Issue No. 3, Murder!

Issue No. 3, Murder! - Young Life: A Nathan McMurphy Mystery, Part I

I was reached for the morning I had spent all week dreaming of, the Saturday morning I was to float downstairs mid-afternoon and greet my parents’ cries of “This is how you take advantage of your youth? You’ve wasted the day! Your breakfast, lunch, and dinner’s cold! We were going to take you to the movies but you can sure as hell forget about that!” with a calm, face-to-the-fridge, “Sorry, I dreamt in.”

I was reached for and thrown into the shower before the migrant leaf blowers had even wiped the sleep from their eyes. I reminded myself whilst dressing in yesterday’s corduroys to bring my pillow along so I could continue in the car, but I was called for and forgot. I sat back--my head on the folded-down armrest--watched the dew fly off the window, and called to mind mass homicide(1) .

Weekends arrive and tireless parents are never content to stop moving--they daytrip. Every state park, historical mansion, colonial village, art museum and arts and crafts museum has been trod upon by my parents and me on at least one Saturday afternoon. They were on a college campus kick, visiting every one, doing the same things at each: the library, the galleries, the dorms, the quads, the disparaging comparisons to their own alma maters. The went to remind themselves of the youth they had lost, not my awkward, lumpy, sixth-grade youth, but university youth--lithe, pale, and in all senses upwards.

The general feeling walking amongst such budding gods and goddesses was of overwhelming self-disgust. I, a pustule of a boy, trailed my parents under the age-old oaks and stone halls with all the anger and hatred that seethes from ugliness like the acne from my sweating, rubbing inner thighs. The feeling was not foreign, but was inflamed amidst people on their sexual peak. Had my parents brought me just to inflame me? Had my parents had me just to inflame me? I had to pee.

“Guys! Mom! Can we stop?” I made the plaintive plea trying to catch up through miles of topless volleyball and mud wrestling, careful my volume did not attract attention. Eventually, I did catch up enough to accidentally step on my mother’s bare heel. She turned back fast, her eyes tearing from the pain. She pointed to a three-story Georgian home across the street.

“Piss in there!” she said.

“I think I can hold it.”

“Piss in there!”

I kept the imposing edifice in view as I walked under a banner with strange letters, Greek to me. At the stoop I turned back and saw my parents continuing down the sidewalk. I thought, rather than run after them, I had better pee first.

The door was open. I saw no one in the foyer. I walked down the hall and peered into the keyholes of all the shut doors. Whatever the rooms were--I saw only crushed papers and soiled undershirts-- they were not restrooms. The hall took me to a staircase and, it being my only choice, I took it. I peered my way down another row of closed doors until I finally came upon a toilet. I shut the door behind me, tried to lock it, failed, and went.

It was an old toilet, involving an arcane system of pulleys and chains. I must have pulled the wrong pulley, or perhaps I wasn’t supposed to pull anything, but the box on the ceiling came crashing to my feet, cracking to pieces and soaking my Airwalks. I did my best to collect the porcelain into a neat pile. I turned on the fan to dry the floor and left the bathroom redder than I arrived.

An older boy passed as I stepped into the hall. He was like the rest of them, an inspiration to mannequins everywhere, but he shot me a very worried look. He walked fast, was down the stairs by the time I noticed the toilet water seeping out from under the door.

I heard voices and sirens; they got louder as I got closer to the bottom of the stairs. I wasn’t sure the floor I walked down to was even the floor I first walked into, it held so many people. Most were university youth, others policemen. A band of caution tape blocked off the stairs from the crowd. They must not have figured someone as young as I would have been in the house since I was able to walk quite comfortably under the tape.



Slipping in eye level with the older groins around me, I noticed all were facing the same direction and--slipping in that direction--I found a small clearing in the center of the hall, in the center of which was the body of a young man, alike in all physical respects to the standing bodies around it, but dead. Two policemen stood closest to the body, one at each outstretched arm.

“Do you think it’s another one?” said one to the other.

“There’s one sure way to find out,” said the other to the one.

He knelt beside the body’s chest, to a tear in its sweater. He pulled the tear apart, revealing a wound, and pulled the wound apart. A translucent liquid, bubbled, poured out of the gash and onto the floor, pouring until all that was left of the chest was a standing ribcage. The policeman closed the wound, ordered a bandage, and the leak ceased. He looked up to his partner.

“Yup,” he said. “It’s Pellegrino.”

I remembered my parents. I slipped my way back to the front door, feeling like a snorkler caught in so many jelly fish he didn’t know which way was surface. I found, after finally making it to the front, my problems of navigation were caused by the sudden fact that no light was coming from the open doorway. The bright Saturday daytripping weather had turned. It wasn’t raining, but the sky was so overcast one couldn’t help but imagine it was.

