Hey! (Gary: yelling, banging on my door) Nephew in-law, we gotta chat!

Woah, Gary, Gary, (Me: sitting in easy chair under SAD lamp)

Sometimes Gary stumbles back from Kilkenny’s Pub in the middle of the night and feels like settling some scores with his tenants. Also, he’s a piss drunk. I mean the kind of drunk who tends to drop his shorts in the hall and piss under your door. And he is, presently, banging on my door. So, I fear what is to come.

Don’t ‘Woah, Gary’ me, Tevas! (Gary again: knocking) If you don’t open up, I’m gonna piss under your door!

Things have been a little tense between us lately. He’s my landlord, and also my soulmate Hola’s uncle. Before Hola got locked up last year, he let us live here rent free. But now that it’s just me, and me and Hola, her being in jail, we’re in something of a mare’s nest, having pissed off Johnny-Law in what was really just a big misunderstanding… Look, I’m trying to pay my way. I know he’s done a lot for us, but he makes it very difficult. I don’t like speaking ill or negative toward anyone. I’m a believer in positive thinking. A seeker of harmony. An animal lover. But empathy, to Gary, is a completely foreign concept.

(unzipping)

Maybe I just need to be more Zen about this. Maybe it’s me that needs to change. I’m open to that idea. Sure. I shouldn’t be characterizing Gary’s whole existence as antagonistic. As much as it feels that way. Like, a lot of people would be better off without mosquitoes, maybe, because of Malaria and West-Nile and… yet they still emanate from the same life force as you, me, the Dalai Lama, my precious Hola, sitting in the women’s pen… Ghaddafi… yeah… We all have a purpose. That’s where I’m going with this. Even if I can’t see his purpose right now.

(shorts hitting floor)

I have to remind myself now that Gary is human, that I am human. Though, this is partly because I’ve been smoking salvia. I’m presently coming out of a dissociative episode where I thought I was a bathmat. I still am, at the moment, not entirely convinced I’m not a bathmat, but

Last chance! (banging intensifying, Gary now bashing door so hard SAD lamp is flickering)

Gary… Man, it is 2:30 in the A.M.

I’m trying to move, really, but it’s like running in a swimming pool. I’m smacking my cheeks purple trying to come down. Not a bathmat, not a bathmat, not a

Selling Special-K in the hallway, Tevas? Think I wouldn’t know you were off the wagon? That old WASPy couple walked on their lease tonight and they let me hear all about you.

Let’s work this out sensibly, at a reasonable hour… And I’ll level with you Gary, man to man… (all the serenity I can harness in my voice) I’m pretty blitzed at the moment, however

You dirty wook, I’m trying to get this dump gentrified! (door chain about to come out of wall) Your mama gave you a damn woman’s name and it messed up your brain chemistry.

I was named after the sandal.

That’s it! (yelling) I’m pissing!

His stream hits the linoleum with some industrial PSI, producing a low leg-hair-tickling mist. I unlock the door and he charges me like a feral hog, pinching his dick to pause the stream. His free hand can’t decide whether it wants to push me down or lift me by the collar. We’re close enough now to trade air. His silver hair is gelled back—poker-straight and nothing out of place. His right nipple is bleeding and the red blotch is slowly spreading outward, concentrically, consuming the palm tree pattern on his rayon shirt like a shadow.

(slowly raising finger toward nipple) What’s

Sorority broad bit off my titty ring.

Why was she

(reaching around my head, grabbing ponytail, dragging me down hallway)

(trying to keep pace, shuffling side to side, so he doesn’t pull hair out)

Rent’s late so you sell some K to the neighbors, huh?

Search my place, Gary. Nothing to sell.

Right, right… You’re a little saint, aren’t you? That’s why you’re free and sweet Hola’s locked up. You sure I’m not gonna find any pills in there?

Just natural remedies, Gary.

Now what the fuck counts as natural to you, acid brain?

I gotta sell the rest of the K, Gary. You can’t flush that. Gets in the ground water, in the breast milk, and the babies get spacey and

(jabbing index finger in the soft spot under my chin, dick flopping and dribbling urine along the hallway floor)

(eyes meeting his, which are half open but maintain that dipsomaniacal intensity)

Now we wrestle!

He’s been known to wrestle tenants over rent, security deposits, etc.

I’m not a fighter, Gary.

