TS Broadside Edition - Edited By Jim Chandler & Haze McElhenny

THE COMING OF DERELICTS

"This is an ordinary gray Friday after work
and before dark in a city of the known world."

-- from RAIN, by Philip Levine

Derelicts: the way they move, think. The way they negotiate themselves into food and shelter; stealing, eating the very heart from things. When Abelard the aging poet had taken an apartment "close to the people & bone of things," he knew the derelicts from every social class would come for him as wolves for the feast.

Abelard: ancient, skin-rusting with freckles, an arthritic relic, white hair falling. His biological clock was stopping. The dissonance of desires still raged, piquing his greed via memory. He aimed to get the last joy-banging morsel from life.

* * *

Shopping lists for old evil? Some say ol' Abelard -- living alone in his apartment by the colossal Mirage -- engaged in private lewd conducts he wished public. With the willing: the non-ovulating temptresses, youth-rife, reciprocating the artful nude photos of himself. Abelard hoped to trade them like baseball cards to Vegas cocktail waitresses. Hating casinos, he hated those in "white slavery" to any hotel, for whatever criminal sanctions. Until "The Reader" came, that is.

Those suffering pre-menstrual stress symptoms were persona non grata. Those who bitched or withheld graceful blandishments were told to depart. And those interested only in Abelard's money -- rumored to be considerable enough, since he once lived exclusively in houses worthy of casino or showbiz moguls -- were spurned.

"Let no anathema or deceiving Jez come upon me again," wrote Abelard to an imprisoned rapist friend. "They can even hate my poetry, sustained for years by my own resources & publishing houses, and the very monies some seek to take from my anomalous way."

Few friends knew Abelard was in an everyday studio apartment, so skillfully had he lost himself. Just another sperm-head within multitudes was how he characterized himself now. Under an alias, Abelard issued countless missives to ad-placing ladies of sexually-oriented journals. In photos sent his nude body glistened in revealed excitement, but Abelard's face was obscured by a Venetian carnival mask.

* * *

Derelicts sometimes congregated nearby Abelard's apartment building, Desert Palms, uniquely close to and dwarfed by the Mirage hotel. In fact Abelard's place was an enclave in the Mirage parking lot. Desert Palms was usually surrounded by an ocean of cars. Due to land claim, the Palms remained unmoved by time and circumstance, despite pressure by Vegas moguls to sell out.

One such derelict in the vicinity, called Solly "The Reader," was not used to loitering. Though dumped by his New York wife a few months earlier -- just before his bust by the IRS -- Solly had it fleetingly good in Glitter Gulch. Mazda, glitzy wardrobe & Rollex, plus a plethora of Reeboks were then in Solly's indisputable ownership. Before that, he'd been on a spree in Florida and Southern California, where the horse racing was good (on a daily basis, pari-mutuel heaven), and the women seeking luck better. Babes fit for Playboys surrounded Solly then, before his fiscal and seminal wads busted. The spree over, with a sizable living stake still intact, Solly headed for Vegas to forget the divorce which prompted his profligacy, and hoped to find bartender's work.

* * *

Solly "The Reader" liked to read racing forms, not poetry.

Standing outside Abelard's ground floor apartment one Friday morn, Solly was debating going to the sports book at the Mirage -- or another casino -- if only he had enough bucks to justify the trip. Solly wasn't making much at the jobs afforded by the Jesus Saves Mission downtown,
where he was staying, but he had found religion and was being Born Again. Thinking about it, Solly realized he didn't have a light for his Marlboro -- and that's when he first noticed Abelard the Poet, like an old pasha reflectively smoking a pipe while prowling nearby a Desert Palms trash bin.

"Got a lite, Chief?" Solly asked.

No way, Jose, Abelard wanted to reply, disliking Solly's looks. Instead the septuagenarian tossed over a casino matchbook. Solly visibly appreciated the gift, the way a bigoted South African does the right skin color.

"Play any ponies, Chief? I was thinkin' of making some bets at the Mirage. Valenzuela's riding today at Santa Anita. And there's a horse named Mr. Frisky I've heard a lot about ..."

"Don't know a damn thing about race horses, except I don't like it when they're shot for breaking a leg," scoffed Abelard. Grunting, teeth yellow, he appeared the picture of ill-health.

"That so? Well, I don't like to see that myself. Hell, I'd rather see myself shot then a good horse. Anytime."

Solly's doggy face lit with joy. His old benefactor enjoyed disliking him, which was almost the same as being liked. Professionally, Solly "The Reader" was a car salesman before he burned-out at 37, another casualty of booze and hard-edged women. A Born Salesman, Solly had called himself, and the money was once plentiful. With a little salesmanship, Solly believed he'd sell himself to this funny, bermuda shorts-clad codger -- and thus find another "Mooch."

