No One Was Hurt

No One Was Hurt

       by Douglas Cline, the Patsy

       

       gander at a homemade bomb

       and wonder how it's done

       slander someone who is strong

       and know that you have won

D.J. Dick scratched records for a living. He did it willingly and without malice aforethought. His work took him to the place of employ at approximately 9 p.m. and home at about 6 a.m. He played songs like "I Shot the Sheriff," and "Lucky Luciano's Back," and "Mists Over Jordan." He sported tattoos on his arms of various animals in the act of eating other animals. His neck, especially, took passersby by surprise since it showed a woman in a filmy costume halfway down the gullet of a swan. His clothing resembled nothing so much as the outfit of a tightrope walker who is halfway across Niagara Falls and hopes to make it all the way. Smile he did little. Dance he did all the time. His gait was a dance, one might say with certainty, since he bobbed and ducked as he stepped from foot to foot on his way somewhere. Not quite five inches over six feet, he looked slightly funny in his tall, hippity progress down street or through house or business place. His name was Tristan Speller.

       Mr. Speller was working his normal shift at the Empire Friday night, June 11, 2003 when he heard a grand explosion. He scratched vigorously across the record, announced that he was taking a short break, rushed through the wings of the stage on which he was set up, and saw that the Empire's back half existed no more. Brick and smoke, dust and debris met him instead of walls and roof. He made his way over the pile of ruin and into the alley behind. He saw a car dart out of a driveway and start to rush away. In a second, as it passed him, he made a move of instinct that haunted him the rest of his days. He reached for the car door handle and caught it and pulled. It opened and he leapt inside. Still not quite sure what he was doing or why he was there, he saw a man of similar age to his holding a gun and pointing it at him.

       "Why are you in my car?" the gun holder asked him. "Now you will have to die!" With that he shot the gun and Tristan saw the flash of the bullet exploding. The shooter, however, had never shot a gun before and he was so surprised by the effect that he dropped it and Tristan immediately picked it up and pointed it back at him. Then he thought to inspect himself. He had not been hit. The bullet had torn its way through the backrest of the seat before him and injured the driver whose foot now jammed the accelerator forward and the car rocketed down the street with no one steering it.

       "Steer!" Tristan commanded of the man who sat next to him. That worthy jumped up and reached over the back seat and did as he was told. He proceeded to climb to the front and brought the racing vehicle to a standstill.

       "Nice work!" Tristan shouted. "Let's go for a beer." They did that. Tristan found that his new acquaintance had no knowledge of the explosion. He had simply been escaping what looked to him like a work of criminals in his own back yard, and Tristan, he thought, was one of them. The two became fast friends and even today, three years later, they talk with joy about the time Tristan almost got himself shot and killed.

No Needs of Any Kind

No Needs of Any Kind

       by Rugrat Doug

              if i needed you would you come to me

I bumped into this sermon recently while going through files I was disgarding in a move to downsize our piles of stupidly hoarded stuff. I was preaching at our local Kleine Gemeinde church in Kleefeld, Manitoba one Sunday a few years ago and it got away on me. It was a Sunday in late winter and we had all been cold too much and warm too seldom for too long and my hunger for joy must have brought about that state in me that happens now and then where I find myself temporarily believing that snow is wet, boys are girls, clouds are sun, sin is good, good is sin, money is desirable and pieces are the whole. So, instead of preaching on the topic I had prepared taking the lectionary into account, something about the way that heaven will provide all of us with peace and all our needs will be met in good time, I preached extempore that we have too many requirements to start with. It did not go over well as you can imagine.

       I started thus. "Babies have needs. If there is one thing we know about them, that is it. Milk, hugs, diaper stuff, smiles, attention, sweetnesses from the faces hovering above them, rocking, and so many different ways of saying, 'You are special!' Yes, from early on we humans want to be affirmed. 'You are special!" we need to hear our whole lives long. Milksops is what we are. When we achieve an action it is immediately followed by a need for praise. 'Did I perform well?' one asks the other. 'Yes, Honey, you were spendid!' replies that one. She, in turn, wishes for comment on the effectiveness of her person. 'Did I make you feel good? Do I still turn you on?' And in reply, 'Oh! Sandra. You are so pretty still. At fifty how many women do you know who look as good as you? How many have such firm breasts at your age?' At seventy-five, mother to her son speaks thus: 'Son, you should really come over more often and visit. It's been two weeks since you drove over here to see me! I know you are busy but I love you so much!' And son, to placate her: 'Mother, I love you, too. Very much. You are always so good to me. I will try to come again soon, okay? I miss you, too, when I am not there for a while.' Sister on the phone: 'John, brother, how are you!?' While he is answering, as if she has not heard him, she shouts out, 'I love you so very much, John!' This is a comment not really meant to shore up John's ego or sense of self worth but her own, if you examine it at all for its overtones. He will soon reply that he does, too, in return, love her to distraction, as brothers love their sisters. And prayer: 'God, please forgive my sins. I repent. I have been bad. I should not have taken the carburetor off the Cadillac of that gentleman but it was so tempting and I knew we needed the money to make our mortgage this month. He did not really need a replacement carb, but it did need work, and so I changed it. I won't do it again. I love you, Lord!' And so on. People need always to be made to feel big about themselves."

