Panflick: The Boston Car Wars Complete Text

Panflick: The Boston Car Wars

By Stephen C. Rose

Copyright 2006 by Stephen C. Rose

For Kurt Vonnegut

"I have just returned from Boston. It is the only sane thing to do if you find yourself up there."  -- Fred Allen

1 Car Crash

(1980s)

Adam Panflick stood up at a table in the Boston Public Library, pulled $300 in crumpled bills from a pocket of his baggy pants and let the money fall over the fifty or so volumes he'd been perusing through the afternoon.
"Anybody want some?" he honked.
A few regulars looked his way and hurriedly returned to their books. A senile guard coughed.
"Good!" Adam honked again, scooping up the bills. "I have a use for these anyway." He noticed a portion of his ample paunch protruding from a buttonless aperture in his denim shirt and gave it a paternal pat.
"Bloom's alright," he said.
Eyes turned toward him again and there was a scattering of "Shhhs" mingled with more profane utterances.
"Time to go for the jugular," Panflick grunted.
He headed speedily for the door.
"Time to tremble, barbarians of Boston!" His huge denim vest billowed out behind his top-heavy frame. "There is mung on the land."
"Psychotic!" someone muttered.
"Read Bloom," Adam called over his shoulder.
He barreled by the inspection station.
"Sir?" the inspector called. But by the time the soundwaves reached Adam's ears, he was pushing open a 'Please-don't-use' door and thrusting himself out into the summer heat of Boylston Street.
Panflick stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. His small, delicate nose searched for a sea breeze to drive off the disgusting exhaust fumes of Boston's polluted Back Bay. "I thought so," he opined. "The air is as noxious as ever."
Then this curious person assumed a stance of deep meditation for perhaps twenty seconds, after which he drew in a deep breath and squared his formidable frame, looking to and fro. He then walked to the curb and plunged onto the crowded one-way thoroughfare.
"Go ahead hit me, you mungsuckers," he yelled, head down, eyes mere slits. He waited to die.
But now heard a symphony of screeching brakes and and the seraphic percussion of vehicle striking vehicle. A Yellow Cab ploughed into the side of an obscenely long stretch limo, double-parked in front of the Boylston Street eye establishment.
"Good one!" Adam cried.
A raging BMW jerked forward and pulled to a screeching halt inches from Panflick, the driver's curses audible, his face a mask of pure malevolence.
"Up yours," Adam yelled, peering triumphantly at the face behind the glass. He walked smartly onward, suffused with the heady balm of a pure and transcendent joy.
But as he attained the opposite sidewalk, Panflick changed instantly. He took on an all-business air and proceeded East on Boylston as though nothing had happened.

Police cars were appearing on various side streets, their renegade movements adding to the gridlock. A fight broke out between the crew-cut Irish limo driver and a portly Hispanic cabbie. But Adam was, by now, entering the Dunkin'Donuts on the next block.
At the counter he purchased a baker's dozen of oat bran donuts and walked purposively to a rear table where he began to consume them, one per bite. He washed down his mammoth mouthfuls with gulps from a jumbo Classic Coke.
Suddenly he gagged. "Is there," he blurted, scattering half-masticated dough in all directions, "a big dirty cucaracha in this oat branner?"
Eyes now turned to him as he began a minute examination of the fragments that fell within reach. He held each one up like a rare diamonds for close inspection. Then for good measure he picked them apart with inquisitive fingers.
"None here. Hmm. I could swear."
When he was satisfied he had merely imagined the insect--or worse, swallowed it whole -- his feelings against the remaining donuts softened to the extent that he now offered them to onlookers.
"No cucarachas, false alarm!" There were no takers. So he carried the box out on the street where, now, more mayhem reigned.
Shirt-sleeved ad execs and fitness professionals had vacated their places of work. So too had administrative assistants, shop-keepers and the staffs of various eateries. There was virtually impenetrable mass on the sidewalk. Boston's anarchic drivers had by now converted Boylston Street from a four-lane drag-strip into a five- and six-lane confusion of vehicles intent, against all logic, on Getting Through.
"Nothing but ocean over there," Panflick yelled, pointing East as he pushed his way through the crowd. He was soon among the cars.
"Oat bran here!" he called brightly to beleaguered drivers. "Roach free!" Adam squeezed his way through the mess and arrived at scene of the fight, which had degenerated into a shouting match. He caught the eye of the cabby. "Donut, sir?"
"That's him!" the driver shouted, jumping up and down. "It's all his fault!"
"You lie!" Adam protested. "It is the fault of the lobotomized mass mind and the imprint on the world of one Henry Ford. Another mind must rise to undo his chicanery. C'est tout!" He motioned to the sea of raging, honking automobiles, stretching far beyond Massachusetts Avenue. "Besides, you nearly ran me down. Take away his medallion! He's a menace!"
One of the regiment of police officers took Panflick by the elbow. "Move along, bud."
"Panflick's the name." Adam held out a donut. "Want one, officer? Oat bran. Lines your intestines like concrete. Protects against food. You look a bit pasty. Pollution sickness, I'd say." He thrust a jowly face toward the man in blue.
"Move on," the officer growled.
"I'll move, you brute." Panflick quickly made for the stricken limo whose central portion, unsupported by wheels, had simply caved in. He clambered up onto the crushed top.

"People of Boston!" he cried, "Look at this!" He waved at the sea of honking cars backed up to Massachusetts Avenue and beyond. "The legacy of Henry Ford who came from a place where they stripped bark from trees to save themselves the labor of chopping them down. You are all pusillanimous conformistos. Enemies of the future!"
Adam paused take in a great gulp of air. "Down with the car!" he cried, raising his fists. "Everybody now! Down with the car! Down with the car!"
The limo was sagging perceptibly beneath the weight of our formidable agitator. An officer groped for Panflick's ankle but Adam did an elusive dance.
No one took up the anti-auto chant, but repeated it with great gusto. When two other officers ran up, he leaped off the other side into the middle of Boylston Street and trotted off.
"No place for a car!" he called out to the stalled drivers. "No place for a car!"
He still had six donuts, clutched in his hairy, veined hands. He began wolfing them down, so that his commiserations became muffled. "Wo pay fow a ca'," and so forth.
Panflick came upon a matronly driver catatonically muttering unspeakable epithets and banging her head against her steering wheel. He gulped down the remainder of his donut with a satisfied smack and placed his face inches from her's.
"No way out," he said with grave finality, tossing the last donut into her lap. He walked off without looking back.


2 Suburban Anxiety Attack

The east gate of the Auditorium T station was opened and Panflick could not resist running down a short flight of steps to see what was doing underground. He produced a crumpled dollar bill at the cashier's window and received one token and fifteen cents in change. A panhandler stood by. Adam held the nickel and dime up. "Want 'em?" There was no reply. Panflick pocketed the shiny coins with a shrug.

A train pulled in at that very moment. It was substantially unoccupied. Adam vaulted up into an air-conditioned outbound car and draped himself languidly over two yellow plastic seats. By the time the train made Kenmore he was snoring peacefully. And so he continued until a sharp regional accent pierced his benign aura of dreaming innocence. "Wake up, sir, wake up, end of the line."
"Where might I be?" Panflick groaned.
"Riverside."
Adam looked out the window to his left and saw a sea of parked cars. "Eek!"
"Sir?"
Adam looked out the right window and saw green trees and, in the distance, the huge interchange where Route 128 meets Interstate 90.
"Eek!" he repeated.
"What's wrong?" the conductor said.
"What's wrong?" Adam cried, holding both hands to a suddenly pulsing forehead. "It's a suburb!"
"So?"
"How do I get out of here? Quick! Anathema! Dregs! Enemy territory!"
"Sir?"
"Hurry! Contamination is setting in. Terminal boredom originated here! Help! Unspeakable acts occur here, mass murders, hidden crimes against self. Help!"
The conductor succeeded in walking the distraught suburbophobe to the inbound platform. Adam paced up and down for a minute, trying to clear his head and get a grip.
He read a sign over an unoccupied ticket booth that said the return fare to Boston was $1.50, payable in exact change. Across the tracks several uniformed T employees were conversing in a leisurely manner behind the closed glass door of a shack-like structure. They were drinking from white cups.
Adam continued to pace. The oat bran donuts were beginning to create salutary repercussions in his upper colon. Soon he would need to act. Just then, a train pulled in. "Thank God, just in time!" Panflick ran for the front door.
But as he arrived the young woman driver leaped out and the door slammed premptorily behind her. "What's going on? What is this?" Adam called. But she turned without a word and headed toward the shack.
Panflick contemplated his options. There was a sea of cars behind him. The space between any two of them could have served as a place where he could, in a word, go. But then it occurred to him there was no tissue about.
"Damn," he honked aloud. "How could I have known I would end up in this wasteland?" There was only one other option. Adam moved resolutely across the tracks and banged on the shack's glass door, attracting blase gazes from the recumbent T workers.
"Fecal emergency!" he yelled. "Fecal crisis!"
"What's he saying?" said the lady driver. "Probably some abortion nut," a conductor said.
Adam began battering the fragile door with his capacious fists. When it didn't give way he rushed it and it burst open. Before anyone could stop him he scampered across the floor and locked himself in the bathroom where he assumed a favored Zen position. A shuffling of shoes and urgent conversation a few feet away could not remove a thin and knowing Botticellian smile from his lips. "Good one," he said softly.
Adam rose, ignoring yells and bangings on the door. He washed his hands, flushed twice, and faced the vibrating portal. "Make way, proctological voyeurs!" he cried.
There was a lull. He unfastened the latch and turned the knob and the door opened. Adam had only to extend his meaty hands to part the silenced crowd. He walked through the room and out without a word.

He resumed his wait upon the platform. In a few minutes, the woman driver re-emerged. Adam let a few newcomers precede him to the now-open car door and then hopped up. "How much?" he asked. "Buck ana half, exaact change."
"Here ya go," Adam said handing her a dollar bill and two quarters.
"I said change, no bills."
"WHAT!!!!"
"Ride free."
"I certainly shall," said Adam. He stumbled t o a single seat, this one a bright blue. "Suburbs!" he muttered aloud. "A planning disaster, that's what they are. Frank Lloyd Wright was wrong. Drew the first interchanges, hypothesized gardening instincts, ignored the venal slob nature of the species. A pattern lingo. Pshah!"
This bitter monologue continued all the way back way back to Park Square where Adam transferred to the Red Line, bound for Harvard Square.

3. Prayer in Copley Square

Within twenty-five minutes Adam was wedged into a plastic chair in the front row of the main lecture room at the Kennedy School of Government, just in time for a speech by the new Surgeon General, Star Behnke, the former Lieutenant Governor of Texas, known widely for her controversial positions on teenage pregnancy.
She was led to the platform by a former television personality who had been brought to the school during the Reagan era to engage in media studies.

Adam dreamed away through this fellow's tendentious introduction and most of the Surgeon General's speech. Her main point was already well-known to readers of the Boston press which had that very day devoted fifty or so inches of type to it. Males should be held accountable for their part in impregnating young women. Males need education, awareness. Feminists should help.

The high official sat down to resounding applause from all genders. Adam scampered up to the questioner's mike before the moderator could even call for queries. The former celebrity nodded to Panflick. "Please say your name and be brief."

"You may call me Bloom," Adam said. "My question, Dr. Surgeon General, is whether you favor, as I most emphatically do, reversible vasectomies for all male children--at birth? " Adam stood there calmly, hand on chin. He was growing hungry.

"Sir," the Surgeon General replied crisply, avoiding Panflick's baleful gaze, "I most certainly do not. Your proposal sounds positively Hitlerian."

The room reverberated with instant applause.

"You are a grungoid hypocrite," Adam said. "If we can go to the moon, we can reverse vasectomies. Stop playing to the gallery and think about it!"

The celebrity moderator nodded to a technician and Adam's mike was summarily silenced. Adam was incensed at this incursion on his powers of speech.

"Would you go for a voluntary program at puberty, with tax incentives?" he screamed. "Would you go for kid licenses instead of marriage licenses?"

But nobody heard and he became aware of censorious stares accompanying a loud chorus of cacaphonous derogation.

As Adam wheeled about and walked swiftly from the room. he called back over his shoulder: "Repent and believe selected portions of the Synoptics!"

