleen, so it's the event that most car dealerships are on about, the "once in a lifetime" deal and crap and shit and you never know do you, you turn on them the night following, it's the next year and they still "ever" all over you. ARLEEN. Not these cars, right? I mean. We've passed that? ARMONT. (Growing angry; starts swinging arms) I am setting up a... thing. A thing. You let me talk about Roy with an i, Roi, and he'll let it be told to you about perfection, an amount of spaces that must be filled. Any time there is a "must" in a something, you've got to know that there is a meaning of parking, yes, it's fantastic, in what it achieves, brings it in and sets it there before, on top, underneath you, whatever! (Being swept away by the excitement, he becomes even more animated than when angry) And it's on free land, that's the beauty mark that sets this thing into so many directions, you see what I can be on about, when's the preceding time you've built the establishment and lost directions to the rent catcher because there is no just none of a fucking address?! (ARLEEN shakes her head "no", but really doesn't understand what he's talking about) It's this that is the secret, and do you know how many lots attract, it's like putting up one of those...you've seen, spiral coin drops, for the GAY AIDS awareness, whatever, that circle down and down and nobody can stop the hands from going to it, that's what they need! (Pauses to see what her reaction is; she has none and it momentarily confuses him) ARLEEN. I want you to put this in the kind of single sentence thing that you use...on Delmonte. A full peel. Come on. I love seeing you so excited. (Picks up the letter and shakes it a bit, hoping his excitement's come from this. It agitates him, and he runs over swinging his arms) ARMONT. There is no subject of doctoring at the present point of summits. Uh, climax. Until there is a direct stoppage of what I've got the latch to, I mean Roi knows the land, we go halves for a contractor, he can put the touch in with that too, it's not like we're going to the dole with six months up our sleeve, and a percentage for something like...three...months 'til our way paves, ha, ha, it, uh, paves clear to settle it up completely, so... ARLEEN. I don't think run-ons count with me. You're scaring me. (ARMONT becomes excited. He almost hits her the way he's ranting around) ARMONT. I have the chance to get in on the ground floor of a parking garage. You chitter like a jungle aphis and we don't see the logic of countless thousands, we're meaning a hundred thousand over some kind of period. A pie, no pieces for us, and we'll take the plate with us. ARLEEN. (Pauses; worried) This is one of those gorilla things... ARMONT. What? ARLEEN. A joke of the bush, some kind of - ARMONT. What the fuck is wrong with a proposition, that puts you on the pave to glory, evolution, no, not that, uh - bene - uh! (It's making him mad that he can't think of the word, and he runs around the apt.) The revolution! The revolution of affording it all for the first- ARLEEN. (Very serious; causes the pause in the room) We have an envelope. ARMONT. (Turns away to think) I have seen the white. When held. ARLEEN. You have an envelope. - A kind of bulky substance that can only generate something you've wanted. I think we've both wanted. ARMONT. (Torn) - Of course, the affirmation is a given. But Arleen. (Serious himself) The projected income is staggering. "Remember A Day In Hollywood, A Night In The Ukraine"? Full to the rafters, a five spot per, and it was like a wedgie to get us in, and then sunbathed by a wondrous moon. Everyone dressed to see, hear, entertained, and they don't care how much...cars...(Stops to have his point taken) ARLEEN. (Pause; thinks seriously about this idea) Moonbathed, then. (ARMONT doesn't know what she's talking about, but after a moment figures it out and goes wild) ARMONT. You're missing the crux of a point set out! You're missing... (He starts swinging wildly about, and ARLEEN still tries to pretend to clean when all she's really doing is trying to ward off the blows. But at least one finds her and connects. Either an uppercut or direct to the eye. She's down but still ARMONT grunts like a wild beast in front of her to show he's angry. He doesn't strike her again, but lets her watch the anger. A strange feeling comes over ARLEEN in moments like this. This is why she hates herself. She's attracted to the violence her husband shuns on her, but hates feeling the pain. She can't help the attraction; and now stands up, face to face with the mad gorilla screaming before her. It gives her a rush she can't help, and before she knows it, she's in his arms, trying to kiss him as he flails her with his hands. She withstands the abuse because it drives her sexual urges on more, then after a moment, ARMONT too begins to calm more toward sexuality. He treats her rough as he paws over her, kisses, forces her into painful positions. She's almost starting to cry, but doesn't dare come away. He grabs her legs and she busies herself with undoing her panties as ARMONT sets her on the table so that they then commence "the nasty". From start to finish, the act is quick, but with such intense energy, it's obvious that it's a need far too powerful for them to ignore. They finish and the breathing becomes more regular. ARLEEN removes a weak hand to behind the table to find a banana which she then gives to ARMONT. He moves away to peel and eat it, but she feels used and unhappy because