Coda 1: the old ring ring routine

Clack clack. Clack clack. I never thought about how much clacking that goes on when you're a crab.

Everything inside my Bakelite crab armor was normal sized and everything outside of it was gigantic.

We were like horseshoe crabs but with tiny king crab legs, though from our perspective our legs were regular size.

All in a line we were walking across the carpet. Clack clack. Everyone was clacking.

I wasn't sure where we were all going to but the clacking gave us a tone of purpose.

Everything stopped and I looked down the line. My precious little vagrant army.

Something changed and we started going again. Clack clack. And then it was the old ring-ring routine:

Ring-Ring - is that you? No it's not me, is it you? Ring-Ring No it's not me, it must be you. Ring-Ring - is that you? No it's not me... This went on for about 20 minutes.

We thought it was funny because we were crabs.

 

 

 

Part 1a. Herman Has a Smelly Egg

 

"They wouldn't even let me buy a frosted Santa cookie." Herman poked his head out of the door as soon as he heard me coming up the stairs.

I was surprised by the hair-pile accuracy of his sudden self imposed shunning, it was almost like a literal erosion of physical decay; the historical circles of his connections with other people fell in chunks around him like the last lonely cracked spire of a collapsing patch of wet sand.

The homunculus has been poking at me all day about the cliche potential of that last analogy, but this is more serious than using too many adjectives. Plus I'm ignoring the homunculus for now or I'll never get this done.

I say Herman's isolation was self imposed even though it wasn't. He did impose the actual isolation on himself through a decision made

in free will, but it was in the context of a discovery that tore away at the entire assumption supporting his connections with other people.

Herman didn't start off as a paranoiac shut-in. He was once a regular person like you. But since understanding the mess of self perpetuating rumors spread about him Herman wouldn't go outside any longer at all, associating with nobody he didn't create in his own mind. Including myself.

When rumors start to fly around and stick there's little can be done to spare the native. And sometimes the spatter of a lie becomes too big to do much more than remove yourself completely from everywhere and everybody until you can forget it's not normal.

"The mood-ring was the precursor to modern social dildonics." Herman was obviously appropriating these things from some overheard conversation or radio broadcast.

He continued.

"In the future, the English language will be simplified down to contractions and apostrophes will completely vanish. I don't believe Mandarin will eventually be incorporated because we haven't got the pallet for it." Herman was standing at the top of the hallway now, fully outside the room and holding a smelly egg.

The way he handled the smelly egg was distracting; rolling it gently in his fingers to feel the squishy blob under the vellum thin skin that seems to randomly appear in a wrinkled strand when sometimes shelling a boiled egg.

Herman wanted an activity to keep himself occupied while I was out buying our supplies for the day. I've never been very good at activities so I didn't give him one. I've found that in the anticipatory

boredom of waiting, the level of what it takes to fix us for entertainment drops steeply.

This wasn't just a case of giant shoe / regular shoe. Herman was a fully scheduled schizoid lunatic, barely functional even in a world he himself created, who had the same relationship with hats as I did with everything from socks to doorways.

Somehow although my own abnormality had my habits distributed more widely than Herman's, I was able to function well enough to leave the building to do whatever I wanted. As long as it didn't take more than 15 minutes. Which restricted me to a few shops on Kings Highway.

"Nothing to compare me to." Herman dropped the egg on the floor, it squash bounced listlessly and rolled to a slow stop. He walked over to the egg, picked it up, blew the floor dirt off, and began to eat it.

When Herman and I first met, his immediately friendly features reminded me of something between Lou Costello and a baby monkey, and a ham.

He was close to 280lbs, 5' tall, and shaped like half of an inverted pear with an apple on top of it and a grape in top of the apple. His backward bending W.C. Fields posture made him look fatter than he actually was, and his thin black hair curled like a spotted bowl cut half way to the ears.

Herman picked a piece of lint from the bottom of the egg and wiped a finger on his shirt.

You may be forming an image by now of Herman as a caricature of a 1950's hobo with clown pants and possibly a giant cigar. Which would be incorrect, because he isn't one. Though he did like his

shoes to be bigger than they should be so he could rattle them around his feet.

He was usually wearing his red overalls, the kind you would expect to only find in the husky section of a 1970's JC Penney boy's department. He's still never told me where he got them.

Eventually they'll wear out and need to be replaced. So we have that adventure to look forward to.

A few years ago I found an enormous crate of striped shirts for Herman in the remainder room of an Elizabeth NJ factory closeout sale. He could wear a different one for the rest of his life without washing a single shirt. Which is what he does.

Herman wasn't some sort of idiot savant either, he didn't have special counting powers, or a mental memory machine, and he didn't run around in a beanie with a propellor holding a Jerry Mahoney doll either. I mention these things just in case you were beginning to form those impressions as well.

We lived on the second floor of the boarding house on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. I call it a boarding house, even though in the strict historical sense it was an apartment building.

The building, previously a corner property with an iron fence, 40 units and a carpeted lobby, had a pair of glass doors with brass fittings that faced Ocean Parkway and another pair facing Kings Highway.

However after the collapse, and the Benevolent Committee's initial repurposing of dwelling resources came into effect, and over the many years in rapid transience of residents, the building's boundaries blurred in decay.

As the organic mingling of the living areas occurred inside the building, kitchens combined, bedrooms became hallways, and whole sections of walls disintegrated into soft brown powdery round arches. Doors were mistaken for windows as laundry was naturally draped across their openings, fire escapes began to flesh out walls like open-air corridors with naturally occurring wallpaper.

Over a period of 4-5 years, the foundation of the building shifted organically as well to eventually include the houses on either side of the block.

I got to the top of the stairs. The hallway floor had patterns muted and that brown musty smell of years with caked up dust from generations neglecting the evolving public areas of the building.

I asked Herman if I could look at the egg and pretended to examine it while walking over to the garbage bucket.

I wanted to make sure Herman knew I wasn't disappointed, although he shouldn't be cooking eggs when I'm not there. But our dependence on each other, and the condition of Herman's isolation from just about everyone, left me as his only social constant, and that didn't allow for the luxury of small disagreements.

There were of course Herman's people from the other side of the window, but they were pretend.

Not pretend people in the sense they were imaginary like myself or Martuni, or George, because the people from the other side of the window were real. In this case it was Herman who didn't exist from the perspective of others.

He would come into the kitchen area every morning and pull a cup from the dispenser to make his hot chocolate from the water and packet I laid out for him the previous night with a plastic spoon to

stir it in. Then after the stirring he'd grab one of the regular size chairs from the table and bring it over to his window. "I'm Pulling up a chair." He would announce it to himself once the chair was squared against the window and the shade was snapped up.

Herman would watch the people walk by through his window every day, listening very carefully for important bits of dialogue to record in his notes so he could pretend to be part of their groups, part of their conversations, on a daily basis.

Some of them he knew their names from listening to their interactions, and he would make up a history with these people that included him.

He would call the ones with the names he knew his friends, and he would sometimes tell me about the things they did together back before things became different.

Some mornings I would see Herman at the window, standing in profile and practicing to be like other people, watching the clock, pretending to be on time to meet them as they arrived on their way walking past the building.

I knew of course he had no real contact or history with any of them. The ones who did notice him in the window, most of them considered him to be the simply weird guy talking to himself from the second floor.

Herman would often quietly add into the dialogue he thought he heard streaming from behind the glass. Sometimes even adding advice regarding future situations; constructed by Herman from what his notes assumed about one particular person or another.

I'd watch Herman sit on his cot at the end of the day with his pencils and drug store reading glasses, organizing his notes of raw paper,

keeping one sheet reserved on top for a key, or a schedule, a list of friends with names assigned by Herman based on manner and pace of movement, character of dress, and the time of day they usually walked by.

Sometimes at night I'd see Herman pull a folder from the old filing cabinet he kept in his room, and spread out his notes about a particular group of people from the other side of his window.

He'd imagine himself going with them to the same places they might be at that moment; being like them and invited to join in whatever it was they were doing.

"Just feeling stupid can be enough to keep a person from going outside at all." Herman walked into his bedroom and gathered up his loose notes from the day along with the red flat lumber yard pencil he used to make them.

I hung my coat on the hook behind the ice box. "I know buddy."

I put the box of supplies on the table and noticed one of Herman's friend folders, the folders he made to keep his notes about the people on the other side of the window, sitting open on the table.

It was made from navy blue and brown construction paper and held together with those little brass tacks that have the fold out points. A shiny number 10 was pasted on the front in tinfoil and etched with different colors of wax crayon broken marker scribbles.

These note taking behaviors didn't approach the obsessive component of my own abnormalities. And Herman wasn't compelled to make these notes in order to effect an action.

"It's not a Prince Valiant routine." Herman put the pencil in his overalls pocket and peeked into the supply box I brought home. "Crunchy onions thank you very much goodnight."

He said that because I remembered to pick up the container of crunchy onions to sprinkle on his soup.

Herman picked one of the cans of soup out of the supply box, indicating that's the one he wanted for lunch. "Edward's wife is having a little baby."

"That's great buddy, tell him I said that's great." My responses to Herman's updates about his pretend relationships to the people from the other side of the window had become an automatic reaction of tone and context over the years.

I'm not sure if I mentioned yet that Herman wasn't infected by the homunculus and that his abnormalities didn't approach the scope of my own. Though obviously he wasn't particularly normal either in the strict sense of terms.

Herman was lonely, and he had no acceptable social ability to find an approach to fix the problem.

This drove Herman into conditions of habit that had him in a state of reactive frustration; like a cat who gets his nail stuck in the couch cushion and keeps pulling at it because he doesn't have the abstract perspective available to simply unhook the nail and go about his business.