       I preached this. I left for home after the service without an invitation to lunch. I woke Monday regretting that I had done so. I am, some years later, not interested in preaching anymore. I read more for my own diversion now. Though diversion it is not exactly since I am of the opinion that much reading for the sake of entertainment when there are so many philosophical values concerning Being to be understood is disgusting. Just now I am reading Heidegger's four volumes on Nietzsche. It is lovely outside my window, not yet winter, and I smell the comfort of toast being made in the kitchen.

         

Enough Time (cont'd)

Enough Time (cont'd)

       by Dr. D.R.

                I was always told, "If you're not sure, don't."

       "But, would you like to?" She was not easily dissuaded from a line of thought. The workers behind the counter, secure from their customers, kept taking orders and calling out things to those completely out of sight in the kitchen. A funny group of old, young, dirty, clean, retired and working had gathered here today, I noticed. Yet, I could not get them clearly in my head, so the fact held little significance for me. A wicked-looking old man in a  pinched pair of overalls and with a hooked nose to make Captain Hook relieved, kept looking at Celine. She noticed but paid him no mind. She moved her legs over so he could not look up her skirt, but continued talking unconcerned.

       "Theoretically, yes, I would," I said. "I would like to give a young woman a massage, and that's final." I smiled and wished I were young, too. I thought of my clothes, my hair, my arms and my face but I did not think of her body. It would be like all the pretty young female bodies there were, simply fantastic. Mine would be like all the you-know-what old bodies in the world.

       "Let's go!" She leaned toward me, whispering, her blouse opened a little at the neck. Her blouse was light purple, like sun through a lily. Perfume surrounded her. She wore a wedding ring and it glistened on her tanned finger. Her body lithe, of course, and utterly beautiful, hidden by a skirt of cotton flowers and a sheer top through which her slip glimmered made me say yes.

       "Yes, let's get out of this place and massage!" I said, and guided her around tables by her elbow. Almost six feet tall, she stood an inch or two above me in height. She bumped her head in her haste on my door and I leaned over to kiss it better. Her hair smelled very nice. She sat close to me, her hand on mine as I shifted gears.

       We walked into her apartment, she pointed to a couch and I waited for her to stretch out there, but she pointed again and then I understood that she wanted me to lay down first. I did that. She removed my shirt and stroked my arms. She began to rub my shoulders and my lower back. She said how lovely my skin was and how muscular I was. I smiled and thanked her, not believing at all. Then she had me lower my trousers, which I did, and I lay there in my skivvies. She rubbed my legs and for a long time she lay against them, warming them and kissing them with her lips and hair. Then she returned to massaging them until I fell asleep.

       When I awoke the room was not empty. She was there still, waiting for me to get up.

       "Is it your turn now?" I asked, feeling a bit of guilt. The walls seemed too empty, no pictures hanging on them. Dishes cluttered the galley kitchen.

       "No, there isn't enough time," she said. "I have to go to classes and then to work. She was already sort of moving toward the door.

       "Thanks!" I said, and she nodded.

       "I enjoyed it," she said. She took her keys from her purse and we went outside. She locked up. I drove her to St. John's, neither of us saying much, and we parted. I have never met her again. I sometimes think that it isn't fair that she didn't get a massage, too.   

                        

Enough Time

[Written circa 2005]

Enough Time

       By Douger Reimlas

All the innovations in fiction and poetry have already earlier been affected on Saturday Night Live. Our literary elite would not appreciate this insight as definitive but would wish to qualify it in order themselves to come out justified. It is up to latter day realists cum postmodernists to defend their uses of these by calling what they themselves do serious literature worthy of considerations, as in the case of creative writing graduates for Ph.D. status.

An  attractive woman asked me for a quarter at the parking lot outside St. John's College. She was in a hurry to get to class and was short the change. She'd thought she had some, she explained, but there were only loonies and toonies in her purse. I gave it to her and told her not to worry her pretty head about such a triviality. She smiled at the anachronism and the audaciousness and said she would pay me back when she came from her class at ten. I smiled at the ridiculous assumption that she would ever see me again. She walked away in a hurry, her skirt slim in the sunlight and her step jaunty as only the young can affect. When she disappeared through the double glass doors I turned with some reluctance to my day.

        I picked up my text and notes and got to my classroom on time to begin on time. I fully enjoyed the lecture and then briefly saw a student after class about an assignment due in a few days. I thought that she had left her request a bit long but gave her the advice she wanted. When I was riding the elevator I remembered the young woman at the parking lot. I smiled to myself. Silly, a fifty-seven year old man with a growing bald spot as well as innumerable declinations from youth thinking about a twenty year old student this way with small excitations of the heart and lungs. What the hell, why not, I thought, put my books on my desk and went back down the elevator.

