the inmate's journal : the corporation v : the branch iv

That night I dreamt about her.  There was a huge cornfield but the ears were men’s heads and they grew until they were as tall as telephone poles and they all began chanting together, New Bank New Bank New Bank New Bank we are New Bank New Bank New Bank.  Then Magna came billowing through hacking the stalks down with scimitar breasts and as the men’s heads fell into the earth money trees sprouted and Magna plucked bills from the branches and stuffed them into her mouth which had become her whole head—a giant gnashing sphere of teeth and saliva and lips and money and a tongue like a dragon.  Then she started calling Jude Jude I want you Jude, but I was terrified, hiding under a giant Bible for I knew she was going to eat me too and I heard her footsteps pounding, coming closer and closer and I was clawing my way into the ground trying to bury myself when the Bible was ripped away and I felt fingers on my back and I woke up.

 

I made the mistake of telling her.

 

Donut.  There are two types of people.  The kind that dream and the kind that gets things done.  You’re the kind that dreams and I’m the kind that gets things done, that’s why you’re who you are and that’s why I’m who I am and that’s why we’re gonna end up in the vault together.

 

I couldn’t help but imagine sex with Magna—crashing nights on broken beds with t-rexes and pterodactyls swarming around trying to peck at the flesh.  She’d be eating cheesies and Doritos while she crushed me with 7-11 breath and a cunt that smelled like potato chips; the scenario wasn’t entirely unpleasant and I found myself returning to it as I did the banking of the squadrons of Italian grandmothers who dominated the lineup and my days.

 

A few months after Magna interpreted my dream, a flurry of men descended from New Bank’s Inspection Division for a surprise visit.  They spent a week opening every filing cabinet and looking at every sheet of paper and during the whole time Maso never went home and Magna wasn’t herself, blabbing loudly about how great everything was and not talking about sex, and all the rest of us shut up.  Friday afternoon the men packed up and disappeared and two weeks later Maso did too, replaced by a silent short stern man in a black suit who kept the manager’s door closed and entertained strange visitors.  Magna would be invited in every now and then and each time she came out she was in a worse mood than before.

 

Things are changing, Donut, she’d mutter.  I don’t like it.

 

My little branch was disintegrating.  Maso was gone, Magna was becoming gloomy, and the new stern man in the black suit in the office cast a funereal stupor over the already monotonous enterprise.  If I have any rule in life, it’s to not stay still for too long.  People die before their deaths because they get too scared or lazy to jump into the darkness and find out what happens.  What if I die? they think.  But who cares?  Isn’t it better to die living a vital life than live dying inside?

 

I did long for a guide though … at least someone to talk with about what it means to live a jumpy life.  After all, Dante had Virgil, Huckleberry Finn had Tom, and Sal Paradise had Dean Moriarty.  I sort of wished Jesus was around to have a coffee with; we could go down and sit by the river and talk the way they do in the old King James—

 

Sweet Lord and Savior of Mankind, I’d say, I dost find myself in the greatest travail.  The vile sinner Magna giveth me harsh tribulations and the unholy influence of mammon showeth me the life of the pit and I am tossed and turned like the waves of the sea.  I searcheth and searcheth for God but all I findeth are donuts.  What shouldst I do?

 

Jude, he would reply, stroking my arm and looking like he does in those Sunday School posters, I have heardest thy complaint and havest prayed long for thy sufferings to my Father who art so far away in the garrets of Heaven even I knowest him not.  But Jude, thou jelly-souled maggot, didst thou not knowest that those of my kingdom liveth in the state of what they are, not in the state of what others wanteth them to be; they knowest no defense can be given to the world’s clamorous and anxious jury, which is sore afraid of passion and truth.  Magna, though, is one mighty in the ways of my kingdom—she traveleth from Times to Tiananmen Square in seconds, she flyeth on the wide wings of storms.  She eternally belongeth to God.  But thou, Jude … thou art a ragamuffin in my kingdom; thou art unbaked.

 

That wasn’t as helpful as I had hoped.

