THE RELUCTANT VICTIM by Wordhunger A star-crossed mystery Victim: Not yet. NOT YEEEEEEEETTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!! You b*****s!!! Were there six stars intended to be there? One minute you are there enjoying the prime beef of life?  The next minute -- WHAMMO -- chilling ball of light grows in the back  brain in hypercrystal slo-mo. Corpse is cooling in the rank undergrowth.  Song of the lark. The dark sky is alight with pixels. The spines of a hedgehog brush past your eyeball.  Memory acid bathed in the transition from this world to the next.  Some folk may thank their God for this charitable act of forgetting the gory details, but screw that! I had plans, goddamit. I was going places. What's my name? How cruel to have robbed me of even that least ornate badge. Not that there's anything in a name, and all that... Was I young? Was I old? Fat? Thin? How many points? Who's that knocking? Is it knocking? Decaying sine curve double beat? Is that my heart finally going to sleep after years of workmanlike precision? This is so degrading.  Headlights pulling away. Land Rover tyres tearing up the shale. Remember a bloke called Dreyfus. He had a black suitcase. Said he was from the south.  Spat when he talked.  Remember him eating a plate of german sausages and green beans. Sheamus, too, what about him? -- a fireman with beautiful wife and there's three kids. Shame it wasn't me... Call us us. We'll be there first. Veronica is out there trawling the ether for lost souls such as me tonight. Never knew her in reallife but now, get a tarty battery acid taste that to me is the body equivalent of unpalatable. She is broadcasting in wideband on the Samaritan sine frequency. Red glow, like the stars, now. Motion sickness drives me through a rainbow. Tears rush by tasting of the gutter or the hose. Electric ring cycle - 240 volts. Brick hardens around me. Plaster. Scorched wallpaper from the early seventies. This is the house of a single male. Maybe a divorcee. Sounds of dogs barking out of sight.  The living room smells of masturbation. Viscious video collection.  Tunnel of Love motion carries me through to the kitchen chip-pan where an unshaven, balding man shovels CocoPops into his face. He is approximately 45 years of age. Has a strong dog odour.  I can go right up to him close enough to see the blackheads on his whiskey nose. Pushing through into his mind like an ice storm. The name Trainer. Flashframe of domestic violence. Palm to cheek in one swift move. He loves the old movie stars, too. Hot property all of them. ***** Krendle: My pathological report. Victim was found in Lover's Lane, at one thirty in the morning. There was no identification found, but it is now assumed that the victim is relatively well-off: the suit is Armani, original. Victim died from a small puncture wound behind the right ear. As if he'd been pumped out. Victim is male, approximately thirty-three years of age, and of Latin appearance.  He is also six foot in height, and two hundred pounds in weight.  A photograph has been circulated within the area, but I have a suspicion we may need to seek further plots afield. My Elisha's spoken four. I am currently awaiting results from forensics, to ascertain the probable murder weapon. Fowles is investigating officer: wish he wasn't. ***** Veronica (Carranza Maria Obregon): I love the sky and the way it works the stars and your life streams… I've seen blood all my life. Bloodstains on bedsheets, on pillow cases, on shirts, on skirts, on suits, on jackets, on pants … on star signs. I've seen bloodstains large and lake-sized. I've seen bloodstains run like questionmarks. Or asterisks and ampersands. It's part of the laundry business. When you own a shop it's not just the machines running day and night, it's the drycleaning work, too. The customers always look all sheepish at you, like they've done something wrong, when usually it's just that they cut themselves or something. You've got to stand there stone-faced like you're a wall or something, not a person, and just nod and give them the price and the ticket so they don't feel stupid. Thirty years I've been doing this. Started out as a maid working for my mother when my father left. We'd spend all day cleaning mansions in the richest part of the city and have to go back to our shack with the one bedroom for me and my three sisters. But you heard that kind of story before. You don't need to know that. You don't need to know how I got here -- how I worked 15-hour days so I could buy my own business... Come here. Really: come here... Feel that grip -- like a vice. I got hands like stone. I got that grip dealing with three lousy husbands in a row. You don't want to feel that grip too hard, do you? I didn't think so. Which brings us back to the bloodstains.There's bloodstains and then there's bloodstains. You see this shirt here? Police Detective Angus