Having set off in the direction my parents walked off in, I was admiring a marble globe outside the planetarium when a very fat woman intercepted my path and grabbed me by the neck. Her apparel was as one would expect from a fat woman: sweat, and too small. The only remarkable characteristic, aside from the violent greeting, was a silver, shoulder-length wig, too silver to pass for real and yet even too silver to make for a sensible costume. I paid enough mind to what she was saying--though the dried Chef Boyardee in the nooks of her lips was distracting--to at least hear, in a nasal British, “Very like a murderer to calmly leave the scene.”

Despite my loudly-stated intentions of finding my parents, the woman in the wig turned me around and carried me back to the old Georgian house.

to be continued…

Issue No. 3, Murder! - Footnote #1, Nathan's Fantasies

A child is asked, “Would you ever like to kill someone?” The child rolls his feet to their sides and pulls on his fingers. “Sure.”

The secretary’s long, auburn-dyed hair was pulled and taped to the front of her desk, the secretary lying face up on her blotter. A pair of scissors were taken out of her pencil jar, raised with both hands and driven into her forehead, then again between her eyes. Her cheeks, her nose, her mouth were stabbed. A family member later called to identify the body said the face was nothing more than “a bowl of marina sauce,” although her blouse and woolen skirt ended spotless.

I watched the tiny, white waves cover the toddler’s face. His mother punched me in the gut and dove into the hot tub after him. I was expelled from my hotel.

The living tend to blend in, except when they’re ripped open. Blood lets everyone know that living is something different.

Issue No. 3, Murder! - Rigor Mortis

Issue No. 3, Murder! - Young Life: A Nathan McMurphy Mystery, Part II

The crowd in the hallway was as I left it. Wig Woman pushed me through, carrying me right back to the policemen over the body.

“Here’s your suspect, boys,” she said. “Caught him fleeing the scene.”

“Mindy, why don’t you just go home?” said one of the policemen.

“Here, tell ‘em where you were five minutes ago.” She bumped her hips into my head.

“Well…”

“Come on! Speak up!”

“I was in the bathroom…upstairs. I had some trouble with the toilet.”

“With the toilet?” asked the policeman.

“It’s true, sir! Look at his shoes!” A lesser, younger officer piped up from the side. “There was water everywhere.”

“Hmmm.” The policemen started think. “Water, huh? Well, we’ll have to take you in.”

Mindy grinned at me.

“Can I go tell my parents?” I asked.

The policeman thought again. “Ok, but come back.”

I retrieved my arm from Mindy’s love handles and turned to leave--but stopped. “Couldn’t that be a calling card?”

I pointed to a corner of paper sticking out of the body’s pants. The policeman bent down and pulled from the victim’s key pocket a small black and white photo. He handed it to his partner.

“Look’s like that cat’s got homocidal tendencies.” He turned to me. “How did you know to look there?”

“No one puts anything in their key pocket. Any bulge is suspicious.”

He handed me the photo. It was a portrait of a young, Hispanic man, the victim’s age, a ripped, denim jacket over his bare chest, a knife in his hand, his mouth sneering at the camera.

“Good work,” said the policeman. “Good work, indeed. How would you like to help us out a little?”

Mindy protested. “Sarge! He’s no detective!”

“Mindy, go home!”

“He’s too attractive, Sarge!--”

“I’m too what?” I said.

“We could sure use another hand.”

“He’s bait at best!”

The detective ignored her. “Where would you like to start?”

I decided to tackle the victim’s classes first. It would take a week to visit all of them so the police gave me a room in the old Georgian house--which I later learned was a Christian fraternity--to sleep and work in, provided I help fix the toilet. The other residents were not very useful. They had spent so much time trying to look like one another and succeeded, that they were all too afraid they’d be next to even be seen with me. They never left the house, only left their rooms to silently pass into another, throwing me sly, knowing looks as they went.

I snuck into the back of a full lecture hall and heard, “Structural narratology(2) …” The professor meandered from there and dismissed his class, half of which immediately swarmed him with bodies and questions. I waited a half hour for my turn.

“Did you know--” I began to ask.

He gave me his office hours and showed a young woman his writer’s callous.

“It’s been like that all week,” I later reported to the policeman. “None of his teachers recognize the boy in the photo. I don’t think that last one ever looked at a male, much less a Hispanic.”

“We’re stuck,” the policeman said.

“We have to start back at the beginning,” I said. “What do we know? The victims are young men. Broad shouldered. Flawless complexion. Blood replaced with seltzer. All killed in the residential area of campus. Ok. What connections does the young man in the photo have to this area?”