 

I had started dating someone who had a friend who was a manager in New Bank’s Technology Division—who needed someone who knew how to communicate and had branch experience—so I applied and got the job and scooted off to head office and its crisp protocols and left Magna and the gang, beautiful refuse in the neverneverland of malls, strapped to the wheel of drudgery but not caring because somehow they knew we’re all strapped but in different ways, that we’ve all been cast from the Eden of the womb into a voracious machine of words.  But I knew I had to find my way to Hal Blood and his high office in heaven and in between there’d be a great expanse.  A wilderness of middle management mush.  I’d have to suffer to sniff the flowers at the top of the world.  For I’ve always been obsessed with the low and the high, the prostitute and the king, Jesus and Beelzebub.  Isn’t it the bums and the mad that define sanity for us?  And isn’t it the powermongers in their grey halls that beget the color of our dreams?  Isn’t it the impossibly happy Thai nanny and the Hollywood starlet we simultaneously envy?

 

But to get from the farflung outskirts of the branch to its concentrated center of energy, I’d have to travel through New Bank’s infinite suburbs—gridded carstudded enclaves of accountants, babbling ravines of model home marketing managers, nondescript barracks of technologists, endlessly lit parking lots of consultants, noname cheeseburger joints of lawyers… the institutional sprawl required to sustain the human dream.  You travel through Delaware and New Jersey to get to Manhattan, Clichy-sous-Bois to get to Paris.  You shed a thousand tears for a spasm of love.  Nine parts ugliness and mediocrity for one part beauty.  You know the ratios, dear sibling; you live them.

 

I divide history into three segments:  the past, where we traveled on water to search for new lands and dreams.  The present, where we travel on highways to search for new experiences and photographs.  And the future, where we travel on our souls to search for lost memories and buried hopes.  There’s a road we all travel on.  Maybe it was once the rivers.  Maybe it was once the highways.  But it’s a becoming a road of ourselves.  So I clambered into the transport of my soul, put it in first and drove into the fog with my eyes set on the bright city of God at the pinnacles of New Bank’s might. 

the inmate's journal : the corporation iv : the branch iii

Donut, Magna said after stroking the hole of her jelly donut, who do you think’s better looking—me or Ruth or me?

 

The politics were difficult.  While Magna obviously had the power, Ruth could make my life miserable.  She worked beside me and when she felt I had slighted her she’d fart unabashedly—magnificent lingering devastations of chicken fingers, ketchup, onion rings, fish sticks, and diet Coke.  But Magna saved me from answering.  You’re stalling son.  She took a 50 and wiped some jelly dribbling down her face and said, See Ruth, you’re a dog.

 

The branch rocked with such dirty repartee even the Marquis de Sade would have wanted to work there.  After all, if you’ve been cashing cheques day in day out day in day out day in day out for so many years … you’ve either got to die or do something to amuse yourself.  But I didn’t realize this then and, fresh from my forays into Jesus, was a bit lost in this unabashed display of female vulgarity.  I’d escape as often as possible into the lunchroom to recover my innocence.  Harold would join me and tell me stories of how he met his wife at Price Club by the family pack croissant section.  This wouldn’t necessarily help.

 

Our primary function in any given job is not necessarily to do what the official description says; often it’s to subtly flatter the boss, to shut up and listen, make peace (or war) among one’s colleagues, or simply come to meetings and look beautiful (or ugly).  My primary function was not to help on the teller line, where I was more of a liability than an asset, but to be a prop on Magna’s libidinous stage.  Harold had lost his torment value, Ruth and Geraldine had worked with Magna so long they had developed cunning subterfuges of revenge, and Maso kept herself chained in the office like some asylum dog. 

 

Don’t make it too obvious but see Mr. Slunk over there by Geraldine, Magna would whisper to me as I was serving a customer.  He and his sister are what you might call … close.  In fact the whole family’s full of love.

 

Don’t look now, but Suzanna Dougherty—the one showing all that leg—one day she came in here so pissed she put her brassiere on outside her shirt and Rev. Sloop—that Catholic toad—was so miffed he went right into Maso’s office without knocking and Mr. Dietz was in there who’s so loaded his sheets are made of money and he’s diddling half the branch and Suzanna every second Tuesday so let me tell you the Catholics got a big service charge out of that one.

 

Donut, I don’t think you should put this one on your resume but you know Geraldine’s sister—the one who comes in here on Mondays with her lunch, with the tattoo and the hair—she’s got the hots for you so bad she’s shaved your name on her pussy.