of the experience, and quickly takes her gorilla back to hug, faking the afterwards happiness. ARMONT eats his banana over her shoulder; he's calmed as much as a gorilla can) ARLEEN. (To stay away from the depressed subject of herself:) I think, and I mean, I just want to understand that this is a...um, given with you. Not like the door to door pompano, at four-way stops. Something you'll want to..? ARMONT. I am tired of being beneath the lion. ARLEEN. (Laughs at the absurdity of this) Where is this located? I mean, can you count on - ARMONT. Okay. Now, the first thing to be admitted, is that, it is in a sense in the middle of somewhere, nothing can be nowhere centered, it is just not possibly in a civilized society. (Beats his chest; she gets the joke) But. In the bus lines. On the trail of a government work station. We will be competitive, when rates discovered. ARLEEN. Unless they're giving free. (This makes ARMONT angry, and ARLEEN is sorry she's said something. She's afraid. ARMONT didn't think of this) ARMONT. But. A territory of wide expansion. Next to a State Park. Would have the tourist trade, of course any workers that comed to high-rise and "progress". So we've got several. ARLEEN. (Feeling cold; goes about her housework) You realize how long you've been waiting on that envelope. ARMONT. (Pause; thinks; becomes convinced) Yes! But do you know this. To sit in the shade of my box. My box? I read the complete Agatha Christie. Earl Stanley Gardner. Rex Stout. They pass and I ring up and charge out, and count off change. Like a professional. And think of the time. (Obviously this is a lifelong dream with him, so she's quick to put compassion into everything she says. Pause) ARLEEN. And it's more than being a doctor? ARMONT. (Screams) I am angry with myself for once being unsure. There is a cypress tree inside every one of us. At the top of that one for some is the desire for the professional capacity. Fixing, doing, becoming, I've realized that once for me. But I know now what I've been feeling, needing. You can't just be cutting it down. Lot of monkeys around. ARLEEN. I understand. ARMONT. What's the matter? ARLEEN. No, it's nothing to do...I mean, if you've changed... ARMONT. (Excited) No, but yes! That tree to me is reading mysteries. If it can be done in a box somewhere on free land. It's a dream to be made into cash flows. A system of us. And a husband around, forget the calls, the, yuck, defecation of clean up, I interned and...you know how you think something's made for you, just because you're invested. Spent. Done. But you don't become. Am I swinging on your vine? (ARLEEN is preoccupied with something else now. Ever since the word "defecation" she's been afraid of showing ARMONT the smelly trash can) What? (She smiles and pretends that she's just doing her usual cleaning as she moves to try to take the can away. But she slips on a banana peel and falls, then quickly and seriously tries to throw back all the top papers, etc. she put in there so ARMONT won't see. He notices this strange and serious attitude) Are you going to have to show me what's both - okay, what's in the trash can? ARLEEN. - Don't you remem - (Decides to stop there. ARMONT starts moving around more: the beginning of getting worked up) ARMONT. What is so -? (He moves closer and ARLEEN tenses, ready for something to happen, as lights fade. A pop song is heard through the scene change, and remains when lights come up on the pub. It's a dark place with tables and chairs around, a counter going off stage that hasn't enough room to show the bartender, a jukebox playing oldies through the scene, perhaps the flicker of the occasional dance light from a far off disco part of the place. KIEV, a nicely dressed woman in her thirties who loves clicking her nails over her teeth while thinking, which is what she now does, waits at one of the tables anxiously. She wards off the invisible come-ons of the men now and then. After a moment, ARLEEN, dressed in unrevealing long clothes, wearing sunglasses and a hairnet, enters timidly, but worriedly. KIEV peers through the darkness, then waves to her, but ARLEEN can't see the signal. When she gets close enough, KIEV trips her, then helps her up. They both try to speak above the music. ARLEEN's shocked about KIEV's appearance) ARLEEN. My God. KIEV. (About sunglasses) Take those off. ARLEEN. You're making me... KIEV. Oh, relax. ARLEEN. You're just...up. KIEV. Don't fly off. Huh, get away from here, but don't fly off. Remove yourself, why didn't you call? ARLEEN. (Not eager to go into this subject) Why is it here? I don't frequent these...we are two in here together, fighting off the men, haven't you been? (KIEV nods) For the sake of virtues, why...