"Chief, you look like a winner to me, gambler or no."

"I don't get beyond Keno or slots. It's women I want to win with."

"Me too," Solly said, moon-face darkening. "I just got divorced from my wife less then a year ago. Ain't been the same since."

"She dump you?"

"You got it. She got the house, which was O.K. with me. I got enough to get out with, since she makes 30 G's as a sales exec for a ladies lingerie company. I'd be O.K. if the IRS hadn't nabbed me out here, Chief ... The straw that broke the camel's back."

"You got it," Abelard agreed, pulling on his briar. "Beautiful day. Beautiful are the winds of summer which blow us free, eh?"

"Blow?" Solly thought the old fellow dirty, dotty, or both. "The Reader's" russet mustache curled briefly, like paper under pressure. With his middle-parted hairdo also, Solly resembled a turn-of-the-century Italian immigrant, now preserved in documentary photos of old barber shops.

"If you like women -- young women," said Abelard, "you should see the one scheduled to drop by my place around noon. She's going to interview me. I don't mean to be facetious, but she's going to be hot for everything about me."

"That so, Chief. Why is that?"

Abelard laughed, snorting back exotic pipe smoke into the summer air. "Because I'm rather a famous poet, young man. Is the racing form your only preferred literature?"

"Just about." Solly could feel his wide smile becoming strained. He could just imagine how shitty his teeth looked. "I like some porno, you know ..."

"I do not write for the base majority," sniffed Abelard. "I write for the diehard elite. Those whose souls have aesthetic gusto."

I'VE BLOWN IT NOW, Solly thought. GUSTO MY BALLS, BUT THE OLD FART MIGHT HAVE MONEY! LOOK AT THAT GOLD AROUND HIS NECK AND FINGERS. HE'S GOT TO BE A "MOOCHIE," AND HELL -- MAYBE HE'S FAMOUS TO PEOPLE WHO WEAR GOLD & HAVE BEAUCOUP CREDIT CARDS ...

In America the base mingling with the precious is a cornerstone of Democracy. Impenetrable mysteries are solved by the right song and dance. No one is safe from inflation or the dark ways of bankruptcy, despite whatever economic boom, mused Abelard.

"Come in, young man, and let's have a drink. I hope you like Scotch."

"Positively -- "

Solly tucked the racing form like a talisman in his pocket and followed the famous geezer into his apartment. Things were looking up. Really, hey, the place wasn't bad. But lots of arty crap cluttered it, thought Solly. And he nearly freaked seeing a large poster on the wall depicting The Poet standing regally, nude except for fashion briefs and the paperback open like a papyrus wing in his hand.

"That's from one of my infamous public readings: L.A., the eighties."

Solly shook his head. "No shit." A germ of superstitious fear formed in Solly, made more narrowly religious those days by the Jesus Saves Mission. Keenly paranoid, he feared The Poet was an atheistic homo, given to evil. Corruption burned like another incense. Allied with the Mission's power, Solly couldn't forbear deviation. Misery is a long cross to bear, he thought.

Abelard's apartment held enough book clutter to start a bonfire business. Solly was pointed towards a gaudy sofa chair which he sank into gleefully, like a cosmonaut does a padded wall in space.

"Chief, life is hell. I need to get back on my feet."

"Do you remember your childhood?" asked Abelard, now himself augustly seated in an ornate arm chair, antiquated with a pagoda-like top. A chair of extreme kitsch.

"What the hell kind of question's that, Chief?"

Solly chewed on sudden anger, until old Abelard produced a tray of glasses, with liquor and ice.

"Drink heartily, young man, and try to remember."

"I was broke even as a kid in New York -- that much I remember -- our family scraped like beggars to get by."

There was a slight sound from the screen door then. Abelard grunted a sonorous welcome, and a young, striding woman at least six feet in height entered. She wore impenetrably dark glasses (never removed), a skin-hugging blouse with top buttons unclasped (revealing little chest, rued Solly), and foreign-looking sandals on her large, muscular bare feet. Sans make-up of any kind, she exuded a pleasant scent of the arboreal outdoors. More than striking was her hair-do, coiffed immaculately like a museum-bound kouros'.

"You've arrived just, or almost just, in time, Lucretia. This is my off-the-street guest -- so-called Solly 'The Race Book Reader' -- who knows absolutely nothing about literature. Both of you should be charmed," cackled Abelard, sipping whiskey and enjoying things like a scientist does a challenging experiment. "Sit on the couch over there, my dear, and make yourself a drink. I do hope you brought one of those little tape recorders."