I was given an interrogation room in the basement of police headquarters and a long list of possible connections, so long my stay at the fraternity was extended indefinitely. It seemed like everyone who had ever set foot on campus came into the dim, steel room and checked their hair in the two-way mirror--even my parents.

“First of all, I’d like to know why you left without me,” I said.

They gave an apathetic pause before my mother launched into something about my being too gloomy. I let them off the hook but called up to make sure they got a parking ticket on their way out.

I was running out of ideas. I didn’t feel fresh. I had a moment between interrogations to roll up my sleeves and wipe my cuffs across my forehead. Mindy came in and, though I didn’t think I had another one in me, I sighed.

“All right, boss,” she said. “How are we doing?”

“Mindy, you are not a detective. Why don’t you just waddle back outside and help yourself to some donuts.”

She inched her way up onto the doctor’s room white paper sheet that for some reason covered the table.

“I still think I was right. Your good looks could impede this investigation,” she said.

“Thanks, Mindy.” I picked up the interview list and turned to the mirror, thinking if I squinted I could see the policemen sleeping in the other room. I ran my thumb down the page and, to my surprise, printed below my parents’ names: “Mindy.”

“I think it’s in the way you hold yourself,” she said. “No, it’s your eyes. Something in your eyes is very handsome.”

“Mindy, I’m going to ask you a few questions.”

“Come here, I want to see what’s so doggone handsome in your eyes.”

I stepped closer to the table. “Where were you coming from when you met me outside the planetarium?”

“It’s the pupils. Isn’t it? They’re darker than most people’s, aren’t they?”

“Your wig--”

“You know, I don’t tell many people. I suffer from chemo. The hairs fall off with the cancer therapy. Or they will soon."

I had gone too far. My foot slipped into the straps of Mindy’s purse. I knocked it over. A bottle of club soda rolled across the floor and as I watched it roll I could see, in the corner of my eye, her watching me. She lunged off the table, arms stretched to my shoulders and pinned me to the mirror.

There not being much strength in fat, I was able to throw her down. She hit her head against the table, though not hard enough to shift a hair of her wig or deter her from pulling out a penknife. She crawled at me fast but I darted out and locked the door. I ran into the room behind the mirror ready to wail at whoever didn’t think I was worth saving but there was no one in there. I ran upstairs.

“The sergeants want you over on Lee Street,” said the receptionist.

Lee Street was no stranger to police presence, it running through the shady neighborhoods behind campus.

“Keep the interrogation room locked,” I said on my way out.

A crowd like the crowd I first saw in the fraternity stood outside a convenience store. Showing my sheriff’s badge, I slipped my way to the front.

“This was dragged up from the sewer this morning, sir.”

I saw the body of a young Hispanic man, a ripped, denim jacket over his bare, ripped chest. Rats crawled over his legs, but his face--lips still sweetly sneering, eyes open to our faces--seemed somewhat serene, as if he had just been complemented.

“Nothing in the key pocket, sir.”

A rat wiped its mouth and belched.

Issue No. 3, Murder! - Footnote #2, The Professor's Lecture

[Structural narratology], contrary to popular opinion, can in fact have a direct link to the fabula. The reader of mystery fiction can actually solve the case before the detective by critical application of the theory. Intuitive following of shape and pattern, keen observation of the universal laws of beauty, will reveal the murderer. Never deductive logic. Do not spend your precious literary time sniffing around for motivation. It does not exist. Not on the page. Not off the page. Solve the chalked-out shape committed by the writer. Return to your great-grandfather Poe and his friend Dupin: think like a murderer; that is, think like a writer. Auden tells us: “Murder is negative creation, and every murderer is therefore the rebel who claims the right to be omnipotent. His pathos is his refusal to suffer.” Please finish the Levi-Strauss for next week. I hate to, but I will quiz you.

Issue No. 3, Murder! - Lights Out

Issue No. 2, Words

Issue No. 2, Words - The Concert Mistress

The concert mistress followed me, I assume, out into the lobby during intermission. I was standing in line for a Pepsi and Reese’s when I could feel someone, her, tapping my shoulder. A great deal smaller than myself, she still had to wave for my attention after I turned around. She looked adorable, smiling up at me in her long, black dress covered with—invisible from the stage—tiny, diamond sparkles. “I like you,” she said in a Chinese-accented staccato.

It was the dress and the posture that filled it which made me realize the personage before me. Due to the position of my seat, I could never have recognized the face; all of the violinists looked the same to me, for that matter. But set off against the herded, hunch-backed furs, it was obvious who she was. I managed to mutter a polite, “Hmm?” to which she said again, “I like you.”