(Floats a hand around meaning "here") KIEV. You have not returned them. ARLEEN. What are you doing up and...I mean, God, what did he say, is it like a...oh my God, it's drinkable, isn't it? KIEV. Arleen, would you just - ARLEEN. Yes, and we're to become the best of sloggers joined. Whatever it is, I mean, don't do doubles, Christ, don't...the singles aren't worth the price, I still mean monetary concerns, Kiev.. KIEV. Leave it alone and it'll grow by itself? I told you...that. To get your butt into a seat I can see, talk to. ARLEEN. (Realizes the deception) I'm not sorry? KIEV. You should be a big time. You dropped me...in two months, ago, haven't heard a ring, write, drawing God from your kind. What do you think, I don't concern myself with, if living or dead, I wouldn't want to take even money on you, but I could take it. ARLEEN. Hold it. You don't have breast cancer. (KIEV nods "no") Uh-huh, this is the way you go. KIEV. Worried, Arleen. ARLEEN. (Stands to go) This is your playing. KIEV. You're going to sit down, until I'm satisfied with your excuses. (ARLEEN pauses at this serious tone. She really does want someone to confide in, but she's scared. She looks around to make sure she's safe. KIEV doesn't understand) Drink? I think a couple of orange and rums. You know? (ARLEEN shakes her head "no", but KIEV has already signaled the waiter with a snap. KIEV tried to wait until a pause in the music so she'd be heard. There's an uncomfortable pause in the music while ARLEEN sits looking quite depressed. KIEV thinks it's up to her to supply the conversation) You know, I put in for Yardbirds and I think I'm gypped. (ARLEEN doesn't even look at her) "For Your Love"? When Clapton wasn't restless yet, I think. (Tries a laugh, but it's leads to nothing. Pause. She's quite concerned for ARLEEN) You know, I took off the full afternoon out of Lakewood for you, you've got to talk. Speak. Gush forth the words, as you say. You're alarming me in a kind of...huh. Just...ah... ARLEEN. You shouldn't've taken me out. KIEV. That's! ARLEEN. I don't like to... KIEV. You're worried about Armont? He's... ARLEEN. Yes? He could be here, how would I know? He's... KIEV. (Notices ARLEEN's sad) You married a black. ARLEEN. (Has to laugh at this) Generalize. And you don't even know... KIEV. (Getting angry) I'm almost at it, Arleen. Pretty close, all right, now you've been gone away for months, and at home, I've driven by. I don't come in, because of...your husband. I don't feel it's...I mean, talk to me. It's obvious...all right, no more words unless they've got a tag from you. ARLEEN. (Smiles) We've been friends too long. KIEV. (Also smiles) I don't know where I pick up talk like that. ARLEEN. (Pause; serious) I think it was that Lakewood should've been given up six months before...the trip. Was I ever happy with it anyway? KIEV. Regrets? Huh. ARLEEN. You don't call them...you've stuck with it and I admire you. Perhaps if I was to have a...another "space" of my own. I don't know if you call it cope, but. - The fact-finding mission... KIEV. Into Mali. Timbuktu. Up the Niger. ARLEEN. Twenty-five miles north of Gao. My mistake. KIEV. (Understands) I think you should meet someone. I've got a...there's a saint in mind, my angel. Crosses the t's while he speaks, that kind of good. And all for - ARLEEN. (Still in her own world; grows cold as speaks) Can a person help it, though? There isn't much you can do but dig down and excavate, it may be a copy someone's planted and it's not worth...but it's from you. And you've got to abide by it. Leaves you cleaned out like something, but isn't it better? I mean, better than leaving it alone, and not doing anything about.. it. - If the jungle wasn't my thing. Then. (Pause) I'm sure I woulda found something else. KIEV. (Pause; can't follow. Like a friend:) I blame Trandike. Of all the places. ARLEEN. (Laughs despite herself) Not Trandike. KIEV. Well, I mean. Because of a package? And we should all take advantage because the unions scream for it? What kind of a boat cruise are we talking? ARLEEN. (Though glad for the relief) No, no. Come on, Kiev. KIEV. (Grateful for the smile) Now. You going to take those sunglasses off. There is an eye in this room, I'm a pretty fair guess it's behind one of those windows and I don't mean to say lightly I don't care for the peeps. I like to see the ones that extract this clever talk from my...(Makes the motion ARLEEN should get 'em off) ARLEEN. (Scared to; rationalizes) It's too light in here. For me. You know how - KIEV. It's nighttime in this place. It's chalkboard without the writing in five feet of any direction, Mrs. ARLEEN. Like how you drive at night? And it's so bad when the, on the two lanes, the cars start and you have to shield. Well? There are cracks get in here. The dance floor? KIEV. Is that what that is? ARLEEN. Sensitive eyes. KIEV. (Lets it go for now) - How's the work coming? ARLEEN. Huh? KIEV. Armont. He get the appointment? I'm sure, since it's been years. ARLEEN. - Two months and he's making more money than I thought possible. Only took them a month or three weeks or what to erect the stupid thing, and it's coming in. KIEV. What? ARLEEN. The car park! KIEV. Sorry. ARLEEN. Sorry. Yeah. Just. This doctor thing. Thought it would... KIEV. His idea. ARLEEN. I don't remember. KIEV. Maybe? (ARLEEN shrugs) - He's wild. ARLEEN. (Frightened) What makes you say that? KIEV. (Unsure; it's so obvious) Well, he's... ARLEEN. All right, okay. He switches around. I was hoping. - It could do something, and the change would, a doctor. Now that's some sign of pride. A niche. But the lot's bringing it in, why should I be on about...? KIEV. And that's not my obvious meaning? (A pause between the ladies. ARLEEN has withdrawn into herself, while KIEV makes a short plan) Did we ever get those drinks? (ARLEEN's not listening) I'm going for them myself. I will get picked. Have the affair from the husband who is the invisible man and not feel guilty thanks to you. It is the walk that does the pick up, that's why Yardbirds is good, naturally funky. Blues swivels those legs and hand me the stick, Arleen, I rhythmically strike their hollow heads. Down. (ARLEEN turns at hearing her name. KIEV moves closer to her) What did you say you needed to - (She loses her balance as she