The unspeaking young woman did as requested, and Abelard turned his attention back to the drink-consuming Solly, who was in Scotch refill heaven. "Lucretia is one of the finest magazine writers extant. She's known far and wide, and conducts the best interviews."

Solly wondered. For a snooty-type her bod wasn't that bad. Did she have blue or green eyes behind the shades? Not bad legs either, considering, and after a sip Solly clutched his glass in a talon-grip. "So you like poetry?" Solly innocently asked Lucretia. She issued no reply, immersed in setting up the tape recorder and readying her other materials. The teacher-type, grimaced "The Reader." He was brought up in an era when women didn't act like that, behaving like there were no real men present.

"Innocence has died a horrid death," intoned Abelard towards the tape recorder, his voice now official-sounding. "It's become another plane crash victim in our age of spiritual perversion. It's another victim of institutional oligarchy -- handed down, becoming unrestricted anarchy, like our civil aviation industry. Such unrestricted anarchy is modern poetry's state, for better or worse. Another plane crash victim."

Solly "The Reader" sat there somewhat perplexed, listening to the old bird go on in nonsensical fashion. Maybe this was all a put-on -- the prelude perhaps to a very wild party, like in the 60s? -- and Solly smiled despite himself. Good Scotch anyway, and if that long tall Sally
would just loosen up, misery would not be such a long word. He could smell money on the old man, the way rabbits sniff out lettuce. It would be all right ... Just let the Halloween act run its course. Later they'd all be betting big at the Mirage -- courtesy of ol' Abelard, the
most unknown famous-something.

During the silent interval when Abelard paused to lubricate his tongue, Solly commented, "Nice place, Chief. You sure got enough books."

Abelard's talk of airplane crashes had Solly reminiscing about New York's Kennedy airport. How things were a madhouse at JFK; how he once worked for a short time as a pre-flight passenger screener in the airport's security checkpoint area, where all the metal detectors and baggage X-ray machines were, and where life on any given midnight shift was a prelude to hell -- if not downright disaster. Misery was a perpetual crashing state then all right. In reminiscence Solly's russet features were exuberant, almost joyful. He'd taken the stage temporarily from Abelard. Solly could imagine how his voice might sound on tape playback, but -- in one of those chuckling, liquor-fortifying pauses -- he noticed the tall blind babe had shut the machine off, and now stared back at him with a coldness reserved for interloping field mice. Her chill temporarily halted Solly's convivial recallings, and his mouth was now crestfallenly open, revealing a dental disaster zone. He could hear A!belard's wheezing exclamations cut into the uneasy silence.

"Yes, civil aviation is retarded, young man, as are the states of post-modern art and literatures." Rather patronizingly, Abelard then asked his icy interviewer if everything was all right.

"A temporary mechanical difficulty," replied Lucretia in a high voice. Her first utterance. To Solly it was one more irritation about her, unlike the silence of crash victims.

"Maybe you just need another drink, babe," Solly said boldly, challenging Ms. Snooty.

She ignored him, instead addressing her entire attentions to Abelard. "What is this man doing here, Abelard, except taking up space in your apartment."

Abelard sighed with magnanimous forbearance, creating a pyramidal shape with his upraised hands. The apex of his joined fingertips nearly touched his nasal flesh-tip. "He's here, little darling, because nothing really matters. All art and literature being bankrupt, fodder for the unknowing crass multitudes, who sustain such nonsense with their tax-free and otherwise dollars. Do you visualize it? He's here because he has a right to be. He even has the right to say as much during this interview as I have. I want you to include his unedited remarks in this interview -- or it shall cease as of now."

Lucretia of the exotic shades reacted like the senile man just propelled a dirk into her side. All manners of common sense and reason to her were violated. The dogs of hades ruled artistic hierarchies, and Lucretia blanched, massaging her own nose with a probing, thin forefinger.

"Then let's be more specific about your recent poetry and work output," continued the interviewer, now recomposed. "You're still writing and publishing, are you not?"

"Ah, I've faded into obscurity, despite a poetic smattering of mine, every now and then, in insignificantly small magazines. Mere tabloids and pseudo-publications. Nothing as formidable as the weekly racing forms are."

"The best thing you should read," Solly smilingly took his cue, "if you want to win at the track, Chief. Believe me."

Abelard winked back: "I'm sure of it."

Lucretia smiled super-thinly. "So your productivity has lessened."