It wouldn't have probably helped if Herman did have the ability to approach his loneliness anyway, being most people were generally frightened and confused by his appearance.

So in this reactive frustration Herman slowly started folding in, slightly at first, a bit of eccentricity, some organizing of objects only related to each other in secondary or abstract terms, sometimes a little humming or mumbling when opening certain doors. But then a few years later, a period of collapse and total isolation. A turtle retreating into its shell, a pig in a covered wallow refusing to come out.

Once the initial hit of psychosis subsided, Herman got that post crazy relaxation and the dust settled.

You maybe know the kind I'm talking in this part. If not then you're lucky. Being crazy can be exhausting, and an attack of amplified crazy can leave a person immobilized for hours afterward.

After the breakdown Herman fitted the crazy neatly in a permanent mental binding collar and used it to filter out everything that caused his breakdown, which was everything, and then from that perforated void Herman created his own safe little environment and the rest of us to go with it.

I'm not in a position to judge any of this. Though I certainly can't endorse the existence of Martuni. I'm not sure I'm even on board with my own self being here.

Martuni was the imaginary person Herman bunked with in Albany. A defrocked pervert clown slash local boat captain parody type of character.

He recruited Herman, according to Herman, out of a certain respect for his ability to 'remember what to do and what not to do most of the time'. I can't call Martuni Herman's imaginary friend because he wasn't. He also wasn't a homunculus.

The difference between Martuni and a homunculus, is a homunculus is an infection that requires the repetition of a specific action against imagined consequences to sustain itself.

The cycle was this. Martuni would build Herman up with specific praise on something Herman was thinking or doing at the moment, then immediately shift down into reverse on the previous subject of praise. This left Herman in a constantly vacillating state of over confidence and self deprecation.

The perfect timing of these states was calculated in a manner that only an imaginary character sharing the same brain as its victim could execute; Martuni betraying Herman's inner trust and sending him into marshmallow soft overlapping waves of confusing inner dialogue.

This would leave Herman in what on the immediate surface appeared to be a constant state of Thorazine style sledgehammer blurriness, but really it was his polarized strobe like inner dialogue taking up most of his attention which gave that outward impression.

Luckily after Herman and I got ourselves out of Albany and down to Brooklyn, Martuni receded into background noise. Though Herman would bring him out by choice if he was intimidated by the possible lack of structure in a situation.

Now that Herman didn't leave the building at all any longer, there was rarely enough stimulation to bring Martuni out. Which was fine with me.

It was important to protect Herman from the reality of his isolation for the hope of helping him make it through without becoming like me.

"If they knew me really they probably wouldn't be so surprised." Herman plucked the container of crunchy onions from the box and opened the can next to his ear.

It didn't always used to have to be like this for Herman.

 

Part 1b. When Herman and I Met It Was Albany

 

This is a frame and it actually happened.

I originally met Herman at a self run vagrant shelter in Albany NY two years before I became infected by the homunculus.

It was about a year after the collapse, and six months after the planning committee gained complete control over every aspect of benevolent services in the area.

I had been hitchhiking across the state in the middle of a winter dump and the second night after landing in Troy the chill point went 30 below zero. So I took a bus down to Albany because there was still one of the few YMCA blocs in operation at the edge of the city.

There was no room at the YMCA, not even on the floor of converted storage containers tacked against makeshift holes in the outer shell of the building. Everybody who lived outside, wanted to live inside. It

was getting dark so they let me make some soup and then sent me in a car to the shelter.

The man in the car told me I was lucky as we pulled up on a full block of ghosted brownstones, ironically annexed by the planning committee and turned into vagrant shelters after the collapse.

I got out of the car with my pack and went up the chipped stone cut polished stairs.

The heavy sculpted double doors thick with black enamel shut with a heavy muffled chunk and bounced in its locking mechanism with the crisp solid kind of click all heavy tall doors make when the hinges are nicely oiled.

I was waved into a reception area.

I walked through what was once a beautiful livingroom with velvet wallpaper, now watermarked and torn in strips to reveal the buckling plaster.

Undamaged spots where mirrors and photos used to hang were stenciled in black dust over time like the mist of a cave painting.

A disassembled brass chandelier hung down almost sideways like a cliche, with wires poking out each tip behind the stolen fixtures.

This place had a history that obviously included the previous occupants leaving quickly in a grab what you can and get out of here now kind of scene; forced out or absorbed in the collapse.

Etched French doors with knocked out hinges sat at either side of the reception area with yellow cellophane tape across each pane substituting for or bracing the broken glass.

I figured the doors were most likely removed to fit the large metal 1970's pearlized clay-green school principal desk with aluminum trimmings dropped in the middle of the wood paneled dining room.

The man at the desk in a green army jacket waved me in covering the mouthpiece of the black rotary phone. "I'll be with you in a minute." I sat down on the springy couch.

At this point in our history I've mentioned my abnormalities several times vaguely. It's ok if you're wondering about them because they've already started to become accepted at this point in the story's timeline.

If you're one of those people who used to know me a long time ago but don't any longer, you maybe are expecting me to say next in some flat tone of Burroughs that 'I pulled my wrinkled zed stroke 192 form out of my pocket wrapped around the last of my boiled cottons' or something.

It's not that kind of story, and I stopped writing under that influence in 1991.

Plus nobody has given my abnormalities a zed stroke anything since I was little, and even if I had any cottons, there would be nothing left to boil out of them.

Luckily for people like myself, the committee didn't concern itself with documenting differences and disorders. The lunatics were running well beyond the funny farm by now so there was no point in singling themselves out for ridicule under the wake of over assessment and personality scales.

The regular people were also just fine. They were given plenty of resources to consolidate and build their own services as well. I mention this just in case you were becoming concerned about them.

The man behind the desk in the army jacket was round and had a mustache. He went back to the phone call.

From what I gathered he was talking a friend of his out of blowing his own head off with some sort of gun. I realized at that moment I had walked into a 1980's style, stereotypical vietnam vet social worker talking down another vet having a flashback type of scene.

It was boring. I wouldn't have even mentioned it if this wasn't something that actually happened and was necessary to getting us to the part when I meet Herman.

I waited for it to be over. When it was over, I said the YMCA sent me because they're full.

The round man with the army jacket and now confirmed to have had a mustache got up out of his chair with a struggling humph. "We only have one rule, you clean up after yourself and no leaving the building after 9pm."

There were two rules.

He walked out from behind the desk. "Oh, you also can't leave until it's at least 0 degrees outside."

There were three rules.

"Oh and no girls..." he looked at me for a full 2 seconds "...or patrons, are allowed to stay over night in the dorms." The man poked his head out the doorway and I heard him say "Hey Herman come show this guy around."

"Herman will show you around. He'll set you up with a bed in the dorm as well." He handed me a clipboard with some sort of cursory information form on it. "Here, fill out what you can on this form,

anything you can't answer just leave it blank. Do you have a pen?" I shook my head no. He dug a pen from a box on the desk. "Make sure you bring it back, these things are like gold around here." I said ok and followed Herman out the door.

Please remember here that Herman in this part of the story, isn't like Herman now.

Just like my own abnormalities hadn't surfaced with no homunculus to amplify and order them, Herman's own issues were pleasantly at rest below the surface, waiting for the trigger to release the damage which would envelop him completely and forever.

He hadn't yet become a paranoiac shut in, he had no collection of hats, and there were no eggs being hidden. He could go and come from his living areas as easily as George does now, or myself before the infection by the homunculus surfaced with its rules and habits.

Herman had a very clear and sharp perspective of what was going on around him at a given moment. He was the first to realize I had become infected by the homunculus, before I even knew it myself.

It was his detached sweetness that would have been the only precursor, which could be recognized easily if it had the specific social traits to put it in the context of an abnormality; if abnormalities were still being categorized and segmented away from normal behavior.

I followed Herman up the perfectly polished marble spiral staircase and into a kitchen the size of a carport.

The kitchen was lined to the walls with various refrigerators and freezers. A little man was sitting at the table eating a full pound block of butter with a silver potato knife.

He sensed my entering but didn't look up from the NY Times, which he seemed to want very much to appear to be reading. "What's your birthday?"

Herman looked at the ceiling with an oh brother face. "Just tell him your birthday."

I told him.

The little man put down the potato knife and looked at me. "You were born on a Wednesday." He paused nodded as if I agreed with him, then picked the knife up and went back to eating the block of butter, slowly turning the pages of the newspaper as if there was no conversation in the room.

I was told later he did this every day; sitting down and eating a block of butter while appearing to read the Times front to end. I was also told he refused to wash any dishes which was a sore point for many of the residents, though nobody would barely mention it directly.

He was one of those kinds of characters you wind up hearing stories about when traveling in the circles of road people. With this guy it was an old standard: he was actually a millionaire and lived in the shelter out of choice because no family members would have him. This rumor gave him the ability to move in and out of spaces with people being helpful and polite, just in case it was true and he was in fact a walking lottery ticket.

It turned out, I was told much later, that in the end he was just one of the previous tenants of the building before the collapse, and everything changed so slowly around him he just continued living there; unaware, like a frog in a slowly heating pot of water.

Ironically he probably would have wound up in the shelter or one like it eventually anyway. The planning committee was very efficient

in their foresight when it came to placement of the natives after a major change in the residential restructuring of an area.

We left the kitchen and Herman said "I'll show you the activities room on the way to the dorm."

There were 3 main living areas in the shelter. Men's shelter on 2nd floor, women's on 4th and the common area on the middle 3rd. First floor was administrative like I told you before.

We walked through the open wall which never had a door into the activities room, a huge space with vaulted ceilings and one of those round window areas with a point like a castle. You probably know the kind.

The scene in the room was like a chaotic level out of Dante's hell or something like it.