The patrons in line behind us began to clear their throats as the gap between me and the person in front of me grew unacceptably large. I apologized and turned back to the concession stand but I felt again the same, small fingers. The concert mistress swung me around by the arm, stood up on her tip-toes and said, loudly this time, “I like you.” Before I could say, “Excuse me?” the clear-throated patrons behind me walked up and filled the gap themselves.

I was not, however, without a place to stand. The mistress pulled me across the lobby and stood me at the water fountain. She held each of my shoulders firmly in front of hers, squeezing them as if she were planting me into the carpet, and said again, this time slowly, mouthing the words grotesquely in case I were deaf, “I…LIKE…YOU.” I shook my head, honestly bewildered. I attempted to complement her performance but she interrupted by saying, tapping her sternum on each word, “I…LIKE.” She then poked my chest, hard, and said, “YOU.”

“Well, thank you,” I said. “You’re very kind.” She squinted and frowned and I could see her in her eyes wondering, perhaps, if that were defeat. She must have decided it was for two seconds later she let go of me and walked off, shoulders slumped and her head down, into the crowd. I do not know why, but it made me very sad to watch her walk away. I no longer had any appetite for a Pepsi, not to mention a Reese’s.

I excused myself through the line leading to the women’s restroom and walked to the men’s. While washing my hands, I glanced up to the mirror and recognized something new in my reflection. Certainly the lank of my torso and the droop of my spine were as I last saw them, and the feathery, red hair and the crisp, smart bow-tie de rigueur, but there was a look behind my eyes and mouth that looked back at me anew. The idea struck me: It’s only her poor English preventing her from expressing something quite true!

The lobby lights were off when I came out of the restroom, allowing me to see perfectly across the lobby and through its crowds the diamond sparkled dress of the concert mistress, just then sliding behind a curtain. When the lights came on again and the ushers rang their bells, I called out to the dress. “No, no!” I said. “I understand! You’re contracting the ‘AM’!”
Immediately, she turned around, that smile I saw when she first tapped my shoulder fully returned to her face. I sprinted across the lobby floor to her, never minding how many mingling enthusiasts I pushed from my path. I grabbed her squarely by the shoulders and said, “I AM like you!” She nodded giddily and repeated, “I am like you! I see you from stage! I am like you!”

The house lights came down on the settling crowd, stealthily unwrapping their contraband Reese’s. The orchestra, too, were making themselves comfortable, ending their final private rehearsals and self-tunings. Eager to move things along, the audience applauded right upon seeing the door in the back flat open. I stepped out and the applause weakened considerably. Giving a good pat on the back to the principal percussionist—the one with the largest mallet—I wound my around the violinists and took my place at the center-front of the stage. I looked out to my old seat in the second mezzanine, at my friend the concert mistress, her smile covered in melted chocolate. I blew big kisses with both hands to her. I announced to her for all to hear, “Let ‘like’ be assumed, I AM YOU.”

My imaginary coat tails swung behind me as I turned to tune my peers. The principal wind held out in silence. The winds did not match pitch, neither did the strings. The second tubaist yelled out, “Who the hell are you?” I think it was the second tubaist. My stand partner was not overjoyed to see me, either. After I knocked our music to the ground with my unwieldy bow, she refused to accept my apology.

I heard the back flat open again behind me. I had attended enough concerts to know that when the back flat opens for the head honcho everyone pats their thighs and bangs the stage with a foot, so I banged away. But I soon found, still in silence, that the flat had opened not for the maestro but for two security guards, each eventually with one of my arms in their hands. They dragged me across the stage, my feet limp and lagging behind, as I tried to explain to the best of my ability the events of that night’s intermission.

A true friend, the concert mistress left the concert hall with me, although a bit more gracefully, unaided by large men with guns. In the parking lot, she told me to ditch her violin. We took my car and without even discussing it drove straight to the mall. We skipped hands-held to the photo booth, pulled the curtain, and exchanged each other’s clothes. There is a loving strip of us, my orange chest hair spilling out of her low-necked blouse, her hands lost in the elbows of my jacket. We are smiling and making faces.

Issue No. 2, Words - Paper Words

Issue No. 2, Words - There Are Poems Beyond Reproach

there are some poems beyond reproach
whose time-sick authors often gutter
and then blacken with ill-timed flame!

there are some moments pass us blind
that only in brightest afterthought
we are shown exactly how re-frame!

there are deadly nightmares we approach
whose roaring monsters often mutter
some once distinct and much-loved name!

there are wakeful instants we are kind,
whose twisted aftertastes have brought
us wonder the sour nature of this game!

there are small candles we light and coach
in arts of fire---through cupped hands we utter
curses at fistful winds we cannot tame!

there are small prayers sent out, aligned
to the spectra of starlight, with nought
to guarantee any answer to our aim!