Out on the street he took stock. The thought occured to him: "Were it not for my ungenerous pater and a bit of luck, I would be out on the street or poised on the Mass Avenue bridge, ready to expire in the Charles."

Panflick's hunger was by now so great it could only be satisfied by a trip to the Yenching Palace on Boylston Street. When he got off at the Copley T station he immediately rounded up the homeless and panhandling regulars on the intervening block with loud honks of, "Soup's on. Chinese alright? My treat!"

A motley but colorful gathering of thirteen street people soon filed into the nondescript establishment. Before the owner could react, Adam produced his three c-notes and pressed theminto the Chinaman's hands. Then he moved impatiently to the rear where waiters started scurrying to create a table for fourteen.

"No beer!" the owner said, following Panflick warily. Adam whirled on a dime, dug deep for more of the green, and shouted, " No beer? You probably believe in entropy. How dare you? Rifkin's wrong, you know."

The owner looked at the bills which Adam had given him and saw the light: "Beer OK!" he cried with brisk resignation.

"Six Peking Duck, fifteen orders Peking Meat Sauce Noodles, two rounds beer," Adam called to no one in particular. "Double fortune cookies."

The entire meal was consumed without incident, indeed with hardly a word of conversation. When it was over the Panflick party filed out with contented smiles to face the fetid Boston night.

In the hazy glow of a streetlight, Adam fumbled with the fortune from his second cookie, unsure whether to toss it or reread its piercing message: NO LOVE, NO GOOD.

He folded the small paper in fours and used the stiffened result to clean a finger nail. Then he threw the makeshift file into a trash bin and lifted his eyes to the green haze that had fallen over the city--an amalgam of damp sea air melded with the detritus of three million automobiles, trucks and smokestacks.
The haze lay like a soft judgment. If the message Adam had lately read were not still on his mind, he might have tried to execute a bit more judgment on the streets, bash a car or two with his bare fists. But now he stood convicted. He lowered his eyes to the facade of Trinity Church, and forgave the Florentine building for being closed.

It was only ten at night. But then in Boston most establishments locked their doors at sundown. Adam's mind drifted affectionately to another city far away where the lights glow all night long, thanks to the inexhaustible flow of the mighty Colorado. Suddenly, prostrated himself on the brick pavement, letting the cool stone caress the naked extremities of his pleasantly full tummy.
He knew religious observances in public were frowned on by the Misunderstood One, but there was a peculiar urgency just now. Fortune's brief text, fabricated in some Taiwanese word-processing den, had cut him to the quick.

"Lord," the prostrate Panflick began, "this morning I heard several Teutonic touristos in the Public Gardens. They were gathered around the bronze ducklings snapping endless high-speed 35mm frames with their Leicas and such. All the while they were going, 'Quack, quack, quack' and laughing uproariously.
I thought inevitably of that 'good German' Brunhilda Schmertznabel, Trustee From Hell, author of my most recent downfall. The only thing that consoles me is that Brunhilda Schmerznabel has never been close to anyone save her sabre-toothed Weimeraners while I have enjoyed many most glorious intimacies, thanks to You I am certain.

"But as you know my heart's desire has now run off to court some horrendous coupon-clipping offspring of insipid New England declining wealth. And I? I'm back on Melchizadek's inadequate dole, reduced to using Oscar's Grind cum Panflick Gambit to earn my livelihood. I ought to be living on a Macarthur grant. Instead I am just another unemployed generalist, making a spectacle of myself.

"Boston is a cold place, Almighty. I have been here three years now and have not met a soul, but my dear departed, to talk to. This afternoon in the library I realized my truest friends are upon the shelves. The prolific professor Bloom, the prophetic Fyodor and Mr. Ainslie.

"Tonight I made a fool of myself because I was jealous of a man who, in my right mind, I would never wish to be. Never in a thousand years. But he was in and I was out. He was on the platform and I was in the crowd. He was known. I was not. And so I rose up to try to be a someone again. I am disgusted with myself. This damnable fortune cookie is the last straw.

"Why am I lying here with people beginning to look at me? Is that a voice I hear? Is this the fame of the nameless? Lord, I am not going to go back to Melchizadek and plead for more.
I am not going to go back to the shrinks and cathart with pillows. I refuse to murder Ms. Schmertzgabel as well, mainly because I am afraid of her sabre-toothed Weimeraners. Besides, I do not wish to spend an eternity in Purgatory listening to good Germans.

"This is very bad Lord. Sometimes I feel I am father Karamazov himself. Oh and cable TV, Lord! Cable TV doesn't help at all. I thought watching movies endlessly, carefully ascertaining their status by reading all the published reviews, would take my mind off this lurking rage inside.
How will I ever love again? Trite question? No love, no good. Lord, have you looked at my flaccid member lately? I am aging, Almighty!

"I thought I might simply come here and ask you to lift these manifold burdens from my heart. I am past being ready. As they say in the ads, just do it, Lord, just do it!"



4.


Seismic Movements

Panflick slowly pushed himself up, washed out by his exertions. He looked at the semi-circle of onlookers and decided that henceforth he would carry on such colloquies in the privacy of his closet, as the Synoptics recommend.

But this would require a bit of readjusting at home. So he squared his shoulders and marched resolutely back across the square and did not stop until he had reached the Fairfield Building in the Prudential Center complex.

"Evening Mr. Panflick," said Carlene, the Pinkerton guard who sat behind a desk in the lobby of the twenty-seven story structure. She was surrounded by high tech consoles of the type one would associated with such an organization as the Prudential Apartments.

"Evening, Carlene," Adam said, moving resolutely toward the elevator which would bear him up to the studio apartment whose rent was paid the first of every month by one Mr. Oswaldo Quince, Melchizadek's seemingly ageless man Friday.

As the elevator doors closed, Adam pushed six and muttered, once again, "Bloom's alright." Then caught himself for the third time this week, beginning to cry.

Once he had thrust his key into the hefty medical lock of 6A and gained entry into his spacious and generously-windowed sanctorum, Adam walked straight to the door which opened the Pandora's box that was his closet.

The entire area was piled high with folders, piles of notebooks tied together with twine, cartons of papers and manuscripts, large envelopes filled with letters, old checks, and newspaper clippings.

The Panflick wardrobe fit easily onto the hook on the back of the bathroom drawer. It consisted of another pair of pants, two shirts and a worn Harris Tweed jacket for special occasions.

Undergarments and socks shared his top bureau drawer with bottles of various prescription drugs, all designed to relieve pain, unclog veins and inhibit the flow of adrenaline into the Panflickiann corpus. The rest of his bureau, like his closet, contained endless collections of paper.

Adam's eye scoured the parquet-floored premises, the nicest he had ever occupied in his adult years. The large room was furnished in minimalist style. There was a mattress with a green and blue sleeping bag laying there, just as it had been left when Panflick got up that morning.

For a pillow there was a rolled up camel's hair trench coat Adam haD bought for seven dollars at Morgies Goodwill on Washington Street before it closed down. A shadeless lamp stood next to the mattress. Far off by the window a simple folding chair of the 17.50 garden variety sat next to an inverted carton.

For a moment Adam was torn between the literalism of the Synoptic text regarding the confined area appropriate for prayer and the thought that the entire apartment was a closet of sorts.

But no. Tonight's experience had shaken him. There were seismic movements taking place beneath the Panflickian surface. A great compulsive urge to be rid of the detritus of the past rose up and soon Adam was rummaging madly among the stacks of cartons and loose papers, trying to determine which would be sacrificed to his worship needs.

There was no safeguard against massive and irretrievable deletions when Adam was in such a state. When he had said farewell to his semi-wife Ganya many years earlier he filled his car with a decade of memorabilia, manuscripts, petitions and publications and disposed of them in the incinerator of a Poughkeepsie motel after sorting through them on a kingsized bed in a frenzy of catatonic agony.

Like some gray commissar of a nightmare regime, Adam had from time to time determined that he would be, to all intents and purposes, a tabula rasa. He would clean his own slate, obliterate his sorry history, try again. And so he shed like dead skin the 'insufficient' products of his more recent past.

There was a schute in a hall closet into which one could toss small bags of garbage. Papers were to be left on the closet floor. Adam felt there was too much to be stacked where prying eyes might look, so he dropped large piles of yesterday right down the shute where, lately, coffee grounds, empty cans, crushed cereal boxes, gnawed bones and banana peels had observed Newton's Law, hurtling down to be cremated or compacted or otherwise obliterated forever.

Screenplays, songs, letters, notebooks describing the traversing of the great American continent on the tiniest of roads, monographs on games of chance, theological theses and creedal commentaries -- swoosh! Down the shute, la, la, la, to clear out a place of prayer removed from the world.

"History," said Adam, "is in here." He pointed to his sweaty cranium. "To be a writer is to be a betrayer. Everything must go. Oh it may be true that the world lived by ideas and that these ideas come off the page, but somehow I have not got the hang of it. There are too many truths." Thus he muttered to himself as he made trip after trip to the schute.

Finally he returned for the last time to to face an empty closet. But now he was too wired to stop and commune with the Almighty. He wondered what was happening on the street. He felt a strong sexual urge course through his very center. NO LOVE, NO GOOD. Lust not bad. Ahh. What to do now?

No autoerotic interlude would suffice. Fate was written in the paper that had cleaned his nails. Somewhere out there someone waited for him. NO LOVE, NO GOOD. Power to the Taiwanese scholars and their interpreters! Adam wondered about Clarice. But no.

One should not have affairs with the concierge. He thought of running up to the penthouse floor and banging on doors until some unrepentant descendent of Erica Jong came panting to the peephole, saw his lascivious face, and fainted with desire.

Check out the checkout girls at Star Market? Perhaps a cool walk around the perimeter of Copley Place, inhaling the counter-aphrodisiacal vibrations of a fetid summer night.

Suddenly Adam thought of the enormity of what he had just done. His whole justification for existing as he did -- as one certifiably unable to endure the slings and arrows of normal bread-winning -- was ... down the shute!

Notes for a novelistic biography of Veblen. An opera on the ideas of Robert Ingersoll. A light opera on the deaths of Henry Pitney Van Dusen, Mrs. VanDusen, Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King, Jr.. A long poem about the eccentric founder of Universalism in America. A diatribe against Hosea Ballou, universalism's scourge. The diary of an earthquake at the Salton Sea.

"Life is the biggest idol of all," Adam had said to himself of late. "What's life worth unless other things are worth more than life?"

There was an odd chime. Adam was unused to it, then realized it was the house phone. "Mr. Panflick, there is a Serena Parsnoble here to see you."

"Send her right on up," Adam said with happy smile.

Then, looking into the bathroom mirror, he made his best Herman Goebbels face and said, with perfect German inflection, "Quack, quack, quack."

.
5


Sleeping Superhero

Adam opened his door and peered down the hall. "You are ineffably beautiful."

"Well-beholded, merci and such," Serena replied.

"I forgive you, you know."

"Yes, cher narcissisto. Have you eaten?"

"Yep."

Serena pulled a small paper bag from an inner pocket and extracted a sandwich-shaped packet. Her long hair touched her hands as she bent to unwrap it.

"Avocado?" Adam asked.

"Cum tomato, parsley, thin-sliced cucumber."

"Need I express surprise?"

"I am free to change my mind."

Serena took off her anarak. "It's warm in here. You are the only male I can tolerate at this point, Adam."

"And Mr. Silliman?"

"I was angry with you. You have more to offer the world than the latter-day alchemy of eking out an income supplement at the blackjack tables. I rethought our Las Vegas adventure and decided it was not fun, after all."

"Wendell B. Silliman, III, Bostonian, correct?"

"I wanted you to give up on your get-rich-quick to spite Melchizadek schemes. But then I reflected that you are you and that that was alright."

"Silliman is a Preppolino pig."

"I am not ready to write him off entirely. We are still a fallen race, Adam."

"It's no good with a colleague. But that is, of course, wrong. Colleagues often make wonderful lovers. Until the nefarious Teutons spoil it all!" Adam shook his head. "By the way, I ran across Michael Frisbie in the library today. An account if his last days."

"I want to move my desk but Carmelita says it's an antique. I feel like an exhibit."

"All Beacon Hill is an exhibit, when people aren't out knifing one another."