Fowles brought it in. It's got a bloodstain. He cut his thumb with a knife and wiped it on his shirt sleeze without thinking. That's a pretty obvious one. You don't need to think about that. Besides, he told me that's what he wanted me to try to get out. Now let's look at another shirt. Yours here... You can't even see it at first, it's so subtle. But you look closer -- and there's a spray of brown drops in a circle along the cuff. It's blood -- don't even tell me it's not blood. I know blood when I see it. But you didn't tell me to try to get the blood out. So that's not as innocent a mark as the blood on Fowles' shirt. But it's not like anything you'd think too much of... it was what I found inside the pocket that worries me. I think it should worry you too. I think it should worry you so much you'd want to talk to me about what we can do so that it doesn't wind up in Fowles' pocket when he comes to pick up his shirt. But before we talk about that, I've got one question: Are you stupid? Are you just plain stupid? Once a victim, always a victim, I say. Or did you think I was stupid? Did you think I wouldn't know what that thing in your pocket meant? My mama didn't raise any stupid  kids. It's written down somewhere. *****Bill: Yesterday was my first day off from driving the buses in nearly six months and what did I do? Spent the whole day worrying about the damn wind chimes again, that's what. I should've been down at the races watching the dog that Trainer swindled me out of. (B******d. I'll get him for that one one of these days). Lately the chimes have been rattling instead of chiming -- as if they're made of brittle bones rather than hollow steel pipes. I've been meaning to take them down for a while now but somehow whenever I get near them I forget. Then, later, a gust of wind blows and the dreadful racket starts again. I didn't sleep much last night. Invading my dreams were images of half formed children, open faces oozing blood and black stuff, skinny hands holding tiny bones and clicking them to the tune of the chimes. Even Sheamus couldn't put them out. Veronica was there too, chasing after Victim.  Said she wanted a prayer. She stopped for a while to chat to the children -- it looked as if she were asking for directions. When I woke this morning I found a smear of blood on my sheet. The blood was still wet. And it wasn't mine. *****Frenchie: I knew Veronica when she was more than a laundry woman. Nothing is too low for us politicos, but nobody is going to read this anyway, so I may as well blow the gaffe on Veronica's rump. One minute tasting the air for dead spirits.  The next scrying the menstrual remains of her latest bit on the side's bit on the side. Then often she got me crepe suzette when I was easing fixers into the government soup runs.  I once said -- jokingly -- that her crimson dressing would decorate the juiciest organ salad, given the hitman's sayso.  A victim accused is a reluctant victim given the need to strut these days in high circles of star and screenprint. A building made to the underhand teasing of two-faced brickies, only murder could square the fact that *I* was the most professional victim of all -- staging death scenes that made even the best senators corpse and giggle.  Who'd've thought I could make the brightest government shirtcuffs link up with those red beads, like a Hansel & Gretel plasma trail, towards the magus himself.  That king of the house of cards. That strawberry birth mark masquerading as a bent dick. I hear he salvaged, from a stiff shirt, a solid 3D thumbprint which was either an exact replica of the murderer's escape route or Veronica's very own contours of more over-the-hill husbands than even she could reckon upon climbing to the brow of. All the authorities were in on it, even the fire crews under that arch douser Sheamus.   Bill actually provides emergency victims -- donating his little maimed ones to rescue from somewhere in his school bus, when he drives it cityside.  Often, Bill says, he spots Jaccuser A. Dreyfus and his softshow luggage, shuffling to sell frontdoors from door to door, Bill often reaching one end of a terrace as Dreyfus joins it at the other, giving the patentors the slip.  But that's probably another story. That's getting us no closer to even the supremest victim of all! Well, when I'm at home after a day at the ooblah-di ooblah-da shouting match that some call the house of commons, I wonder whether I should slip into something more comfy.  Veronica's starched smalls are a trifle big and far too scratchy for my cosy demolishers.  Elisha's overalls have too much of the red brick-dust laden.  Any vicarious victim's slacks are often crumbled over with the underfoot stuff that lover's lane makes you wade through: but good enough, later, for cement. Or plaster. Little matter, I'm too cropped for entertaining cronies from the backwink office, those who like running their fingers through my mane, mock or not.  