Holding his cane, Pop ambled upon the sidewalk in a minstrel showmanship, looking up and down and then left and right and towards both ends of the sidewalk and then tossing his cane off to reveal to possibly no one that it was a remarkably round stick arched his head back as if to have total coverage of his surroundings, his feet seeming to float before a childlike sense of glee being overriden by sudden fear posed him back in shape like an action figure, the ideal impersonation of Pop Kenzing. The leaves seemed to shatter and the wind was unlikely and unwelcome. He could still feel a dis-ease and hobbled back to his cane, now lying in the street next to a sticker-covered scooter and a hockey stick that said FUCK JJ (jimmyjohn) and a man much older than Pop asking Is this your kid? And then pointing his fingers down as his mustache pulled inwards to the eye-pop of an enraged Boomer, and Pop told him that he was just stretching and grabbing his cane which he had dropped.

“I know bullshitters,” the Man said, “because you are looking at one right now, and you can’t bullshit – a bullshitter.”

Pop started walking away as soon as he knew where the sentence was going as soon as he said bullshitter, and lit up a spliff while looking back and waving as if they had resolved all and that whatever he was so upset about had been ameliorated with the kind of neighborly expedience expected of a high-trust community such as the one they lived in, Fort Mennsionne and their particular swath of large and often famous neighborhoods called Greengrass Pointe – a relic of the French and New France and all that convoluted history which Pop still to this day vows to conquer, just as Frances Parkman had (and in under forty years). Pop was now almost a block away from the gentleman with the Terrible Vibes he could not distinguish in any linguistic manner other than someone who regrets having children and believes everyone else cannot enforce a sense of discipline, as he, probably, secretly, thinks of his own performance a father.

Pop had just become a father, maybe three weeks ago. It was two weeks following his seventeenth birthday, and he was headed to the Bar, where the bartendress Jeeney had promised a five-beer maximum on such an otherwise dull occasion. Who enjoys turning 17? There is no sudden collective joy over my new ability to drive, nor am I just about to graduate from high school and become an adult. Turning 17 is a tease.

An hour later, he has spent $50 on the jukebox, which is still operated by 45” records – half of which are good, but way too old for such an old bar. They sounded crisp and brand new, and the bar smelled dank and was utterly decrepit. A couple, or perhaps just a duo or two friends of opposite genders, had somehow attained a cruel and distasteful monopoly over the pool table, and the bartender and owner JV – who had been hiring Pop for odd jobs since he was – none could say for sure what he’d done, but after a week of this pool-table business he supposedly tried kicking them out, a gun was pulled, a white girl who was secretly going behind his back had a second gun pointed at the bartendress, Pop had a gun and was pointing it at himself, there were so many shots and so much blood that the police and cleanup crews had to be paid off through a second mortgage… These were some of the tall tales told following the night the pool table became inoperable; the truth was, JV had just emptied the quarters and tossed a rubber cover over the table along with some plastic pieces meant to preserve the balance and structure he had gotten for a fine deal. As Pop was told the entire story, along with the myriad vestigial nonsense that had nonetheless shaped it into local urban myth even further than the “stink” the pool-hustle couple made when they realized their glory days had abruptly been brought to a totally futile end.

“In defiance, they tip one dollar on sixty dollar check. It is too bad they leave their credit card, inside the purse in the ladie’s room along with enough potent skiing 80s cocaine to make me call my doctor. We reached a stale mate, and I told them the pool tables were being taken out; I was just an investor. And on a practical note, I needed quarters at the time. I tell the two, the investor comes down my canal with my reputation and our rapport and is laughing with his friends as they enter the bar to see – a fucking drape hiding the pool table. Not a quarter in sight and all the sticks were stacked up in one of those yellow bins you use to mop. They start to get bored of my story, which is dubious – and they tell me they’ve won the lottery because they saved their quarters and bought scratch-offs instead. I tell them congratulations, truly. And she, the girl, rolls her eyes and they toddle off and I haven’t seen them in the bar. I did see them at the gas station, a sad situation. Him holding the red gallon-sized container, begging and making the prayer sign with his hands…”

Pop sighed and laughed, in a “still-taking-all-that-in” way he had gotten too good at; JV could tell, but guys like him were too humble to ever say anything about their most ubiquitous and troubling observations.

“So, when does the pool table open up again?”

“Oh, you mean all that? Didn’t you listen to the story – I had to return the pool table to the owner.”

“But kept the license.”

“Indeed. But there is nothing under that rubber… cloth… thing, – besides boxes and bar-stuff.”