"It must have been awful," Serena said.

"What?"

"Frisbie's death."

"Any fool could have surmised there are mountain lions 'round Escalante. He became part of their food chain, that's all. I'd have preferred encamping at a lower altitude."

"Damn!" Serena fished a vagrant piece of fallen avocado from the parquet floor.

"How is Ms. Carmelita? Why does she waste her formidable talents trying to atone for Mr. Frisbie's woeful escapades?"

"She has a PhD in Belief Systems, Adam. Our work is worthwhile. You should talk."

"Then why are you smiling, my love?"

"Don't be rude."

"Did Frisbie's group have a name?"

Serena licked her upper lip.

"God," Adam harrumphed. "A membership limited to American and British --British! -- males! Unbelievable."

"In our rainbow age."

"Using semi-automatic weapons against long-horned sheep!"

"Silliman says he can't believe you went to Exeter."

"Just because there is no Panflick Hall? Odd, he ends up working for an unknown cult investigation unit on Beacon Hill. What's his angle, besides your ineffable self?"

Serena walked with a touch of stealth behind Adam and bent over his rotund frame, planting her long artist's fingers on his protruding tummy.

"Ahhh!" Panflick smiled.

"I do not want to live here."

"Our love is complete whether you are here or not. Ooooh! That tickles."

Serena bent until her lips touched Adam's ear. She kept up pressure on the Panflickian midriff. "You are very foolish. Is there any water?"

"Naturally. It is holy. You left it here and I have not touched it."

"Good." Serena felt a drop of moisture on her hand.

"You are crying."

Adam nodded.

Serena got up and turned off the lights but the room remained suffused in the penumbra of Boylston Street's nocturnal illumination. She took Adam by the hand and pulled him up and led him to the futon mattress that lay on the parquet floor a few feet away.

"Let me," she said.

Adam lay down and smiled at the ceiling.

"Tell me about Death Trips Limited," Serena said, sitting down beside him. She liberated Adam from his baggy pants and turned her attention to his knees.

"That was ages ago. After the Ganya period. Before now. Only did one of 'em."

"Tell me about it."

"Ah, keep on."

"Richard Vale. Terminal leukemia, six months to live. An anomaly in the Berkshires where they believe if you die it's something you did wrong while attending weekends at the latest homeopathic retreat center. But no sooner does the diagnosis come through than they urge him to do the whole works. Radiation, chemotherapy. The guy was dying, pure and simple."

"Did he have a family?"

"A wife on the verge of divorce who repented when he got ill and wanted him to do what the doctors said. No children."

Serena pushed herself up and removed her blue shift. She lay silently beside Panflick and closed her eyes.

"I have never felt such peace. Go on."

"Everything Dylan Thomas wrote about raging against the night turned out to be unmitigated bullshit. How 'bout more knee?"

"We have plenty of time, Adam."

"Not if you go back to that sleazoid preppolino. Do you have any idea of how bad that makes you look."

"Go on," Serena whispered, touching Adam's knee. "I think you would approve of how I have handled that situation.".

"I told Vale, You know you're gonna die soon. How about a real duzy of a death, one for the books? A Death Trip."

"Go on."

"Only barrier was his resurgent wife and a legion of puling, guilt-ridden well-wishers who couldn't stand the idea of someone their own age knocking off so early."

Serena was breathing easily and regularly.

"Work." Adam said.

"I'm gathering my strength. Go on."

"I composed a fare-thee-well missive -- guided his hand, as it were -- and we were off."

"A leukemia-naping? What happened then?"

"I had a Plymouth Champ with a zillion forward speeds and about three horsepower. It was rear-ended by a fool in West Stockbridge one night when I was chowing down at Miss Ruby's Cafe and I took the insurance money and patched the bugger up with duct tape. It had a certaon cache."

"So you drove off -- where to?"

"We went on tiny roads through upper New York until we got to the Thousand Islands Bridge. We crossed into Canada and hit a bit of traffic until we got halfway across. We ate alot of phony Chinese food and heard some good radio."

"You were doing the driving?"

"Yes. He was slumped in the next seat -- at least at the start. But a funny thing happened. He began to rally. The word remission sprang to his lips. I had brought some Cuervo and Jack Daniels along as a condiment for a good Death Trip. He sipped as I drove. We played 'Hickory Wind' numerous times along with other affirmative things."

"Trouble is real."

"We spent a night in Moosejaw."

"And drove on to the, ah, Blue Canadian Rockies?"

"Mmmmm."

"How did you pay for the trip?"

"We had cash in a shoe box."

Serena pushed herself up on an elbow. "Intermission." She kissed him.

"Mmmm," Panflick said. "Unbridled passion. Can it be that this Death Trip business is stirring up a nether region, a subvutaneous layer?"

No sooner did he speak than Serena was reclining again, eyes closed, breathing softly and regularly.

"Umm, er, a follow up?"

"Go on," she said. "Money in a shoe box. What happened next?"

"He insisted we go to San Francisco. He said he wanted to watch the weather there before he died. Have a cone at the Baskin Robbins on Clement Street. It seems he had once lived there during a low period of his life. His one consolation was a daily cone, evidently."

"It's you who likes to watch the weather in San Francisco, Adam. And if I am not mistaken, following your dismissal from the Center you spent some time out there -- in extremis, as it were. But that was years after this."

"Shush," Panflick said, "I'll lose the thread."

Serena lay a hand upon Adam's other knee.

"By this time Vale was beginning to change -- talking to himself. Saying things like, 'Before I die, when I die', and such. We were at this little hotel near the Presidio. We'd wait for rain and then run down to the ocean."

"Did he cry?"

"We both did. He got much worse. I had to help him do things. Eventually he stopped eating."

"Didn't it occur to you that you were, ah, biting off more than you could -- I mean dying was what was going on, Death Trip or no."

Adam was silent.

Serena opened her eyes and, without moving her head, looked at Adam.

"He became much worse. Fortunately we were able to obtain some decent medication."

"What?"

"One of the 3's -- a mild nip."

"Did it stop his pain? And your discomfort?"

"Hardly. But with our other condiments, it helped."

"What happened?"

"We went to Mexico by way of El Paso. His pain was growing more terrible hour by hour. We played the tapes at full volume as we drove through the desert."

"Adam, what were you feeling?"

"Glad I wasn't him, for sure," Panflick replied quickly. "We spent the first night in a little hotel in Chihuahua. It was getting unbearable. He lay in a sweat, moaning. Finally calling his wife's name. Revolting. In the morning he had me call her collect from a pay phone and tell her where we were."

"What happened then?"

"I am not proud of myself in retrospect," Adam said softly.

"Why?"

"I wanted Vale to die before they could get there."

"You're a little boy, Adam."

"Ha! Do you know what happened?"

"Go on. No wait."

Serena sat up and rested her hand on Adam's chest, above his heart.

Adam continued. "Mrs. Vale arrived with five friends and relations prepared for an instantaneous encounter group. They took him in this room with them. Naturally, she would not speak to me. She told me this was between her and Vale and his closest friends."

"You were, after all, trying to make a business of his demise?"

"My heart wasn't in it anymore the moment she arrived with her egregious entourage. What are you doing -- imparting serene vibrations?"

"Did you ever raid the little shoe box?"

Adam shifted. Serena's hand remained upon his heart.

"We never discussed compensation. I told him this was a dry run. He did pay for the trip, as far as it went."

"What happened to the money, Adam?"

"They took him back that very afternoon. They did not take the shoebox and nothing was ever said about money."

"And what did you do?"

"I went to Fremont Street in my Plymouth Champ with ten forward speeds."

"Then what?"

"Used the formula."

"You used the money in the shoebox as a stake?"

"Quite so." Serena lifted her hand involuntarily, then lay it again over Adam's heart.

"I tried to visit Vale at the end but the people in the hospital told me clergy and family only. I naturally protested and set up a vigil in the hall. There's nothing in the Synoptics about clergy and family only."

"So what happened?"

"He died, that's what happened. Ashes to ashes and such. Apparently it was horrible because he lost all recognition entirely and she could not make any contact."

There was silence for some time and Serena withdrew her hand and sat lotuslike next to Adam, looking at him.

"Adam, whose Death Trip was it?"

"I think he would have known me at the end."

"Answer my question."

Adam looked out the window at the grungoid sky.

"It's late," he said.

Serena was wide-eyed now. "It was your Death Trip, Adam. You were doing what you will want to do when the time comes for you."

There was nothing but silence punctuated by the steady the steady undersound of the omnipresent Boylston Street traffic. Serena shifted slightly and her voice changed. "Adam, do you know what my Death Trip would be?"

"Listening to 'Paintng Box' while riding slow motion on the Knott's Berry Farm Roller Coaster?"

"Stop, Adam."

"’'Pologies. You have survived California most admirably."

"You and I would be together on that boat on that river in Mexico, Adam. Listening to 'One of These Days' and drinking Jose Cuervo Gold. We would be just as we are now."

"We would be moving from strength to strength," Adam said. "And there would be no fear or pain. Not like my friend Vale."

Serena turned and looked out at the bilious sky, then consulted her tiny wristwatch. She pushed herself up and stretched languidly.

"Time," she said. "I'll take back my key. We shall continue this." She walked to Adam's bureau and pulled open the top drawer. "Tell them at the desk," she said, extracting a set of keys. "Next time it will be your turn."

She slipped into her shift and pulled her anarak over her shoulders and, without a word, was off.

As the door closed, Adam looked up at the ceiling and wondered aloud: "And just how are we now?"

Then he turned over and fell into a sound sleep.


6

Car Free Heaven

Adam was wakened by the cacaphonous noise of the phone. He hurled himself from the confines of his sleeping bag and grabbed the receiver.

"Lo," he honked.

"Oh, well Adam, it's Mildred."

"Mother, indeed."

"Darling, how are you?"

"Well, mother, I am here and all is well. I have been working on my latest book. A blockbuster. It will doubtless be discussed by distinguished tenured personages questing after the new paradigm.."

"A new what? You haven't gone and bought something, have you?"

"Nothing, mother."

"Your father is still quite upset, Adam. He says he got you that job at the Center and while he does not admire that woman, what's her name, he says there are reasons why she might have wanted that other woman friend of yours all to herself. Woman's reasons, Adam."

"My pater is upset, mother, because I have embarrassed him once again because of his association with pusswanks and other horrendous offal of the wombs of Teutons, Angles and Saxons -- a most noxious race."

"Pusswhat?"

"Never mind, mother. Why are you calling?"

"He has other concerns. He says you have failed to show up on the list of contributors to any institution you have been related in the span of your entire adulthood. He says he is terribly embarrassed."

"Were those his exact words? Span of adulthood, embarrassed? What database provided him with these earth-shaking revelations? How does he know that I have not made any contribution? Don't answer. He clearly searches the horrendous alumni bulletins for some sign of largesse on my part. All givers get listed nowadays, Mother. It is a major contravention of the Synoptics -- this conspicuous charity."

"Excuse me, Adam?."

"Have you ever considered the position you're put into when reduced to the role of a messenger? I am available to speak directly to the loins that sired me on this matter. He knows my number and my point of view quite well.

Every institution to which I have a past connection has been devoted to transforming predatory instincts into civilized sheep's disguise, the better to eat us with, my dear. These bastions of the humanistic arts are far worse now in this respect than when I attended them. They have attained consciousness of their disgraceful role, and still lift not one finger."

"Adam, please, that is hardly the point."

"Providing the future predators of America with a patina of respectability, courtesy of spent radicals and tenured idiots, blind to their common rapaciousness?"

"Oh, Adam."

"Bloom's alright though," Panflick mumbled. "I hope."

"Adam, anyway, your father--"

"Mother, when is the last time you actually saw my father, as you call him?"

"Well, you were here too."

"Yes, last Christmas. It is August, mother. He's left you to rot in darkest Vermont where hostile social dropouts inhabit small sheds and exhibit their pent-up rage in all-night contra dances in the Brattleboro town hall, stomping Third Reich style on creaky wooden floors."

"Adam, speak clearly. I don't understand. Your father loves you. He is concerned."

"They could run American Rockwell Corporation and there they are, putting all their energy into growing groats and emulating hapless peasants."

"I don't understand."