Mismatched and carefully upholstered fine leather comfort chairs lined the walls, left behind by original owners, or even worse, previous tenants.

A cluster of kerosene heaters sat in the middle of the room with black soot flaking down from the ceiling like poisoned flurries.

On the once valuable chairs and couches was a mix of men brown with dirt and beards, and haggard torn women on their laps or running around barely contained in stretch pants and tight jeans with holes in them, their tired trade also made irrelevant after the collapse and the planning committee's declassification of illicit behaviors.

There was a large tv on one side of the room with three guys watching some sort of sports event. One of them in glasses held together with a paperclip would stand up every few minutes, turn the

tv volume dial up and down three times yelling "shut up, shut up, shut up!" at the guy standing at the other end of the room blasting blue oyster cult on a 1970's gradeschool media cart tape recorder.

There was yelling and laughing in the rest of the room, bottles of thunderbird and Robetussin were being swung and passed around.

A ragged couple appeared to be trying to do sex to each other behind a ripped room divider in the corner. If it wasn't fascinating it would have been disgusting.

It was actually pretty disgusting anyway.

I half expected someone to wheel in a gigantic golden calf with flowers around its neck and Charlton Heston to come out and start yelling at everybody.

One of the women got up off a guy's lap yelling and slapped him in the face. The rest of the room went silent with a hush. Except for the tv, and the music. The room was still noisy. The people went silent. Some of the people went silent. Most of the people didn't pay attention.

The woman now red fisted, spun slowly looking at the rest of the people in the room bugeyed with flaking painted on makeup accented and cracking under her stringy black frazzled hair like a halloween wig.

She started screaming without many actual words making it through, and then stopped screaming, and then a gurgling sound, and then she fell on the floor with eyes open and mouth half closed with collection of spit bubbles forming in the corner of it.

Herman vaguely and in a matter of fact tone looked over at the lady and slowly turned around. "I should go tell the man with the

mustache to call an ambulance. I'll show you the dorms on the way down."

I followed Herman down the spiral stairs and in to the second level. We walked down a short hallway that was obviously newer than the rest of the building, having been built to buffer the men's dorm from the staircase.

The dorm was split down 3 lanes with 2 level metal bunkbeds, each with one of those thin vinyl cracking mattresses with the muted light blue or salmon color stripes and those round metal screens on the sides.

Each bunk had various states of clutter and pillows with blankets folded.

Herman took me down to the end of the first row next to a window. "Here, you can stay in this one." The steam radiator made a series of clanks and then relieved itself with a hiss.

My bunk was next to the window. It was smelly there and Herman told me "It belongs to the birthday man." Which was Herman's name for the little man eating butter with a potato knife. He was referring to the jars of urine next to the bunk across the row from mine.

Herman showed me his bunk which was next to the door. He was in charge of turning out the lights like a grownup version of Brady bedtime for lunatics.

"Don't leave your stuff there on top of your bed like that. If you have anything costs money you should give it to the man with the mustache." There was an obvious confusion on my face I'm sure because everything I had cost money, and although yes I assumed he meant valuables I still wasn't sure where to put my regular stuff.

Herman was never very good with other people's facial expressions, he stood there obviously waiting for me to sort my valuables so we could go tell the man with the mustache about the most likely dead lady.

Herman was also incapable of understanding sarcasm, something it took me a few tries to figure out, and also something that alienated George slightly at first.

I pulled my glasses and passport out of my bag and stuffed it under the bed. "Ok, let's go tell the guy about the lady."

"Are you sure you want to put everything under your bed like that?" Herman bent down and pulled the bag out and walked it over to me as if he was to show me where to put it.

He stood looking at me for a solid 30 seconds as I waited for him to explain where I should put it instead. He didn't say anything, just kept looking at me.

"Um. So where should I put it?" I relieved Herman of the bag and looked around for a locker or something.

"I mean it goes under the bed but like this." Herman took the bag and slid it back under the bed again. "That's better let's go."

I mentioned it looked the same to me and Herman got up without responding.

It was from that point on that Herman and I became friends. It wasn't until at least a year later that Herman's eccentricities would begin to become debilitating, and 2 until my own abnormalities would surface under the infection by the homunculus.

We left the shelter and headed down to Brooklyn once I saw an announcement the building 2 houses from the one I grew up in had

become available under the Benevolent Committee's housing redistribution act.

 

Part 1c. Birthday License.

 

The weather changed slowly outside the building on Ocean Parkway. George would probably be back soon.

I put the rest of the supplies for the day in our kitchen area cabinet and poured Herman's can of soup into the metal pan.

I cleared the table of Herman's notes into the folder and sat it gently next to the doorway which ran through his room.

The soup started to sizzle against the edges of the pan so I turned off the flame and told Herman lunch was ready.

He pulled the shade down over the window. "I have to go have lunch... Ok. See you tomorrow." He picked up his folder I placed in the doorway on the way into the kitchen area thumbing through it as if inventorying its contents.

"Birthday license" Herman seemed to have switched out of talking in made up catch phrases like in the beginning of this story, and

degenerated instead into blurting out pairs of words that have an indirect link with each other.

"Steamroller basketball!"

I asked Herman to grab a lunch set. He went over to the corner cabinet and pulled out a presorted green cellophane wrapped paper bowl containing a plastic spoon, a packet of mustard, 3 sugar/salt packets and a wad of napkins. "Green for lunch, blue for breakfast and red for lunch, I mean red for dinner. And yellow for when George comes over."

He placed the lunch set face down on the table and peeled off the stickum that held the cellophane together. It squeaked as he unfolded and crinkled it flat.

With the exaggerated mannerisms of a circus magician Herman lifted the bowl spinning it upright between his fingers. Then picked it up off the floor and handed it to me.

I stirred the soup and ladled it into the bowl. "Ok bub, go sit down, I'll bring it over." I got the foil wrapped container of crunchy fried onions from the box on the counter.

Herman sat down in his lunch chair, an oversized custom mail order pinewood 2x4 ricket we had to assemble at home. He neatly arranged the napkins, spoon and condiment packets into a square with an empty space in the middle for the bowl to be placed. "Don't forget the crunchy onions." He was wearing a Boston lobster bib I fitted with Velcro for easy removal.

I shook a small mound of crunchy onions out, stirred them into the soup bowl and sat down next to Herman at the table.

I wiped the bottom of the spoon against the bowl and tipped the chunky white soup into Herman's mouth. "I'm glad you're not still hiding that smelly egg," I told him "you know I'll make you a new egg whenever you want one, right?" Herman nodded and showed me his napkin before using it to wipe dripping soup from the front of his red overalls under the bib. "I was banished."

I asked Herman if he wanted any more crunchy onions. I could hear my own exhaustion in the response because I wasn't sure how to answer Herman's lucid statements about the subject of his isolation. Even if these statements were blurted out randomly, I knew they were just the few words that made it through the filter, runoff from his internal rumination.

What would I say anyway? Would I confirm it bluntly? Make eggshell caveats? Or maybe try to explain the mounds of safety mechanisms that brought Herman to this point of isolation; try to untangle the knots of obsessive self abusive logic that brought Herman to this point in his life.

And even if I were to try and untangle Herman, I was hardly in a condition to make a judgement regarding anyone else's anything.

Fixing my friend wasn't something I was able to do, however taking care of him is something that I was able to do, so I did that.

The breaker snapped with a loud sparking pop, turning both our heads and making Herman jump out from his lunch chair. "If anyone knew me better they wouldn't be surprised by the kind of hat I'm wearing tomorrow." Herman was acting normal.

"Herman normal." He pulled the cork out from his first ear and placed it back in the other one.

It wasn't unusual lately for Herman to say things relevant to what I was thinking at a given moment.

I asked him why he was wearing a cork in his ear. "I'm hearing in two dimensional."

Herman was finished eating soup. I looked over at the timer and realized my drink would be ready in the next 5 seconds.

I got up to move quickly across the room because the homunculus has me trained to turn off the machine before it starts beeping.

The machine started to beep anyway, but that was ok because I also had a safety mechanism. Which was if I could reach it, open the door, and touch the cup before the third beep, any pending consequences would be avoided.

Stopping the machine before the beeping starts is optimal, but touching the cup before the 3rd beep is acceptable.

There's a soft and slippery moment in some of us where falling into a warm psychosis is as natural as the condition of realizing a dream is really a dream and the consequences of any actions would be wiped clean.

A circumstance relates to a miscalculation of intuition or desire, just enough to sync up like two dusty repellant magnets with that little back and forth magnet swinging dance they always do before smacking together sideways.

And when you pull them apart the mingled magnet dust reaches out, wanting to stay with its original magnet, until laying down residedly to accept its new position.

Then the faulty intuition makes the leap to validate the action into the role of presupposed control over the prevention, or creation, of the circumstance, until the habit created becomes more amplified than the circumstance itself and the habit itself is adopted as 'just something I do', or whatever it is the person says to justify the little homunculus in the head making him perform nonsensical behaviors slowly turning him into a lunatic.

Slight interest in some action or avoidable circumstance turns to focus, then focus to rumination, and eventually the original circumstance fades down the spiral of what's become a series of crucial actions which need to be performed to effect the imaginary outcome controlled by the homunculus.

I was concerned Herman might absorb the homunculus. Possibly even obsessed, I'm pretty sure this is the third time I've said something similar to that last sentence.

And a homunculus infecting someone like Herman without a George to balance it would have him completely immobilized.

Almost just as bad was simply in evidence of my participation in this world created by Herman at all, I perpetuated the made up lunacy and so was at least somehow responsible Herman was like this. But where else would he go? It's not like people make up elaborate alternatives to reality because they have rich and flourishing social lives filled with opportunity and happiness.