 

 

Come here, Donut, I want you to watch something …  

 

But look how long the lineup is …

 

Pay attention to what’s important boy, that’s the only way you’ll get ahead in life … come here … she angled me over to her side … see how Mr. Goodman’s sidling against Harold, it’s true he wants money but go and check his account, it’s 71-80104 …

 

… but the …

 

… don’t be a fag Donut, go check the account …

 

… … … It’s got over 150 grand in it.

 

Exactly.

 

Exactly what?

 

So he doesn’t really want money.

 

What does he want?

 

He wants Harold.

 

I glanced at Mr. Goodman and Harold, focused on a pristine portfolio on Harold’s pristine desk.

 

Harold’s a homo Donut but he doesn’t know it.  His wife knows it and I know it and Ruth knows it and Geraldine knows it and now you know it … but he doesn’t know it. 

 

She’d tell stories about her youth when she was curvaceous and beautiful and 200 pounds lighter and boys revolved around her like wanton moons.  One day when I couldn’t balance and everyone else had left, she sat beside me in a particularly reflective mood.

 

In the old days Donut, I looked like Raquel Welch.  Not Raquel when she got, you know, kind of, well you know, but the kind that made Chinamen weep.  Things aren’t like they used to be … lots of things have changed.  They even talked about naming a donut after me next door.  When I started here New Bank was good and Maso was fun but now look at her.  It’s not that.  She paused for a moment and stared at New Bank’s logo, luminescent and warm on the wall.  You’re a horrible teller Donut, go next door and get me a half dozen Boston creams and I’ll tell you what you did wrong. 

the inmate's journal : the corporation iii : the branch ii

I was a mediocre teller—never balancing, misplacing 100 dollar bills, insufficiently courteous to customers, insufficiently vulgar with Magna.  The days were sweaty vaudevilles of pain.  Hours upon hopeless hours of the filth of money and cheques and bills and drafts, and fat Italian grandmothers would descend from their kingdoms of clean and hand me 20 paycheques for Pesquini and Poosquoono and Boosetti and Ragatoni and Macaroni and Genovese and Bonanno totaling $10,478.33 and 30 bills for flushing and cooking and heating and watering and fucking totaling $1,973.81 and say in barely intelligible English, 500 cash and I’d hand them a deposit slip and ask them to fill it out and ask for ID and all hell would break loose because her greatgreatgreatgrandmother had been the mistress of the Bank’s founder and who was I a skinny cracker to question anything and Magna would say Just cash it Donut and I’d be on my feet for half an eternity and sad Jewish entrepreneurs would ascend from their domestic hells, unable to satisfy Yahweh or their wives, hated and needed by everyone, full of deposits, and I’d be on my feet for three quarters of eternity and slutty crackheads wearing Playboy bunny tshirts and no bras and nipples scratching me in the face wanting $200 from their accounts with -$1.47 in them and eternity sucking me into it like some malevolent fellatio … the entire dreaming parade of hungry humanity squawking in some symphony in which cash was the melody and despair the contrapuntal strain … this is a teller’s job and don’t forget it next time you go to a banking machine.

 

When the doors were finally locked at the end of the day, I’d escape to the lunchroom to get away from the melancholy and mayhem upstairs.  One Friday Magna and Ruth and Geraldine came down after me and sat around the table mischievously.  Magna took a small metal man with a giant penis out of a plastic bag.  Donut, look what Ruth and Geraldine got me as a it’s-the-end-of-the-week present.  She wound it up and it walked across the table, its cock moving up and down robotically.  My three colleagues guffawed outrageously.  Donuts orbited around their heads.  Raspberry jelly began falling gently.

 

Donut.  If Ruth and her tits … don’t stare son—if they was to suggest to you that the two of you go into the vault for a little hankpanky, what would you say?

 

I’m really not …

 

Forty percent for trying.  The correct answer is you’d have to do me first.  Ruth, Donut here wants to do you, but he’s got to do me first.  There’s a pecking order to the world Donut and some of us get first dibs.   I know it’s hard Ruth but that’s the way it is.

 

Mag, you haven’t been done since the flood.

 

Hell no, Harold does me every time I balance.

 

Just like I said Mag, you haven’t done it since the flood.

 

Ruth here’s got a wit as big as her twat.

 

And you got a mouth as big as yours.

 

All the better to eat Donut with.