No, it's Trainer's shoes that I get off on most. Mainly because they take me nearer **you**. *****Dreyfus: I'm not fooled: I see things. Not just the kind of things you'd expect from a travelling salesman, but much, much more. I've worked these pudgy streets, worked these shoe-leathered people for thirty years. The streets have struggled against me, but I've gradually learnt to let them have their way, and I've taken what I need without them even knowing. Even the patentors think they've won. It's the same with the ordinary people. Let them think they're in charge of their lives, become so small a part of things that they barely acknowledge me, are hardly aware of the dues I exact from them. Like the tape-worm or the tuberculosis germ, barely noticed for a long time, until one day when it's too late. How else to make a living as a travelling salesman? But I have the advantage over others who ply this trade. I see the unknowable: see much more than the fading brows of a family quarrel when I ring the doorbell, or the lover's quickly-bedded anxiety. No, I don't see through plaster walls, not that! But though I can't explain it to you, I do know just what goes on. In every house, in every salt-stained street, every rain-boiled town on my rounds. I see it all. Too much to bear. Or beef about.           So to me they are not real, these inhabitants I exact my dues from. I could take much more, if I wanted. It is enough to make a living from these puppets -- as I call them to myself when I tread the oily pavements on wet nights and know that I am better off than they in the softly-clinging armchairs of their brick-cased hutches. Like stark-eyed dummies in suitcases they are, and me condemned to walk amongst these living dead so that I might live. Seeing all, knowing all. Knowing no other way to live.           Take this street with its broken soda lamps and burnt-out derelicts and smiling take-away-chicken-cartons crushed into the gutter by passing rubber. I see him, the one who dwells here still, though he was rent from the protesting flesh when he was least ready. He doesn't see me, not yet. Doesn't remember what happened just before the food we shared in the cat-infested, ice-walled kitchen on the corner. He is moving now, along the street. From house to house -- I can feel him -- looking for the one who did this to him. He is not like others of his circumstance. He is reluctant to live -- reluctant to live on. He seeks only his killer and the annihilation of everything when he finds him. After he has learned the truth about himself, perhaps: who he was... The one he seeks is close. I know him.Veronica knew him too, but no one has found her body yet; he hid it well. Probably burnt it. But I have little to fear. He thinks he's watching me, but I'm watching him in his cement-kneed overalls. And I'm watching Fowles too. They make worthy opponents, creeping towards each other in the dark. *****Fowles: Fowles burped up a two day old hotdog.  "Wow," he thought amusedly to himself, "That was almost puke!"  Oh frabjous day's perpendicular illogic wound through the gutted pig's brain of Offal Lieutenant Fowles, whose name, if spelled differently would steer one in the wafting direction of foul stench that was this corpulent bloated paste-faced man.  He sat at his desk in his own filth.  Big Mac containers with a singular roach ensconced within, Barq's root beer cans crumpled as if crushed by the mellifluent wall of intangible odor that reeked, which was itself doing combat against the mighty urinal-like traces of Hi Karate aftershave given to Fowles by his mother's executor of a lowly penurious estate of nothing in particular.  Fowles swabbed up a taco bell bean burrito from his report and dipped the pudgy pig-in a blanket finger into his jollymouth-hole. "Christ, you fat porker, can you go someplace else and eat?  And right after you took a dump, too," said leanboy rookie Jerry Conroy. "You shut your gashwipe, you little fug!  You don't tell menuthin!" and dismissed the little upstart with a silent air biscuit floated from his munificent stunning size 77 trousers. An acrid odor dispensed like nerve gas through the precinct cubicles, in accordance with properties of physics, notably Boyle'sLaw, where every molecule of an inert gas expands to fill the proper volume in every proper direction. Even Sheamus couldn't have put them down. "Jeesum Pete's Gramma!  You cut the cheese, Fowles!" said Jerry again. "They say son, that if you hold in your gas, you'll get a heart attack!  As my mama said, more room on the outside than on the inside!" "Okay, now can I please have my report back so I can redo it a bit? I found out some more stuff about that greaseball in lover's lane with the entrance wound behind his biscuit ear." "Sure kid, knock yourself out." Fowles shifted his ballast from one sweet ham of huge well-marbled thigh to the other in his creaking wooden chair of mercy. Elisha was his bit on the side and she still sorta hung there like a wen. "Did you know, son, Jerry, that Lyndon Johnson fucked the entrance wound in JFK's head?" "Damn, just give me the report, Magus!" "Come an' get it.  