George, if I haven't mentioned yet, is my own imaginary friend who extends in his presence to Herman once removed.

George had no problem walking in and out of all manner of establishments, acting as if everyone weren't already briefed with a made up backstory about him, that was compiled conveniently over

the years by people with a similar agendas which required his redefinition by rumor.

Nope, it wasn't like that for him at all.

George was pure, he made his own 'you leave me alone and I'll refuse to believe in you' deal with the homunculus a long time ago. And so he remained uninfected by my abnormalities.

I gave Herman another egg and then put an extra one on the table. I made sure Herman knew he didn't have to worry about disappearing eggs or open windows so he wouldn't have to become like me.

 

Part 1d. In Which George Is On His Way to Meet Herman and I For Dinner with the Basement People

 

The whistle stops. Everything starts to go. Rattle of brass. Bird in the air.

George stopped to wait out the rain at the yellow newsstand under the Kings Highway subway stairs.

The little balding newsstand owner, too big to be a midget but small enough to be sensitive to remarks about it, poked his combed over head up from the counter, looked in George's general direction, and then climbed back down from his footstool perch after ashing his cigar on the floor below.

The owner didn't recognize George even though he's been stopping there every week for the last 2 years.

George was barely anywhere at any given moment. An incidental character, he lived in the space between the interactions of others, and left only a half beat of memory with those who he made natural contact.

There were people who might recognize him as a background character in a scene, but even if pressed, it would be difficult to choose him from a lineup of similarly shaped people in a neutral setting.

There were several people who knew him of course. People in the building, myself, Herman. Martuni had stated several times he doesn't believe in George, which personally I think requires Martuni to be aware of George's existence in the first place. But in the sense of public interaction, George could move through a party packed room without leaving a single impression on its residents or their guests.

This wasn't his intent, though neither did he consider this condition to be worth the attention it might require to correct.

The little newsstand owner stopped making notes on his checkpad with a pencil stub. He looked up, then he looked at his watch, and with a vacant sweep he removed his coffee from the counter, put out his cigar, and placed both items in a metal framed money box nailed to the plywood inner wall.

He climbed back up on the footstool to reach a set of rubber clip- ropes from the wall, then back down again, and then he proceeded to wrap and tie himself to the post in the middle of the floor.

After the little man finished tying the last half knot in the rubber rope, the rumble of the approaching train started to bounce and sway the newsstand, rattling the strings of pill packets stapled to hanging cards and knocking gum and fruitrolls from their shelves.

The newsstand owner remained expressionless while he bounced around like a springboarded children's toy.

Crack crack the train whooshes in with the staccato snapping of its wheels across the space between each set of rails, and then a disjointed flam of squeal brakes, and then three bursts of the bell at the station to slide the doors open down the line. The train unloaded and the lunch hour drugstore crowd poured through the open turnstiles and toward the exit stairs.

First the gong of a single foot hopping down the iron trestle stairs, then a second, then several, and finally a banging rush of feet in a constant flow swelling out into a single reverberating tone with muffled definition, until the crowd thinned back into a single pair of little old lady feet hopping down each stair using the arm rail acting as a lever.

This new group of landed passengers was my reason for having George wait at the newsstand. Done in order to get him into the drug store for his supplies, and back to the building.

It's not as if he had anything better to do anyway, and that gave him the liability of freedom to linger in the flush dynamics of the lunch hour drug store crowd's arrival.

When they all got to the bottom of the stairs, the crowd silently accounted for each other and grouped uneasily. Moving like a school of confused fish being suddenly dumped into a tank, they relied on blind perspective to slowly orient themselves into a pod with the intentional direction of a singular purpose.

Once the nonverbal consensus is reached, the group jerks forward, moving in disjointed unison and fanning out once they push through the open market drug store's invisible barrier.

The sickly sweet smell of 100 years of subway fruitstand news market dissipated into the drug store's air-conditioned atmosphere of perfume samples in glass cases with chrome fixtures and soft gold lighting.

I guided George through the crowd and into the store without even touching him once. I've been guiding George through my here and there since 1991 at least, and a bat-like intuition has developed between us over the years.

Most people in the store were in line at the dispensary. An old lady was at the front of the line arguing with the attendant.

Once the Benevolent Committee's agitated lawyers repealed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, they nationalized the drug markets and turned them into citizen run dispensaries.

Once the new distribution structure was in place, the Benevolent Committee then went on to replace immediately any doctors and pharmacists who through the social decay of the previous decade, began to think they were somehow charged into the role of enforcement agent.

The old lady in the front of the line was giving the attendant behind the counter the 'I lost my bottle' routine, and instinctively started talking louder every time the attendant tried to tell her he'll just give her a new bottle if she would just please pull out her dispensary card.

After the Benevolent Committee cut the straps of certain regulations which the pharmaceutical industry and doctors were being held down under, there was no longer any reason for this type of fight or deception.

There were no more pain contracts with random sample drug testing, emergency room doctors didn't have to add a dependence

variable into their treatment decisions, and pharmacists were no longer charged with the task of checking if someone was presenting duplicates at another store.

On one level this put the industry in a better position. Black market drug sales no longer existed, so the Benevolent Committee basically handed the entire split of profit over to them. After all, this wasn't communism.

On another level the industry was hurt by the change however. Treatment became more blunted. There was no longer an incentive for doctors to push over-complicated and ridiculously priced treatments for simple problems.

Of course some people were unable to self regulate, and wound up dead or otherwise permanently disengaged, and certainly this new structure created addicts of various types. But like any new government, the committee needed to test policy and make changes where needed. The benevolent establishments were set up for that reason.

For the moment I'm going to leave these details alone so I can get George back to the building and down to dinner at Wo Hop with the basement people, Herman and myself. No Martuni.

So eventually the citizen behind the old lady tapped her on the shoulder to diffuse the situation, and after being smacked with a pocketbook was able to get her to pull out the dispensary card.

She was given the bottle, no questions or hassle, and after some mumbling and hat pinning she stumbled through the store, swinging and knocking things over as one of the store attendants moved smoothly behind her, picking things up like an octopus with wings on the side of its head.

The line moved quickly. George paid the attendant behind the counter and put his supplies for the week into a paper sack. 2 packs of paper plates, 1 boxed assortment of plastic forks, knives and spoons, bag of tobacco, vial of dilaudid, food, and a small pallet of chocolate for Herman. He headed down Kings Highway toward the building on Ocean Parkway.

George used to live next to the subway above the old Russian lady bakery. He didn't mind the noise of the trains so much being he never really slept, or did anything more than go to his job most of the time. This condition, I would eventually decide, was by his own free will.

When I originally became aware of George in Boston, we were living next to a set of commuter rails just above the T station in Chinatown.

I never really thought to ask him if it was intentional or coincidence that in the two cities he lived in, both times I had him living on top of or below subway tracks.

When the city originally decided to start running subway tracks directly through low income residential areas, the debate over the noise level residents would be subjected to ended with the single argument, voiced by a city manager on the take: "These aren't the symphony crowd that's going to be living in these places," the pineapple shaped bureaucrat poured ice water into his cup from a sweating metal jug, "it's not like they need to worry about hearing much above a punch-clock bell or assembly line buzzer... or when I ask for more butter on my plate. Heh... heh..." He looked around to see if that last joke landed. It didn't.

When everything changed after the collapse, and the Benevolent Committee took over all aspects of demographics and residential planning, the first civilian instinct was a call for revenge against the

regular people, and anyone responsible for creating, or benefiting from, the previous systems.

The option of this angle was immediately denied by the committee of course.

Not only would this kind of action have put a tainted context around any future policy introduced by the committee, but also the enormity of the task in identifying and sorting the population wasn't something the committee was interested in pointing resources toward.

The policy the Benevolent Committee had on this issue was to create structures in which the people sorted themselves for the benefits attached to doing so, not to force an identity, or even signify an individual as part of a predetermined group.

Presupposing someone is one type or another is a form of aggression. Allowing them to do so for you, that is an asset.

This is not a metaphor.

So George went out from the store, everything in a bag, and started down the street and into the crowds.

George had an ability I was to envy at times, even enough to repeat myself at least once about it, which was his freedom of movement. This freedom had consequences however, and one of them was walking up to George right now.

"Hey George who do you like?" Manny was a bookie turned state since the collapse, an unfortunate carryover from the underground trades turned 'profit pending' after the restructuring of previously illicit leisure activities.

He used to work for the Imbecile, a mildly retarded drug dealer slash profit based rumor monger. Even after the change, the Imbecile continued spreading rumors, partially simply because he was too stupid to break a habit, and partially on some idiot scheme for profit on spec; convinced they would have some sort of payoff which never arrived. There was a reason he was called the imbecile.

His father was so disgusted with this family he created by mistake, he ran off immediately after the imbecile was born, leaving his mother to raise him with barely a word of English in the middle of Idaho.

This gave the imbecile that special angry sort of crazy unsuccessfully blunted with alcohol, making him appear even more stupid than he actually was.

Manny gave off the impression of an upright greasy stuttering rat with a hip disorder. He wore square glasses with nothing in the holes as if they made him look like something other than what he was.

His hair was straight and brittle and it stuck together in sticky rows from the constant combing through it he did with hair oil.

He recently lost almost half of his mustache in a shaving accident and decided to grow it out to match rather than shaving the other side off.

His skin was pockmarked and stubble grew in the depressions from where the razor didn't reach all the way in. He was wearing a clean suit, which meant he must have found himself a new mark.

Manny's walk swayed far to the left and back again with each step after breaking his hip in a snow related accident, which of course he tried unsuccessfully to sue the city over. For some reason he didn't

use a cane, maybe it would make him seem like too much of a sympathetic character. Which he wasn't.

