THE BUSINESS

At first, they were just isolated blips with extremely short durations, swimming in the rectilinear screen of Blindman’s inner eye. Image: mother's gaping mouth. The discerning mind while aware of the brief flickerings in terms of form as well as content, can not grasp the flow of pictures long enough to add to them symbolic interpretations. Image: a broken, meatless bone

Sharp, white teeth. The impact of the data (being conveyed) spreads through the network of dark passageways, flipping open the neural circuits of fear and shame --- of an animal waking to its wounds. The noon blaze as always obscures a portion of the picture near the upper edge of the frame, but otherwise the details, as they linger longer and longer, coalesce into an arbitrary reality over which Blindman exercises no control. Pictures implant until he is rendered unconscious by the only respite that is allowed him. Downs get inside his head and close the shutters to his mind. Image: a corpse.

Blindman strains against the residual effects of too many pills. He sits himself up and searches the long headboard for something to set em straight. Everywhere his fingers come down, there are pills. Pills and more pills. Blues and reds, yellows and pinks, some gruesomely deformed, some untouched, bits of broken plastic, childproof caps, bitter white powder. Pills on the floor. In the bed. The room is a shambles. Butt-mounded ashtrays. More crushed pill bottles. More bitter white powder. What did he do? How many pills did he take? How many destroyed? Lewlyn will be furious. He has gobbled up the pills she intended to sell --- gobbled and crushed and stomped in a frenzy of self-destruction. She'll be ruined. Out of the Business. Where can Blindman get the money to pay Hanrahan? Where?

Blindman's fingers brush a pool of dried vomit, speckled with gooey red caps, the partially digested spew of which grows hideous as he realizes its meaning. His chronic gastritis has saved him from an overdose. The clock ticks. Thousands and thousands of maddening micro-moments dragging with that irritating little noise. Then it stops. He can’t remember how long ago. The passing wind of a city bus rustles the dirty yellow window shades. They're going to come home. Find him in this stinking tomb. What is he, anyway? A broken down blindman without a pot to piss in. He reaches out and comes back with two small yellows. Like setting the alarm clock. You take the speed and fall off to sleep. Falling down, down --- pop! You wake up again. He drifts. Dreams of the scars. White puffy places where he twisted and fought against the ropes.

Poof! The dawning of consciousness. He snaps open into a sightless haze. God damned hang-over liketa split his face in half. Little yellow cranks whiz and bang at the back of his soggy braincase. Gotta get up. Immaculatize this room before Lew gets back. Gotta get a handle on some money to pay Red for the mutilated stock. Wham bam. Crack these scripts. Thank you mam. Gotsta go---get it in gear.

By the time Lew and Adolph return from the poetry festival at Crooked River, Blindman is bopping around, whistling to himself. The vomit is scraped up. The windows blow in fresh wuffs of inner-city gas. What pills he can cull from the litter are returned to the proper containers. He feels better. Sleeping pills, speed, a titch of Glenlivet. It's all there now --- all the necessary ingredients for well-being. He settles into a hot bath and girds himself against the inevitable tongue lashing Lew's going to give him when she finds out that, thanks to Blindman's little orgy, 'the Business' is tottering on the edge of financial ruin.

"You shithead! You fucking shithead!" Lew growls. "Better than five hundred pills we had! Ya hear? Five hundred. Gone!

Vanished! You smashed half of em. Smashed them! You shithead!

Look! There's one on the windowsill. Ya feed em to the birds

Shithead?"

Adolph looks nervously from side to side as Lew's harangue, wraps tighter and tighter around the room. Like a hungry she-boa. Poor bastard, he thinks. Tried to blow out the candle. Poor blind bastard. Adolph shifts his weight to a more comfortable position against the bedpost. Things can't get much worse. Not after that thud at the Crooked River Poetry Festival.

How could an erudite gasbag like Adolph, with a gold-plated plum dangling at his fingertips, be unable to mount the podium and perform? True, Myra Fishbein, the festival organizer, insulted him, but she didn't know at the time that Adolph was the featured reader for the main symposium. She never laid eyes on him before. But to call the Crooked River Campus Police and have Adolph escorted from the gymnasium just because he arrived toting a fifth of bourbon in a rumpled paper bag --- well, that was a bit much Oh, Fishbein apologized all right and the insincerity in her voice may have been like Lew said, "just a figment of Adolph's paranoia," but it cut him to the quick anyway.

