Dodo, Chapter Fifteen, The Shit-Faced Family Blues

I made my way back through the lounge car, steadying myself against the seats, the way everybody did, even the seasoned employees who worked the busy Capitol Limited, on its daily progress between Pittsburgh and Chicago, a journey I was now making in reverse, having endured eight days along the brutal and lonely beaches of the gulf coast.
     I had met a girl named Meredith on the lazy train and was excitedly transporting a cardboard tray filled with two orders of fries and two sodas back to our seats. I waited for the doors between cars to open with their automatic clutter, the rush of air from the tiny space like the false roar of a seashell. Stepping over the slippery joint where the floors met, I looked through the next door to see Helmut, leaning into the seat where I’d left Meredith not some ten minutes before, having done my best to look gallant as I refused the crumpled bills she’d tried to force into my hand. “My treat,” I’d said, happy to explain it was my way of showing appreciation for her having helped me photograph a stretch of torn and shattered auto wreckage yards, the cars piled at least fifty high into the mint blue sky, creating a bizarre late-morning landscape of faded painted metal peaks, behind which an obstructed sun was still trying to greet the new day.
     Helmut was a bastard when it came to girls, especially those he knew I was toppling over the precipice for, something I was, of course, all too prone to do – all too quickly. The only girl I’d ever been surprised by was F. The night I first saw her, I was sure she was about the furthest thing I’d ever want to crawl into bed with, let alone fall in love with. Proving my intuition an immature thing, she soon transformed into a raven-haired promise of sexual adventure, a girl whose funny back teeth, flanged like the tips of a hawk’s wing, became a source of thrilling sensation, the times she’d take me past the archway of her mouth and move her jaws side to side, in a circular motion, setting me as rigid as stone as I penetrated the warm well of her throat.
     Meredith was a sandy blonde with a face that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the center of a cartoon drawing of a sunflower. Her pink cheeks were accented by impressive dimples that appeared when she smiled, offering a greeting so reassuring it all but dislocated my natural predisposition to shyness, something so many people took as a classic case of Teutonic aloofness.
     I was, in truth, anything but aloof. But still, I had to overcome the stereotype, even years after my Southern German accent had all but faded into the recesses of my adopted rush of American phrasing and intonation.
     “Hey! Look who’s finally made it! The concessions kid! Ice cold soder – git yer ice cold soder!” Helmut called out, laughing the big way he always did, all teeth and tongue, not caring how loud he was in the crowded car. He made no show of moving as I approached. I was keeping my eye on the tilt of the tray, afraid of tipping Meredith’s orange soda into her fries. “Mere’s been telling me all about her dad’s cow machines!” boasted Helmut, grabbing the flimsy tray, passing it over to the grinning Meredith, who he had all-too-conveniently trapped in her seat against the window, where, only moments earlier, I had been sitting, trying to set the lens of my Leica flush with the dusty window in order to capture the jagged peaks of rusting wrecks. His use of the instantly-familiar “Mere” didn’t slip by me. It was an extra little slap in my face, of the sort he’d used before. That was about the only weakness in his armory – he was reliably repetitious. Every victory bought imitation, which forged a circular evolution, something I have to thank God for. If he had been learning along the way, I would have been dead long ago – from trying to kill him, if not from an irreversibly-broken heart. “Fifty gallons a minute he can collect from just two head of Jerseys! That’s almost enough to keep Bunter Beams quiet!” roared Helmut, his eyes half-closed, chewing at the inside of his mouth, his idea of a good James Dean impersonation.
     Bunter Beams was the fattest child in our primary school back in Worms, a boy as big and round as a buoy, a situation only made worse by the red and white stripes of our compulsory school cap. He wasn’t actually named Bunter, we just called him that, in reference to the popular British character, Billy Bunter, the roly poly, bespectacled schoolboy of supremely nerdish inclination.
     Bunter Beams loved his milk. This was the real kind, the sort we were served with our school lunch, with an inch of cream at the top of each bottle, a treasure we all relished in licking at with our tongues, after we’d peeled back the little foil caps. We had the same delivered at home. Mother would set a six-pint holder just outside the front door once a week. It had a plastic needle and a gauge showing the half moon measure of one bottle to the full compliment of six, to let the dairyman know just how much we needed. No matter how early she rose, the delivery had always been made, every silver foil cap already punctured by sparrows, who relished the cream almost as much as Bunter Beams. Some mornings, I can remember hearing father yelling at the happy little birds from the upstairs bathroom window, spitting toothpaste as he screamed that he was going to shoot them all and make a king’s pie. “That’s blackbirds, Georg, not sparrows,” I could hear mother correcting, in her country lilt, almost effecting a cockney meter, banging their metal bedpan into the toilet, flushing what father had left in the night. Though they’d acquired indoor plumbing two years after Helmut was born, father still refused to completely give up his old manners, swearing off navigating the dark landing for late-night visits to the new bathroom. Being such a heavy sleeper, in those days before the bottle ruined his natural constitution, he was probably sparing us the likelihood of his tumbling down the stairs, cursing with each bump, like the tight bellows of a bagpipe.
     “Here, Dodo – this is yours,” Helmut snickered, handing me my soda, ignoring the ice that was spilling onto the carpeted floor of the train. “Have some fries too, why don’t ya?” he said, dropping a greasy handful into my open palm.
     I just stood there, my feet wide apart, balanced like some Parisian archway, straddling the aisle. Helmut now had one knee set into the seat beside Meredith, its cushion still warm from my recent occupation. I watched her, her beautiful olive eyes flecked with seaweed, her bright teeth, her thin red lips, the lean grace of her pale, freckled neck, and my heart ached, for I knew I had already lost her.
     “Sit down, Dodo, you’re blocking the way!” barked Helmut, sitting down in what had been my assigned seat. I winced, taking my eyes from Meredith. Dodo. It was the nickname that stayed strictly between us, part of our brotherly code, the secret language that had been so important when we first came to the new country. Now it was simply a term of ridicule, one he only used when he meant to emasculate me, such circumstances often involving a pretty girl who had dared speak to me first. In a club, at a party, on a bus, a train, a hovercraft – it didn’t matter – he didn’t discriminate.
     Defeated, I sat down across the aisle, next to the grey-haired lady who had fallen asleep on Helmut’s shoulder half an hour earlier, causing him to make faces at her as we rattled through the broken backyards of eastern Michigan. I knew even then that he was only trying to get the attention of the mesmerizing blonde sitting next to me, the girl who was quietly looking out the window, pointedly not saying a word. I’d tried numerous times to work up the courage, to locate the right thing to say to her, to find an easy opening, but I’d failed, and now there she was, edging into the sleazy embrace of Don Juan Vogel. She might as well have been on a train heading in the other direction.
     “Thank you again so much, Tot!” she called out, in a brittle, but warm voice, across the way, her fingers doing a dance as she waved around Helmut’s grinning profile, a fry dangling from his chiseled lips. “You’re so sweet to have done this! Really. I need to pay you before we reach Pittsburgh – I really do.”
     I smiled back weakly, hating myself, hating the train, hating the plan to meet Helmut in Chicago and ride home with him, a thorn at my side, one I’d end up pressing to my own flesh, the way I always did. My trip north, on the City of New Orleans, had been bad enough as it was.