leans over and falls on ARLEEN, knocking her sunglasses off. KIEV notices the swollen black-eye and ARLEEN darts to recover the glasses) Arleen! - Is he? Good L - (But she stops because ARLEEN has found the glasses and hurries away as she puts them on. Lights fade here and music from the jukebox comes up to cover the scene change. Lights come up on ARLEEN's apt. again and music fades out. ARLEEN enters, looks carefully around to make sure she's alone) ARLEEN. Armont? - Armont? (She's alone, and quickly goes into her usual practice of cleaning up the apt. She folds up her sunglasses, pockets them, and makes sure she doesn't look like she's been out of the place. She tries to whistle a pop song to pretend she's in happy spirits but her lips aren't working. She picks a large amount of banana peels out of a corner. ARMONT, in baseball cap that has a pocket protector full of pencils latched onto it, enters. It's been a long day and he's moving slow. He's also a little guilty about his previous behavior. He pauses. ARLEEN knows he's there, but waits until he starts the conversation) ARMONT. (Notices the silence) Said I was sorry. - Months ago... ARLEEN. How did it go? ARMONT. You heard me. - I try to contr... - You heard me. ARLEEN. (Nods. Stands and tries to be heroic) - It was your shit. (ARMONT doesn't answer, just gives a slight grunt and bounds away to hang his hat up. Takes a pencil from his hat and scoots around the room with it. He uses it to measure his temper; to control himself) ARMONT. It was - it was...my shit. ARLEEN. (Ready to turn off this subject) So did the fist fulls come in? ARMONT. They are there. They have been captured. Done away with, into the box that is locked, kept for cash, stocked and barrelled probably if it means anything. (Still trying to control himself. It's tough for a gorilla to count to ten) The receipts I believe gross this kind of thing at about, oh, come on, say, a thousand? ARLEEN. (Surprised) Another bottle over the nodes, s'il vous plait! ARMONT. It is a figure, and those are facts. ARLEEN. But for how - ARMONT. This is a weekend figure. A curvy, luscious, bit of boner that just sets you out. Don't it? (Getting himself horny) ARLEEN. (Senses this) Roi? ARMONT. What, doing his box? Reads almanacs, for Dike's sake. ARLEEN. (Correcting) Christ's sake. You do it for Chri - (Realizes she may not want to say this. ARMONT doesn't notice, he's still becoming aroused) Quite a park. ARMONT. Yeah, doesn't it bring it? In? (Comes up to her and fondles her) Curvy, luscious figure. Keeps you hungry.. hungry, for the non-holidays, and who wants a Sunday, God. Legal, free par...(She tries to pull away to get back to cleaning, but he's too strong) ARLEEN. Haven't done the right wing corner. ARMONT. Not yet? (He looks around and it's driving his rage on. He looks at her, not understanding. She's growing afraid. It's making her blood boil. He starts flapping his arms, and she can't help but throwing herself into them. He's enraged and she finds it so stimulating. She begins to kiss his nipples and hair, and it's hard to keep near him in this ranting state. Finally ARMONT breaks the pencil and begins to stab her with the broken half in his hand when the lights go out. Pop music, perhaps Prince's "Thunder", comes up and stays even when: lights up. It's the same apt., cleaner, three months later. ARMONT enters and grabs his hat as if late for work. There are no pencils in it now. ARLEEN limps in; it's not a bad limp but she's walking far from perfect. She carries a brown bag with a smile) ARMONT. It's no good. ARLEEN. No, they're yellow. ARMONT. No, the attraction. We're pulling them in, another building going soon, near, and it's, I told you about this, there's an eats, so there's no reason to worry about...I mean, how much are we making? It's going in right on top, and we're working out a discount with the head...whatever and get a...thing about discounts. If not free. Parking for food that kind of...put them away! (ARLEEN has developed a thick hide to this kind of random abuse, but it's still difficult to ignore the sheer volume of it sometimes. She's lost a lot of love, not to mention blood, for ARMONT. She's looking quite anemic and has more scars than the obvious limp if the audience could see clearly) ARLEEN. Time? ARMONT. Yeah? ARLEEN. Tonight? Time? ARMONT. In a - oh, uh. A meeting. ARLEEN. What meeting? ARMONT. This thing of the Park Officials. They've gathered already, and it's said to go until an...oh, what is...an eleven o'clock time frame I'm thinking. ARLEEN. And you've got to stay. ARMONT. Roi calls in sick out of the blue, grey out there, and you suppose I like pulling double? When are they going to extract their cars? How should I know? I've got a library set for this one. Fucking impossibly. ARLEEN. Ble. ARMONT. You think so. ARLEEN. No, - (Sighs) Doesn't matter. ARMONT. The hurry in, am I. Impossibly the way twelve hours gotta pass. ARLEEN. No bookmark for you. Straight through - ARMONT. (As he reaches for the doorknob) Maybe I'll phone for the paint. ARLEEN. Paint? ARMONT. Going too well. Good? ARLEEN. It's going well. ARMONT. And lines' got to be redone. ARLEEN. It's only five months. ARMONT. Four. But yeah. (There's a knock at the door which surprises both. ARMONT opens it not too quickly) COP. (Off) Ah, Jesus! What the hell is - (Enters. A young man in plain clothes. He looks at ARMONT with a little terror and unbelieving. He tries to speak to ARLEEN but can't get his focus off ARMONT) You