Issue No. 2, Words - Fragments

A kid on the bus told me I can’t trust everything I read or see on TV. I imagined a page in a library book: a paragraph, a photograph, and a caption – a phib! I was repulsed. “A whole library filled with lies!” I imagined a news anchor with her fingers crossed behind her back. “Now what I am I supposed to do?” I decided the kid was full of it. I’d trust everything I read or saw on TV. But I wouldn’t trust him. I wouldn’t trust what people said about books and TV.

-Everything’s a mess, the kids were up in arms, running around like Banshees-
-What’s a Banshee?
-It’s an expression.
-A Banshee is an expression?
-Like a Banshee. Crazy.
-I see.

“Do you like balloons?” the doctor asked the little girl. “Yes.” “Good, because right now your lymph nodes are like balloons.”

David slew Goliath with a psalm.

I was on the elevator with a stranger. The stranger tapped the elevator floor with his foot and said to me mischievously, “The ground.”

A girl passes time in a Barnes and Noble reading about her astrological sign. “Leo—You are ugly.” “Well,” she said, “that read me like a book.”

There is a dearth of words spoken directly to you and many, many words spoken just past you. You gradually learn how to listen to the words spoken past you and you correctly mistake the words spoken to you as your own.

Issue No. 2, Words - A Defense of Reading

In the age of Poetry Defended, narrative dominates the public sphere. Anyone with a computer can be an internationally acclaimed poet, millions of escapists worldwide stop their days for televised fiction, books take nations by storm, and artists are pop icons. Society has come full circle since the Philosopher banished the Poets from his Republic. The Poet has now become the Philosopher King, leading the world towards the blinding light of ideal forms as distributed by cable networks across the universe, while the position of the Reader, our hero, Philosopher-like in her questioning of forms, is degraded to the former inferiority of the Poet. Because the Reader does more than just watch and because she directs her critical activity at something other than the physical forms of this world, she is taken for a threat to artistic pleasure, by the Poet, and to social productivity, by the Political Activist.

To the Poet, the Reader’s extension of the Poet’s creative world is a rebellious and presumptuous deconstruction, an appropriation of meaning as dangerous to his world as nuclear testing is to ours. The Reader disrupts the peace of simple viewing by insisting on a mistrust of forms. She extends the chain of signifiers beyond the literal reading of text as reality role-playing.

To the Activist, the Reader’s sincere concerns for fiction are trivial as compared to “real life” problems (like nuclear testing), and he hopes any critical discussion will further his causes. While political and social dissent is very real and sometimes fruitful, the interpretive dissent of the Reader is regarded as fruitless by the Activist.

Reading does not engage a representation of reality – neither the Poet’s fictional reality nor the Activist’s global reality – but rather culminates in the presentation of an experience, in which an equal exchange takes place between the Reader and another element, whether it be Text, Author, or community of Readers.

Intentional concerns (’what does the author mean?’) and confusion of text with reality (over-identification with a character, for instance) inhibits a Reader from being critical, from exercising a careful evaluation, a comprehensive understanding of a text that can be made available to her in the experience of reading. Reading is a personal relation with and a reinterpretation of a text and deserves to be practiced by everyone, not solely a limited number of published Literary Critics.

Reading, like Poetry, is a creative art. Just as the artist perceives and reinterprets the world around him, to the delight of others, the Reader perceives and reinterprets a textual world. So why is the Reader necessarily a failed poet, as the Poet was a failed philosopher, conjuring forms twice removed? The Reader is rather a creator in her own right, the missing link between Poet and Philosopher, experiencing and reinterpreting objects in reality, words themselves.

Issue No. 2, Words - From Monster To Word

Issue No. 1, Travel

Issue No. 1, Travel - The Dole by Jonathan Tuttle

The heroes of boy Bevy were the kings of late night comedy. Surely it is they, thought Bevy in Civics, and not the political leaders they ridicule, who do in fact run this country. It is gracious statesman David Letterman who, unlike the object of his wit, at least speaks to us regularly, who lends to his subjects his stentorian voice at the crown of every day. Indeed, of more import to Bevy was not the man who was to fill the next empty White House, but rather the man who was to fill the next empty desk on the next empty oval platform. Bevy drew a line connecting his immediate goal, that of attaining summer employment, with his grander goal and wrote to Mr. Letterman directly. “Dear Mr. Letterman,” he began, “You are a gracious statesman and your stentorian voice crowns my doldrum days. I need a summer job. You need the summer off. I was wondering if you were hiring for the position of host? I can fly up at your earliest convenience. Thank you for considering,” signed, “Bevy.”

