LAST CALL

The bus ride home is tedious. The long ribbon of gray highway bores on and on into America. For lunch the bus pulls into Finley, Ohio. whaddaplace! Adolph wonders what it would be like to live in Finley, to marry the Prom Queen of the class of sixty-four, to own the hardware on Finley Drive, to slip it to Alice Finely, the Prom Queen's mother waiting tables now that her children are grown? It doesn't sound so bad. A normal boo Boise world. Alice and the Prom Queen, Mr. Finely and all the little Finley’s are probably as happy as squirrels. On the way out of the fastest of Finley’s fast food restaurants, Adolph propositions Alice at the register. No time, of course. The bus is running and, as always, Adolph is the dog outside the door. Woof. Woof. Like with Wes. Ah Wes. Why did you have to go? And Adolph --- beaten, dejected, heading for certain doom, without a care for his own skin, grabs at straws like Alice to divert his cud-chewing sadness. It was so nice and cozy. Wes home from modeling at Gooseridge Arts and Crafts with her arms loaded with sacks.

"First the groceries," she beamed. Salmon from Norway. The rotten Greek olives Adolph loved. Goat’s cheese. Hard salami. Gable's rye. Hot Indian pickles. Rumple Minze schnapps. Black Italian rope cigars. She reached into her Egyptian strawbag with the Emperor Moth frozen in clearcast. "Close your eyes," she enchanted.

Adolph hadn't sensed the sting of a kiss-off yet. He was thinking of their first prickly interligatory with its paradoxs of pain and pleasure. The intestinal paroxysms seemed to drink to the dregs of human spirit and yet it had been wonderful beyond anything he had ever imagined.

It was a tiny cloisonné' heart that she produced from her bag. A blood-red trinket to replace the sorrowful cinder of his own ravaged pump. Yes, he could see it now. Right through the "I love you's", despite her erotic address before him. Even the use of Wes's active mouth as a salve couldn't soften the blow of betrayal in her words. "Zap's coming home. He's leaving in a week for Chicago, but I mustn’t see you until he's away. He's done so much, so very much. I owe him my life. I just can't hurt him'"

Adolph's expectation of failure was his Peter's Rock allowing him to detach inside from outside. He pressed the button marked ejection. Whamo! Now. A posture? A floodtide of incredulity? No! He would martyr himself "Why me?" he dragged the words across the full belly of his hurt. The red gash already revealing the inner cockscomb of unspent spleen. The battered soul. "Why---me?" He wasn't even allowed to call or come to the club. It would have been too painful anyway. To see her and not trace the lines of her face with a finger. "Zap will have you killed if he finds out you are my lover. He believes I am his possession.

"An artifact," Adolph pulled from the bag of images just the right word. Wes is in a sense a creation of Zap's --- a trained act in a world where performance and style seldom concur in the same expression. Maybe, she'll find him in New Hope and save him again from the viselike squeeze of fate. He left her a masterpiece of guilt-provoking eloquence as well as detailed directions to New Hope in a cunning little note. He put it beside the gifts on the bed that had been their raft in the seething torrent of the insane river of life. Not the heart, though. Maybe he can trade it for a little sleep.

The groggy Greyhound pokes its way into the slit as the sun rises sharply over the Bleaker Street Bridge. New Hope thick with fog. At any moment, the roller coaster rush of the oncoming hoards will engulf Adolph's peaceful torment in its ticker tape of activity, but now the giant, polymorphous playpen of skyscrapers stands safe, secure tall teeth in the foci of death. Adolph's mail has been neatly stacked inside his door and on the very top, among the most recent arrivals, are a large manilla envelope and a stubby box. The envelope, Adolph discovers, contains a manuscript of poems from New York City written by WINEBREATHANDLOAVESOFBREADFORBREASTS. Hard to pin down her name. This old flame of Adolph's changed her name to get across the literary footbridge only to discover that most goal-orientated behavior becomes a dialectical nuisance. One becomes the object of synthetic subjects. Her's is a flyblown sack of words. Where's the juice? Juice is very much the issue for Adolph. Juice is the enlivening substrata of human existence. You either squirt a dollup when squeezed or crack with bone chilling nullification. Adolph's juice is barely a trickle. It's been twenty months to the day since his shaky hand with the convoluted heart line oozed a pen-worthy poem. There's been dry periods before --- distractions, but this time he has just plain run out of gas. Perhaps, thinks Adolph; there will be enough for an epilogue. Perhaps.