You win, I turn a blind eye. Sell all the Ketamine you want. It’s your circus. But first you pin me. That means shoulders to the ground for a three count, out loud, one Mississippi, two Mississippi

Gary, man, sir, I can’t really get down with this stone age

three Mississippi, nunna that onetwothree bullshit, it’s on your honor as a man,

Hammurabi’s code, might makes right, way of settling

this count. Not that that’s saying much. Or else I tap out, but a word of warning, wookie, I will pass out blue-faced before I tap to a long-haired

disputes where violence begets violence while, meanwhile, spiritually we all

shit stain such as yourself. But you lose, you flush the K and you and I go to the fucking city college and you say ‘I’d like to scrub your toilets for 7.50 an hour please, sir, thank you, sir,’ so that this time next month we

lose because the collective unconscious isn’t playing a zero-sum game with suffering. The universe wants its manifestations, its hypostases, i.e.: us, Gary, like the universal Us

You psychobabbling over me, boy? (sweep kicking me onto back, in the grass in front of the building)

You can sweep kick me all you want, (gasping, wind knocked out of chest) but I’m a noncombatant down here.

Get on your damn feet and fight me.

(closing eyes, the last dissociative waves receding) I will give you money when I have it, but I do not. (hands up in a gesture of supplication)

(grunting, zipping up shorts)

He lights a cigarette and seems to cool off. On the grass, I can see that he has lost one shoe, and the sock too, at some earlier stage of the night. His calve has a plimsoll line of constriction from a lifetime of sock elastic, above which his leg is sun-tanned and swarthy, below is hairless and fish-white. Our bodies accumulate the funniest signs of use…

Gary, I can’t handle a job. (looking up at a starless city sky, hazy around the edges like old headlights) I can barely leave the house.

Well, you any good at robbing people?

(looking back at him) Huh?

Don’t play innocent, Tevas. (extinguishing cigarette under his remaining New Balance)

So, just to tell you in my own words, I had a brief stint, while I was between jobs, of robbing people. Not really “robbing.” Burgling. There was nobody in the house. All it was was when people posted family vacation pictures on Facebook, I might stop in. It was nice to walk through someone else’s house, usually people I barely knew, if at all. You know how you organize your home, what you permit to share space with you…well, how does this family do it? This couple with six kids, this family with the wheelchair elevator going up the stairs, lot of good copper in there … but no. The flat screen TV. They don’t need that. They shouldn’t have it, actually. Bad for them. Bad for the eyes, turn them square. Sell it for 500 dollars, this thing—and “things can be replaced,” as people say—and purge this family of what’s weighing them down, spiritually, and maybe just, in my own small way,

you’ll find me a ten-thousand-dollar dog named Boner. (apparently explaining his plan during my soliloquy)

One more time?

(groaning, starting over) The eccentric widower. In the Green House, you know the one, uptown. Big one. His Chinese Crested pup—tag says ‘Boner.’ I saw it through the window one night and did some digging on the pooch. Thoroughbred trading cocksucker from Germany. The widower is, I mean. Boner’s Chinese. Anyway, he’s a perfect conformation of the breed, Tevas. Boner and me could be cleaning house at ugliest dog competitions all over town.

He named his prized dog Boner?

Means something different in German.

Gary, I appreciate you, but it’s like… what have you done for me lately? Piss under my door? Why would I steal this
dog for you?

Rent free for… fuck, I don’t know… a lifetime. Until you die. Or I die. (laughing mirthlessly) Plus a room for my lovely niece Hola too, when they let her out.

Seems like you could just get the dog yourself.

Back talk seem like a good idea to you right now, Tevas? How about this—you and my darling niece killed woman in my building last year. Maybe you slipped past the law, but you and I know different, don’t we? So maybe it’s high time you gave me a reason to not kick you to the curb tonight.

Let’s unpack that. Did a woman die in this building last year? That’s what I’ve been told. But I can’t even say for sure because I wasn’t there. A killer who wasn’t even there; does that sound very probable? She overdosed in her room. That’s a tragedy. No doubt about it. Now yes, Hola synthesized the stuff and I sold it, but I didn’t mislead anybody. I cut nothing with kitchen cleaners, with prescription drugs. Okay, and here’s the kicker—I didn’t even sell it to her. Her death is so many degrees removed from me that to say I “killed” a person is starting to sound a little ridiculous, yes? If you owned a pool and your neighbor had a baby, inciting you to put a fence around the pool—not eliminating the danger, but showing reasonable caution—and one night the baby climbs out of its crib, crawls out an ajar door, hears the enticing lapping of water next door, hops the fence and… well, you wouldn’t be morally responsible for the baby in the skimmer, would you? Ketamine is a rave drug. It is a party enhancer. Meant to ensure good-times-had-by-all. If we’re going to start spinning this into some kind of reefer-madness-level…well, I simply won’t engage arguments made in bad faith. If you take the butterfly effect to be true, then we’re all responsible for everything! We’re all stranded in this fog of culpability and

What, are you monologuing again? You gonna find me Boner, or you gonna hit the road, Jack?