"Mother, I am approaching the sunset of my years. I shall be constipated if we don't end this conversation immediately. When you hang up, call the House of Panflick and tell Father I shall doubtless win the National Book Award and possibly the Legion d'Honneur as well.

"Oh, and Mother, be sure to tell him I shall need his continued, albeit parsimonious, support, in order to be spared the indignity applying for grants or, God forbid, having to go to work. Goodby, mother."

Adam slammed down the receiver and scampered to the john. A copy of Robert Nozick's "Philosophical Explanations" lay on a mall plastic table by the toilet. Adam picked up the paperback. "Nozick is salient on the matter of the Holocaust," he said to himself.

"This event renders all past claims of Christian Orthodoxy specious. The choice now is to take suffering upon ourselves or let the world be damned. Neither appeals to me, although there is something to be said for the former course."

He walked to the plastic table by his imitation Eames chair and picked up his remote control which he aimed at hip level at the TV screen. ZAP. He was confronted with a hazy picture of a car-glutted Tobin Bridge.
He turned and looked out his westward-facing windows. On Boylston Street, the morning traffic was proceeding just as though, the previous afternoon, there had been no warning. At once Panflick knew what he must do.

As Adam waited for the elevator he intoned silently the following prayer to the deity.

"Holy One, thus far we have succeeded only in riling up a few Bostonian motorists. It is time now to arouse the sympathies of the Hub's National Public Radio set, the liberals of the area, a mild-mannered and generally ineffective breed, but of some use in our struggle.

Please, this very day, supply me with a foolproof chance to thrust this transcendent conflict into the realm of their deepest instincts and feelings."

He then reached into an inner pocket of his denim vest and pulled out a spiral notebook. He opened it to a lyric he had written but eighteen hours before and began to sing, to the tune of "What A Friend We Have in Jesus." His gusty delivery continued even as an elevator containing penthouse residents picked him up and descended to the lobby.

THERE WILL BE NO CARS IN HEAVEN

There will be no cars in heaven
There will be no traffic jams
You won't need a car in heaven
Cars are not part of God's plan
You'll be free of all the hassle
Of our crowded thoroughfares
You won't need a car to carry
Everything to God in prayer

Does the driving drive you crazy?
Is insurance killing you
There's no reason to be waiting
There is something you can do
On earth as it is in heaven
You can start right where you are
You'll save money and depression
Just get rid of all your cars

There will be no cars in heaven
There will be a peaceful flow
You'll have divine transportation
Anywhere you want to go
You say this is too preposterous
This is more than you can stand
Once more I'll repeat the obvious
Cars are not part of God's plan

Coda: There will be no cars in heaven.

7.

Peace

Following his sonorous exertions Panflick descended into the Fairfield Building lobby, where he decided to go to the Copley Mall for a bit of breakfast at Au Bon Pain. A seven grain roll with extra jam and a humongoid iced coffee from their brewing partner of the moment would hit the old spot. The day was already heavy with humidity. The temperature was hovering near 90.

Panflick's journey to this gastronomic haven ordinarily took him across Huntington Avenue on an enclosed overpass where he could look down on Boston's speeding automotive demons with appropriate disdain.
But the Prudential Center was defying the current recession by building a monstrous addition to its already-bulbous shopping mall and the overpass was blocked, leaving Adam with a horrible prospect: the streets.

He walked cautiously through the Fairfield's underground lobby to the so-called Ring Road that fronted his building. Out on the sidewalk, he looked warily right and left, ears searching out hostile sounds.

Cars typically approached from Boylston Street on an angled blind curve, achieving great centrifugal force. One of them could explode into view and kill at any moment.

To the right, up the hill, was Saks Fifth Avenue. There, expensive vehicles from Detroit and Stuttgart parked dispatched their frumpy suburban freight and waited with impunity. Past Saks down a hill at the end of the long block, Ring Road met Huntington, where motorists were most often stalled by one of the longest lights in the annals of urban gridlock.

One could read an entire Boston Herald waiting for the left turn arrow. But the damned thing would flick off at the turn of a page.

This crazed already certifiable motorists so that they roared up the hill like kamakazes on their way to ceremonial sepukkuland.

Panflick listened for the expected roar of such beasts but heard only the dismal sound of Traffic as a Whole, choking rights of way from Route 128 to the sludge-filled Atlantic. But no roar came. He then looked up and down the vacant street like a giant bird. No car was to be seen saved for the inert monoliths by Saks. So he waddled pell-mell to the other side, miraculously spared.

He then trundled fifty feet up the hill and ducked left into yet another underground parking area and walked through to Exeter Street where cars were generally powerless to inflict damage. They would typically be bunched up, revving and snorting, at another interminable traffic light where Exeter dead-ended into Huntington.

This morning, Exeter was almost car-free. A few vehicles waited at the light. Adam wondered if his "act" of the day previous was responsible for this lull. Whatever the reason, he stepped confidently into the street.

But just then a jet black BMW careened left from Blagden Street. Horn blaring, the auto braked to an angry stop inches from Adam who, for some reason, simply stood there, the soul of calm.

Panflick noted the presence of a pretty long-haired blond in the passenger seat. She reminded him of Serena. He bowed gently toward her with a hand gesture that was meant to concede the automobile's right of way.

But the driver, a yuppie sort with dark close-clipped hair, took obvious umbrage (perhaps thinking Adam had made a, ah, gesture of some sort). So he opened his window and yelled, "What do you want?" with roughly the timbre of a Hitler Youth Corps adjutant dealing with an octegenarian Rabbi.

Adam quickly circled the rear of the vehicle and walked to the driver's window and bent down close so that his portly head bobbed inches from the face of his inquirer. He bellowed, "What?"

"What do you want?" the driver yelled back angrily. Adam moved his head so he could see see the timid but interested eyes of the driver's kept trophy bride.

"Hmm, a kept trophy bride," he muttered.

"I asked you a question," the driver said with measured hostility.

Adam stepped back, and threw his head up and screamed at the top of his voice, "Peace."

"What?" the man said.

"Peace," Adam screamed again. "As in World peace." He looked at the driver.

An odd glint, whether of comprehension or not, Adam could not tell, suffused the questioner's face. Instantly, his window shot up and with a screech the BMW took off and ran the Huntington light with a conspicuous squealing of tires.

Adam calmly noted that the vehicle had New Hampshire plates. "Loeb progeny, no doubt," he said softly, a reference to a noted publisher of idiocies in the city of Manchester, New Hampshire, now doubtless roasting below.

 fiction, boston, 1980s, car wars, anti-automobile

8.

Rolls Royce with Big Dog


Adam made his way without incident to Huntington, crossed in the middle of the block and ducked into the entry of the Westin Hotel. Parked by the hotel entrance stood a beige Rolls Royce Silver Cloud of recent vintage. Panflick had a certain admiration for the craftsmanship of the Cloud. He ventured a closer inspection and saw, through tinted windows, what appeared to be a flash of fur.

"My, my," he said. "A suffocation is in progress. In Las Vegas the owners would be jailed. Poor sweating rich li'l' doggie! However, hmmm, ah yes, the Public Radio matter."

Adam inched conspiratorially toward the car, looking furtively at three youthful door persons fifty feet away, occupied with the considerable baggage of a portly platinum blonde.

As Adam drew closer,, he spied the the furry object's face. What looked to be no less that a pure-bred Great Pyrenees pup, already 90 pounts or so in weight, was now licking most pathetically the rear right window glass of he Silver Cloud, creating an impenetrable screen of gouache-like dog saliva. As this was being applied, the poor beast was emitting major whines of canine self-pity.

The acoustics of the $150,000 vehicle muffled these cries but the expression on the pup's face would have reduced the entire news staff of All Things Considered to tears.

And with every passing second Adam himself was thinking, This is too good to be true.

But where was a weapon of liberation, something with which to force entry and save the suffering creature from the callow and cruel master or mistress who would leave him with all the windows shut to virtually perish in the horrendous August heat?

At once Adam noted a sign that Abba in Heaven had indeed adopted a providential mode toward him this morning. Leaning against the side of the hotel was a small sledge hammer, the precise weapon needed to free the pup from his misery.

Adam backed unobtrusively toward the sledge and when he was a foot away, bent and scooped it up in a single motion. Then it occurred to him that he needed to strike a balance between effective dog liberation and a broader strategic objective: gaining sympathy among the pet-inclined liberals for his social program. First he must see if the hammer would do the trick. Must not hurt doggie, though.

Panflick lifted the heavy tool and swung it hard at the front door handle. To his surprise the hammer made only a minor dent just to the right of the handle.

The Great Pyrenees was, by now, leaping up and down furiously in the back seat. Sensing the pup's profound impatience, Adam popped a neat hole in the front passenger window. He sheathed his hand in the ample sleeve of his denim jacket and opened the front door. The huge creature bounded over the seat and out the front door, bowling Adam over.

Confused by his freedom, the Great Pyrenees began to howl. Adam lunged across the pavement on his knees siezed the dog by the collar. Standing stiffly, he made for the emergency door next to the Westin's automatic revolving doors and marched with his new friend into the lower lobby.

Without thinking, he followed his usual practice and made for the escalator up to the hotel lobby. Only when he was travelling on this device with the pup in tow did he contemplate the horrendous possibility of puppy fur being caught by the devilish wheels of this instrument which, after all, was modeled on the classical Medieval rack, the instrument used by good Christians to root out belief warp among the heretical.

Consumed with anxiety, Adam wheeled. When he did, he was rewarded with a great slurping face-lick which did in fact upset the pup's precarious balance. Adam's attention was further riled by the appearance, at the bottom of the escalator, of a security guard in a telltale Copley Plaza blue suit, armed with a beeper, held aloft like a standard.

"Stop" the guard called.

Adam grabbed the pup with a prodigious move and lifted his monstrous frame to chest height, wheeled and deposited him on the carpeted hotel lobby floor, scurrying off without, he noted, catching his denim vest in the monstrous teeth of the evil machinery.

"Look mommy," a little girl, done up in velvet and patent leather, called out. "Big doggie!"

The lobby was filled with a typical selection of tourists, business types and the more genteel of the homeless who occupied the available seating.

"Stop him" the security guard called, leaping smartly off the escalator, But nobody made a move and Adam, now holding the pup by a collar decorated with silver, walked past the small coffee vendor, who sold noxious hazelnut blend to unsuspecting customers, and straight through the doorway leading to another overpass to the Copley Mall proper. As he strode, Adam became aware of two things.

The huge white pup was following him as though trained to veritable perfection. No matter what he did the pup's portentous head was a few inches from his right knee. Panflick skipped suddenly to the left, nearly bowling over a smart young woman coming in the opposite direction.

"Watch where you're going scumbag," she said harshly.

Sure enough the pup skipped in tandem and Adam looked down to find his head at precisely the same inclination and distance from his right knee.

The second thing was no more than a sense Adam had that the Great Pyrenees possessed a profound psychotherapeutic temperament, rarely found in any creatures and certainly more healing in dogs than in homo sapiens, regardless of their training or experience.

Adam made up his mind to possess the pup somehow. He was too far gone to give up what might be his last connection with sanity. Indeed, possibly, Henry could emerge as a sure ticket to the restoration of health and happiness. Besides he was liberating the poor creature from major captivity.

Had Adam's attention been somewhat more focused on the general situation at hand, he would have seen that he was about to be sandwiched by two security men in front of him on the Mall side of the overpass and a whole frantic delegation in hot pursuit from the hotel side. A high keening shriek jerked his attention from the pup.

"Rexie! Omygod, there he is!"

The shriek came from the pulsating larynx of a woman who was perhaps six feet five inches in height, bedecked with what appeared to be precious stones.

"Stop that maniac this instant."

Adam took one last look at the dog.

"Rexie?"

The pup wore a disgusted expression. "I thought not," Adam said. "Henry suits you."

The great pup licked Adam's hand.

9.


Hand Gun Attack


Fortified by Henry's obvious affection, Panflick wheeled to face his pursuers. His demeanor was so regal, in an odd sort of way, that the party of security guards and the couple, who presumably had incarcerated the pup in the first place (the male was almost equal in height and thinness to the bulemic soul who had called out Rexie and now stared daggers at Adam) paused for a moment, until the dog's owner intoned.