"Life's little joys are also gone, little darling, or nearly extinct. Sex, Boozing, Loving, Carousing -- all of them endangered, in extremis."

Solly kept smoking, drinking, talking, and after awhile everything went like clockwork. In a very real sense, God had found Solly -- saving him in time. So Solly believed, wanting to know His riches and the world's again. That old poet-jerk loved him -- Solly knew that much -- and that was all he needed to handle the Lucretia "broad." Misery would be past-tense city. He laughed, having old Abelard in his palm, convincing him how fantastic the old bird would find the casino gambling world -- a world Abelard had always despised, until Solly's coming.

"Let's all go over to the Mirage and check out the action," Solly coddled. "I feel like making some passes at the dice tables."

"This might well be our lucky day!" agreed Abelard, emboldened by the liquor, which left his skin a florid mass of freckles -- the hue of lobsters steamed for kings' banquets.

"I don't think this will enhance our interview," demurred Lucretia, biting her lip in a conflicting moment.

"Nonsense!" Abelard barked, his vocal volume on high. "This will be the perfect color and life-slice to enhance the interview indeed. You of course must come along ..."

* * *

" 'NOW BEAT THE DEVIL/ IN A WORLD OF SHAM,' " intoned Abelard over his Scotch, once inside the casino. He was giddy with merriment, with the novelty and incipient danger of it all. " 'WE'VE COME TO CUT THE CANCER/ FROM THE HEART OF IDIOT-MAN.' Not one of my finest," the old scrivener snorted, "but fit for Keno babylon?"

The crowded casino was aflame with noisy pedestrian multitudes, machines, obtrusive lights, and a dark air of elusive possibility. One escaped willingly into its meretricious appetites, and hoped. Solly smirked, nodding affably, wondering how many greenbacks could be filched from the ancient druid. Abelard might be loaded -- in more ways than one -- and Solly would soon join the club. TO THE GILLS. Victory mambo over craps. He could see it all now. Only the Lucretia "journalist" needed straightening out. She was the puzzle, the roadblock to a perfect evening. Something about her tongue-tied questioning nagged at Solly like the fear of testing positive for the world's most mysterious disease.

She was a foreigner, he decided. Worse, a handicapped one.

Anyway, Solly knew he'd escaped the Rescue Mission. That was the main thing. He'd never be going back. Goodby to the kitchen and hot stove city.

Heading for the dice tables, Solly chuckled, almost pitying the Mission characters he'd left behind: Dirty Charly, an old goat going blind, who failed to become Chef Solly's kitchen nigger. Crazy Red, who one day burned Solly's meat loaf into ashy residue. El Toro, who needed Vodka almost hourly, and owed Solly a ton of bucks. There were more, a gross cast of characters in an epic movie no one but Solly really saw and understood.

"I gotta make a pass," Solly said, a prodigal son returning to throw dice. He winked at a cocktail waitress taking his drink order. She made Solly's downtown whores look flat-chested and near death.

Abelard was exultant. "Let's bet the hard numbers! Let's win at this wheel of fortune!"

Only the reporter Lucretia was unsmiling, a bad partner in crime. When Solly threw dice, she snickered gratefully when no huge winnings occurred. With each unsuccessful toss she seemed to gain solace in a world given over to lurid sensations.

Hurriedly gulping down another Scotch, Solly realized his money was gone. He looked up to see the skinny butch-bitch all but laughing at him. It wasn't her commentary that bothered him so much as her voice. It was something scarifying all normal enunciation, impairing her speech noticeably. Was she talking in tongues, or drunk?

Solly regarded the writer's speech impairment as an affront, since she'd only finished one watery cocktail. Activate Plan B-C, he told himself, and collar old Abelard immediately. Fortunately the august poet was inebriated inordinately, and feeling not the least put on when Solly requested a small loan to see him through.

"I'll do better than that. Here's fifty dollars," Abelard said, proffering the money as if it were beneath him. "Show me what you can do. I'll be your broker."

"Now you're talking, Chief," Solly said, toasting his benefactor. "Let's go hit those tables."

The results were unchanged. Loss after loss, with Abelard supplying more funds, and Lucretia -- tape recorder microphone ready, despite the din -- asking him the reason for such folly, a tone of incredulity exaggerating her speech impediment.

"I feel this young man is lucky, and will yet win enormously, that's why," Abelard said, drunk.

Lucretia thought otherwise. The casino environment was a horrifying experience, and she felt they were being held hostage by a madman. Panic enfolded her like a poisonous jellyfish, and she considered fleeing. To hell with the interview and job. The campus quarterly she wrote for wasn't paying her enough anyway. She felt cheated by the world's vulgarity, crassness and corruption, which Solly "The Reader" ably personified. Through her glasses she caught a glimpse of a cardplayer thowing down a joker which had "The Reader's" face.