I’d been half asleep, reading a dry old crime paperback I’d picked up in an antique store in the French Quarter.
     The Case of the Wheelchair Corpse.
     It had a bright cover, picturing an elderly lady clutching an afghan, tumbling from the chair in which she’s just plunged over the edge of a rooftop. I’d bought it, half-intending to send it anonymously to F, sort of a final word in the long and miserable argument that had colored the last few weeks of our two-year relationship. “It’s like you’ve got me in a wheelchair!” I’d declared, in one of our more-heated final sessions. “You’d be happier if I couldn’t do half the things I could – wouldn’t you? You’d like me like some – some invalid – just so you could be in charge. I thought this was supposed to be a team effort? I mean – wasn’t it?” She’d hurled a biscuit tin at me, necessitating six stitches in the musty-smelling room of the Pakistani doctor at the clinic across the street from Tarmonti’s.
     The book was amazingly boring. It made an episode of Murder She Wrote seem nearly as exciting as peeling Fay Wray out of her underwear (an image that had accompanied my earliest nights of self-pleasure, one acquired after seeing the original 1933 King Kong at a year-end school assembly). I’d drifted to sleep, hunched in my seat, my nose poking between the open pages, trapping the book against the back of the seat in front of me, my arms slung lifelessly across my lap. I was startled awake by a fierce burst of coughing, coming from across the aisle. I’d only recalled seeing a younger man sitting there, but it was now occupied a large woman wearing a bright red kerchief about her head. She leaned at the window, her cheek flat to the glass, fanning her face with a travel brochure. She coughed more, sounding like a stream of tiny firecrackers going off inside a wooden trunk. I tried to look away but she caught my eye and grinned, the silver in her teeth reflecting the dim reading light above her head. “Tarzan’s gonna teach those savages a lesson!” she said, as if I knew what she was talking about. “It’s not up to the white man to lord the castle. Worse is if the dark man gets to aidin’ an’ abettin’ the white lord, then you’ve got a sin – a big one!” I smiled quickly, pressing my book to the seat, bringing my nose to meet its splayed aged pages once again, pretending I had dropped right back to dozing, but the big lady just rattled on. “See yourself, son? You’re as white as me, I can see that, but you’re not of me, not at all. Where you from anyway?”
     “I’m German,” I replied.
     I don’t know why I told her, why I just didn’t keep my nose to that old book.
     Actually, that’s a lie – I do know why.
     I told her because it was the first time anyone had spoken to me, all the way from New Orleans – other than the red-faced man who had peered from the mouse-sized toilet between cars when I’d opened the door. The fact that he’d left it unlocked, the green bar showing, did little to quell his fury. He’d actually called me “gimcrack”, a word I’d never even heard before. I later learned it meant something useless. It’s a wonder Helmut never got a hold of that one.
     “I’m German.” That was all I’d intended to say. I thought it would suffice. I thought I could drift back to my semi-sleep, feeling better at actually having heard my own voice, but she wouldn’t let it go at that, she had issues to filter the air with.
     “You ain’t blonde. How come you ain’t blonde? What color are your eyes? Can’t see in this light. You know who your father was? Hmm? Maybe you’re one of those gypsies. Your people would frown on you, son, riding in an electric train.” I almost laughed. I think she actually thought train tracks were electric, like toy trains. “I’m Dutch myself, at least there’s some on my mother’s side,” she went on. “My mother, bless her, was shot in the buttocks by her father. Bullet went right through her thigh and into the shoulder of her suitor – my father – as he was scramblin’ buck naked up the plum tree.” She said it all in the same matter-of-fact tone, as if she were reading me the bylaws of train commuting. I started to make a snoring sound.
     It was a pathetic ruse. I was asking for it.
     She raved on, her voice rising as she did, the beads of perspiration lining the pink flank of her brow growing in size, glowing in soft accompaniment to the sharp sparkles of her fierce dental work. “Harry Truman was a curser – blue as a gas flame in the company of ladies and gentlemen alike,” she said. “He was an American, son, and what I mean by that is he was a man who could talk down a tornado – standin’ in his underpants. Don’t suppose you German’s understand that, now do you?”
     I actually nodded. Some sleeper. I couldn’t have fooled an infant at a card game.
     “Dresden. What’s that mean to a boy like you, huh? If you was of the yellow persuasion I might say Nag-saki or Hiro-sheema to lift the skin from the skillet. We should have put your people back to the stone age. The Asians didn’t deserve any better. Nor did the Italians – but at least they knew when to turn tail and run.” It was like listening to an old man, like some of father’s old work friends in Binghamton. There was nothing about her that seemed remotely like a woman. No mercy. No room for empathy. She was a real bulldog. “But your people cooked the Jews in those ovens, didn’t they? What does that make a boy like you? Huh? I gotta think you outta be bent like a nail – so crooked with shame you can kiss your ass while givin’ yourself a suck-off!”
     I should have hurled my book at her, but I didn’t. I should have told her to mind her own fucking business, but I didn’t. I should have moved, but I didn’t. I was about the most civil twenty-two year-old alive.
     “God only knows what they’re doing letting you in this country. If I wasn’t medicated, I’d turn you in to the train engineer, I would!”
     I opened my eyes, seeing her sitting there, talking more to the hummingbird of paper fluttering before her big face than to me. “Did you say medicated?” I asked, all but ignoring the offense of her barrage. She suddenly stopped her incessant fanning (the car was actually quite cool) and slowly turned her thick head my way. Her tiny eyes settled on me and stayed there for a long, excruciating moment, before she began to recite anew the mad transcription of her mind.
     “New drugs, son, designed to balance an imbalanced brain. They’re made to treat my depression. I got the blues – the shit-faced family blues.”
     I didn’t speak another word. I just sat there, my face stuck to the book, trapped in my failed pantomime of sleep, listening to her detail a life, offering moments that sounded so familiar they practically made me nauseous. The shit-faced family blues, I thought, my ears filling with the rickety-rack-rack of the train running the tracks, each division of lumber like a measure in a song sung in the voice of my grandfather Amwolf, his temples jagged with veins, his throat a lusty bugle, one red fist bunched at the sleeve of his Sunday suit, advancing on Helmut, holding in the other the wooden end of his hunting rifle, intent on breaking it over his grandson’s skull.
     The shit-faced family blues.
     I carried the phrase with me, all the way to Chicago.

The Capitol Limited was scheduled to arrive in the Pittsburgh station at approximately 11:15 PM, but it was almost midnight and we were still in Ohio. We’d just crawled by the dark outskirts of Cleveland, the dead-looking warehouses and brick buildings as silent as a waiting room in hell. I was humming the song about being a passenger, the one by Iggy Pop, recorded in Berlin with David Bowie. I remember the first time I heard it. I was at a birthday party on the North Side, the affair of some friend of Laser’s, who worked at a popular comic book store just over the 6th Street bridge from downtown. The shop was equally revered for its eclectic record selection, certainly to young men like me who had yet to uncover the riches of obscure music, the psychedelic treasures and rock explosions being hatched in countless drab studios across the world. Pop’s masterpiece on rail travel had crept into my mind as a peach-haired girl who answered to “Penelope P.” danced topless for all assembled, writhing like some drugged snake on the glass coffee table still cloudy with the powder that was fuelling the night. She’d been prepared for her impromptu performance, not wearing a bra under her poodle-emblazoned yellow cardigan.
     It was one of the first things I noticed about her, the moment I stepped into the kitchen of the house and saw the extraordinarily dark face commanding so much attention, the big eyes, like beacons, taking in all with an acute sensitivity I later knew to ascribe to the speed pills Laser was dispensing up in the birthday boy’s bedroom. Like some spiky, red-haired, pierced chemist, he was squatting in his combat boots before the little desk beside the bed, groups of the pale pills assembled on tiny sections of torn composition paper. Dazzled into my stupor by Penelope’s electric presence – the rich color of her ebony skin, the elastic grace of her smile, her perfect teeth, the way her top lids hugged her eyes like half-open garages – I knew it was hopeless unless I joined her in Heaven. Bumping into Meat on the stairs, I was carried through the bedroom doorway, cursing him with all my might, kicking at his shins with the heels of my sneakers. He tossed me onto the bed, right on top of two girls, both dressed like new wave gravediggers. They pounded at my back, clawing me, calling me out for what Meat’s stupidity. Escaping with a healthy scratch across my cheek, I tumbled to the far side of the bed, just in time for Laser to slap a little pouch of paper in my hand.
     Ten minutes later, I was wading through the soup of light that had suddenly filled the kitchen, a fluorescent fog growing from the floor, my eyes sliding like a robot’s, searching for Penelope. I found her in the backyard, which was nothing more than a tiny, walled-in patch of brown grass and dried dog shit. There was a keg sitting on a small picnic table, pushed against the far wall. Penelope was sitting on the table, watching her feet slap together, one high-heeled clog meeting the other. She was moving constantly, like a fly trapped inside two windows. I walked right up to her and placed my hands on the wooden table, on either side of her, bringing my grinning hot face to within an inch of hers. It was thoroughly unlike me. I was more alarmed than she was. She just grinned and reached out and grabbed the collar of my paisley shirt, pushing her big pink tongue through her Olympian teeth, using it to lick the bridge of my nose as her free hand cupped my crotch and squeezed. At first, she did it with some restraint, but that quickly went, her heavy grip soon making me gasp, dancing on my toes in a bizarre fit of agony that I kept confusing with pleasure. As I dropped to the dry grass, howling blue murder at the night sky, she walked right over me, giving me a clear view of the space between her legs, revealing the surprising fact that she wasn’t a girl at all, at least not wholly. I never learned just what direction she was headed in, which train it was she’d boarded.
     It was my first experience with such a thing. I was terrified, ashamed of having been so attracted to her, to him. My amphetamine-powered brain made all sorts of wild rationalizations and assumptions for the interest, leaving me a quaking puddle of neurotic impulses, just perfect for Helmut, when he showed up half an hour later, whistling like the Dusseldorf Express as he stumbled into the dimly-lit living room, catching Mr. Penelope doing her thing atop the coffee table. Seeing him so thoroughly taken with the ambiguous sexuality on display made me begin to laugh, so much that I vomited right onto Penelope’s stage, making her slip and fall into Helmut’s arms, my cocksure brother collapsing under her, as ineffective as the Scarecrow of Oz.
     These memories raced along the back of my mind, as I watched my brother paint Meredith’s mouth with his own, their faces two wrestling shapes in the dark of the night train, the haunted lights of Cleveland industry spread behind them in the misty window. It was easy to imagine that it was Penelope he was kissing, still ignorant of her little secret, as he had been at the party, giving her his classic slow-eyed once over, as he squeezed at her upper arms, pushing himself against her backside, his wasted brain cells whispering inside his skull, like a wind spiraling about an empty bullfighting ring, ancient cheers and cries ringing in his ears, envisioning a mad tableaux of debauchery between he and the incredibly-composed black girl. Penelope’s shove had been completely unexpected. Helmut went backwards, right into the wall, knocking a framed sketch of Frank Zappa from a nail. He cursed, rising, rubbing his shoulder where it had contacted the plaster. He was moving towards the defiant dancer when Iceman appeared, grabbing his arm and whispering to his ear. The look on Helmut’s face when he realized what he was being told was the greatest gift I’d ever received, an image I was conjuring that midnight on the tracks, my body sore from its cramped position on the merciless coach seats, my heart silent, no breath in me, seeing perhaps the most naturally beautiful girl I’ll ever meet, pressing herself into the cavity of my brother’s body, slipping her hands under his shirt, her head buried below his chin, tiny moans breaking from her throat, the dull rumble of the tracks reverberated about the torn stretch of a dying city’s extremities, the sunflower melting into the black cloud, oblivious to the secrets he was hiding under his bravado, the anguish of the first heir to the final playing of yet another recording of the shit-faced family blues.
     Rickety-rack-rack went the train, moving through one graveyard, on the way to the next. Just two weeks later, they’d fine Helmut dead, sprawled across a pool table in the basement of a Carnegie Mellon fraternity, a victim of his own emotional fury.