 

The three of them sat around grinning like a deputation of medieval witches cast by some cackling god into a foreign and unwelcome age.  I tried to place them in my hierarchies of humanity and failed.  I tried to reconcile them with what I had been told about women, and failed.  I tried to fit them into my notions of professionalism and efficiency, and failed.  I thought of New Bank’s diversity program—how it promoted gender and racial and sexual and religious diversity … but friends and adulterers, diversity of genitals and skin color and bedroom activity and god is great; I’m all for it.  But what I’ve wondered many times since is—what about all the other kinds of diversity? Diversity of the things we can’t see? Of words? Of lifestyle? Of insults and inebriation and codependence and madness?  For I’ve watched the grooming of those hacking their way up the Wall Street ladders and I’ve seen the straight and narrow they must walk if they would rise.  Here, though, in a distant satellite orbiting far from the hot power of New Bank’s sun, was real diversity:  freaks from the broom closets of the psyche let loose on the public and on Harold and on me.  I looked at them and all things seemed strangely possible.

the inmate's journal : the corporation ii : the branch

New Bank of the Dead is a multinational conglomerate that sprawls across continents, resumes, foreclosures, and centuries.  While its marketing name is simply New Bank, the legal and historic name dominates its cultural heart.  On the sixth floor of its primary skyscraper is a vast office, rumored to contain a library, nine-piece bathroom, bedroom, billiard room, kitchen, restaurant, pub, oyster bar, fitness center, mini-brothel, and chapel.  Accessible only by the world’s most technologically advanced, reliable, and secure elevator—built to withstand chemical, conventional, and nuclear attacks—it is the home of Hal Blood, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of New Bank.  As with all the world’s most powerful people, he was felt more than seen, named more than heard, feared more than loved.  He had begun his career in the trenches of the banking industry—the branch—and hacked and torpedoed his way to the top in the usual way.

 

Naturally, then, I began my career at New Bank in the branches too.  The top is what most of us dream of, the middle is where most of us end up.  But the bottom is where most of us start … working for poorly paid petty tyrants in retail outlets, lugubrious assembly lines, and insurance basements strewn across the face of the earth in the name of progress.  The fact that the only progress I could see anywhere was in the number of things weighing the planet down didn’t seem to bother many others—and, anyway, I was on my quest to find God and committed to traveling down whatever road I found myself on to see if he’d finally pop out and say, Hey Jude, Hide and Seek’s over, you got me.

 

But at the beginning I wasn’t sure if God was to be found with the lowly and oppressed (among the great hordes of nine-dollar-an-hour tellers), at the pinnacle of wealth and influence (in Hal Blood—his ice and stare), or hidden in some unexpected place like the panties of a junior executive in Inspection Division.  But it was a quest and quests are meant to be full of doubt and darkness or else they’re lousy quests.  So I faked confidence and walked into a dismal mid-town New Bank branch in a dubious strip-mall consisting of stores selling falafels, adult videos, large women’s lingerie, donuts, and Catholic hagiography.  The parking lot had more potholes than parking spaces and the whole derelict mess of grease and porn and bras and sugar and saints and cash stared mournfully across one of those monstrous seven lane roads that circumscribe the new world to a discount grocery store on the other side, where Lays chips, Wonder bread, and Oh Henrys gleamed as if they were some warped sacrament.  I walked into the branch’s harsh fluorescent sheen, carrying a resume that stretched but didn’t break the truth, and asked to see the manager.

 

Now to the young entrepreneur seeking a loan or the nervous job-seeker such as myself, a manager of a bank branch is an eminent and intimidating individual, with powers so radiant even the feral cats passing its doors hesitate, sensing a force not entirely subject to the laws mere mammals must obey.  To the unsuspecting customer, the manager hides behind the thick curtain of money, pulling invisible strings which bring happiness or devastation to the puppets on life’s stage who require debt to live according to the standards handed to them by TV.  In reality, of course, the manager is a junior bureaucrat in a system so ponderous, millions of technology workers are necessary to keep it all stitched together, a system so procedural and whimsical, so documented and contradictory, that the manager is frequently only an email away from Prozac.  

