Vitriole vomit.

  In that space between "in" and "out" there is a mess of vitriole.  Like puke outside a hall or near a rollercoaster.  That happens.  It's like the people confronting Beowulf. 

  Some people comment (i)poor guy(i) or (i)poor people(i) and cruise on by.  It's a mark of centeredness to not join in.  It's somebody's limit on control of self.  It can be an influence.  It certainly taints the pool atmosphere. 

  There was this guy.  He'd been in wars before.  Had powered himself and others through lacks so devastating there was affect on generations.  Suffering so poignant, there was no way to unsee what had happened.  The guy often held his tongue, especially when the pitch of commenting gathered itself around the notion of (i)you don't know(i).  But the guy would mutter and cuss and be cantankerous with chores and labors.  Somebody suggested he should find other work, (i)less stressful(i).  Somebody else took it personal if necessary, and asked, "Who the fuck are you negative vibing on?" 

  The guy chose not to talk to that one.  But he told some others, "the enemy". 

  "But it's peacetime." 

  "You may think so, but it ain't really." 

  "Does it help?" 

  "Does me.  So I'm ready." 

  "Not on my radiostation." The woman zapped the board with the mute button. 

  "It's not yours bitch." 

  "I'm done here." The woman's face wasn't literally covered with spit and puke and the nasty bugs that come out of peoples' mouths, but you could see it that way.  She took a folder out of a sleek pursey briefcase.  "Here's the incoming programming.  And you will be bleeped on all that cursing.  FYI." 

  Like the muppet Animal, Howard Stern kept blathering on about superficial stuff on the Rock station even as hijackers were aiming for our buildings.  9112001 wasn't his fault, but airwaves choked with vitriole didn't help that morning. 

 Fifty years already?  No way.

  A car pulled up.  Mine was booted.  Guys.  (i)Great(i).  One notoriously snobbish.  He threw the CD out the window at me.  "Achtung baby," he said like a toast. 

  "What does it mean?" 

  "Give it a listen.  When you get out of the gutter." 

  Of course they drove off with the traffic. 

  "Not (i)in the gutter(i) just because I'm not (i)on point(i)." 

  "Don't drift too far away.  I want to show you the books." 

  Somehow the perfect capsule of emotions in the music.  My age?  Or that thing that some can do?  Like we're all stuck, or all trepidatious about some general consciousness thing, or we just don't know (anything really)...but somebody, some artist, some writer, some intellect, some spiritual person (i)does something(i). 

  Transmissions. 

"Just let them go by," a caped figure

  said to some flask sipping nervous about the big dance guys. 

  Gold chains, hairy chests sticking out in the cold, silly shaped hookah-like cocktail plastic-glasses.  They were loud and boasty.  Proud to have escaped any responsibility. 

  "Offtah fucksome kids Epp?" 

  Other officers tackled the heckler. 

  A man in an almost stiff wool dresscoat broke from talking to some women.  The women shivering in dresses and nylons, no coats.  Nicotine stained fingers and dark lipsticks.  

  Jagged wind rippled the American flag.  It's metal grommets tinging against the metal pole like sailboats in a marina. 

  A giggle turning into a wet cough. 

  "Why shouldn't I try to get them on my dance team?" The man in the wool dresscoat had put on leather gloves and grabbed the flag pole.  "I miss the Sea," he said.  

  "Vhy vood yoo?" A dark uniformed soldier asked. 

  "Vhy not?" 

  The man let go of the flag pole.  Reached into a coat pocket.  Pulled out a rolled and folded piece of paper.  Straightened this.  Held it up to look at it in the light on the flag.  More WANTED poster xerox copies.  The man looked through them.  Chose one, let the wind blow the rest away. 

  "This redski said he was going to send all my new friends to the meatgrinder." He told everyone sort of acting like they weren't paying attention.  "I'm thinking they might like dancing better.  I think I have some invites here," he pulled out a stack from his breast pocket.  "Oh Assistant, will you hand these out please?!" 

  More than one woman came forward.  "I'll leave them here." He snapped the rubberband on the tickets.  Put the flyer on the rope holder and hung the invite tickets by the rubberband also on the flag rope holder. 

"Look Dick," one little girl

  sat on a stool in front of the man.  Two others dragged the blanket full of coins across the shag rug.  The little girl crossed her arms.  "We're not taking (i)no(i) as your answer.  Consider this a donation."  The two little girls let go of the corners of the blanket and the coins, every kind imaginable, piled at the man's booted foot.  The little girl got off the stool, waved a magic wand, and pulled a silver dollar out of the man's ear. 