Dodo, Chapter Fourteen, The Flowered Stage

Day-Glo’s was a little more upscale than most of the clubs we were used to, but it was otherwise no less parochial in its taste for performers. It was the typical mid-80s rust belt review of parking garage rock, new wave, and college radio favorites. They often seemed to book bands from novel-sounding places like Wales and Australia, prompting the tactless owner on one occasion to decorate the front of the stage with stuffed kangaroos and koala bears, a decision that led to a storm of loose stuffing filling the dance floor, moments after the confused band had begun its kinetic barrage.
     Glo’s, as we eventually came to know it, was thoroughly Pittsburgh, in spite of its awkward attempt at being cosmopolitan. We were drawn there, the Manchester Pals – Iceman, me, Meat, Bettina, Carl, even Willy Blanefield III, before he was ejected and tried unsuccessfully to return in various ridiculous disguises. Their liberally-run open stage night was the main attraction, a mad free-for-all of totally uncensored comedy, theater, and music, held every Tuesday, nine to midnight. It was the golden moment of the week, back there in those shabby, hair-brained days in the only American city I’ve ever grown to think of as home, despite my many more years stuck in Cuyahoga.
     The association began one typical, restless summer evening.
     I was living in a house in the Shadyside district, another of my countless temporary residences, existing day to day on the grace of the household, knowing my presence was tolerated by only half the tenants. This was before I’d met F. I was still working at ridding myself of my Bettina crush, something that had been made all but intolerable upon discovering she and Helmut were sleeping together. I’d followed a tiny blonde girl named Dot, who was hardly more than that. If not for her prominent cheekbones, dark-lined eyes, and spiky bottle-blonde hair, she might as well have been a child, at least fully clothed. Her narrow hips and flat chest enabled her to comfortably dress like everyone else, especially the boys, all of us in our finest rags, the accruements of our certified punk bohemia.
     I remember Dot’s favorite top, a black AC/DC T-shirt that she’d raggedly cut the sleeves from with a pair of paper scissors. She wear it without need for a bra, proud of her androgynous aura, as ready as anyone to smash a vacant window or tip over a USA Today box, those strange street totems that had shown up earlier that year, designed to look like futuristic televisions.
     Dot was from Australia. She was the first to grab one of the kangaroos at Glo’s that night and tear off its head with a gleeful relish, sending a burst of sneeze-inducing stuffing my way.
     She told me how she and her father had sailed to the U.S. in a small wooden boat he’d made himself, the night we’d first kissed, soon after we’d made our way into her bedroom, shedding our clothes and squirming about her bed like two gerbils in a cup, each unsure how to take it any further.
     Not much more than four foot ten, with her compact, tanned body, artificially white hair and big eyes, she was more like a kewpie doll than a human being. She’d quit college in Ohio, having come to Pittsburgh to start her own band. Two months into it, she’d found only a keyboard player to accompany her awkward, tribal drumming. They called themselves Botched Abortion and practiced in the one-car garage behind the split-level house she shared with the keyboardist, Tyla, Robin (Tyla’s younger sister), and Bettina. Dating Bettina’s housemate was all part of my approach to getting over her, what I saw as her betrayal of my feelings, the hurt I was attempting to toss right back in her face by spending so much time with little Dot.
     I was sitting out on the tarpaper roof of the house’s big front porch, my arms folded behind my head, resting against Dot’s open window. She hadn’t returned home from her job at a fast food joint on Liberty Avenue, over in Oakland, not far from the Kings Court theater, where I’d see Pink Floyd’s The Wall just a few weeks later, already deep in crush with F.
     It was one of those summer evenings when the whole world feels warm – the air, the ground, the entire city – it was all one big, inviting lap. We usually prowled aimlessly on such nights, those of us without jobs that required an early start. We’d race down the streets lined with affluent older homes, their spire-shaped attics and black iron fences, the gothic mini castles inhabited by professors and faculty of the near-by Carnegie Mellon University.
     I was listening to the reliable static throbbing of crickets, the low murmur of traffic along Walnut street, when I heard the sudden voice.
     “Hey! T-Tone! Rise and shine, motherfucker!”
     Startled, I opened my eyes, leaning forward, remembering I was some fifteen feet above the street, my bare feet only inches from the edge of the roof.
     “Come on down, man! We’re gonna jam!”
     It was Iceman, all six foot three of him. He was the only person who called me T-Tone, a nickname he coined the day I first showed up wearing the checkerboard sneakers that Bettina had found tied to a fence along a playground on the South Side. It was Two-Tone for a day, until the T fell into place.
     Iceman was as tall as Meat, but seemed much smaller, carrying himself like some heartbroken teddy bear, all slouched over, with a cumbersome gait, always in danger of tripping over his own large feet when he had to do anything other than walk casually. He had a voice as sharp as gunfire. Of Russian descent, his real name was Mikel. His father was a big noise in one of the city’s breweries. His sisters were best friends with Tyla and Robin. They were the ones who had talked Dot and the others into taking me on as a fifth boarder, just for the summer, to help them all balance the rent after a prior housemate had run out on them without paying her final share of the bills.
     “Jam?” I replied, slouched against the window, my arms hanging inside, feeling where the dark wall beneath the sill was still almost cool to the touch. “Where?”
     “That new club - over near Reds!”
     Reds was a favorite haunt. An old man’s bar run by an ex-fireman, it was almost entirely red inside, from the ceiling, to the padded booths, to the shattered eyes of its patrons.
     “That place?” I questioned, sounding doubtful. “Isn’t it really fancy?”
     Iceman shook his head, chewing at a piece of gum, a fixture he was rarely without.

“Nah, they’ve got a cool open stage. Lisa and Flakes checked it out last week. It’s punk as shit!”
     “Punk as shit” was something we all strove to be in those halcyon days between childhood and adult resignation. Provincial Pittsburgh was the perfect platform to display our adopted angst, not too high, not too low. We spent many a night roaming en masse, beating on garbage can lids, gas cans, anything we could find. We’d roam the streets, from the cozy grid of Shadyside, to the grassy sprawl of Squirrel Hill, all the way to Oakland, banging out our signature cacophony, one of the few times Willy’s atonal bleating was tolerated. Some nights would end in a fight, some irate driver discharging his drunken passenger to pummel us senseless. Meat would usually cut the campaign short, sticking his chest into the face of the belligerent frat boy.
     “We gotta sign up early – they fill up really quick. C’mon, dickhead – hurry! See if Tyla wants to come!”
     I pulled myself backwards into Dot’s room, landing with a thump on her small bed. I could smell her on the pillow. I lingered there for a moment, my mind drifting to Bettina, the way it always did. “Damn it!” I cursed, punching the pillow, leaping up, feeling about in the semi-dark for my sneakers. Too impatient to tie them, I wrapped the laces about my ankles and made a quick knot at the front. This was something Helmut and I had learned back in Worms, an old playground trick we’d teach the younger kids, telling them it was the proper way to tie one’s shoes, getting them in trouble when the physical education teacher noticed.
     Rushing down the hallway, grabbing a soda from the kitchen, I pounded on Tyla’s door, seeing the band of light at my feet. “Hey! Tyla! We’re going to hit that new place by Red’s! They’ve got an open stage! Ice says it’s cool!” I put my ear to the magazine clipping of Henry Rollins she’d taped to the center of the door, flipping his fans the bird. There was a moan and the sound of bedsprings and a thumping across the wooden floor. The door opened slightly.
     “What?” drawled Tyla, her head cocooned in a pair of large silver headphones, the cord dangling at her waist. Her modest afro was crumpled by the audio gear, making it stick out, like a fortune cookie over her forehead. I could just see her pale brown legs, smooth and alluring beneath her long T-shirt.
     “Iceman and me are going to jam at the open stage at Day Glo’s – that new place on Craig – by Red’s. Interested? We could use drums.”
     She rolled her sleepy-looking eyes, pushing the door to within an inch of closing. “I ain’t making a jackass of myself in that place,” she said. “Break a leg!” The door shut with a click. I shrugged, turning on my heel, heading out the apartment, bounding down the stairs to the building lobby, opening my can of grape soda.
     “Where’s Tyla?” asked Iceman, seeing me alone.
     “She’s not into it.”
     “That’s fucked up! She’s always into jamming!”
     I shrugged, taking a swig of my drink. “Yeah, well, she’s not so into me. You should have asked her yourself. Who else is coming with us?”
     Iceman grimaced, tilting his round head to the moonlit sky. His thick glasses were offset by a dirty smear of a moustache, which only looked silly on his boyish face. “I tried to get Lisa to come, but she’s dancing tonight. Meat’s got work too, so does Carl. You know if Laser’s around”
     “Nope. How about Bettina?” I ventured, knowing all to well she was more than likely with Helmut, at his place on the North Side.
     Iceman shook his head, cracking a quick bubble. “Willy’s meeting us there.”
     “If we don’t make an ass of ourselves – he will,” I sighed, hustling down the porch steps, feeling the warm night air at my ankles.
     “Yeah, well, at least he’s got some real instruments.”
     “If you consider a one-string guitar and a tiny keyboard instruments.”
     “He said he found us some cool old wigs to wear.”
     I followed him along the sidewalk, sneaking sips of my soda.
     “Wigs? What for?”
     Iceman laughed, sharp and loud, making a dog bark behind a closed door. “We’re signing up as The Grandmas. Old-school punk – like your Brit buddies!” He always said that. I never knew if it was a digging reference to old history or just his sense of everything outside America being one place. He wasn’t the only American I’d encountered who thought that way.
     “The Grandmas? That’s kind of a stupid name.”
Iceman laughed again, spitting his gum onto a neatly-trimmed lawn. “Punk as shit, T-Tone, punk as shit!”

