Nocturnal Omissions: A Grim Faerie Tale of Murder, Money Laundering, Buggery, Incest, Insecticide and Lycanthropy – an Account of Life Within a Disorganized and Dysfunctional Crime Family

By Peter Samuel Kolins

a grim faerie tale of murder, money laundering, buggery, incest, insecticide and lycanthropy-- an account of life within a disorganized and dysfunctional crime family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 17, 2008
• ISBN: 9781462823826

Peter Samuel Kolins

Peter Samuel Kolins is a corporate lawyer in New York. Nocturnal Omissions is his first book and he is grateful for the many real and unreal characters that inhibit it.

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Copyright © 2008 by Peter Samuel Kolins.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

PART TWO

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

‘A devil masters each of us; but it is not having been

in the dark house, it is having left it that counts.’

Theodore Roosevelt, in a letter to the American poet,

Edward Arlington Robinson.

INTRODUCTION

A dark sea of passion and violence, veiled undercurrents of inner betrayal, a cycle of madness and decline going well beyond the horrors of garden variety insanity, and a climactic battle against malevolent forces for the possession of a man’s soul; yes, that would be Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’, three aisles over in the ‘Classic Books’ section. This is instead a particularly grim faerie tale of murder, kidnapping, money laundering, buggery, incest, insecticide and lycanthropy—an account of life within a disorganized and dysfunctional East Village crime family, and here you will encounter an altogether different depth-dwelling species, a lawyer—a person or thing that would climb a tree to tell a lie rather than stand on the ground and tell the truth.

My name is ‘Compote’, ‘Thurston Compote’ and I shall be serving as your narrator and designated ethicist, a difficult task in any tale of the law and its minions, and one made especially loathsome in this particular case as I shall be devoting significant unwarranted attention to Humping, the story’s least tolerable main character and my own personal cross to bear since the day I first met him at law school nearly 25 years ago; and had I made due observation, applying my theory that there is ironic contrast in all things living, I might have realized it was not his hair but his morals that were then receding.

At a dime bag shy of five foot-nine, he was too short to be tall and the flesh that he carried about with him covered altogether too much bone. It wasn’t that he was too thin; rather that he didn’t take up quite enough space. He had two eyes, dark and well pinned, two ears protruding out at something like the customary parallel angle, and a head that, although not a clinical abnormality, was nonetheless somewhat larger for a person of such small personal stature. Everything was in just about the right place; but somehow none of it quite worked.

When I had first arrived in the East Village from my family’s home in Greenwich, Connecticut in the mid-1970’s I was alternately charmed and horrified by the dilapidated and abandoned buildings that lined streets flooded with protesters clashing with police officers seeking to enforce curfews, evictions and warrants. Candy stores sold heroin, cocaine and crack, and gunshots rang out in Tompkins Square Park and the surrounding area during the night, leaving the neighborhood littered with the bodies of people who had been killed or had died of a drug or fun overdose; a third world city with a lively mix of people, junkies, drug dealers, students, poets and writers. Being a concerned citizen and, too, possessed of a fierce investigative nature, I knew that one day when my law career was at an end I would forge a reputation as a documentarian of suffering and strife. Nowadays, being less than mildly interested in the hardship of victims of natural disaster in Indonesia and victims of very unnatural disaster, the misery of sex workers in Thailand and Cambodia, I decided to write this book instead.

A local storytelling troupe was in those earlier days performing at a drug ’n shrug lounge at the corner of Clinton and Stanton Streets. Sensing that I too would one day be sharing a story of my own, I made mention of this to a member of the troupe, earnestly assuring him that I planned to take a slow walk around the subject, patiently assembling the facts, sifting through the archival records, judiciously weighing the evidence, some of it new, some of it old. The man slapped me hard across the face, offering serious admonition. ‘Storytellers are sought out because of their extreme personal confessional tone; but the tale has to seem real, especially so at the beginning. Most of all, storytelling will succeed only when it is truly participatory. We always enjoy hearing about the troubled lives of our friends and our enemies, encountering all kind of messy truths appealing to those with a multitude of unanswered questions and at least one eye partially open. Still, it has to be more than a verbal form of voyeurism, a tepid connection to what is happening. The readers need to get involved; but there are limits.’