This swaying caused him to develop a sharp eye movement sensitivity because otherwise the world would be lobbing sideways and back again with each step at nauseating angles.

Even when standing still his eyes darted around, landing everywhere but on the eyes of whoever he was talking to.

Manny lived off favors from others when he could get them. He was one of those types that defined people by their assets and how they could be exploited to fill a deficit in his own planning or skills. And although this character is extreme, you probably know the kind of incapable person I'm talking about in this part, because they are everywhere, and they will find you.

With George, what Manny wanted was as odd as it was specific; access to Herman.

After the collapse and the building on Ocean Parkway became available, Herman and I moved in. About a year later rumors somehow got started about Herman. It was another one of those rumors that get started by a cycle of validation in repetition. Regardless of the absurdity of the rumor, it gets repeated and angled until an entire story is fleshed out by unknowing collaborators who corroborate the story, which at its core is based on a false assumption. However those repeating the story are unaware of its initial angle, and therefore it's assumed into truth.

Herman was unable to stop the rumors, and decided it would simply be easier to stop going outside. Which by his absence fueled the rumors with a lack of counterpoint.

George continued walking. "Hello Manny what do you need?"

Manny trailed George hopping slightly forward and stuttering intentionally in an attempt to use his physical abnormality to punctuate each obviously pending request with some sort of sympathetic angle. "N-n-n-need? Why do I have to neeeed something? Can't a guy say heh-hello to his friend without n-needing something?" He nearly knocked into George accidentally while concentrating on sounding incredulous. He decided to give up the stutter so he would have less fake amplified mannerisms to keep track of.

George rolled his eyes and continued walking. "Ok, then what don't you need?"

"Well George I was just thinking maybe we could go over to your place and hang out for a while, got something to share with you, maybe we could go over to your place is all." Manny pulled a half empty bottle of blackberry brandy out of his jacket pocket and and jiggled it at George. "See I was just thinking we could go over to your place, over to your place and we could share this and hang out." Manny was talking in a quick paced desperation. "So what do you think? We could go there now, right now we could go there."

George stopped at the corner in front of the locking grate to a closed office building. "Maybe that would be a good idea, except instead of my place let's go over to yours, it's closer."

"My place? No my place stinks my place is a mess it should be your place we go, my place is a mess it stinks." Manny was starting to sweat visibly.

George looked at Manny, Manny held up the bottle and jiggled it again with a big smile showing gray yellowing teeth.

George stopped looking at Manny. "When have I ever given off the impression my place wouldn't be a mess?"

Manny stopped jiggling the bottle and made a thinking face. "Um...My place is being fumigated?" He didn't mean for it to sound like a question but it came out as one because he couldn't convince even himself with it.

George shook his head. "Look. Manny. I'm not bringing you over to the building. You're never getting into the building, forget about the building, and forget about Herman, and the basement, and any of it. Nobody over there is going to let you in."

"Herman?" Manny slipped the brandy bottle back in his pocket and forced a set of pleading worry lines on his forehead. "Herman? You think I want to go to your place to see Herman? Wha, I mean, you know, no, dude. Herman? Why would I want to go see that fucked up retard..." Manny's words were cut off as he was lifted off the ground and slammed into the locking grate.

George bristled "First of all, he's not a retard. He's a person, who's trying, and it's not working out so well. Second, I see you near the building, talking to anyone who might not know you well enough, or might be too stupid, to let you near him, and I personally will put your head in a printer vise and permanently emboss a warning sign on your face."

Manny nervously grinned and started sweating all over George's hands around his neck, so George dropped him to the ground and picked up his packages.

"Stay the fuck away from Herman." George cocked his leg back into a ready to kick position. Manny put up his hands in anticipation and started to whine. "Ok ok no problem. No problem." George put his foot back on the ground and started walking away. Manny yelled "What I want with that retard anyway?"

George turned around. Manny had already slithered around the corner.

George was, as is probably by now very obvious, as protective of Herman as I was.

George stopped at the te amo cigar shop to pick up a pack of cigarette papers and paused to casually glance at the newspapers held down with rocks and wires.

Some of them were as much as a month old. Since the collapse, all news and notifications were distributed freely by the Benevolent Committee for anyone to use as a reference, the papers and informational posters laid out at the doorways of citizen establishments.

This in a strange sense was a momentary boom of virtual profit for the subway entrance newsstand owners, because suddenly the old papers they had laying around collecting water and foot dirt on the sidewalk were out of print collectables.

After this all came down the newsstand owners started marking the remaining and by then out of date papers up to ridiculous prices. Sometimes 3-400 each in the case of Sunday editions.

Problem with that kind of strategy is something can be valued as anything on paper, but if there's nobody willing to pay what you're asking for your this and that, it's as worthless as an out of date newspaper that had little factual value when it was still current.

Now the old papers just sit in front of various establishments for the look of it, and the occasional citizen doing a period piece that needs the paper for the effect of authenticity.

George never was much for reading newspapers when they were being written, and he enjoyed seeing them dead on the stand for the simple irony of their overconfidence from years of distributing assumptive propaganda.

 

Part 1e. Herman and Shriner Hat

 

"Happily family for 5 please" Herman was very excited to have an occasion for wearing shriner hat.

He had been preparing all week for our highly anticipated trip downstairs for dinner with the basement people; deciding what to wear, how to act, where to put everything.

We were playing Chinese restaurant, in Chinese restaurant.

Herman had his clothes neatly laid out before bedtime the previous day perfectly at the foot of his cot.

Acrylic cranberry blazer with those fake round and embossed gold buttons that dangle from their loops sewn right through the sleeve, a new blue button shirt, purchased by George and pins removed on my request was tucked and rippling bloused into a pair of forest green 1975 Benson & Hedges mall breakfast pants with a reflective candy apple red tie. All under a velvet burgundy shriner hat. His favorite.

My little 280lb pear shaped tutifruiti lunatic.

Herman walked into the kitchen area with his tie in a jumbled half knot. "Fix my jumble please." He held both ends of the tie out to me. I unjumbled it and pulled up his collar.

The conditions for our evening were fine with Herman and the rest of everyone involved.

There were only two actual conditions and they were these: We'd take Herman down to Wo Hop using the building's back basement tunnels to avoid leaving the building, and the basement people at Wo Hop will have the restaurant cleared of strangers by the time we get there.

You may be thinking now I'll write another one followed by 'there were three conditions' but there were only two and how many times will you put up with my repeating devices.

Maybe the conditions weren't really even conditions at all. They could already be assumed to be the case anyway, with Herman never leaving the building and being under constant protection from strangers and circumstances by George and me.

But the declaration of these conditions was necessary to pull the evening off regardless. To Herman acting normal meant a constant struggle to mimic the behaviors of the others, and having a predetermined context for the evening gave him a set of railings to hold onto.

I finished tying Herman's tie and set the tassel on his shriner hat at a more appropriate angle. "There we go bub, did you remember to bring your fork?"

Herman nodded and then picked the shriner hat up off the floor. "Is George coming too?"

I opened the ice box and told him I think so, that is I think George is coming.

On the top shelf of the ice box was a white crackly paper bag, the sideways kind, and a folding bakery box knotted at the top with red and white twisted string holding down its warping flaps against springy escape tension. The box had a gold stamp indicating it was from the old Russian lady bakery on Kings Highway.

Herman looked over my shoulder at the pair of treat packages in the ice box. "Man of mystery."

I opened the bag to reveal several Chinese cookies, the ones with the yellow bean mush filling and blurry red pictures printed on top of the egg yolk glazing. You maybe know the kind.

I picked up the box in one hand and the cookies in the other, I turned around to Herman. "Should we bring cookies or the Shmectectalach?"

Shmectectalach is a fictitious Jewish pastry I just made up that has drizzled honey over a Slivovitz soaked and crusty rolled up cake inside a fried sugar shell. It's quite popular for the purposes of this story, though it's almost impossible to eat because of the ridiculously hard shell that shatters bits of sticky sugar all over the place when broken.

Slivovitz is a plum brandy that actually does exist and comes from the old country somewhere in eastern Europe depending on which kind it is. Sometimes Hungary and sometimes Croatia.

Herman made a reasonable face, "cookies." I agreed. With it being so cold down in the tunnels and hallways under the building that lead to the Wo Hop back entrance, the shmectectalach coating would harden and most likely be almost as impossible to eat as the bar of Chh that I was saving in the freezer.

Chh is another Jewish dessert I just made up with its origins supposedly in post invasion Kiev. The recipe is said to have survived the extermination fields of the mid 40's after being smuggled to holland in a frilly lace bodice, the carrier having been only wounded when shot had survived by hiding in the mass open grave for several days, laying motionless as the people of the town picked through the clothes and belongings not already removed from the carcasses in the pit.

Jewish food backstories always seem to require a level of tragedy in the telling, real or imagined.

Chh is pronounced 'chh' - a short burst of hard H. Like the beginning of chhhhanukah, or chhhhallah, or chhhhamburger. Except not hamburger.

The best way to eat Chh is with tea and lemon using those blushing face teapot shaped tea bag dishes from the 30's. The Chh is dipped in the tea to soften it enough to take a bite until eaten. Traditionally Chh is eaten during the pretend self effacing holiday of Flegdelem. It's considered a mitzvah to break a tooth on it, however there is rumor that part was created and promoted by Mitch Fineman DDS in the early 60's.

None of this is relevant, we chose the cookies.

A shape came navigating in through the layers of laundry sheets dividing one of the living areas next to our own.

George poked himself through. "Hey there moon boy."

Herman walked over and stood next to George, he looked over and adjusted his posture and height to mirror George's sort of. He chuckled as if he just let himself in on a joke. "Hello George."