Willy Blanefield III was already there, involved in a heated discussion with a cute girl at the registration desk. They were at the top of a wide carpeted stairway that took us to the club bar and the small stage used for open mike night. Willy was wearing his customary outfit of charity bin lootings; a pair of huge army issue parachute pants, turned inside-out to reveal the white pocket linings, a stained red satin dress shirt with tuxedo ruffles, over which he’d somehow pulled on a dark blue sweater that had been divorced of its sleeves. On his bare feet were dirty white deck shoes, a good two sizes too large. Atop of his oily black mop top sat a bus driver’s cap, one of two he alternated almost every other day, like clockwork.
     “So what? That place sucked anyway! College is for losers,” he was explaining, his wiry frame bent over the little desk. I could see the frustrated look on the girl’s face as I made my way up the stairs, Iceman breathing heavily behind me.
     “You’re making it hard for new students to get their own loans, you know,” the girl replied curtly, a crease across her brow, the only mark on a face as clear as a model’s in some skin cream commercial. Her eyes were silvery blue. I had an immediate crush.
     Willy slapped his hand on the stack of entry forms, almost upsetting the girl’s glass of water. “Tough! It’ll save them from getting suckered like I did. I’m helping them. I’m a deferment hero, you know. Can you guess where my accent’s from? I’m not from Pittsburgh originally, you know.”
     The girl now scowled. “I don’t care.”
     “C’mon! Just try to guess! You’ll never get it!”
     Willy was born in Toledo. He was the son of a small-time radio disc jockey who went by the name of “The Foghorn”. We all referred to him as Leghorn, in reference to the big rooster in the old Merry Melody cartoons.
     “Are these your friends?” the girl asked, craning her neck to catch my eye as I approached. I immediately wished I didn’t know Willy.
     “Hey! Ice! T!” Willy exclaimed, turning to give the girl a cocky smile. “Get that one? Ice Tea” he laughed, loud and tuneless.
     “You guys are The Grandma’s – right?” the girl inquired, ignoring Willy, pushing an entry form my way, as Iceman forced Willy to one side, pulling his cap down about his prominent ears. I blushed slightly, shrugging. “You both need to sign in here and I need to see your IDs.” Everyone between eighteen and twenty-one had a fake one. It was an old tradition in the steel city, almost expected. Iceman and I quickly showed ours and scrawled our unintelligible signatures. “You guys are punk rock?”
     “Punk as shit!” declared Iceman, giving her a scary wink that looked more like he was having a stroke. I held my breath as he pressed against me, hogging the desk. The two mile trek had given rise to his notorious funk, a body odor unlike any other.
     The girl frowned, looking serious. “Ron doesn’t like punk very much. Better not be too loud. We don’t want anyone getting scared away from the bar.”
     “Fuck them!” hooted Willy, pulling out the old keyboard case he’d hidden underneath the closest table, slamming it down. The girl destroyed him with a look.
     “Sorry,” I managed. “He was born a jerk like that. He can’t help it. Just be glad he hasn’t tried to play you any of his recordings.”
     She rolled her eyes, offering a slight smile. “He has,” she moaned, nodding towards the grey boom box Willy was stacking atop the keyboard case.
     I winced. “Sorry.”
     “Is he retarded?” she asked, with a sincerity that almost fooled me.
     I laughed. “Nah, he’s just from Toledo!”
     Iceman snorted.
     “We only hang out with him ‘cause he’s got instruments,” he offered, brushing by me, his perfume trailing him, like the papier-mache tail of some preschool dragon. The girl wrinkled her little nose and made a face. I hung there for a moment longer than necessary, hoping she’d realize the smell was dissipating, that it wasn’t me.
     “You look a bit like this guy a friend of mine used to go out with. Vogel? I think his name was Vogel too,” she remarked, handing me my ID card, which she’d been holding onto as we talked.
     “Lots of Vogels, I guess,” I lied, not wanting to know any more. The long list of girls that Helmut had hooked up with since moving to Pittsburgh was embarrassing. I certainly didn’t want to be known as the brother of such a lothario. The girls I liked were usually smarter than that.
     “You totally look like him. Wish I could remember his name,” she grinned, putting the eraser end of a pencil to her dark lips. “You guys are on third.”
     “Thanks,” I said, making my way to the table that Willy had claimed as The Grandma’s staging area. He and Iceman were already sipping on drinks, Iceman’s hand covering the play switch of the boom box. Willy was bobbing back and forth in his chair. If not retarded, he was certainly borderline hyperactive. I saw his beat-up acoustic guitar sitting under his feet, the worthless antique he called One-String Newman.
     “I’ve got the keyboard,” announced Iceman, belching gin. “You get drums, T-Tone.”
     I squinted, seeing a small, plastic garbage can poised at the edge of the stage.
     “Stole it from work!” Willy declared, sounding very proud of the fact.
     “The ass says he dumped it right outside,” sighed Iceman, yanking the boom box away from Willy’s reaching hand.
     “All that carbon paper and cigarette ash in the street?” I exclaimed, giving Willy an evil eye. He cackled, like a witch. Iceman rolled his eyes, sucking at his drink through the tiny mixing straw, his red eyes settling on the can. “Nice going, jackass! You’ll get us kicked out of here before we even get to perform.”
     “Take a pill, German!” laughed Willy dismissively. “No one’s going to know.”
     Iceman swatted the cap from his head, making him squeal.
     “We’re on third,” I informed them, grabbing a chair and sitting down.
     “No “Kaiser’s Finest” tonight, Mr. Vogel?” grinned Iceman. He was referring to easily the cheapest beer in town, named Old German, much to my chagrin.
     “I promised Dot I’d stop drinking on weekdays.”
     Iceman narrowed his eyes. “You really like her?”
     I shrugged. “I don’t know. She’s OK, I guess.”
     “Good in the sacker?” he grinned, working on what was left at the bottom of the ice in his glass. Two people had just entered the bar. We were early.
     “OK, I guess,” I replied, trying to keep the conversation low, not easy to do with the present company.
     “She swallow?” Willy asked, almost yelling, making me flinch, fearful to glance back over at the registration desk, sure the cute girl had heard.
     “Shut up, dickhead!” I hissed. We were all free to call Willy anything we pleased. He hardly seemed to notice. The only thing he ever really heeded were Meat’s physical threats. Anyone with any intelligence did the same. Not that Willy had much in that department.
     “She swallows yer dickhead?” cackled Willy, pleased with his own joke, reaching again for the dreaded cassette player, causing Iceman to pull it from the table. Following Meat‘s usual protocol, he yanked the tape from inside and hid it in his back pocket, making Willy steam.
     “Virgin!” Iceman sneered, before giving me one of his disquieting winks.
     “Am not!” barked Willy.
     “Yeah? What’s a pudenda then, Mr. Hefner?”
     “A pussy! Duh!”
     “Yeah, what part of the pussy, fuckface?”
     Willy looked stumped. “What do you mean – what part? It’s just a pussy!”
     Iceman laughed happily, kicking me under the table. “Only a wanker would say it’s just a pussy! Right, T-Tone, my lad?” I grinned, avoiding his eyes. I’d only ever once seen him with a girl who looked anywhere near being interested in him. His bravado was brave, but showing. I got up, deciding to get a soda. I hated catching that vulnerable look in his eye. It made me feel sorry for him.