I wiped off the refrieds... and don't call me that here, Blurto!" Another gangrenous-fold of pure Crisco flab in Fowles side was itchin' up again. "You can see where I told Doc Krendle to go do an autopsy on a naked teen corpse... cause he don't know shit about no forensics but feelin' bare tit off a teenybopper choked on a rubber..." "I'm readin'." "I got all kinda suspects here. That frog Frenchie's hidin' his own mamma's underwear if you ask me.  I got that spic maid to sleep wid me for a couple bucks, and she done commenced to sayin the rosary while I was a doin' it. Stars in her eyes … and ears … and lodged under her manhole cover…" "So she didn't know anything?  Except there was a rubber in the shirt pocket?" "Yep, used one too.  Still had the pullet sperm caked all over it. Krendle's doin a DNA tapdance on it when he ain't on the crapper all day. Like a lump of shit with a map crazed out in the veins.” "What about that slimball dogtrack bastard, whazhisname?" asked Jerry.  “Some weird nickname like, oh, here it is, 'Trainer'.  Talkabout trailer trash.  He's the kind ta screw his own sister." "I got it all in there."   Another burp rang through the air and then ceased abruptly. Jerry excused himself to go get a smoke. Sheamus likes smoke, he thought as he shrugged and farted. *****Elisha: Trainer stumbles forward trying to escape but Krendle has cut his throat and it's spraying everywhere, especially into his own face which is a deathly bluish grey as he tries to grasp onto Busdriver Bill, who lunges at him, pushing him into a lover's lane tree, causing his head to make a loud wet cracking sound as he simultaneously sings out an extended ululating 'Ahhhhhhh' and his body sinks and flails like a collapsing balloon.  Grinning through layers of cracked lip gloss, erection straining against the flimsy cotton material of my panties, I throw a heavy punch to the side of Trainer's head, sending his stupid baseball cap hurtling into the air, where for a brief moment it becomes something other; backlit by a cold moon stained against the clouds, it pirouettes briefly before crashing deservedly into a pile of dog shit next to my big, hairy, stillettoed feet. "WHEN THE GREAT WHORE, BABYLON, IS FINALLY FALLEN!" Krendle cries. "Keep your fuckin' voice down!” Busdriver Bill rasps. "I WILL NOT!" Krendle shrieks indignantly, fog pumping out of his nose like a lathered workhorse. "Both of you shut up," I whisper through gritted teeth, and then, "Let's finish this." "Who died and made you the fuckin' boss, trannyman?" Busdriver Bill spits at me. And Trainer is on his knees, his Umbro jacket is sopping wet with blood and his eyeballs are rolling back into his low-browed head, and this disturbs me because I really want him to look at my shiny black eyes, and more importantly I want him to see my panting, slavering, ruptured mouth. "Cunts like you constitute a disposal problem," I hiss through a crimson fog, and in my head a television audience catches its breath, such profanity Elisha, someone whispers, and I'm thinking kiss my Labium, suck my cock, but I'm actually saying, "and what were you wearing a fucking baseball cap for? This isn't fucking America you prick, we don't have fucking baseball over here!" Then I kick him hard in the stomach and he falls down flat  like a sack of rotting gelatin. Even Frenchie fried up better than him. "Pleesh I won'sh tell anyone about the wop," he gurgles through mouthfuls of bleeding, glistening flesh. "Your lies are the clarion call for the killer fucking virus queen!" I exclaim for special dramatic effect, smelling blood in the air -- so fresh it's pulsing. Then Krendle crouches down swiftly and stabs him eight or nine times in the chest causing a loose brownish spray that spurts upwards into his eyes, temporarily blinding him. "Bastard!" Krendle curses, blinking the blood out of his eyes. "Helshp meesh," Trainer death-rattles pathetically, “I 'aven't done nuffinshk." "We are helping you," Krendle replies cornily, "but know this, I am the butcher, you are the sacrifice," and he takes a long knitting needle (a number seven I think) from the deep side pocket of his black waterproof and holds it up in the air, then leaning forward, hand still raised, he positions the tip of his nose about six inches from Trainer's face and whispers, "your breath smells like your rotting stomach." Blood, black in the moonlight, streams from Trainer's throat and bubbles out of his mouth and back across his cheeks as he tries to talk, to beg, to implore us not to kill him.  