"Why don't you have a drink, my dear?" inquired Abelard. "It might loosen you up."

"She's had enough," Solly laughingly said.

"Let's drink to our eventual triumph," proclaimed the poet.

"I think we better try some 21," Solly said, seriously considering the situation. He'd now lost the old shit's money and couldn't believe Abelard was offering more. "Maybe poker, I don't know, but never any horses," he winked at the old man. "They're like people now."

Abelard raised his glass. "We are at the edge of danger. That is the situation closest to the state of 'living poetry' I know of."

"I'll drink to that," Solly laughed. Very soon they were at the poker and blackjack tables. Solly's luck fared no better at first.

Beyond hope, beyond seriousness, Abelard openly howled for Solly to "hit big!" Lucretia appeared stunned by the hoary poet's obvious drunken disorientation. This was the Pulitzer Prize winning poet laureate whose public image, for years, was one of genteel sophistication? And why, of all places, had he decided to retire in the false oasis of Sin City? "Come on, Solly babe -- let's break the bank here! Let's win a big hand." With that Abelard gulped down another Scotch, then grabbed Lucretia's svelte neck like she were personal property, his prized thoroughbred muse betokening ultimate fortune. "Loosen up a little, sweetie, and put away the goddamn notebook already."

Speechless -- with her impairment unable to find its usual intimidating expression -- Lucretia felt like screaming. Or calling the police. When one of Abelard's ancient hairy hands found its way to slight convexity of her breast, something flammable took charge of the too-tall woman's innermost depths.

"Win us the big one, Sol! Win us a bundle," toasted Abelard, his face now a mottled redness resembling innards.

Solly lost -- big. He lost again with repetitive madness, no matter what game he labored at. Tokens and chips by the handful dissipated into nothingness nearby his elbow. The shock forced gluey tears to stick like cataracts to his eye corners, where spirits of his consmanship ebbed.

"Goddamn it all," muttered Solly, downing another strong cocktail. When he looked up from his table, he confronted a sudden commotion overwhelming the vicinity. Old Abelard (according to an eyewitness hotel employee) had jackknifed like a broken straw into a twitching, unconscious relic at Solly's feet. His facial color had zoomed from lobster red to arctic white. His mustache drooped into an unsavory facsimile of hair. His eyes enlarged bulbously, like a silent movie actor's. All the medical woes of seizure consumed the man, rendering his body a paralyzed mass. Still his right hand clung to Lucretia, this time around the slender region of her ankle.

"My god," she whispered, stunned and jostled by the crowd's impatience.

"Call a paramedic!" someone was yelling.

"He needs air!" someone else said.

Still sitting at his poker table, Solly "The Reader" couldn't believe what he looked at -- nor any of what had happened. This turn of bad luck almost caused his own heart to give out. Even life at the Mission was a pallid imitation of this tragedy, and Solly desperately knew he had to return to his true home before he lost everything, like Abelard. The Lord had fled this place, Solly decided. The Lord (who had recently saved and rebaptized Solly) had decided this House of Cards was an evil one, and now Solly reeled painfully from that reality.

"Get a priest," was what Solly said, but it was more like a request for his confused and hypocritical self. "That man is my friend, my benefactor."

Solly beheld the next sight as something viewed through the interstices of hallucinating nightmare. The Lucretia person sprung towards him with a long-tined fork in hand, and tried -- like Marat's assassin -- to plunge the spiked metal into "The Reader's" eyes. She uttered an incomprehensible cry while doing so, but nimbly Solly dodged her. A bystander was foiled trying to grab Lucretia from behind, and the fork managed to scrape a bloody trail down Solly's exposed forearm. Scratches of the Devil, Solly thought, believing himself in apocalyptic battle. Oh, for a guaranteed redemption -- painless at that -- without some crazy fiend trying to assault him. Stress-fear had Solly believing (or hallucinating) again, desperately as ever, through the terror of his blind faith.

Was it dark out? Solly wondered, feeling uneasy sweat rain down him. He imagined it Christ's tears, or godly baptismal waters, and prayed once again for salvation from human betrayal, before it was too late, before he drowned, before all the losers of creation came and hoisted him angrily to their collective shoulders and proclaimed him a doomed slave, and not the last winning jockey in this neon paradise.

"Let's go play the horses," somebody said, and -- looking down at Abelard's brokenly inert form -- Solly realized they had.