Having in mind those limits, I will offer in defense of Humping’s unruly behavior that he always attempted to confine his most off-putting undertakings to those that came most naturally to him and that, although his restless ways had him staying up way past his bedtime at private clubs where the lowest common denominator more often than not was he himself, he was but a reflection of the times in which he lived. It was a time when ‘45’ meant ‘music’ rather than the number after 44, and ‘Apple’ meant fruit; when the Strategic Air Command, with airborne B-52’s waiting to drop tactical nuclear bombs on the underfed and under-washed masses, had begun a promotional campaign with a new slogan: ‘peace is our business’; and a time when a panel of high-ranking defense department officials had issued a strongly worded indictment against sexual harassment in the armed forces stating that ‘the military may have been in the business of killing and maiming, but rudeness is a different matter entirely’. New York Times headlines actually read, ‘Major Shift on Integration—‘Separate but Equal’ Wins Support from NAACP’, ‘In Need of Income, Cemeteries are Seeking Breathing Clientele’ and ‘Bathroom Attendants in Bid for Tips’; and it was a time when NYC Mayor Al Shrapnel, fresh from his starring role in yet one more race-baiting fiasco, had called the place ‘a gorgeous mosaic except for the people who live here.’

The scrapbook that documents the events is frayed now, the photos, clippings and court documents all faded with time; and on this late wintry Connecticut evening, I will crack it open as I often do on such days, knowing that I will be unleashing a flood of memories from what seems to have been a former life. Still, this is not a story of age-yellowed lives. It is a play within a play; the characters diverse but equal individuals, neither politically nor in several cases anatomically correct, nonetheless always aware of their own part of the work and able to compose and critique it, bending the rules and ignoring the script as they deem fit to do so.

The story commences in a church in the East Village and concludes in a synagogue in that same locale, but it is not a tale of morality or redemption; neither will there be any other or further reference to a power higher than the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York or Humping’s mother. There is bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity. Anachronisms abound, but the pivotal events actually did happen. The truth is here even if only between the lines. Sometimes the truth appears directly over the lines, making this an even more difficult book to read or understand.

Budgetary constraints have made it necessary for Ms. Dino Baldino, a cross-dressing and otherwise bent out of shape member of the cast, tragically possessed of multiple personalities, all of them uncommonly nasty and unlikable, a blood-drained master of the deflating putdown, to portray multiple roles of each gender; and as accomplished as the rest of the cast is, it is Baldino alone who finds the complexity beneath the ostensible nastiness of those roles, striding the divide between comic intoxication and public drunkenness.

Finally, it should come as no great surprise that Lower Manhattan is still in bad shape, having been hit by a horrifying crash that still creates images jump-starting the memories of every New Yorker who smelled the white dust, saw the drifting burned scraps of paper, or still bear searing physical or mental scars; but in this place and at this time, we find a city worthy of pride and love; just as important, we find a city worthy of narration.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

PERSONS OF INTEREST

The East Village grammarian, Ms. Beatrice (pronounced in the Italian style, ‘bee-a-tree-chay’) Webster has oft-times described the East Village as ‘a concentrate of art, literature, education, drugs and sex, an audacious low-rise stretch of limestone, bricks and concrete where the real life of the city takes place, a designated fun-zone bringing artists, writers, poets, actors and promoters of weird commerce to a compact area, a magical place in all its incarnations; a place with tomorrow and yesterday, but no today.’ Preferring rigid specificity to mere flight of fancy and cloying pomposity, I myself would characterize the area as bounded by 14th Street and East Houston on the north and south and by the East River and Broadway, east and west, respectively. But there had once been a time when the East Village was an area of colliding populations, the city’s filthiest crime and gang-ridden neighborhood, where residents faced a daily dodge of knife-wielding thugs and prostitutes packing the sidewalk; when an afternoon at the cinema meant pushing your way past junkies in the aisles hawking drugs as if they were peanuts to a squeaky seat with worrisome stains and a time when divorce was put to a plurality vote at dinner time.