Mrs. Ugatun? (ARLEEN nods but doesn't know what to make of any of this) Where is your husband, ma'am? (She points. He looks, then laughs) Uh-huh. Where might I locate him at this present time? ARLEEN. He is standing right there. COP. Am I going to have trouble? (ARMONT sees that this is going to go nowhere, and removes his wallet from one of the socks he's wearing on his big feet to hand to COP. During this:) He is wanted for a few questions, and I would deem it proper if you could help us out? We don't ask for much. (ARMONT takes the driver's license out of the wallet and hands it to COP. COP looks at it and laughs at first at the joke. A pause. He looks at ARMONT and realizes it's true. He can't believe it) They give them to anyone nowadays. ARLEEN. What's this about? COP. Land. You're wanted for questioning. ARMONT. What about? COP. (Jumps when he hears it speak) - Land, I just put in your ears. Are you - yeah, I could think of a couple good questions. You come along. ARMONT. (Growing angry) Am I under arrest? COP. (Places hand on gun; ready for it) I am prepared to do so. ARLEEN. (Concerned) Under what charge? COP. Conspiring to defraud the national government out of three point six acres of valuable government land. Land belonging to the United States of America. ARMONT. (Over "States of America") Yeah, I know where the states are. What kind of a crack is this? I don't know who...what is this in reference to? I don't know anything you're...how come I'm being picked on, where's Roi, he'll explain everything you need to...his was the land, and he got it in signed places, saw the deeds, it was a clear case, I mean...why are you...what are you trying...defraud, I don't... (During this ARMONT's become very agitated and early on COP's realized he must put the cuffs on this one before something happens. During this, ARMONT is dragged out; COP can do it because ARMONT is surprised more than anything and allows himself to be taken away by the puny official; ARLEEN is concerned) I don't know what you expect to learn by, I mean everything's on file, and things go by...legal, it's was all legal, like a kind of, I don't understand wha keend of, wha sined o' quoostons, you do knoo wooo... COP. (Over ARMONT) You have the right to remain...silent, an attorney, bananas if you want them. (Laughs) If you give up any of these rights, go hungry or something, don't blame me because they were all told, you could do damage to your...case. And how do you like the climate here? Oh, all in a court of law. (They moved out and ARLEEN is worried. She shuts the door slowly. She feels alone. After a pause, she picks up the phone and dials, but no one answers) ARLEEN. Come on, Kiev......you.....bitch...... (She hangs up, exasperated. She doesn't know what to do, and just walks around the apt. a couple times. Finally she realizes, grabs her coat and scarf off the hat rack and leaves, closing the door behind her. Lights out. Lights up on a jail. There's no need for bars, just a lighting effect of bars on ARMONT who sits on a stool facing ARLEEN. They've lapsed into one of those pauses that come in long, emotional talks) ARMONT. If it wasn't for Darwin I'd be destroyed, now I get a trial. (ARLEEN tries to smile but can't. She's not as outraged as she should be) ARLEEN. (Absently) Darrin. (ARMONT grunts that he doesn't understand. She shakes her head and comes back to earth) You're right. Insanity like...itself. Nothing else. Me. ARMONT. What can I expect? What do I know? The thing is built. Fine. The thing is, it brings in and fine. ARLEEN. What are they going to do about Roi? ARMONT. Those posters like Jesse James? (She nods, then he nods. Hopeful:) You're coming to it. (She nods, though not sure of herself. He's happier and begins pacing and speaking, but lights fade from ARMONT. Lights stay up on ARLEEN for a moment, then go out completely. Lights up on a bar. Not the same one as before. ARLEEN sits sipping something. Also, she doesn't care if she's seen or not. She's doing some heavy thinking. There are shadows in the back. A pause. KIEV wanders on, laughing, having a good time, she's not looking for ARLEEN so is surprised when she finds her. She waves frantically to someone. BOBBY, a relaxed man of any age who has bad eye trouble from the contacts he wears, enters, unsure of himself since he didn't expect to meet anyone) KIEV. (Taps ARLEEN on the shoulder) Arleen?, you lush. You're sitting between these shades of light, I can't see, I can't tell you even exist, how are...months, again. (ARLEEN waves the talk away. KIEV sees that something's wrong) This is Bobby, but you can meet him later. (She pushes him offstage. She's concerned about ARLEEN, sits down and waits for ARLEEN to say something. Pause) You know, I lost fifty cents here. Not really. But I feel it's our tradition now. These places. Gabber-gabber. Ben Ohmart [2] -------------- ARLEEN. (Looks at her without expression) - The accounts are frozen. (Goes back to her drink) KIEV. (Worried) Months, Arleen. You've got to explain to me... (Touches her back as she says this, but ARLEEN pulls away because it hurts. She withdraws into herself, unsure. There's a pause, as KIEV doesn't know what to say. Lights fade. A gavel raps. The following voices blend into one another like As Is) BAILIFF'S VOICE. Hear ye, hear ye, all rise, the honor - JUDGE'S VOICE. To be decided on this day being the twenty - PROSECUTION'S VOICE. Did in fact have a secret desire to make more money, sure we all do - DEFENSE'S VOICE. There