"Jeez bub if you got any closer you'd be standing on the other side of me" George walked over to the ice box. "I was actually saying hello to this one." He flipped his hand up in my general direction. "But hello to you also Herman... Got your fork?"

Herman pulled his fork gently from the inside of his jacket pocket and showed it to George. "Just in case they only have sticks" Herman put the fork back in his pocket. I told him I'm sure they have forks but I'm glad he's prepared.

I asked Herman if he would go and try to find something nicer than a sideways white paper bag to put the cookies in.

"George are you also wearing a tie?" Herman pulled his own tie up in the direction of George and then left to find something nicer to put the cookies in before George said anything in response.

George worked at the automat as a machine stuffer and I doubt he owns a tie, having never seen him wear anything but gray work pants and a t-shirt.

He was part of the "close-down world". What I mean by the close- down world is the world after the places are closed, the vacuuming of carpets is done, the bar dishes have been run through, the construction has stopped for the day. But even though the work has stopped, there's that short period between the public world and the close-down world where everyone is still talking about work.

Theres a certain level of access that comes with being a member of the close-down world, back hallways of malls, the basements of old buildings, the top floors of new buildings still half built but with businesses already moved in. This will make sense to some people, those who have been or are part of the close-down world.

George was glad, as glad as George can be, that he was able to land a job in one of the smoking only establishments.

Since the collapse and the changes implemented by the planning committee, people were able to make their time how they wanted. One effect of this newly minted growth in personal time was a resurgence of the automat trade larger than any since the mid 1960's.

The particular automat George worked at had machines lining its walls complete with quarter pointed pie slices and salted nut rolls, cold sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper and drink dispensing machines with paper cups.

When the planning committee came into power and started forming the various benevolent establishments, some civilians were concerned they were focusing too much on vices and hosteling.

It is true the committee used the legalization, or maybe more accurately the reintegration, of previously marginalized behaviors as a vehicle for disseminating nodes of their new power. However it was the softest place for them to grab into and start to solidify.

It started with the repeal of the Harrison Narcotics Act, and the setting up of unions for insomniac writers, and other marginalized trades followed easily once the door to vice was propped open.

They franchised the vagrant shelters and shooting galleries in the same manner they did the restaurants and drug stores. Smoking and

non-smoking establishments of any kind were predetermined to be so, ending that element in the conflict of social division.

I know that last bit may sound like a small detail, but the real focus here is that while it's true the committee took care of its own first, like any political or social entity, it was done in the order of setting up blocs of confederates in various fields and states of condition, all in the order of taking on the social decay which brought them so easily into power.

The automat George worked at was very convenient to our location being 3 blocks from the old Russian lady bakery and 17 from the building on Ocean Parkway. It was also open all night for the purposes of this story, which was also fine being I've never actually seen George sleep.

Herman came back in with a small octagonal hat box with stripes and one of those acrylic cords that pull out, but never long enough to render a satisfying grip. "Can I bring Martuni?"

George walked into the bathroom area and turned on the exhaust fan. "No, no. No Martuni." He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into the sputtering fan. "No Martuni."

It wasn't so much that George didn't like Martuni as it was he didn't like the fact that Martuni apparently didn't believe in him.

I straightened Herman's tie and told him I didn't think it would be nice to show up for dinner with an extra person without being invited. Herman agreed. Somewhere in there he also knew it would be easier to enjoy himself if Martuni wasn't around.

I tossed a look at George over his initial reaction at Herman for bringing up Martuni. He stopped smoking for a moment and shook his head at me. "What?"

I've mentioned several times about how Herman back when I first met him wasn't like Herman now, but I don't mean to imply he wasn't all fucked up.

He was a mildly disassociated guy living in a building full of crazy people with his imaginary friend, his imaginary friend's imaginary friend, and an unstable imaginary enemy he mistook for a needed friend under self abusive posturing.

We gathered the cookies into the hat box and I placed it in the middle of the table after tapping each point on the lid.

George walked back into the kitchen area picked up the hat box and moved it to a random place on the table. I turned around twice and moved it back to the middle, then tapped on it 8 extra times.

George moved it to another random place on the table when I walked away.

You're probably expecting this moving of the hat box to eventually turn into some tug of war that has the hat box tear open and the cookies fly up in slow motion and all over the floor. But this isn't that kind of story. I'm fine if you'd like to imagine that alternate scenario, but really I just let George keep the hat box wherever. We were leaving soon and any presupposed consequences I had attached to the positioning of the hat box on the table were minimal, cursory, and transient.

George left the hat box wherever it was and put on his ripped canvas work jacket. "Are we ready?"

I was jealous of George's ability to do things like move the hat box to a random place on the table without considering the ramifications, or leave the building for more than 15 minutes at a time, or leave a room without having to tap the lights and then have to go back into

the room because I'm not sure if I tapped the lights correctly, and so need a do-over. And I envied the objectivity he possessed in order to be free of these habits.

George asked again if we were ready to go. I told him I had some things needed doing before I could leave and will follow on in a bit.

George picked up the hat box and handed it to Herman. "Come on bub, our feathered friend needs to touch some doorknobs or something."

They left through a window that was mistaken for a doorway for so many years, it had grown almost to the floor.

I began the tasks I had to perform to satisfy the homunculus, in order to participate in our visit with the basement people at Wo Hop and not have to worry too much about things I may or may not have had a remote type of control over.

 

Part 1f. PECTOPAH

 

If there's anything I've never been accused of it's not not being not able to start with one thing, distract the story in the middle, and then have it wind back to the beginning without someone noticing it was gone in the first place. This may be because I'm good at it, though it may also be because people zone out and stop listening when I get misdirected instead.

That made sense. You can read it again if you like, it's not going to advance the storyline however. In fact this entire section is an aside. Though not irrelevant.

Wo hop sat halfway under Mott street in Chinatown since the beginning of time, until shortly after Herman and I got ourselves down from Albany and into the building on Ocean Parkway. Wo Hop then found itself moved into a space in the basement previously occupied by a Russian grocery, moved back to Ukraine after the

power of the Benevolent Committee reached past the eastern borders of old Europe.

I say the previous establishment was a Russian grocery even though it wasn't. For our purposes I guess I'll call it a deli even though it was barely one of those either. It was mostly just a crapped out storage space with a front room fitted with a counter and booths from somewhere else.

Herman and I went down there at the end of moving day for dinner.

A pale blue enameled metal and glass meat case with missing chrome along the bottom extended down one side of the room with barely anything in it. A piece of dried up brisket covered with congealed orange fat wrapped in plastic, some sort of cold fish dumplings in old celery water on a metal service tray, a small stack of onion rolls and a half empty jar of generic borscht.

Behind the meat case there was a man. He was wearing a paper hat and a pair of red rubber gloves. On the wall behind him was a wooden shelf. On the shelf was a box of old crackers and a can with a morose cow on it, and some sort of pickled meat in a jar.

The rest of the room was divided by a repurposed waist high wall, mounted in warped panelling, and missing bits of amber textured translucent plastic where the windows used to go.

On the other side of the divider, 1960's cracked and faded cloud pattern Formica tables with mismatched wood chairs serviced the gray ripple-red floor which stretched across the room and terminated an inch out from the stain colored walls. A short hallway led down to a large half working bathroom with a trough style communal urinal. There was a line in front of the door. Only one person at a time wanted to use it. Not a successful plan, the communal urinal model.

Herman and I went over to the seating area and found a booth. A young girl in an apron put a disposable foil ashtray on our table without acknowledging our presence and walked away.

There were a few people at the scattered tables, some of them in normal shirts, and some wearing dirty suit vests or sweaters. The men smoked cigarettes through pinched cardboard filters. Most of them were drinking tea from styrofoam cups and eating some sort of gray meat off fiber spun pale yellow cafeteria trays. You know the kind.

Herman was having tea and dunking the bag in it. "This place isn't going to be ok for me. The way it is now I mean." I agreed and walked over to the counter. I looked into the sparse case. It was almost as if the they were intentionally effecting a parody of the 1980's western impression of a Soviet grocery without the supposed toilet paper lines.

Some people may wonder how a place can stay in business with barely anything to sell all of the time. The answer is because as long as an establishment has patrons, it fills the need in order to exist.

After the collapse, and the committee created the benevolent establishments which catered to the various needs of citizens, places like this no longer needed to worry about profit or sales.

As long as there were people who needed an establishment to exist, that establishment would continue to be subsidized by the allocation of resources based on the number of citizens using the place, regardless of if they actually generated an income or not.

In this case it was the old Russian guys with their cardboard filter tip cigarettes and wives in hairnets with house coats eating the boiled meat from trays who were the benefactors of this establishment.

The man wearing a paper hat looked at me. "We don't have anything." he was scraping the orange grease off the piece of congealed brisket. I looked at the onion rolls. "I think I'll just have an onion roll with butter." he put the spoon down next to the brisket and wiped his hand on his pants. "That we have, just not sandwiches."

"That's fine, just toasted please." I looked back at the booth. Herman was stirring his tea and leafing through a Russian news magazine with faded photos of offices and objects on stands draped with goldenrod tablecloths. There were also captions. In Russian.

When I look at a magazine that's in a language I don't understand, I find myself involuntarily hoping the pictures will have some sort of narrative instead as if put there to supplement and replace the written content.

But they don't usually have that because magazines aren't written for people who don't understand the language they're printed in. And so there's no reference and the photos have no context.

The man in the paper hat asked me if I wanted butter or meat. I said butter and he put it on my roll. I went back to the booth.

Herman was reading one of the pages. "This man won an award. They gave him a crest to hang on his wall." He pointed to a picture of a man wearing a tight knit sweater vest with violently clashing patterns and a gray suit jacket with matching pants. He was standing in front of a wall with an enameled half ivy crown shaped object surrounded by photos in various types of frames. He stared vacantly past the camera at the person behind it.