       I had not come even halfway across the lot toward my car when I noticed her standing there. She was leaning up against the trunk in a relaxed manner, reading.

       "What took you so long?" she asked, putting her book back in her purse. She smiled in a manner that told me she knew the surprise I was feeling and delighted in the fact that I had come and that I had found her there. She waited for a few seconds for me to compose myself and then announced that we should go for coffee somewhere. I agreed.  

       I said, "Why are we going for coffee?"

       She said, "Why shouldn't we?" She added, though, "It was kind of you to give me a quarter and I wish to be kind to you, too, do you understand?" I nodded my disagreement. I did not understand and I said so, but I did not say so, either. I said nothing, but pointed to my car. We got in and drove to Macdonald's. I bought my charge an ice-cream cone since it was still hot at the beginning of September. A vegetarian, she declined a burger. When we were half done our snack and had talked about this and that, she asked me if I had ever given a young girl a massage. I said with emphasis, "No! I have not!"

(to be continued)

Dead Sea Capers

Dead Sea Capers

       Stingray Pete

One studied, the other sold. That's the way of the world, isn't it? Read Homer, for instance, or even better, Horace, and after Horace, Ovid. When you tire of the ancients, turn for a few well-spent evenings to Beowulf and Sir Gawain. End with Geoffrey Chaucer. In Chaucer we have the greatest purveyor of, or more accurately, the intense dealer in the contradictions between the meditant and the merchant. He is fiction's grand marquis of the philosophy of the ascendancy of thought over action.

       Who am I? My name is Meckling. I teach philosophy of religion at a small college in Trier, the oldest city in the country. That is neither here nor there, though. In my spare time I read, increasingly, to my own curiosity, accounts of the intrigue surrounding the release of Dead Sea scrolls privileges. These codices are all housed in the Kumran Building in Hafiz and access to them is strictly controlled, ostensibly by university religious scholars but actually by the Israeli government itself. What is this to you? Nothing. This is a question for the trained thinker, not for you. Not for commoners dabbling in ideas as if they were indifferently stirring their pudding after a sumptuous dinner of roast beef or candied pig. I eat no pig. My name should tell you that. Mine is one of the few sects, let me qualify to you, that still observes ritual Jewish holidays and fervently follows Levitican laws. I am a believer, that is. That is neither here nor there, however. You, unfamiliar with either Jewish ritual or German intellectual rigor, will about now be throwing this account aside for some less patently partisan and more piquantly sexual reading material. But bear with me. This is the conclusion of my digression into exposition of this sort. So, let me begin my story.

       First, however, I want to ask you if the name Eisermann means dick to anyone here? No? I will introduce him to you. Eisermann single-handedly toppled the Israeli government over this business of the Dead Sea scrolls. They--these scrolls, that is-- were to be kept out of reach of all scholars as well as out of the public eye. Nothing was to escape the vigilance of the repressors of information. No information flow about them whatsoever was to be allowed. No publications in scholarly journals. No newspaper accounts of how Malek the shepherd found them when he threw a stone into a hidden cave and heard pots breaking. Two thousand years after they had been placed there they had till then not been discovered! They had not been robbed! Nor any hurt or piracy done to them! Astonishing! Why astonishing? Because the Bedouins, who share that particular desert around Kumran, where the Essenes made their last stand against the Romans in 70 A.D. not on top of Mount Oreb but that fascinating messa the middle east has come to call Masada, have done for centuries a flourishing trade in and made passable livings from illegal trade in codices such as the Dead Sea scrolls. The only difference between scholars and Bedouins is that the latter get big dollars for these texts, and I mean big dollars. So, guess what. They break--yes! literally break, and it breaks my heart to say it--these more than precious texts into fragments, each of which they sell to the casual buyer or fortune hunter with the promise of more of the same if she comes up with another half a million denarii. God! God in heaven, how can You permit such a travesty?

       No appeals to the divine. It helps one dick, let me tell you. Back to the story. Now, having found these scrolls this shepherd, not practiced in the nasty science of scroll profiteering, actually visited a local scholar with his news, not a man of any renown but still someone who understood the significance of the discovery and who himself longed not for money but for the joy of historical knowledge. This encounter immediately reminds me of "The Pardoner's Tale." The maligned Pardoner, the protagonist of that marvelous tale, decides to confide to his fellow travelers, men and women on a pilgrimage to Canterbury one spring who have each agreed to tell a story to pass the time, confide to them that he is a cheat and a liar. Now, imagine that! A seller of relics and religious artifacts no more holy than the trinkets German entrepreneurs market to "seely" tourists in their hauptmarts in May or June or around the Porte Negra, he decides to come clean. Oh, sure, scholars have argued that the Pardoner does this to pinch and piss off his less pecuniary companions, but I have another theory, one eminently more intelligent than any I have read in Modern Languages Quarterly or Chaucer Quarterly.

(To be continued)