I was staring into space. The faces at the bar were just a blur, like streetlights in a fog, impossible to distinguish from one another. I knew I was on the stage. I could feel the edge of the garbage can against my thighs. It was turned upside down. I had been banging at it with the heel of my palm, which was bright red.
     “You OK?”
     I suddenly noticed that Grandfather Amwolf was standing before the stage, in a flowerbed that appeared to be growing from the carpet. His suspenders hung about his trousers. A red bowtie pressed at his wrinkled neck. Gold cufflinks shone from his sleeves. He was in his Sunday best, drunk as a crow in a field of overripe grapes.
     “Father? Come on now, time to come home. We’re playing cards by the fire.”
     “Who’s that with you? Who’s the tiny man?”
     “That’s just Totty, father.”
     “A gremlin? You bring a gremlin to grin at an old man in his cups, do you?”
     “No, father, it’s your grandson. Mother sent us to find you. You wandered from the house while you were outside smoking. Remember?”
     I pressed my fist to my forehead. It felt as if it was sinking right through my skull.
     “Hey! Jag-off! You OK?”
     Iceman had me under my arms, holding me like a ragdoll. The front of my shirt was spattered red. I moved my mouth, feeling the pull of the blood that had dried across my lips. A man with a thatch of curly blonde hair behind each ear was leaning at the side of the stage, a towel on his arm, looking concerned.
     “Is he alright? We’ll call an ambulance, no problem.”
     I shifted my eyes. It hurt. The lights at the tables burned. I saw the pretty girl from the registration desk, lingering just behind the man with the towel.
     Grandfather Amwolf laughed, kicking at the begonias, spitting into the dirt.
     “Where’s the television woman then, eh?” he coughed, his voice broken, like a faucet full of trapped air. “Sing with me! The gremlin too! MAR – LARE – IN – O! MAR – LARE – IN – O!”
     “She’s not home, father, I promise you, she’s not. Come with us. Mother is making a toddy. We’ll play rummy with Alder and Helmut.”
     I clutched at my father’s trousers, grasping them behind his knees, terrified, yet mesmerized at the sight of grandfather, listing in the front flowerbed of our semi-famous neighbor, Eva Dinter, a middle-aged actress who had once appeared in a dingy afternoon soap opera, some years before.
     “Tell her to show herself at the window! Tell her! Peter Amwolf Vogel serenades a woman, he expects company! Come to us in your nightgown, Lady Dinter! You want that I piss in your garden? You want that I take myself a shit?”
     “Here’s some water.”
     The pretty girl helped Iceman sit me down in a chair. They’d dimmed the lamp. My head was cradled in my hands, which were still shaking. I tried to remember what had happened. I couldn’t.
     “Here, take this thing off him,” said the man with the towel, pulling at the grey lump of acrylic that Willy had pinned to my hair. It was one of the “Grandma” wigs he’d picked up for fifty cents at a thrift store in Wilkinsburg and had stupidly tossed into a dryer after washing them. They’d melted into fez-shaped clumps.
     “How are you feeling now?” asked the girl, giving me a smile from across the table. I could sense others standing near, watching. There was a murmur in the air, like I often heard at night when I tried to sleep, the voices F would later refer to as “T’s little radio show”.
     “Where’s Willy?” I asked. It was the first thing I’d said since everything had gone funny in my head.
     “Forget him,” replied Iceman. “He got kicked out after the first song.”
     “That kid’s eighty-sixed from here, you know,” explained the man, putting the towel to my face, telling me to tip my head back. The towel was warm and damp. “I think you’re bleeding again. There. Hold that right there.”
     Father struggled with grandfather, trampling flowers, filling the night air with a fragrance that reminded me of the little bottles on mother’s bedroom dresser, the ones with the rubber pumps attached, each full of a pungent perfume, the smells she doused herself with on church days, me sitting at her feet, watching a tiny run in her stockings racing up her calf, as she leaned towards the dresser mirror.
     “Go and get your brother, Totty – now!” ordered father, caught under grandfather, as if he was trying to hoist him from the ground. “Tell him to fetch a pair of trousers from my room. Hurry, boy – hurry!”
     I hesitated, standing there at the footpath that led from our house on down the short lane that crossed the black river where Helmut and I caught tadpoles and beat them to greasy pancakes on the street.
     “Go! I’ll thrash you, Totty Vogel! Go now, Goddamn it – now!”
     “What did grandfather do?”
     Grandfather seemed lifeless. He hung over father like he was just clothes, not a man. I smelt a new scent amongst all the night blooms, one I recognized all too well from the box toilet in the yard at home. Father sighed deeply, giving me a funny look, almost as if he were grinning. Perhaps he was.
     “Your grandfather’s a very bad boy, Totty. Go and tell Helmut to come – and bring fresh trousers. Go on.”
     “What’d he do?” I asked, Iceman leading me to the doors at the bottom of the carpeted stairs, carrying the plastic bucket and the keyboard case.
     “The fucker pissed himself.”
     “Up on stage?” I asked, feeling the tepid night air hitting my face, a napkin of dried blood at my nose.
     Iceman hurled the makeshift drum into the street. It bounced over the remains of the ashes and carbon slips that Willy had left there some two hours earlier. “That’s the last time I chug grain with that stupid motherfucker! He pissed on the carpet! I’m fucking embarrassed! I’m never ever going in that place again! Fuck you, jag-off!” He then lifted the old leather keyboard case over his head and pitched it after the can. It came crashing down upon the yellow line in the road, the rusty latch bursting open, the derelict instrument shooting out, sliding under a parked car, bits of plastic keys scattering in the glow of the streetlights. I felt my head spinning again and fell backwards against the side of the building.
     “We were drinking grain in Day-Glo’s?” I asked, confused, closing my eyes, shutting out the lights.
     Iceman was walking back from the middle of the street. He had a handful of black and white plastic shards. He looked at me, like he didn’t even know me. “No, dumbass – in the alley – behind the dumpster, before we went on. How much did you drink anyway? You little alcoholic.”
     I began to heave, lurching forward, making my nose burst again, warm blood running into my mouth. Iceman just stood there, watching me. I was now on my hands and knees, my whole body shaking, my legs as cold as ice.
     “They think you had some kind of a seizure or some shit, you know,” he said, shaking his head. “Good job too. Or we’d both be six’d from there too. Not that it matters now.”
     “Seizure?” I replied, my left hand in my pocket, feeling something I didn’t recall putting there, a fold of paper. “I did? When? Just now?”
     Iceman grunted, dropping the broken keys onto the pavement about me. “You’re drunk, totally fucking drunk. Come on, shithead, let’s head for home – the fun’s over.”
     I stumbled to my feet, pressing the napkin hard at my nose, taking a deep breath through my mouth. One of my laces had come undone from my ankle. Iceman wasn’t waiting for me. “My grandfather once shit himself in the neighbor’s flowerbed!” I called out, starting to laugh.
     “Who? You mean the Munchhausen guy?” he called back, kicking at a fire hydrant, almost falling over himself.
     “Yeah – that’s him,” I said, unfolding the paper, reading what was written across it, wondering who Isabelle was, and why on earth she’d wanted to give someone like me her number.

Dodo, Chapter Thirteen, The Gulf Between

The photograph was of a tiny girl, looking no more than two, standing beside what appeared to be a birdbath shaped like an eggcup. The top of her head, covered with a spirited mass of raven locks, hardly reached the lip of the stone drinking pool. She was wearing a white dress, beneath which were two grey socks pulled up to her chubby knees. She didn’t have on any shoes. It appeared to be summer, the short grass of the yard upon which she was standing was blanched with a bright light that placed dark shadows upon her legs and created a black doppelganger that stretched out far behind her. She was in mid-laugh, her well-fed cheeks stretching to reveal a missing tooth and playful tongue. Her eyes, half-squinting to meet the sun, were set wide about her button nose, giving her a faintly piggish, but nevertheless charming appearance. Behind her, to the right, was the side of a wooden house, a non-descript early twentieth century structure, if I’m any judge of architectural design. It appeared neither lived-in nor abandoned. Apart from the birdbath, the only other sign of inhabitance was the edge of a section of striped fabric, blowing in the wind, appearing at the upper left of the picture. The more I looked at it the less certain I was of its origin. It may well have been an American flag, or it might have simply been a bed sheet hanging on a line, there was no good way to tell, and the over-exposed photograph did little to help. Turning over the small, weathered slip of paper, I saw a single name, hand-written in pencil.
     “Imogene,” I whispered to myself, repeating it, trying to decide just who it might have been. My best guess was F’s grandmother, on her father’s side, though I realized I didn’t know her name. She’d died during the great depression, not long after giving birth to F’s father, Jack. “They had to burn her all her clothes,” I remember F telling me one sleepless night. I never knew just why, even though I’m sure she explained. It was my fault, I was becoming increasingly more inattentive, to her, and everything around me.
     I was perched on a roadside picnic table, my ten-speed bicycle placed upside down before me, balanced on its saddle and handlebars, its detached front wheel resting beside it, the tire flat against the rim. Being bored, with no sense of urgency about fixing the flat, the brilliant sun having made the wooden table as warm as toast, I’d been embracing my idle nature, flipping through the little red book I’d stuffed in the side pocket of my pannier almost a week before. The photo had suddenly appeared, falling from the back pages.
     Not ten feet in front of me stood a palm tree, its drooping fronds an unhealthy brown. Behind it lay a field, an acre of tough-looking bramble, growing up through twisted knobs of golden grass, like barbed wire. I’d learned just the day before that the bundles were not natural, as I’d first assumed, rather they were created by local hunters, as a way of making the small deer that grazed the grassy flat fields easier to spot, a measure taken prior to the annual setting of fires to herd them out. Beyond this patch of uninviting bumps was another field of gold, glistening in the rich afternoon sun, the face of the frying pan that had given me a handsome, if spotty, tan, one acquired during the week I’d spent cycling from the city of New Orleans, to Houma, then along a thin peninsula that had eventually brought me to Grand Isle, the southern most tip of the state of Louisiana, a sleepy assemblage of small houses, all built on stilts, in order to meet the regular flood waters, many so high from the ground there was a basketball net just beneath the front door. There was little more situated about the tarnished landscape. I’d encountered one or two small grocers and a couple of bait shops, plus a peeling plaster statue of Jean Lafitte, the infamous bayou pirate of yesteryear, sitting at the foot of a driveway leading to a shrimp shed, a hangar-sized building of corrugated metal that rested on wooden legs, out over the swampy waters of one of the many tributaries that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, the body of water I had pedaled some sixty miles to see, my tiny blue tent right that moment staked to a beach situated less than a mile away, a lonely stretch of gray sand operated by the state parks department.
     I had come south, all by myself, taking a train named The Empire Builder from Cleveland to Chicago, from there riding the famous City of New Orleans to its namesake, my Peugeot PX-10, my tent, a few tools, and a change of clothes all inside a box lying under the baggage car. It was a trip meant to assuage me of the guilt I had been experiencing, ever since the day, just some two weeks earlier, when I’d decided to break up with F, the girl whose book I now held in my hands, the only girl who ever really understood me.