I cut the roll in half and handed it to Herman. "That's pretty boring bub."

Herman took the roll without looking up. "It says here the award was for some sort of public art project. Either a fountain or a toilet park..." Herman laughed and looked at me. "Probably a fountain..." He laughed again. "Toilet park, I'd like to see that."

Yes. Herman was multilingual.

I enjoy remembering and telling you about the part of time from before Herman became a paranoiac shut-in who, even in a world he created himself, needed constant care to make it through.

 

Part 1g. The Handle Puller

 

Herman and George went down the back basement stairs and in through the boiler room brick breakaway that led to the first set of tunnels.

The only way to get to Wo Hop for Herman, meaning without leaving the building, was through a series of tunnels and hallways which led to the back kitchen entrance.

The back hallway tunnels moved through and connected the basements of the houses swallowed up by the building through time, forming a honeycomb of underground trenches as the building weaved the other properties into the evolving structure.

Strings of misaligned gas pipes embedded in a wide groove in the ceiling, white blue flames under glass in a cage spotted the darkness every few feet.

You might be thinking there could be problems regarding Herman and dark places. And I appreciate your consideration.

However being Herman has been here from the first moment of the building's structural changes, even sometimes appearing to encourage the patterns of change himself, he was comfortable with any pathway within the expanding property, no matter how spooky it might seem to a regular person.

Plus, even if Herman were afraid of the dark, which he isn't, George was there with him and Herman was very much aware of how fiercely protective George was.

George doesn't give a crap about the dark. You likely figured that already.

So after George and Herman crossed through the entire series of tunnels, they finally arrived back into the proper hallways that sat under the original building footprint front basement section.

There was a series of doors with paper notes written for Herman and placed there by the basement people. Each note was written in a combination of Russian, English, and with small incidental notes on the bottom in both Mandarin and Korean lettering.

You may be wondering why the basement people, who are the Chinese owners and workers of Wo Hop, are writing notes in a combination of Mandarin, Russian, English and Korean. I wondered that myself for a while. But then I got distracted and went off to do something else.

I personally don't understand written Mandarin, though I can tell it when I hear it spoken. I don't understand any Korean at all. Written Russian is easy for me as long as the word is one I know, like

PECTOPAH. Which is what restaurant in Russian looks like even though that's not how it sounds.

I hope I mentioned that back in the last chapter what PECTOPAH means. It would be pretty irresponsible for me to use a word as the title of a section of the book and not explain what it means until the next section. If you're reading this, and I did explain it in the last chapter then it means I either did it already and am wrong about forgetting, or I went back and fixed it. If you don't see it up there it either means I forgot, which is unlikely being my obsessive editing process means I get to read each sentence 500 times, or it means I decided I'd rather just explain it now instead. The Wo Hop waiters are probably giving odds on that right now. That last sentence won't make sense until a little later even though it's important.

Ok, enough with the that nonsense, back to the stupid story already with George and Herman in the tunnels and reading the note on the door put there for him by the basement people.

The single English word on the note simply said Herman written inside a sharpie drawn arrow pointing the way through the halls to the back entrance of Wo Hop.

Herman got very excited when he saw the notes were written for him there personally by the basement people. And even though of course he didn't need directions through the tunnels to Wo Hop, the notes gave him a sense of pending importance.

Herman stopped walking and pulled out his drugstore reading glasses. He ran a finger under the line of Mandarin, reading it out loud. "Nee how Herman." He turned around and looked at George. "George, what does nee how mean?"

George looked at the sign and lit a cigarette. "Um... Got me bub, I don't understand Chinese."

Herman put away his glasses. "It's Mandarin, I don't think there's an actual Chinese language." He checked his pocket to make sure his fork was still in it.

George noticed he was checking for the fork. "Got your fork?" "Yep" Herman slipped it out slightly visible.

George fixed the tassel on Herman's Shriner hat which had become bunched up on top somehow. He put his hand on Herman's shoulder. "Ok then my friend. Let's go."

Our adventurers walked through the first in a series of doorways on their way to the dinner for Herman as given by the basement people at Wo Hop.

Meanwhile, back upstairs I finished the rituals and habits forced on my self by the homunculus and sat in the kitchen area waiting for the tralazaplazm to take effect. Tick tock. Click clock. Clack clack.

After around 28 minutes I felt the warm rush of chemically induced semi normalcy and it was time to go. I got out of the chair and grabbed the coin sitting on top of the ice box.

I looked at my coin, the one I somehow assigned a world changing power of importance to one day without thinking, and decided which way to place it in my front pants pocket.

Heads facing out to keep luck in as it relates to interaction with other people, or tails facing out to project luck under the same terms. All as dictated by the homunculus.

After a full ten minutes of self debate over what may happen when I walk out the door and into the world on my way to Wo Hop, a total of 38 steps from my own front door outside the building, I finally

decided how to place the stupid coin in my pocket and got myself out of the dwelling area and down the front stairs.

First one step, then every second one, then third, then go to the other railing, up one step, kick my shoe heel on the step below, and repeat.

This is one reason I rarely go out on appointment. A simple 5 minute task can take over an hour of preplanning to be on time.

Being I was mostly capable of leaving the building, yay for me and my stunning abilities, I was able to take the front door route to the restaurant. Which means I walked out the Kings Highway side of the building, rounded a corner and went down the stairs under the red and yellow backlit sign reading Wo Hop.

I got down the short concrete steps and in through the glass doors, a note saying 'Closed a For Private Party' was taped to the handle.

 

Part 1h. Wo Hop

 

The Wo Hop that moved into the building on Ocean Parkway still matches perfectly the Wo Hop of Mott street in Chinatown.

There's still the glass enclosed swinging door entrance area with an umbrella stand and a pile of old newspapers, and the bubble gum machine with a blurry photocopied kid on crutches printed on a piece of paper like a parody of an outdated lions club charity scam inside with the gum.

Just beyond the second door a cracked pay counter with cigarettes and mints stacked in one of those old enameled metal lifesavers display racks that look like the actual rolls of candy.

There were some of the usual things decorating Wo Hop. Candles with fruit in front of them, gold statue in a box, one of those smiling cats with a moving arm that ticked as it waved.

One corner side booth was decorated with random party objects in anticipation for the celebration of Herman.

Spinettes with congratulations and happy birthday on them were draped along the corner wall with silver pop-rivet hinged golden coated cardboard wedding bells. Red and yellow crepe paper streamers were strung over the booth and below the table along with mini chinatown holiday lanterns with lights in them and some sort of writing up and down the sides. I don't know what they said because like I told you already I can't read mandarin, I also can't read Cantonese. If in fact it was even Cantonese written on the lanterns.

I walked into the entryway and stopped for a moment to watch Herman excited in the role of guest of honor through the window.

The basement people were all gathered around my giant little friend in his shriner hat dressup as he clapped and smiled sitting at the table all laid out for him with some of his favorite items, his fork placed neatly on the red polyester napkin cloth next to a plate of multicolored deep fried shrimp chips.

The deterioration of Herman into the guy I was watching in Wo Hop, wearing a Shriner hat, clapping in a sparkled mist of my own hallucination surrounded by the basement people, the deterioration of the original Herman, it was gradual and obvious and there was nothing could be done to stop it.

I know I've mentioned this several times, possibly too many at this point. But unlike the old lady folding wontons in the corner or a hooker buying groceries in a regular supermarket, I actually did have a singular purpose, and that was to care for Herman. Something which his deterioration marked my failure with on a moment to moment basis.

The basement people were patting Herman on the back and shaking his hand.

Before pushing on the second entry door I noticed it appeared as if they were going to start singing at any moment, I checked to see if anyone saw me so I could retreat into the staircase shadow.

There is only one thing I hate more than cartoons and musical montages, or even cartoons with musical montages, and that is singing in a group.

I had almost decided my escape when George spotted me and shot over an 'if I need to be here for this nonsense then so do you' look, so I went in.

Everybody waved and George came up to me. "Finally. What the hell took you so long? Never mind don't answer that. Let's get out of here."

I hooked my coat up at a booth across the room from the Herman festivities and sat down. "You just made me come in George. I'm not just leaving. It'll be fun, try to tolerate yourself."

George huffed and sat back down across from me. He lit a cigarette. "Manny showed up today."

I looked over at Herman in the party, the singing was still going on, the old lady folding wontons at the round corner table on the other side of the room stood up and saluted in Herman's direction. Not sure why. In all my years going to Wo Hop I have never seen her do anything but fold wontons and drink some sort of wine from a tiny cup.

She was one of those kinds of people we see regularly but only in a certain context, and so we assume that person to have a singular purpose.

Someone constantly pesters you, eventually they end up in the category of pest, neighbor is always noisy, making noise must be their main function and you may be surprised to see them doing something else. Even hookers go do things like wear regular clothes and buy groceries.

Sometimes a person's style and occupation can deflect any probing beyond the stereotype they appear to fit into.

I had no idea what the basement people were singing. It sounded like some sort of Russian memorial ballad stuffed into the structure of happy birthday with an Asian tone of beat and measure. For a moment it seemed there really was something sparkly hanging in the air around Herman.

I took one of George's cigarettes and he lit me a match. "There were no consequences or anything..." George looked at me as if I knew what he was talking about. "... I mean about Manny." He still didn't have my attention, I was watching Herman across the room again. George decided to go with parody. "Well, oh my George you say you ran into Manny, the guy who works for the Imbecile, the guy who wants to take Herman away from this, inject enough stress and rumor so our special friend over there snaps out and packs up, taking everything and us along with it in a gigantic shwoop." I should probably explain that last bit.