 

"Why is there a photo of a pile of pineapple cans?"

  The voiced boomed. 

  "Why don't you get your foot off our negatives?" A girl asked.

  "A pile of pineapple juice cans, say that ten times fast." A boy said. 

  Many hands grabbed at the suitpant leg and fancy shoe grinding the visual evidence into the sidewalk. 

  "We're not paying your fucking tribute," one face said as it was being pulled on by hands desperate to save the negatives. 

  "CHILDREN!!!  GET AWAY FROM THAT MAN!!!" One of the neighborhood mothers stood many feet away from the squirming pile of kids outside the drugstore.  A couple girls immediately got up, brushing dirt from their school uniforms.  Thinking the man distracted a boy tried to fold the man's knee from behind. 

  "I see who you are," the man pointed at the boy. 

  "THERE ARE MANY SETS OF THOSE PHOTOS." The lady said calmly but loudly. 

  "There are?" Asked a kid on the bottom of the pile nearest the shoe. 

  "OH YES." 

  "GET OFFAH ME NUMBNUTS." 

  The pile of sweaty, grimey kids broke and scattered. 

  "You know the drill.  (i)Give the man his due(i)." A BLACK POWER tee shirt was tight over a militant uniform.  People in ski masks with night sticks stepped closer to the woman in the doorway.  Handed the short spry woman a megaphone.  She pressed the button which amplified her voice.  Started chanting, (i)Give the man his due, give the man his due(i).  Pasty white, bleary eyed, crying, terrorized children in the house had hastily collected up candlesticks and other shiney objects.  They dragged a bulging pillowcase past the woman with the racing heart.  Pushed it over the threshold.  Pushed the woman backward. 

  Closed the door. 

  The months wore on. 

  At school Officer Friendly had taught kids, (i)If you see something, say something(i).  "That must be why," a kid explained to a sunken-eyed mother.  "Why what?" 

  "Why the good black neighbors had to leave the neighborhood and left a sign in the window that reads, (i)Follow the bloody axe(i)."  The mom got on her knees and pulled the children to her.  "Let's say our prayers." 

  "But it's not bedtime." 

  A person behind a curtain in a yard of a house spoke barely in a whisper.  Explaining that a lot of the people who'd taken over abandoned houses were friends in jail.  (i)And,(i) she explained, "A lot of them have relatives all over the world.  (i)And,(i) those are here now because everybody wants to be American." 

  "Seizing someone else's property without a sales transaction is (i)not(i) American," a man with a broad moustache said aloud. 

  "Your curtain is NOT invisible," said a kid missing front teeth. 

  "Let's all go get pizza," the man said. 

"Is this (i)transparent(i)?" The

  man held up a Mylar balloon and made a fish face. 

  "It is," said the woman changing bandages and charting the intensity of the liquid oozes. 

  From the other room came voices used to booming orders, not listening to (i)sorry ass excuses for men(i) "blubbering" about lost loves of their lives and debts that only working would resolve. 

  "So (i)let them(i).  Let them (i)investigate(i) us until the cows come home.  We got nothing to hide.  Some buttcrack smelling foreign bills that aren't even real money left at a golf course?! That is not (i)corruption(i)." 

  The man made deeply sucking for air fish faces at the baby.  The baby smiled.  The mom said, "He has gas.  The kids only smile when I make the fish faces." 

  "We have to go find some people.  These photographs," everyone could hear a heavy finger tapping on the table, "These tell me, uh, us (i)something(i), but I'm not sure what yet." 

  "Cute kid," someone remarked as the pack of muscled military men exited. 

  A photojournalist and a writer stayed at the dining table.  "Can we come in if we don't talk politics?" Someone asked.  The pair nodded.  People filed into the room and sat around the table. 

"Keep that heart beating," a nurse calmly ordered.

  Her calmness was the counterweight on the frantic, out of whack scales of America. 

  "Watch out!  That apparatus shoves palettes out of the plane." 

  A needle jammed into a thigh with dead aim for the artery and a weak try-to-smile "my pleasure" brought the frozen man into a rigor-mortis-like sitting-standing-up position.  "Do the other guy," the nurse unrolled a paintbrush holder of glass needles full of "the stuff"...an antidote to death for some people. 

  The other guy wasn't frozen but he was stiff and standing.  Looked like he'd seen a ghost, shocked, and baked lobster red.  A field surgeon hung a bloody carpenter's short apron on the man's hands held up and fingers stretched out.  "Hold that for me.  I'd call you Sir, but not unless you're breathing.  Nurse is this man breathing?  Have a pulse?" 