The East Village offers its many visitors the hope of discovering an utterly charming and exceptionally beautiful old church building. Nevertheless, keeping a house even for the Lord can be an expensive proposition. So it was that many of the classic churches were then being put to less-spiritual uses. Designed in the latter part of the 19th-Century by the notoriously priapic architect, Stanford Whitehead, deemed capable of the most rococo of motifs and lifestyles, the Church of the Blessedly Naïve Child displayed granite-hewed gargoyles linked fang-and-claw, leering up at funereal spires that spiked into low-drifting cloud formations. Flying buttresses criss-crossed gothic-themed, morally-stained glass entry points that were aligned at such angles as would entreat rays of the moon to shoot in and illuminate the stygian-like setting, producing the effect of drawing one deep inside, keeping them there, capitalizing on the ‘moth to the flame’ strategy tried once too often by the Vatican’s demon hip-hopping hair-stylist, Sweeny Toad. A major façade renovation was made necessary as more than one-third of the bricks were cracked and few of the intact pieces matched the others in earth tone and ambiance, raising the question whether it would have been less expensive to replace all the bricks at $500 apiece or cover the entire façade with $50’s and $100’s?

That morning, a piercing shriek filled the lavender dreamy stillness of the church; no, nothing could quell the aching pain between Francis Cardinal Spellbound’s legs.

Holy fuck, the priest, I’m bleeding again; must be my cycle. No, you morons, I’m talking about my bicycle, the one where the seat went missing two weeks ago and nobody called to tell me about it. So tell me, how is it there’s approximately 18,762 feet of live bratwurst down here in the East Village and a nice girlie-guy like me can’t get a few lousy feet? Nope, no one will ever hear me say I can’t take it any longer. Uhmm, as the priest’s eyes left their sockets and were roving the line forming in front of the confessional, catching sight of the boys and girls, many of whom had been drinking; but the low light made it impossible for him to know whether the caged young party monster lunging back and forth, rendering staccato-like thrusts, challenging him with her newest unpublished hit, ‘Smells Like Teenage Laundry’, was just one more zonked-out congressional page his frizzy hairdo way-too-daring for the delicate jewelry and dress or Greg Louganis truly gone off the deep end.

‘Hands in my pockets and my back against the wall/now wouldja? There’s a present in my pocket/reach a little bit further/or shouldja? Stuck ya finga on the needle and ya need to see a doctor/how couldja?" McCrawley Trollkien, waving his arms wildly above his head like some punch-drunk fighter who had spent one-too-many rounds in the ring with his mother.

Displaying a wave of body piercing and a silver bolt popping a clamped head through an angry swelling tongue, he was mindful not to disappoint the cheering mob that witnessed the primitive tearing at his clothes, at the same time careful to avoid the way-off-duty NYPD members shoving and pummeling the throng swaying in a line that snaked from the doorstep of the building to within a coin toss of the local precinct. However, the sheer scantiness of his costume showed so many ridges, grooves and wellsprings that even Ms. Webster had demanded a brief respite from all the male flesh on display.

Goodness gracious, Cardinal Spellbound, one might take special note of the tiny adjustments to the timbre and the phrasing, a form of sexual Kabuki, a stylist of remarkable subtlety, able to draw a single note into a full-fashioned flutter, a hint of wings as he plays the role of abandoned youth brimming with true romantic sagacity. Do you take special requests?

Later on, Trollkien, when I get inside with you and allow myself to mingle, encouraging the priest to drop two quarters down the back of his pants but not reach back in for the 25 cents change.

*     *     *

It was nine o’clock that next morning in Calcutta, India and eleven million Hindus kneeled down to mourn, paying homage on the bi-weekly anniversary of the death of the goddess, Saraswati; in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, a near-equivalent number of anguished Muslims were entering the holy month of Ramadan, requiring them to abstain from the more pungent forms of entertainment as a display of personal sacrifice, purification and personal hygiene; and in Bazookistan, once a part of the former Soviet Union, 25,000 members of the Cathedral of the Transfiguration of Our So-Called Economic System celebrated survival of the persecution of the czars and the Bolsheviks and were preparing for the invasion of the American junk bond promoters.