(sighing) Alright, Gary. (seeing, again, no way to reason with him) But can we call him something else?

He’s not mine to rename, Tevas. Not yet. (lighting cigarette, talking out side of mouth) Can I call you something else? The fucking sandal… So, until I’m stroking Boner’s wiry little whiskers

Mr. B. Let’s call him Mr. B. (rubbing temples) You’re perverse.

(lighting another cigarette) This is a perverse world, Tevas.

And how am I supposed to steal this dog?

Let’s call it rescuing. And a ghillie suit, Tevas. A gift from me to you. What the French call ‘camouflage.’ (another cigarette) Stole it from wardrobe when I was what the French call a ‘ray-va-lay’ in Vietnam.

(ray-va-lay? ray-va…)

Spelled “reveille,” smart guy. Hola didn’t tell you? Her uncle was top bugler in Saigon ’til the night he rickshawed out of that joint. (and another cigarette, absolutely sucking these down) Now get comfortable in those weeds and let me tell you what I know about Mr. B and his Master.

—

So, I find myself among the Zinnias. Uptown. Behind the Green House, under cover of night… The Master’s house has those windows that come out in a half circle—faceted, like a diamond set in a ring. The door has small panes of glass. Punchable, if you wrap your hand in a towel. The Master removes his hearing aids, reads for an hour, and hits the hay by nine-thirty. Mr. B sleeps on a pillow kitty-corner to the four-poster. Perfect. I crush my can of Rockstar and catch the bus downtown. 9:45. It shouldn’t be anything special tomorrow. Rent free for life…

—

It is Halloween night. I’ve forgotten about that for some reason. All Souls Day. The one day of the year where the spirit world Venn diagrams with our world of matter and we can commune with our

(Group of Adults in Costume: whizzing down sidewalk on electric scooters)

…commune with our dead. It would be disappointing, I think, to be a spirit and only get to come back on a day when your adult relatives are throwing glorified frat parties and dressing either quote “sexy” or quote “funny.” It’s probably the worst day of the year for them.
Anyhow, the rescue mission has hit a slight snafu. Seems there is a large gathering at The Master’s tonight. I wouldn’t have taken him for a hard partier. The man is 85 years old. But all hope is not lost. The crowd is large and anonymous, so I will lay among the Zinnias in my ghillie suit until the guests clear out and

Look! (Woman in Red Hood: throwing open the French doors) Among the Zinnias!

(fuck)

(music stopping, lutes palm-muting, harpsichordist hitting sour note)
(crowd gathering around back porch, their costumes ornate, billowing)

(standing, holding hands up in a gesture of supplication, preparing back story as a solo adult trick-or-treater)

Der Natur Geist, (shouting) Sieg Heil!

(sieg what)

Sieg Heil, der Natur Geist! (Rest of Party: yelling in response, bowing in my direction)
(Two Young Women, Naked Save for Crowns of Olives and a Couple Tastefully Placed Acanthus Leaves: slipping arms under mine and gliding toward house)
Attend the Spinozan spirit of Oneness in all things!

We follow the woman in the red hood. I’m getting cheers’d left and right by the guests. It seems they don’t expect me to say anything, which is good. Sieg Heil der Natur Geist? Spinozan spirit of oneness? I’m wishing I’d read the Dr. Bronner’s bottle a little more closely… The mood of the party is what the French call “libertine.” Kind of… uh… torrid, actually… I mean to say that pumping away in the anteroom, presently, is a well-oiled ninesome. People are dressed like the art on tarot cards. There is debauchery of the kind fashionable among dark age aristocrats—the old mixing with the young, human with the animal, and all manner of… instruments. Towering, body-building physiques hold drinks on silver’d platters—triple distilled mushroom tea, and shots of wormwood flambé, says the script on the little white cards—and what the French call hor-derverse… hors-douvrs… hors… deviled blue jay eggs, fox breast au hollandaise, and

Der Natur Geist! (Red Woman: placing a tiara on my head) You in whom all things are unified, are made God, (Red Woman really hamming it up) make humanity your slave tonight!
(Arm-Nymphs: departing)
(Red Woman: handing off clean-cut young man, twenty-five or so, attached to a leash)

