To begin with, a few questions; junkets come with the job…what’s the occasion for this assemblage here in the midst of deep white, with flights outbound to anywhere delayed, then cancelled? Their meeting. And what’s their meeting about? The occasion. Okay, okay, alright already, nobody knows, nobody’ll admit to not knowing. Tightlipped. Burnttongued. Closed set. What’s that about? It’s about time, again. About time for what? For this. All under the lettered sign on the hill. Who stole the
I’m telling you, we owned New Amsterdam, we took New York, we had the whole island, the inners, the outers, the nation, the entire goddamnit world.
Anything was ours for the taking—
We had all the reservations, all the restaurants and tables in town.
You want a house, you got a house.
You want an election, it’s yours.
Jesus God they named streets after us, can you believe, squares and parks. We had the press, the television and the movies, too, we owned the networks and the theaters, the unions and art.
We wrote the books, then we’d close them on anyone who’d presume to oppose.
And then, nu, you know the rest…this is the Laughtrack King talking and, hahahamutterfutzingha as he’s drinking the Tea King’s wild fruits assortment, he spurts it out his nose then back into the cup and then drinking again, spurting and yadda — how we knew everyone, presidents and senators and actors, how we knew the presidentsenators, the senator-actor-artist-&-athletes, all the way down to the shvartze jazzsingers whose contracts we canceled and wages we prorated, held against their habits (here’s a swell, a whistling Dixie) — we were the sitcoms and Broadway, deli and stocks stacked high on rye, the funds hedge and mutual, medicine and law, the military’s authority, the conservative bombs and all the liberalism in the world with which to apologize when we dropped them…they’re talking at once when the Shoe King takes one of his support’s loafers off, pounds the table with it as a secretary emerges, struck from oblivion to shorthand,
THE MATTRESS KING
How we knew all the titles, their acronyms, the big machers & the contract menschs, the personalities, and the gossipedabout.
How we worked all the angles, had every number, knew every score, played hard on all schemes.
We rose to their equals, then we raised them one more. Our hands were everywhere — even they were in hand.
THE PILLOW KING
What we bought, we sold, and what we sold, we bought back then sold it again, for a profit margin higher, always higher, toward heaven.
Let’s talk rate of return, taking a piece of everything then putting them back together into new wholes: threehalves of any percentage always to parties of our own imaginative accounting, leveraged in the greed that only in America’s known as ambition.
The vig for living free, you just have to deal.
But aside from family immediate and extended, a congregation of maybe arsonhappy brothers-inlaw, it wasn’t a Syndicate, wasn’t a System — it was a loose thing…
That’s what no one ever understood.
And that’s a wrap! says Spielgrob.
Print it! he says to the soundstage, emptied…even he’s not there, anymore.
A promise, though — we’ll patch it up in edits…
Always, there’s post.
All the while all the way back east — being the manger of opinion, straw-thought, dungwonder — the tsking siskeling critics, the talkinghead commentariat, latenite pundits, qrating mongers and their PR meisterminders they’re asking, for once without rhetoric and in unison, from a deck above the reader’s pew…shtumup, where is He?
Benjamin. Ben. Mister Israelien. Give Him over unto us. Produce Him or wither upon an alien vine.
What’s with this journey dorf-to-dorf, this khuter hopping, this zemstvo zip…is it a quote unquote quest for identity, a search for roots, an undertaken Wander not quite though by now almost jahr, a pilgrimage and if so then, to where — who owns the rights? Listeners and viewers at home, by now they’re not even encouraged, they’re urged, to send in their votes, any ideas, tips hot or not, c/o any dark rider headed through the night to the next town, just over the river.
For a moon, though, it’s none of those.