George continued "Well George that's very interesting and important George, please, tell me more about the encounter with Manny, oh, and I almost forgot, how could I? I don't know, but I did, I almost forgot to thank you for bringing Herman the stupid chocolate, which

I didn't have time to pick up during the 15 minutes I myself was able to leave the building for without turning into powdered moss."

George caught his breath, and then snapped his fingers in my face. "Hello, you listening? Powdered moss?"

I was certain there was indeed a golden glow of sparkles hanging in the air around Herman, put there by the basement people somehow. I turned around to George. "Oh, yeah, Manny. I'd love to choke the sweat out of that weasel."

I turned back to watching Herman. "Thanks for picking up the stupid chocolate by the way."

George made a frustrated face and then turned around to look in the direction of the beaded kitchen area divider. "Where's my special wine already."

'Special wine' was just regular wine served in a teapot, a tradition that survived from back before the Benevolent Committee repealed all outdated drinking laws, under which Wo Hop had functioned as an after hours establishment.

There was the sound of a plastic party toy, one of those things with the paper that rolls out. One of the old Wo Hop waiters came through the beaded kitchen doorway wearing a cobalt blue pointy hat with silver glitter in his hair from it.

George looked at the waiter, then back at me with a puzzled face. I shrugged. "The guy's being festive."

It was odd to see the 1950's style Chinese man in his red and black waiter jacket and long square unsmiling face wearing a pointy hat with glitter on it.

"Pu-Pu for Herman." He was carrying a large wooden plate with a cast iron round grill and purple blue sterno flames waving above its grate.

There were various little items in the grooved bowls of the wooden rotating platter. Bits of chicken wings, steak on sticky bamboo skewers, triangles of tin foil wrapped chicken and butterfly shrimp fried in a batter. Tiny eggrolls in a woodpile stack with small strings holding it together.

"Pu-Pu. Pu-Pu. Puuu-Puuu-uuu!" Herman clapped his hands together as the Chinese man with the pointy hat placed the platter in front of him on the table.

George got up and pointed at the service cart next to the kitchen entrance. "I'm going to grab some noodles and duck sauce."

I looked at the service cart and then at George. "Ok. You need my permission or something?"

He ignored me.

Herman took his time examining each little stack of items around the cast iron Pu-Pu platter flame pot.

The basement people watched and nodded in anticipation as Herman carefully chose first to have one of the chicken foil wrapped triangles.

One reason for this anticipation was for the pleasure in celebration of Herman. But also is there were undoubtedly several bets placed on which Pu-Pu treat Herman would choose first.

At Wo Hop there was some sort of wager going on between the waiters at any moment and on just about any thing.

It wasn't unusual to see two of them come running out of the kitchen with duplicate orders, banging into each other and kicking chairs in a race to get their dish on the table first, often ending in a shuffleboard style tie breaker knocking of one plate into the booth floor below; the looser left sulking back to the kitchen through the other waiters silhouetted behind the curtain in a flurry of chalkmarking walls and paper money.

One time I went in and one of the old waiters in green surgical gloves with cotton stuffed in his nose was measuring a blue crevice in one of the urinal cakes with a micrometer, while the others stood around him rapidly talking in some form of carnival French slash Pidgin Cantonese with fingers in the air.

It took over an hour to get a simple bowl of wonton soup that day.

There were three color coded take a number machines at the front counter of Wo Hop and not once did I see them used for seating customers.

When a customer did randomly happen to take a number, once seated it would be placed into a gray lockbox in the kitchen's refrigeration unit to be counted in order to generate some sort of jackpot numbers game contest. Leftovers were often weighed and photographed before leaving the restaurant without explanation.

Funny thing is at the end of each day of constant betting, there wasn't one time in almost 100 years the Wo Hop waiters didn't break even. Playing with the houses money, nothing to declare. Almost as if the pattern of betting regulated some other offsite system that needed the type of balance that could only be provided by the Wo Hop waiters' style.

 

Part 1i. Elevator Johnson was on his way to wait.

 

I looked up and out the Wo Hop basement window. There was a ridiculously tall man crouched down in stripe flared pants with a blue jacket, low heel boots and a satin banded white hat which gave him the look of an uncle sam parody without a beard.

Elevator Johnson was his name. It was his real name. I'm not sure why.

Herman stopped unwrapping his foil triangle of chicken. "His parents thought he would already grow up to be tall, and so that was his name." Seems like as ridiculous and unlikely an excuse for naming a kid elevator as any I've heard before. So it may be true.

When unlikely reasons for something pair up they usually set the expectation baseline back down past perceptual zero, and in the right environment just about any argument can seem sensible, no matter how rotten the explanation really is.

Elevator Johnson was on his way to wait when he noticed the party and Herman through the Wo Hop basement window behind the glass.

When I say Elevator Johnson was on his way to wait I mean he was on his way to wait; going to a predetermined meeting place to wait for a connection he already knew wouldn't arrive. 'On the wire' as he called it.'

He lived in the moment between the fixing of habits and the contact of strangers. This condition of placement coupled with his constant state of deficit need, put Elevator Johnson in a position of always waiting for something; contact, money, drugs, difference, just about anything a regular person takes for granted.

The time of a junky is measured in the availability of a fix and the space between each one. Life by stopwatch. As long as the addict is within range of the fixing mechanism, the time spent between fixing is incidental.

As Burroughs once defined, in his book Junky, the term 'running on junk time', in which for a junky the time between fixes is just there to be filled until it's time for the next shot, that is, as long as one is available. Otherwise the time is spent trying to secure the next fix.

For Elevator Johnson, after years of incompetence and the inability to plan ahead in order to obtain the fix before running out, it was the time spent waiting between fixing that had eventually become the habit itself.

Like a junky of any type, Elevator Johnson had at some point become trapped in the circular pattern of waiting for a fix and then preparing to find the next one, and his life grew and folded around a pattern of addiction to the cycle in itself.

However, unlike a regular junky, addicted to a drug that doesn't exist and would never arrive, Elevator Johnson, in a state of convenience, had somehow developed an addiction to the waiting period between fixes and the disappointment in anticipation of withdrawals.

In order to achieve this he still had to seek the warm orgasmic capillary flush bang bringing the release of getting right and the simple state of homeostasis that followed. But barely ever obtain it.

Ice under the nails instead, static dust in the lungs, steel wool under the eyelids and everything vibrating crackle blue. Facial muscles curling and that feeling of a sideways sweeping shift of the floor. A sense of disconnected nostalgia, similar to the brief condition when coming on to acid, but lasting for days and without the release of an effective distraction.

Familiarity, even the red eyed sand in the skin chill of withdrawals or a punch in the face every morning before school, familiarity of any type can translate into habit.

Funny thing is, for Elevator Johnson to get his inverse fix of never actually getting right, he had to continually ruminate on and seek the fix, but only obtain it enough to continue the withdrawal pattern; keep enough junk in his body to tease the cells into noticing it's not enough.

Living in this continual state of deficit need forcing him into the moment, if there is one thing that brings a person into the present, it's withdrawals, and because of it Elevator Johnson never acknowledged the possibility of a future, and so he had none. He was stuck in the present forever, and the best he could hope was for the changes around him to be gentle as time went sliding past him.

Elevator Johnson was well aware of his condition. Life by stopwatch, addicted to waiting. He was an observer and not a participant;

resigned to document a life rather than live one. He didn't have enough hope to spread around for himself to think what may or may not become of the document, and in rare times when he wasn't uncontrollably forced into complete focus on his present condition, he would become concerned about what he may not leave behind.

These thoughts however were brief and forgotten against the rest of his general condition.

Before the committee came to power, it was much easier for Elevator Johnson to maintain this condition in a pure state. The limited access to illegal drugs of any type created a velvet rope distribution funnel through which the addict was supplied and the scarcity of the drug created a high margin pricing structure that had an entire exchange economy resting on it's foundation.

The limited availability and inflated cost of drugs caused an illegal trade of stolen goods, which had companies justify working predicted losses into their pricing structures, and caused a need for people to replace stolen items, items often manufactured in prisons filled with people working for pennies on the hour, incarcerated for selling, possessing, or even being in the presence of, the illegal substance.

And so there were many ways an addict could miss the mark for a connection, either because of artificially created rarity, or strictly an inability to make the money required to meet the inflated prices.

However since the committee reclassified all previously illicit habits and illegal drugs, and set up the citizen run establishments and dispensaries, there was no longer the period between any type of fix where the addict had to wait for the dealer and come up with enough of whatever in order to fix.

This all caused Elevator Johnson to have to remap and come up with his own plan in order to maintain a condition of artificial scarcity to satisfy his need for the sensation and disappointment of the anticipation of junk sickness. His plan was neither intricate or graceful and there's no need yet to bore you with the details.

I watched as Elevator Johnson stood up from his crouching position, leaving now only his legs visible through the basement window.

He turned around and looked at the lighted activity in the windows along the intersecting streets, and slowly walked away until his figure was dissolved into the darkness down the boulevard in the direction of the park.

 

Coda 2: Choosing Socks It was difficult to explain to the girl why he had to clap three times.

Sometimes he'd wonder what it would be like to close the door without having to turn the lights on and off while humming.

He would have interesting fantasies about not being the kind of person celebrities send money to support programs for.

Sometimes he didn't want his t-shirt to have to must match the underwear.

There were some days when he was tempted not to take the five little clay green pills with food at bedtime.

One false move could cripple an entire day.

He thought it was a healthy step to choose socks with his eyes closed instead of spending hours ruminating over cause and effect.

Eventually all of his socks had some sort of comical charge, now he wears the same pair every day and leaved the rest in their positions in the drawer.

There were certain reasons for these abnormalities. All of them made complete sense until a regular person was involved by accident.

continue.