"You owe me one pure-bred AKC champion and approximately ten thousand dollars for damage to a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud."

Adam thanked the deity for the woman's theatricality because it had the effect of silencing everyone on the overpass, all of whom had forgotten their hurry and now waited in a discreet oval to witness the unfolding drama.

The sudden silence was broken by a security guard.

"You can't have that dog in here, sir."

Adam did not bat an eye. Looking directly at the peremptory female who was Rex's evident owner, he took one forward step, the pup keeping perfect position.

"You," he said softly, "shall have everything you demand if you can do one thing. Call this maligned creature, this sweet being you left to suffocate in your ostentatious prison, leaving me no option but to strike a blow for his freedom. If he comes when you call, you win. Doggie and damages. If the dog does not come I owe you nothing and he is mine."

"Really" said the male of the couple. "Just have him arrested. Lord knows we're insured, lovey."

"Double damages," Adam said. "I will even eat a few milkbones myself if you chance to win. Though when he is my compatriot I will forever release him from dependency on unwholesome fatty foods. You will notice that this persecuted creature has not budged from my side one inch since your Arpege-drenched body came into view. It's obvious your empty existence is both boring and noxious to him."

"I accept," the female said, squaring her padded shoulders.

"Call away," Panflick answered.

"The challenge, you rodent."

With that Vickie knelt on the floor, stretching the skirt which encased her to the ankles.

"Here, Rexie." she called sweetly.

But the big pup did not move. Instead he regarded her balefully, indeed with a certain apprehension.

"Here, Rexie, you goddamned bastard. Look at him! Faithless, that's what he is. What'd we pay for him?"

"Forget it, hon. He never obeyed. We're well rid of him."

"Help me up, Charles," she said in a fierce whisper.

Charles responded instantly. She now began to open her gold encrusted purse. As she did the dog began to fidget ant to whine, without budging from his position next to Adam. Deftly the woman extracted a small handgun from the purse and aimed it in the general direction of Adam and the dog.

"I'll forget Rexie," she growled. "But the rodent is mine."

Adam moved between her and the dog. "Go suck a toad, murderess."

But even as he spoke his heart, he spied a smiling touristo, bearing a complex-looking video camera, which looked to have a sound system. The camera was trained on the little scene now being enacted. Instantly, Adam saw in this vignette, this slice of a typical Boston day, there were archetypal elements, Jungian paradigms, in short, the very stuff of which he might create sympathy for his aborning movement.

But just as this swift apprehension of SUCCESS occupied an edge of his consciousness, another primal force arrived as well. For success, and even happiness, for Adam, carried a potentially unbearable price.

"Wait, I take that back." he said quickly. "I was merely overreacting to the fact that you were allowing Henry here to suffocate in your needlessly luxurious automobile while you did whatever you were doing in this sterile complex."

The woman trained her pistol on Adam and her look turned from fire to ice. "Give me my dog."

Adam smiled happily. "Never," he responded. "This dog belongs to the people of Boston who corporately care for furry ones and never leave them to suffocate in ostentatious vehicles while on shopping binges."

"Vickie," her tall consort said in a nasal whine, "let's pack it in. Give him the damned dog. You never really wanted him, anyway."

"Horace, if you say another word I'll shoot, I swear." Vickie brandished the silver plated designer 38 under the acquiline nose of her Latinate companion.

Adam noted as he looked about the general confusion, not to say impotence, of the four Copley Mall security men, all clad in regulation blue and equipped with radios. From one of them came the simple evocation, "Jesus!"

From another, a subdued and ill-attended, "Hey, ma-am."

Adam noticed this, observing that these young fellows were rather different than the typical, close-cropped, square- headed, barrel-chested sorts who walked up and down Boylston Street on Friday nights breaking into drunken screams at the least provocation. These fellows had a less burly aspect.

"Give me my dog," Vickie demanded. This timne she took a step forward and pointed her pistol in the general direction of Adam's head.

Out of the corner of his eye, Adam observed the tourist with the video camera, trained upon the unfolding drama. Suddenly he sensed a stirring in his chest which he had not experienced in many years. He began to breathe in a measured manner, consciously. He realized that he must leave the scene immediately.

"Come Henry," he said in a changed and muted tone.

He turned and started walking toward the mall.

"Go ahead shoot," he muttered, head down, deep in some fearful place from which he had no sense he might ever return. He had thought this was over. He began to tremble and it was only, he thought, Henry's presence that enabled him to keep a tiny hold on reality. It was only the great pooch trotting happily at his side that gave him a point of reference toward a possible recovery.

There was no shot, however.

Vickie merely stood with her legs apart contemplating the gun and the speechless crowd.

"I think," her companion whispered, "we'd better leave before there is trouble."

Adam did not enter that state of nothingness which had been his all too common condition during earlier years. "It was the damned video that set it off, Henry," he said softly. Henry responded with a look of profound understanding."




10.

Phone Call from Mother

Adam walked Henry back to the Fairfield but, no sooner than he swept proudly into the lobby with his newfound friend, Becky the Pinkerton concierge, announced: "Oh, Mr. Panflick, you can't have that in here."

Henry regarded Becky with open curiosity, Panflick looked at her with a mixture of chagrin and incipient rage.

"This is Henry," Adam said. "He is a personage, a therapist, if you will. He will merely live here. His office is elsewhere." Without waiting for a response, he ushered Henry into a waiting elevator.

On the way to 7, Henry's tail wagged vociferously, tapping an exalted code on the elevator paneling.

The phone was ringing as they entered the apartment. He picked up the receiver and muttered, "Panflick here."

"Darling is that you?"

"The same, Mother."

"Your father says you disapprove of the automobile."

"He lies, mother, but how does he know? I disapprove of the invasion of my rights of way by Bostonian drivers. I say, Send them all to Montana to die in a Glacier Park traffic jam."

"I see. Such a contradictory child!"

"I have a destiny, Mother. How does my esteemed father know I am involved in the battle against cars in Boston?."

"He has his Boston connections, you know. Froggy Daniels is one of his oldest and best friends. Your father is keeping an eye on you."

"For what nefarious purpose?" Adam said, feeling the forces of lividity rising within him.

"I received an overnight mail from your father containing something from, let's see, Benbroke and Terry."

"Ah, a small, prestigious Boston law association. Specializing in estates," Adam said. "I believe they serve three of Boston's four celebrities."

"The letter contains a report to Froggie Daniels."

"The old friend network is involved? This is disgusting," Adam said. "The costs involved could do me very well just now."

"Want to hear what it says?"

"Continue."

"Let's see. A hostile encounter between you and the driver of a Lincoln town car at the entrance of the Copley Plaza Hotel: Subject swore at driver and threatened to destroy car with, ah, mace."

"It was only a threat, Mother. Boston drivers are a strange and lethal breed. The city is built upon principles of division that defy reason. Public and private are all askew."

"Adam, if you don't like Boston, why not move out to the Hamptons or someplace?"

"Come, mother. Not my world. Never was. Neither, of course, is this godforsaken Hub where the people who are not auto-lemmings are all on some self-absorbed program of some sort."

"The report refers to a Serena Parsnoble."

"Hmm, what does it say?"

"Serena Parsnoble appears to be subject's 'love interest'. Couple was observed, ah, embracing on grass near, mmm, bronze ducks on Boston Common, attracting attention of many small children."

"It is good for small children to recognize that all men are not car-driving homicidal maniacs."

"He says you have been at this for more than a month. He is afraid you do something, ah, public."

"Bearding cars in their den or kissing Serena?"

The house phone buzzed.

"I must go, Mother. Henry is under attack. Farewell."

Adam set the receiver down and headed for the house phone. "Don't tell me, I know," he said with acute resignation, banging down the receiver. He walked back to the phone and dialed the Frisbie Institute.

"Serena Parsnoble, per favor," he said. When she came on the line it took only a moment to arrange for the reception of Henry at Serena's Beacon Hill digs. Soon Adam was exiting the lobby once again with Henry in tow, at the end of his Sulka leash.

This time Adam turned left on Ring Road and headed for Boylston. All at once Adam was siezed with a desire to repeat his moves of the day before -- to hurl himself once again into the breach, to be the Paul Revere of pedestrians everywhere. But new occasions teach new duties and Henry was present, looking up at his new master with unrestrained affection.

Besides, when Adam actually focussed on the street he noted that there was no traffic at all. The automobiles from the west were being restrained by a traffic light at Hereford. So with a hearty, "Heigh ho, Henry!" Adam bolted into the street and made for the opposite side.

But just then a car rounded the corner from Hereford and roared Panflickward. Incensed, Adam stood his ground, facing the advancing beast. Like a TV wrestler, he bent and moved from side to side, holding to the raw silk leash all the while. "C'mon kill us, you pusswank!"

Unpredictably, fifty feet away, the old Porsche's brakes screeched and the car came to a sudden stop a foot from Panflick. A head popped out of the window.

"Omygawd!" Adam said, "Bungo himself." Adam and Henry stuffed themselves into the passenger side as the light changed. Before the descending hordes could do any damage, they were speeding toward Beacon Hill in the automobile of the younger Panflick's accountant, Ephriam Bungo, III.

"How goes it," the Bungo asked. He was dressed roughly in the manner of Toad in Wind in the Willows and he drove with approximately the same disregard for the rules of the road.

"Broke again," Adam said matter-of-factly.

"There are remedies," Bungo said. "Have you gone out with Senor Pirhana lately?"

"Ixnay, but it's a thought." Adam did more than think. He made up his mind to see the person in question this very day.

"I have always wanted to watch you in action," Bungo said.

"Not a good idea," Adam said.

The Porsche pulled into Louisberg Square, where all parking places are owned by the tenants of its various dwellings and institutions.

"Who was that?" Serena said, as she watched the Porsche disappear.

"Henry and I were picked up by a friend and driven here. Did you enjoy the trip, Henry?"

"Henry is sheer beauty, love," Serena whispered.

"You are sheer beauty," Adam replied. "Henry will keep you warm while I go on mission."

"What mission, love?"

Adam favored Serena with a cross between a leer and something rather more affectionate, turned and headed out to catch the T.


fiction, boston, 1980s, car wars, anti-automobile

11.

Atlantic City Black Jack Strategy

Adam took the afternoon plane to Atlantic City and met Mr. Pirhana on the Boardwalk at a Philly Steak joint favored by both men. Mr. Pirhana presented Adam with $5000 in hundreds and walked out.

Ten minutes later Adam found Mr. Pirhana flat-betting green quarter chips at a $25 minimum blackjack table. Adam walked by and settled at a nearby Double Diamond machine. When a waitress asked Panflick if he wanted a drink, he ordered two spring waters with tops on and a dark coffee with sweet-n-low on the side. He tipped her a dollar in advance.

While she was fetching this provender, he visited a craps table and bought in for $5000 in black $100 chips. Sotto voce, he asked the stickman how the table was doing. When the answer came back -- "So so" -- he threw up his hands, said, "Sacre bleu!" and walked back to the slot machine seat.

He slipped the bottles of spring water into the inner pocket of his denim jacket and nursed his coffee until he noticed a slight change in the position of Mr. Pirhana. Legs that had been crossed now stretched toward the carpet. "Appendage toggle," Adam muttered.

He walked to the table where Mr. P was the only player and dropped one $100 chip on three spots. "Allowable, I presume?" he asked the diminutive Asian dealer, whose name was revealed to be Ko. The dealer nodded and proceeded to deal face up. The Panflickian hands were 8-3, 7-4 and 10,K. The dealer showed a 6.

"Hunkey dorey," Adam exclaimed, drawing the attention of a 30-something pit man. He thrust out 100 chips on each hand, splitting the faces and doubling down on the eleven and the ten.

"Splitting 10s, sir?"

"Natch," Panflick answered. "Now slap down two faces and see the the truth writ large!" As if Panflick possessed omnipotent power, two faces were deposited on two faces and there were two twenties where once one twenty had been.

"Now smack this eleven with a tenner," Panflick cried, pointing to the second spot. There came a nine. "Ho, ho!" was Adam's guttural response. "Close enough! Now do the deed." He pointed to the final hand.

The dealer turned over a deuce for a total of twelve.