Inside the hastily wrapped box, there is a ring with the inscription: LOVE HURTS. Also a note penned in a feathery scrawl:

Dearest Darling Adolph

I've gone to Chicago and then it's off to

Venice. I'll miss you. These are real tears.

Take them like the Blood of Christ into your

soul. Please don't run out of gas.

Heartbuggered

Long fingered shadows scurry rat-like into mustard colored rents and fissures. Adolph fights with the fleeting cloak of sleep. The yellowed daggers flashing. The insistent little click of the neon sign with its animal hiss squeezing out --- Star Bar, Star Bar. The phone stands in the eddies of light pulsing in the window from the varicolored sign. Silent reminder. Adolph is still hoping that Wes will call him or something and put an end to this intolerable depression. The Star Bar sign with its bald memorial to happy women clanking glasses with expectant men blinks, blinks and then silent darkness. Wes isn't going to call and the pills are kaput. Only a capfull of bourbon. Barely enough to wet a bowl of cornflakes. Still the phone, stinging, mute, wades in the gloom. Ring! You bitch! Ring!"

Adolph's voice falls back into his head. His mind wanders. Not to where he wishes, but to some neutral, unfeeling square. He's sick A growing malaise has taken hold of the very essence of the man and sunk deep its 'slug-a-bug' underside into the core of his will; the still awareness peering out of his hard wooden peeps.

The window rattles loudly. Bang! Bang! The ruckus redoubles. Something or somebody is kicking on Adolph's window. Wes! Maybe, Wes? Adolph tries to leap from the bed, but ends up reaching the window stiffly after falling flat several times. The light from the street plays on a figure standing practically on top of the winterberry bush. It's Lewlyn rubbing a wounded thigh, vermillion housecoat, a hint of pink satin undergarment. She's seen signs of life from Adolph's window and is curious to find out what gives.

Adolph is wondering what to tell Lew about his adventures on the road. He can't tell her about Wes. She wouldn't like any of that story. He slips the rusty latch on the window allowing Lew's penumbral figure to slide into the room. Night murmurs. A sycamore with hundreds of leathery seedpods. Ghostly rattles. A twittering sprinkle of soft, brown wrens. A wrankled cat. Things breath and hack with unromantic candor. As Adolph shuffles through the nebula of his already fading days with Wes, he envisions the past week's events without her timely interventions The locked doors of THE HOME FOR THOSE WEARY OF THE WORLD, the walls crawling with the characteristic mechanical clicks of incarceration and the final blow of the loss of his precious little tin. Adolph's mind isn't working with its usual facility, but as the fantasy brightens to a clear picture he begins to embroider it with the thicker thread of the storytellers art.

In the final scene, as Lew hears it, Broom and Boise try to give Adolph an enema of fermented cabbage juice and, only by beating a hasty retreat to the street, taking advantage of the general pandemonium of a full-back charge, knocking white-smocked aides wily-nily, did Adolph escape with his dignity tucked safely under his arm.

Lewlyn is deeply moved by the sheer horror of Adolph's tidy little confabulation which is made even more impactiful by the genuine emotion that he gleans from the unsaid pain in his heart. She slips out of her housecoat, bosom barely cleaved, legs like slender stems and gives up to Adolph in his moment of sorrow that recalcitrant bud of love. Not for the first time. Not forever. She stumbles drunkenly with a half-empty bottle of purple wine held out before her in one hand. The grape stains streak her neck in defiant little revulets. Adolph takes the bottle of wine, presses it to his greedy lips and sucks it dry. The depression continues to bloom. A hot black lily pressed to the lip of sleep afraid to dream. Lewlyn waters that darkest flower with a handful of pills and a kiss that cold-shoulders into a weary passion. "Don't hurt me," he says. "Please don't hurt me!" She laughs nervously as the greatest actor of them all pushes her clumsily to the bed and presses his face between her chalk-white thighs, nuzzling like an infant with a favorite blanket, sucking up the odors of her eternal feminine fecundity. Any port in a storm.