For a brief moment I almost feel sorry for him and want to nuzzle him like a puppy dog to my padded bosom, but then I catch a whiff of something foul, a sudden, vile stench of excrement rising up towards my face, and this changes my mood.  Disgusted I look at Busdriver Bill, who incidentally I do not like, and he raises a hand to his nose and says to me, "Dirty bastards fuckin' shit himself Harry." "My........name......is...........Elisha," I reply in monotone, glaring at him. Then Krendle starts to jab the knitting needle rhythmically into Trainer's eyes schlup, schlup, left, right, schlup, schlup, left, right, causing him to convulse spasmodically, one shaking hand half raised up scratching at the empty sockets, fingers opening and closing automatically, seemingly detached from any remaining thought process he may or may not have. "You won't find your eyes in there anymore," I call down at him, "they're far too busy squirming down your cheeks...like....red....vein-threaded......poached eggs."  I smile inwardly at my sense of poetry and the television audience in my head baulks loudly, you call that poetry you cop-fucking, queer-arsed, hermaphrodite drag queen! "I am a living metronome," Krendle chants to himself over and over as he continues to poke at Trainer's gouged eye sockets.  Schlup, schlup, left, right. "Sick fucker," Busdriver Bill mutters under his breath.     Mouthing horrified formless words Trainer keeps struggling, too dazed and too stupid to stop and give himself over to death.  A can of Special Brew rolls out of his pocket, instinctively he lowers his arm and grasps for it with his hand, a gaudy sovereign ring catching the moonlight. "I'll 'ave that," Busdriver Bill says, and starts tugging enthusiastically at Trainer's finger placing his foot under the armpit to give him more leverage and also to hold the body in place for Krendle who does not like to be disturbed when he is working. I have stepped back a little now, warm jism flooding my pink knickers, bathing my clitoris, watching all of this from a physical distance of about five feet, although an existential chasm separates me from its reality.  I am holding a rusty knife with a serrated blade in my left hand, pretending to sharpen it against the coarse black hairs on my right arm, staring blankly through my breath which is forming soft feathery plumes in the cold air in front of my face. I see Trainer through the plumes, I see Krendle hacking off his nose, I see Busdriver Bill stamping on Trainer's hand -- it is swollen and looks like an inflated rubber glove, and it is all like a dream sequence in a film, and then Busdriver Bill starts to take off Trainer's Reeboks and once they are off he measures them against the bottoms of his own feet which are quite small for such a big man. “I'll 'ave these as well," he says, "that blood will wash off no problem." Krendle who looks like some kind of crimson minstrel stops his work and looks up at Busdriver Bill, his face twisted with disgust. "What's up with you Krendle," Busdriver Bill says indignantly, "These Reeboks are bloody good shoes, fuckin' comfy as well when you're lazing about the house in yer scruff.  Anyway they're no use to Trainer anymore are they?  I mean he's not goin' to be walkin' anywhere again is he?" Before Krendle can reply Busdriver Bill's mobile goes off, he answers it with a pissed off attitude and is saying things like, "Fuck that Frenchie I'm busy tonight" and "Well can't you get Sheamus to do it?," and "Look, I don't give a shit if it's his wife's birthday, and then reluctantly, "All right, I'll be there in ten minutes." Krendle stands up, "You're not leaving us to sort this mess out on our own Bill!" he snarls and looks at me for support but I pretend that I haven't noticed.  In truth I'd rather Busdriver Bill wasn't here. "Sorry boys," Busdriver Bill smirks, "duty calls and all that bollocks." Then, as if in response to Busdriver Bills remark, there is a loud hissing noise and we all look down at Trainer, it's either coming from his head or his chest I don't know which, although it reminds me of the noise a jacket potato makes in a microwave oven when I've forgotten -- as I usually do -- to pierce its surface with a fork first. *****Whoquothit: Fowles finally went ahead and found a star called Jesus.  I saw him do it. Through the pin-prick of my hose. Little baby Jesus.  He was barfing in a cathedral downtown, had a fifth of Ten High in his fat pudgy hand.  It was half slaked.  Great, I'm even talking like Fowles, now, and Fowles fouled up the coprophagic cirle when he thought I'd victimised Bill who'd victimised Frenchie who'd victimised Krendle who'd victimised Trainer who'd victimised the ultimate victim, the one whose fire I finally put out and it ain't *****us. To keep the flow of Fowles flowing on the fire, up until he found baby Jesus, Fowles liked drinking vowels in churches. Late at night, when them veiled women had a hankering to come in a pray and light holy remembrance candles.  