“It’s not that, T, I love your stories – I do – it’s just – I want to know what you’re thinking – what you’re feeling.”
     We were both half-dressed, lying on the bed we shared in our small apartment in Cuyahoga Falls. What had been a night of drinking with friends had become a delirious stumble home in the dark, upsetting the neighbor’s garbage can, bringing old Mr. Drummond outside in his smiley face pajamas, making us both laugh until we had tears in our eyes. Literally falling through the side door that led to our ground-floor of a house owned by a taxidermist and his infirm sister, we’d collapsed in each other’s arms, tugging at each other’s pants, intending to make the most of our soaring spirits, but we were soon snoring away, oblivious to the fact that we’d left the door open. F had woken about four, wondering why she was so cold. My hand settled on her thigh, feeling the goose pimples on what was otherwise a reliably warm place. Making my way through a swirling head rush, I’d shut the door and returned to the bed, setting myself upon her, pushing my face between her legs, rubbing my chin against her underwear, murmuring my desire, but she wriggled, shaking me off, finding the edge of the downturned cover, drawing it up over us, shutting out the bright moon that eavesdropped through the bedroom window. Now awake, too wired to sleep further, she began to talk, peppering me with the regular litany of questions she seemed to reserve for such unguarded occasions.
     “You never tell me things.”
     “Like what?” I mumbled, the cover a shroud across my face.
     “I don’t know – like when you were a kid. What did you want to be when you were little?”
     “Bigger.”
     “Tot!”
     I laughed, reaching for the promise between her legs. She slapped my hand into retreat.
     “See what I mean? You won’t tell me anything.”
     “I have,” I protested. “I told you about the accident on the road, about Alder’s hands, about father –”
     “Yes! Exactly! But not about you, you idiot!”
     I wore a hidden frown.
     “You tell me all these interesting stories, but you leave yourself out. I don’t hear what you felt. It’s like I hardly know you, T. Nobody does.”
     “That’s not true,” I groaned, shifting to my edge of the bed, offering her the silence of my back. She didn’t say anything for a long time. I was beginning to drift off into a troubled sleep, when she spoke again.
     “Did you want to be, I don’t know, maybe an astronaut? A fireman? A doctor?”
     I rolled my eyes. If her voice hadn’t sounded so dry and cracked, so child-like and earnest, I don’t think I’d have given her answer.
     “Grandfather Amwolf gave Helmut and me this old race car set for Christmas. It was metal, just a little circle, painted green. The pieces didn’t go together very well, the wind-up sedans were always getting caught on the separations. There were two of them, one for the gangsters, the other for the police. It had a blue police badge painted on one door. They were wind-up. You know? With a big key at the back? Helmut always picked the police at first, leaving me to be the bad guys. Which made me desperately want to be the policemen. Father had a friend who worked in security at the big paper mill in Mainz. I remember seeing his holster once, knowing that inside the black leather was a gun, a real gun.”
     “So you wanted to be a policeman?”
     “Only because Helmut did. When he switched to the gangster car I wanted to be a gangster.”
     F groaned, rolling onto her side. “Is this a Vogel condition?” she sighed. “Or is this just a German thing?”
     “What?”
     “Fuck, T! You really don’t see it, do you? You’re a sponge your brother and your dad use as a punching bag! Everything you think and do is because of something they’ve said or done to you. Your grandfather did too, from what you tell me.” I began to mumble my objection to her theory. “No, listen, really, it is! I pay attention to this stuff, you know – I’m a girl.” In my stupor I took this as some sort of subtle clue, and again reached for her, making her punch me hard in the ribs. “You’re fucked up and you won’t get any better if you can’t talk about yourself!” she whined.
     “I guess I wanted to be an soldier when I was really little,” I offered up, my side smarting.
     “Why?” she asked, her designs on one day becoming a therapist coming to the fore. “Did you feel powerless?”
     I laughed. “C’mon, F! I was a boy! I wanted to fight in a war, shoot bullets into the air, hold a grenade in my teeth – it was the cool thing to imagine being – we were all the same. I’ve told you about the comics we read, especially the British ones Uncle Alder brought back from his business trips, how they were all about the war. We read and read those things, until we could practically recite the cheesy dialog. It didn’t matter to us that the “Jerrys” were the bad guys, we just wanted to imagine ourselves part of that kind of action.”
     “But you stopped feeling that way?”
     “Yeah, I guess.”
     “Why?”
     “It’s late – we need to get some sleep. I’m not going to waste the first Saturday I’ve had off in over three months.”
     “But why did you stop wanting to be a soldier? Tell me – please?”
     I was never able to resist that hurt tone she employed. It made me want to cradle her like she was a child who’d woken from a bad dream. It was only years later, when I had my own daughter, that I realized how strangely paternal my attraction for her was. I took a deep breath, hugging my pillow, my eyes closed tightly, seeing the trail of my lived life. “One day – it must have been during the last year before we moved to America – father came home from one of his social nights. He was drunker than usual, barging about the little front room, knocking one of mother’s porcelain figures from the mantle trying to hang his hat on it. He picked me up by my suspenders, dropping me on the sofa, hurting my nose. Then, after a failed attempt at kissing mother in the kitchen he stumbled upstairs. He came down a moment later with a ledger in his hand. Helmut and I were huddled on the sofa, barricading ourselves between the cushions, the way we often did when he came home. We both just stared at the book, never having seen it before. Charging for the sofa, father partied us like the Red Sea, each of us clinging to a cushion. He dropped down hard, exhaling the vapors of his bitter drink, and opened the leather-bound ledger, setting it across his knees as he began to read, his voice automatic, wooden, as if he were auditioning for a job. It contained Grandfather Amwolf’s diary, what little existed of it, an abandoned attempt at chronicling his life – for who, I don’t know, because father only discovered it after grandfather had died, hidden away in the locked chest he kept under his bed.
     “What did it say?” F asked, her voice sounding nearer. I could smell her, making me want to take her to me, but I knew better.
     “It was all about the war and how grandfather’s four brothers all died within two months of each other.”
     “In World War II?”
     “No, silly, this was back in the teens. It was the first world war.”
     “I don’t even know who was fighting in that one. It confuses me.”
     “Well, suffice to say, we were on different sides – our countries, I mean.”
     “Oh – right,” She sounded embarrassed. My arms ached to hold her.
     “That was the war where soldiers, on both sides, died like flies, thousands and thousands. Grandfather’s brothers, all older than him, were drafted the same day and were sent to the trenches. Amell, Peter, and Jon, they all were shot or blown up in the first month. Winfred took a bullet through the hand and was sent back home to convalesce. Things were so hard he was only allowed a couple of weeks in the infirmary, before they sent him to the steel works in Frankfurt, which had been turned into a munitions-making machine. His job was to scale the huge chimneys that belched out the black smoke from the kilns. He was a chimney sweep. He slipped and fell over fifty feet to his death.”
     “God, T, that’s horrible. It’s amazing you’re even here, if you think about it. If your grandfather had been old enough to be drafted, I mean.”
     “Yeah, I guess. Still, I probably wouldn’t exist if grandfather hadn’t raped Peter’s girl and she’d been forced to marry him.”
     “What? Are you kidding?”
     “Nope. That’s how father came into the world. It was all in grandfather’s ledger, written up like some cheap paperback. Father, having already known the truth without ever telling anyone, translated it for us that night, making it sound much more vulgar than grandfather’s German. Vogel family history – nice, huh?”
     She took me in her arms, pulling me into her warm body, her breath on my neck, saying my name. I reached around her, sliding my hand deep into the back of her underwear, searching for her moisture. “T! Cut it out, for Christ’s sake! Can’t we just hold each other for once without that? God! You’re impossible!”

I slipped the old photo back into the book, closing it, running my fingers across its gilded surface, the faded gold lettering that read Naked Photographs. I’d taken it from F’s side of the bed, the day I’d made my escape. I’m not sure why, other than that it held a strong attraction for me, its unorthodox conceit, photographs appearing only as text description, leaving me with such clear images, almost as if they were my own memories.
     I’ve always found a sad kind of comfort in my memory, letting an old moment intercede when the present seems an unbearable proposition. It’s a condition I’ve learned only increases with age.
     I know it’s unhealthy to dwell in the past, at least I’ve always been told it is, but it’s inevitable, isn’t it? What do we have as we get older if not more and more memories? How do we avoid lingering on them? What would an old man do without memory, if he is alone, left to see the end of his days in the wounded house his family has left him?
     I suppose Grandfather was right when he told us “regret is the life sentence of those who haven’t lived.” Helmut and I were hardly teenagers when he handed us this cryptic epitaph, having caught us sharing a cigarette behind the garage, back in Binghamton, an act he dismissed with a wink, leaving us to finish our poison. He enjoyed giving us such perplexing lectures, knowing we knew little of what he spoke. But now, after all the time that has gone by, it makes sense. His rare gesture of leniency seems to reach right out through the intervening years, making me almost smile at the vision of his hard and bitter face, the torn eyes that were the font from which we all tumbled, hopelessly, into our own inevitable fate.
     It was with such an inkling of my own future derailment that I held that little book, that hot, breezy day, temporarily mired in the cradle of the Gulf, my thoughts settling wistfully on the bed I had shared with Effie Jones, its addictive warmth, the hiding place I’d found in her soft limbs, the sanctuary I’d created in the broken back corners of my psyche, the paradise I all-too-quickly met with a scowl when reality demanded I take it for what it was, the fragile steering of another’s heart, something I knew I had no good right doing, not a young man whose own had already been traced and cut like a butcher’s diagram. I hadn’t wanted to hurt her, that was the last thing I wanted to do, but how could I explain that staying with her was only going to hurt her so much more in the end? I had to bolt, I had to have her angry at me. I wanted her to learn to hate me, hate me so much her love would be transposed, forever and ever. It was a certainty that gave me some solace, alone there on that isolated finger of grassy brown terrain, thousands of miles from what I knew as home, the result of a flight on the rails I’d taken without even consulting “the very best damn rail rider in these Goddamn entire United States of America”. I know Helmut would have understood, even if he would have given me endless grief for it. He wouldn’t have let me go, he’d have bullied me into staying, regardless of the fact that he was then planning the first of his own great retreats, following father’s desperate tracks into personal oblivion.
     I shook the little red book, the edge of the photograph sliding back into view. I let it fall into my hand and, looking at it one last time, now seeing F’s dark, needing eyes in the face of the child, I crushed it, hurling it as far as I could, off into the burnished field, offering it an escape of its own. I then took a small pencil from my pannier and, in the blank back page of the book, I began to write.