An hour later, when the much touted public reading was to begin (after Adolph gulped down a few barbitals) a deep torpor o'er took the bard and he could not be moved for love or money. Lew coaxed and coddled, reminded him of the much needed honorarium he would not be taking home and generally expressed her disappointment that the trip and a big moment in Adolph's life were being ruined by his stubborn recalcitrance. He would not move. He would not talk. He wouldn't even take the hit of speed Lew pressed to his slavery lips. An impossible situation.

The insult and the drugs were certainly contributing factors, but deep in the seat of Adolph's mind another cause predominated. The cupboard was bare. Adolph wasn't writing anymore. Not a jot.

He could have thrown out a few crowd-pleasers, poems that over the years proved to be effective, but it would have been strictly cold-plate. The Dues Bank showed no-account. It would either be the old bullfighter turned clown or a pompous seat in some big-ten crammer. Despite his lack of extraordinary gifts, Adolph was no fool. The clown was out. And the retired literary-type, with a lapful of malarkey a yard long, saying to his students,

"I have listed on today’s hand-out seven criteria for Quality.

Number one...

BULLSHIT! Adolph froze. He couldn't face being washed-out, so he froze. That's the way it is when you’re all dried-out. A lose of face. A dust-clot on the endless yellow cracker.

Lewlyn's jade earrings sparkle with every toss of her head.

"Shithead!" Lew harps.

She paces the room in her customary attire, a natty terry robe, black lace panties and her monkey jade earrings, twisting her hands nervously together, trying to shake Blindman's now imperturbable countenance. When Blindman asks for another down, she figures he isn't all there. So she sweeps up a pile of bitter white powder and makes him take it raw.

"Here! Eat dirt Shithead!"

Lew's hands shake. They always shake no matter what. Shake like maybe she's freezing or something. But they don't shake so much that she can't twist and push down hard at the same time. Unlike Blindman, Lew can open a medicine bottle without stomping it flat. She doesn't even count em. Jus puts the bottle up to her pouty lips and tips. That's all it takes. In less than fifteen minutes, she's curled up comfy in Adolph's hopeful arms, her language falling off into a real slow ramble.

"I jus donnu what' um gonna do wit you she says to Blindman. "I jus donnu."

At about six o'clock the phone rings. Blindman is stretched out, fast asleep. After several thwarted attempts at getting Lew to lay him, Adolph decides to watch boxing on television. Then he won't have to look at Lew's pointy little tits and sizzler figure, going to waste as it were. Lew picks up the phone on the second ring, hoping it's one of her waitresses with money to spend.

Most of Lew's best customers are young waitresses. Pop-boppers with high speed, dual control lives. In the arena, where Mr. Suit and Tie is the way to a fat tip, these red-lipped speed queens wink and buzz through their short hops with absolute efficiency. No time for a bumpy ride in the lower stratosphere. Lew's girls stay high, but smooth, avoiding too much contact with ground control and at the same time, careful not to jump the envelope of outer space. Lew used to be a waitress herself until Red Hanrahan set her up in 'the Business', a real blow-up doll in highball heaven. Now she's the dealer or at least she will be if Red doesn't kill her for Shithead's witlessness.

"Get some likker honey," Lew entreats Adolph with' her' characteristic croak. "I'll buy, if you fly."

She covers the receiver and tries to cough loose the dry rasp that envelopes her vocal cords. "Hello," Lew says, affecting a friendly tone.

It's Snowball with a message from Red. The message leaves little room for misinterpretation. Red wants the money folded, five twenty-dollar bills to a stack. Lew's breaths come in soughing, self-indulgent groans. Deep black sockets, long brown hair stuck in greasy ringlets, the shakes. There isn't near enough money left in the Kitty to cover her debt to Red and without a product, she won't even be able to make a big turn-over in time to uncoil the rope from her neck. Oh baby, you can shake my peaches, but don't you shake my tree, she thinks as she thumbs the cockeyed nose that makes her pretty, painted-face, a merger between Lillian Gish and Rocky Marciano. Hanrahan wants the money AZAP! You can't stiff him. Look what he did to Snowball. She'll either have to lay on a good con or take an ass whipping. What else is there to do, but pay the piper and dance?