"Hmmm, twelve versus a six. " Adam mused. "You have 16 no doubt. Does the book say anything about the third double down when the dealer shows a 6?"

"You would generally stand," the pit man said. "Six is a stiff card."

"Stand it is, then," Adam responded magnanimously. "With my big winnerinos here, I can afford to gamble."

Mr. Pirhana took a hit on a pair of fours and got seven, hit again and pulled a five for a respectable twenty.

The dealer flipped over a deuce hole card to bring his total to eight.

"Pop a face on that, my good man," Panflick exclaimed. But the dealer pulled another deuce from the shoe for a total of ten.

"Oh, Lord, jeopardy!" Panflick covered his face and peeked through fleshy fingers as the dealer turned another deuce.

"OK! Now a big facer," Adam cried. "Bust!"

But the dealer produced a three to bring his total to fifteen.

"Gotcha!" Adam yelled. "Bring on that face!"

The dealer brought on a six for a pat 21 and swept the table clean.

Mr. Pirhana crossed his legs. Adam watched his six black chips disappear.

"Hmm," he said, "Time for revenge."

The pit boss smiled and made eye contact.

"Always pump 'em up after a loss, I say," Adam said happily, fortified by Mr. Pirhana's latest appendage toggle, signalling that the count had gone through the roof.

Adam pushed six black chips each -- a total of $1800 -- onto three spots.

Three hours later he was back on the plane to Boston with, eight thousand in his pocket, after splitting his winnings fifty-fifty with Mr. Pirhana on yet another successful foray.


fiction, boston, 1980s, car wars, anti-automobile

12.

Allah's Oil

Safely landed at Logan, Adam decided to blow some of his winnings on a cab ride back to the city.

As he rode, he began to mutter to himself out loud: "Existence precedes essence is a fundamental error of thought. The curse of our waning century. A fatal laziness. A collapse of critical capacity. I am not saying that God thought up the Mars bar. At least not exactly."

A chant of sorts began in the front of the cab, something from a tape perhaps, something with a distinctly Middle-Eastern cast to it. And the vehicle began to pick up a good deal of speed, weaving in and out among the lanes of traffic.

Adam harrumphed and peeked up at the rear-view mirror to get a look at the cabbie's face. "What's yer name?" he said in a peremptory manner.

There was no response.

"What's yer name," Adam called with more urgency. He leaned forward and tapped on the transparent divider. "Turn that damned thing down."

Almost immediately the volume of the chant increased, and the driver began to swing even more madly as he approached the bridge.

"Ah, business. Hmmm. What sort of business?"

"Oil."

"Oil?"

"ALLAH'S OIL."

"Oh, I see," Adam said. "You believe Allah owns all that crude beneath the surface of your desert home, eh what?"

"Of course. That oil exists for us to use as we see fit."

"That oil is a test," Adam said. "The whole idea is whether the world can comprehend its reason for being -- and the limitations on its span of influence."

"That oil is ours," the driver said with quiet resolution.

"That oil belongs to Jesus," Adam said, with equal calm. "He after all made the world."

The cab screeched to a stop. Adam noted they were at base of Charles Street.

The driver was suddenly livid. "Out infidel! Neo-platonic scum! Allah owns that oil. And this is our era. You are a fatuous Western windbag and a bore. A Toynbean throwback. Get out, before I eviscerate you in the traditional manner."

"Cum scimitar, I presume," Adam said with perfect calm. "My entire being is flooded with penitence. I sit corrected."

"Out, infidel," the young driver repeated.

"You are not one of them Muslim fundamentalists, are you?" Adam asked. "Ah well, if you say so," he added lightly, opening the door and walking off into the night, not ignoring the fact that the driver's sincere conviction had eliminated, evidently, all thought of payment for the ride.

Adam wandered toward the Commons, pausing at Rebecca's to watch the cooks toss entrees into blackened frying utensils. "Conspicuous cuisine," he muttered. "Wonder if Mussolini thought the oil of the olive was his personal property? Wonder about waving wheat and purple mountains, for that matter. Whose idea was anything?"

He felt down to his right hand front pocket. Mr. Pirhana had taught him to fold big bills and place them there, rather than in a wallet. "Nobody's gonna get in there," the BJ Wizard had said.

Adam watched a bit of fish being tossed into the frying- pan. Then he thought suddenly of Serena and of the little pup he had lately rescued and placed in her care. Just then he spied, out of the corner of his eye, a wisp of diaphanous hair. And his sensitive ears picked up the cadence of paw on pavement.

He turned and opened his arms in palpable glee, speechless, his face wreathed in a seraphic grin. "My two loves," he said. "You were angels in heaven, glistening with the light of Abba's benificence, before ever your tread could be heard on Charles Street."

Serena approached close and brushed her smiling lips across Adam's extended cheek. "Love is like that," she whispered.

Then they walked silently, in profound contentment, back two blocks on Charles, then up Mt. Vernon Street.


13.

Sonoma County Cult Goat

"I need time, Adam," Serena said, as she prepared an iced beverage in a little kitchen off the hall. Panflick threw himself down on a low-lying futon at the end of the dark passage that led to two narrow rooms, the former servants quarters in this once-stately Beacon Hill establishment, now chopped into miniscule apartments.

Henry lay contentedly at Panflick's feet.

For some unknown reason, Adam did not leap up to demand why Serena was raising the time issue. Instead, perhaps still humbled by his encounter with the erudite cab driver, he simply answered, "Yes. Of course."

When Serena handed him his drink, she walked into the back bedroom and closed the door, Adam sat there wondering what would happen next, but nothing did. And when he had slurped down the the odd but tasty concoction, he set the glass on the floor, reclined on the futon and soon was lost in sleep.

He dreamed he was a latter-day Miciah, a prophet of Israel, standing in a Michigan mansion before an audience of oil and auto moguls. They had just received a most rosy projection from in-house consultants. But then a voice said, "Can we have just one outside opinion?"

Panflick was wearing the pelt of what might be bear or some equally prophetic beast. He glared at the assembly. Patronizing chuckles filled the room. The head man said, "Panflick, is that your name?" Adam did not answer.

"Well sir, we're told the future of our industry -- oil, automobiles -- is one of incredible expansion. There is almost a, a lust, yes, lust of the most visceral kind, global lust, for our products."

Adam stood mute, like Miciah before Jehosephat.

"So tell us, Mr. Panflick," the man went on, "Is our picture the same as your picture?"

Adam stretched in a most languid manner and then opened his mouth in a broad, and it must be admitted, malevolent grin. His lips clamped shut and his cheeks began to bulge. Then, from his bloated maw, there burst a rheumy Panflickian spray.

Not un-munglike, it hung together in mid-air, a sickly green coagulation, traversing the space between him and the deluded executives. But instantly, and in unison, large designer umbrellas opened, and the men quickly formed a Roman phalanx to ward off the attack.

Seeing this, Adam screamed at them. "Go up and sell! Sell! Sell! Sell! The multitudes pant for your product! All of Arabia stands ready to squeeze the last drop of Allah's oil from the desert, just for you! Sell! Sell! Sell! Sell! Sell!"

Adam woke strangely refreshed and credited his lack of logy feelings to the potion he had lately consumed. He leaned forward and gave Henry a peremptory pat and saw that the door Serena had closed was now ajar. Serena was propped up on her bed, reading.

"Hello," she said. "Were you by some chance involved in the traffic incident on Boylston Street, day before yesterday?"

"I did cross Boylston that day, yes," Adam answered, "and there was a disturbance of sorts. Caused mainly by the police, I'd say. In their belated haste to see what was happening, they blocked all possible escape routes, parking on sidewalks and driving the wrong way on one-way streets. Yes, I would say the police were quite culpable."

"Considerable mayhem was documented." Serena said, looking at the ceiling and breathing slowly. "They said it was all caused by an unidentified jaywalker."

"It stands to reason," Adam said.

"Excuse me?"

"That the protagonist would be unobserved."

Adam was gripped suddenly by a visceral fear. He hastened to change the subject.

"Are you going to be crossing any more streets?" Serena asked.

"Might I join you?" Adam said casually.

Serena nodded and patted the quilt. Adam stepped carefully over the still-recumbent Henry. When he was comfortably ensconced next to Serena, his anxiety diminished with every rise and fall of his substantial midriff. He felt her comforting hand on his shoulder and heard her soft voice say, "Tell me about Bleeg."

"Ah," Adam responded with a smile, "What might you not know?"

"Well, the Institute knows a good deal, but you were actually there, before Bleeg moved to a remote island in the Caribbean."

"Hmmm, we are talking, let's see, eighty-two or three. I was reduced to surviving in a damp San Francisco basement, collecting unemployment. A Baskin Robbins Jamoca Almond ice cream cone was the high point of my day except when the weather was bad.

“When the weather was bad, I would go and watch it at the end of Geary Street, the Pacific pounding the rocks below, the dark and eerie clouds dancing like mad prophets in a falling sky. And I would cry at the elemental beauty of it all."

"Yes. Well. Go on."

"Every morning, I would drive my Chevy van to get breakfast at a place on a hilltop. And every morning I would take a run by what had once been People's Temple. It was by then a Korean church. A drab stone edifice on Geary Street where once Jim Jones' appetite for weak and docile souls became insatiable.

“I asked the Bay Area cult monitors if they thought Bleeg was in a league with Jones. To my surprise, they answered yes."

"That would be true," Serena said. "Bleeg consumed souls as greedily as Jones did. I was more aware of that at the time. Of course, he was vastly more subtle."

Serena loosened Adam's belt and relieved him of a few items of clothing. Balmy summer weather and her warm ministrations saved him from any untoward chills.

"Mmmm," Adam said, wondering what sort of time Serena was talking about. Serena stopped moving and Adam resumed his narrative.

"Bleeg was living about fifty miles north of the city, up past Marin, a bit inland."

Serena kissed Adam on the cheek.

"Bleeg Chakra Love Mudra," Adam intoned. "He kept changing his names according to various exaltations he professed to have experienced. His original name was Clarissa Smith. He was the child of working class parents in Lorain, Ohio."

"Yes, Clarissa. I remember."

"After his sex change, the young adept went from strength to strength, propounding a doctrine of bliss based on ignorance and absolute devotion to the Supreme Ignorance, which he modestly conceded to be himself."

Serena said, "Knee?"

"Ah, yes. A little up. Mmmmm."

"Go on."

"It is not hard to see that the dispossessed might embrace a messianic egotist like Jones. Of course naivete in the Bay Area is so pronounced that Jones himself managed to hoodwink even intelligent folk for years. The only person who actually saw through him was my cousin Barrington, then a commentator for one of the city's horrendous newspapers.

“Well, I decided to see with my own eyes the nature of Bleeg's appeal. He certainly did not attract the wretched of the earth the Herculean guilt-ridden who gravitated to Jones."

"No, he appealed more to the religious fringe of the Public Radio crowd," Serena said.

"Bleeg was robust and portly, somewhat like myself," Adam continued. "He might have been even more rotund, but he lived on a spiritual Atkins Diet of sacrificed goat, lamb and an occasional bull, all braised over his back-temple barbecue."

"How did you arrange to see him?"

"It took a detour to Binion’s on Fremont Street and a supreme stroke of luck to afford the outing at all. I actually parlayed twenty dollars into $1700 or so on a single extended roll of the dice. Quite remarkable. Even the old men applauded. Anyway, I decided my approach to Bleeg should have a certain flair, and this required time and money.

“I finally rented an egg-white stretch limo from an eccentric lady on Telegraph Hill with whom I had contracted a brief and exclusively carnal laison. Initiated, I might add, by herself"

"Unlike ours," Serena said softly.

"Absolutely," Adam said. "Only relentless -- "

"Get back to Bleeg."

"Very well. The car drove unexpectedly well. Bleeg lived in a completely nondescript mansion set back from the road. I saw him from a distance sitting on the grass on hill that sloped down from the house. His mansion had a strangely institutional aura. There was nothing appealing about it."

"You read auras?"

"Only big ones," Panflick said. "Anyway, carrying a frisky newborn goat in my arms, I approached the throne of grace. Bleeg was surrounded by a hundred or so glassy-eyed devotees, straining for some sort of contact with his being. But Bleeg gave every appearance of being asleep.