 

Maso F. Whimple ran the branch—or rather she was run by it—a woman so bedraggled by paperwork, by being squashed between the demands of her staff and the demands of Head Office, that she came to work at 7 in the morning, left at 8 at night, and got about 3 hours of real work done in between.  Being inefficient, she had no time to see me and I was told to wait for Magna Flatch, the head teller.  Like all institutions—but even more so, as they’re the guardians of that sweet ogre, money—banks must give us the impression that they’re professional, reliable, organized, rational, diplomatic, and sensitive.  And, at senior levels, everyone has to pretend, in public at least, to be these things.  But once you get far away from the eyes of HQ, its pomp and protocol, and leap into the great retail sea and bump into the trash that’s tossing around there … well, that’s when life gets interesting.

 

Magna, head teller, sovereign queen of donuts, sugar bum fairy, was a life form concocted in the dungeons of Krispy Kreme.  She was cruel, as only the powerless can be, and had worked for New Bank since the Jurassic Period.  In that small smelly branch of five—Maso, Magna, Ruth and Geraldine (the two junior tellers), Harold (the administration officer)—Magna dominated its cultural scene with the whip of her tongue and the fierce lechery of her soul.  As the area’s sex industry had picked up recently, they needed another plebian to handle the resultant flurry of commerce and I realized—too late—that Magna was intent on hiring a manboy on the teller line to impress and dominate.  I was eventually shown down to the basement lunchroom, a windowless wasteland of paper towels and plastic cutlery, where Magna sprawled on herself, biting into a fresh Boston Cream throned on a stack of 20s.  A mighty army of donuts, some whole and healthy, others partial and broken, lay around her like a battalion of confused and defeated spheres.

 

I understand you have a vacancy for a teller position; I would like to apply for it please.

 

The first bite’s always the best, that’s what I say.  What do you say?

 

I’d like to apply for the teller’s position that’s available please.

 

You said that already.  Tell me something I don’t know.

 

I wasn’t sure what she didn’t know.

 

Son, you look stupid.  Tell me, Donut—I can call you Donut can’t I—why should you get the job when there are a billion children starving in Africa?

 

I’m not sure what relevance …

 

You’re supposed to say cause they can’t stand up for the day.  What do you know about numbers?

 

Well, I can add and as you can see from my resume here I’ve taken some courses in …

 

Son, you’re saying some of the right things but if you’re a smartass with the customers I’ll send you next door to work with Morgan selling Naughty Housewives.  At New Bank we like to have a good time you understand, but we do things right when the customers are around.  Now tell me your proper name, go up and find Ruth—the one with the tits but don’t stare—tell her you have to fill out the forms go home come back tomorrow at 9.

 

So I was hired and took my place among the women of the bank.

the inmate's journal : the corporation

The church likes to claim some blend of faith, tradition, and reason to support its conclusions.  The academy claims reason.  The beauty of the corporation is that it claims nothing and doesn’t need to; it has power—the one legitimate claimant and inheritor of the earth.

 

The church claims truth and the academy knowledge and both fail because they reach beyond human capacity.  But the corporation claims only money … and achieves it.  In fat heaps of success.  That the corporation is the only truthful institution is its horror and beauty.  The pragmatists, in their metallic way, only appreciate its beauty; the lefties, in their leafy way, only appreciate its horror.  The former have spent as little time outside of the corporation as the latter have in it, thus both speak from their respective cribs of inexperience.  I, however, have spent time in its eye, its heart, its anus, its liver, its tumors, its lint—and an equal amount of time so distant from its body I have had to look at the jpegs on my iPhone to remind me of what it looked like.  Like I promised you, in my journal you get the whole goods, the inside and the outside, no strings or teeny print … right here from Uncle Jude.

 

The corporation does have one pretense, though:  the endless games its inmates play as they jockey for the best cells.  But this pretense, dearest beloved, is an acknowledged and integral pretense and so becomes a strange integrity.  Everyone’s moves, everyone’s words about the moves, are directly or indirectly about this game and about nothing but this game.  Only the innocent hobbits and otherworldly elves believe the values; every corporate inmate worthy of his chains believes the game.  The game is god and all and beauty … and tomorrow’s expensed lunch.

 

You may object—I speak about the corporation as if it’s a single beast instead of an entire jungle of beasts, a veritable planet of screeching bugs and carnivorous flowers, a galaxy of foul stars, a cosmos of disabled stars, …

 

Sure.  Objection sustained.  Just stay with me, okay?  If you’re objecting, you haven’t got the game.  If you’re objecting, you’re never going to make it past senior manager of extra-absorbent tampons.