“Bummer. How much do you expect to pay for a new one?”

“Two-five.”

Pop crossed his legs and shifted in his chair once before snapping his fingers:

“Two, and you give me one-fifty in my bar tab or two-fifty cash. And you’ll get to come on a nice yacht and smoke some ancient alien cigars and check out a Rutherford table he doesn’t want to deal with putting on that insane local auction thing they do now, the delusional-rich.”

Jameson woke up the next morning in the hotel, still feeling a residual euphoria from all the shots the night before. Where did they even get all of that junk? And where did they all go?

He scanned around the hotel room for a packet of cigarettes, and eventually found some in his back pocket, still in perfect condition but flat – like the flat cigars his Uncle used to smoke.

It was somewhere around noon, and after several cigarettes he finally looked out of the window to see what kind of deserted, military occupied ghetto he was dealing with this time. Each city they had played in seemed worse than the last, like the unnamed and opaque Civil War was following their tour bus. He had no clue which “military” occupied Gamewood; they are generally all the same. Jameson tried to ignore the conflict and what little news could get through to them; it all seemed predictable, and he had already seen it all depicted in much more vivid ways through cinema and literature. He knew that his tour bus wasn’t a threat, and that his band was a valuable asset for any of these makeshift armies.

Expecting yet another ghost town as he looked out the window, he dragged heavily as he took in the exact opposite image: it was a thriving, happy city, like just out of a postcard. The entire scene was perfect, and he drank instant coffee and wrote in his journal about the beautiful women and families and businesses.

Maybe I will walk out of here and this entire beauty just disappears. Maybe our band is the curse that created this war and I’m at the nucleus – so once I leave this hotel there will be no more Gamewood. Maybe I am the tornado of this entire thing, or the man that I am common to, or just men like me I guess. It isn’t the men with guns that are the problem, it is me who enables their financiers. Entire industries have been built based on contracts made for us. And now we are traveling through war zones. But Gamewood looks promising, and I see no clouds in sight today. I will leave the room after this cigarette. A woman just looked up at me, and maybe she blushed because I am only on the second floor. Did she see me? I am going to just go find her.

And he left the hotel room, suddenly feeling a round cylindrical object in his pocket – and then several more. They were shots. He ducked into the bathroom in the lobby and did one as quickly as he could, lighting up a cigarette and wiping the blood off his arm as he read the military-grade labeling on the shot. ONLY ADMINISTER QUARTER SHOT ONCE DAILY. IMMEDIATELY DESPOSE OF APPARATUS ONCE ALL FOUR (4) SHOTS HAVE BEEN ADMINISTERED.

And he left the hotel, immediately taking in the splendor of both the shot and the town. The entire street was bustling and peaceful, and it seemed like every shop was open for business. Beautiful women were everywhere, and all the men seemed respectful and rational. There were no traces of the civil war, no evidence of conflict or terror.

He was about to walk back to the hotel to get breakfast when he heard the laughter of his bandmates in the distance. Excitedly looking around, he barked out a “Hey! Boys” and found them nearby, all huddled up and cracking up at something, and as he walked up he saw something that immediately filled him with terror as the sunlight poured through and smoke like ribbons danced around it he saw little men very little men and they were laughing and smiling and floating and seemed to be… projected or on a loop.

chowder skies and polarize
the world is not a clown’s eyes
but a hurling bag of coal
a chawing bag of Hell
left out to curl and write the Law
to ring that sudden bell
and to ride that random bull

Ronald “Yellow” Horffstein was given a cigarette by the warden, and after two hours of wild, spirited debate and discussion about all kinds of topics, he was also given a small window of time to actually observe this man, this so called tyrant and the Final Word on so many important details and outcomes in the lives of the prisoners. Warden Cansulle looked more like a movie director or a painter than a Prison Warden; he fidgeted with great intensity and was highly particular about minute details, or even just details that were huge and expected, he brought this sense of process although it was fleeting for just about every poor soul in that place. 

“It is cold. By nature, I can’t ever fix it – and I’ve tried things that are bulletproof, I’ve made an Eskimo sweat, I’ve gotten a woman’s prison warden friend who says she seen a burka woman – a Muslim, one of the few – she fell down a flight of hard cold prison stairs and my Female Warden Friend, who is similar to me, she will tell you that that poor woman did not break but a nail in her thumb in that fall. Doctor says she was 120° and with a blood pressure of almost five-hundred.”