     There is a tiny girl, no more than two, standing beside what appears to be a birdbath shaped like an eggcup. The top of her head is covered with a spirited mass of raven locks…

Dodo, Chapter Twelve, The Twisting Road

“You’ve never really told me,” F whispered, shifting her weight in my lap, the warmth of her soft breasts against my chest. My hands had traveled under the silk of her skirt, my fingers finding themselves beneath the elastic of her garters.
     It was just after eleven. We were parked at a rest area on the Ohio Turnpike, not far from Cuyahoga Falls. It was a favorite spot for such a rendezvous. I’d treated her to a late dinner at Tarmonti’s, an Italian restaurant known for the dusty suit of armor that greeted customers in its lobby. It was our tenth anniversary. Ten months in each other’s company, a milestone that would have passed unrecognized if I had been at the wheel.
     It was almost four weeks since we’d moved back to Ohio, from Pittsburgh. We’d found our little second-floor apartment in Canton two days before, only a mile from the street where F had grown up. I’d been scrubbing cars at her father’s used car dealership and had just cashed my first paycheck. We’d spent the first part of the day searching for a much-needed couch and were feeling positive about things. We were two adults in love, a real couple. It was a new situation for both of us but F seemed to be absorbing it in stride. I felt as if I were walking on the moon.
     Coming out of the restaurant, she’d surprised me. She’d taken my hand and had run it against her thigh, letting me feel the ridge of what she had to explain was a garter. “Wow,” I’d whispered into her ear, my cheek lingering against hers in a sleepy, pleasant way. We made our way towards the pumpkin-colored ‘79 Pacer she’d secured from her father the week before. It was a hideous-looking car she’d nevertheless fallen in love with, naming it Cinderella, “Cindy” for short. “The panties and bra are leopard print,” she’d whispered in reply, her full lips almost touching mine. “Just like in the magazine, you bad German boy.” I blushed, recalling the old pin-up I’d gushed over a few days earlier, in an antique shop, how she’d teased me about my interest in bondage wear. We shared a wet kiss, before she made her way around to the driver’s side. “Let’s go and park somewhere,” she’d smiled, struggling with her keys at the finicky ignition. I’d suggested the tree-lined parking lot behind the city park. It was a dark and forlorn spot, about as private as one could want, but she had other plans. Pulling onto the turnpike entrance with a sly grin, one hand having settled on my thigh, she spoke in a firm, seductive voice, telling me things I’d never heard a girl say before. My ears went hot as she ferried us across the leaf-lined rest area blacktop. Before I knew it, the engine rattled to a stop and she was sliding herself upon me, crowding my face with her breasts. “You never really told me,” she repeated, my attention lost between the buttons of her blouse.
     “Never really told you what?” I replied, letting my fingers inch upwards along her thighs, my wrists now passing under the garter elastic. She shifted again, making me wince in the moonlight, the weight of her wide and firm bottom threatening to snap the erection that had sprung to life even before the engine was quiet. Our lips met for the umpteenth time, our tongues gliding.
     “Why you don’t have a license. It’s not because of epilepsy, is it? I mean, the test said you don’t have it.”
     I pulled away from her mouth, my throat going dry. I lowered my forehead to her chest, breathing softly into the opening of the cotton blouse, which I’d begun to ungracefully part, struggling with the buttons. My heart began to pound. All at once I was laboring for air.
     “T?” she whispered, taking my hair in her hand, stroking my forehead. “Are you OK?” I nodded weakly, not taking my face from her bosom. “No you’re not. I know you’re not. What’s wrong?”
     “Nothing. I promise.”
     “Uh-uh – something’s bothering you. Your heart is going like a jack hammer.”
     “That’s because your butt’s in my lap!” I declared, laughing quickly, desperate to change the subject.
     She worked at the part in my bangs, arranging it like a child might a doll’s, tenderly and methodically. “Tell me what’s wrong, T – please.”
     I sighed. My erection had already disappeared. “Can we talk later?” I asked, sounding hurt.
     “When?” she replied softly, putting her lips to my forehead, cooing.
     “When we’re not in the car.”


Helmut had broken up with Bettina and had moved back to Cuyahoga Falls to help mother, taking the tiny room we used to share. This was during father’s first extended absence.
     Cuyahoga Falls was a fairly non-descript place, not unlike so many small cities in Eastern Ohio. For every nail salon there was an auto body shop, and for every auto body shop there was a bar. It ambled along, neither noisy nor peaceful, a town with its fixtures, its regulars, a tight history of small to medium happenings. Its most appealing feature was the Cuyahoga River, which ran through the middle of town, along a series of descending twists and turns. This was the same river that famously caught fire in 1969, due to its intense pollution, but that was a good thirty miles north, near the Cleveland city limits.
     Seeking work, father had brought us to this sleepy burgh in the late 70s. He’d been told the river created a lot of industry and there was always an open spot at one of the factories, be it the rubber plant, the glass works, or any number of the varied industrial fabricators that had established the modest city during the first half of the century. Unfortunately, like much of the information father managed to attach to his addled mind, this piece was a good decade out of date. The community we arrived to was now mostly residential, just beginning to acquire its commercial identity. The factories left standing along the crooked brown river were mostly empty shells, rusted catacombs of cobwebs and broken windows. The only full-time job father could scrounge up was a custodial position at the Cathedral of Tomorrow, a strange, round building sitting on the outskirts of the business district, one that Helmut and I, upon first viewing, decided was actually a secret UFO. We imagined all sorts of outrageous things were secretly going on in the late 50s concrete structure, the least of which was the villainous gathering of fuel in order to leave the Earth, accomplished by sucking out the fluid of the congregation’s brains. The church’s figurehead, a popular television evangelist with hair like Elvis Presley, was clearly the leader of this evil alien space ministry. These stories were hardly tolerated by father, who’d toss his slipper at us whenever he caught wind of the regularly growing narrative, one in which his part as nighttime superintendent was soon a key chapter. “Polishing the UFO” is how we referred to his occupation, the task that kept him away from the house from just after suppertime to the early hours of the morning, when we were dragging cobwebs about the tiny kitchen, trying to delay the rapidly-advancing school day.
     “Your daddy cleans up brains?” queried Matthew, the precocious five year-old son of our immediate neighbor, on one of these slow, cold mornings, as Helmut and I occupied the front porch, me dreading the sound of the approaching school bus. Matthew asked this every time we began to spin our tales of alien subterfuge. His porch abutted ours, the walls of the two houses all but touching, leaving an alleyway no wider than a skateboard, a vertical gutter that had filled with stray bits of garbage over the years, leaving a knotted, fetid mass of paper and plastic that no one had ever ventured to clear out.
     “Our daddy is a special agent, Matty, he works for the aliens. He cleans up all the brain juice that gets splattered on the floor,” explained Helmut, rolling a cigarette on the curled tip of his leather shoe. Little Matthew’s eyes widened.
     “Why, Hel-mat?”
     “Why? It’s a trade off, dummy. He gets to go with them, of course, back to their planet – when they leave the Earth.”
     I snickered, one eye on the thin black road that followed the Cuyahoga down to the brickyard, watching for the pick-up truck that brought father home each morning, from another long night scrubbing the halls of the television ministry. It usually arrived a few minutes before the bus. The street was a pothole-filled stretch that passed before the row of nearly identical, depressing houses, in the middle of which sat ours, nestled like a sickly scavenger among a wire of crows. The homes had been built a good sixty years before, to serve the workers of the now-abandoned brick factory. They remained at the mercy of a hillside choked with overgrown bramble and ancient apple trees with branches bent like witch’s fingers, which often came crashing down upon us in violent fall and winter storms.
     “Do the aliens eat kid’s brains too, Hel-mat?”
     “You bet they do. They like the brains of five year-old boys the best.”
     Matthew squealed, clamping his hands over the top of his head. He jumped up from where he was sitting and hurried off down the porch steps, sprinting up his own, like he always did. He burst through his front door, slamming the screen behind him, screaming to his mother that “Mister Vojel” was going to eat his brains.
     I gave Helmut a critical eye. “Maybe you shouldn’t have said that,” I offered, grinning. Helmut scowled, slipping his homemade cigarette between his lips.
     “I don’t give a shit if father finds out, if that’s what you mean,” he replied, taking a small lighter from his shirt pocket. I turned away from his hard stare. He was eighteen and almost six foot two. He no longer ran from father. Just the day before he’d brushed right by him, straight out the door, ignoring father’s demands that he get back inside. They’d been arguing about was he was going to do with himself now that he had graduated high school. Helmut had no good plans and less ambition. “Why should I care what the neighbors think anyway? They talk about him all the time. They think he’s nuts,” he scoffed, wetting the end of his wobbly cigarette with his mouth.
     I wanted to say he was only make things worse, but I couldn’t do it. “Can I have a puff?” I asked.
     He snorted and laughed, getting up from the top of the steps, where he’d been sitting. “Piss off, Dodo! Get your own!” he declared, bounding from the rickety steps, heading off up the road, in the opposite direction from the old brickyard. I could only imagine what he was doing with his mornings, now that he was no longer required to board the old bus. I’m sure he would have happily slept in, but that would mean being home when father arrived.
     A moment later, I heard the familiar knocking sound of father’s ride. I sat where I was and watched the rusty green truck weave towards me, like a fly with one wing, putting stitches along the faded yellow line in the middle of the road. It pulled up along the thin gravel strip between the road and the porch, groaning to a stop. I’d never seen it driven so poorly. Father slid from the passenger seat, holding his lunch box, his body as crooked as the apple trees behind the house. No words were exchanged between he and his workmate. The truck rolled off noisily, waking a dog three houses down. An angry voice hollered for it to shut up. The sun was just beginning to show itself behind the stand of maples beyond the stream across the way, appearing as a fluorescent white ball, cut by the spidery black veins of the leafless tree limbs in the steam rising from the damp morning ground. I instinctively sniffed at the air, catching the expected stale odor of whiskey, along with the remnants of Helmut’s lit cigarette.
     Father hobbled up to the porch, not raising his head. He staggered at the first step, almost dropping the metal lunch box. He seemingly hadn’t noticed me until then. He looked up, giving me a scowl, just like Helmut’s. “Is your mother still sleeping?” he asked. I nodded yes. He grinned sloppily and pitched the empty box up onto the wooden porch. “Get your coat,” he coughed, fumbling in his pockets, muttering something under his breath. I hesitated, not understanding why. “Hurry!” he barked, shaking a bent cigarette, attempting to straighten it against the palm of his hand. I made my way into the house, wondering what was going on, dreading that he might have spotted Helmut heading off and wanted me to go and fetch him back.