(taking leashed man, nodding to her aristocratically)

The man on the leash looks, aside from the nudity, like he could be fresh out of accounting school. He paws at my boots and I see a strip of untanned skin on his wrist, like he wears an expensive wide-band watch when he’s not moonlighting as this…hmm…as a, like

(Woman in Antlers: placing hand on my shoulder) If you don’t kick their ribs from time to time, they will not stop with the pawing.
(Man Behind Her: wearing shield-sized tiki mask, speaking with RP British accent) Don’t listen to her. The key to handling subs, like this sub here, is
positve reinforcement. They’re not so different from you and I in that way—subs.
(feeding Accountant a blue jay egg) But make sure to keep your hand flat so he doesn’tFUCK! Little bastard has some chompers…
(Antlers: rolling eyes, bells jingling) Have it your way.
(Accountant: devouring egg)

Someone hands me a glass of that mushroom concoction. Excitement around Der Natur Geist seems to have died down a bit. I get a glass raised in my direction from a few more party goers, but not much more than that. I sip the mushroom cocktail and, now woah, hey, that is some kind of hooch… So, Accountant and I are walking upstairs, toward The Master’s bedroom. A naked man in Shiva-blue body paint, dick in some kind of little chastity cage, stops me on the balcony. I squint from behind the camouflage—the governor’s here? He asks to pet Accountant.

Excellent breeding. (petting Accountant) Do I have your vote? Do I? Do I? (behind the ear trick polling well with Accountant)

Meanwhile, his wife and I exchange pecks on the cheek like we’re European dignitaries. Maybe she is, I don’t know. She’s a dark-haired woman in a glitzy gold pinafore, her hair up in a ruby’d snood. An Egyptic beard hooks over her ears.

Der Natur Geist (mwah) my dirty slave would appreciate your support at the polls next month (mwah)

(mwah)

(Governor: tears welling in eyes after becoming aroused from contact with Accountant,) Forgive me, Mistress.
(Dark Haired Lady) Will you excuse us, Natur Geist?

(nod of understanding)

(Dark Haired Lady: grabbing Governor by cock-cage, angrily whispering) I swear to God, Stephen. A week in The Box.
(Governor: whimpering)

The Master’s bedroom door is open. Inside, a middle-aged Japanese man, well built, with a dri-fit polo tucked into his khakis, is suspending a couple tweenage boys from the ceiling with a skein of complicated knots. He pulls loose a particularly convoluted one which, when released, acrobatically flips one of the boys ass-up. The people gathered in the bedroom for the entertainment applaud. But none cheer as enthusiastically as The Master, who lies in his bed, gold-robed and oiled, with the boys above him, clearly having hired this knot tyer as his personalGood Lord, this man has a member like a farm animal, how did I miss that? Anyway, with all this distraction, I am able to pick up Mr. B unmolested, leaving Accountant curled up on the pillow in his place. Kind of an Indiana Jones move.

(pausing in doorway)

Now hey… those kids are like, what, no more than twelve up there…? I look back at the audience, and, uh, there are some bruisers. Big guys, the ones holding the food, perhaps doing double duty as bouncers. I don’t think they’d appreciate Der Natur Geist quite so much if he rained on their pederasty parade…

(Mr. B: unperturbed, tongue flopping out of mouth)

I should just get out of here before they notice. We leave The Master’s bedroom unsuspiciously. The anteroom orgy has entered double-digit participation and most of the downstairs is too distracted to notice us. Soon we’re out the door.

We made it, Mr. B.

Until we pass, on the garden path, a man with leaves glued all over his body, walking toward the party, who steps up to me like, “And who the fuck are you?” So I hand him the tiara.

They’re waiting for you in there, Natur Geist.

(Real Natur Geist: running toward party)

And that seems to defuse the situation. I light a spliff among the zinnias to celebrate and we continue off the grounds. A perilous nest of electric scooters sits on the sidewalk, one at the top still spinning its wheels. I hop on it and set Mr. B in the basket. He and I are finally home free.

Quite the swar-ee, so-waaaar…Quite the evening, huh, Mr. B.?… God, you smell like sewer. (tucking tongue back between his teeth) You’re a ratty little creature, aren’t
you

(tense pause between Mr. B and me)

I didn’t mean it that way. (gently petting) I shouldn’t talk to you like that.