But at the Church of the Blessedly Naïve Male Child in the East Village of New York City, where the clock on the steeple always read, ‘it’s time for you know what’, Cardinal Spellbound was pissed-off, the smile on his face then flashing ‘insufficient fun’. The rectory still reeked of over-priced, underhanded sex; the inky medicinal scent of the crisp new bills the priest had tendered the prior evening to McCrawley Trollkien, his newly hired spiritual assistant and keeper of the organ, having lingered long after the 12-year-old had left him in stitches and sorrowful reminiscences. Of more immediate concern, however, was which of the ritualized leather garments he himself would be wearing on the occasion, eventually settling on the velveteen cloak, matching cod-piece ensemble and red satin flip-flops with the uplifted metal tips, as he would not have been caught dead wearing the traditional rough leather shoes the other local clerics had lately taken to wearing off-campus.

Fellow sinners, the priest, downstairs in the chapel, due to a lack of eligible participants, the East Village’s ‘Annual Easter Procession of the Blessed Virgins’ will be held in another neighborhood. I pledge to leave no child’s behind.

Talk about ‘child rearing’, Trollkien.

My cup runneth over.

Wishing won’t make it so, the spirited assistant.

Come let us prey.

‘Pray’, and if that ‘cup runneth over’ business had to do with the moonlit fly-fishing cruise you and me took to Fire Island last night when you were all the time confusing ‘grouper’ and ‘groper’, then I shall say, ‘evil will not depart from the house of one who returns evil for good’, Proverbs 17:13’.

17:14’, but who’s counting?

And what have you got to say about the church’s long-standing policy of excluding women from the priesthood? Jesus was a male and he chose only men to be his disciples.

Dammit, Trollkien, maybe if you got yourself a decent manager, voice coach and are guided well, you might move to line of shoes to line of clothing to chain of chicken stores to drug-dealing motel chain? Then again, the Indian giver, "you might continue to earn a living as a puto with a client base that’ll keep on coming even after you reach puberty. So tell me, just what part of unconditional love and commitment is that street hustlers like you can never understand?"

I still cry about last night, when you told me how fast and graceful I could be when you put me on the Vatican’s Olympic Swim Team when all I really wanted was a ‘Clorox’ lollipop to get the taste outta my mouth.

"I dunno, Spellbound, but it’s beginning to look like what we got in your own case is a failure to ex-communicate."

"Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned."

"How’s that possible, as it’s only been 26 minutes since your last confession? When is it you find the time?"

Lately, I’ve been grappling with hundreds of sexual abuse suits filed by teenage parishioners refusing to kneel down in the sight-and-sound-proofed confessional booth without armed security guards. I’ve seen lawyers who don’t represent me and representatives who don’t speak for me, dealing with dreadful allegations that seem to surface every time I go past the local playgrounds passing out candy and five-dollar bills. I wake up in the middle of the night with my stomach in knots, trying to keep track of all the litigation. What will happen if I get arrested?

"You’ll go to the can and I’ll go to the movies."

Can you have forgotten what Jesus says in the gospel of St. John, that ‘in the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer as I have overcome the world’ and then a few paragraphs down that ‘only the man who makes the journey can truly speak about it’?

"I am not of a mind to endure the unendurable and suffer the insufferable, especially since you knew the rules about ‘keeping your hand in’ when you took the job. Church higher-ups like you can never be forgiven what they have done once it has become a matter of public knowledge. Still, be assured I have no doubt that at least a few of your victims were bad seeds."

"Wazzat ‘seed’ as in me ‘spreading my seed upon the Earth’?"

"No, you freak, it was ‘seed’ as in ‘I jes seed what you did all over that little kid’s sparkle-ized sneakers."