The dollar cinema was empty but for F and I. I slumped deep into my seat, smelling the musty carpet, a toxic perfume of mildew and old popcorn.
     “When we reached the turn after the tunnel by the old brickyard gate I could see the car sitting against the telephone pole. The front was peeled open like a banana. You could smell burnt rubber and gasoline from yards away. I then noticed the two shapes lying in the road, one set across the center line, the other stretched onto the shoulder.”
     F murmured thoughtfully. A story flickered on the screen, ignored by all.
     “What where they? Bits of the car?”
     I didn’t answer.
     “T?”
     I felt her warm hand taking mine, bringing it to her lap. She stroked the top, pressing softly at my knuckles.
     “They were people,” I replied, my voice a hoarse whisper.
     “People?”
     “Yeah. The driver and his passenger.”
     “From the smashed car?”
     I took a deep breath, feeling my arms and legs tingling, my heart ricocheting between its own beats. I knew my face was palsying, my mouth turned down at the sides, my eyes moistening. It was just like that morning, just the same. “I don’t – don’t want to do this anymore, F – sorry – I just can’t.” She took my hand in both of hers and squeezed it reassuringly.
     “I think you should. I think you need to. Have you told anyone this before?”
     I shook my head. Tears were now running down my cheeks. I began to sob. It was noisy, I couldn’t stop it. My eyes fluttered about the darkness surrounding us. I was relieved to see we were alone again. The only other person in the theater had left ten minutes ago.
     “It’s OK. I’m here, we’re both safe together here. Please tell me – I want you to.”
     I was breathing through my nose, biting my lip, forcing myself to go on. “Father was waving his arms about, the whole way down the road, telling me how the bodies flew out of the car. Like dolls, he said, they looked like two giant dolls, followed by bits of broken glass and a seat belt that reached outwards and then pulled back, like a slingshot. He said it all happened so fast but seemed so slow. It was early morning still and no one hardly ever drove along that way. Most people were still asleep. They hadn’t seen what caused the car to leave the road. It just swerved as it came towards them, out of the tunnel. Father’s co-worker managed to hit the brakes and pull over, even though I know he was as drunk as father. He wanted to get out and help the men but father told him no, that they had to drive on to the house and get help because they’d be arrested for driving intoxicated. This scared his friend, who abandoned father at the house. He must have seen Helmut up the road because he dragged me back with him, never even asking for Helmut. I remember feeling really dizzy the closer we got to the first man, the one lying over the line. He was wearing a brown jacket, corduroy, I think. That’s all I can remember. Father suddenly stuck out his arm and stopped me. Stay here, Totty, he said, stay right here. His voice was half-gone, all shredded and dry. I just stood there looking but not seeing anything. I heard father cough. It sounded like he was going to be sick. Follow me, Totty, he then said, but don’t look. I stumbled after him and I looked. I couldn’t help it. I just couldn’t – couldn’t…”
     F lowered her head to my hand, pressing her cheek against it. “Go on, T, go on – you can tell me.”
     “I know the man was dead, F, I know he was, even though it never said so in the paper. At least I can’t seem to remember ever reading it. I know he was dead because a big bit of his head wasn’t there – it was a few feet away, with hair on it.” I was breathing fast, my eyes closing about tears. It was all coming to me, flooding my emotions, taking me there, back to that twisting stretch of road.

“What the fuck did you look for? I told you not to look! Not to look! Not to fucking look!” screamed father. He was crying, his words coming out on great sobs. I moved towards him, away from the dead man. He was standing near the car, his red hands loose at his sides, as if he hadn’t any idea what to do. “I’m going to turn the motor off. Don’t move.”
     “We should call the police,” I muttered, my thoughts racing, my eyes glued to the broken car, imagining it blowing up any moment, like they always seemed to do on television. “We should have called from home first.”
     “You want your mother to wake up to this?” father yelled from the driver’s side. “We go down to the coffee shop and call – after I turn the motor off!”
     The passenger door hung limply open, the seatbelt dangling to the ground like the tongue of a dead serpent. The window was shattered. There was dark red clotted along the frame. I buried my cold hands deep into the pockets of my jacket. I felt a coin nestled among the lint. I began to press it between my thumb and forefinger, over and over and over. I couldn’t stop it, it was purely reflexive.
     “Stay right here!” father suddenly commanded, pointing to the ground at my feet, where I stood, just off the side of the road. “I’m going to call the police.”
     “But – but I want to go with you – I don’t want to stay here. Please!”
     “You stay here, damn it! You think I’m going to talk to the policemen like this?” he cried, pointing weakly to his mouth, the cracked lips that had been nursing a bottle less than half an hour before. “I call from the coffee shop! You show the police what has happened.” I began to blubber out in protest, my eyes red and stinging. He suddenly rushed at me, forcing me back against the now idle car. I hit with a painful crunch, broken glass under my feet. He held me by the collar of my jacket, pulling it up about my neck, making it hard to breathe. “You do NOT tell them I was ever here, you understand me? Never here! I am drinking coffee this morning! You walked along and found them – not me!” I began to cry, everything in me was coming undone. I begged him to take me with him, clawed at his arms, pulling on his dirty coat sleeves. He shoved me backwards, his eyes splintered red and wild. “You are nearly sixteen years, Totty Vogel – not five! Act like a man and do what I tell you! Do what I fucking TELL you!” Hearing him swear in English always seemed so much harsher. I could do nothing but relent. Crouching down against the car I watched him stagger off down the road, steam billowing around him as the waking sun made the glass strewn about my feet glisten. I wiped my sleeve at my eyes, swallowing hard, tasting salt. I was beyond terrified. I could feel my toes and my fingers, but they no longer seemed connected to me, it was as if I’d been filled with Novocain from my palms to the tops of my feet. I blinked, noting the warmth of the growing sun on my face. Then the strange sound hit my ears. It was low and soft, almost like someone talking to a young child or baby, a sort of cooing sound. I opened my eyes and saw him, the man, the one who had been thrown to the berm on the other side of the road. He was trying to sit upright, his back to me, his hands slapping at the ground as if he were blind. The cooing sound was coming from him.
     I’m not sure how I managed to get to my own feet and cross over to where he was, but I did. I was compelled. I don’t think it was me, not my conscious self, that did it. Which is perhaps why I’ve never quite been able to recall everything. But I know I was there, putting my hands out to steady him as he toppled backwards. He couldn’t do any more than sit up. I can still see his thick, dark hair, an afro, huge about his shoulders. I just stared at it and watched as bright red bubbles began to appear amongst the tight curls. They poured out and soon were streaming from his hair, soaking the collar of his denim shirt, staining his back. I don’t know what I did next because I suddenly realized there was someone behind me, whispering gently into my ear, pulling me away from the injured man. I turned mutely, seeing the friendly face of my school bus driver. She said something, using my name, and smiled as she took my hand and offered it to a grinning older man. I remember seeing an empty school bus parked alongside the road and another car and then a man was hurrying across the road with a blanket, which was wrapped about the bleeding man. I looked to the middle of the road and saw someone else, kneeling, covering the other man with a plastic tarp.

“And that’s all I can remember – I promise.”
     F pulled me to her lap, across the seat divider. She held me there awkwardly, for what felt like forever, just talking to me, repeating herself, telling me it was going to be alright, telling me how brave I was and how much she loved me. In the background I could hear the voices on the screen, a woman shouting at a man, a car speeding off, sad music playing, violins braying like lost sheep.