  A nurse fell out of a line of nine or ten in a little aisle of a few back seats.  Came forward holding up the stethoscope. 

The handpainted sign was big.

  A most of a sheet of plywood.  The lettering a little drippy like the blood coming out of peoples' ears and noses and one man's eyes. 

     Jews be warned THEY are blaming all of this money problems on you because you voted demokrat. 

  Pages of stories were nailed to the bottom part of the plywood. 

  The neighborhood had been blitzed again.  Bat-wielding angry animal people.  Smashing, grabbing, destroying in the smog of planes sinking low on the horizon only when they got near land. 

  One civilian soldier in half business clothes, half army greens sat slump-propped against a brick wall.  His one barefoot twitching.  A child clinging to the booted leg.  Another clinging to that child. 

  Broken bloody glass on the sidewalk. 

  "Hey.  We need an ambulance over there," a middle-aged woman in a shawl with a vigil candle tapped on the man with the filming camera's shoulder and told.  "So do they," the man pointed a finger in the direction of the twitching foot, but missed (i)dead on aim(i).  He was leather belted to a wagon so his arms could push his lame legs down the sidewalk.  Off he went into the sparks of a lightpole a helicopter had run into. 

"Nobody knew."

  The woman threw another frying pan through the hole in the screen door.  "THAT'S A LOAD OF HORSESHIT.  YOU PEOPLE KNOW EVERYTHING." She hurled the spaghetti pot at the man.  A small boy went and retrieved it, brought it around to the clubhouse.  "AT LEAST THAT'S WHAT YOU PRETEND!!!  (i)PRETENDERS!!!!!(i) THAT'S ALL YOU PEOPLE ARE WHILE THE REST OF US SUFFER YOUR CONSEQUENCES AND SACRIFICE OUR CHILDREN!!!!" The woman hurled the contents of a drawer out the hole in the screen door.  "YOU RUIN EVERYTHING GOOD! EVERYTHING GOD GAVE US." She slammed the heavy door in behind the ruined screen door. 

  "You better get out of here Dick." 

  "You threatening me?" The man asked the kids standing around a runned-over bicycle. 

  "So you're saying he has his own political psychosis?" One woman asked another woman.  A girl child shivered and squealed at the word.  The woman nodded. 

  "That's a (i)strong(i) word Mrs. (i)what did you say your name is(i)?" 

  "Call me Julia.  But you can't call me on the phone.  At least not until we get through this phase." 

  "Does the phase have a name?" 

  "Why do you ask?" 

  "The children and I are working on words and expressing our feelings." 

  "That's interesting." 

  "It's helping us get through all this stuff.  Especially," the woman looked at a child's drawing in her lap, "Being (i)neglected(i)." 

  "Your husband?" 

  "Oh NO.  Not him, he's actually," the woman teared up, "Wonderful.  I'm very lucky.  I know that." 

  "There's been a lot of people just crushed by the war stuff." 

  "Mine's not military.  He's religious." 

  "And a (i)businessman(i)," said a boy in a suit with a briefcase. 

  "He works in the City." 

  Another helicopter flew down the main road to the Sound. 

"Put them on." The man's hand opened the flap

  of a box of hospital gowns. 

  "But I'm not (i)dirty(i)," a kid said. 

  "We can't leave here until you do."  The man further smoothed a dress hanging on a dry cleaner hanger beneath preserving plastic.  Then he contemplated the plastic and the dress.  Then he took the plastic off, folded it, put it in a fliptop garbage can.  He looked at everyone putting the hospital gowns over their clothing.  "If one of us is down, we're all down." 

  "For the count?" 

  "For the count." 

  "Let's beat the count." 

  "Beat the count." 

  "Let's let some air into this bell jar." 

  "Air into the jar." 

  "Let's figure out (i)what's wrong(i) with us." 

  "Let's do this." 

Bubbles burst. Begin grind.

  One kid had put his red tie in the paper shredder.  Another had so many knots in his, around his neck, that his face was turning purple.  A woman took extra relax pills and looked like she had a broken leg at the bottom of a staircase.  A little snore revealed (i)not dead(i).  "We need help," someone told a maid.  The maid and the someone afraid to be accused of anything went to a neighbor's place. 

  The phone calls established a perimeter.  Men groggily went out walking to locate everyone. 

  "It's in shambles." 

  "Not really any one person's (i)fault(i)." 

  "That's good messaging." 

  "That's reality."