Trying to be holy is becoming holy. Trying to be a good shepherd is becoming a good shepherd. It is all in God’s hands and only he is responsible for my misdeeds. My sins of omission will be perceived merely as failed efforts at integrity and goodness and I will be forgiven and redeemed.

"Why dontcha try spending less time telling me how to do my job and find yourself a way to increase rather than scare off church membership? Have you given thought to offering qualified stock options, tax-deferred compensation and insider trading information to new members? No, then how do you expect to lure away people from the synagogue across the hall? Ya know, an exorcism can be an ugly thing, but I think it’s just about time we had one. Now where’d I put that red, leather-bound book put out by The Pontifical Academy Regina Apostolorum, outlining in detail the prayers, the blessing and sprinkling of holy water, the laying on of hands and making the cross or whatever? Goddammit . . . oops, there I go again, using my own name in vain."

As for McCrawley Trollkien, his other pernicious activities in the local neighborhood caused even greater consternation later that week when he could be seen in a brief struggle with Father Bruce Ritter of Covenant House fame, wresting away a platinum diadem made by Lavabre for Cartier in 1911, offering only that ‘when you give something away, madam, you never miss it.’

*     *     *

Opal, the orphanage room clerk, Amoebous, you put one more tattoo on your body and I’ll take a freaking steam iron to it! and just maybe the sweet orphan child had gone a tad over the top with the newest tattoo on her right butt-cheek, ‘if you can read this, you owe me money’. The tattoo on her left cheek I shall leave to your imagination, averring only that it matched in both longitude and lassitude. The room clerk’s forearm displayed a faded tattoo that spelled the word ‘regret’.

Yeah, Amoebous, that regret business was a few months ago when one of my other girlfriends ran off with an older brother, the one that didn’t have the AIDS yet. Damn, I know I’ll never love again, at least not that slimy shitbox. Oh well, time for me to get Opal fixed up for her next customer. This time, I won’t be confusing the can of cover-up spray with the vat of ‘Sears’ insecticide. The main thing though is to make money. No problem there for her though, as the mystery went out of ‘kinky’ for Opal when she was twelve or maybe nine, although I can’t remember exactly how much the Uganda soccer team paid me for the experience.

Opal was not in her room that next morning when the orphanage room clerk took his first shot of the day, causing the back portion of his skull to go flying out the window like a hairy unguided cantaloupe, leaving in blessed memoriam a flash of fire illuminating pumpkinized splat on the kitchen wall; and the cuisinized blood stream flowing from the event had not ruined the Tootsie Plohound platforms she had lately taken to wearing; but that was the day she decided that the East Village Orphanage for Unadoptable Street Sluts might have been a nice place to sell soft-core sex and buy hard-core drugs, but sure as shit she didn’t want to live there anymore.

*     *     *

Modern scientists say that the troubles began when White Star Line’s ship builder, Harland and Wolff, reached beyond its regular supplier of rivets and rivet iron and ordered No. 3 bar, known as ‘best’—not No. 4, known as ‘best best’, traditionally used for anchors, chains and rivets. Many of the rivets studied by the scientists at the site of the disaster were found to be riddled with high concentrations of slag, a glassy residue of smelting that can make rivets brittle and prime to fracture. Other ship builders of the day, as for example, Cunard Lines, were then moving from iron to steel, which was much stronger; and although Harland and Wolff used steel on the rivets in the central hull, where stress was expected to be greatest, iron rivets were chosen for the bow, where the iceberg struck.

Get on with it! a reader.

It was the social strategy of the Humping family of London, England to have money without actually being seen to make it. Maintaining a toehold on the lowest possible rung of British high society, the Humping’s were tolerated, but only barely, at most social gatherings, although such was never the case when the older, more comatose of the House of Lords were expected to be in remission. Angered at the perceived rebuke, the family patriarch sought redress in the circumstance.