But when he puked up the Ten High right there next to the vestibule, he wiped the vile consonants off his wide elliptical face and saw baby Jesus in some kind of beatific vision, just a floating like some kinda cloud up there above the altar.  So Fowles went ahead and had his bovine stomach stapled.  After the doctors made him lose his appetite by their surgery, he couldn't eat more than half a cheeseburger without feeling satiated.  That's when Fowles got stairmastered for Jesus.  He joined a health club called the Magi.  Yeah, those little wise gals laughed behind his back, but within a month of reading the Holy Book while exercising on the stairmaster, his mind was free of toxins, poisons, tinctures, powders, granules, and mixtures.  He could think clearly.  Down at the station house the boys saw the results.  No more clearing the precinct when Fowles dipped into the red beans and rice.  No more seven deadly sins, avarice, sloth, pigging out, you name it.  Fowles was literally a new man, a St. Paul, a St. Augustine, who once was the nine-mouthed Cerberus shoveling food and sex into his being, now a born again, statue-worshipping, Little Baby Jesus-cradling, speaking in tongues, starring in stir-fry, snake-handlin' Christian with a small see.  Even the women at the station house start treating him like a human, instead of like an old mule tethered out back.  He had another hankering.  He had come across an Idee Fixe of a kernel of truth wrapped up in a UPS package of enigmas.  Who killed that cleaning woman, Veronica, aka Maria?  Who would also kill the victim, and the weasel of a dog trainer?  Who could or couldn't be there every time?  Who had airtight alibis and whose alibi leaked like a depends undergarment?  Before he had stood up to baby Jesus he had known biblically, Maria, the cleaning woman and, umbilically, every fireman going, but Maria it was who had commenced to praying during the sex.  She was a nice churchgoing lady, real nice.  A body hidden underneath that drab uniform that revealed bosoms like 'heaps a wheat', 'sweet breath like scented apples', all that good stuff from The Song of Solomon, perhaps the raciest part of the good Book.  Before his witnessing after hurling vomit in the Church, he thought of her as 'dark meat', just in time for Thanksgiving. Now women were better in his eyes, that of holy vessels, not slabs of carnal meat, luncheon loaf for makin' funny business.  And he thought of her fondly. But he had a suspicion about the pathological pathologist.  The guy had a drug habit.  He sucked ether out of a mask while driving his coroner's company car to deaths.  And Fowles began to sum up the situation after he stumbled across Krendle sort of caressing the corpses during autopsies.  Sort of climbing on top, fumbling around with his trousers, putting on Dean Martin romantic ballads, and literally humping corpses while "Oh My Pappa" was being rendered by the tape recorder that was supposed to be used for recording during forensic examinations, the finding of contusions, tissue sampling, bullet wounds.  First, Fowles shrugged it off, because he wasn't far from Necrophilia himself; hell, once he wandered drunk into Campbell's funeral parlor to 'grab a cold one', and he didn't mean a Budweiser.  Before, Fowles said of his enormous appetite for beer, "A hot Busch is better than a cold Bud...".  But he never danced with a corpse like Krendle did.  Why, he saw Krendle whispering into a corpse ear, sweet nothings, calling her or him, "My treasure", "My beauty", "My precious." So Krendle left him a tape.  A 90 minute video of necrophilia, involving the corpses of the first victim, Maria (Veronica) and the stringy Dog-trainer. At the very cusp end of the tape, Krendle confessed the whole matter and proceeded to stick a surgeon's knife in his eye just for luck.  Fowles had it with him.  His newfound religion had him babbling in tongues as watched it near his desk, now his buttocks fit neatly into his detective's chair, his gangrenous flab gone, his stomach still slack dough but a bit tinier, and Fowles did his duty.  He dropped the tape into his supervisor's office, went to Church, said hallo to little baby Jesus, and waltzed into the health club to do a tap dance for a few hours on the stairmaster, saying "Oh shalla bazazameminshula ta, Father, forgive me for I have sinned...." As for me, I find hell's all froze over so they couldn't send me there – a shame, being what I was to them all. Being a family man (with beautiful wife and three kids and Armani suit for Sunday best), nobody could stand me either drunk or dousing. In the end, they couldn't have crucified me on a taller turntable ladder, twirling toward the stars, upward, upward, to another victim, the most reluctant Victim (wearing a big busted bloodstained capital V-neck pilfered from the laundry) of us all.