A reply was not forthcoming and Bevy fell on a back up plan. He was to produce a daily pamphlet, distributed among the discerning crowds about town, wherein would be typed a list of highlights from the previous night’s shows. Bevy took notes while watching his heroes, jotting down in his reporter’s notebook every set up and punch line he found worthy of print. He typed the jokes first thing in the morning, printed fifty copies, and folded them up. Typed along the top of his pamphlet was a large banner that read, “Funnier Than The Dreams You Were Having – 25 Cents.” He threw the stack into his messenger bag and biked to every social establishment open. Reaching up, Bevy would drop a pile at the end of a bar and tip his hat to the oblivious barman. Bevy did notice the pamphlets were read, or at the very least moved, for he saw them lining the make shift mattress of a panhandler. But the quarters, like Mr. Letterman’s RE, were never received.

Bevy was broke and if he was so much longer he was sure his parents would kick him out; first from the house and then from the tent he would pitch on the front yard. They didn’t want him to turn into his readers, asleep on his papers. Bevy was greatly upset at the prospect as well and looking through newspaper one morning for the classifieds his dread was pushed head long into spleen. A front-page article announced that the city council spent last evening debating the necessity of half the public library research staff. Bevy was good friends with a member of that staff, though the two had never met. He admired from across non-fiction the poise and serenity of the humble sub-sub-librarian, dressed with the aesthetics of a devout ascetic, going about his monastic routine with a perpetual dolphin’s smile. Bevy adored this sub-sub to such an extent he found himself unable to enquire of the librarian a job. And look at him now, the poor librarian, being put to sleep the night prior unawares of which time he should set his alarm clock to: the usual working seven or the now jobless never. The image deeply saddened Bevy.

“Think of it!” he thought to himself, “what it means to be unemployed in this salesmen-sucker society, the brunt of each day spent being sold to by the barrage of surrounding images – the TV commercials and the billboards and these here lingerie photographs in the paper – and what’s left of the day spent spending. It is our ability to spend, that is, the money we have most likely made selling something to someone, that lets us forget, nay, enjoy the pictorial banter of salesmen. Unless, that ability is lacking. Unless, you have no money. Then you are outcast by your own vision, seeing in the iris of every billboard model the imposing reflection of the corporate photographer. Every grinning clerk and rep grins to clench their position between their teeth, knowing full well that if they let slip their piece of American pie they’ll be swept up into that outcast vision with you and me, sub-sub and Bevy in miserable company. Where in this lame brained country is the romance of the unemployed, the romance so espoused by the English working class, as in those black and white movies my mom shows me? Where are those pubs whose business hours are filled with the cheery, ruddy-cheeked likes of those avoiding business? Where are those towns whose factory noon-whistle serves not as a dinner bell but as an industrialized cock-a-doodle-do? Oh, if we but had that drop of vanilla socialism, not large enough to curb our humour but large enough to calm our Coked-up, sales-addled brains into a lush melancholy. Find me a dole line and I’ll extend it by one! Find me a country, though I have one in mind, who appreciates my citizenship enough to see to it I continue to citizen! I’m not asking for a lavish lifestyle. I’m asking for a check. Now! Send me a check!”

The heated passion of these thoughts did not cool in Bevy until eleven thirty postmeridian, when the foreshipmen of late night comedy took the helm. Joke by joke a smile widened across Bevy’s cheeks. He even wrote a few of the jokes down, in spite of the homeless. And then, a joke came along that widened Bevy’s smile to the cracking point. Mr. Letterman was discussing the recent tour the Prince of Wales and his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, were making across the country. Apparently, the couple had been drawing exceptionally meager crowds, and apathetic ones at that. Mr. Letterman fancied, “In fact, this very night, the two were forced to cocktail alone, playing cribbage at a Best Western in” – crack – Bevy’s hometown.

The laughter after that punch line was great and the applause greater as Bevy was on his bicycle hightailing it to the Best Western. “Typically disrespectful Americans!” Bevy continued as he rode the international thoughts of the afternoon. “To disregard two well-speaking demigods, why it’s abominable! If there’s no one else they’ll at least be me to welcome them to our community, and with fireside chat instead of musket shells!”

Bevy didn’t bother with the bike rack. He crashed into the revolving doors and followed them in. He ran to the lobby. Jumped his eyes from loveseat to settee. No sign of them. He ran to the pool. There was no one in the pool or the hot tub. He ran to the front desk and wailed on that waiting bell like thunder’s crashing cymbals. Out from the office in the back stumbled the bellboy rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. He was Bevy’s age, had Bevy’s sconeish build, even bore Bevy’s near terminal acne. The only real difference between the two was a pair of pressed slacks on one and some cut off cargos on the other.

“The Prince of Wales! The Duchess of Cornwall!” Bevy stopped to catch his breath. “Where are they?”