‘Last year my family spent its quarter-annual Spring break traveling around the world, but this year we’re going somewhere else. Yes, I have booked passage for us on the most extravagant ocean-going steamship our peace-loving neighbor state, Germany has to offer, the ‘Teutonic’. True, the Teutonic is a near-ancient antique, lacking that ‘new boat’ smell; and all the extra lifeboats and Mae West’s on deck likely give it a fishy odor; but the Teutonic shows decent porno, as for example ‘Das Bootie’, and critically acclaimed classics like ‘Ship of Fools’ and that inspirational Disney flick, ‘Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’. Yes, folks, the Titanic it is.’

*     *     *

When an individual frets over physical appearance, staring for more than two hours daily into an object bearing the admonition ‘objects may be even uglier than they actually appear’, it may be symptomatic of body dysmorphic disorder, a preoccupation with an imagined defect in personal appearance, or in recognition of a genuine deformity.

"‘One singular sensation, every little move I make, Clarabellus Humping, the sole survivor of the clan, so tell me, mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the hottest 75-year-old in the East Village?"

Congratulations, Clarabellus, you’re right up there on the list just after John C. Merrick, the self-styled ‘Elephant Man’, the image, on due reflection. You’ve got the appearance of something grown in a basement, likely suffering from sickle-cell bulimia and conspicuous consumption, each an ‘orphan disease’, one of the nearly 5,000 disorders so uncommon that the large pharmaceutical companies choose to ignore them, assuming there would not be enough customers to recover development costs plus the usual 1000%.

I can face that.

And why not, as you are a man of many faces, all unfortunately your own. Frankly, if my dog had a face like that, I would shave his ass and make him walk backward. Incidentally, that cologne you’ve lately taken to wearing, does it contain secretions from the cadriocrum plant found in the Himalayas having a stem that towers to 15-feet topped by 10-inch lilies or am I confusing the cadriocrum with the voodoo lily, sauromatum guttatum, which can generate heat with only a mild stench, bearing huge flowers which can weigh up to a half a pound each and get as hot as 108 degrees inside, but which possesses a fleshy purple spike emitting waves of heat and a foul odor not unlike a mad cow with gills?

What ‘cologne’?

Did I fail to mention the glimmering tooth curiously poking its way through your lower lip?

That’s not my lower lip, you moron; it’s my chin.

Which one? the image, craven.

*     *     *

Labor Day has always been a ‘dressing down’ day, but such has never been the case at ‘Wigstock’, the East Village’s annual drag queen festival held at Tompkins Square Park, a magnet for political protest, a rallying point for strident opponents of gentrification and advocates for the homeless. That particular Wigstock morning, Mr. Humping could be heard to boast about the rest of his Rubbermaid having-a-real-bad day kind of number.

This purple trash-can I glued onto my butt demonstrates my commitment to recycling.

And the bee-hive hair-do? the local beat cop Roadie McDonald, attired in a tailored suit jacket that had been cut with extra material around the waist to avoid unsightly bulges from gun, gear and gut.

The higher the hair, the closer to God.

"Keep your distance!"

Ah yes, witty, canny and in that same moment eternally youthful, the old man, enraptured, filled with wisdom, a face registering pain, loneliness, and resignation, possessed of narrow ankles, near-perfect calves, a tiny waist, alabaster throat, lush full red lips and matching nose; blue eyes beneath dark, over-arched brows, chestnut hair that looks to have been stroked two thousand times a night since old enough to handle a brush in the authorized manner.

Jeez, Mr. Humping, the orphan child Opal, you sure got a way of sweet-talking something like me that’s always got its horns up.

I wasn’t talking about you, dear; I was talking about myself.

There it is again, me having to suffer premature bone-loss. Shit, even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and getting kicked!

Actually, young lady, most New Yorkers have become used to a boneless world, what with neighborhood butcher shops where one might see a haunch of lamb or a side of beef being dismantled fast disappearing, replaced by supermarkets selling packages of boneless chicken breast and ground beef to the point that no one quite understands the anatomy of the animal anymore.

Mr. Humping, are you Irish?

"Why’d you ask that?"

Because the other day when you were trying to yank my ‘Cat Woman’ polyester pants-suit over my head so that you could try it on, I had to help you out. God, isn’t it a great day when you pee and it doesn’t sting?