has been no "obligatory scene change" linking this - PROSECUTION'S VOICE. I think the contracts, this is your signature is it - ARMONT'S VOICE. Milk snake uncoilings, always fund raisers, plays at Nat. Park, so when he pitched in this thing, sure I thought there - JUDGE'S VOICE. This court stands adjourned for Martin Luther King Jr's birthday weekend - DEFENSE'S VOICE. And you know of no one besides Roi, he was the perpetrator - PROSECUTION'S VOICE. Where is he hiding, Mr. Ugatun, there is nothing to prevent this court - (During the following, ARLEEN is seen in a dark area of the stage, wearing her coat, scarf and a little blue cap. The wind howls; perhaps snow. She's slightly sad and pensive) DEFENSE'S VOICE. You are only part owner of this enterprise, and yet it seems this court - ARMONT'S VOICE. If I knew - JUDGE'S VOICE. The witness will answer the question - WITNESS' VOICE. Well, I suppose...five for an hour - LADY WITNESS' VOICE. But we were really at a race to see City of Angels, found the tickets in a Boston subway garbage can - WITNESS 2'S VOICE. I never found them unreasonable in any way, form, buy one get one free hours - ARMONT'S VOICE. I suppose several thousands - PROSECUTION'S VOICE. Wasn't it closer to the tens of - JUDGE'S VOICE. The defendant will answer the question - PROSECUTION'S VOICE. When in the throws of the Park's Planet of the Apes musical, with real apes - ARMONT'S VOICE. (Becoming excited) Arleen!, I suppose, but I can't be expected - PROSECUTION'S VOICE. To clear close to a hundred thousand in a period of - (The voices fade away just as ARLEEN makes it off the stage. Lights up on KIEV in her house, a newspaper in one hand, the receiver to her ear in the other. She's excited. Obviously no one's answering. Lights come up on another bar; different from the last time. ARLEEN enters, no emotions can be seen. She unbundles and sits at a table. She snaps for service and a WAITRESS, a woman with tied back hair and exposed cleavage, enters. All she has to do is see who it is and she's off to fill the order. There's a huge shadow behind ARLEEN, checking her out. WAITRESS returns with two drinks and ARLEEN puts a couple dollars on the tray) WAITRESS. There's an easterly coming up. (ARLEEN shoots her an inquisitive glance) A three bourbon. Filters to the toes and a man loses his warmth off the top of his head. Donald Pleasance lives in the south of France. That rhymes. (Starts to go) ARLEEN. (To herself; in her own world) Favorable. Favorable. Shouldn't pick them up. What right did I have. Socks on that padding. Six months. Snorting. Too cold to be a favorable... WAITRESS. (Misunderstands) Strawberry scotchshake. (Exits. ARLEEN holds the glass in two hands as if it could warm her. She's not as upset as she is confused. Looks like she hasn't slept for a while. After a long pause of this analysis, FRANK, the original Frankenstein's monster in complete get-up, enters. He's the one who's been checking her out. He walks, talks, acts just like the Monster. He stretches his hand out for her and taps her on the shoulder. She turns startled, but not by his appearance) FRANK. Mind...sit down... (ARLEEN isn't prepared for this, though she could be somewhat attracted to this...thing) ARLEEN. I don't... (FRANK begins the arduous task of bending his knees to sit, but ARLEEN doesn't want this) I mean...I don't do...this isn't what I'm here for, I'm thirsty and it's cold. (FRANK grunts disappointed, but respects her wishes. ARLEEN turns at hearing this grunt and pauses. She could be entranced, she could be frightened or shy, but she's got to say something to this bachelor) Those joints. They need something too. Liquified jostle. (She tries to smile and he shakes his head. She thinks that was a stupid thing to say, but after a moment smiles. She traces the smile with a hand and is surprised to be wearing one. She loses it and thinks. She pauses, then shakes her head and downs the drink, and bundles up quickly to go. She starts out, but sees something and stops. She's not sure how to act, but just calmly sits back at her table and doesn't try to hide, but doesn't offer her face voluntarily. In a moment, KIEV enters, peering through the darkness. She's surprised when she finds ARLEEN, but adopts an attitude as if she's getting used to it. She sits and ARLEEN knows she's there, but still says nothing) KIEV. (Pause) There's a much better one on the East. A clan called The Brady Killers. Instead of smashing their instruments, because they may need them. They open up cole slaw containers and heave the ho. It's messy because they use like mega-ounces of mayonnaise. (Pause) Are you going to talk to me? ARLEEN. No, I'll phone the police. KIEV. (Pause; doesn't understand; concerned) I just got it today. I just got it and there it was, what did you think, I mean why didn't you let me know? About...? You're here? You keep coming to...these... ARLEEN. You introduced me. You're really one of the last, okay? KIEV. What? ARLEEN. I did not meet you. You came and I was about to go. KIEV. Will you talk to me? You can write it down if you'd rather. ARLEEN. (Coming out of her shell) You're trying to be funny? You're trying to make like it's some kind of...all fated thing, and just hold the hand and make it with a Rum Collins, a bit better like you've got -! KIEV. (Cutting in) Hold the cordless. Hold on, Mrs., I'm looking in these places because the other day...and you try to - ARLEEN. Look. Leave. All right? KIEV. What? Talk to me. How is Armont