“They’re still in the restaurant,” said the bellboy. “They were just about to go up.”

Bevy took off in the direction of the bellboy’s pointed finger but stopped short and turned back.

“Could I ask you another question?” he said. “How did you get this job?”

“My dad owns the place,” the bellboy responded.

Bevy said, “Oh,” and he took off running again. But he stopped and turned again to the bellboy.

“You wouldn’t by any chance be hiring would – “

“No.”

Now Bevy was really sprinting, to the restaurant, through the restaurant, kicking every empty chair and table out of his way until he came to the one inhabited corner of the room. Sitting across from one another, each hanging faces long enough to stir their hot toddies with, the Prince and his beloved Duchess looked deeply and silently into the cribbage board between them. Royalty as real as his television heroes, reality as royal as his dreams, they sat finally before him. To speak or to collapse.

“Welcome to America,” he spoke.

After a silence deemed awkward only by Bevy, the Prince eventually turned, mumbled a delicate “Thank you”, and returned to the chewing of his tongue. They were obviously quite depressed.

Bevy spoke again. “Are you enjoying your stay in the States?”

This time it was the Duchess who tilted her head towards Bevy after a semi-awkward silence. “Yes, dear,” she said.

Bevy stepped closer to their table. “Are you two down in the dumps?” he whispered.

“Yes, dear,” repeated the Duchess.

“No one wants to play with us,” mumbled the Prince again, signaling that everything he and his wife would say was to be dipped in a rancid irony.

“Oh come on,” said Bevy. “You know what you two need?”

The Prince made a move on the cribbage board and the Duchess wiped the toddy off her nascent mustache.

“I’ll tell you what you two need,” said Bevy, stepping again closer to the royal table. “You two need a court jester.”

“Charlie had the last one hung,” said the Duchess.

“One Viagra joke is one too many,” said the Prince.

“He was indeed well hung,” said the Duchess.

Bevy tried to laugh. “Dry as their streets are wet, that’s the British wit, or so my mom tells me.”

“Yes, dear.”

Bevy, remembering that employers only respect the bold, took three cribbage pieces off the board and began to juggle. The Prince and Duchess continued playing without notice. Bevy got nervous and dropped a piece in the Prince’s toddy. He took a sip.

“Aw come on guys,” said frustrated Bevy. “You could use the Viagra for your upper lip.”

The Duchess giggled. Bevy pointed to her waning smile and said, “Look! Look! There it is!” The Prince raised an eyebrow. “Sorry your highness,” said Bevy, “but I just can’t stand to see the two of you moping around like this. I have an idea!”

Bevy went to the table beside the royal couple. He removed all of its chairs but one and pushed the table close to the Duchess. He sat at the table, alongside the couple but facing out towards the barren restaurant.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the empty table and chairs spread out before him, “we have an amazing show here for you tonight. On tonight’s big show, fresh from their tour of our once betrothed nation – the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall!” Bevy stood up clapping. “Welcome to the show lovebirds, it’s great to have you here. The both of you look amazing, just amazing. What do you think of America?”

“Daft,” said the Prince.

“Hmm?”

“I’m daft about it.”

Bevy laughed out loud and clapped. “Now, tell us who you’re wearing Mrs. Cornwall.”

“A fox I met in Highgrove gave me this hair shirt. The scarf’s Burberry’s.”

Bevy laughed and clapped. “We have to go to commercial here so sit tight and we’ll be back in a moment with this merry young couple from merry old.” Bevy looked out in front of him. “Are we out? Yes? Ok.” He turned to the Prince and Duchess. “Wonderful job, guys. I think they’re really loving you.”

“Smashing,” the couple said together.

“So what do you think? Are you feeling better? Do I get the job? Can I be your court jester?”

The Prince and Duchess sipped the last of their hot toddies, quietly rose from their seats, and turned from Bevy to walk away.

“Hey! Hey!” said Bevy at his host’s desk. “Where are you going? Don’t you need me? Can’t I come with you?”

Still, the royals walked to the elevator.

Bevy shouted after them, “Now what am I supposed to do?”

The Duchess paused and looked to Bevy as her husband held the elevator door. “Thank you for your hospitality,” she said. “We know our two great nations can sustain each other well into the future with the knowledge of our long lasting friendship.”

And the elevator doors closed on the image of a curt, cupped Princess hand waving.

“Ah hell no,” said Bevy and he ran to the front desk. He swung round the counter and into the office where the bellboy was snoring face down on the desk, Mr. Letterman’s musical guest finishing up on a telly beside the bellboy’s head. One hesitant second passed before Bevy undressed himself, undressed the bellboy, and redressed himself in the bellboys pressed slacks. Bevy flipped through the registry and found the room number of the hotel’s special guests – 401, Economy Suite. On his way to the elevator Bevy poured a drink at the bar and placed it on a tray.