(coughing up about a yard of mucus)

Hey, can I ask you a question? (revving scooter, starting to get kind of philosophical with Mr. B) Do you see your abnormal features as deficiencies from an ideal or are you rather, as Gary seems to think, the perfect conformation of your own ideal? You are, you could say, the best ‘you’ you can be?

(wheezing neutrally)

Maybe you are, as a part of nature, exactly as you ought to be. (patting his little white mohawk, feeling pleased, harmonious, with this conclusion) As a part of nature myself, it’s comforting to think that I too am exactly as I should be.

(Mr. B: speaking to me in the voice of a grown woman, maybe the lead alto in a gospel choir) Fool that you are, (clearing mucus from throat again) you conveniently ignore what separates the human from the animal, vis a vis: reason. This is nothing more than a transparently psychological defense constructed to barricade your ego from the anxiety of your own wrongdoing, Tevas.

Woah, there, Mr. B…

How do you respond?

Is this that mushroom tea, or

(rolling crusty little eyes) You’re avoiding the question, Tevas.

Alright, alright… well, uh… plenty of animals exhibit supposedly human traits like metacognition, death consciousness, and

Good for them, Tevas! The fact remains that you do have control over your actions and thus bear responsibility for them in a way that is altogether distinct from the mechanistic, and thus morally neutral, laws of nature which make lions kill gazelle, or sharks eat their offspring, or recessive genetic material code for Boner to be hairless, malformed, and glaucomic. Yes he may be, as you say, ‘as he was meant to be’ insofar as these examples are not the result of Boner’s conscious choices, but some of the choices you made are not morally neutral, or destined, or mechanical in the way that nature is because they were choices you made, and so the effects are ones your conscious will brought into being.

Mr. B, why are you using the third person?

It is not the dog called ‘Boner’ you are hearing but a soul from the spirit world. You knew me from my earthly life. My name is Nique, I am the woman who lived on the second floor of Gary’s building. You and your girlfriend, the chemist, synthesized ketamine which you sold to

Oh, God, Nique! I needed the money. I’m sorry I

which you sold to my two boys. Now they thought if they slipped that in my dinner I’d be knocked out for a night and they could throw a little party. In hindsight, we know when it kicked in I suffocated and died in my bed. You are aware of this, correct?

I… I’m aware… (crying)… I

Calm down, Tevas. But what I still don’t know is how their action compares to yours. Even in the spirit world these things are often hard to sort out. Life is very complicated that way. But the reason I spent my first All Souls Day visiting you instead of my boys is that I know they spend every day reflecting on the choice they made. 14, 15-year-olds. And you have used every trick you could think of to avoid reflecting on your role in my death—not your legal responsibility, I know you can’t be held accountable legally, but that really has nothing to do with the fact that

Hola synthesized it, so the case was stronger a-and (blubbering) they wanted to get somebody. Gary said we’d always have a room if I stole Mr. B. But the truth is our love is never going to last because she resents me for

you sold it to a couple teenage boys in the hallway and I died, Tevas.

I know it was wrong, Nique, (stopping at red light, face in hands like a cage) but I didn’t know this would happen to you. Just tell me what I should do. God, Nique. Please forgive me.

Hey, man why you ahthking that dog for forgivenehth? (Man in Boxers: Mike Tyson tattoo stenciled around his eye, affecting a lisp) Were you the one who made it htho godamned ugly? Ha-ha…

Nique, you still there?

(Mr. B: tongue sliding back out between teeth)

Was it wrong to steal Mr. B? Sh-should I have freed Accountant instead of passively accepting him as a slave?

(Mike Tyson: standing on sidewalk) … ha…

What about the boys on the ceiling? Do you forgive me, Nique? Can I make it all right?

… ha. It looks like its name should be, like… Dick… weed, or

(turning to Tyson) Actually, man, her name is

Cockhthucker! (grabbing Mr. B, running)

No! (sweeping Tyson’s shins with scooter) Fuck you, Mike!

(falling hard, Mr. B tossed in front of him, clutching shins)

(wrestling him into the gutter, clogged with wet party debris, throwing punches, scratching, slapping, biting, basically losing mind on Iron Mike) That’s my dead neighbor inside that dog—I need to talk to her!

(looking regretful, like, ‘Fuck, I didn’t know this guy was schizo,’ fighting my moves to pin him.)

(beating knuckles raw) I need her to forgive me, Mike!

Hey, man… (getting pummeled) Hey…

(pummeling, breaking two bones in right hand, beat down resuming with left)

ma… ma… (eyes, wet and far away, looking into mine as if to say, ‘it’s a fucking dog…’)