doing, is he... ARLEEN. (Viciously) You want to talk to me about him, after you set him up in the first place! Why do you have to keep after - KIEV. Whoa, whoa, I did what. What? What are you - ARLEEN. You know, don't you? You've always known, but some people just can't stay out of - KIEV. If I had a vague idea I think I could catch it, but it's running too fast for me. ARLEEN. You always did object, and couldn't wait until after Africa, but did anyone ask - (KIEV stops her because she's nodding in the affirmative; KIEV understands. This action has taken all the fight out of ARLEEN and now she tries to drain an already empty glass. To herself:) How can I go there? KIEV. (Forceful friendship) I say to a cause, it's none of my business. They do it that way, that's the way it is, and I can't change anything. My advice, my money, it can go. But when it's forced on something, I say forget it. - You be the way you like, fine. I could always tell, yeah. You don't build heaters together. You don't stand at those lines. Side by plastic molds by side and you think you don't understand what makes a girl sweat. So why do I change you? I don't, and you should know that an apology's coming. But. I mean. To be truthful. I've always seen - you don't quite know yourself. But I'm not giving out anything. You come to me, if you don't like something. And I can't help with your own skin, but I can give you a piece of my brains that don't particularly contender...you know, that kind. Of thing. ARLEEN. You didn't... KIEV. (Shakes head "no"; means herself:) There's a sane person somewhere. Oh! There she is. ARLEEN. But how... KIEV. You really expect to build on government land, you don't get caught? ARLEEN. But after so many... KIEV. Listen, Arleen. You see the sweaters, middle of roads? How long does an artist take to paint a dotted line? Gee, men. (ARLEEN understands and wants to laugh) Man's an idiot...(ARLEEN looks at her sternly) This Roi. With an "i". Garage on wild life estate... ARLEEN. You really didn't...? KIEV. (Lays a hand on ARLEEN's hand, takes it away quick, remembering last time) I don't do those. Don't do those kinds of things. - If it's the kind of thing you - ARLEEN. (Knows what she means) I know I probably left him there. Make him something he's not. KIEV. - But if he'd have taken the hospital gig... ARLEEN. Oh, sure. - And then? Does it make a difference. (Pause. Slight mood change) KIEV. I would've expected you to be...I forget the court number, but it's in the - ARLEEN. Twenty-three. (Pause) But how can I? Really? KIEV. You're having thoughts on - ARLEEN. (Almost pleading) We all get our kicks. We get them in some kind of way. KIEV. (Doesn't agree, but nods for ARLEEN'S benefit) Kicks. Yeah. (Pause. Another mood change. She tries to be bright) Know that Bobby? Prick, nine-incher. Launches off on these tirades of a bulk rate overseer. He's discussing to me about the dangers of giving the charity works too much power in poundage, and slams his hand down talking about a man who's trying to cancel those black boxes, you know, that the bulk rate you see it in. And opening doors that stay long enough to bunk me in the ass, and a complete asshole, told him about you, think you might be a couple. Got his phone number, well, I don't mean couple, but...you should see about...(A tender subject) Well. Just. - There are a lot of dangerous people out there. Moderation is the key. You be careful. But do something to be careful about. (ARLEEN's been listening attentively but she doesn't want to come out of herself too much. KIEV sees this, but also that she's half-listening; it's better than she expected. She smiles) Let me go refill us. Well, you, and I know the special that this thing causes, it's going to be one of my requested. I do these joints, not roaches. You know you never did drink enough at the retreats. You taste the Kiev Special and Fried Fruit Concoct an d you make up for it. (She walks off. ARLEEN's pensive again, but now more aware of where she is. After a moment, music cranks up. A WOMAN, tightly dressed, walks across the stage. She knows she's being followed and likes it. That is, until she turns around. It's FRANK, and she's repulsed, and so quickens her pace. He's not disappointed, but has that lady's man gait. He sees ARLEEN who's looking at him from the corner of her eye. He stares at her for a moment, being as civil as Frankenstein can be. She turns to face him. He makes a "greetings" gesture. She turns back around. He starts away. She looks back. He looks back and it catches her. She smiles, not sure why. She turns back to her table. He comes over) FRANK. (Always speaks slowly) Frank wonders what beautiful woman has to sit around for. You beautiful woman. (ARLEEN can't help but blush) No. Mean it. Kind of red of lips. That certain...French expression, don't know what. ARLEEN. (Somewhat attracted; but repressed) Thanks. FRANK. Let me buy you drink. Talk. Talk about selves, or other people, it doesn't get on Frank's bad side in any case. ARLEEN. (Isn't sure it's a good idea) I'm with someone. I think maybe... FRANK. (Gives the signal "it's cool") There is a time for everything. A season, I like the Byrds. I had to put some change into the jukebox because it is not...enlivened quite enough, don't you think? ARLEEN. (About music) It's nice. FRANK. Frank think you have nice too. Are nice too. You have that certain French saying something. ARLEEN. (Looks at her wedding ring; it's causing her distress) Yes. FRANK. (Takes a paper