“My peaceful approach was soon interrupted by a rather burly follower. I held the goat above my head, with some effort I might add, and fixed him with a gaze of such supreme confidence that he stopped in his tracks. By then Bleeg was wide awake and gesturing me to come to where he sat."

"So?"

"So I approached and there was total silence and Bleeg did nothing at all to relieve it. Finally, a most aggressive female devotee came up to me and said, ‘Kiss Bleeg's robe’.

”I told her I had hardly come to fifty miles with a sacrificial goat to prostrate myself before this Bleeg -- I had come to speak to him as an equal. Then the bucolic environment was pierced by a faint but clearly audible scream from the bowels of the Manor. It was a woman's scream. One of profound hopelessness and despair.
“I looked at Bleeg and he looked back at me. He gave no sign of hearing a thing. I looked at his followers. They likewise seemed completely unaware. Not one person even turned toward the house and the screams kept on, strangely similar, never varying in pitch or length, clearly audible."

"He told you there was no scream," Serena said.

"No, but it would follow from his damnably clever appropriation of the mind of Aurobindo and others. When I asked him, he did not answer. I asked him again. Finally, he spread his hands out, as if to receive the goat, which, by now, I had no intention of giving him. I had actually planned to break goat with him. Or at least to propose it."

"Adam, really! You would have allowed the goat to be killed and then consumed with this, this charlatan?"

"Yes. Break goat together on our butts. Top it off with an apposite Sonoma Valley red," Serena detected a trace of smugness in Adam's grin. She shook her head. Panflick waited to see what she would say. Finally, he continued.

"It was clear that the gathered acolytes all expected to me to kiss the man's robe, presumably while holding the goat and trying to think of an appropriate retort. Bleeg just sat there with a beatific grin in his Lotus position, his flatulent belly cradled between his hairy calfs, gazing at me expectantly.

“I told him I had come to see what he was up to and that, if he persisted in telling me, against all sense and reason, that there was no screaming coming from the house, I was going to enter the dismal manor and see what was what for myself. At which point, I was bodily seized from behind. A vicelike grip. It was all I could do to keep the rambunctious little goat in hand.

“A voice behind me called,'Who is greater, God or Bleeg?' It was Bleeg. 'The Deity, by a country mile, you imbecile' I answered. 'Then you don't need me. You are a prisoner of your own ego,' the voice said, exuding sympathy, though hardly drowning out the despairing screams from the manor. ‘I am sorry for you,' Bleeg called out as the three-hundred pound gorilla pushed me pell-mell down the hill to the limo."

"What happened to the goat, Adam?"

"Ah, the cute little goat, brown and white, soft as silk?"

"You can't have meant to slaughter the poor thing. What did you have in mind with Bleeg?"

"Nothing more than the Deity vouched me to see in the few minutes I was in his august presence," Adam replied,

Serena's ministrations had stopped. Panflick pushed himself up on an elbow and looked at her.

"The whole thing ended up in song," he said. His face became remarkably gentle and his look quite faraway.

Serena gazed back at Adam and he knew that whatever was going on was serious. He did not know quite how to proceed. He thought he might argue the goat issue some, but determined a more pacific course.

"I set the goat free," he said. "On the drive down the coast, I went out to Point Reyes. I was going to free the goat to romp with the sheep out there amid the beauty of it all. But there was a family, the only other people to be seen, a Volvo station wagon family. You cannot imagine what such people actually do, but they seem so, so sensitive and, actually, almost beautiful -- hardly ugly Americans at all.

“I ended up giving it -- the goat -- to their children. Then I went on to Bolinas to revive a few memories and then down to the Over The Hill Bar and Grill in Stinson Beach, where I ended up performing."

Adam got up and looked at Serena. Something inside him told him to be quiet.

A minute passed.

"You are a violent person, Adam. And worse, you feel no responsibility. You are a violent child."

14.


Child

Adam put his hands to his head and grit his teeth.

"Don't try to evade," Serena said softly. "What would have happened if, when you crossed Boylston Street, people had been killed? What possible right did you have to place hundreds of people in harm's way? And who are you to judge -- no, to give free rein to your own anger at some betrayal of your private aesthetic regarding how things should be? To feel justified in wrecking property and exposing people to injury, inconvenience and trauma?"

There was no change in her gentle tone.

Panflick held himself, hands crossed over the cavity where his heart and lungs were housed, and said nothing.

"How much money did you win today?" she asked.

"A good deal," he answered.

"Isn't that part of it? This man you play with. God, Adam, how far would you have to go to structure a life that could give you the luxury to do what you do and the luck to get away with it? Oh, God, I love you Adam. Or I would not be saying any of this."

"Luck? What luck would that be? Do you know why I crossed the street in the first place? I was sick, sick of not acting. Sick of knowing what must vanish before we can move to the next stage, and of doing nothing to act against it. It is the case with any horrible epidemic. The oil. The car --"

Serena sat up and put her feet on the floor and crossed her hands, looking prim and proper. Even as Adam stood, unable to parse the moment, he could feel an old force enveloping him. He gave way to it. And suddenly from his diaphragm there emerged a rich baritone. He began to sing something he had put together years before, during another time, in another place.

For so long as you tread upon the poor
Taking bread you need not to endure
And build great houses, castles, treasuries

When Serena made a move to stand, Adam stepped back and continued to sing.

And as long as the tongue of the suckling one
Cleaves to the mouth's dry roof
Cleaves to the mouth's dry roof
And none there are who break bread with the young

Adam looked directly into Serena's eyes and tears began to flow from his own.

Then we shall see and not perceive
We shall hear and never understand

Then louder.

We shall hear and never understand.
We shall see and not perceive.

The phone rang. Serena jumped up. Unnerved, she moved past Adam and through the door to where the receiver sat on a long work table. Adam's singing became softer and he retreated again. He heard Serena answer and say, "Yes, yes, I'm sorry. I will." And Adam confirmed at some deep level that even in this remote room, his music was out of place, an annoyance. But he kept on.

Behold the closing of the eyes

"Yes ... yes ... I will. Thank you," Serena said, setting the phone down.

Behold the fattening of the heart

She walked back into the bedroom and heard Adam almost whisper.

Against the day of recompense.
Behold. Behold. Behold. Behold.

"I'm finished," Adam said. "Good lyric, what?"

"That is violence too," Serena said, "the whole book, old and new."

"I must leave now," Adam said. Henry was up now, nuzzling him with therapeutic intent.

Serena moved toward him, but but he had turned away now, making for the dark hallway, absently patting Henry.

"Are you just going to leave?" Serena asked.

Adam walked down the hallway and out the door, aware that by this time he was more desperate than he had been in years.

fiction, boston, 1980s, car wars, anti-automobile



15.

Violent Crimes

Now Adam, having run from Serena's apartment with every impulse to flee, stopped. He sat down on the stoop and looked out into Mt. Vernon street.

"She's right. I am violent," he said softly. "I've been lucky. Or perhaps I bear the mark of Cain."

He watched a rat walk slowly down the sidewalk. "Beacon Hill is a great rats nest," he muttered. "Rats, cars, hormone-filled fowl. Aaaah." He shook his head and began to sing softly.

Draw near, oh nations
Draw near, oh nations
Draw near
Draw near to hear

He pushed himself up and stood, spreading his arms wide. His voice rose.

Hearken, all ye people
Hearken, all ye people
Draw near
Draw near to hear

He heard a window open above. "Quiet!" came a man's voice. But Adam ignored it.

Indignation is upon the nations
Fury upon all armaments
Indignation is upon the nations
Fury upon all armaments

"Shut up, you creep," the man's voice said. Behind Panflick, the door of the lobby opened and and Serena and Henry came out. Adam kept on.

The BLOOD of destruction
Is SHED on the mountain
Kyrie
Kyrie

"Shut the FUCK up! Jesus!"

Adam walked down the steps and across the sidewalk to where a mailbox stood, He began to beat out a lilting Island percussion:

Behold a line of confusion
Comes over all
Behold a plummet of chaos
Envelops the capitol

"I'm calling the cops!"

A couple descending the Hill stopped, keeping their distance. Across the street, a few more people paused to see what was going on. Adam's singing turned from happy to mournful.

The people and the princes
Shall be swept away.

Panflick felt a hand on his shoulder and became aware of Henry nuzzling him.

Stones shall turn to pitch
Dust thereof to brimstone

Serena stood on tiptoe and whispered, "This is not 'Crime and Punishment'."

"Ah," Adam said. "I see. Well, walk with me."

"No," Serena said. "Come."

So Adam turned and went with Serena and Henry, back into the building.
 


16.

T Rap

The next morning, feeling rejuvenated, Adam descended Beacon Hill to catch the Red Line to Harvard Square. On the platform a spindly young man delivered his declension of the blues, accompanying himself on a lute-like instrument.

"Such will be life in my post- messianic village," Adam mused. "Blues on the lute. Buses big as zeppelins. Work demystified. Waiting lines eliminated. Rights of way returned to the people. Sunday abolished."

He reached into the depths of his pants pocket and found his 100s.

"Faaaaaack!" exclaimed a quasi-derelict, sidling toward Panflick.

"Jeeaze!" exclaimed another.

Adam stuffed a few bills into the singer's pocket as the song was being drowned out by the cacaphony of an arriving train.

"Good!" he yelled, with an ingenuous grin. "Right on target."

The train was uncrowded but the door on Adam's platform failed to open immediately. When he observed passengers entering from the other side of the train, he began to beat on the grimy door glass.

"Unfair!" he raged. Just then the door opened halfway and Adam squeezed through. With a simian spring, he caught hold of an upright chrome pole and allowed centrifugal force to hurl him into the last available seat.

More than one seat was taken up by contemporary shopping bags, with names like GAP, BON TEMPS and HUZBALLAH.

Just as Adam was recovering from his exertion, he noticed a wizened gentleman wandering up the aisle looking for a seat.

"One of you young!" Panflick blared. "This man! Has civility entirely escaped your pusillanimous generation?"

When not a head turned, Adam shoved hard to his left. The entire row moved a tad.

"Move down, dammmit," Panflick roared. "This man was here before you obtained your fellowships and grants. You are all sick!"

His exertion had already set a GAP bag, three spaces down, teetering. Finally, it toppled slowly onto the chewing gum-paved floor.

"Eeeeuuuuu!" came a cry of disgust.

"Riiight!" came an antiphonal response.

"Tell me about it!" came another.

Bostonian disdain-glances were cast Panflickward. But Adam ignored them. He'd already whisked the man into the cleared space beside him and was now totally lost in contemplation, his body-mind focused far beyond Beacon Hill.

He was thinking of his father Melchizadek, in the precious years prior to Panflick's fifth birthday. Before the House of Panflick became such a time-consuming vocation, the scion of that establishment treated young Adam with the deference and care for the child that Jesus himself commended to his disciples. Chippendale and Shaker had not yet become his sibling rivals.

The elder Panflick was not immersed so deeply in consumptive commerce that young Adam found himself as alone as he had been when, at three weeks of age, he somehow sensed his very destiny: to wander free and sad upon the earth, think Panflickian thoughts, doing Panflickian things, and seeing his earthly family recede into the distance mist-laden statues possess, no matter how close one is to them.

At Charles Street, a trio of sprightly young men, whose odds of living to adulthood were about one in six, boarded Adam's Cambridge-bound train. The largest carried a massive boom- box the size of a child's coffin. De La Soul was playing at an already substantial decibel level.

Facial tics broke out among the already wary riders. But Panflick immediately gave up his distant reverie. His eyes opened wide and childlike. He cupped a hand to his ear.

"Turn that up!" he cried with clear delight. The tallest of the three obliged, in a cool, remotely amused manner. When train stopped at Kendall, many the passengers got off and hurried to other cars. But the old man, the trio of youth and Adam remained.

"Good, good!" Adam exclaimed, fixing the owner of the boom box with a gaping grin. The young man averted his eyes and Adam closed his.

"Martial music in the correct key," he said softly, and listened happily all the way to Harvard Square.


17.

Net the Big Cat

Wandering in the direction of Brattle Street, Adam remembered that he had not yet had breakfast. His favorite breakfast place was a friendly establishment perched atop Beacon Hill which specialized in crusty high-oxalate chocolate muffins which, on a good day, were seraphic.