 

In fact, I’m going to go even further, just to titillate you senior managers of tampons, thou fable-quaffing hobbits, thou bitter elves.  My claim is this:  the closer you get to the center of power the closer you get to the center of truth and the closer you get to the center of truth the closer you get to unity.  And my claim is this:  there is nothing closer to the center of power than the corporation and there’s no corporation closer to the center of the center of power than a bank.  And thus my claim is this:  a bank is the black hole of power and truth and unity; go there to find time and the modern seat of God.  And my claim is this:  I worked for one of North America’s largest banks for ten years—in five divisions, with every department, on every godforsaken rung in the woebegone hierarchy, through cunts and cocks, up strategic ladders, down bankrupt snakes.  Nay, velvet voyeurs, this is my claim:  the world is not large enough to hold everything I did and said and saw in those nickel halls.  The world is too small to hold the stories.  That’s what all that infinite black space is for … to hold the stories that will never be told.

 

Too many claims?  Go work for a bank.  Then you’ll know too many claims.  In the meantime, don’t sentimentalize unity or truth.  Unity is a permanent agon between clashing, often incompatible, truths; truth a shady spot where one has lunch then moves on.  And what better symbol of these than money, which is neither tangible nor static, but as virtual, mobile, and elusive as identity.

 

So strap yourself to money’s invisible back … fly, soar … on a tour of the world’s fluttering wallet.  The cost?—ah, some things never change—your soul, just your soul, your soul, your stir-fried deep-fried soul.  But in the age of the Internet—that soul made visible in two dimensions—such a trifling trifle to lay down for such a heady flight.

 

But enough of all this pompous metaphysical grandstanding.  Let’s pay the price and start the ride.

inmatus interruptus

 

i don't know folks and peasants - these memories go back twenty, thirty years, maybe more - they're so merged with dust now who could even call them memories. more frass under a busted ottoman in longterm storage. they're nightmares, surreal fantasies, psychedelic wormholes, vomits of a decaying brain. are they cringe ... maybe - but there's some cringe in all of us and doo tries to avoid laundering and sanitizing itself, to avoid presenting an image that conforms to the images images say should be the image. doodoo accepts doodoo while attempting to minimize its spillage in dimensional exoterica

as novel always claims - this is a work of fiction for the sole purpose of amusing the sprites of non-existence - whatever the fuck that means - if you haven't already throw etiology and volition in the devouring dumpster and get on with the voluminous gyrally disintegrating work of your own peculiar hallucination

the inmate's journal is my hallucination and if anything like this even remotely happened may the nonexistent gods help us

we'll continue with the corporation circus vortex soon, then close with the vermiculously slimy and imbecilic academy, though a brief postamble follows in oaxaca in the basement of the amerikan consulate, which might be the only true part

none of this means we're out of prison. migrating from formal institutional life to the vast winds of the tomb doesn't mean freedom. at most it means we may have changed our clothes. whether dead or living, all is persiflage and kaffeeklatsch 

the inmate's journal : spring fragrance xiii

every institution is built on a dream.  someone has a vision—a perfect world, a better world, a richer world; others are seduced by the belief and the passion of that vision and give their time, their money, and sometimes their lives to help build that church, that bank, that university.  we build solid structures of light and order from inchoate surges of power.  buildings and laws are born from brief glimpses into shadowy lands that lurk in the canyons and crags of our minds.

 

the church has been the traditional keeper of visions and glimpses, of light and order.  like many dreams, its dream has dreamt of being the only dream and so has named its dream the dream.  the one god, the one book, the only way.  but that dream has broken down.  it’s shattered into seven billion solitary dreams.  it’s reshaped itself as machines and needles.  falling on the blood of the twentieth century, it’s grown insecure and confused.  the church totters while young women leap with new visions and old men watch tv.

 

and in the soft dreams of my youth, after having wandered in the labyrinth of the church and spoken with its divine representatives, i asked, where is god in the places of his name?  was he choreographing rev. weal’s aloof ecstasy?  the glint and couch of sister gooch?  sleeping on ferrelyn’s soft prayers?  juan’s tumorous virility?  had he fled entirely from people, weary of their haplessness, being found now only in cream of melancholy soup and garret photographs?  or just fled … fled to the eternal vacuity of that sad closet we call the gods?

 

i didn’t know.  all i knew was that i couldn’t find him in the churches.  so i moved to a bank and sought him in money’s plastic heart.