out of his huge pockets with some difficulty) Frank ask a favor. See. ARLEEN. I'm not sure if... FRANK. No, no. Just ask to. See. Phone number. Now, I can't write. But I...persuaded this...man to write out my own pay phone for you. Give me a call? (Hands her the paper. Grunts in an endearing way and shakes away after he sees something off. ARLEEN is taken by him, but isn't sure if it's a smart thing to do. After a moment, KIEV enters with a strange-shaped drink. She shows it to ARLEEN) KIEV. You know what this is all about? (ARLEEN turns back from looking after FRANK. She doesn't know) Said you ordered it, the girl. Girl, huh. She keeps ragging on the Cloisure brothers over there, and I know 'em, enough to...let's put it this way, there's enough breast work on her she could do a one-woman magazine. Forget the Newport Kings ads. Drinks coming, it's the banana, you know...mooshes in the grease.. (Goes off laughing. This puts ARLEEN aware to her situation again. Obviously KIEV's forgotten it's a tactless remark. ARLEEN pauses and looks at the paper FRANK gave her. Lights fade fast and the VOICES start) PROSECUTOR'S VOICE. So you know how everything's run, go to the osprey nests on your lunch hour - DEFENSE'S VOICE. I fail to see how any - ARMONT'S VOICE. Arleen - PROSECUTOR'S VOICE. And of course how do we know that there was in fact, no one can positively rely on a - DEFENSE'S VOICE. Does counsel wish to sum up in a - PROSECUTOR'S VOICE. Who can say what your "Roi" may be made out to be, you have your choice between a gorilla and a man with an almanac fetish, which do you re - ARMONT'S VOICE. You keep twisting every - JUDGE'S VOICE. This is a high charge, with violating the United States National, you will - PROSECUTOR'S VOICE. So produce him! (Lights up on ARLEEN deciding something in her apt., by the phone. She does and picks up the receiver. At another part on the stage, only a hairy hand can be seen picking up another phone after a ring's heard) ARLEEN. (Shyly) Frank...? (There's a light sound, like a wild animal busy on fresh meat, from the shadows. ARLEEN doesn't know what to make of this, but she's intrigued. Slowly) I'll...hold... (A loud pounding comes in. It's FRANK's footsteps. He answers the phone) FRANK. This is Frank. (Lights fade on both of them and a romantic song starts, perhaps Derek and the Dominos' "Thorn Tree in the Garden" or something intensely romantic and "cool". This plays during the romantic montage that begins, hopefully ending as the song ends. Lights up on the bare stage. This is the street. ARLEEN is shy and not completely willing to do this. FRANK comes forward; he's intimidating and never looks too friendly. As he advances, ARLEEN gets a rush and it's obvious she's ready for rape or some kind of activity which stimulates her deeply. They exchange first date greetings. He puts a heavy hand on her shoulder to lead her away. They come to a small newsstand where a WOMAN sells newspapers, magazines, etc. She sees FRANK and can't move. He knocks her out of the way and grabs a paper. ARLEEN is breathing hard after this display of strength. He folds the paper to the movie section and throws it to her, pointing that she should look for a film. ARLEEN begins reading the movies, as FRANK shakes his head yes or no. This doesn't have to be heard. Lights dim here. It's another night. A slight addition to their clothes could accommodate this. It's a restaurant and they're having dinner. It's hard for FRANK to use cutlery. ARLEEN's loosened up but still not sure of herself. They talk. Finally FRANK is fed up with not eating with his hands and throws the food, etc. to the floor. Lights dim from here, ARLEEN is scared and hates this, because she's still excited. Lights come up on a doorstep where ARLEEN and FRANK are just coming in. A different night. She's smiling and turns to face him. He holds up three fingers and lunges his face toward hers. She backs off, but thinks) ARLEEN. Third date? I suppose... (He goes for her. The difference between FRANK and ARMONT is that FRANK is very gentle in his violence; it's from the moment of the violence rather than how ARMONT intimidates with wild actions. ARLEEN senses this and she's caught up in it. For her, it feels like romance. He presses his lips to hers, but pretty soon she wants to get away. She didn't expect such a long one, and he's squeezing her hard. Now she's fighting for air and trying to squirm away from the pressure put on her. She starts kicking to be let go, but FRANK doesn't know anything better to do than hang on. He's killing her. At last, he deems it enough and let's her go. The song has finished. They're both out of breath, but FRANK hides it better. ARLEEN is in heat and it's all she can do from jumping this once dead man's bones. Finally she nods and does a stupid movement that makes her trip or something and she tries to get back inside before her knees give way. She waves goodbye to him and FRANK starts away after giving his cool bye wave. A soft song begins, either a new song or something like Queen's "You Take My Breath Away"; perhaps Ray Charles' "Unchain My Heart". Lights fade here) JUDGE'S VOICE. And the court will now hear both arguments for - ARMONT. Arleen! (It's the next night. A movie theater. Two seats in the dark staring into the audience. FRANK concentrates on the film, it's hard for him. ARLEEN is really falling for FRANK and casts many glances at him. She grabs his hand. He takes it and squeezes it hard, very hard without knowing it.