“Room service!” he called after knocking on 401.

The Duchess called back, “It’s unlocked!”

Bevy entered the suite. The bathroom door was closed but he could see the light was on inside. He heard water patting against the tub.

“Did my husband order something?” the duchess shouted from behind the bathroom door. “Just leave it on the nightstand! That’ll do!”

Bevy could see the heaving outline of the aging prince in bed and heard the chatter of the Prince’s grinding teeth. Putting the drink down on the nightstand, Bevy looked over the room and found in the corner, next to the air conditioner, exactly what he had expected to find. He opened the lid of an enormous white trunk, bearing the characters C&C on its sides, and got in it.

As Bevy was slowly lowering the lid, the Duchess shouted again from the tub, “Thank you for your hospitality. We know our two great nations can sus – “

The lid shut. The lock fell.

Bevy’s hometown was not the final stop of the royal tour. From inside the white trunk Bevy had the opportunity to not see a dozen or so other American towns and landscapes before being slid into the cargo hold of the newlywed’s private jet and flown off for the home across the pond. It was hard for Bevy to hold his growing boy’s hunger and he considered escaping on more than one occasion. But holding his thirst made it easy for him to hold his bladder and somewhere over the Sargasso Sea Bevy fully realized the enormity of his journey and he floated into a novice traveler’s ecstasy. Curled fetal-wise over one of the Duchess's favorite ball gowns, Bevy mulled over the first win-win situation he had ever encountered, for life in London is either life as a jester or life on the dole.

Issue No. 1, Travel - Le Tiers-Monde by Andrew Ferris

We travel to India. On a patch of monsoon-cracked concrete along Napier Road, just off one of the major intersections of the old city of Pune, sits a small, grey-haired woman with a round face. She doesn’t have a stand or sign or even a lock-box for the money she collects; laying her goods out on the shady pavement, she tucks the coins she gets right into a fold in her sash. She sells assorted things: candy wrapped in shiny foil, baked snacks, rolls of tangled thread. Items go for 5 or 10 rupees, equivalent to 10 or 20 cents. Her location is hardly ideal: a thoroughfare mostly populated by children walking on their own to school, or rickshaws ferrying their passengers to other parts of town. On a good day, she’ll make 2 or 3 dollars. This woman produces little money and spends little money. Is this the Third World?

In retrospect, one of the blessings of the Cold War was that both of the major powers felt compelled to economically support lesser states in order to maintain power and influence. The American Marshall Plan and the Soviet Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) dolled out millions of dollars in aid and infrastructure support to poor and war ravaged countries. However, all this philanthrophy was politically motivated and therefore limited: nearly all the money ended up in the battlegrounds of the Cold War.

Walking a little further down Napier Road, we come to an intersection: telephone booths, internet cafes, and barber shops, line the sidewalks while cows, dogs, and the homeless lie on the sidewalk. Rickshaws and mopeds make way for Land Rovers and Rolls Royces. There is no doubt: money is abound.

Pune, an academic town called the “Oxford of the East,” once small is now burgeoning with a population of nearly 5 million. The growth is due to foreign investment: IT companies and Coca-cola plants employ the youth. But one shouldn’t confuse investment with aid, or cash with infrastructure. The “Developing World” is hard to find, because development takes generations and the pay off is never quick. It happens from the streets up. India, like many Third World localities, is splitting down the middle. Two parallel economies are being formed: one fed from the outside and one sucking on the bottom. The woman selling little for little will spend what little she has on food and shelter. She doesn’t starve, but nor does she save. She exists entirely in a local economy. However, floating inches from her is a global economy that she passes every day but can’t be a part of: an economy that sells cars manufactured in Germany and MP3 players designed in Silicon Valley, all at prices directly commensurate to West because, essentially, it’s the same market as 5th Ave.

There are fewer and fewer geographic places that conform to our vision of the Third World, and what few remain are slowly joining the global economy, but it would certainly be a fallacy to suggest that we are in one united world. The Third World exists in the eyes of the old woman, who can see, but not see into, the First World around her. It’s in the outlook of people who have limited means and limited room for growth.

The gaps growing in Third World countries between local and global economies are deeply problematic and have long term consequences. We should not forget that as the global economy unifies, and as the bottom rises to meet the top, the top must lower itself to the bottom. This will involve not just investment but traumatic sacrifice. Cheap labor may be the beginning of the opening of Third World economies, but competition will follow. Competition not only of individuals or ideas, but of entire systems of value.

Issue No. 1, Travel - Travelling Words by Alexa Garvoille

This issue of FOLIO made possible in part by LOUISE DOTTER.