I inhaled deeply as he placed the pack onto the middle of the table, which in smoker’s body-parlance means take as much as you want. The smoker should be mindful to not smoke all of his friend’s cigarettes, and then laughs as he realizes he can’t just go to the gas station and pick some up for the next pack. Warden Cansulle devoted the entire day for him and I to talk, at great lengths or small paths, to do what ‘real’ intellectuals do, and that I was the only man in his life he could talk to. He said with a deeply suspicious look of himself that I was perhaps the only friend he has ever had in his life.

I thought about the immediate, pragmatic implication: this guy is mindfucking me and will never let me out of his prison because he is in love with me. Does he have a wife?!

“Do you have a wife? Children?”

He laughs and even slaps his knee while doing it. The laugh is so false and mechanical that it could be a life sized action figure, with only the most basic means of articulation… A demented life sized simple action figure, who can only move his mouth and arms.

“I have three children and my wife is… Oh, fuck it. I have three children and two wives, and my second wife seems to be flirting with divorce. And I do have a… concubine… heh-heh-hmm… And her becoming my third wife… Hmmmmmm.”

I lit up another cigarette as he paddled around a puddly mask of rueful and forgotten facial expressions and body articulations. No longer the cheap action figure, he was full-blown lurching and retching and being attacked by some kind of terrorist in his mind and body alike; in an oscillation, pinging back and forth between the two. He tries to say sorry, and his mouth can not make the “why” sound of Y at the end of Sorry and I pat his arm across the table and sshhh shh shh it’s okay Warden Cansulle. His keys are on the floor, along with a picture of him as a very young man seemingly in a place like Thailand, holding and almost cradling a quite old Asian woman with gigantic breasts that she would otherwise use many layers of clothing to obscure or hide in public. But – not in a photograph, with her, lover? 

“Do you want to talk about that picture, Warden? That woman is so beautiful. Who is she?”

“I met her when I was 22. Bartender. Thailand, but in a district known for less… constant everything, pounding music, the stench of sex reeling about like a fucked melange ranging from butterscotch to the smell that a dying human body makes once their kidney shuts down. It is an uncanny smell that doesn’t even smell like death – it just is death, coming from every pore, like a fishy sweet rot that I find now hard to explain or poetically describe. I have smelled that once again another time, when a friend of mine was dying from drugs. It pushes a chemical kind of like urine smell out of every pore as your kidneys fail to properly get your piss ready and white and proper. I’m sorry.”

“For talking about piss?” I light another cigarette, and he yells a beckon to his big-butt secretary to fetch him and I a carton of Lucky Strikes on DeliverDaddy. 

“You should ask her on a date, you know.”

I was nodding immediately, but not because I agreed in a particularly effusive or impatient way, but I was rather beginning to mimick him and his general tempo. 

“She’s a bit old, yeah?” I whispered as I lurched against his ear and across the desk in a very un-prisonerly fashion.

“You are 48. She is 29!”

My heart stopped a beat when he said that. It isn’t like we have fucking birthdays in here. And I don’t mean birthday parties, either. You are just left to your own devices just as the same day after the other… besides the lucky ones, those with cavalcade’s of visitors and special little fuck-rooms that end up resembling a pig stye, with Chinese gifts that will fall apart at the exact moment you actually want to use it, all pyramidical next to the ziggurat piles of garbage and boxes and warranties. The Birthday Boy himself is almost always agitated, because he had done so much for Warden Cansulle and that he just wants five minutes alone in a dark room with his wife and she crosses her arms -  obviously horny as he is – and says some blah-blah-blah about getting caught, and he looks her in the eye and says:

“You better go find us a closet right now or I’mma just rape you right here.”

Cansulle is laughing as I tell him this story, he is really laughing hard. He lights up a cigarette, still laughing, and pours us each a shot of, I don’t know. Scotch. 

“Do you know what they do with like, pregnant lady prisoners? Is there a separate ward? Is there a woman’s prison abortion clinic?”

He looks flushed and flustered but finds his laugh again and just says with another eruption of happy-noises that he has no clue, and that those are excellent questions. His secretary walks in, holding up two cartons of Luckies and seemingly displaying her round shelfy butt to me as she whispers a secret in the Warden’s ear, which also coincides with an eruption of thunder outside. The Warden tells her to turn off the main fan light as he switches on his desk-lamp and pours another shot.

“You know… There is a door in this place that no one knows about who is still alive. You can just leave whenever you want if you have this door, but it would only be the idiot who doesn’t return to the prison and uses the door on special occasions. One time a man brought in a fucking gun because he knew about the door. Fucking retard. I shot his big toe off, and I created a mock-lock so that he would assume the door is no longer the special door it once was. He told everyone how complex this lock was, too. It didn’t even have half the numbers on it… All he had to do was, well, just dial it to 32. Nobody ever figured it out. 32. 32. Fucking retarded imbeciles.”