Talk about a pig in the city.

Mr. Humping, that quarter-inch thick cylindrical item in your front pocket, is it flashlight or are you just happy to see . . . no, it’s a flashlight.

And how would you know something like that?

You left it ‘on’.

Oops.

Mr. Humping, I love you. I’d even take a bullet for you.

"Howsabout taking a bullet from me?"

Omigod, the local beat cop Roadie McDonald, two days later, wailing with grief, rocking side to side like the clapper of a bell and pleading, please let me touch her clothes, her sandals and leather death mask. There must be some bones somewhere. There must be something. I need to have something. No wait up; there she is, over there in the bushes, pumping at the pedals of a virtual Exercycle riding to the heavens, eager for the mere chance at winning; and that lovely smile of hers as she beckons to me with a slip of paper reading, ‘take a number and line up in the Grand Central Station Men’s Room.’ Alright, Opal, lifting her up and frog-marching her onto the curb, rule number ‘one’ in the East Village is cross in the middle of the street, not at the corner; otherwise the traffic light might drop on your head and you might fall into the crosswalk."

Ain’t no flies on me.

Little enough that; and didja even know that down here in the East Village a yellow light means ‘walk right out into the street with a blindfold, lay your burdens down and take a nice long nap’?

What about the heavy traffic, the delivery trucks coming so close to where you’re now shoving me, they pose at least some danger, no?

Whap!

Damn, the local beat cop, running from the gory scene, that was a close one!

*     *     *

In ‘Bleak House’, Charles Dickens describes a place that ‘so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is no honorable man among its practitioners who would not give the warning, ‘suffer any wrong that can be done to you, rather than come here!’

The Humping family apartment on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village was the kind of place where the skeletons in the closet were ashamed of the people that lived there.

A proud father who left for work at 8 p.m. on days ending with a ‘why’ and returned home that next morning in a blond wig, wearing a smile and loaded with bad checks, Clarabellus Humping was a burlicue’d cocktail pianist specializing in tunes peppered with racy bon mots that could turn a young man from a proper background into a roller-blading carcaradon carcaradis. He could usually be heard offering up a lavenderized version of Cole Porter’s, ‘You’re The Top’ that would have caused even that composer to use his blush. His song at an end, he would slump on his stool and go crashing to the floor where he could next be heard spouting sharply-held opinions of Broadway legends he pretended to have known, guilt-edged leather-bound scores and manuscripts of non-produced musical shows and scrapbooks teeming with vaguely memorable memorabilia from a rose-colored past where life had been one never-ending soiree and the boys had been free. Eventually he achieved modest fame as the ‘East Village Nightingale’, strolling about the streets late at night, singing very high; at other times, he was quite sober. He believed himself to be a respected member of the East Village community up to but not actually including the day he learned that ‘grande maricon’ meant ‘major faggot’. It was a day when a shackle of cutting-edged Latino junkies wearing tanked tee-tops reading, ‘yo keeps on paying yo taxes an we keeps on living las vidas locas’ had shouted out to him, ‘cabeza de mierda’ (‘shithead’) and ‘ciu cia la banana’ (‘eat me’).

Also a few apples short of a picnic, his wife, Opal Humping was a beautiful young woman, hauntingly so and strikingly aggressive, who brought balance to the unholy alliance, many times interrupting the conversation of others as if it belonged to no one exactly. Mrs. Humping considered herself to be a much-adored member of the local community up to but not actually including the day an elderly nun who had crossed the street to avoid her suffered a bout of Tourneau’s Syndrome, causing her to toss her ¼-pound Rolex to the pavement and break a 32-year vow of silence to shout out, ‘Opal, your mother, God love her whoever she was, had two assholes, including you!’ Mrs. Humping had a voice that seemed to channel root wisdom, causing one to think she might have been a teacher in another life; but Mrs. Humping was not a teacher, and she was not in another life. She was in Mr. Humping’s life.

"‘Take out the paper and the trash’, moving to the beat that morning, and while you’re at it, ‘Mr. Softee’, why dontcha sit