But Adam had no desire to get back onto the T and the sight of a large fishing net in a sports store window reminded him that he had a mission to complete in Cambridge.

"I cannot be a one issue person," the net reminded him. "There is another system of hypocrisy that must now be confronted."

The net was a short-handled aluminum rig suitable for fisherpersons, but also adequate to the purpose Panflick had in mind.

"Do you want a bag, sir," the young man said after returning the greater part of $100 to Adam in change.

"No thank you," Adam responded, putting the aluminum- handled net smartly over his shoulder. He marched out onto Brattle Street and headed for his destination, a small coffee shop on JFK Street.

The Krisnamurti Tea and Coffee Company was located in the basement of a rather rickety house not far from the John F. Kennedy School where, two nights previous, Adam had attempted, with limited success, to propound his views on matters of genital responsibility. The Krishnamurti was, Adam reflected, one with a number of establishments in the Boston area.

The common thread binding these businesses together was violation of the Panflickian sensibility in a particularly noxious and even self-righteous manner. Today would mark the beginning of the end for such operations. Adam lifted his eyes to express gratitude to the Deity in the matter of the net. But then it occurred to him that, on certain divisive issues, the Holy One might follow the example of Solomon and withold judgment entirely.

The owner of the Krishnamurti establishment was a somewhat celebrated feminist named Crenshaw Mink. She had rejected in print her Christian name Martha "Martha was a drudge in the Bible," she told Boston's alternative newspaper, named for a bird. She had a point, Adam conceded.

The continuing subjugation of Mink's gender in matters of drudgery was a comment on the general failure of the women's movement to do more than attain to the pitiful status of Adam's ilk. Both Panflick and women in general had a long way to go.

He took a seat at a table close to the front of the establishment, which looked out onto the busy street. For a while, he simply sat there, not even thinking. Then his eyes turned to the aluminum handle of the object that was propped, net down, against the table.

He looked around and saw the dark haired Crenshaw Mink, sitting on a stool next to the cash register. She had long, jet black hair and would have looked like a throwback to the early Joan Baez, were it not for a figure which rivaled Panflick's in sheer bulk. Even now, this Ms. Mink was munching on what looked to be an almond croissant.

"It's self service, you know," she said in a flat monotone.

Adam nodded. "I didn't come here for service, I came here for justice."

He started peering about in a strange manner.

"I know you," Mink said. "You're the yo yo who believes in vasectomies for infants."

"Infant boys, I do indeed. As for being a yo yo, I have no interest in trying to convince someone who addresses me as a yo yo of my point of view. You do not, in fact, know me any more than I know you." As he said this, Adam saw a huge black and white cat sidling out from underneath Crenshaw Mink's stool. His time had come.

"Remove the cat immediately please," he barked.

Crenshaw Mink was visibly taken aback.

"Allergies," Adam said with gravity. "I represent thousands, no millions, who will be bullied no longer by the sentimental moral authority of those who allow four-footed felines to terrorize the sinuses and other canals essential to human survival on the planet. Remove this excrescence immediately."

Finally finding her voice, Crenshaw Mink could only say, "Remove yourself. We don't need your business."

Meanwhile, the giant cat had traversed the space between Crenshaw Mink and Adam, and now appeared set upon rubbing up against his trousers, an event that was, in prospect, intolerable.

Adam pushed himself up and looked at Crenshaw Mink. "You," he began, "purport to run a business establishment that abides by the law."

"Get out of here," the proprietress said, standing, with her hands on her hips. "This is Bernadette's home."

"Bernadette?" Adam hooted. "Bernadette?"

The portly cat continued her advance.

"I'll show Bernadette." Adam grabbed the aluminum handle of the net and raised it aloft, baton-like, as if to telegraph his purposes to the growingly apoplectic Ms. Mink.

"It's bye-bye time, little kitty."

"Stop!" Mink screamed.

People on the street came up to the window and peered in.

"Allergenic rights!" Adam responded warmly, with a desultory swish of the net at the cat, who was now stalled in the middle of the floor, neither advancing nor retreating.

Suddenly Adam threw himself to his knees and slapped the broad mouth of the net over Bernadette, flipping it with uncanny skill. At the same moment, Crenshaw Mink ran across the room and interposed herself between Adam and the street door.

"Call the police," she screamed. "Stop this beast."

But now Adam, Bernadette-filled net in hand, moved in measured steps toward the door and the livid Ms. Mink.

"Another time, perhaps, we can discuss the philosophical ramifications of the human predeliction for turning wild and cannibalistic beasts into pets, but now I intend merely to remove this Bernadette from a public place of commerce. I will not be deterred."

Suddenly Bernadette, who had been quite dormant, commenced to utter loud and plaintive meows and to scratch for dear life against the nylon tethers that confined her. Adam paused to make certain the cat would not twist her way out.

But in the instant that he looked toward the writhing Bernadette, he heard another screech rend the air. And, before he knew it, he too was joining this decibel derby  with with his own screeches of consummate pain.

"I'm a yellow belt, sucker!" the breathless Ms. Mink yelled.

Her initial kick had been sufficient to accomplish her purpose. The net had clattered to the floor. Adam stood in shock, gripping his left hand which had lately borne the burden of his effort.

"You've broken it," he moaned. "Crime upon crime."

But Crenshaw Mink was crouched on the floor consoling Bernadette with a selection of incomprehensible baby talk.

Suddenly Adam felt the pain leave him. He squared his large torso and looked down at Crenshaw Mink and the danderous Bernadette.

"Try having children," he said, then walked past her onto JFK street.

On a distant clock, he heard bells chime the noon hour.




18.

Harvard Traffic Jam

On the street, Adam noted that Boston humidity was mingling with the monoxide filled air, creating a fetid climate of transcendent noxiousness. Cars were moving as usual, at reckless speeds with the random eccentricity endemic to Boston motorists.

The drivers' hooded eyes were even now darting about, seeking advantage and avoiding direct contact with putative pedestrian enemies. It was, Adam reflected, a perfect day to wage war against the most obvious and vulnerable symptom of the world's entanglement with principalities and powers.

This was not Panflick's first effort in this place. A prior attempt to recruit denizens of the Square had been abortive. The Hare Krishnas refused Adam's request to form a saffron wall across Massachusetts Avenue.

"Doesn't your chanting guarantee you immediate union with the Ultimate, should you be decimated by homicidal drivers?" Adam demanded. But he received no reply.

Likewise, the Andean band, whose music had lately been popularized by pop millionares, and other aggregations of street musicians, were deaf to him, operating as they did under bureaucratic codes regarding conduct, decibels and territory.

"You have to have a licence to be a street person?" Adam had shrieked in terminal frustration.

Even the winoes of Harvard Square had responded to Panflick with bemused inattention.

Now, standing by the news kiosk in the very center of the Square, Adam surveyed the tables of Au Bon Pain, a huge outdoor cafe favored by Cambridge's derelicts, quasi- professional chess addicts, seedy academics and middle- class adventurers, a shade to the left of the MTV beach party crowd.

His eyes moved to the intersection by the Harvard Co-op where three major thorofares converged and intrepid jaywalkers, using all manner of hostile and provocative gyrations, dared motorists to do them in.

Adam's eyes moved right, toward the junction of Massachusetts Avenue and Church Street. Across from all this lay Harvard, whose students were presently infesting the summer homes of their haut-urban, suburban and exurban parentos. Gradually, a plan began to take shape.

Adam reached into his pocket and drew out the ziploc of hundreds and walked resolutely toward Au Bon Pain. There was a sign by the counter commending the thriving franchise's mew Catering Service.

"Catering, eh?" Adam addressed the manager.

"How may we be of help?"

"You deliver, of course."

The man nodded. "Anywhere you like within ten miles."

"One thousand large iced beverages please. Your choice."

The manager started, but Adam quickly stacked fourteen of the hundreds onto the counter. A slight breeze came through the open door, and the green began to stir. The manager slapped his hand down on the pile, and Adam favored him with a Guy Grandish grin.

"Bring 'em over to the Co-op as soon as possible. Urgent gathering over there. Needs catering."

Within five minutes, a stream of Au Bon Pain employees was transporting trays filled with iced cold drinks across the street to where the Co-op stood, creating a formidable traffic jam. Over a hundred pedestrians stood and watched, disregarding the changing lights. Some of the motorists also slowed to see the odd sight.

"Put 'em here on the sidewalk," Adam ordered, with growing excitement.

The Au Bon Pain employees looked at him with expressions that suggested a hiatus between their normal functioning and their being made to look like fools. But Adam responded to their querelous glances with vigorous nodding similar to that of schizoid patients in mental wards prior to the Reagan- Foucault era of de-institutionalization.

It took the better part of a half hour to completely fill the sidewalk in front of the Coop with tall paper cups containing the best of Au Bon Pain's lineup of soft drinks.

To the crawling traffic and growing crowd was now added a small legion of law enforcement personnel. The constables were trying, with great difficulty, to motor on through to the eye of the storm, as it were. But this, as someone once said, was only the beginning.

With everything in place, Adam put his hands on his hips and began to scream, "Free drinks, step right up! Freebies here! Free ones! Come and get' em!"

He could hardly be heard over the blaring of horns and a gathering chorus of profanity coming from irate drivers now irretrievably caught in traffic hell. Within twenty minutes the drink supply was being steadily diminished and pre-riot conditions prevailed.

Fights were breaking out.

Fenders were bending.

Pedestrians, in an increasingly celebratory mood, started climbing over the stalled cars to get their free drinks.

No one had ever seen one-thousand large iced beverages from Au Bon Pain sitting on a Cambridge sidewalk before.

Finally, an irate driver swerved onto the sidewalk and advanced with horn blasting toward the remaining cardboard cups filled with Diet Coke, Classic Coke and Sprite. Most of the crowd retreated in terror. But some chose to fight back.

"Charge!" Adam cried. "Rise up! Rise up against long lines, asphyxiation, foundation boards, processes! Rise up against lemmingness! Give Detroit juicy contracts for buses big as zeppelins. With built-in obsolescence, I don't care!"

Just then, the advancing driver gunned the motor and the car actually pushed the attackers back until their counter pressure managed to lift the entire vehicle off the ground and tip it on its side.

Police officers on foot were quickly bulling their way toward this scene of confusion. When Adam caught glimpse of their blue uniforms, he set about escape.

The doors of the Coop were virtually blocked by wide-eyed employees, watching in amazement. Adam writhed through the crowd and began to bang on the glass.

"Got to go!" he screamed. "Hurry!"

When the door opened a crack Panflick inserted his meaty hand and yanked for dear life. Once inside, he ran pell mell through the store and out the other side onto a narrow street that once reverberated with the elixir of a folk music worth the name.

Now in the basement coffee house which Adam had once patronized with enthusiasm, a generation weaned on Public Radio and recondite folk festivals participated in the cannibalization of culture on weekends for varying prices, depending on the celebrity of the artist who was appearing. Not for the stout of heart, Adam muttered, as he threaded his way to Church Street and freedom.

19.


Salience Trumps Innocence

The evening telecasts concentrated on the fact that the Panflickian intervention (they did not call it such) had created a gridlock unknown in the history of Cambridge or, for that matter, Boston itself.

Nearly two- hundred angry motorists were cooling their heels in crowded cells and insurance company spokespersons were estimating damage to cars in the millions.

Back in the peace of his apartment, Panflick flicked off the TV and went to his bedroom bureau. From the top drawer he extracted an America West frequent flyer ticket from Logan Airport to Las Vegas due to depart that very evening.

As the television commentators were describing him all too well -- albeit in general terms -- as a portly eccentric laden with cash, who ordered up 1000 soft drinks and precipitated the day's events, Adam hightailed it to the air terminal. He did not bother to pack.

He maintained a home away from home, possession-wise, in the back of a defunct pickup truck parked in the Lake Shore Trailer Village, down the hill from Boulder City, near the Dam which had made Las Vegas possible in the first place.

By nine, he was looking out over the midwestern night as humming Rolls Royce jets speeded him along. He had, within a few days, been a catalyst in an era of impotence. If such activity was not heroic, if it reflected neither genius nor even acuity, it was still -- possibly -- salient. And, as Adam Panflick moved on in life, he reflected pleasantly that salience might well be good enough after all.

THE END