I couldn’t tell if the door was real, or if the story was real, or if the story was faked at a certain point, and as I thought more in our ridiculous smoke-chamber I came to the logical conclusion that the door is real, and that the rest doesn’t really matter. 

I told him I had to piss, but I was actually going to ask out his secretary, and as I did it I realized I was a prisoner – I couldn’t leave. The money here was pitiful, as if all scales of purchase and labor had been sliced to a tenth. I had a patchy, unappealing beard.

“—-You know what, fuck all that. I’m just thinking I’m hot shit. I’m the Warden’s Best Friend. You know?”

She smiled and licked her teeth in an extremely subtle way and said without missing a beat that she was his best friend. 

“Are you gonna let me finish, or are you like every other broad? Just talk talk talk, yap yap yap…” I pretended to smack her face with one hand while actually smacking her butt with the other. We embraced, kissed and smoked and after ten minutes I told her I will probably propose to her if I get out of here soon enough. We will have eight children. You’ll never work again. 

“But what if I like to work for the Warden?”

“Yo, fuck that guy. He just like – he comes around to skateparks and events and just like, tries to start fights with kids, like, – what are you even doing? He calls himself a professional skater but I never seen him skate once, just basically fighting kids and bein’ a dick.”

“That dude sucks. You’re asking if I’m a fan? Fuck no, that dude ain’t got a single fan on this earth unless they like getting harassed and beat up by some 40 year old guy.”

“I heard that Travis Yellen likes to go to punk shows and he’ll just start punching the wall. Like, – what?! He’s just like… this ogre that everyone wants to avoid because he can’t chill or just like, he’s obsessed with punching and kicking stuff all the time and beating up on people. Why hasn’t that dude been arrested yet?”

Travis Yellen stood there with his arms crossed, staring at the video editor as his manager glared at him.

“Are you gonna beat me up now, Travis? We’re making skate tapes and stunt tapes and stuff. Is this what it has come to? I give you thousands of dollars and you go around the country beating up teenagers and tossing your reputation down the toilet?”

Travis looked back at him and shook his head.

“You wanna know who those guys are? Jocks and assholes. They come up go the park trying to hate on skaters. That’s what the videos aren’t showing – these guys are just haters too. They hate skaters- so I do what I gotta do and enforce and somehow I’m the villain?”

“Jocks and such. Huh. Do you have the video of the actual fights?”

“No shit I do.”

“OK, so we frame it as skaters vs. jocks and jerks. That should work. What we’ll do is a perfectly symmetrical scene for the cover of Shred magazine, one side it’ll be astroturf and a bunch of football players huddled up in formation and then on the other side it’ll be skaters on a big half-pipe or something ready to smash their heads in with some boards. Then we’ll do an interview with you, and we can film some actual skateboarding footage, and -”

“I don’t give a shit. I MEAN I don’t give a care. I’m trying not to curse anymore. You want me to skate? I’ll just fall over like a crooked old scarecrow, dude. I’m pretty sure my knee caps are falling off.”

“I see.”

“Just, like – how about this, find a guy that looks like me. Use him and some crappy camera. Let him get 50% off my name and I get the other half so I can go home to my wife and kids and be a father.”

“You have a wife? And kids? Since when?”

“Are you kidding me, dude? Children are the future.”

“Haha – what?”

And Travis lit up a cigarette and walked out of his boss’s garage, and went home to his family. Later that night, he got an email from his boss with a video attached.

“People talk mad shit on Travis but that dude is my hero. I didn’t even know how to skate and I was like 12 and my board fell apart right in front of everyone and I swear the entire skate park was laughing at me and I was about to cry but then Travis Yellen comes in just like the Hulk and starts kicking into the wood, he’s not even walking just sort of kick-walking and is telling everyone to shut up, and that everyone fucks up and it’s like, totally silent. And he walked over and helped me up and I swear to God I was about to cry and Travis spent like $50 buying me a board and something to eat and showed me a bunch of techniques and even gave me his number and told me to call if I ever needed advice or wanted to talk to someone. He’s a really chill guy when he’s not pissed off. I still talk to him, we’re friends on Facebook and I stopped skating after an ACL tear from rugby like – five years after that – I wasn’t even that good a skater. But he told me to ignore all the skate culture and to just get good grades and start a family and go to church, which I thought was a joke but he showed me the ways and I have nothing but love for Travis Yellen. He’s a legend.”